subject: [Wikipedia-l] Moldovan wikipedia, again

body:
Nuance:
  - You say it's a wikipedia with no native contributor.
  - But we proved here that there is NO CONTRIBUTOR AT ALL.
    Your "contributions" are stolen from ro.wikipedia.

I know of the Wikipedia licencing policy, but this still is utterly
unethical: One person copying articles from one wikipedia to another
and then claiming they are different just because the script was
changed.

Actually, this is what infuriates me and makes me fight here. This is
why I, a Romanian, am involved. The "Moldovan" identity is the problem
of the Moldovan people. I have already said that once a native Moldovan
speaker wants a Moldovan wikipedia, I'll help him create it.

But you are not Moldovan. You are not able to write Moldovan.
You pretend helping some people that did not ask for your help.
No native Moldovan expressed an interest in your wikipedia.

In fact, all people from Moldova, here on Wikipedia, say they
speak Romanian. You have Oleg Alexandrov, which used to help you,
but then dropped you when he saw you profess extreme oppinions.
You have Dmitriid, which marks ro-2 in his Babel box, not mo-2, and
would agree for an automatic translation tool from Romanian, a tool
that exists (as he said two days ago).

And these are the ones that you claim to have (or have had)
on your side.  Because there are Moldovans, like Pavel, that are
utterly mad at you for supporting Stalinist points of view.

You can always come with arguments of the sort:
- there is an ISO code
- maybe, in the future, there will be some community
- the bad Romanians are against it

BUT: RIGHT NOW, THERE IS NO COMMUNITY, no interest in
your work, aside from the interest of your opponents (the people you
plagiarize), and that of some innocent bystanders on this list and
elsewhere, that are forced into listening all this because you won't
accept that you serve nobody's interest.

Dpotop

Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote: If Wikipedias with no native contributors are so evil, why don't you
request locking of the over 100 Wikipedias for which this is the case?

You might say that none of them have any people writing, but that is
not true. Wikipedias such as the Lingala Wikipedia (ln.wp) are filled
with content created by non-native speakers, and you aren't
complaining about them. Why is that? Why don't you go on a crusade to
close the Lingala Wikipedia? Or the Maori Wikipedia?

Mark

On 29/06/06, Jacky PB  wrote:
>
> Hello Gerard,
>
> I don't really understand what you are implying.
>
> But I can repeat why we ask for the deletion of
> mo.wikipedia (all of these are already proven in
> previous messages):
>
> 1. There is no community. Nobody on wikipedia is both
> interested in having it and able to contribute.
>
> 2. All content is copied from ro.wikipedia and
> transliterated. There are better, already tested ways
> of changing script, if someone wants it.
>
> 3. In the current status, mo.wikipedia is in fact a
> heaven for trolls of all sorts.
>
> Of course, deletion needs not be permanent. As soon as
> the condition 1 becomes false (as soon as a community
> forms), the moldovan wikipedia can be re-created.
>
> Yours,
> Jacky
>
> --- Gerard Meijssen  wrote:
>
> > Liviu Andronic wrote:
> > > ... The big issue comes mainly from the
> > desinformation that mo.wikipediacreates.
> > >
> > > The content that is currently on mo.wikipedia is
> > written in a language that
> > > is not used any more in the Republic of Moldova.
> > It could be argued that
> > > Moldovan is used by a minority in the territory of
> > Moldova (in private and
> > > personal matters), and by a part of population
> > (mainly Moldovan schools) in
> > > Transnistria.  Please note that Cyrillic Moldovan
> > is not used on a large
> > > scale (that is, generally speaking, you won't
> > encounter Moldovan Cyrillic
> > > anywhere in Moldova). At least for Moldova, I can
> > assure you, as I am a
> > > native Moldovan. As far as Transnistria is
> > concerned, I really doubt it.
> > >  Even the   official presidential website
> > > doesn't
> > > contain any Cyrillic Moldovan content. ...
> > >
> > Hoi,
> > Either the information is correct, and given that it
> > is said to be
> > information from the Romanian language Wikipedia it
> > should be both
> > correct and NPOV. If it is not correct or NPOV,
> > /both/ the Romanian and
> > the Moldovian language Wikipedia are to be
> > considered problematic. All
> > the rest is very much politics, posturing and
> > intransigence.
> >
> > I am sure that this continued existence is best
> > ignored. Consider you
> > are either a party to this dispute or you could not
> > care less. When  the
> > argument is that the mo wikipedia is occupied by
> > trolls, remember they
> > thrive by getting attention.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >    GerardM
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> >
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> __________________________________________________
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> http://mail.yahoo.com
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>

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list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Where are the decision makers?

body:
Yes, it is normal -- the decision was effectively already made.

Although the decision was originally to lock the Moldovan Wikipedia,
it became clear that it was not an open-and-shut issue and so those in
power decided the best course of action was to respect the status quo.

Obviously, they do not care to rehash the issue because it got so
nasty the first time around.

Mark

On 30/06/06, Jacky PB <dpotop1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I'm only saying that it is not normal that we are left here to quarrel.
> Even in a free country, a court of law is not an anarchic exchange of oppinions.
> There is a judge that:
> 1. lets the 2 parties expose their POV
> 2. asks questions
> 3. decides
>
> We have been left at stage 1, which is not normal, but lets me express my personal oppinion (argumented) that you only spread FUD.
>
> Dpotop
>
>
> Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote: So it's not OK for me to accuse you of FUD, but it's OK for you to accuse me?
>
> I have presented plenty of proof. I am done arguing with you here about this.
>
> The decision makers have left, as I said. They are no longer listening.
>
> Mark
>
> On 29/06/06, Jacky PB  wrote:
> >
> >
> > Hello everybody,
> >
> > It's been now some time we are providing actual proof
> > in support of a petition to close the Moldovan
> > wikipedia.
> >
> > However, it is obvious that something is wrong,
> > because every single message of ours is simply buried
> > under sequences of messages from Mark Williamson.
> >
> > Moreover:
> > - Our messages are sequences of facts that can be
> >   verified by anybody. Proof, in the scientific sense.
> > - The edits of Mark have the sole goal of
> >   discreditating the opposed camp. No proof, just
> >   "their oppinion is biased, because they
> >   have a hidden agenda". The very definition of FUD.
> >
> > Under these conditions, nobody says nothing! We are
> > left here to exchange messages in an uncontrolled
> > fashion, while the matter is really important.
> >
> > Where are the decision makers? Isn't there nobody
> >
> > Yours,
> > [[:en:Dpotop]], [[:ro:Dpotop]]
> >
> >
> >
> > __________________________________________________
> > Do You Yahoo!?
> > Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> > http://mail.yahoo.com
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> --
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>
>
>
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Moldovan wikipedia, again

body:
Your (well, at least, it sounds like what you would say) harassment of
me on my livejournal nonwithstanding (and you might wish to check it,
I have replied)...

You seem to have a very wrong concept of ownership of articles.

Neither you, nor the country of Romania, nor the group of all
Romanians as a whole, has any ownership over the Romanian Wikipedia or
any articles therein.

Would it be fair to say that all of the ro.wp articles that are
translated directly from English with no addition of facts are
similarly "stolen"?

No, it is Wikipedia, and we frequently copy from one another.

This is not "plagiarism".

> I know of the Wikipedia licencing policy, but this still is utterly
> unethical: One person copying articles from one wikipedia to another
> and then claiming they are different just because the script was
> changed.

They *are* different -- do they look the same to you? No. Different
letters. They may or may not be in the same language ultimately,
depending on your POV, but they are definitely different. They are
stored with different byte articles.

And no copying occurred. It is called transliterating.

> Actually, this is what infuriates me and makes me fight here. This is
> why I, a Romanian, am involved. The "Moldovan" identity is the problem
> of the Moldovan people. I have already said that once a native Moldovan
> speaker wants a Moldovan wikipedia, I'll help him create it.

You are infuriated because someone is using your articles? Well, I am
infuriated that you are using text I have written! Surely, somewhere
in ro.wp is a direct translation of some content I wrote in English.
Oh no!

> But you are not Moldovan. You are not able to write Moldovan.
> You pretend helping some people that did not ask for your help.
> No native Moldovan expressed an interest in your wikipedia.

I am Moldovan. It is your _opinion_ that I am "not able to write
Moldovan", especially given that you attach no adverb. "Native
Moldovans" (assuming you mean Moldovans living in Moldova) have
expressed an interest, although in very limited numbers.

> In fact, all people from Moldova, here on Wikipedia, say they
> speak Romanian. You have Oleg Alexandrov, which used to help you,
> but then dropped you when he saw you profess extreme oppinions.

He never "dropped me".

> You have Dmitriid, which marks ro-2 in his Babel box, not mo-2, and
> would agree for an automatic translation tool from Romanian, a tool
> that exists (as he said two days ago).

And I said that I agree to it to, as long as this tool will be
implemented on ro.wiki just as it is on sr.wiki and zh.wiki, and as
long as IMPROVEMENTS ARE ACCEPTED, which Bogdan did not allow so far
-- I gave a list of improvements, and he ignored them entirely.
Spelling still sucks.

> And these are the ones that you claim to have (or have had)
> on your side.  Because there are Moldovans, like Pavel, that are
> utterly mad at you for supporting Stalinist points of view.

Psh. They're certainly not the only ones.

> BUT: RIGHT NOW, THERE IS NO COMMUNITY, no interest in
> your work, aside from the interest of your opponents (the people you
> plagiarize), and that of some innocent bystanders on this list and
> elsewhere, that are forced into listening all this because you won't
> accept that you serve nobody's interest.

