body:
On 12/12/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> >On 12/12/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> >>I generally agree with your comments, although this one strikes me as
> >>backwards.  I see ratings as a way of determining whether an article is
> >>in fact stable.  If an article must first be judged stable what would be
> >>the mechanism for making that decision?
> >>
> >>
> >You seem to be confusing "good" and "stable".  It's easy to see if an
> >article is in fact stable.  Just look at when the last time is that
> >it's been edited.  I suppose you could get even more detailed, and
> >look at the types of edits that have been performed (minor fixes
> >indicated stability or major changes and new content indicated lack of
> >stability), but even that isn't what ratings are about.  Ratings are
> >about whether or not a version is good, not whether or not it's
> >stable.
> >
> >And in order for ratings to be useful, you have to have a lot of
> >ratings on the same version.  That's why you need stability before
> >ratings can be effective.
> >
> The two go hand in hand, or become part of a feedback loop.  A "poor"
> rating will have the effect of destabilizing an article.

I don't see how.  I don't even understand how this is supposed to be
applied.  When you see a bad article, do you rate the version before
or after you fix it?  Or do you rate both?  Or do you go through the
history and start rating all the versions?

Is there a project with an example of ratings running?  I've seen
article validation in practice, and already that's way too much.
Ratings seem to only be worse.

> This is
> perhaps a chicken-or-egg kind of problem.  One would need an easily
> applied criterion to measure stability.

Number of characters changed in the past two weeks?

> We all know that the edits on
> [[George W. Bush]] can be chaotic.For comparison I looked at the
> recent edit history of [[Martin Van Buren]] and it had 26 edits in the
> last month.  I didn't look at the details, but it would still take time
> for someone else to do that if it were being considered for rating.  To
> be effective a rating system should be able to automatically adjust its
> results for stability.
>
In what way do you think a rating system should be adjusted to account
for stability?  I can think of a lot of different arguments, all of
which would be applicable to different situations.  I'm just not sure
you can boil this stuff down to a number.

> >>The lack of an agreed mechanism for doing that has been a major factor
> >>in not getting the 1.0 project off the ground.
> >>
> >>Ec
> >>
> >>
> >I agree.  That's why I haven't really opposed adding ratings in.
> >Agreeing on something is better than nothing here.  Worst case
> >scenario ratings come out and everyone realizes why they weren't such
> >a good idea, and then new ideas can come forward.
> >
> >
> Yes.  Ratings like any other tool will have bugs.
>
> Ec

I'm not talking about bugs.  I've seen article validation in action,
and I think it's fairly useless.  It works, but it's not useful.  I
think article ratings will be even more useless, because the data will
be even more spread out.

Maybe I'm wrong.  If so, then I'll be happy to jump on the article
rating bandwagon.  There's only one way to find out for sure, and
that's to try it.

Anthony


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Proposal: Article Improvement Weeks! (was Turn off
	article creation AND deletion.)

body:
On 12/12/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Sam Korn wrote:
> > On 12/11/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> >>In my opinion it is never acceptable to keep false information in the
> >>article namespace.  There are places where eventualism is acceptable,
> >>but presenting false information as true information is not one of
> >>them.
> >>Oh well, whatever.  Two separate people seem honestly and irreparably
> >>opposed to the idea.  I'll just drop it.
>
> > I agree with you, but with one caveat.  It shouldn't be removed, just
> > marked as being unverified.  If it is marked as such, Wikipedia
> > specifically abdicates all responsibility for the contents.  This way,
> > the information is still available so *anyone* can verify it, admin or
> > not.
>
>
> The {{unreferenced}} tag pretty much puts this message across, unless
> the reader is too stupid to breathe without instructions.
>
>
> - d.

Either the information is easy to be verified, and we should do that,
or it isn't, and we should remove it until someone verifies it.
Either way I don't see the point of adding a tag.

I'm very afraid that this solution is going to lead to thousands of
articles with annoying little self-reference tags on them.  And then,
what does it mean if an article *doesn't* have this tag?  Are we
saying that article *has* been verified?

I can see it now: "This Buckinghamshire location article does not cite
its references or sources. You can help Wikipedia by including
appropriate citations."  What's next?  "This article related to
broadcasting in Singapore has spelling mistakes.  You can help
Wikipedia by fixing the spelling."

Fortunately, Magnus Manske is working on task management support.
It's my understanding that it's made for exactly this sort of thing.

Anthony


list: foundation-l

from_name: Patrick, Brad

subject: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation

body:
This situation is being addressed on Juriwiki-L for legal reasons.
Thank you for bringing it to the list's attention.

-Brad

Bradford A. Patrick, Esq.
Fowler White Boggs Banker
501 E. Kennedy Blvd.
Suite 1700
Tampa, FL  33602-5239
(813) 228-7411 main
(813) 222-3336 direct
(813) 229-8313 fax
bpatrick at fowlerwhite.com

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Dori
Sent: Monday, December 12, 2005 6:43 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation

Is this a trademark violation? http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org/

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list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation


from_name: Ryan Delaney

body:
On 12/12/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> I can see it now: "This Buckinghamshire location article does not cite
> its references or sources. You can help Wikipedia by including
> appropriate citations."  What's next?  "This article related to
> broadcasting in Singapore has spelling mistakes.  You can help
> Wikipedia by fixing the spelling."

Actually, we already have this. It's the {{copyedit}} tag, and it has proven
rather useful to editors who do not speak English as a foreign language to
draw attention to articles they need to have checked for spelling,
punctuation and grammar.  I think this isn't a terrible analogy for the
{{cleanup-verified}} tag, which also already exists and I have been using
for some time.  If an article subject is out of my area of expertise for
verification, or I simply don't have the time, I will use this tag to draw
attention to the problem.

Really, the problem of unsourced material on Wikipedia is serious, so I
don't think we should look on potential solutions with sarcasm and disdain.

Ryan


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject:
[WikiEN-l] No wonder people don't realise that anyone can
	editWikipedia

body:
Hello,

> But then again, I have my doubts Wikipedia should be calling
> itself an encyclopedia in the first place.  It's not really
> an encyclopedia, it's a website for a group of people who are
> building an encyclopedia.  I remember arguing that years ago
> on IRC, though, and I lost the argument.  Most Wikipedians
> insist that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, even though common
> sense says that it is not.

Well, I'm not sure I agree. I use wikipedia as an encyclopaedia all the
time. It's great on countries, models of cars, computer technologies
etc. But I'm lucky enough to realise that the information is of an
"amateur" standard, and I don't make any serious decisions based on
anything I've only read there.  As most of "us" know - there are good
bits and there are bad bits.  But does the general public?

Steve


from_name: Kyle Lutze

subject: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's fantasy...

body:
here's my idea to help the fantasy, but also keep up in general.

I found this one program interesting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CryptoDerk/CDVF
the problem is that multiple editors may be looking at the same page,
making it ineficient.

I also came along another interesting program:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v156/vilerage/Screenshot-3.png
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v156/vilerage/Screenshot-2.png
granted they're only images of a project in the works, but it also has
the flaw of not being realtime, so my idea is to combine both of them.

In short, there is a backend server that everybody connects to with a
program quite similar to CDVF. When an edit is made, it shows up in
everybody's window, such as with CDVF.

