from_name: Tim Starling

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Eliminating homographs in usernames: was: Re:
 [WikiEN-l] Pruning "dead" accounts (was Re: New York Times article)

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> A suggestion, based on practices used for IDN registration:
>
> Restrict new usernames on the en: Wikipedia to characters from the Latin
> alphabet and selected punctuation only (and possibly digits as well).
>
> Before allowing a username to be registered, generate a canonical
> comparison form by Unicode normalization, lowercasing, punctuation and
> space suppression and accent-stripping, followed by homograph
> canonicalizations such as mapping both digit zero and letter O to the
> latter, digit 1 and letter L to the latter, eth to lowercase d, etc.
>
> A new username should then only be allowed to be registered if the
> comparison form of the proposed new username is different from the
> comparison form of every existing username (which are stored in an
> indexed table, alongside the full, uncanonicalized name that actually
> gets registered).
>
> Doing this will eliminate the vast majority of all simple username
> spoofing hacks.
>
> Existing usernames get grandfathered in, of course.

Yes, we could do it based on normalisation. Another option would be to
disallow cross-script usernames.

Chris L?er wrote:
> Is there are a reason why user names with weird Unicode characters
> are even allowed? It would seem sensible to limit user names on each
> Wikipedia to the alphabet that is used in that language.

On the English Wikipedia we could potentially limit usernames to basic
latin, but on the other wikis it's not so simple. Wikis which use another
alphabet for the main text often have a large number of usernames which are
written in ASCII.

Most homograph pairs occur across scripts, because within scripts,
characters are typically intended to be distinguishable. There are a few
unfortunate exceptions, such as l and I in some sans serif fonts, and if
you're not watching closely you can be fooled by substitutions such as I->1
and 0->O. But I would argue that users should most certainly be watching
closely before they go pointing the finger at an established user. You can't
protect against all forms of stupidity, an established user once told me
"actually it looks like I did do that edit", when a vandal with an all
lowercase surname impersonated a user who conventionally capitalises the
first letter.

Anyway, what I recommend is:

* Disallow control character ranges. I think this one is already
implemented.
* Disallow usernames which take letters from multiple scripts. Exceptions
would have to be made for certain punctuation and number characters.
* Remove errant composing characters by normalisation. This could be done
silently during Title creation, like first-letter capitalisation.

-- Tim Starling


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Vancouver university

body:
On 6/21/06, Vancouver University - Worldwide University <vanu at vcn.bc.ca> wrote:
> Why don't you folk (including that ODA weirdo Contreras)
> take the time to read the http://www.VancouverUniversity.ca
>                                     http://www.WorldwideUniversity.edu
> website.

Err, what's this in relation to?

Steve


list: foundation-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] the easy way or the less easy way

body:
Michael R. Irwin wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>>I think it's sufficient to agree that the by-laws as a whole do not
>>>reflect the principles that drew us to this venture.
>>>
>>>
>It might be useful sometime to have a discussion of what specific
>reasons beyond the big gigantic principals or goals of changing the
>world people have for being here.
>
The goal of changing the world often clashes with the idea of limitless
growth

>Often people are motivated by extremely different personal goals to
>participate effectively in a project.  If the personal goals are not met
>for sufficient participation then the project will fail to meet its
>larger overall goals.
>
That's a fair observation.

Ec


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: James Hare

subject: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?

body:
Simple Spanish Wikipedia is a great idea, since we have Simple English.
However, I heard that Simple English is an actual, established subset of the
English language. Can we say the same about Simple Spanish?

--James Hare

On 6/21/06, Johan Bos <skatinghacker at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Spanish is worldwide a big language. Would it be an idea to start a
> "simple
> Spanish" wiki: sencillo.wikipedia.org? I would be prepared to contribute
> to
> it.
>
> Greetings,
>
> Johan Bos (Jcb)
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?


list: commons-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Commons-l] Image donations?

body:
On 6/21/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> Using FlickrLickr to filter donated images sounds like a great idea. I
> could upload them to the FlickrLickr database if there's an interface.

I could hack an authenticated HTTP POST form that would allow you to
add metadata to the DB. Would that be good enough?

> After the safe-upload experience, I wouldn't want to store the image on
> the toolserver ;-)

Sorry, I didn't follow this - what is the problem with storing images
on the toolserver? I'm not sure my server could handle all the
incoming image donations, and I've been thinking about migrating
FlickrLickr to the toolserver anyway.

> Two problems with this:
> * Each image in a zip file would basically get the same description.
> Otherwise, you'll have to include a text file with the descriptions,
> which is probably more hassle than uploading them one by one.

See
http://scireview.de/wiki/donations2.jpg - for each file in the ZIP,
the user would have to enter metadata after the upload.

> * Zip files can be manipulated to grow into extreme amounts of nonsense
> data. Even a small zip fil could potentially result in hundreds of GB of
> uncompressed data. A potential attack vector.

Listing archive contents should be a trivial operation. With PHP, you
could use the Zip module, which has a zip_entry_filesize function (not
sure if the toolserver has that installed). Or you could parse the
output of the "unzip -l" command. If a file is much larger
uncompressed than compressed, that's probably an indication of
something foul.

> I have altered the text to show that option more prominently. I'd prefer
> to give the uploader some choice, though. Choice makes people think,
> whil a single checkbox just gets, well, checked ;-)

I don't think most users of the form would have enough of a basis of
knowledge about copyright and licensing to make an informed decision.
If you want to make people think, prominently linking to a licensing
tutorial might work better.

Please remove the GFDL from the list of licenses. We really should
_never_ have images which are only under the GFDL. The GFDL is
completely unsuitable for such materials due to the requirement to
reprint the full license with every use. There is no dispute about
this as far as I know -- GFDL/CC-BY-SA dual licensing is the preferred
option.

> Here's a thought: Let people mail their images, descriptions, and
> license to a central e-mail directly. Volunteers could then upload them
> after checking.

Free form e-mail is difficult to process because every mail looks
different. It also makes it more difficult to collaborate using
interfaces like FlickrLickr.

Erik


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] "the experiment" - did it work?

body:
Have you ever looked at a regular day of submissions at AFC?
Each and every one of them is one more than hasn't been created by an
ignorant newbie
and avoided overworking admins with the need to delete it.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure if that effect is undone by the amount of logged
in newbies.
Was there a spike in AFD entries at the time? - ~~~~

Mgm

On 6/21/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> > As I said before, the experiment did cut down on a lot of crap, because
> some
> > newbies simply don't want to register and instead post to AFC where we
> can
> > nip an article's creation at the core.
>
> But what are the numbers? There's all this raw data sitting there in the
> database from which it should be relatively straightforward to determine
> actual statistical measures of what effect the change in policy had, but
> since the analysis hasn't been done we're reduced to relying on
> subjective impressions and assertions pulled seemingly out of nowhere.
> How can I _verify_ that the experiment did or didn't cut down on a lot
> of crap? I don't personally do any of the various sorts of "patrolling"
> this change was likely to have an impact on (recent changes, new
> articles, etc) so I don't even have subjective impressions of my own to
> go on.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
>


from_name: Daniel Arnold

subject:
[Foundation-l] (volunteer) job position : Ombudsperson
	checkuser (or checkuser Ombudsperson or whatever)

body:
Hi,

I think there is need for a brief explanation how Checkuser's interface is
like (after looking at some posts):
* CheckUser ability status is granted to an account either via CheckUser
rights in local projects or via global Steward status (any steward can give
himself local CheckUser rights).
* So checking a user works only in the project you have the right to do so.
* However the CheckUser log file is globally visible to *all* CheckUser people
in any project. For example I am CheckUser in Wikimedia Commons only but I
can see for example all Checkuser request of en.wikipedia as well (timestamp,
wiki, executing person and target person are stored).

> The board regularly receives some complaints about checkuser activity
> and what happened is either that no one look at the case, or look at
> them poorly. In 95% of case, the "abuse" is imaginary; but we can not be
> sure that one day there will not be a problem.

Well by far the most CheckUser requests are done in en.wikipedia (> 50% of all
project). The total number is ~100 requests daily just in order to give
non-CheckUsers an impression of the general usage. de.wikipedia has the most
conservative CheckUser use of all large Wikipedia projects (most IP sock
puppets are so obvious that there's no point making a CheckUser) and thus has
only perfomed a few Checkuser requests. de.wikipedia even doesn't have an own
CheckUser person.

> So, what I suggest is a sort of ombuds-wo-man for checkuser, who will
> offer a sympathetic ear to complainers, take charge of investigating
> cases for the board in an official manner, mediate between the checkuser
> and the complainer when the case is litigious, educate checkuser if
> necessary, and will report to the board in case where there IS a problem.

As the logfile is visible to all Checkusers there is already some review of
each other and I was more than once talking in private communication that I
personally do not feel comfortable with the regular use of Checkuser in
en.wikipedia (although I admit that have zero insight in the single cases).

Don't get me wrong: For example regarding the
nl.wikipedia-checkuser-abuse-thread I would say this was a perfect valid
application doing a Checkuser there.

So I think there's need not to have so many policies with strict automatic
application (and I think this is the main reason why en.wikipedia has so many
CheckUser requests) but just some trust that an admin blocking somebody as
sock puppet did the right thing (TM) and that people go ahead writing an
encyclopedia and not creating a wiki-nation.