Oh, please. There is too a community. You are infuriated for no good
reason. Take a step back, and take a good look at the situation. You
have worked yourself up into a tizzy over nothing. I'm not sure why
this is worth the effort to you -- there's a good chance you will lose
the fight, and anyhow, no matter what, you are being destructive.

Mark

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list: wikien-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] SPUI requesting unblock

body:
On 6/30/06, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have been blocked for a week (initially indefinitely, then unblocked
> by another admin and reblocked for a week by the initial admin) for the
> contents of a page I made in January *2005* -
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SPUI/jajaja .

The page was recently listed on MFD. You reverted the MFD notice. Why?

For the record, there is now a separate mailing list for unblock requests:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/unblock-en-l

Erik


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Ivan Krstic

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

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> I love the fact that we have server admins telling us not to worry too
> much about the performance side of things :)

We *should* worry about the performance side of things, but not let that
fear impede the addition of useful functionality. I believe this is what
Rob was actually saying.

--
Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D


subject: [WikiEN-l] SPUI requesting unblock

body:
On 6/30/06, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The page was recently listed on MFD. You reverted the MFD notice. Why?
>
> Hmmm - I was pretty sure I had kept it while reverting a blanking, but
> on looking back at it, it appears I did remove it. My mistake.

Why did you create the page, and how do you justify its continued
existence in a website dedicated to creating an encyclopedia?

Erik


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

subject: [WikiEN-l] SPUI requesting unblock

body:
SPUI wrote:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SPUI/jajaja

What I don't get is, why would anyone care enough to argue about that on
MfD, much less on DRV?  It's nonsense, with markup that makes it crash
some browsers.  While the content might be useful as a demonstration if
one was reporting the bug to mozilla.org, I see no reason for Wikipedia
to host it.  We speedy delete nonsense pages like that all the time.

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: Filip Maljkovic

subject: [Wikitech-l] lot of blank pages and errors tonight

body:
Steve Summit wrote:
> I've been getting quite a few blank pages and error messages this
> evening, which disappear immediately upon reload. (This is
> en.wiktionary, if it matters, not wikipedia.)  I wonder if some
> number of the squid servers are indisposed?
>
>
If it makes you feel any better, same happened to me at sr: wikipedia.

Filip [dungodung]


from_name: Jacky PB

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Moldovan wikipedia, again

body:
> But you are not Moldovan. You are not able to write Moldovan.
> You pretend helping some people that did not ask for your help.
> No native Moldovan expressed an interest in your wikipedia.

I am Moldovan. It is your _opinion_ that I am "not able to write
Moldovan", especially given that you attach no adverb. "Native
Moldovans" (assuming you mean Moldovans living in Moldova) have
expressed an interest, although in very limited numbers.
The "limited number" is currently 0. :)

And anyone can check this by looking at the number of users registered (with Babel) as speakers of Moldovan (code mo). On the whole wikipedia, there is a single "mo" user, which is Mark, a.k.a. User:Node_ue. And he's level mo-2, meaning that he's making basic grammar and spelling errors.

:en:Dpotop

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from_name: mboverload

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Moldovan wikipedia, again

body:
What I'm actually interested in is the number of hits on that wikipedia.

mboverload

On 6/30/06, Jacky PB <dpotop1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > But you are not Moldovan. You are not able to write Moldovan.
> > You pretend helping some people that did not ask for your help.
> > No native Moldovan expressed an interest in your wikipedia.
>
> I am Moldovan. It is your _opinion_ that I am "not able to write
> Moldovan", especially given that you attach no adverb. "Native
> Moldovans" (assuming you mean Moldovans living in Moldova) have
> expressed an interest, although in very limited numbers.
> The "limited number" is currently 0. :)
>
> And anyone can check this by looking at the number of users registered
> (with Babel) as speakers of Moldovan (code mo). On the whole wikipedia,
> there is a single "mo" user, which is Mark, a.k.a. User:Node_ue. And he's
> level mo-2, meaning that he's making basic grammar and spelling errors.
>
> :en:Dpotop
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Next-gen email? Have it all with the  all-new Yahoo! Mail Beta.
> _______________________________________________
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> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
Domas Mituzas wrote:
> Exactly, this is why my initial mail on this issue was just a
> rambling on incremental diffs. I didn't get any opinions on them yet :)
> There can be various ideas on how to deal with it, diff just last 3-5
> revs, and make it rolling diff.

Incidentally, I've recently been looking into this extensively, using a
Wikipedia dataset. I have a bunch of hard numbers; I'll clean them up
and post them here in the next few days.

--
Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D


body:
On 6/30/06, Filip Maljkovic <dungodung at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Steve Summit wrote:
> > I've been getting quite a few blank pages and error messages this
> > evening, which disappear immediately upon reload. (This is
> > en.wiktionary, if it matters, not wikipedia.)  I wonder if some
> > number of the squid servers are indisposed?
> >
> >
> If it makes you feel any better, same happened to me at sr: wikipedia.
>
> Filip [dungodung]
> _______________________________________________

And to pile on...it happened to me this evening a lot on english wikipedia.
I just thought it was my bad ISP. Guess not.

Garion


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Moldovan wikipedia, again

body:
Hm, interesting, so you want another criterion to
measure the "genuine interest" in mo.wikipedia.

Then, I suggest some rules for this measurement:

1. Take into account only hits to actual articles
   (main namespace) having more than 5 lines of text.
   Otherwise said, the articles copied from the
   Romanian wikipedia.

2. Make the measurement on a period when there was
   no full-scale revert war (for instance, before the
   current one started).

3. Do not count IPs of Romanian wikipedia users, nor
   IPs of Russian wikipedia users. These users (like
   me) are just inspecting mo.wikipedia to spot
   the current status of the revert war (it's full
   scale and never stops). One week ago, for instance,
   Mark (User:Node_ue) tried to organize, and then rig
   some elections to get back his sysop status (he has

   been desysopped some time ago for bad behavior).

If you think you can do this, then ask yourself what
this measures. Remember: you cannot assume that the
traffic has the same structure here as in
en.wikipedia.

Yours,
Dpotop

--- mboverload <mboverload at gmail.com> wrote:

> What I'm actually interested in is the number of
> hits on that wikipedia.
>
> mboverload
>
> On 6/30/06, Jacky PB <dpotop1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > > But you are not Moldovan. You are not able to
> write Moldovan.
> > > You pretend helping some people that did not ask
> for your help.
> > > No native Moldovan expressed an interest in your
> wikipedia.
> >
> > I am Moldovan. It is your _opinion_ that I am "not
> able to write
> > Moldovan", especially given that you attach no
> adverb. "Native
> > Moldovans" (assuming you mean Moldovans living in
> Moldova) have
> > expressed an interest, although in very limited
> numbers.
> > The "limited number" is currently 0. :)
> >
> > And anyone can check this by looking at the number
> of users registered
> > (with Babel) as speakers of Moldovan (code mo). On
> the whole wikipedia,
> > there is a single "mo" user, which is Mark, a.k.a.
> User:Node_ue. And he's
> > level mo-2, meaning that he's making basic grammar
> and spelling errors.
> >
> > :en:Dpotop
> >
> >
> >
> > ---------------------------------
> > Do you Yahoo!?
> > Next-gen email? Have it all with the  all-new
> Yahoo! Mail Beta.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> >
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

__________________________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Moldovan wikipedia, again

body:
Rig? No. I just deleted votes that were invalid, like Pavel did.

And the limited number is not currently 0. You have not been following
this discussion for very long. Please take a look at the archives. You
have accused me of arguing on topics I am not familiar with, now you
are being a hypocrite.

Mark

On 30/06/06, Jacky PB <dpotop1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hm, interesting, so you want another criterion to
> measure the "genuine interest" in mo.wikipedia.
>
> Then, I suggest some rules for this measurement:
>
> 1. Take into account only hits to actual articles
>    (main namespace) having more than 5 lines of text.
>    Otherwise said, the articles copied from the
>    Romanian wikipedia.
>
> 2. Make the measurement on a period when there was
>    no full-scale revert war (for instance, before the
>    current one started).
>
> 3. Do not count IPs of Romanian wikipedia users, nor
>    IPs of Russian wikipedia users. These users (like
>    me) are just inspecting mo.wikipedia to spot
>    the current status of the revert war (it's full
>    scale and never stops). One week ago, for instance,
>    Mark (User:Node_ue) tried to organize, and then rig
>    some elections to get back his sysop status (he has
>
>    been desysopped some time ago for bad behavior).
>
> If you think you can do this, then ask yourself what
> this measures. Remember: you cannot assume that the
> traffic has the same structure here as in
> en.wikipedia.
>
> Yours,
> Dpotop
>
>
>
> --- mboverload <mboverload at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > What I'm actually interested in is the number of
> > hits on that wikipedia.
> >
> > mboverload
> >
> > On 6/30/06, Jacky PB <dpotop1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > But you are not Moldovan. You are not able to
> > write Moldovan.
> > > > You pretend helping some people that did not ask
> > for your help.
> > > > No native Moldovan expressed an interest in your
> > wikipedia.
> > >
> > > I am Moldovan. It is your _opinion_ that I am "not
> > able to write
> > > Moldovan", especially given that you attach no
> > adverb. "Native
> > > Moldovans" (assuming you mean Moldovans living in
> > Moldova) have
> > > expressed an interest, although in very limited
> > numbers.
> > > The "limited number" is currently 0. :)
> > >
> > > And anyone can check this by looking at the number
> > of users registered
> > > (with Babel) as speakers of Moldovan (code mo). On
> > the whole wikipedia,
> > > there is a single "mo" user, which is Mark, a.k.a.
> > User:Node_ue. And he's
> > > level mo-2, meaning that he's making basic grammar
> > and spelling errors.
> > >
> > > :en:Dpotop
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ---------------------------------
> > > Do you Yahoo!?
> > > Next-gen email? Have it all with the  all-new
> > Yahoo! Mail Beta.
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > >
> >
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> >
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
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>

--
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Moldovan wikipedia, again

body:
> Rig? No. I just deleted votes that were invalid,
> like Pavel did.