The only difference is, when somebody checks it out, and changes it,
that edit disappears off of _everybody's_ page. The other thing it would
do is load all unchecked edits into somebody's CDVF client when they login.

This way, we can keep all edits from going unchecked. obviously, there
would be some edits made to the way the program works (besides the
network backend) such as the ability to login and help is done on a
per-user request basis to keep trolls from being able to go in and mark
all spam off as legit. Also, to keep things in check, anybody
blacklisting a user (without a prior ban) would have to also get a vote
of x amount of people before it becomes a global blacklisted user on all
clients.

Unfortunately, I'm not a programmer or have any time to learn, but I am
willing to share more of my ideas and hash things out. I'm always in
#wikipedia if you wish to chat.

On a more general note, it would be really cool to get more paid people
onboard, such as Tim Starling, and some editors that'll complete stubs.
maybe even some sort of bounty system for the articles that could use
being done but nobody wants to do?

Food for thought,
Kyle


subject: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's fantasy...


from_name: stevertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
-- David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

> So what term do you suggest for the thing that is
> currently usefully described by the word
> "pseudoscience"?

I dunno- "quasiscientific," maybe. Because 'pseudo'
carries a prejudicial connotation of 'falseness,'
while 'quasi' carries a perhaps more accurate
connotation of "almost" or "partly" being something;
in this case, as something being based in science.

The term "pseudoscientific," to be fair, seems like a
natural one to use in cases where non-scientific
claims are asserted as if there was established
scientific proof. Its probably more accurate to just
call certain specific outlandish claims as plain
scientific 'fraud,' though my guess would be that that
would probably be considered POV. 'Pseudoscience' is
not much different than calling something 'fraud,'
though 'fraud' seems to imply deliberate deception
rather than an honest claim, written in religionese,
and borne of intellectual confusion (SPOV) or
'ecstatic inspiration' (RPOV).

There are claims which are best described as being
from the POV of the domain to which they belong:
religion, philosophy, or metaphysics, etc. (ie.
'pseudoscience' is naturally in the domain of
science). That alone should satisfy in almost any case
I can think of. Whether String Theory should also be
called "quasiscientific" of course stands out as an
interesting fulcrum for Wikipediology.

Stevertigo

__________________________________________________
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body:
On 12/12/05, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/12/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> >
> > I can see it now: "This Buckinghamshire location article does not cite
> > its references or sources. You can help Wikipedia by including
> > appropriate citations."  What's next?  "This article related to
> > broadcasting in Singapore has spelling mistakes.  You can help
> > Wikipedia by fixing the spelling."
>
>
> Actually, we already have this. It's the {{copyedit}} tag, and it has proven
> rather useful to editors who do not speak English as a foreign language to
> draw attention to articles they need to have checked for spelling,
> punctuation and grammar.  I think this isn't a terrible analogy for the
> {{cleanup-verified}} tag, which also already exists and I have been using
> for some time.  If an article subject is out of my area of expertise for
> verification, or I simply don't have the time, I will use this tag to draw
> attention to the problem.
>
> Really, the problem of unsourced material on Wikipedia is serious, so I
> don't think we should look on potential solutions with sarcasm and disdain.
>
>
> Ryan

If someone cares to propose a potential solution, I won't be sarcastic about it.

Anthony


body:
On 12/12/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
>
> If someone cares to propose a potential solution, I won't be sarcastic
> about it.
>
>
Well, {{cleanup-verify}} isn't a solution, but I think it helps, and it
would be part of any effective solution.

Ryan


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Caching old revisions

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> 3) Add a parser hack for *only* replacing templates with their contents
> (recursively). Then store *that* wikitext.
>
> Takes more space than a template links table, but would be *way* faster
> (template replacement is only done once, on declaring a stable version).

That's a good idea but it will break rollback :-/ Unless people manually
restore the {{template}}.
<snip>

--
Ashar Voultoiz


subject: [WikiEN-l] Undeletion service

body:
On 12/12/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
> > On 12/12/05, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:
> >>David Gerard stated for the record:
>
> >>>I hereby declare that I will make deleted content (apart from copyvios
> >>>etc) available for reading. Of course, using it to recreate the deleted
> >>>content is speedyable, and using it to keep it hanging around in your
> >>>userspace may get you penalised as Anthony was for doing so. But that's
> >>>what you do with it afterwards.
>
> >>Watch out, David.  The AfD crew is vicious -- defy them in public like
> >>this, and I won't be surprised to see that you've been put up for
> >>deletion, Arbiter or not.
> >>And by the bye, I've extended the same offer for quite some time now.
>
> > Me too.  I'll get around to putting it on my userpage one of these days.
>
>
> I've just added the following to my page. Other admins should feel free
> to do so also.
>
>
> ==Undeletion==
>
> If you need access to a Wikipedia article that has been deleted, ask me.
> If it's not a copyright violation, libel or similar, I will make the
> text available to you. This is because [[WP:DRV|deletion review]] is
> infected with a crippling case of [[m:Instruction creep|process]] [[ISO
> 9000|fetishisation]] over [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia is an
> encyclopedia|product]] that ignores the actual [[Wikipedia:deletion
> policy|]] and is in need of being made [[WP:IAR|ignorable]].
>
> Note that using the text to recreate the deleted content is speedyable,
> and using it to keep it hanging around in your userspace has gotten
> editors penalised before. But that's your problem.
>
>
> [and if Anthony sends me a request a day I will at least raise an eyebrow]
>
>
> - d.

One a day?  But there are hundreds of deletions every day that I'd
like to see.  :)

Why can't some admin just write a bot to get them all, and email them
to me.  I promise I won't tell anyone who you are (use an anonymous
remailer if you don't trust me, they still have those right?).

Anthony


body:
On 12/12/05, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/12/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> >
> >
> > If someone cares to propose a potential solution, I won't be sarcastic
> > about it.
> >
> >
> Well, {{cleanup-verify}} isn't a solution, but I think it helps, and it
> would be part of any effective solution.
>
> Ryan

Already 1000 listed there.  I wonder, are there any articles that
*don't* qualify?  [[Westboro Baptist Church]] has the tag, and it has
33 references!

BTW, the "Buckinghamshire location article" and "article related to
broadcasting in Singapore" quotes were real examples from cleanup
tags.  So yeah, it was sarcasm, but it was serious sarcasm.

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] 3RR blocks and admin immunity

body:
Oh please dont bring up ME in this, Mr. "due to time
restriants I only cheak reported violations" and "Yes
I should have blocked the other party but it wasn't
reported" and "I was contacterble by email for as long
as the block lasted."

If you want to defend the process of enforcing da
rulez, it might help matters if you actually followed
the rules in doing so.

Granted its a sticky issue and one which we all forsaw
when 3RR was first started. The "equal treatment"
clause began as a core requirement and now (judging by
how easily you and others dismiss it) its just an
overlooked footnote.