So data security is very important and it should be made clear to all
ckeckusers but creating yet another ombudsman creates IMHO more avoidable
meta-work (= work that does not improve a wikipedia article).
IMHO "CheckUser-abuse" is mainly an en.wikipedia problem and should be
adressed there locally in the main line.

Arnomane


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Legal threats by proxy?

body:
[[User:Sussexman]] has been indef-blocked for legal threats following
a rather complex and nasty exchange in which he alluded to another
editor, [[User:Edchilvers]], that legal process would be served, and
such process duly was, but by a person not provably identical to
Sussexman.

He is asking for unblock:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Sussexman

The article in question is [[Gregory Lauder-Frost]]
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Lauder-Frost)..  Unfortunately
most of the talk has now been deleted; looking at the deleted history
I can't see any reason why ed Chilvers should be singled out for this
treatment, but that is by the by.

Brad states that Lauder-Frost's solicitors have contacted the
Wikimedia Foundation.

The article was originally a blatant hagiography which included for a
long time a provable falsehood regarding the subject's criminal
record, stated in loaded terms:

  Politically motivated, his employers (HM Government) then claimed
  financial irregularities in January 1992 and this led to a
  succession of charges against Lauder-Frost which were over a period
  of eight months either dropped or amended as challenged. A
  conviction on a reduced number of counts for theft was obtained in
  November 1992 but because of the irregularities of the case (no
  audited accounts) the judge, Mr.Justice Marr-Johnson, refused an
  order for restititution. A successful appeal eventually came the
  following year. A Civil case was then raised against him which also
  failed.

The facts as reported in contemporaneous press reports were that he
was convicted of theft from his employers, a health authority, on
eight specimen charges totalling ?8,700, and asked for numerous other
counts apparently totalling over ?100,000 (according to testimony in
court) to be taken into consideration; he was jailed for two years;
his appeal was dismissed and he served his term in jail.

Sussexman and an anonymous editor claim that the UK's Rehabilitiation
Of Offenders Act makes it illegal to discuss this conviction.  They
also claim that "convicium" applies, that is, that the case is being
nooised about in order to defame and damage the subject.  No evidence
of intent to defame has been presented in the Talk pages that I can
see, but there is undoubtedly some determination to include all the
facts, regardless of how flattering they are, and to remove trivia
along the lines of "once sat near Margaret Thatcher".

At this point I would like to see the deleted Talk restored and moved
to an archive, leaving the existing Talk as-is, but I am not going to
do that without some discussion.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Legal threats by proxy?

body:
On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 13:35:35 +0100, Guy Chapman aka JzG
<guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:

Forgot to mention:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Sussexman_and_legal_threats.
also applies.

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


from_name: Petr Kadlec

subject: [Commons-l] Creative Commons logos up for deletion, again

body:
> So what are the chances of
> (a) getting a technical fix so that these images link to the required
> CC license, in every use on every WM wiki? (then we are compliant)

Note that this is partially possible even now, using CSS. See
[[Template:Click]].

-- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Oversight log

body:
On 6/21/06, Selina . <wikipediareview at gmail.com> wrote:
> None of these were appointed in any way by the community, they just seem to
> have been privileges handed out to friends as individuals see fit...

You could look at "friends" as being a nepotistic conspiracy by which
cronies evilly band together to take control of what was supposed to
be a public, open project. Or, you could look at it as people
selecting only the Wikipedians they trust the most - as demonstrated
by experience and time with the project - to give access to
confidential information which could be used to hurt the project.

Pick whichever you prefer.

Steve


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l]Complete image list of a local Wikipédia

body:
On 21/06/06, Emmanuel Engelhart <emmanuel.engelhart at wikimedia.fr> wrote:
> Hi
>
> I tried to set up a local french Wikipedia on my personal computer.
> I didn't find any way to get the complete dump of all pictures used in our
> french articles.
> There is a dump from commons and fr at download.wikimedia.org/images/, but I
> don't want to download almost 300 Go to be sure to have all needed pictures.
>
> Can't someone light me ?

We don't offer up-to-date image dumps at this time. Someone was
looking into making it happen, I think, but I'm not sure.

Rob Church


from_name: Mark Wagner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Oversight log

body:
On 6/21/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/21/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Now, we cannot do this like an RFA election, as there is potentially
> > sensitive information.
>
> How were arbcom elected?

The current batch?  The community selected a number of candidates, and
Jimbo approved some of them.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
On 6/21/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> If there are actually cases where articles that were previously
> protected are now semi-protected.  Except that article weren't really
> ever permanently protected in the first place.
>
> One of the previous rules about protected articles was that *no one*
> was supposed to edit them, including the admins who were technically
> able to edit them.  I'm sure you could slant that as another gain for
> openness, though.  Is allowing only admins to edit more or less open
> than allowing no one to edit?

These are reasonable questions. Jimbo implies that if P(t) is the
number of protected articles at time t, and S(t) is the proportion of
semi-protected articles, then:
P(now) << P(a year ago)
That is, that full protection on the whole has greatly decreased. But also that:
 P(now) + S(now) <= P(a year ago)
That is, that the total amount of articles off-limits to newbies has
not increased.

We should verify both these claims. I'm a little bit wary in
particular because articles are *never* protected for more than a week
or so at a time, whereas we now have several *permanently*
semi-protected articles. You could not claim that the level of
openness for articles like [[George W Bush]] has increased, for
instance.

Comparing
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:List_of_protected_pages&oldid=14851127

against

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_protected_pages

I think these claims may be in trouble. Now, I haven't taken into
account the increase in total number of pages in this time. But, it's
easy to see that the total number of pages protected a year ago was
about 1.5 pages, whereas currently it's about 2.5 pages, with nearly
another 3.5 pages semi-protected. So, you're talking 6 pages of
entries of semi or full protected pages (yes, an imprecise measure)
compared to 1.5 pages. Has the number of pages gone up 4x in that
period (~370 days)? I doubt it.

Steve


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
On 6/21/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/21/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > I think that the first is true, and if not we should seriously look at
> > why not.  I think that there is no reason for the second to be true.
>
> There is. Long term semi protection really only hits a very small
> number of subjects. The number of subjects that enough people feel
> strong about to cause a problem is unlikely to increase.

I don't know that I agree with that last sentence.  What subjects are
there, which are contentious in real life, which don't already have WP
pages, and are encyclopedic?  What subjects we have WP articles on
which are contentious in real life aren't contentious in WP, and why?
What would change over time about those?

You might be right, but it doesn't strike me as obviously so.  I think
a lot of the problems which are likely to hit, have already hit.  Many
may stay poorly resolved for a while, but they're already here, I
think.

--
-george william herbert
gherbert at retro.com / george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
On Wed, 21 Jun 2006 14:58:31 +0200, "Steve Bennett"
<stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

>By and large, AfC is a lot less work for any given article than AfD
>is. "Bad" AfCs can simply be ignored. "Good" ones take a couple of
>minutes, but at least we end up with a useful, well-formatted article
>out of the deal.

Plus, the interaction with the newbies at AfC can act as a better
introduction to policy and guidelines than slapping "unsourced" tags
on their newly created article.

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


from_name: BJörn Lindqvist

body:
On 6/21/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Have you ever looked at a regular day of submissions at AFC?
> Each and every one of them is one more than hasn't been created by an
> ignorant newbie
> and avoided overworking admins with the need to delete it.

It appears to me that at least a large minority of them aren't written
by an "ignorant newbie" but by a "smart newbie." Each and every one of
them is one more problem that some wikipedian has to deal with. Seems
to me like the whole AFC thing has just managed to move the problem to
another place. AFC = AFD in reverse.

--
mvh Bj?rn


from_name: Kelly Martin

body:
On 6/21/06, Daniel Arnold <arnomane at gmx.de> wrote:
> So I don't suggest to en.wp stop checkuser but use it more seriously. Just
> block an IP or recently created vandal account unilaterally if you think it's
> a sock puppet without investigating deeper (hey you're admin you have to *be
> bold* sometimes) and only perform a checkuser afterwards in case there was a
> real demand from several third persons.
>
> That way you also avoid creating a large bueraucracy on blocking of small
> fishes like IPs and short lived accounts and have more time for far more
> important matters.

I really think you should refrain from commenting on how checkuser
should be used on en.wp when you clearly don't have any real
information about how we currently use it or even our own policies on
the matter.  You're not even subscribed to the checkuser list.

Kelly


subject: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?

body:
Well, try bringing it up on the Incubator: http://incubator.wikimedia.org

On 6/21/06, Johan Bos <skatinghacker at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Not as far as I know. I just meant articles in simple Spanish words.
> Readable for people who just understand for example 1500 words.
>
> Greetings,
>
> Johan Bos
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "James Hare" <messedrocker at gmail.com>
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2006 7:22 PM
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?
>
>
> > Simple Spanish Wikipedia is a great idea, since we have Simple English.
> > However, I heard that Simple English is an actual, established subset of
> > the
> > English language. Can we say the same about Simple Spanish?
> >
> > --James Hare
> >
> > On 6/21/06, Johan Bos <skatinghacker at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Spanish is worldwide a big language. Would it be an idea to start a
> >> "simple
> >> Spanish" wiki: sencillo.wikipedia.org? I would be prepared to
> contribute
> >> to
> >> it.
> >>
> >> Greetings,
> >>
> >> Johan Bos (Jcb)
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> foundation-l mailing list
> >> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> >> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?


body:
On 6/21/06, BJ?rn Lindqvist <bjourne at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/21/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Have you ever looked at a regular day of submissions at AFC?
> > Each and every one of them is one more than hasn't been created by an
> > ignorant newbie
> > and avoided overworking admins with the need to delete it.
>
> It appears to me that at least a large minority of them aren't written
> by an "ignorant newbie" but by a "smart newbie." Each and every one of
> them is one more problem that some wikipedian has to deal with. Seems
> to me like the whole AFC thing has just managed to move the problem to
> another place. AFC = AFD in reverse.