Really? Your rules were that every account made before
the vote is valid. Why did you delete my vote?
BTW, your attempt to justify this by changing the
rules of the vote *after* the vote ended was pitiful.
This can be checked, and I provided the link in my
initial post:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2006-June/044508.html

> And the limited number is not currently 0. You have
> not been following
> this discussion for very long. Please take a look at
> the archives. You
> have accused me of arguing on topics I am not
> familiar with, now you
> are being a hypocrite.

Actually, I'm following this *very* closely.
Could you, please, tell me who these editors are?
And don't start with "I have said it before". This is
your favourite excuse. Just list some user names.

:en:Dpotop

>
> Mark
>
> On 30/06/06, Jacky PB <dpotop1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hm, interesting, so you want another criterion to
> > measure the "genuine interest" in mo.wikipedia.
> >
> > Then, I suggest some rules for this measurement:
> >
> > 1. Take into account only hits to actual articles
> >    (main namespace) having more than 5 lines of
> text.
> >    Otherwise said, the articles copied from the
> >    Romanian wikipedia.
> >
> > 2. Make the measurement on a period when there was
> >    no full-scale revert war (for instance, before
> the
> >    current one started).
> >
> > 3. Do not count IPs of Romanian wikipedia users,
> nor
> >    IPs of Russian wikipedia users. These users
> (like
> >    me) are just inspecting mo.wikipedia to spot
> >    the current status of the revert war (it's full
> >    scale and never stops). One week ago, for
> instance,
> >    Mark (User:Node_ue) tried to organize, and then
> rig
> >    some elections to get back his sysop status (he
> has
> >
> >    been desysopped some time ago for bad
> behavior).
> >
> > If you think you can do this, then ask yourself
> what
> > this measures. Remember: you cannot assume that
> the
> > traffic has the same structure here as in
> > en.wikipedia.
> >
> > Yours,
> > Dpotop
> >
> >
> >
> > --- mboverload <mboverload at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > What I'm actually interested in is the number of
> > > hits on that wikipedia.
> > >
> > > mboverload
> > >
> > > On 6/30/06, Jacky PB <dpotop1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > But you are not Moldovan. You are not able
> to
> > > write Moldovan.
> > > > > You pretend helping some people that did not
> ask
> > > for your help.
> > > > > No native Moldovan expressed an interest in
> your
> > > wikipedia.
> > > >
> > > > I am Moldovan. It is your _opinion_ that I am
> "not
> > > able to write
> > > > Moldovan", especially given that you attach no
> > > adverb. "Native
> > > > Moldovans" (assuming you mean Moldovans living
> in
> > > Moldova) have
> > > > expressed an interest, although in very
> limited
> > > numbers.
> > > > The "limited number" is currently 0. :)
> > > >
> > > > And anyone can check this by looking at the
> number
> > > of users registered
> > > > (with Babel) as speakers of Moldovan (code
> mo). On
> > > the whole wikipedia,
> > > > there is a single "mo" user, which is Mark,
> a.k.a.
> > > User:Node_ue. And he's
> > > > level mo-2, meaning that he's making basic
> grammar
> > > and spelling errors.
> > > >
> > > > :en:Dpotop
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > ---------------------------------
> > > > Do you Yahoo!?
> > > > Next-gen email? Have it all with the  all-new
> > > Yahoo! Mail Beta.
> > > >
> _______________________________________________
> > > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > >
> > >
> >
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > >
> >
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
> >
> >
> > __________________________________________________
> > Do You Yahoo!?
> > Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam
> protection around
> > http://mail.yahoo.com
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> >
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> --
> Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

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


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Sanity check on image uploads

body:
On 6/30/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30/06/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I don't like it. It reeks of spying, and it's not the sort of thing we
> > would be proud of telling everyone about.
>
> Concur. People fuck up all the time, god knows I've done it enough. We
> don't need to keep a log of their "almost" fuck-ups as well.

Better turn off the ability to view revisions then...

The ability to scour image page histories for people switching
licenses after the fact has been instrumental to detecting dishonestly
tagged material on enwiki (people uploading content found on the web,
tagging some website, seeing the notice, changing to non-commercial,
seeing the notice then finally selecting pd-self, for example).  If we
are to provide any 'quiz' to users about the copyright status of their
images, we should store the intermediate results so that searching for
the right answer.

If there is concern that people will see your mistakes and criticize
you for them thats a social problem.


body:
On 6/30/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30/06/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If there is concern that people will see your mistakes and criticize
> > you for them thats a social problem.
>
> I'm talking about not storing information which crosses the borderline
> from needful retention to smelling off, to me.
>
> If someone almost uploads something which would infringe copyright,
> but doesn't, do we *need* to keep it? I'm inclined to state not,
> unless it becomes a frequent occurrence. And who would have access to
> this information, and under what conditions and policies?

Eh, I see it the same as "If someone tags an image with
{{forbiddenlicense}} and then changes it, why should we keep a record
of their initial 'mistake'?"

The initial comment that started this subthread was justifyed with "If
the user initially gets to a 'copyrighted' result and then backtracks
and claims he took it, you'll know something's up.".

Any solution which could be equally used to teach a new uploader what
lies to tell to keep his image kept really should write a record.
Would you like to see some examples of deleted copyright violations on
enwiki which would have been undetected if not for the ability to
discover where an uploader has cycled through license options?

Perhaps an alternative would be a system which doesn't tell the user
the results of their quiz until after the image is uploaded, then we
have no situation where a change of mind before the upload results in
a record.


from_name: SPUI

subject: [WikiEN-l] SPUI requesting unblock

body:
Sam Korn wrote:
> On 6/30/06, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>I created it to see what would happen if I kept increasing the font
>>size. I kept it around because I found it amusing. I justify its
>>continued existence because leaving it alone uses less disk space than
>>deleting it.
>
> Arguments based on server load do not wash.  If server load is ever an
> issue, the developers can tell us what to do.  Note that this doesn't
> only apply to this instance, but to all editorial actions (as opposed
> to those done by developers).  Let's not put words into their mouths.

I know that a deleted page takes up more space than the same page, not
deleted. I also understand that this is a very weak justification, but I
don't see any valid arguments on the other side, especially given that
nothing links to it.


body:
On 6/30/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/30/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Better turn off the ability to view revisions then...
>
> No. We are totally upfront about the fact that when you press "save"
> your history is being recorded. Tracking what clicks someone makes
> before they press save is, well, wrong, deceitful, pointless, ....

Eh, then make sure the quiz doesn't let you know what you did wrong
until after you save.

> Anyway this is the wrong direction to be heading. There are countless
> ways we can massively reduce the addition of good-faith copyright
> violations, by restricting uploads to registered users etc etc etc.
> Focussing on the few bad eggs who deliberately upload copyrighted
> images is wasting our time...

You're taking a very black and white look at this... it's not as
simple as good-faith vs bad eggs.

It would appear that there is substantial cognitive dissonance between
the innate ethics of Joe Sixpack and the requirements of copyright
law.

In particular, it appears very common for people to be quite convinced
that it's okay to upload anything they were able to obtain off the web
at no cost, and also fairly common for people to be convinced that
they have complete ownership of things like screenshots they made of
movies. This is complicated by the fact that numerous violations and
borderline cases exist, so Joe can go point out other cases where
images have not yet been deleted which are similar to his.

So you end up with people who would be described as honest and
trustworthy who think nothing of iterating through a set of options in
order to find one which doesn't cause the computer to say that their
image will be deleted.

It's a complicated problem. Personally I'd like to make new users be
dropped into a live chat with someone experienced at the time of their
first few uploads to consult with them on the image... but scaling
that would be a challenge, and I suspect the idea would go over like a
lead balloon. "Oh no! it reduces openness!".

Oh, and if you weren't aware. Uploads are already restricted to
registered users.


subject: [WikiEN-l] SPUI requesting unblock

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> On 6/30/06, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>I created it to see what would happen if I kept increasing the font
>>size. I kept it around because I found it amusing.
>
>
> The moment something outside the encyclopedia space which you merely
> find amusing becomes disruptive and annoying to other editors, there's
> little justification to keep it around. Certainly disk space is not
> one. You could have demonstrated maturity and blanked the page
> yourself. Instead you reverted the MFD notice, put a big "jajaja" text
> on your user page, and commented on MFD itself: "If it crashes
> Firefox, maybe you should use a non-broken browser. "

Most of it was commented out on my user page - I don't think any
browsers that crash on the full one will crash on this. If I am wrong, I
will gladly comment out more, as I don't wish to have a user page that
crashes browsers.

An orphaned subpage is a different issue entirely.

> Don't get me wrong. It is legitimate to experiment and try to
> determine whether there are HTML instructions that might crash or
> freeze common browsers. This should be done in a subpage clearly
> designated for that purpose, such as [[/Browser crash test]]. If you
> then can reproduce certain behavior, you can report a bug -- either
> for the browser, or for MediaWiki to filter these instructions.

Given that I didn't intend it as a browser crash test, that would not
have been a possible name.

> Asking community members to help you with such an effort to test
> problematic browser behavior is a positive way to contribute on the
> technical level. What you have demonstrated, however, is not mature
> behavior, and I support the (one week) block being upheld for the time
> being, at least until you acknowledge this.


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] SPUI requesting unblock

body:
On Jun 30, 2006, at 3:37 AM, Erik Moeller wrote:

> I support the (one week) block being upheld for the time
> being, at least until you acknowledge this.
>
> Erik

A week seems rather mild. SPUI is rather good at chewing up energy
regarding minor disputes. He actually restored that page on June 26.
Then he comes on here and claims he was blocked over a page he
created in 2005.