Stevertigo

--- geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 12/13/05, Leif Knutsen <vyerllc at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm not even going to bother to go into why a
> recent 3RR block of me was
> > unjust and unwarranted, and probably abusive. What
> interests me more is what
> > appears to be the immunity enjoyed by admins. I
> reported one of you for
> > vandalism three times in the last few days,
> documented the three specific
> > instances and countless others, and nobody (except
> the perp) even responded,
> > let alone acted on the complaint.
> >
> > I'm just curious: how many cases have there been
> of an admin being subject
> > to disciplinary action, either in the form of
> blocks, long-term blocks,
> > being deprived of admin rights, or outright
> expulsion? What I see - even
> > from admins I have learned to respect - is that
> admins generally stand up
> > for each other first and last, whether they harbor
> reservations after the
> > fact.
> >
> > Leif
>
> Under the 3RR I've blocked 5 admins. Two of those
> cases resulted in
> further actions which in tern cuased the admin to be
> de admined. There
> is at least one block of an admin under the 3RR that
> was not carried
> out by me.
>
> --
> geni
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

__________________________________________________
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from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Caching old revisions

references:
<dnjf1f$tql$1@sea.gmane.org> <439D82CB.6090905@web.de>
	<dnkdrv$708$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 12/12/05, Ashar Voultoiz <hashar at altern.org> wrote:
> Magnus Manske wrote:
> > 3) Add a parser hack for *only* replacing templates with their contents
> > (recursively). Then store *that* wikitext.
> >
> > Takes more space than a template links table, but would be *way* faster
> > (template replacement is only done once, on declaring a stable version).
>
> That's a good idea but it will break rollback :-/ Unless people manually
> restore the {{template}}.

There's no need for rollback on stable versions. Just declare some
other version the stable one, and the current one gets replaced.

Alfio


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Caching old revisions

body:
Alfio Puglisi wrote:
> On 12/12/05, Ashar Voultoiz <hashar at altern.org> wrote:
>
>> Magnus Manske wrote:
>>
>>> 3) Add a parser hack for *only* replacing templates with their contents
>>> (recursively). Then store *that* wikitext.
>>>
>>> Takes more space than a template links table, but would be *way* faster
>>> (template replacement is only done once, on declaring a stable version).
>>>
>> That's a good idea but it will break rollback :-/ Unless people manually
>> restore the {{template}}.
>>
>
> There's no need for rollback on stable versions. Just declare some
> other version the stable one, and the current one gets replaced.
>
Why the bother? Lease the revision system as it is, and store the
"merged" text of the currently stable version somewhere else (that is,
additionally to the "real" revision).

Magnus


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

subject: [WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
stevertigo wrote:
> Something else to talk about:
>
> Some of our rather intelligent sciency people seem to
> have an unusual inability to distinguish science from
> neutrality. Ultimately, they tend to argue that
> articles should hold a defacto deference to what is
> essentially a Scientific Point of View, rather than a
> Neutral Point of View.
>
> How best to single these people out and correct their
> behaviour? Any examples of articles in question? Isnt
> the term "pseudoscience" a POV pejorative from the
> SPOV?

Could you give an example of a "scientific point of view" which is not
neutral point of view?

Pseudoscience is not a POV pejorative term, as pseudoscience has little
or no actual basis in reality. The fact that pseudoscience is 'wrong' is
not a POV opinion, as it is true. Scientific observations have
demonstrated the vast majority of pseudoscientific babble to be exactly
that - babble.

Wikipedia should accurately reflect truth - if people say something
wrong, it is not POV for us to point out that it is wrong, and to show
why it is wrong.

Pseudoscientific ideas deserve a page (for historical value), but they
don't deserve a voice in what is said in it, and the fact it's all wrong
should be made crystal clear.

Chris


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Christmas presents, or: MediaWiki,
	reloaded

body:
On 12/12/05, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> Well, as this is likely to affect all wikipedias one its live, I thought
> the initial announcement should go to wikipedia-l. You know how they
> hate it when a new feature appears and noone told them ;-)

Yeah, I just realised that since *my* message was almost entirely
technical discussion, it might annoy non-technical people if it
carried on filling up wikipedia-l with backlog.

> Right now, each task type in the sidebar has its own id. A new style can
> be chosen by editing MediaWiki:Monobook.css and setting a style for,
> say, "task_sidebar_delete". A read background would surely be noticed.

Hm, maybe. But it still misses the chance to explain to newer users
what's going on (linking to deletion policy etc as well as the
particular discussion).

> Personally, I think that would suffice. Anyway, putting up a bigger
> notice, for example, in the page subtitle wouldn't be a problem.

I was thinking perhaps there could be a "tasks-banner-<foo>" message
for each task (e.g. "MediaWiki:tasks-banner-delete") which was shown
at the top of the page. Priority could be based on the order of
"MediaWiki:tasks task types", to only show one such banner. The
default [if the relevant message didn't exist] could be just a small
"There are [x] tasks pending for this page", and that could be given
as a $x variable to the banners so that it could be added inside, say,
the big red box of a 'delete' banner.

> Transclusion IMHO would clutter the search page. It would look pretty
> much like AfD looks now :-(

Well, some people actually *like* it that way, so I think providing
the *option* will be important in getting this feature accepted (that
was certainly the case in some of the discussions I've seen regarding
alternative VfD styles, some time ago). The great thing about having
proper software support is that we can have all sorts of *different*
views, without anyone having to maintain them.

The main problem with *not* transcluding, BTW, is that the "status" is
not fine-grained enough to reflect, say, the progress of an AfD debate
"at a glance". Perhaps the "initial comment" could be replaced with an
editable "summary", with the initial comment becoming the initial
content of that and the Task: discussion page? Interface for that is
awkward, I know; how about ripping it out of a special
<tasksummary>...</tasksummary> section when the Task: page is saved,
meaning it'd even have history?

> The task discussion pages *are* linked from the status tables. (maybe
> you saw an older version with a bug? Try the current one!)

Sorry, this wasn't clear; I meant that "Special:Tasks" (or rather,
sub-pages like Special:Tasks/Delete) should probably be linked from
the status tables, so that people can navigate to other tasks of the
same type.

[Task page naming:]
> My first attempt was including the original title page. Then I
> remembered page moving. If the page is moved after the task is created,
> the "task discussion page" will stay the same this way.

Hm, that's a good point, and is rather awkward; still, having numeric
names strikes me as distinctly ugly. Could page moves and redirects
not keep things consistent, either manually or automatically?
[Relatedly, what happens when the associated page is deleted - is
there still an associated page_id containing the right name? I'm not
sure what the database looks like for a deleted page...]

> And they're not broken; each tasks has its own number, which makes up
> the () part. The page_id is stored in the task table, it is not used in
> the title of the task discussion pages.

Well, they're broken in that part of the name is actually redundant -
"Task:Delete (1)" might as well just be called "Task:1", and indeed
that name will show the correct status table, as will "Task:FOO(1)" or
any number of other variants. The reason this is particularly
confusing is that:
* using the wrong name will *not* show the actual discussion for that
task, only the status table
* seemingly valid names such as "Task:Delete (1)" can actually be
incorrect [on your test wiki, task 1 is a wikify task, so the
discussion is actually at "Task:Wikify (1)"]
I'd suggest either:
a) use a purely numeric naming scheme (Task:1, Task:2)
b) make invalid titles [where the title doesn't match the task type]
invalid, so that "Task:Delete (1)" will show an error rather than an
unrelated [blank] page with erroneous status info
and/or c) make invalid titles automatically "redirect to" the correct
titles, so that the status info is shown *but so is the correct
discussion*.

> Part of the problem is that the feature is visually colliding with the
> "stable version" one.
> I just deactivated the stable version feature, since Tim is already
> working on a better one :-)
> Is this better? Maybe I should just change the font size?