No, the great thing about AfC is no one has to deal with it at all. If
we stopped working on AfC, then Wikipedia would simply lose a little
bit of growth. By contrast, if we stopped working on AfD, then
Wikipedia would fairly dramatically fill up with total crud.

By and large, AfC is a lot less work for any given article than AfD
is. "Bad" AfCs can simply be ignored. "Good" ones take a couple of
minutes, but at least we end up with a useful, well-formatted article
out of the deal.

Steve


from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked for 36 hours

body:
G'day Nathan,

> Fadix: Questioning an admin's capability is generally Not A Good Idea[tm].
> I wouldn't resort to this myself and I've said some things that have been
> pretty disruptive.

I'm not sure what you mean by "questioning an admin's capability", but
as a general rule, questioning admins is a Good Thing.  We all need to
have reasons for what we do, and we should be happy to give those
reasons to anyone who asks.

(This is not to say I support those who hysterically scream wild
accusations of "ADMIN ABUSE!!11112" every time an admin does his job
properly, but rather that simply questioning an admin is in itself
something we should never in a million years try to discourage.  If an
admin's wrong, he's wrong.)

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse


from_name: Jon Awbrey

subject: [WikiEN-l] Exit Interview -- Jon Awbrey

body:
o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o

sydney,

thanks for the kind thoughts, not to mention
the professional health care advice.  as it
happens, one of the places where i got some
of the most valuable experience with "stats
in real life" was as a faculty associate in
the early 90's doing comp/dat/stat consulting
at the school of nursing in galveston (utmb).
it was always the greatest "fun" trying to
run lines of compunication between the
quantitative/epidemiology types and
the touchy qualitative researchers.

fill yer bathtub ...
big 'cane coming ...

jon awbrey

poore5 at adelphia.net wrote:
>
> Take a break from editing till your batteries are recharged
> then come back and help fix the problems.  Theere is a place
> for you at Wikipedia. You need to learn the ropes.
>
> Look me up: User:FloNight, a former Register Nurse, mother of
> three college students and a Wikipedia Administrator.  I'll give
> you some tips on how to deal pov pushing editors and bullies.
>
> Take care,
> Sydney Poore
> Georgetown, KY

o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:Jon_Awbrey
o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
George Herbert wrote:

>On 6/21/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>On 6/21/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>>
>>>I think that the first is true, and if not we should seriously look at
>>>why not.  I think that there is no reason for the second to be true.
>>>
>>There is. Long term semi protection really only hits a very small
>>number of subjects. The number of subjects that enough people feel
>>strong about to cause a problem is unlikely to increase.
>>
>
>You might be right, but it doesn't strike me as obviously so. [...]
>
Empirically I find it to be true. It's amazing how many people
will fight tooth and nail to get their POV into [[X]], while
being oblivious to [[History of X]], [[X and Y]], [[X-Z effect]],
[[list of Xes]], etc, all of which will have extensive material
inconsistent with the wanted POV. (My unkind belief is that POV
pushers are simply not smart enough to figure out that the
encyclopedia has more than one article.)

There are alway outliers of course - I'm no longer amazed at how
even the most obscure topic can push *somebody's* button. We have
talk pages with three-year-old streams of invective that have yet
to find anybody else who cares...

Stan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Vancouver university

body:
On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 22:32:21 -0700, Vancouver University - Worldwide
University <vanu at vcn.bc.ca> wrote:

>Why don't you folk (including that ODA weirdo Contreras)
>take the time to read the http://www.VancouverUniversity.ca
>                                     http://www.WorldwideUniversity.edu
>website.

I did.  Why don't you folk take the time to get a credible
accreditation to answer your critics?

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


from_name: Mark Ryan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Oversight log

body:
We appear to have lose access to the Oversight logs altogether. Is
there any explanation for this at all? I presume without this slight
accountability measure in place the oversight privileges have also
been revoked from those who have them.

~Mark Ryan


list: textbook-l

subject: [Textbook-l] Wikiversity

body:
On 6/21/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> If the WMF board was more inclined to approve new projects (not any old
> thing, but at least allow some new projects), I might be more encouraged
> to move the How-to guides to a new project.

I think if we work together, we can pull it off. The open question for
me is: is it necessary?  Do you think how-tos have a future on
Wikibooks itself?

Erik


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] More quotes from AfD

body:
Jeremy Cushman wrote:
> Maybe it's just me, but I think that this current system is fine because as
> of now, (for most articles) we get enough votes either for '''Keep''' or
> '''Delete''' and it is not a hassle for users to vote.
>

AFD IS *NOT* A VOTE. VFD was a vote, and it was *deleted*.

AFD is where we /try/ and work out if an article is suitable for
inclusion in Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. The *number* of people
who comment on any given AFD means *absolutely bugger all*. The only
things we should be discussing on AFD are:

1. Is the article suitable for inclusion?
2. Why or why not?
3. Are there any experts in the area who wish to comment?
4. Outcome

Anything short of Using Common Sense when discussing deletion of
articles is sheer lunacy, hurts the encyclopedia, makes Wikipedia look
bad, makes the people who continue to do this sort of thing become
partial to the taste of lightly cooked baby, and in general is a Bad Thing.

As stated[1] in the wub's First Law: The impossible holy grail of
Wikipedia policy is a complete definition of common sense. It follows
that anything less is flawed by comparison.

[1] [[WP:RAUL]]
--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
> One thing that could be done is to make a list of homographs -- most
> of them are rather obvious -- and to consider, for example,
> User:??tth?w.?r?wn as "taken" as soon as the username
> User:Matthew.Brown is registered (in case you couldn't tell, the
> former uses several Cyrillic letters).

There's a list of "confusable" characters as an appendix to TR 39:

http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/data/confusables.txt

So it's not necessary to make a list, it's already been done for us.

> The question you may ask is, why would people want characters from
> multiple scripts? The answer is that, depending on the language, this
> may be fashionable, a pun, or have some other effect. For example, a
> username such as User:????jp is not unreasonable to allow for ja.wp,
> especially for a Japanese person named Shiro Tanaka.

Before seriously considering implementing this, we would obviously need to
do some statistics on existing cross-script usernames. We could implement
exceptions as existing culture dictates.

> Also, with some scripts, there are few or no homographs with certain
> other scripts -- for example, Hiragana and Basic Latin have no
> homographs, you can add Hangul, most Indic scripts, Thai...

Yes, that too.

The main reason I'm advocating validity checking over conflict checking is
my intuition over the elegance, simplicity and consequences of each solution.

* Do we really want to encourage untypeable usernames like "??tth?w ?r?wn"?
* Remember that conflict checking goes both ways. We could conceivably have
trolls squatting on conflicting usernames of sysops in foreign wikis. This
might be an ambiguous policy situation.
* Conflict checking requires an extra database column, an extra index and an
extra database query on account creation, compared to validation. A script
would need to be written to populate the new column.
* A validation module could be reused in applications where conflict
checking is irrelevant or impossible.

Of course, these aren't particularly strong arguments, feel free to pick
your favourite strawman and give it a beating. But I haven't heard any
particularly strong arguments which favour conflict checking over validation
either.

IDN uses conflict checking because it is aiming to have particularly high
standards of security. It aims to address phishing, where a confusable
domain name may lead to a user being tricked out of large amounts of money.
On Wikipedia, the only problem is temporary confusion over the identity of a
vandal or troll. More experienced editors are no doubt aware that this
confusion can be cleared up by simply clicking the contributions link.

Wikipedia benefits from usernames which are typeable, memorable and
preferably pronounceable. Validation can assist with these goals. In fact,
IDN would probably benefit from attention to these goals as well. Perhaps we
should suggest it to the relevant committees.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [WikiEN-l] Why AFD just does not work

body:
Ilmari Karonen wrote:
> Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>> Articles on fictional subjects should include as
>> much detail about the real-world aspects as possible, and make a clear
>> distinction between fact and fiction.
>
> Well said!  If those specific words aren't already in some guideline
> somewhere, would anyone here oppose their inclusion?
>

I've just posted it on [[WP:RAUL]].

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[Foundation-l] Opinions/suggestions for "outside" members ofthe
 board?

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:

>Anthere:
>
>
>>One problem I have with your list and with Jimbo's list is that they
>>propose very few great candidates from Korea or Madagascar.
>>
>>
>North or South Korea? Difficult choice:
>The former will surely add a different perspective from what we have now.
>Also their system for representing the people is very efficient.
>
As I understand it, the North has never activated its top level domain
name.  Such a board member could have difficulty travelling to on-line
meetings.  ;-)

eC


subject:
[Foundation-l] Opinions/suggestions for "outside" members of
 the board?

body:
James Hare wrote:

>Nah, Jimmy isn't turning into Anthere, nor is Anthere turning into Jimmy.
>
>All the Wikimedians are very, very slowly merging and assimilating into each
>other as one grand Wikimedia being.
>
The Borg?