Fred


from_name: Theresa Knott

subject:
[WikiEN-l] SPEEDYING images Re: Jimbo's rule, copyright,
	old images with permission only

body:
On 6/29/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> Anthony schrieb:
> > On 6/28/06, Pedro Sanchez <pdsanchez at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Well, my point is, why aren't these being speedied like the new ones?
> >> If giving time for finding replacements was the issue, plenty of time
> >> has been given, (yet precisely since they were kept, noone is
> >> bothering to find free replacements).
> >>
> >
> > Is there somewhere I can get a list of the images I've uploaded which
> > don't fall under the current tagging rules?
> >
> > Is there even a place where I can get a list of the images I've uploaded?
> >
> http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/pushforcommons.php?language=en&wikiuser=Your_user_name_on_en
>
> will show all your images on en, and tries to guess their status by the
> used tags/templates. If it doesn't recognize a specific tag correctly,
> please tell me so I can fix it.
>
> Magnus

Can it be used to find images on wikibooks?

Theresa


from_name: Sean Barrett

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

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

Jon Awbrey stated for the record:
> o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
>
> hey, it's a dirty job, believe me,
> i know, but somebody's gotta do it.
>
> Jon Awbrey

What makes you think so?

- --
 Sean Barrett     | The Internet is out of control, impossible to
 sean at epoptic.com | map accurately, and being used far beyond
                  | its original intentions. So far, so good.
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

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from_name: A. Nony Mouse

subject: [WikiEN-l] 3RR policy proposal: No "Gotcha" rule

body:
On 6/23/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/23/06, Warren Blanco <fireislandparadise at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Lack of warning
> >
> > A 3RR ban cannot be imposed against an editor who has not been warned
> that
> > he or she is in danger of violating the 3RR. A ban can only be imposed
> when
> > an editor violates the 3RR after receiving a warning even if he or she
> has
> > already tecnically violated the 3RR prior to receiving a warning.
>
> Strongly oppose. Admins should use discretion in not blocking unwarned
> users, but they shouldn't be prevented from doing so. 3RR is already
> subject to gaming, and it only works because it's so strict. Giving
> more escape clauses is a bad idea.
>
> Steve

Small point of order: 3RR doesn't work for shit.

3RR is supposed to be an "electric fence" of some sort. Instead, though, all
it does is make edit warring into a game of chicken. One side of a dispute
dredges up sockpuppets/meatpuppets, the other does the same, and they play
the "gotcha" game with their patron admins on either side standing by to
drop a block on the opposing side at moment's notice.

Then whichever side got the block fumes, while the other side has free rein
to make the article into complete lunacy... until the block expires and they
go back to warring.

It's the same thing with our page protection policies. A bunch of edit
warriors start reverting each other and then demanding the page be locked to
their preferred version. Demand that it be locked, and get one of their
friendly patron admins (and thanks to the broken RFA procedure these days,
we've got a fuck-ton of those too) to make sure the lock is on "their"
version.

We need better policies. Policies that actually make sense. I proposed, a
long while back, changing the page-lock procedure (in the case of edit wars
as opposed to mere vandalism) so that the page be blanked or stubbed while
it's locked, to make it so that neither side in an edit war would "win" by
getting the page locked to their side.

Instead, I was attacked for even trying to suggest it.

So here you go. A reasoned suggestion.

As for 3RR, better idea. If you're caught in 3RR, both you AND whoever you
were reverting get blocked. That's supposed to be the policy as pertains to
edit warring anyways, but no admin seems to give a rat's ass about policy
when they can misquote it to give their POV warrior buddies a hand.

A. Nony Mouse


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 6/30/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech at gmail.com> wrote:

> I was thinking of having that exist but lead to a "copyrighted" answer
> (i.e., if you aren't sure we just assume the worst every time).  If
> we're talking a software-level implementation, though, a abortive
> upload should be logged: "User:Whatever attempted to upload a file
> named XXX.jpg, but stopped after 4 steps.  [some brief gibberish here
> to allow those in the know to see what he answered to the questions]".
>  If the user initially gets to a "copyrighted" result and then
> backtracks and claims he took it, you'll know something's up.

I don't like it. It reeks of spying, and it's not the sort of thing we
would be proud of telling everyone about.

Steve


subject: [Wikitech-l] Interwiki/transwiki imports mostly working now

body:
On 6/30/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/29/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> > Now I'm waiting for people to complain about the spam ;-)
>
> Nah, it's what everyone does (at least on enwiki, don't blame me if
> they yell at you on de :P).  No one would know about Lupin's popups or
> AWB or VandalProof if they didn't add a plug to default edit
> summaries.

IMHO it's a good practice. It's not like you're putting "transwikied
image. Buy Coke!" as the description.

Steve


from_name: Rob Church

body:
On 30/06/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> Is this something that can be plugged into MediaWiki?  Or was that just
> a mockup, and you're still early on?

When it was shown to me, I was under the impression it was proof of
concept code. With our current method of storing text, it wouldn't be
a *simple* thing to add in, but it *would* be something that could be
considered, if we could cache the diffs in some manner, otherwise this
becomes a real performance hog.

It's worth noting that someone else has registered an intention to do
something similar and provide it as a script on the toolserver. That
sounds infeasible to me, however, since we all know that, right now
(and likely, for some considerable time), Zedler does not have access
to the text of pages.

Rob Church


body:
On 30/06/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't like it. It reeks of spying, and it's not the sort of thing we
> would be proud of telling everyone about.

Concur. People fuck up all the time, god knows I've done it enough. We
don't need to keep a log of their "almost" fuck-ups as well.

Rob Church


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bad image list

body:
On 30/06/06, brion at svn.leuksman.com <brion at svn.leuksman.com> wrote:
> Revision: 15165
> Author:   brion
> Date:     2006-06-29 16:54:01 -0700 (Thu, 29 Jun 2006)
>
> Log Message:
> -----------
> * (bug 6491) Apply bad image list in category galleries
> Patch from Ilmari Karonen
> http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/attachment.cgi?id=2024

Some thoughts on this...when I fixed whatever bug it was that caused
galleries to ignore the bad image list, I considered doing this,
however, I wondered whether it didn't quite make sense. The purpose of
the bad image list as designed was to allow a few dodgy pictures to be
specified and quietly suppressed upon parse actions.

Leaving the fact that I don't support this behaviour in categories
aside, I'm starting to think about whether or not we need to be
storing this information elsewhere. A page with a bunch of regular
expressions on it[1] that is evaluated in the manner the bad image
list is...doesn't scale well if the administrators start adding
several hundred/thousand odd images to it. It might be more effective
to look at migrating this information to the database somewhere.

As I see it, there's a few options springing to mind:

1. Add an extra column to the image metadata; treat it as a boolean
value and use it to determine whether the image is bad

2. Add a whole new table for the purpose and introduce special pages
to manipulate it

3. Similar to option two, but do it through an extension; don't make
it part of the core code; expose the check via hooks in wfIsBadImage()

Personal preferences lie with options two and three. We'd want logging
for it, of course, but that is rather trivial. :)

Anyway, just throwing out some thoughts, concerns and ideas...

Rob Church


body:
On 30/06/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> When you say "performance hog", are you thinking in terms of the blame
> map being displayed every time someone clicks "history", or only when
> they click some specific button?

I'm thinking in terms of the algorithm having to refer to diffs of the
page which won't exist unless cached from a previous operation. So it
would have to generate them there and then. Diffs are cheap enough,
sure, but keep pulling the text records and diffing against them en
masse, and we'll notice the spike.

Rob Church


body:
On 30/06/06, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> But still, it is a eye candy, that requires quite a lot of resources...

You call it eye candy, I call it an interesting and potentially damn
useful feature idea. Running a web site that gets upwards of ten
thousand odd hits per second, allowing any old web user to edit it,
etc. etc. also requires resources.

How do we handle the hit rate? Caching. Squids, shared memory caching
and opcode caching, not to mention encouraging the client side cache
where possible. Our resources evolve to meet our needs. We can adapt
to what our code base is doing.

Sure, unreasonable and needless performance drains are a bitch, and
I'm all for eradicating them. But the emphasis is on unreasonable and
needless.

I'm well aware of the issues that the innocuous phrase "caching diffs"
brings up, hence the "...". But here we have an interesting proposal -
it's new born, it might not have the cleanest implementation, and it
might turn out to be a load of bollocks. You won't known until we've
examined it in more detail.

So performance is an issue. When is it not?

Rob Church


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Detecting deleted articles

body:
mdd4696 at gmail.com wrote:
> I'm generating a few lists of articles on the Toolserver, and I can't
> seem to figure out how to detect if an article has been deleted. I
> don't want to include those articles in my lists. Is there an easy way
> detect this?

This depends on what you're trying to detect, actually.

If a page has been deleted, it simply does not appear in the page table.

If you wish to distinguish between "has been deleted" and "never existed at
all", then you must check the archive table (probably not available on
toolserver) or the deletion log in the logging table (not necessarily as
accurate due to renamings or age).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
On 30/06/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> I love the fact that we have server admins telling us not to worry too
> much about the performance side of things :)

I'm not a server admin.

Rob Church


body:
On 30/06/06, Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> We *should* worry about the performance side of things, but not let that
> fear impede the addition of useful functionality. I believe this is what
> Rob was actually saying.

Precis?ment.

Rob Church


body:
Jacky PB wrote:
> Where are the decision makers? Isn't there nobody

No one else is interested in this issue, and getting involved would mean wasting
a lot of time with people fighting a lot over something unimportant. The safest
course is thus to leave a rarely-used wiki sitting there, same as we do with
dozens of other rarely-used wikis and nobody minds.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
On 30/06/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> If there is concern that people will see your mistakes and criticize
> you for them thats a social problem.