Yes, that does improve it somewhat. Still, I would prefer larger font
and black rather than grey, but then I think the same of the
"(Redirected from...)" text that goes in the same place - this is
fairly important information that should be prominent enough that
people will notice it even when not looking for it.

> It's in the "extensions" module, directory "Tasks", file "Tasks.php".
> Make sure to read the initial comment in that file for how to set it up
> correctly.

I noticed the CVS commit notifications just after I'd sent my message,
and was considering making time to play with it later tonight. [I
probably won't get round to it, though]

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
Rowan Collins wrote:
> On 11/12/05, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
>
>> The third one I talked about, but noone saw it yet, so here it is: Task
>> management! (you gonna love this!)
>>
>
> This looks like a really great start, and a much-needed new feature,
> so thank you. Here are my thoughts on the key things that need work to
> get this operational (hm, this should probably be on wikitech-l,
> shouldn't it... re-addressing):
>
Well, as this is likely to affect all wikipedias one its live, I thought
the initial announcement should go to wikipedia-l. You know how they
hate it when a new feature appears and noone told them ;-)
> * A proper replacement for manual in-page templates saying "this
> article has been listed for..." - as mentionned before, things like
> "wikify" don't need much prominence (though arguably more than the
> current sidebar link gives), but things like deletion most certainly
> do. A configurable banner for each task still seems the best way to
> me, with perhaps a built-in priority for different tasks (so that, for
> instance, only one banner is ever shown, but with an extra "+ 3 other
> outstanding tasks" if necessary)
>
Right now, each task type in the sidebar has its own id. A new style can
be chosen by editing MediaWiki:Monobook.css and setting a style for,
say, "task_sidebar_delete". A read background would surely be noticed.
Personally, I think that would suffice. Anyway, putting up a bigger
notice, for example, in the page subtitle wouldn't be a problem.
> * Actual replacements for AfD, etc - i.e. more viewing options for
> Special:Tasks, including ones which transclude all the relevant Task:*
> pages. These should probably be linked to from the little task status
> tables, as well.
>
Transclusion IMHO would clutter the search page. It would look pretty
much like AfD looks now :-(
The task discussion pages *are* linked from the status tables. (maybe
you saw an older version with a bug? Try the current one!)
> * The "task discussion pages" need a better naming scheme, involving
> both the pagename and the task in question. e.g. "Task:Main
> Page/Delete". [I now realise that the current system is actually
> broken, with the "task box" relying only on the task's ID number, so
> that http://www.magnusmanske.de/wikipeerdia/index.php/Task:Delete_%281%29
> and http://www.magnusmanske.de/wikipeerdia/index.php/Task:Wikify_%281%29
> show the same metadata, but different content.]
>
My first attempt was including the original title page. Then I
remembered page moving. If the page is moved after the task is created,
the "task discussion page" will stay the same this way.
And they're not broken; each tasks has its own number, which makes up
the () part. The page_id is stored in the task table, it is not used in
the title of the task discussion pages.
> * Obviously, presentational details can be fiddled with relatively
> easily, but I thought I'd mention that on the Task: pages themselves,
> the "This task is for..." message seems a bit hidden, and the "initial
> comment" might need to be more prominent to look like the start of the
> conversation that will take place below it.
>
Part of the problem is that the feature is visually colliding with the
"stable version" one.
I just deactivated the stable version feature, since Tim is already
working on a better one :-)
Is this better? Maybe I should just change the font size?
> Like I say, great start, and these are just a few thoughts, most of
> which you'd probably already thought about, but not had time to do
> yet. Y'never know, I might find time to help out (though presumably
> this isn't in CVS yet, since we don't really have an 'unstable' branch
> there atm, HEAD being the version live on Wikimedia).
>
It's in the "extensions" module, directory "Tasks", file "Tasks.php".
Make sure to read the initial comment in that file for how to set it up
correctly.

Thanks for the feedback!

Magnus


from_name: Leif Knutsen

body:
I'm not even going to bother to go into why a recent 3RR block of me was
unjust and unwarranted, and probably abusive. What interests me more is what
appears to be the immunity enjoyed by admins. I reported one of you for
vandalism three times in the last few days, documented the three specific
instances and countless others, and nobody (except the perp) even responded,
let alone acted on the complaint.

I'm just curious: how many cases have there been of an admin being subject
to disciplinary action, either in the form of blocks, long-term blocks,
being deprived of admin rights, or outright expulsion? What I see - even
from admins I have learned to respect - is that admins generally stand up
for each other first and last, whether they harbor reservations after the
fact.

Leif


body:
--- geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> You know I've carried out dozens of blocks under
> the 3RR. I think I know how to inforce the rules.

Yes, one could at least hope that such ample practice
would make for more perfection. I can only hope to
someday become as practiced with using the block
button as you are.

> You knew of the other case and yet you
> never emailed me about it.
> You never emailed me at all. Of course you
> didn't have to. You could have emailed any admin
> and asked to be unblocked.

One could say its the job of the officer to do their
homework. Check a link or two, etc. I know its a lot
of trouble. Besides I dont use email, and why would I
when theres wiki?  Wiki is a great idea, and a
preferable means for open communication. (Though it
only works when people are reasonable enough to not
block you from it. But that's a problem with 3RR
blocking in the first place, and not with your
quasi-proper application of the rules.)

> Both you and your oponet were blocked as soon as
> reports were brought to light.

Why not just be direct and state that there was 24
hours difference between the blocks? That way you let
people decide for themselves if that material
difference was had some substantial effect on your
claim of equitablity. "Brought to light" is a clever
convolution, young man, but its not encyclopedic. Nice
try though.

Stevertigo

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body:
--- The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> Everyone, I hope, recognizes that turning off
> article creation for a week would eliminate one of
Wikipedia's well-recognized remarkable
> successes; that is, responding quickly and
> informatively to breaking news of import, from
September 11 to the Indonesian
> tsunami to Nobel
> Prize winners.

Yes, but its really just practice for next year's
schedules "lets turn off the internet day." Anyone
else hear about that?

Stevertigo

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list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Class Action

body:
On 12/12/05, Bod Notbod <bodnotbod at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I just subscribed to draw the community's attention to:
>
> http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org/
>
> Apologies is if this is old news, but I hope people appreciate that the
> vast size of the project means that it's very difficult to find out who
> is aware, and to what extent, of any particular issue.

Hmm. It's nice to know that even the people wanting to bring a lawsuit
haven't managed to get the story straight:

"Untrue information ... was eventually removed by Wikipedia's
co-founder Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales, but only after more than four months
anguish and hard work by Seigenthaler" - yes, those anguishing four
months of being unaware of it...

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: Dori

subject: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation

body:
On 12/12/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Dori wrote:
>
> >Is this a trademark violation? http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org/
> >
> >
> I doubt it.  He is not pretending to be Wikipedia, and I suppose his
> usage is relevant to what he is trying to do.  None of the ads for other
> class actions use the logo.  As long as he limits himself to that narrow
> use it may be better to follow a policy of "Don't feed the trolls."
>
> Ec

I won't post anymore here since people are discussing it at juriwiki,
but the site does say "(c) 2005 WikipediaClassAction.org ? All rights
reserved." and they mention nothing about Wikipedia being a redistered
mark of another entity. At the very least having the image there is a
copyright violation. Anyway I'm not a lawyer so I'll shut up.