Ec


from_name: Fadix

subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked for 36 hours

body:
I wonder what does it take in here so that administrators reported misbehavior is dealt with. I understand people can mind their own business, afteral I'm the one being blocked for 36 hours.

Fadix <forwikipediause at yahoo.ca> wrote: Why? I really believe that this user should not have any administrative privilages, it is not like I accuse every admins which I accounter.

 This admin fail to understand why such tools are given to him, he has hard time understanding that those tools should be used with something in mind ''what I am doing is above all for the best of the articles which constitute Wikipedia'' and Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and articles are what matters. This, this admin does not understand. He is using his tools because he is criticised, I wonder if in the real world any judge being criticised could sue someone and be the plaintif and the judge in the same time.

 What is disruptive in Wikipedia are revert warring, POV pushing, all the sort of things that disrupt the quality of the articles, not some abarsive words which any admin could edit from a user who has enought of POV warriors who build hateful websites and after being bored there recycle themselves in Wikipedia and once in a while in his answers of hundreds of words use a word which could be interpreted by some as personal attack. I have never been blocked for 3RR and I shall never be, because I know that such behaviors are really disruptive since the victim is the article. I know to restrain myself and I don't need someone to tell me I am in the wrong, worst, I don't need someone who thinks I am in the wrong and has tools to impose his misconceptions of the rules.

 Also, this admin is seriously disrupting in his behaviors, who the hell do he think he is? Members are reporting others in his talk page and then he go on to distribute warnings as if they were cake. I have been reported by a user who was the other side of the conflict, and I have never used such cheap tactics to get someone silenced, when it happens that both sides have used such words.

 Right now, I am blocked and there is not one admin that has warned this user, who's autority I contest, for his misbehavior, please just read the example which I have requested any admin to answer on whatever or not it is a warning material. It was not, and even he realise it was not, while he placed it as personal attack, he then presented it as not assuming good faith, which neither was the cases.

 Such admins are even more disruptive, because by blocking users like this they prevent those users to contribute, this is really harmful for Wikipedia. And I am really tired of this silence.

Nathan - Mailing Lists
 wrote: Fadix: Questioning an admin's capability is generally Not A Good Idea[tm].
I wouldn't resort to this myself and I've said some things that have been
pretty disruptive.

- Nathan (User:nathanrdotcom)
_______________________________________________
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To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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subject: [WikiEN-l] More quotes from AfD

body:
G'day Ilmari,

> Mark Gallagher wrote:
>
>> G'day Ilmari,
>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Resonance_%28MIT%29
>>
>> I note, though, that neither you nor anyone else who has commented or
>> is likely to comment here has seen fit to add your voices to the AfD
>> in question.
>
> Actually, I did.  The comment I quoted here was in response to that.

Whoops!  So you did.  My mistake.

> Also I wasn't really trying to bitch so much as see if someone here
> would have something constructive to say about it, or at least would be
> willing to support one side or the other in the debate.  At this point,
> I can't think of much I could add to the AfD discussion itself on my
> own, save for iterations of "Is too!" / "Is not!" ad nauseam.

Fair enough.

Note that I don't think there's anything wrong with posting about an
issue to the list, to get better visibility for it --- e.g. this case,
Herostratus' RfA, etc.  What irritates me is when people complain to the
list for the sake of complaining, without actually doing anything on
Wikipedia themselves about the issue --- something I thought you were
doing (because I wasn't paying attention), and I apologise.

It's not bitching on the list, per se, so much as using the list as a
substitute for fixing easily-corrected problems.

<snip />

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse


subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked for 36 hours

body:
For a reason I haven't seen your answer.

 Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3ARequests_for_comment%2FFadix&diff=54091641&oldid=50756937

 In no way was he involved in anyway in those conflicts, he signed it just after I criticised him and since then he is retaliating. If you want any other evidences feel free to ask.

Pecher <pecher at ukr.net> wrote: Fadix,

Are able to provide edit diffs showing InShanee signing an RfC against you?

Pecher
-----Original Message-----
From: Fadix
To: English Wikipedia
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2006 09:34:34 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Blocked for 36 hours

> Why? I really believe that this user should not have any administrative privilages, it is not like I accuse every admins which I accounter.
>
> This admin fail to understand why such tools are given to him, he has hard time understanding that those tools should be used with something in mind ''what I am doing is above all for the best of the articles which constitute Wikipedia'' and Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and articles are what matters. This, this admin does not understand. He is using his tools because he is criticised, I wonder if in the real world any judge being criticised could sue someone and be the plaintif and the judge in the same time.
>
> What is disruptive in Wikipedia are revert warring, POV pushing, all the sort of things that disrupt the quality of the articles, not some abarsive words which any admin could edit from a user who has enought of POV warriors who build hateful websites and after being bored there recycle themselves in Wikipedia and once in a while in his answers of hundreds of words use a word which could be interpreted by some as personal attack. I have never been blocked for 3RR and I shall never be, because I know that such behaviors are really disruptive since the victim is the article. I know to restrain myself and I don't need someone to tell me I am in the wrong, worst, I don't need someone who thinks I am in the wrong and has tools to impose his misconceptions of the rules.
>
> Also, this admin is seriously disrupting in his behaviors, who the hell do he think he is? Members are reporting others in his talk page and then he go on to distribute warnings as if they were cake. I have been reported by a user who was the other side of the conflict, and I have never used such cheap tactics to get someone silenced, when it happens that both sides have used such words.
>
> Right now, I am blocked and there is not one admin that has warned this user, who's autority I contest, for his misbehavior, please just read the example which I have requested any admin to answer on whatever or not it is a warning material. It was not, and even he realise it was not, while he placed it as personal attack, he then presented it as not assuming good faith, which neither was the cases.
>
> Such admins are even more disruptive, because by blocking users like this they prevent those users to contribute, this is really harmful for Wikipedia. And I am really tired of this silence.
>
> Nathan - Mailing Lists
 wrote: Fadix: Questioning an admin's capability is generally Not A Good Idea[tm].
> I wouldn't resort to this myself and I've said some things that have been
> pretty disruptive.
>
> - Nathan (User:nathanrdotcom)
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
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> ---------------------------------
> Get news delivered. Enjoy RSS feeds right on your Mail page.
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> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
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>
>

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from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 6/21/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/21/06, BJ?rn Lindqvist <bjourne at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 6/21/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Have you ever looked at a regular day of submissions at AFC?
> > > Each and every one of them is one more than hasn't been created by an
> > > ignorant newbie
> > > and avoided overworking admins with the need to delete it.
> >
> > It appears to me that at least a large minority of them aren't written
> > by an "ignorant newbie" but by a "smart newbie." Each and every one of
> > them is one more problem that some wikipedian has to deal with. Seems
> > to me like the whole AFC thing has just managed to move the problem to
> > another place. AFC = AFD in reverse.
>
> No, the great thing about AfC is no one has to deal with it at all. If
> we stopped working on AfC, then Wikipedia would simply lose a little
> bit of growth. By contrast, if we stopped working on AfD, then
> Wikipedia would fairly dramatically fill up with total crud.
>
Isn't AfC part of Wikipedia?

Anthony


body:
On 6/21/06, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21/06/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> > In addition, a pseudonym is more anonymous than an IP address.
>
> It's also less anonymous though; wherever a pseudonym is used, we know
> it's the *same* people, where an anonymous IP address is used it could
> be anyone behind a NAT'd gateway.
>
True for some situations, but not for others.  In the case of a
throwaway account used to create one article (or edit once), that's
about as close to anonymous as you can get.


body:
On 6/21/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> By and large, AfC is a lot less work for any given article than AfD
> is. "Bad" AfCs can simply be ignored. "Good" ones take a couple of
> minutes, but at least we end up with a useful, well-formatted article
> out of the deal.
>
Here's something that would be even less work for everyone.

When a non-logged in user creates a new article stick "warning, this
isn't really part of Wikipedia" on the top of it.  Then, when a logged
in user edits it, take the warning off.  If no logged in user edits it
within X days, delete it.

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] newbie culture

body:
G'day mboverload,

[top-posting fixed]

> On 6/16/06, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.com> wrote:
>
>> mboverload stated for the record:
>>
>>> Screw that.  If it shoot someone by accident once, I get a light
>> sentence if I'm lucky..  If it "accidentally" shoot someone TWO
>> TIMES, I get 20 YEARS.
>>
>> Are you having trouble understanding the difference between an
>> inappropriate edit and murder?
>
> I'm making a comment about how you don't get 4 chances of deliberate
>  vandalism in the real world.  Fine, I'll change it to shooting out
> windows. If a cop tells you to not shoot out another window, you
> DON'T get another chance.  You get TASERED.

It sounds like you have very violent cops where you are.

Your analogy still doesn't work.  It costs me less to revert vandalism
(assuming it's a case where rollback would be appropriate) than it costs
the other fellow to make his edit in the first place.  Someone shooting
out windows is causing potentially very expensive property damage, and
he knows it; someone fiddling with a bunch of pixels which represent
text in a file on the other side of the world may not even realise what
he's doing is *wrong*.