I'm talking about not storing information which crosses the borderline
from needful retention to smelling off, to me.

If someone almost uploads something which would infringe copyright,
but doesn't, do we *need* to keep it? I'm inclined to state not,
unless it becomes a frequent occurrence. And who would have access to
this information, and under what conditions and policies?

Rob Church


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Redlinks or redirects?

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Yep. I feel that external links should always be displayed as either:
> * Raw URLs (quite appropriate for references sections)
> * Quasi-footnote style ("...according to the official website
> [www.foo.com]") which renders as "...[1]"

Of late I've often combined these two approaches by wrapping the URL in
<ref> tags. Not as tidy as using a {{cite web}} template, but very fast
and easy to do.

> Even more than I don't like pipe linking for normal links, I really
> object to it for external links. Thanks for reminding me. :)

You're welcome. A well-aimed five minute hate is always invigorating. :)

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from_name: Lord Voldemort

subject: [WikiEN-l] A course in walled gardens?

body:
On 6/30/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> I've been looking round the articles relating to [[A Course In
> Miracles]] (ACIM).  One article details a court case pertaining to
> authorship, under the rather bizarre premise that since authorship was
> claimed to be Jesus, "channeled" through Helen Schucman, copyright did
> not apply. I've asked for some citations from sources outside the ACIM
> movement for this and other articles in this collection, and received
> this reply:
>
>  "But it is quite a challenge to find comments from people outside of
> the ACIM "world" when most outside of that insular world have never
>   even heard of ACIM. Most non-ACIM students couldn't be concerned
>   with whether Jesus is the literal or symbolic source, because most
>   non-ACIM students think the whole thing looks insane, cultish,
>   weird, etc."
>
> Now to my mind if there are no sources outside the movement we ought
> to be very wary about covering the subject at all.  This same editor
> added a section to [[forgiveness]] detailing ACIM's view of the
> concept which was larger than the section devoted to Bhuddism and
> about the same size as the one for Islam.  My view is that unless we
> have some reputable secondary sources external to the movement to draw
> on, we should not include it there at all (else we'll have to have a
> paragraph for Methylated Wesletarians and Jagism).
>
> Back to the article on the court case: I'd say it's a footnote to the
> book unless it's been covered extensively in the mainstream media,
> discussed in the Harvard Law Review as a ground-breaking case, cited
> as precedent in other cases or whatever.  The only cited source we
> have in that section is from the Foundation for A Course In Miracles,
> which was one of the parties to the dispute.  I am minded to merge.
>
> I don't want to let my natural scepticism run away with me here, how
> do others view this kind of apparent walled garden?

Quick request for clarification: Are you looking for any articles
relating to ACIM or articles specifically relating to the court case?
Or both?  Thanks. --LV


from_name: Andrew Dunbar

body:
On 6/30/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30/06/06, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> > But still, it is a eye candy, that requires quite a lot of resources...
>
> You call it eye candy, I call it an interesting and potentially damn
> useful feature idea. Running a web site that gets upwards of ten
> thousand odd hits per second, allowing any old web user to edit it,
> etc. etc. also requires resources.

I don't think of this as anything remotely like eye candy. In fact it will
save resources over manually looking for who is responsible for a
particular change if it is not recent. Something I already do. Of course
with a handy tool for this, people will use it several orders of magnitude
more often than they now do manually.

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

> How do we handle the hit rate? Caching. Squids, shared memory caching
> and opcode caching, not to mention encouraging the client side cache
> where possible. Our resources evolve to meet our needs. We can adapt
> to what our code base is doing.
>
> Sure, unreasonable and needless performance drains are a bitch, and
> I'm all for eradicating them. But the emphasis is on unreasonable and
> needless.
>
> I'm well aware of the issues that the innocuous phrase "caching diffs"
> brings up, hence the "...". But here we have an interesting proposal -
> it's new born, it might not have the cleanest implementation, and it
> might turn out to be a load of bollocks. You won't known until we've
> examined it in more detail.
>
> So performance is an issue. When is it not?
>
>
> Rob Church
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
http://linguaphile.sf.net


from_name: Sam Korn

subject: [WikiEN-l] SPUI requesting unblock

body:
On 6/30/06, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
> I created it to see what would happen if I kept increasing the font
> size. I kept it around because I found it amusing. I justify its
> continued existence because leaving it alone uses less disk space than
> deleting it.

Arguments based on server load do not wash.  If server load is ever an
issue, the developers can tell us what to do.  Note that this doesn't
only apply to this instance, but to all editorial actions (as opposed
to those done by developers).  Let's not put words into their mouths.

--
Sam


body:
On 30/06/06, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> When did you work on performance? How many of various eye candies can
> be cached?

I didn't. My point was that the people best suited to do so shouldn't
be put off by the fact that there might have to be a bit extra work.
God forbid that a programmer should express an opinion on a matter
that's still mostly confined to the development side at this time.

> Many things we did to improve performance were based on profiling
> data. And of course, common sense.

You analyse the problem, you think of the best way of solving it and
you do it. Yes. Why won't that method work here?

> a) how much of use that will get (to create an encyclopedia)

A lot, as has been echoed here already.

> Of course, if someone comes up with efficient feature, it is great.
> But complex efficient feature requires complex efficient programming,
> and we have just two guys who are actually doing such work (and
> capable of doing it).

I won't go into details on this, but I suggest you avoid the
backhanded insults to the rest of us. Who are not paid. Who do this
because we give a shit. Why, I don't know. I couldn't possibly tell
you what compels me to continue working in this environment, writing
little features and bug fixes.

> If anyone else wants to join the ship, of course, they're absolutely
> welcome.

You frequently give off a vastly different impression.

> And people shouldn't have misconceptions that we have lots of
> resources and can run anything. We're donation powered website, that
> has to fix the infrastructure before autumn, because then we have yet
> another surge of users.

I'm aware of this. I'm aware that we're running an Alexa top-15 web
site on a budget that probably equalises the average coffee
expenditure for some of the other organisations around that ballpark.

I had no such misconceptions. I know how bad it is. I know that a
dodgy query can send things sideways; I've *watched* the cluster die
badly.

> Anyone has right to download the dump and provide nice eyecandies for
> community, if they want to participate that way :) Just one important
> thing to remember - don't try getting popular ;-)

Just one important thing to remember. Don't sacrifice utility for
performance. Otherwise, we'll just have to tell Jimbo Wales his grand
little scheme is far too unfeasible to run.

Are we intending on having a productive dialogue here, Domas?

Rob Church


from_name: Jon Awbrey

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

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

Citing cases of "Priority Inversion", in this case
where a few editors declare their "consensus" as an
excuse for deleting relevant and sourced information.

Case 2.

Article:  Charles Peirce.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Peirce

Section:  Scholastic realism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Peirce#Scholastic_realism

Edit: Revision as of 01:49, 11 June 200601:49, 11 June 2006 by Wylie Ali
(?Scholastic realism - deleting section as explained on talk page)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Peirce&diff=next&oldid=57953106

Entire section deleted by "new user" Wylie Ali.
This section was well-documented with both primary and secondary source citations.

The explanation given on the talk page by Wylie Ali is this:

| ==Deleted Material:  Scholastic Realism==
|
| It is clear from above that there is a concensus that this article is pitched to journal level
| and not general educated audience as it should be.  For that reason and others, I'm moving the
| Sholastic realism section to here (for consideration ;-) ). Besides the fact that most of it
| is taken up with an interpretation dispute among scholars (and it takes sides in that dispute),
| the first sentence calls "well known" something readers will have never heard of and the second
| sentence is obviously POV. The second sentence also assumes wrongly that one who believes that
| reality depends on many minds instead of one is not an idealist. The part beginning "Third" is
| weird because if Peirce's doctrine is not about realism vs. idealism, then why did this very
| paragraph start out talking about realism vs. idealism? Why not leave the latter topic out of
| this section entirely instead of putting it in and suddenly saying well Peirce is not really
| talking about that anyway.  --[[User:Wylie Ali|Wylie Ali]] 01:49, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Note the spelling of "concensus".  You will see it again.

As far as I know, this section came in with an earlier Nupedia article by a recognized
Peirce scholar that formed the initial material of the Wikipedia article.  It is true
that some of what it says is controversial among the scholars so affected, which is
par for the course in any article about any philosopher worthy of note.  Standard
practice in WP dictates dynamic balance not wholesale deletion as a solution.

Jon Awbrey

o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o

Jon Awbrey wrote:
For example, under the proper ordering of priorities
a statement that is relevant and sourced should not
be deleted in favor of an opinion that is unsourced
just because the source is not the favorite writer
of 2 or 3 editors or because the sourced statement
contradicts the personal POVs of 2 or 3 editors.
But this is actually the routine way that things
are done in WP.

Rosa, Michael wrote:
Cite please - preferable at least a dozen or so of examples, they should
be easy to find if this is really the "routine way" of doing things on
WP.  This is a persistent, recurrent and systematic pattern in your
emails that I have observed, you describe something that you claim is
taking place without giving any specific and real-life examples.

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


body:
On 6/30/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> When it was shown to me, I was under the impression it was proof of
> concept code. With our current method of storing text, it wouldn't be
> a *simple* thing to add in, but it *would* be something that could be
> considered, if we could cache the diffs in some manner, otherwise this
> becomes a real performance hog.

When you say "performance hog", are you thinking in terms of the blame
map being displayed every time someone clicks "history", or only when
they click some specific button?