Dori


subject: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
--- Leif Knutsen <vyerllc at gmail.com> wrote:

> One of the fun, but often irritating aspects of the
> NPOV debates/disputes is
> getting to the bottom of this very issue. I think
> that anyone who wants to
> assert what is "scientific truth" on WP needs to
> come to terms with just how
> primitive the state of science still is (and we
> should be glad for that). In
> other words, humility has to be a central value.

I dont know about humility ("civility" is about the
only real principle or intangible quality we can
really handle), but I think youve got the balance
right. Reality is indeed often a misnomer for
'scientific truth.'

The Siegenthaler scandal made Yahoo's front page BTW.

Stevertigo

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from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Caching old revisions

body:
On wikipedia-l, Brion wrote:
> Please confirm that you have talked with Tim, who is already working on version
> tagging keeping our caching requirements in mind.

I thought I'd better describe here what I'm doing in that area, so that I
can get some comments on the design, and in case any of it affects what
other people are doing.

It started innocently enough, I ported Salvatore's "show verified" patch [1]
to HEAD, with the intention of putting it live within a day or so. But the
problem with that patch, like other features that encourage viewing of
revisions other than the latest one, is that such page views are currently
uncached. This is especially a problem for Salvatore's patch, which proposes
to switch particularly popular articles and frequently vandalised articles
to a moderated mode, where the old revision is displayed by default.

Our goals are:
* Consistency between the parser cache and the rerendered HTML at any time
* Fast cache hits
* Low-latency cache updates

At the moment, rerendered HTML changes in the following circumstances:
* Template change
* Link colour change
* Deletion of the revision

One simple way to reduce the rate at which the cache for old revisions is
invalidated would be to retrieve the old revisions of all included templates
when the revision is rerendered. In other words, to display all templates as
they were when the article was edited. Besides the cache implications, this
is also a highly desired UI feature. It turns out to be fairly easy to
implement, with the following caveats:

* If a template is moved, there is no way to reliably determine where it
moved to. We could follow the redirect in the first revision, but the
redirect might have been changed by deletion and recreation by an admin.
* Template deletion necessarily changes the rerendered HTML.

My original idea was to ignore these changes, and any link colour changes,
in the interests of simplicity and cache efficiency. However Brion expressed
a desire to see at least some part of MediaWiki work perfectly, and I admit
that's a good point.

For caches of old revisions to properly reflect these changes described
above, there are two design options that I can see:

1) Store a list of templates and links in the parser cache object, and check
 them all to make sure they still exist, on every parser cache hit. This
would make parser cache hits slow, although they would be somewhat faster
than rerendering.

2) Store a list of templates and links in the database, indexed both ways,
in a similar way to what we do now with current revisions. Then analogously
to the behaviour for current revisions, all revisions which include a
template would have their rev_touched field updated when the template is
deleted or moved.

Option 2 is the one I'm running with, because it's likely to be faster if
carefully implemented. Note that template links from old revisions are only
required when there is a valid cache object stored which might need to be
invalidated. Thus we can reduce the size of the table by only registering
links to tagged or current revisions.

This is about as far as my planning goes, I'm not quite sure of the details
of this template tracking system. So in the following section I'm just
thinking aloud.

* Should the new templatelinks table be indexed by (page,tag) or revision?
If it's indexed by (page,tag), then we need to update all those rows when a
tag changes. If it's indexed by revision, then we need to (periodically?)
purge the table of all rows associated with untagged revisions.
* Just how bad would it be if we indexed by revision and let the
templatelinks table grow indefinitely? What would give out first?
* Parser cache objects have a finite lifetime in memcached. Perhaps we could
add a cache timestamp to templatelinks, and then periodically delete all
templatelinks rows for which the parser cache object has expired. This has
the advantage of allowing us to cache untagged old revisions, but I'm not
sure what the DB performance implications would be.

So far, I've ported Salvatore's patch to HEAD, and refactored the link
handling code, to track templates properly and to make it more flexible.
None of it is committed yet.

-- Tim Starling

[1] http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-July/030898.html


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
Lets not be sarcastic. Science is largely a process of
exclusion; Sherlock Holmes style reduction of possible
explanations. Granted its ground rules are reasonable
enough to contain some interesting debates which
stretch the boundaries. But if we say for sake of
argument that science has little compatibility with
religion, why then do a reasonable percentage of
scientists hold religious personal views? Is it just
for the church dating scene?

Stevertigo

--- The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm so glad that I don't have to believe in science
> for all those
> engineers and scientists who do make my nice pretty
> computers and
> internets and lightbulbs and keyboards and mp3
> encodings and electric
> guitars so i can listen to blink 182, which rocks
> the hardest.
>
> hmph.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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from_name: Adrian Buehlmann

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Stupid Mediawiki Tricks: logical templates

references:
<439A1430.5050100@thingy.apana.org.au>
	<dnk5ht$8e6$1@sea.gmane.org> <dnkdt4$8af$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Phil Boswell wrote:
> "Phil Boswell" <phil.boswell at gmail.com>
> wrote in message news:dnk5ht$8e6$1 at sea.gmane.org...
> [snip]
>> ... My personal bug-bear is {{qif}}, mainly because I cannot for the
>> life of me see what it can do that {{if}} cannot.
>
> Now that I have taken another look at it, I think that it is actually
> doing something extremely clever.

That's why I awarded Carl [[en:User:AzaToth]] a technology barnstar.

And because it eliminates one template call level, compared to
{{if}} (In Re "meta-templates").

> [snip]
> It would be nice
> if we could retire the current version of {{if}} and re-use that
> name, but the nice thing about a wiki is that you can take things
> just about as slow as you like, provided nobody jogs your elbow.

Yes that would be nice. One problem is that the old {{if}} unfortunately
provides also a usage variant that provides unnamed parameters, which
{{qif}}} deliberatley does not for speed, simplicity and '='-char safety
(template artist Carl tried to do that in qif, but the outcome was code that
even shocked me :-).

For this reason it comes handy that {{if}} has been given that
new "test", "then" "else" parameter set as a migration path.

--
Adrian
[[en:User:Adrian Buehlmann]]


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Turn off AfD

body:
On 12/12/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
>
> >>
> >I agree, DRV is making it quite hard to get valid stuff undeleted, but
> >if one allows just two people to agree on stuff like this I expect a
> >lot of deletion wars. Addressing people ignoring the need to undelete
> >when new evidence is presented in DRV seems more useful to me. Have
> >you got any particular case in mind?
> >
> That you are able to recognize that it's difficult to get things
> undeleted is important progress.
>
> The agreement of two people to undelete does not imply that the
> undeletion will necessarily be permanent.  Under the right circumstances
> it could be deleted again, and two new people could undelete it again,
> but my guess is that very few articles would go through the entire cycle
> more than twice.  The deletion wars that you anticipate may be there
> shortly after a two person undeletion is passed, but will likely tail
> off within a month or two when the policy has had a chance to stabilize.
>

I've found that listing an article on AfD, and the ensuing strong keep
vote, is a pretty effective way of damping down deletion wars that
sometimes result from undeletion.  It's not ideal but it's probably
all that can be done while people are ready to speedy delete stuff on
purely procedural grounds.