I will block only after I'm sure the vandal knows (or has been told
clearly):
a) He's damaging other people's work, however briefly, and
b) He's being dealt with by real people, not bots whose limits are fun
    to test, and
c) He is on his last warning

Sometimes this can be done with one warning.  Sometimes it requires
four.  Often someone who meets the above three conditions *also* decides
to stop vandalising, and doesn't require a block.  If so, bonza.  We
don't just block people out of the blue, if they don't understand the
consequences of their actions.

There *are* times I'll block without warning:
   i) The editor knows he's not welcome, and edits not because he
      genuinely wants to improve Wikipedia, but because he thinks it
      makes us mockable (such as a certain stalker who, I understand,
      even Wikipedia Review now refuse to accept), or
  ii) The vandal clearly knows what he's doing and is using the
      account/IP as part of an orchestrated campaign (Willy on Wheels,
      for instance, or other sock attack vandals), or
iii) Open proxies

As one might expect, these three occur very rarely.

Warnings Are Important, and it's quality, not quantity, that counts.

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse


body:
On 6/21/06, Keith Old <keithold at gmail.com> wrote:
> If we adopted such a system, it should work so that a user can nominate an
> article and an admin can make a decision according to our policy on
> deletion. There should also be consideration of the categories of
> article that would be liable for speedy deletion and those that would go
> through a lengthier process such as Articles for deletion.

Is that different from existing speedy deletion?

--
-george william herbert
gherbert at retro.com / george.herbert at gmail.com


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Vancouver university

body:
On 6/21/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> I did.  Why don't you folk take the time to get a credible
> accreditation to answer your critics?

This sentence is kind of amusing: "This process is not primarily about
further study. It is mostly about the 'assembling' and credentialing -
by the issuance of degree and formal transcript - what you have
already accomplished. "

Heh:
But in various subjects, and in places which do not have a competitive
or ideological axe to grind, we are well-known and highly respected.
The media are not very helpful.  Did you read in 1997 that the AAUA
announced us runner-up in the prestigious global Khaladjian Award
competition for Innovation in Higher Education (winner NY State U)?
No, you didn't read it, because not a single newspaper or magazine -
not even the locals in Vancouver BC or Bellingham WA - bothered to
report the item. Also, you won't usually find us in 'authoritative'
directories of universities, because we don't pay to be in them.

Hmm.

Steve


from_name: SJ

body:
This sounds like a great first project for some of the stats groups
getting started (Erik Garrison, call your office...)

My personal guess, based on some hasty stats months ago, is that the
rate of good-new-article creation dropped, the rate of bad-new-article
creation dropped by a bit less, and the rate of worrisome-vandalism
(not the obvious kind) didn't drop at all.  I would like to see a
serious stats breakdown, from before, during, and after the change to
know better what's going on.

Interesting statistics: rate of reverts, rate of speedy-deleted
articles, rate of AfD entries, rate of new user creation, rate of new
users created who never edit, rate of creation of articles that never
get more than one major edit, rate of good additions to AFC, rate of
good additions to AFC that never get turned into an article...

SJ

On 6/21/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> > As I said before, the experiment did cut down on a lot of crap, because some
> > newbies simply don't want to register and instead post to AFC where we can
> > nip an article's creation at the core.
>
> But what are the numbers? There's all this raw data sitting there in the
> database from which it should be relatively straightforward to determine
> actual statistical measures of what effect the change in policy had, but
> since the analysis hasn't been done we're reduced to relying on
> subjective impressions and assertions pulled seemingly out of nowhere.
> How can I _verify_ that the experiment did or didn't cut down on a lot
> of crap? I don't personally do any of the various sorts of "patrolling"
> this change was likely to have an impact on (recent changes, new
> articles, etc) so I don't even have subjective impressions of my own to
> go on.


body:
On 6/21/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> On 6/21/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > By and large, AfC is a lot less work for any given article than AfD
> > is. "Bad" AfCs can simply be ignored. "Good" ones take a couple of
> > minutes, but at least we end up with a useful, well-formatted article
> > out of the deal.
> >
> Here's something that would be even less work for everyone.
>
> When a non-logged in user creates a new article stick "warning, this
> isn't really part of Wikipedia" on the top of it.  Then, when a logged
> in user edits it, take the warning off.  If no logged in user edits it
> within X days, delete it.
>
Here's a harsher version, but just as open and should save even more
time.  I'll call a user "registered" if they fit whatever criteria is
currently used (logged in for X days, I believe).

When an unregistered user creates a new article, stick some
appropriate warning on the top.  Registered users see a checkbox and
button next to the warning, which says "approve article".  If the
article is approved, it's entered into a log, and the warning goes
away.

Until an article is approved, it can be deleted by *any* registered
user, there's no need to bother an admin to delete it.  Additionally,
if the article is not approved within X days, it is automatically
deleted.

Anthony


from_name: Austin Hair

subject: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?

body:
On 6/21/06, Johan Bos <skatinghacker at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Not as far as I know. I just meant articles in simple Spanish words.
> Readable for people who just understand for example 1500 words.

English is the most widely spoken second language on the planet, the
lingua franca of international communication; it's also really hard.
The argument for the "simple English" editions is that with more
non-native speakers than native ones, a special effort should be made
to cater to those who haven't quite mastered this undoubtedly
difficult tongue.  While I don't agree, I do recognize the validity of
that point of view.

While Spanish may have more native speakers, it doesn't enjoy the same
ubiquity, and its mostly regular syntax means it doesn't pose the same
difficulty to novices.  You seem to acknowledge the second point
yourself when you talk about "sencillo" as nothing more than a
limited-vocabulary edition of the Spanish Wikipedia.

We're only just starting to recover from the damage done by the
infamous Enciclopedia Libre fork, and I can't see anyone supporting
any division of those efforts right now.

Austin


subject: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?


from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] patrolling improvement

body:
On 21/06/06, Travis Derouin <travis at wikihow.com> wrote:
> Hey,
>
> I'm not sure if this has been suggested before, but on our wiki I
> added in a feature that after someone is marks an edit as patrolled it
> takes them to the next unpatrolled diff page. It keeps our community
> members happy since they don't have to press the back button twice and
> click on the next diff to get to the next unpatrolled edit. For 1.6 we
> plan on passing along along any of the filter settings (namespace,
> minor edit, etc) to choose the next diff.
>
> I thought I'd share this in case anyone else is interested.

And what a coincidence; an extension to do this is in development!
Screenshot at http://www.anubite.co.uk/mediawiki/SpecialPatrol.png.
It's more or less complete, although there is one problem for which I
need a good bit of SQL; right now, the query being run returns any old
unpatrolled change*, when it needs to return an unpatrolled change
which also happens to be the latest change to the respective page.

* Not exactly; any unpatrolled change not due to the patrolling user,
which wasn't bot marked and isn't "assigned" to another patroller.

Rob Church


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> Until an article is approved, it can be deleted by *any* registered
> user, there's no need to bother an admin to delete it.  Additionally,
> if the article is not approved within X days, it is automatically
> deleted.

All good, IMO, except for the assumption of bad faith right at the end
there. I don't see why the default has to be "delete". At that point the
article's been hanging around for X days with a bomb strapped to its
chest and not a single editor has seen fit to pull the trigger on it,
suggesting that it probably isn't total trash. It may simply be a little
questionable, which is something Wikipedia can work with.

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list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Kyle Anderson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Image uploads now undeletable

body:
> On 6/16/06, Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Maybe they should just be deleted automatically after a 3 or 6 month
> > inactive period or something.
> >
> > ~Mark
> > _______________________________________________
Perhaps we could to auto-expire type deletion, Myth-tv style. Images
wouldn't be deleted until a lack of space is detected. (Or if there is
less than 100G free or so.) When there is a lack of space, the oldest
unused images are deleted until the space condition is resolved.
Kyle


from_name: Ian Woollard

body:
On 21/06/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> In addition, a pseudonym is more anonymous than an IP address.

It's also less anonymous though; wherever a pseudonym is used, we know
it's the *same* people, where an anonymous IP address is used it could
be anyone behind a NAT'd gateway.

> Before,
> it was possible to tell that user X came from school network Y. Now
> you have to do a CheckUser to get the user's IP. The Seigenthaler
> vandal was identified because he was an unregistered user.

Right. IP addresses are very useful.

> GerardM also has some great ideas how we can build better
> authentication into our software, so that, for instance, we know that
> certain IP addresses are untrusted, and instead of blocking them
> entirely, we allow users who are authenticated _within_ a school or
> university to use that authentication in Wikipedia.

Yes, it doesn't make sense right now that a logged in user on a
anonymous IP address can't edit the wikipedia. Recently there was a
weird internet routing problem and I found that there was no direct
route to the wikipedia, but I could log in fine via a proxy server,
but couldn't edit. Given that the wikipedia knew it was me, that
behaviour is *broken*.

> Absolutely. My long-term vision of a replacement for both protection
> and semi-protection is "quality protection", where the version you see
> is the last reviewed one, but the article remains fully editable.
> Following this strategy, we can make Wikipedia ever more openly
> editable, continuing the path we have already taken.

I definitely agree, but I think the nupedia experiment tells us that
formal reviews are bad for the wikipedia though.

The problem is they never time out; you could be waiting for a formal
review forever- there's nothing forcing it through. There's no
pressure on the reviewers. I mean, if the wikipedia tells us anything
it's that if most edits to something improve an article, then the
article will improve over time; so the first version doesn't have to
be particularly good, because it will converge to excellence.