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Nofollow

body:
On 6/30/06, jf_wikipedia at mac.com <jf_wikipedia at mac.com> wrote:
> Each link in an Talk page has the attribute rel="nofollow"

No they don't. Each *external* link has the attribute of rel="nofollow"

> I better approach would be to add a meta tag
>
> <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
>
> to all pages not in the article namespace.

No it wouldn't.  This lowers the number of links we have to our own
pages as well as to outside sites.  That completely misses the point
of this change.

--
Sam


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

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

* Repost -- fixing line length for those who do not have wide-screen computers.

Citing cases of "Priority Inversion", in this case
where a few editors declare their "consensus" as an
excuse for deleting relevant and sourced information.

Case 2.

Article:  Charles Peirce.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Peirce

Section:  Scholastic realism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Peirce#Scholastic_realism

Edit: Revision as of 01:49, 11 June 200601:49, 11 June 2006 by Wylie Ali
(?Scholastic realism - deleting section as explained on talk page)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Peirce&diff=next&oldid=57953106

Entire section deleted by "new user" Wylie Ali.
This section was well-documented with both primary and secondary source citations.

The explanation given on the talk page by Wylie Ali is this:

| ==Deleted Material:  Scholastic Realism==
|
| It is clear from above that there is a concensus that this article is
| pitched to journal level and not general educated audience as it should be.
| For that reason and others, I'm moving the Sholastic realism section to here
| (for consideration ;-) ).  Besides the fact that most of it is taken up with
| an interpretation dispute among scholars (and it takes sides in that dispute),
| the first sentence calls "well known" something readers will have never heard
| of and the second sentence is obviously POV.  The second sentence also assumes
| wrongly that one who believes that reality depends on many minds instead of one
| is not an idealist.  The part beginning "Third" is weird because if Peirce's
| doctrine is not about realism vs. idealism, then why did this very paragraph
| start out talking about realism vs. idealism?  Why not leave the latter topic
| out of this section entirely instead of putting it in and suddenly saying well
| Peirce is not really talking about that anyway.
|  --[[User:Wylie Ali|Wylie Ali]] 01:49, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Note the spelling of "concensus".  You will see it again.

As far as I know, this section came in with an earlier Nupedia article by a recognized
Peirce scholar that formed the initial material of the Wikipedia article.  It is true
that some of what it says is controversial among the scholars so affected, which is
par for the course in any article about any philosopher worthy of note.  Standard
practice in WP dictates dynamic balance not wholesale deletion as a solution.

Jon Awbrey

o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o

Jon Awbrey wrote:
For example, under the proper ordering of priorities
a statement that is relevant and sourced should not
be deleted in favor of an opinion that is unsourced
just because the source is not the favorite writer
of 2 or 3 editors or because the sourced statement
contradicts the personal POVs of 2 or 3 editors.
But this is actually the routine way that things
are done in WP.

Rosa, Michael wrote:
Cite please - preferable at least a dozen or so of examples, they should
be easy to find if this is really the "routine way" of doing things on
WP.  This is a persistent, recurrent and systematic pattern in your
emails that I have observed, you describe something that you claim is
taking place without giving any specific and real-life examples.

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


body:
On 30/06/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Anyway this is the wrong direction to be heading. There are countless
> ways we can massively reduce the addition of good-faith copyright
> violations, by restricting uploads to registered users etc etc etc.

Education, education, education. But with less Blairite incompetence
and more up-front, honest, "look dude, we can't accept this, and
here's why".

> Focussing on the few bad eggs who deliberately upload copyrighted
> images is wasting our time...

Well, it's not a waste of our time to stop them. Frequent, persistent
uploading of copyright infringing material is blockable, no? If it's
not, then why the hell not?

Rob Church


list: foundation-l

from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia visual identity guidelines

body:
Hello Peter,

On 6/29/06, Peter Jacobi <pjacobi.de at googlemail.com> wrote:
> At common's deletion discussion the question surfaced, whether the Wikimedia
> visual identity guidelines apply only to the trademark or also to the
> Wikipedia logo.
> Especially concerning the ''The logo should not be turned around or
> distorted'' part.
>
> See:
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Deletion_requests#Image:Bouncywikilogo.gif

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

The case is a difficult one, for many reasons.

First. At this stage, the Wikimedia Visual Identity guidelines do
indeed apply to the Wikimedia Logo only.

Second. There is a fundamental difference between the Wikimedia logo
and the Wikipedia logo in this that the Wikimedia logo still needs to
be established in the mind of the general public. It represents the
organisation, and the wish behind the Wikimedia Identity guidelines
was to make sure that no derivation of the logo would be used to ends
that do not serve the organisation, or for misrepresentation. The
Wikipedia logo is well established and recognizable, even when
transformed.

Third. The Wikipedia original logo has already been derived many a
times, if only by being translated in all the Wikipedia languages, and
historically for marking events, milestones etc. which makes it
difficult to assert a "non derivative" policy for the Wikipedia logo,
such a policy being in my opinion non desirable.

So this is my take on this:

At this time, there is no official policy concerning the use of
projects logos, whether Wikipedia or other projects.

It is high time we did this.

My personal opinion on projects logos is that they *can* be
transformed, as long as they are properly tagged with the Wikimedia
copyright notice and *only* used in the Wikimedia projects.The
Wikimedia logo however should at all times follow the present
Wikimedia Visual identity guidelines.

However, this needs to be formalized, so as to avoid endless
dicussions on the subject and  legitimate questions such as yours.

I believe the communications committee should create a "visual
identity and trademark use" subcommittee that will reflect on the best
way to go about this and that will issue a general policy for the use
and derivation of projects logos, use in projects/banners/advertising
etc. So this is an appeal to the Communications committee.

It is also high time for a general logo and trademark use policy
concerning non commercial use (ie. information, news, sponsors etc.)
which is drafted somewhere but was never brought to a conclusion.

No need to say that I am very interested in being in that committee, I
know Elian was also interested as we started reflecting on the matter
together.

Hope this answers some of your question.

Best,

Delphine
--
~notafish


list: wikimedia-l


body:
On 6/30/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30/06/06, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> > But still, it is a eye candy, that requires quite a lot of resources...
>
> You call it eye candy, I call it an interesting and potentially damn
> useful feature idea. Running a web site that gets upwards of ten
> thousand odd hits per second, allowing any old web user to edit it,
> etc. etc. also requires resources.

I think this blame map idea is a hell of a lot more than eye candy,
and would be a massively useful addition to Wikipedia, well worth
investing time and effort, and possibly new hardware on.  It would
really help dealing with vandalism, hoaxing, unsourced statements and
probably lots of other problems we haven't even realised yet. Hell, it
would even make it easier to attribute unsigned posts to talk pages.

> So performance is an issue. When is it not?

I love the fact that we have server admins telling us not to worry too
much about the performance side of things :)

Steve


body:
On 6/30/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30/06/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I love the fact that we have server admins telling us not to worry too
> > much about the performance side of things :)
>
> I'm not a server admin.

So much for that theory then :)

Steve


body:
On 30/06/06, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> It was not an insult. I know you have a problem and you think whole
> world is against you. Well, maybe it is, but that is offtopic.

That statement is completely unacceptable and I would like an apology.

> I'm not paid either. I also work on little changes and bug fixes. And
> I wouldn't take the fact that we have two hard working guys writing
> fascinating stuff, as an insult. Because I'd like to be able to do

It was the phrasing of it that implied Brion and Tim were our only
competent coders, I think.

> that much too. Maybe I can't, so I do what I can.

Same here.

> We're not sacrificing. We have few other features impacting our
> performance for years, and we have them there. Because they make
> sense :)

So could this. Although I will concede it wouldn't be critical.

> And yet another issue. Our performance is our utility. Make it slow,
> and people will get frustrated and won't be enjoying the free
> encyclopedia.

That's a very valid and fair point.

> When weren't we? ;-)

All right, let's scrap the pettiness and move on.

Rob Church


subject: [Wikitech-l] Bad image list

body:
On 30/06/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> (You seem to be missing a footnote up there, so I'll supply one: [1]
> They're not actually regexps, just a list of image names that are read
> into a hash.)

The footnote was intended to be relating to the spam blacklist,
actually. Namely, "the spam blacklist does not work in the same way,
so don't bring that one up."

> This would be my personal favorite, assuming we think the bad image
> feature is worth spending the effort on.  I doubt most wikis really find
> it useful, so making it an optional extension sounds good.  If I was
> confident I could implement something like that cleanly in a reasonable
> timeframe, I might've done that myself, but I still consider myself a
> newcomer to the wonderful world of MediaWiki source code.

It's the preference I had too. I was downstairs making coffee just
after sending that email, and I could almost see the code. :D

Rob Church


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
On 6/30/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
> My personal opinion on projects logos is that they *can* be
> transformed, as long as they are properly tagged with the Wikimedia
> copyright notice and *only* used in the Wikimedia projects.

Yes, I agree. Community use is separate from external use, and giving
people a little leeway here is better than constantly trying to clean
up after them.

> The Wikimedia logo however should at all times follow the present
> Wikimedia Visual identity guidelines.

You know that we've argued about this in the past. I don't agree with
the rationale that increasing awareness is a good reason to do this,
but in some ways, the notion that the Wikimedia logo - being about the
organization rather than the individual projects - needs to be
"sacred" does make sense. It is, after all, strongly tied to the
notion of organizational authority.

I do still believe that there might be some derivatives that we should
explicitly authorize, such as slight variants for each committee. I
don't see a consistent pattern of combination of the unmodified
Wikimedia logo with a small icon representing a particular area of
work (communications, research, etc.) as inconsistent with the need
for a stable corporate identity.