Having said that, lately we're getting articles that are being
undeleted by DRV and then listed on AfD when no real reason exists for
wanting to delete them, and also cases where DRV is being used to
endorse bad speedy deletions.

[[Brian Walters]]. Prominent Melbourne barrister and civil
libertarian.  Article stated as much, and it's easily checked.  There
were numerous votes on DRV to keep it deleted until I  did a quick
google, undeleted and expanded it.  The person who originally speedied
it could have done the google and saved himself the bother of
deleting.

[[The Form of Preaching]]  Nominated by someone who thought the
article was OR (presumably didn't google either).  A few sheep-votes
sealed it deletion.  The guy whose student created it came to DRV and
pointed out that the piece was very important in medieval rhetoric.
For some reason, although undeleted, it got listed on AfD *yet again*.

[[Mary Welsh Hemingway]], prominent international journalist who,
after covering World War II, married Ernest Hemingway.  Was undeleted
and, for no real reason, relisted.  Speedy keep of this article has
been strongly resisted.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>
> > Of course, because the other ideas are normally all wrong, it's not
> > POV to include a criticism section in the article with references to
> > scientific experiments demonstrating that the idea is wrong.
>
> Your statement that "the other ideas are normally all wrong" is a POV.
> If your criticism depends on a POV then it too is a POV.  A scientific
> experiment that shows something to be wrong is not the same as one that
> fails to show it right.  To say that something which is not science is
> necessarily pseudoscience is a textbook application of the fallacy of
> [[False dilemma]].

One of the fun, but often irritating aspects of the NPOV debates/disputes is
getting to the bottom of this very issue. I think that anyone who wants to
assert what is "scientific truth" on WP needs to come to terms with just how
primitive the state of science still is (and we should be glad for that). In
other words, humility has to be a central value.

The editors of the article on Pseudoscience, Quackery, and other articles
that seek to make these distinctions are constantly struggling with the
issue; I think they will only succeed if they concentrate on making it an
honest dialectic rather than an attempt at arriving at the truth.

All science, and I think it's safe to be that categorical, is tentative; the
conceptual models are based on available information. Some models (the earth
is round) do a better job of describing reality and predicting what will
happen next; but it is safe to say that they will in time be overtaken by
others.  Add to that the difficulty of achieving a consensus among
scientists on anything but the most basic concepts, and we are arrogant
indeed to think that we are in a position to pronounce what is
scientifically true on issues that are controversial in the real world.


subject: [WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
Chris Jenkinson wrote:
> Wikipedia should accurately reflect truth - if people say something
> wrong, it is not POV for us to point out that it is wrong, and to show
> why it is wrong.

I got a private message saying this conflicted with Wikipedia's NPOV
policy on pseudoscience. I'd like to clarify - it's right to mention
that some people disbelieve a certain theory, and believe other ideas on
how such a phenomenon exists. It's also good to include why people
believes/believed such a theory.

Of course, because the other ideas are normally all wrong, it's not POV
to include a criticism section in the article with references to
scientific experiments demonstrating that the idea is wrong.

As an encyclopaedia which is intended to include 'all knowledge', I
don't see any conflict between including pseudoscientific babble and
explaining why it is babble. Including all knowledge doesn't conflict
with Wikipedia accurately reflecting reality.

It's easy to get all philosophical about this (what is truth? what is
reality? what is knowledge?), so please assume that I'm within the
bounds of WP:NPOV with what I'm saying and that any deviations are due
to me becoming philosophical :) ).

Chris


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Turn off AfD

body:
So, Jimbo, what do you say about experimentally turning off AfD?

We clearly don't know what the consequences would be, since the
predictions are all over the map.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
--- The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:

> What evidence do you have that I'm being sarcastic?

Intuition.

> Why do you say that science has little compatibility
with religion?

I wrote 'for sake of argument, if we say...'

> Are you making the claim that science is
> inconsistent with religion? If so, how?

No. See above.

> Speaking of the church dating scene, I wouldn't
> denigrate the biological imperative for a reason
> for people's behavior.

No denigration was implied.

Stevertigo

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from_name: Edward Z. Yang

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: WikiMusic

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

This may seem a bit off-topic, but I've been noodling around with
Lilypond and I simply cannot get it to work, neither on my home Windows
system or my Unix server. Is this just a problem I have?

- --
 Edward Z. Yang      Personal: edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com
 SN:Ambush Commander Website: http://www.thewritingpot.com/
 GPGKey:0x869C48DA   http://www.thewritingpot.com/gpgpubkey.asc
 3FA8 E9A9 7385 B691 A6FC B3CB A933 BE7D 869C 48DA
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)

iD8DBQFDniqNqTO+fYacSNoRAntJAJ4rA3oaRULuJXqpco27iR5jUw+MkwCghN12
nkqv1TrSLUf6wA6Jyaw+ER4=
=BmLt
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: effeietsanders-list

subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiMusic

body:
hello everybody,

 We now have a free encyclopedia. We now have a free library. We now have
free pictures. Now we have to *free the music*
(http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikimania05/Presentation-JW1 )
and make it available for everyone. But with the preservation of the
wiki-idea: publishing music with a free license, or publishing music in the
Public Domain.

Let's make a WikiMusic. A Wiki with:

   - *both score and text* of a free piece of music
   - the *music itself* in a playable music file (in different versions,
   for example one version with trumpet, one with a whole orchestra, not MIDI)
   - the *sheet music* in a wiki-text format
   - *information about* the piece of music.

The WikiMusic has to be *user-friendly* as well. So NO WikiMusic just for
expert musicians, but also for people who are just looking for a nice work
of Beethoven. There has to be a system to *search* in this Wiki in a
user-friendly way, too. Maybe the so-called Parsons
code<http://www.musipedia.org/pcnop.0.html>(
http://www.musipedia.org/pcnop.0.html) can be used?

The WikiMusic wiki has to *allow for growth*. Not just for experts, but
rather also for people with little knowledge of the software.
Lilypond<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_LilyPond>is at the moment
still too difficult, too technical, for this purpose. Maybe
there are possibilities to make it easier to enter scores into a Wiki. Maybe
it is possible to integrate some kind of keyboard (java applet) in the
software, and have the software rewrite it into Lilypond-like formats.
Perhaps a (java) applet to drag and drop the notes into the score can be
developed, so a full score can be reproduced in a Wiki. And that such will
be transcribed into the Lilypond format automatically is our dream.

The Wikimusic has to be *editable*. So not just the creation of new scores
has to be easy, but also their editing. Maybe some way can be found to
change the rather complex format of lilypond into a drag-and-drop idea, so
the sheet can be altered easily. Later the sheet can be transcribed into the
standard format again.

WikiMusic must, last but not least, be *able to survive*. Not only with its
envisioned community, but also with a protection from vandals. It may prove
to be be hard to maintain the usual wiki-way here. Some brainstorming about
this issue needs to be done. How can vandals be checked best, by a mere
possibility of *listening to the differences* perhaps?