So we need to put pressure on the reviewers- how's this as an idea for
the most lightweight scheme for reviewing?:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Timed_article_change_stabilisation_mechanism

(summary: the idea is that newbie edits don't go live for a day or so,
to allow more experienced editors to check it over.)

But beyond that, we need to come up with simple mechanisms to divide
trust between well established users; for example how can new users
get disadvantaged when creating a new article, but in a way that still
allows them to create articles?

If a new user (with say, less than 100 edits) creates an article,
should it go live immediately or should there be a cooling off period
of say, a week, to give the established editors a chance to check it
over? Just adding a delay discourages lots of bad guys I think; no
immediate gratification.

> Erik

--
-Ian Woollard

"Victory can be perceived but not created."


subject:
[Wikitech-l] [Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] moving forward
	on	article validation

body:
On Thu, 2006-06-15 at 11:47 +0200, Andy Rabagliati wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Jun 2006, SJ wrote:
>
> I have a related, orthogonal, request, regarding the process of
> assembling a CD or other snapshot. My interest is less to do with
> quality, and more to do with the process. My end result is either a CD,
> or a plucker document for PalmOS.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Version_0.5
>
> I see the job as too big to be done via hand selection.
I agree, kinda. Too big for maybe one person, but we have a lot of
hands.

> I am also more
> interested in coverage than quality - I figure the quality will just get
> better.
Yes. I am too. For .5 and 1.0, Both are important though.

>  So, I want automated methods, both for selecting good coverage,
> and (less important at the moment) version selection. I also would
> like to target a size - 128Meg, 512Meg, 600Meg, 1Gig, 4Gig.
I really like this. Thumbdrive ? Check. CD? Check. DVD? Check. My
laptop? Check.

> I am also
> interested in post-processing - stripping redlinks, including ''main
> article'' references on core articles, like ''History of South Africa''
> etc. I want to be able to tweak parameters, then press a button and get
> a new CD (from my downloaded XML dump of en and a picture collection,
> and possibly via a live mediawiki snapshot of that content).
Live? How did you want to do this? Perhaps using the toolserver?

>
> This is what I have tried, mostly with available tools, and a bit of perl.
>
> * Download recent XML dump.
> * Download list of articles from category (currently using the WPCD template)
> * Trim the full dump to the above article list (natively performed by mwdumper --exactlist)
> * Import this to mysql
> * import (full) category dump to mysql (sql dump downloaded from wikipedia)
> * Use mediawiki/maintenance/dumpHTML.php to convert this to HTML
> * perl script removes categories with less than four included items from HTML dump
> * redlink removal by un-anchoring HTML with class=new (red links) -
>   but not Categories (that always seem to appear red)
>
> Problems I have come across:-
>
> * templates (particularly <nowiki>{{main|History of Country}}</nowiki>
>   and the like) do not make it through dumpHTML.php. Maybe I have to
>   hack the php.
> * Remove all the dross at the end, like inter-wiki links.
You don't want those? Why not? (assuming they reflecting a link within
the dump)

>
> Could this be done by tweaking the CSS from dumpHTML ?
I don't know, but I would like to reproduce your steps. Can you show me
your perl and any other special things you are using?
Kyle


from_name: stevertigo

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Category:<Subjective-pejorative>, weak consensus,
	and ! NPOV

body:
I dont write here much anymore, but this is blatent
POV enough to mention.

I just told User:Drboisclair on his talk about how,
lacking any editorial guidance where consensus is
weak, non-standard strategies can work, I said:
* "If necessary we can even add Category:Anti-Arab
people to various pages to illustrate our point, but
first we should simply write something to wikien."

Of course when I start putting Category:Anti-Arab
people on various pages, people should rightly revert
me. Such a subjective categorization, as its based on
mere political rhetoric, or actions, should be
regarded as drastically POV.

[[Category:Anti-Semitic people]] on the other hand
seems to get more leeway:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion/Log/2006_June_13#Category:Anti-Semitic_people_to_Category:Anti-Semitism_.28people.29

I believe this is basic bonehead-level NPOV people,
and  it should be a good lesson to resolve it. As
interesting as it is to organize people by their
faulty views, doing so in this manner only reveals our
own  faulty adherence to the holy prime directive. And
if youre one of those people who has to ask what that
is...

Basic stuff, people
Stevertigo

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Sam Korn

subject: [WikiEN-l] Oversight log

body:
On 6/21/06, Selina . <wikipediareview at gmail.com> wrote:
> None of these were appointed in any way by the community, they just seem to
> have been privileges handed out to friends as individuals see fit...

Now, I'm going to assume good faith in that you really *don't* know
why this selection of people was chosen.  Let's have a look.  We have
Jimbo (he gets most complaints, so fair enough), Brion (he could
already do this, so fair enough), the 14 AC members (community
appointed to a great degree) and Essjay (respected, bureaucrat,
already has checkuser privileges).

Now, we cannot do this like an RFA election, as there is potentially
sensitive information.  Matching the Checkuser requirements seems
logical to me.  There's no reason why this couldn't potentially be
expanded in the future.  Let's see how the current team does first.

--
Sam


subject: [WikiEN-l] Oversight log

body:
On 6/21/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> No, they are still active, but we can't find the log either.
>
> Fred

I don't know whether you still can't, Fred, but I can, at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Oversight

--
Sam


from_name: Pecher

subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocked for 36 hours

body:
Fadix,

Are able to provide edit diffs showing InShanee signing an RfC against you?

Pecher
-----Original Message-----
From: Fadix <forwikipediause at yahoo.ca>
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2006 09:34:34 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Blocked for 36 hours

> Why? I really believe that this user should not have any administrative privilages, it is not like I accuse every admins which I accounter.
>
>  This admin fail to understand why such tools are given to him, he has hard time understanding that those tools should be used with something in mind ''what I am doing is above all for the best of the articles which constitute Wikipedia'' and Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and articles are what matters. This, this admin does not understand. He is using his tools because he is criticised, I wonder if in the real world any judge being criticised could sue someone and be the plaintif and the judge in the same time.
>
>  What is disruptive in Wikipedia are revert warring, POV pushing, all the sort of things that disrupt the quality of the articles, not some abarsive words which any admin could edit from a user who has enought of POV warriors who build hateful websites and after being bored there recycle themselves in Wikipedia and once in a while in his answers of hundreds of words use a word which could be interpreted by some as personal attack. I have never been blocked for 3RR and I shall never be, because I know that such behaviors are really disruptive since the victim is the article. I know to restrain myself and I don't need someone to tell me I am in the wrong, worst, I don't need someone who thinks I am in the wrong and has tools to impose his misconceptions of the rules.
>
>  Also, this admin is seriously disrupting in his behaviors, who the hell do he think he is? Members are reporting others in his talk page and then he go on to distribute warnings as if they were cake. I have been reported by a user who was the other side of the conflict, and I have never used such cheap tactics to get someone silenced, when it happens that both sides have used such words.
>
>  Right now, I am blocked and there is not one admin that has warned this user, who's autority I contest, for his misbehavior, please just read the example which I have requested any admin to answer on whatever or not it is a warning material. It was not, and even he realise it was not, while he placed it as personal attack, he then presented it as not assuming good faith, which neither was the cases.
>
>  Such admins are even more disruptive, because by blocking users like this they prevent those users to contribute, this is really harmful for Wikipedia. And I am really tired of this silence.
>
> Nathan - Mailing Lists <lists at home.nathanr.com> wrote: Fadix: Questioning an admin's capability is generally Not A Good Idea[tm].
> I wouldn't resort to this myself and I've said some things that have been
> pretty disruptive.
>
> - Nathan (User:nathanrdotcom)
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> All new Yahoo! Mail
> ---------------------------------
> Get news delivered. Enjoy RSS feeds right on your Mail page.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>


from_name: Pedro Sanchez

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Political User-categories Was: Conservative notice
	board

body:
On 6/21/06, Phil <phil at dabserver.dyndns.org> wrote:
> Yep, individual votes on each category is just as unfair as nominating
> a few. The "popular" political parties survive, the less popular ones
> get deleted.
>
> What's the problem with Factionalism? There is none - As long
> as you aren't forced to pick one faction exclusively.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

Well, that's why now they have been CFD en masse, so it's not
individually. look for
Category:Wikipedians by politics and all subcategories


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject:
[Foundation-l] (volunteer) job position : Ombudsperson
 checkuser (or checkuser Ombudsperson or whatever)

body:
Daniel Arnold wrote:

>Am Mittwoch, 21. Juni 2006 16:07 schrieb Robert Scott Horning:
>
>
>>I've heard a lot of fear mongering and what I percieve to be unwarrented
>>fears about abuses to checkuser actions.  Can you give some clear
>>examples of what have been percieved as abuses of those with checkuser
>>privileges, at least types of problems that have happened as a matter or
>>practice?
>>
>>
>
>I did never take the time investigating the background of any checkuser of
>others. I just noticed some statistics:
>
>en.wikipedia (and some other smaller projects as well) have overproportional
>heavy use of CheckUser. de.wikipedia (the second largest one, which has like
>en.wikipedia many trolls but probably has different approaches keeping them
>down, which naturally also have their specific positive and negative side
>effects) has no checkuser trace in the logfiles (a developer can make a
>Checkuser directly at the servers without Checkuser logfile traces but
>nonetheless it were only a few in case of de.wikipedia).
>

The point I was trying to make here is that there have been enough
checkuser scans and enough people with checkuser privileges that there
must be, just through statistical analysis, some abuse that has taken
place, or at least something that should have been investigated to see
if a person with checkuser privileges has gone too far.  Or if that has
not happened that perhaps the whole worry is way overrated.  Take for
example somebody with sysop privileges and having deleted about 1000
pages from a given project.  Don't tell me that 100% of those deletions
are going to occur without *somebody* complaining that the admin went
too far, even for the very best admin that is completely on top of
policies and one of the most trusted Wikimedians.  I was trying to ask
if there are some specific examples here for checkuser abuse rather than
some vague "it will happen in the future".  Even investigations that
later were proven to be legitimate uses of checkuser scans.