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] A course in walled gardens?

references:
<6b9aa2hoo4t6s16d0glck2c63df29amnui@4ax.com>
	<aa62d5b70606300653y77acc878k216488ecbe7b2db3@mail.gmail.com>
	<8kdaa2t1e3j712dvon8980noqr9qjeo9d8@4ax.com>

body:
On 6/30/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> I want to start at the outside and work back.  So: first, see if the
> case is verifiable and significant, and if not prune and merge back,
> then see if the Foundation is, and so on.  There are rather a lot of
> articles with a great deal of verbiage on what is, from the
> perspective of an outsider, a very small movement of no verifiable
> significance.

Well, the case is real: "Penguin Books U.S.A., Inc. v. New Christian
Church of Full Endeavor, Ltd."  One of the decisions along the way
cited at "262 F. Supp. 2d 251" another at "288 F. Supp. 2d 544". So
there is no doubt the case is legit.  As to it's importance...

As far as I can tell, it has been used as a note for a few technical
things. See:

http://www.abcny.org/Publications/reports/show_html.php?rid=35 (A
technical proposal to change some NY court rules regarding attorneys.)

www.law.fsu.edu/faculty/2001-2002workshops/cotter.pdf  (pdf... if you
couldn't tell. See page 11. Basically just a listing of the case as
one relating to adaptation of a religious work as a copyvio... nothing
substantive.)

And seemingly one court case about awarding legal fees.

But the case has apparently been used in a few other things relating
to the real copyright issue...

www.oiprc.ox.ac.uk/EJWP0903.pdf (pdf on deprivatising copyrights...
see page 76 for relevent cite. Basically she uses it to show the court
held "For example, in analyzing authorship questions involving
religious texts, courts have rejected the argument that since the
source of the text is God, there is no human author and therefore the
text is not subject to copyright.")

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20040827214309785
("holding that copyrighted work entered public domain where it was
'published without notice of copyright prior to copyright
registration'")

So it looks like it has been used, but to what extent required for
notability, I am not sure. The case is verifiable. Does any of this
even help... I wrote this email in bits and pieces, so it may be
choppy or rambling, my apologies.  Let me know if you need more info.
Thanks. --LV


body:
As a follow-up, here's a quick template hack for these kinds of derivatives:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:InternalUseOnly

Erik


from_name: Domas Mituzas

body:
Hello,

> a *simple* thing to add in, but it *would* be something that could be
> considered, if we could cache the diffs in some manner, otherwise this
> becomes a real performance hog.

Caching diffs ain't that fun. The interesting approach to this
problem would generating intermediate diff, that could be edited
incrementally, revision after revision, then displayed.
But still, it is a eye candy, that requires quite a lot of resources...

Doams


body:
On 6/30/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Better turn off the ability to view revisions then...

No. We are totally upfront about the fact that when you press "save"
your history is being recorded. Tracking what clicks someone makes
before they press save is, well, wrong, deceitful, pointless, ....

Anyway this is the wrong direction to be heading. There are countless
ways we can massively reduce the addition of good-faith copyright
violations, by restricting uploads to registered users etc etc etc.
Focussing on the few bad eggs who deliberately upload copyrighted
images is wasting our time...

Steve


body:
On 6/30/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, it's not a waste of our time to stop them. Frequent, persistent
> uploading of copyright infringing material is blockable, no? If it's
> not, then why the hell not?

Oh, stopping them, no. But trying to sneakily trick them into leaving
a clue which helps us catch them - when they amount to such a small
percentage of all the bad uploads - we're not at that point yet.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] SPUI requesting unblock

body:
On 6/30/06, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
> I created it to see what would happen if I kept increasing the font
> size. I kept it around because I found it amusing.

The moment something outside the encyclopedia space which you merely
find amusing becomes disruptive and annoying to other editors, there's
little justification to keep it around. Certainly disk space is not
one. You could have demonstrated maturity and blanked the page
yourself. Instead you reverted the MFD notice, put a big "jajaja" text
on your user page, and commented on MFD itself: "If it crashes
Firefox, maybe you should use a non-broken browser. "

Don't get me wrong. It is legitimate to experiment and try to
determine whether there are HTML instructions that might crash or
freeze common browsers. This should be done in a subpage clearly
designated for that purpose, such as [[/Browser crash test]]. If you
then can reproduce certain behavior, you can report a bug -- either
for the browser, or for MediaWiki to filter these instructions.

Asking community members to help you with such an effort to test
problematic browser behavior is a positive way to contribute on the
technical level. What you have demonstrated, however, is not mature
behavior, and I support the (one week) block being upheld for the time
being, at least until you acknowledge this.

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] A course in walled gardens?

body:
On 6/30/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> I want to start at the outside and work back.  So: first, see if the
> case is verifiable and significant, and if not prune and merge back,
> then see if the Foundation is, and so on.  There are rather a lot of
> articles with a great deal of verbiage on what is, from the
> perspective of an outsider, a very small movement of no verifiable
> significance.

Also, for a brief overview... there have been a couple of articles in
the Salt Lake Tribune
(http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=SLTB&p_theme=sltb&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&s_dispstring=allfields(A%20Course%20in%20Miracles)%20AND%20date(2/18/2000%20to%202/21/2000)&p_field_date-0=YMD_date&p_params_date-0=date:B,E&p_text_date-0=2/18/2000%20to%202/21/2000)&p_field_advanced-0=&p_text_advanced-0=("A%20Course%20in%20Miracles")&xcal_numdocs=20&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&xcal_useweights=no)
But I don't have an account.  And I don't know if you have to pay for
the full article.  Just providing some more info. --LV


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] SPUI requesting unblock

body:
On 6/30/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Don't get me wrong. It is legitimate to experiment and try to
> determine whether there are HTML instructions that might crash or
> freeze common browsers.

Preferably, *not* on Wikipedia itself, though.  "Wikipedia is not a
web host" applies quite strongly here, and it's quite easy to set up a
MediaWiki instance where you can play a crashing browsers and whatnot.
While the tester may not mean harm, a local (and hence transcludable)
page on English Wikipedia that caused problems for browsers would be a
gift to any alert vandals.


from_name: Francis Tyers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Moldovan wikipedia, again

body:
In sort because they aren't as high profile. I'm sure if you put a
petition to close these down, the people who agree with this position
would vote for it.

Fran

On Thu, 2006-06-29 at 17:56 -0700, Mark Williamson wrote:
> If Wikipedias with no native contributors are so evil, why don't you
> request locking of the over 100 Wikipedias for which this is the case?
>
> You might say that none of them have any people writing, but that is
> not true. Wikipedias such as the Lingala Wikipedia (ln.wp) are filled
> with content created by non-native speakers, and you aren't
> complaining about them. Why is that? Why don't you go on a crusade to
> close the Lingala Wikipedia? Or the Maori Wikipedia?
>
> Mark
>
> On 29/06/06, Jacky PB <dpotop1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hello Gerard,
> >
> > I don't really understand what you are implying.
> >
> > But I can repeat why we ask for the deletion of
> > mo.wikipedia (all of these are already proven in
> > previous messages):
> >
> > 1. There is no community. Nobody on wikipedia is both
> > interested in having it and able to contribute.
> >
> > 2. All content is copied from ro.wikipedia and
> > transliterated. There are better, already tested ways
> > of changing script, if someone wants it.
> >
> > 3. In the current status, mo.wikipedia is in fact a
> > heaven for trolls of all sorts.
> >
> > Of course, deletion needs not be permanent. As soon as
> > the condition 1 becomes false (as soon as a community
> > forms), the moldovan wikipedia can be re-created.
> >
> > Yours,
> > Jacky
> >
> > --- Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Liviu Andronic wrote:
> > > > ... The big issue comes mainly from the
> > > desinformation that mo.wikipediacreates.
> > > >
> > > > The content that is currently on mo.wikipedia is
> > > written in a language that
> > > > is not used any more in the Republic of Moldova.
> > > It could be argued that
> > > > Moldovan is used by a minority in the territory of
> > > Moldova (in private and
> > > > personal matters), and by a part of population
> > > (mainly Moldovan schools) in
> > > > Transnistria.  Please note that Cyrillic Moldovan
> > > is not used on a large
> > > > scale (that is, generally speaking, you won't
> > > encounter Moldovan Cyrillic
> > > > anywhere in Moldova). At least for Moldova, I can
> > > assure you, as I am a
> > > > native Moldovan. As far as Transnistria is
> > > concerned, I really doubt it.
> > > >  Even the   official presidential website
> > > > <http://www.president-pmr.org/>doesn't
> > > > contain any Cyrillic Moldovan content. ...
> > > >
> > > Hoi,
> > > Either the information is correct, and given that it
> > > is said to be
> > > information from the Romanian language Wikipedia it
> > > should be both
> > > correct and NPOV. If it is not correct or NPOV,
> > > /both/ the Romanian and
> > > the Moldovian language Wikipedia are to be
> > > considered problematic. All
> > > the rest is very much politics, posturing and
> > > intransigence.
> > >
> > > I am sure that this continued existence is best
> > > ignored. Consider you
> > > are either a party to this dispute or you could not
> > > care less. When  the
> > > argument is that the mo wikipedia is occupied by
> > > trolls, remember they
> > > thrive by getting attention.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > >    GerardM
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > >
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
> >
> >
> > __________________________________________________
> > Do You Yahoo!?
> > Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> > http://mail.yahoo.com
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>


body:
Wooo, you type faster than you think!

> You call it eye candy, I call it an interesting and potentially damn
> useful feature idea. Running a web site that gets upwards of ten
> thousand odd hits per second, allowing any old web user to edit it,
> etc. etc. also requires resources.

Yes, this is what we constantly work on =)

> How do we handle the hit rate? Caching. Squids, shared memory caching
> and opcode caching, not to mention encouraging the client side cache
> where possible. Our resources evolve to meet our needs. We can adapt
> to what our code base is doing.