You can help with this! Today a proposal is posted on meta
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikimusic_II
and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimusic_II), and there are still a lot
of technical issues to be solved. Plese add your comment, and get the
project on it's way. Every bit of help and comment is welcome. I hope to see
you there.
 Effeietsanders (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/gebruiker:Effeietsanders
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:Effeietsanders
)

ps: I sent this message as well from the wrong address, maybe you'll get it
twice. My excuses for that.)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Christmas presents, or: MediaWiki, reloaded

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> No I didn't, I wasn't aware to that. (Which probably means I heared
> about it but promptly forgot;-)
>
> Anyway, mine is very simple: a new field in the page table, indication
> the current "stable" version, or "0" if there is none. And a small
> notice in the sub-header, with links.
>
> Tim, if yours is more advances/better integrated/favorable in some other
> way, please tell me so I won't waste any more time on my implementation
> here.

That's the same as Salvatore's feature. Whether it'll be good enough or not
depends on whether we need a tag table indexed by revision for our caching
system. See my discussion of this on wikitech-l.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: W. Guy Finley

subject: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation

body:
On 12/12/05 5:43 PM, "Dori" <slowpoke at gmail.com> wrote:

> Is this a trademark violation? http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org/

> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

I love how "fair use" goes out the window when stuff concerning the
Foundation itself is concerned.

--Guy


subject: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
I'm so glad that I don't have to believe in science for all those
engineers and scientists who do make my nice pretty computers and
internets and lightbulbs and keyboards and mp3 encodings and electric
guitars so i can listen to blink 182, which rocks the hardest.

hmph.


subject: [WikiEN-l] The heart of the deletion problem

body:
On 12/12/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've run into editors who have been editing for years (much longer than me),
> but haven't felt the need to abide by various newfangled rules like Cite
> your sources, Verifiability and Neutral Point of View, which have often been
> completely ignored, especially in the early days.

NPOV has never been completely ignored, not even close. Even in the
early days. Though I still can't stand the Sanger/Wales definition of
the concept or the promulgation of its usage.

And verifiability has pretty much always been a major bugbear. The
only rule which is significantly new is Cite Your Sources, and until
the software does a better job of making it dramatically easier for
users to do so, it will continue to be a problem.

Non-empty edit summaries should be mandatory except for edits marked as minor.


from_name: Tels

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Moin,

On Monday 12 December 2005 18:59, Phil Boswell wrote:
> "Phil Boswell" <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote
> in message news:dnk5ht$8e6$1 at sea.gmane.org...
> [snip]
>
> > ... My personal bug-bear is {{qif}}, mainly because I cannot for the
> > life of me see what it can do that {{if}} cannot.
>
> Now that I have taken another look at it, I think that it is actually
> doing something extremely clever. The wikicode is:

[snip a lot]

While clever, that doesn't mean it is good. Not every thing you can do,
you also should do. :)

> Takes me back to my (admittedly brief) functional programming days and
> the dreaded lambda calculus :-)
>
> So whether this template is more efficient than {{if}} basically boils
> down to whether the Template Syntax code can perform the
> transformations detailed above quicker than the extra fetch which the
> slightly-simpler {{if}} requires, relying on the trick whereby if you
> specify two parameters with the same name, Mediawiki discards the first
> and uses the second, passing parameters to a supporting template named
> {{show1}}.
>
> I'm betting on the code beating the fetching by a long margin. So until
> we can persuade some kind developer to implement the "if" functionality
> in Mediawiki, I'm championing {{qif}}. It would be nice if we could
> retire the current version of {{if}} and re-use that name, but the nice
> thing about a wiki is that you can take things just about as slow as
> you like, provided nobody jogs your elbow.

I you thought that script languages like Perl, PHP, phyton, etc were slow,
then this system has to beat them hands down. I can't even imagine how
much CPU cycles must be burned for such a thing. Thank god it is only
executed on rendering the page, once, and not for every view.

I can see it now:

* After {{{qif}}, somebody implements loops.
* Soon lexial scoping, the switch statement and subroutines follow.
* 5 days later the wiki-template system is turing-complete.
* 2 days later a careless placed "{" triggers an endless loop and
  brings wikipedia down for 2 3/4 hours, until the bug is fixed.
* 1 hour later JoeCleverProgrammer posts his brainfuck-interpreter, done
   entirely with "clever" templates in wikitext.
* a week later the first page consisting only of curly braces, the pipe
  symbol, spaces and newlines is spotted. When viewed in a browser, it
  renders as "kilroy was here", due to a clever abuse of templates,
  variables, bugs and some unrelated accident involving a pound of butter,
  a slippery server room floor and an unfortunately placed button.

Joking aside, IMHO, if that sort of (ab)use of templates continues, soon
the only people qualified to edit pages will be programmers. The
wikisyntax is a success because it is so easy and maintainable/readable
by mere humans. Crafting "clever" systems on top of it will merely make
normal humans go away as they will not be able to understand this stuff
even after staring on the curly mess for an hour.

Case in point is that regular contributors to smaller wikis already
struggle with the table syntax or even simple templates. Variable
substitution and conditional template inclusion will break their little
minds.

Best wishes,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Mon Dec 12 21:27:19 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "Elliot, Sie Schwachkopf!"

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subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiMusic

body:
hi Gregory, thank you for your imput,

2005/12/12, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:
>
> On 12/12/05, effeietsanders-list <effeietsanders.l at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The WikiMusic wiki has to *allow for growth*. Not just for experts, but
> > rather also for people with little knowledge of the software.
> > Lilypond<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_LilyPond>is at the moment
> > still too difficult, too technical, for this purpose. Maybe
> > there are possibilities to make it easier to enter scores into a Wiki.
> Maybe
> > it is possible to integrate some kind of keyboard (java applet) in the
> > software, and have the software rewrite it into Lilypond-like formats.
> > Perhaps a (java) applet to drag and drop the notes into the score can be
> > developed, so a full score can be reproduced in a Wiki. And that such
> will
> > be transcribed into the Lilypond format automatically is our dream.
>
> Saying Lilypond is hard is like saying wikitext is hard.
> Lilypond is just one step above ABC and much more expressive, anything
> else would not be sufficient to produce and maintain a professional
> quality score.
>
> I'm not convinced.

In short: I want not only "proffessionals" to add their information, but
also people with little knowledge of music. This is very hard with Lilypond.
Please take a look into http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/talk:Wikimusic_II for
further discussion we already had.

> WikiMusic must, last but not least, be *able to survive*. Not only with
> its
> > envisioned community, but also with a protection from vandals. It may
> prove
> > to be be hard to maintain the usual wiki-way here. Some brainstorming
> about
> > this issue needs to be done. How can vandals be checked best, by a mere
> > possibility of *listening to the differences* perhaps?
>
> Most people qualified to edit such work would be able to visually
> qualify such changes.. How could you expect to help out if you can't
> read music?  For such a project all changes should be clearly
> explained. I don't see the problem with regular wiki procedures.

If there come a lot of edits, it'll be hard to determine if a edit is okey
or not. I'm not saying it has to be done the way I mentioned, but that we
have to think about it.

> You can help with this! Today a proposal is posted on meta
> > (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikimusic_II
> > and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimusic_II), and there are still a
> lot
> > of technical issues to be solved.
>
> It is almost always mistake to ever think that technical issues are
> nearly as big as social or resource issues or to think that good
> technical decisions can solve problems of those sort.
>
> There is already a great public domain score site, Mutopia. Tell us
> why what you propose would be worth anyones time when mutopia already
> exists?