>>I know I am speaking from an apparent minority opinion on this mailing
>>list, but I fail to see what real damage is happening from simply
>>looking up the IP address of a user.
>>
>>
>
>My concerns are as follows: A Checkuser of an IP from let us say China or
>Saudi Arabia can have *serious* impact if these informations come into the
>wrong hands although the probability of a worst case scenario is quite low.
>
Who is this information going to be protected from?  The governments of
those countries,  aka Chinese and Saudi governments?  According to
Wikimedia Foundation policy, this information can be, indeed must be,
turned over to authorized government officials of any government that
makes an official request for this information.  The check user policy
is not going to be any kind of protection in this situation.  In
addition, as I've pointed out earlier, both of these governments are
more than capable technologically to be able to obtain the IP addresses
of Wikimedia users without even having to ask for it from the
Foundation.  The Chinese have an entire battalion of their army that
does nothing but electronic surveilance and warfare.  This is a trivial
task for people with that kind of training.  They don't call it the
Great Firewall of China for a trivial reason, as all IP traffic into and
out of China is monitored.

As for the Saudis, I was offered a job with a Saudi company for
$150,000/year (turned it down BTW).  They certainly have the financial
means to get whatever technological talent they need, especially if it
is perceived as a threat to the royal family in any form, or even
religious zealots within their government.  If I were a Saudi citizen, I
would not count on the Wikimedia checkuser policy as offering even a
shred of protection.  At best a speed bump to slow down the government
by a few days.  And a nightmare of negative publicity for the WMF if
board members tried to drag their heels intentionally with an overtly
political act to stop any government from obtaining this information.

>So if en.wp makes heavy regular use of checkuser why shouldn't zh.wp and ar.wp
>do the same as well (and logfile data of a palestinian on he.wp is also a
>potentially serious matter for example)? It is a question of caution and role
>model function of en.wp.
>
>So I don't suggest to en.wp stop checkuser but use it more seriously. Just
>block an IP or recently created vandal account unilaterally if you think it's
>a sock puppet without investigating deeper (hey you're admin you have to *be
>bold* sometimes) and only perform a checkuser afterwards in case there was a
>real demand from several third persons.
>
>That way you also avoid creating a large bueraucracy on blocking of small
>fishes like IPs and short lived accounts and have more time for far more
>important matters.
>
>Checkuser should mainly be a weapon against sock puppets of people that are
>involved deeper in the project (let's say several accounts of a single person
>that abuses them for quite some time in a sophisticated way with a mixture
>out of valid and POV edits).
>
>Just my 2 cents...
>
>Arnomane
>
I agree that sockpuppets and persistant vandals (a variation of sock
puppet abuse) would be the main reasons for even using checkuser scans.
 While I can dream up some scenerios of abuse, what I'm asking is what
actual abuse has happened based on experience.  Apparently there is none
at all.

It is too bad that non-Wikipedia projects can't use checkuser scans,
however.  That is another fight for another thread.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: James Hare

subject: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?

body:
And I moved it to where it's supposed to be:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages#Simple_Spanish_Wikipedia

Good luck on your project. Unfortunately, I won't be able to contribute.

On 6/21/06, Johan Bos <skatinghacker at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> I started a test at incubator:
>
> http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sencillo
>
> Everybody able to write a simplified form of Spanish is invited to write
> an
> article for the test.
>
> I also placed a proposal at Meta:
>
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Proposal_for_simple_Spanish_wiki
>
> So we will see...
>
> Greetings,
>
> Johan
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "James Hare" <messedrocker at gmail.com>
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2006 8:57 PM
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?
>
>
> > Well, try bringing it up on the Incubator:
> http://incubator.wikimedia.org
> >
> > On 6/21/06, Johan Bos <skatinghacker at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Not as far as I know. I just meant articles in simple Spanish words.
> >> Readable for people who just understand for example 1500 words.
> >>
> >> Greetings,
> >>
> >> Johan Bos
> >>
> >> ----- Original Message -----
> >> From: "James Hare" <messedrocker at gmail.com>
> >> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> >> Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2006 7:22 PM
> >> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?
> >>
> >>
> >> > Simple Spanish Wikipedia is a great idea, since we have Simple
> English.
> >> > However, I heard that Simple English is an actual, established subset
> >> > of
> >> > the
> >> > English language. Can we say the same about Simple Spanish?
> >> >
> >> > --James Hare
> >> >
> >> > On 6/21/06, Johan Bos <skatinghacker at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >> >>
> >> >> Spanish is worldwide a big language. Would it be an idea to start a
> >> >> "simple
> >> >> Spanish" wiki: sencillo.wikipedia.org? I would be prepared to
> >> contribute
> >> >> to
> >> >> it.
> >> >>
> >> >> Greetings,
> >> >>
> >> >> Johan Bos (Jcb)
> >> >> _______________________________________________
> >> >> foundation-l mailing list
> >> >> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> >> >> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >> >>
> >> > _______________________________________________
> >> > foundation-l mailing list
> >> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> >> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >> >
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> foundation-l mailing list
> >> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> >> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 21/06/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> > Unfortunately, I'm not sure if that effect is undone by the amount of logged
> > in newbies.
> > Was there a spike in AFD entries at the time? - ~~~~
>
> This is exactly my point. It should be entirely possible to dig up the
> actual numbers and make a pretty graph to show objectively whether the
> policy change had effects like this, but nobody has. So _nobody knows_.
> Or if they do, they haven't published their results anywhere publicly -
> in the email that sparked me off on this thread Jimbo himself says he
> hasn't seen any analysis.

I have seen a graph of number-of-articles-on-AFD over time, but damned
if I can find it. Does anyone else remember it?
--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: Michael Snow

body:
Ian Woollard wrote:

> I definitely agree, but I think the nupedia experiment tells us that
> formal reviews are bad for the wikipedia though.

Depends what you mean by that. Featured article nominations are formal
reviews in some sense, or about as formal as one gets on a project whose
culture trends to the informal. Formal reviews aren't bad per se, but
Nupedia had a poorly designed workflow. Now that we have the community
and the tools to produce large amounts of content, it makes sense to try
to see if we can't adjust the tools to also allow for better review
processes.

Incidentally, historically speaking your characterization is backwards.
It's Wikipedia that was the experiment relative to Nupedia, not the
other way round.

--Michael Snow


body:
On 21/06/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> For instance, a basic copyright check might require only a time delay,
> while stating the accuracy of an article might require one or two
> other editors to confirm the claim PLUS a time delay.

It already sounds way too complicated to me. The more complicated you make it, the more unintended consequences there are likely to be, the more failure modes there are and the more unwieldy it gets to edit the Wikipedia.

We *want* people to contribute to the Wikipedia, it got where it is today by being incredibly quick and easy to edit.

Adding some review process to the wikipedia, which may never, ever finish?? Why?

It's not like the Wikipedia is employing people to edit it. They don't ever have to sign anything off. And once you realise that, you realise that there has to be a timeout somewhere, because they can always go away, and then you start wondering why you need more complication than just delaying stuff a bit on a timeout, and informing editors of edits and letting them deal with it.

At the end of the day, it's the editors that make the wikipedia what it is, all we can do is empower them to improve it. Process can guide, but it won't do it.

> Erik

--
-Ian Woollard

"Victory can be perceived but not created."


from_name: Emmanuel Engelhart

body:
Le Mercredi 21 Juin 2006 14:57, Rob Church a ?crit?:
> On 21/06/06, Emmanuel Engelhart <emmanuel.engelhart at wikimedia.fr> wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > I tried to set up a local french Wikipedia on my personal computer.
> > I didn't find any way to get the complete dump of all pictures used in
> > our french articles.
> > There is a dump from commons and fr at download.wikimedia.org/images/,
> > but I don't want to download almost 300 Go to be sure to have all needed
> > pictures.
> >
> > Can't someone light me ?
>
> We don't offer up-to-date image dumps at this time. Someone was
> looking into making it happen, I think, but I'm not sure.
>

Yes, although that would just resolve a small part of the problem.

Emmanuel


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
On 6/21/06, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Timed_article_change_stabilisation_mechanism
>
> (summary: the idea is that newbie edits don't go live for a day or so,
> to allow more experienced editors to check it over.)

Yes, time delay is one important mechanism for quality control. The
peer review mechanism I have in mind allows for a flexible combination
of different parameters, to deal with different review requirements.
For instance, a basic copyright check might require only a time delay,
while stating the accuracy of an article might require one or two
other editors to confirm the claim PLUS a time delay. We should be
able to tweak these parameters until we have found the ideal settings
for any quality criterion we devise.