When did you work on performance? How many of various eye candies can
be cached?
Squids can cache content for anonymous users, this is what they're
doing at the moment.
Shared memory caching isn't that much of panacea, our usual MySQL
queries are nearly as fast as memcached hits - both at single
millisecond.
It is usually used to offload processing, but you have to define a
clear case how and when to use cache.

Say for simple two-revision diff we not only cache them, but also
have great C++ written module for doing actual work.
You should note that we have zillion-revision articles, so not only
you run out of RGB, but also have quite a lot of expenses.

> might turn out to be a load of bollocks. You won't known until we've
> examined it in more detail.
> So performance is an issue. When is it not?

Many things we did to improve performance were based on profiling
data. And of course, common sense.

We had DifferenceEngine taking nearly 10% of our cluster cpu use,
with less than 0.5% of backend requests being diffs.
Now we're down to 2% of cluster cpu use, with less than 0.5% of
backend requests being diffs.
Add up regular page loading routines, because there's more than
DifferenceEngine for showing a diff.

So sure, lots of work has been done, it became quite efficient.

Now if we introduce task that is far more complex than two-rev diff:

a) how much of use that will get (to create an encyclopedia)
b) how efficient would it be?

Of course, if someone comes up with efficient feature, it is great.
But complex efficient feature requires complex efficient programming,
and we have just two guys who are actually doing such work (and
capable of doing it). And sure, they're both loaded with running the
site.
If anyone else wants to join the ship, of course, they're absolutely
welcome.

And people shouldn't have misconceptions that we have lots of
resources and can run anything. We're donation powered website, that
has to fix the infrastructure before autumn, because then we have yet
another surge of users.

Anyone has right to download the dump and provide nice eyecandies for
community, if they want to participate that way :) Just one important
thing to remember - don't try getting popular ;-)

Domas


from_name: Craig Spurrier

subject: [Wikitech-l] OpenDocument file format

body:
I would greatly appreciate at least .odt and .ott being enabled on EN
Wikinews for the Wikinews Print Edition.
Craig

Brion Vibber wrote:
> Jakob Voss wrote:
>
>> It has been asked multiple times at [[commons:Commons talk:File types]]
>> to enable OpenOffice.org 2.0 formats (=OASIS OpenDocument Format) for
>> file upload. Any objections? Can you please enable it?
>>
>
> Where specifically would you like them?
>
> We've also gotten requests to disable uploading of document file formats in most
> places, as they're only really relevant in a handful of meta-work wikis, not the
> main content wikis.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


body:
Hi!

> So much for that theory then :)

hehe, when cluster load goes up, lots of strange things start to
happen (well, of course less than a year ago, when it all went
haywire), and frustration goes up thousand-fold :)

so when someone says "hey look, they're having lots of resources",
converted to server-admin speak might sound "cluster going down,
going down" :-)

Domas


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

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

Citing cases of "Priority Inversion" -- feel free to call it what you will --
in this case being a situation where a few editors declare their "consensus"
as an excuse for deleting relevant and sourced information.

Case 3.

Article:  Charles Peirce.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Peirce

Section:  Peirce's philosophy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Peirce#Peirce.27s_philosophy

Edit:  Revision as of 15:17, 11 June 2006 by LogicMan
(-> Peirce's philosophy - delete quote. see talk)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Peirce&diff=next&oldid=57973984

Quotation deleted by "new user" LogicMan (incept date 7 June 2006).
The explanation given by LogicMan on the talk page is as follows:

| This quote is being removed because it is just one expert
| scoring a point off of others.  The point it makes is made
| just below it more briefly anyway.
|
| | It is not sufficiently recognized that Peirce?s career was
| | that of a scientist, not a philosopher;  and that during his
| | lifetime he was known and valued chiefly as a scientist, only
| | secondly as a logician, and scarcely at all as a philosopher.
| | Even his work in philosophy and logic will not be understood
| | until this fact becomes a standing premise of Peircian studies.
| | (Max Fisch, in (Moore and Robin 1964, 486).
|
| --[[User:LogicMan|LogicMan]] 15:16, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

The quotation is from Max Fisch, a premier Peirce scholar.
It was was added by another editor late in 2005.  It makes
an important observation, it is relevant, and sourced.  The
justification that LogicMan gives is partly speculative POV
and partly false, as the same point is not made just below it.
At any rate, there was no real discussion of its pertinence, and
no attempt to arrive at anything approaching a local consensus.

Jon Awbrey

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: Rob

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

references:
<21BC71BEAB43B04A95E5DB95AC7FA1EB024FA97A@auntm202.apac.corp.eds.com>
	<44A4AB39.ECD7E110@att.net> <44A532C4.A844FA6D@att.net>
	<44A54C8E.74A274A9@att.net>

body:
On 6/30/06, Jon Awbrey <jawbrey at att.net> wrote:

> The quotation is from Max Fisch, a premier Peirce scholar.
> It was was added by another editor late in 2005.  It makes
> an important observation, it is relevant, and sourced.  The
> justification that LogicMan gives is partly speculative POV
> and partly false, as the same point is not made just below it.
> At any rate, there was no real discussion of its pertinence, and
> no attempt to arrive at anything approaching a local consensus.

Was this block quote really necessary?  Why can't we just say "Peirce
was primarily known as a scientist during his lifetime" and be done
with it?  And what's the big deal?  Either way this argument goes, the
outcome is relatively insignificant and the article as a whole won't
be affected much .


list: commons-l

from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [Commons-l] Flag copyright

body:
On 6/30/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> Can someone explain to me how this is supposed to work?
>
> If a flag design is PD, and I make a faithful representation of it
> (intended to be a duplicate), do I have any copyright over it or not?

Depends where you are in the world.  In the United States, there is a
minimum creativity bar to clear, which accurate copying generally does
not.  Thus in the US exact copying does not create new copyright.

In some other places in the world, new copyright is created every time
a new copy of the work is created - this "mechanical copyright" means
that a copy of a public-domain work is not necessarily public domain.
This is the case in the UK among others, I believe.

-Matt


body:
Hello,

> I didn't. My point was that the people best suited to do so shouldn't
> be put off by the fact that there might have to be a bit extra work.
> God forbid that a programmer should express an opinion on a matter
> that's still mostly confined to the development side at this time.

There were few guys who were complaining about how much of work they
invested in one or other feature, and why doesn't it still run on
site. There has to be understanding about what is needed for code to
be used. If there is understanding, sure, it's great, let's continue
the development.

> You analyse the problem, you think of the best way of solving it and
> you do it. Yes. Why won't that method work here?

Exactly, this is why my initial mail on this issue was just a
rambling on incremental diffs. I didn't get any opinions on them yet :)
There can be various ideas on how to deal with it, diff just last 3-5
revs, and make it rolling diff.

Sure, diffs are quite critical in wikis - they add to collaboration,
and they must be there. The cost of a diff shouldn't be neglected
too ;-)

> I won't go into details on this, but I suggest you avoid the
> backhanded insults to the rest of us. Who are not paid. Who do this
> because we give a shit. Why, I don't know. I couldn't possibly tell
> you what compels me to continue working in this environment, writing
> little features and bug fixes.

It was not an insult. I know you have a problem and you think whole
world is against you. Well, maybe it is, but that is offtopic.
I'm not paid either. I also work on little changes and bug fixes. And
I wouldn't take the fact that we have two hard working guys writing
fascinating stuff, as an insult. Because I'd like to be able to do
that much too. Maybe I can't, so I do what I can.

> You frequently give off a vastly different impression.
:-(

> Just one important thing to remember. Don't sacrifice utility for
> performance. Otherwise, we'll just have to tell Jimbo Wales his grand
> little scheme is far too unfeasible to run.

We're not sacrificing. We have few other features impacting our
performance for years, and we have them there. Because they make
sense :)
And yet another issue. Our performance is our utility. Make it slow,
and people will get frustrated and won't be enjoying the free
encyclopedia.

> Are we intending on having a productive dialogue here, Domas?

When weren't we? ;-)

Domas


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

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

Rob wrote:
>
> On 6/30/06, Jon Awbrey <jawbrey at att.net> wrote:
>
> > The quotation is from Max Fisch, a premier Peirce scholar.
> > It was was added by another editor late in 2005.  It makes
> > an important observation, it is relevant, and sourced.  The
> > justification that LogicMan gives is partly speculative POV
> > and partly false, as the same point is not made just below it.
> > At any rate, there was no real discussion of its pertinence, and
> > no attempt to arrive at anything approaching a local consensus.
>
> Was this block quote really necessary?  Why can't we just say "Peirce
> was primarily known as a scientist during his lifetime" and be done
> with it?  And what's the big deal?  Either way this argument goes, the
> outcome is relatively insignificant and the article as a whole won't
> be affected much.

It is of course possible to discuss the relative importance,
the proper format, and the proper length of any article content.
There are several WP guidelines and heuristics that recommend how
to go about doing that in different circumstances.  Like any set
of guidelines and heuristics they aren't a consistent axiom system,
but live in tension with each other, from Be Bold! to Don't Be A Dick!,
and thus they require common sense, good judgment, and attention to the
details of the ongoing situation in order to be applied with good results.

But it's not my present task to delve into content issues.
The issue at hand is whether the Highesy Priority Policies
of WP are being followed in each case, or whether they are
being superseded by Lower Priority Guidelines, or worse yet,
altogether subverted by cynical mockeries of WP procedures.

The fact is that good faith contributions by previous editors were not being
respected, worked with, and modified, if need be, in the recommended manner,
but simply being deleted wholesale under the guise of a "consensus" that
was ever being declared by a small (but mysteriously growing) number of
editors, with no real attempt at discussion except among themselves.

Jon Awbrey

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