Erik


from_name: Johan Bos

subject: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?

body:
Spanish is worldwide a big language. Would it be an idea to start a "simple
Spanish" wiki: sencillo.wikipedia.org? I would be prepared to contribute to
it.

Greetings,

Johan Bos (Jcb)


subject: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?


subject: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?

body:
Indeed.

Also, the typical reasoning to allow dead language Wikipedias like Old
English and Latin is for using as learning tools. Surely Wikipedia Sencillo
can function the same way?

On 6/21/06, Johan Bos <skatinghacker at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> I agree that Spanish is not too difficult, but it will take a lot of
> effort
> to learn sufficient Spanish to be able to read a Spanish article without
> using a dictionary. A "sencillo" article will be readable without a
> dictionary for anyone with a basic knowlegde of Spanish.
>
> Another advantage is that probable most Italian and Portugese people will
> be
> able to read "sencillo", without even knowing any Spanish.
>
> Greetings,
>
> Johan
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Austin Hair" <adhair at gmail.com>
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Thursday, June 22, 2006 12:41 AM
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?
>
>
> > On 6/21/06, Johan Bos <skatinghacker at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >> Not as far as I know. I just meant articles in simple Spanish words.
> >> Readable for people who just understand for example 1500 words.
> >
> > English is the most widely spoken second language on the planet, the
> > lingua franca of international communication; it's also really hard.
> > The argument for the "simple English" editions is that with more
> > non-native speakers than native ones, a special effort should be made
> > to cater to those who haven't quite mastered this undoubtedly
> > difficult tongue.  While I don't agree, I do recognize the validity of
> > that point of view.
> >
> > While Spanish may have more native speakers, it doesn't enjoy the same
> > ubiquity, and its mostly regular syntax means it doesn't pose the same
> > difficulty to novices.  You seem to acknowledge the second point
> > yourself when you talk about "sencillo" as nothing more than a
> > limited-vocabulary edition of the Spanish Wikipedia.
> >
> > We're only just starting to recover from the damage done by the
> > infamous Enciclopedia Libre fork, and I can't see anyone supporting
> > any division of those efforts right now.
> >
> > Austin
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?


subject: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?

body:
Not as far as I know. I just meant articles in simple Spanish words.
Readable for people who just understand for example 1500 words.

Greetings,

Johan Bos

----- Original Message -----
From: "James Hare" <messedrocker at gmail.com>
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2006 7:22 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?

> Simple Spanish Wikipedia is a great idea, since we have Simple English.
> However, I heard that Simple English is an actual, established subset of
> the
> English language. Can we say the same about Simple Spanish?
>
> --James Hare
>
> On 6/21/06, Johan Bos <skatinghacker at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Spanish is worldwide a big language. Would it be an idea to start a
>> "simple
>> Spanish" wiki: sencillo.wikipedia.org? I would be prepared to contribute
>> to
>> it.
>>
>> Greetings,
>>
>> Johan Bos (Jcb)
>> _______________________________________________
>> foundation-l mailing list
>> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Simple Spanish?


subject: [WikiEN-l] New York Times article

body:
geni wrote:

> On 6/21/06, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
>
>> Empirically I find it to be true. It's amazing how many people
>> will fight tooth and nail to get their POV into [[X]], while
>> being oblivious to [[History of X]], [[X and Y]], [[X-Z effect]],
>> [[list of Xes]], etc, all of which will have extensive material
>> inconsistent with the wanted POV. (My unkind belief is that POV
>> pushers are simply not smart enough to figure out that the
>> encyclopedia has more than one article.)
>
> Or they are smart enough to get as far as figureing out that most
> people only look at the high profile articles.

A combination of both, I suspect. Some simply do not bother to figure
out how much contradictory information is out there. Some rely on the
obvious choice being both the first and last port of call for most
readers. Those who are working more or less in isolation will also often
conserve their energy by fighting the battle where it will have the most
effect. Also, people who are linking to a specific article from outside
Wikipedia, perhaps even quoting it, may vigorously defend their version
of that article but care very little about other articles.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Travis Derouin

subject: [Wikitech-l] patrolling improvement

body:
Nice.

this is the SQL i'm using, it works for MySQL but I'm not sure about
other databases, the "ORDER BY rc_id DESC LIMIT 1" should get you the
next oldest edit.

$sql = "SELECT rc_id, rc_cur_id, rc_moved_to_ns,
 rc_moved_to_title, rc_new, rc_namespace, rc_title, rc_last_oldid
 FROM recentchanges WHERE rc_id < $rcid and rc_patrolled = 0  ";

if ($show_namespace != null && $show_namespace != '')
  // respect the filtered namespace
  $sql .= " and rc_namespace " . ($invert ? '!=' : '=') . $show_namespace ;
else
 // avoid the delete logs, etc
$sql .= " and rc_namespace >= 0 ";

$sql .= " ORDER by rc_id DESC LIMIT 1";

Travis

On 6/21/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21/06/06, Travis Derouin <travis at wikihow.com> wrote:
> > Hey,
> >
> > I'm not sure if this has been suggested before, but on our wiki I
> > added in a feature that after someone is marks an edit as patrolled it
> > takes them to the next unpatrolled diff page. It keeps our community
> > members happy since they don't have to press the back button twice and
> > click on the next diff to get to the next unpatrolled edit. For 1.6 we
> > plan on passing along along any of the filter settings (namespace,
> > minor edit, etc) to choose the next diff.
> >
> > I thought I'd share this in case anyone else is interested.
>
> And what a coincidence; an extension to do this is in development!
> Screenshot at http://www.anubite.co.uk/mediawiki/SpecialPatrol.png.
> It's more or less complete, although there is one problem for which I
> need a good bit of SQL; right now, the query being run returns any old
> unpatrolled change*, when it needs to return an unpatrolled change
> which also happens to be the latest change to the respective page.
>
> * Not exactly; any unpatrolled change not due to the patrolling user,
> which wasn't bot marked and isn't "assigned" to another patroller.
>
>
> Rob Church
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
On 21/06/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think that there would be user value in having available a
> human-reviewed WP derivative of some sort.
>
> I see the logical process as being a separate project.  It could be a
> WP project, or another outside project.  Not a fork, but a grooming
> process for articles.  All contributions made at WP, versions found to
> be stable and useful then "promoted" to live on otherPedia.

With a million items in the wikipedia, there would be a strong
tendency for the groomed version to get way behind, and if that
happens most users won't use it, why would anyone assist in the
grooming?

There may be a reason why they would, but a big advantage of timeouts
is that that can't really happen.

> --
> -george william herbert
> gherbert at retro.com / george.herbert at gmail.com

--
-Ian Woollard

"Victory can be perceived but not created."


from_name: Samuel Klein

subject: [Foundation-l] Sitenotice use for Wikimania

body:
On Sat, 17 Jun 2006, James Hare wrote:

> What should the notice say?

Something like this, only in a variety of languages.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/Wikimania/June_notice

Now up on a number of Wikimedia sites; with a few large ones left to be
targeted (trying not to unilaterally change the sitenotice without the
help of a local admin on the larger projects).

Some wikipedias are trying a sitenotice implementation that only shows up
for *logged-in* users; just as others have suggested in the past having
fundraiser messages primarily targeted at non-logged-in users.  all
something to consider in working out what general policies should be for
various flavours of site notice.

SJ


from_name: Fastfission

body:
On 6/20/06, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> It seems to me that there should be some relatively straightforward
> facts and figures that could be dug out of the edit history database on
> this. Perhaps a graph of the average age of deleted articles would do
> for a start; a drop in speedy deletion compared to other forms of
> deletion should result in an increase in the average age of articles
> upon deletion.

Unfortunately the data at stats.wikimedia.org seems somewhat spotty.
New user data for en seems to cut out after Jan 2006
(http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansNew.htm) and ditto
with new articles per day
(http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesArticlesNewPerDay.htm). There
does not seem to be a count for deleted articles per day on there at
all.

This seems to indicate to me that getting statistics for this period
is going to be a considerably harder job. I'm sure it has been
discussed why the en stats died then, but it would be nice to politely
nudge whoever has the power to deal with this and remind them that
these numbers could actually be useful for more than bragging about
whether we've created our Nth article...

If we had the following stats, some interesting conclusions could
probably be drawn:
1. New users per time period (day, week, month, whatever)
2. Articles created by new users (defining new user as someone with
under X number of edits or an account which is only X days old) per
time period
3. Number of those articles which were deleted with the first X days
4. Number of those articles which ended up on AfD (and maybe whether
they were eventually deleted or not)

I don't know how hard it would be to make the database spit out
numbers on things like that, but it should in theory be possible...

FF


body:
On 6/21/06, Daniel Arnold <arnomane at gmx.de> wrote:
> en.wikipedia (and some other smaller projects as well) have overproportional
> heavy use of CheckUser.

I disagree.  en.wikipedia receives far more traffic than any other
wiki.  en.wikipedia receives more edits than any other wiki.  I expect
it would follow that en.wikipedia receives a similarly high proportion
of trolling and sockpuppetry.

You quoted "> 50%" of checkuser uses are on en.wikipedia.  Looking at
traffic figures (Alexa), this seems about right.

Perhaps it is more de.wikipedia using CheckUser proportionally very
little rather than en.wikipedia using it proportionally very much.

--
Sam