There are even more small projects on the web, and the few I found, probably
not even 10 % of them, don't have the infrastucture I would like to see in a
wikimusic-like project. For example, they seem to have no talkpages, they
seem to have no recent changes, they seem to have no "real music" files.
They don't have possibilities for entering musin in an easy way as well, nor
a way to find the music you search, as a non-musician.

I just hope so much that the music will no longer be limited to a small
group of people, that everybody can enjoy it. I hope so much that if I have
a tune in my head, and I want to find out whitch one it is, how it is
calles, and who composed it, I can easely find it. Through a WikiMusic.

I really recommend you to take a look at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/talk:Wikimusic_II , because some of the
things you mentioned are already discussed over there. (As well as some
legal issues). If you think there might be some problems, please add them.

greetings, Effeietsanders


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Class Action

body:
On 12/12/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > http://www.wikipediaclassaction.org/
>
> It'll be interesting to see if someone tries to force them to remove
> the trademarked Wikipedia logo from that site.
>
> Other than that, Seigenthaler has said he's not interested in suing
> the foundation (and his lawyers have apparently informed him that he'd
> fail due to the CDA).  I wonder if anyone else is going to come
> forward in the first place, you know, someone with standing to
> actually sue.  I also wonder who it is that's running this site.
> (whois Registrant Name: Legal Department)

The Village Pump solves the problem, thanks to [[User:Interiot]]:

"It looks like the the site is set up by QuakeAID (WHOIS tie-ins
here), because they have long-standing complaints about Wikipedia's
coverage of them"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:QuakeAID#Whois_WikipediaClassAction.org
http://news.baou.com/main.php?action=recent&rid=20675

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Turn off AfD

body:
On 12/12/05, Kat Walsh <mindspillage at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/12/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
> > ??? I'm not too sure what you are addressing.  If I were voting for this
> > sort of thing in Wikipedia I would likely take a stronger stand than you
> > about the need for fewer bureaucrats AND admins.  As long as I'm not a
> > candidate for anything, I don't need to worry about the outcome of any
> > such vote.
>
> Fewer admins? Really? Why? I happen to think we could use more. Grunt
> work is boring and people get tired of it.
>
> -Kat
> [[User:Mindspillage]]

We also need fresh faces. Otherwise we end up with a bunch of burnt out cynics.

--
geni


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Sam Korn wrote:
> On 12/11/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:

>>In my opinion it is never acceptable to keep false information in the
>>article namespace.  There are places where eventualism is acceptable,
>>but presenting false information as true information is not one of
>>them.
>>Oh well, whatever.  Two separate people seem honestly and irreparably
>>opposed to the idea.  I'll just drop it.

> I agree with you, but with one caveat.  It shouldn't be removed, just
> marked as being unverified.  If it is marked as such, Wikipedia
> specifically abdicates all responsibility for the contents.  This way,
> the information is still available so *anyone* can verify it, admin or
> not.

The {{unreferenced}} tag pretty much puts this message across, unless
the reader is too stupid to breathe without instructions.

- d.


body:
Delirium wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>> For a strawman, let's take [[Myhill?Nerode
>> theorem]].  I assume you didn't start that article from memory.  You
>> did use a source, right?  Now given a few minutes of searching on
>> Google print I could probably come up with a source to verify that
>> information, but at the same time you could much more easily simply
>> list the book you actually used.

> I did in fact start it from memory, since it's a standard result that
> anyone who's taken a theory of computation class would be familiar with.
> I could retroactively give a source, but any theory of computation book
> will have it. The interested reader would be best served by consulting
> whatever book they find easiest to access, rather than having me pick
> one of them and tell them to use that specific one. (Of course, in
> things that are only in a few books, or treated significantly
> differently by different authors, giving the specific reference makes
> more sense.)

Is there one text that is regarded as *the* text, or maybe a couple?
That would be the one to use.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Turn off AfD

body:
Matt Brown wrote:
> See a recent DRV - where a user is merely asking for a deleted
> article to be made visible to see if the content can be re-used
> elsewhere. Someone posted:

>> I don't like this kind of request very much, and yes, I know what
>> the blurb just up there says. The fact is that this material has
>> been rejected by AfD, and this feels like working it back in
>> through th back door.

> Ugh.

Send such requests to me and I will make the material available.

And could someone beat the author of the above comment around with a
very large cluebat? In the most loving manner and the very best of good
faith, of course.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Turn off AfD

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:

>> Why should 2 people be able to overthrow a bunch of others in case
>> where there's nothing wrong with their judgement? You'd need a bloody
>> good reasons for an undeletion. If you have evidence they were
>> misinformed, undelete. If you know they didn't provide a valid
>> rationale, undelete. If they provided a now outdated rationale,
>> undelete. But undeletions as well as deletions should be proofed and
>> checked by the community before they happen.

> "Overthrow" seems like a drastic term in these circumstances.  Why
> should a desire to undelete something be seen as an attack on their
> judgement?  Things have gone too far when the deleters take a simple
> request to undelete as a serious criticism of their personal judgement.
> It's as though they are insisting that they are never wrong.

It's the Assumption of Bad Faith. MGM, can you see that it looks like a
gross Assumption of Bad Faith?

>> What makes you say only two people are needed?

> Because I don't think that one would be enough, particularly if that one
> is not an admin.  Having a second person agree gives a little room for a
> reality check.

I hereby declare that I will make deleted content (apart from copyvios
etc) available for reading. Of course, using it to recreate the deleted
content is speedyable, and using it to keep it hanging around in your
userspace may get you penalised as Anthony was for doing so. But that's
what you do with it afterwards.

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Caching old revisions

references:
<dnjf1f$tql$1@sea.gmane.org> <439D82CB.6090905@web.de>
	<dnkia1$osb$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>
>> Or the solution I took for my "StableVersion.php" extension:
>> 4) Don't care about templates - if it turns out to be a mess, declare
>> the whole template namespace "protected" :-)
>>
>
> I think I ruled that out in my original post.
>
Sorry, what I *meant* to say was this:

Do we need a "stable" version to stay _exactly_ the same? Or would it
suffice if the _contents_, the information stays the same? Would readers
care if the odd templates changes somehow, as long as it does not
contain malicious contents (misinformation etc.)?

So I said "protect the templates" to prevent anything Evil (TM) from
creeping in that way, and ignore them otherwise.
It would be very clean on the tech side, but leave a bad stench on the
editorial side, I guess...

Just trying to clarify that point, not arguing it.

Magnus


from_name: Sam Korn

body:
On 12/12/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> The {{unreferenced}} tag pretty much puts this message across, unless
> the reader is too stupid to breathe without instructions.

That's a big unless... ;=)

--
Sam


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Turn off AfD

body:
On 12/12/05, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> David Gerard stated for the record:
>
> > I hereby declare that I will make deleted content (apart from copyvios
> > etc) available for reading. Of course, using it to recreate the deleted
> > content is speedyable, and using it to keep it hanging around in your
> > userspace may get you penalised as Anthony was for doing so. But that's
> > what you do with it afterwards.
>
> Watch out, David.  The AfD crew is vicious -- defy them in public like
> this, and I won't be surprised to see that you've been put up for
> deletion, Arbiter or not.
>
> And by the bye, I've extended the same offer for quite some time now.

Me too.  I'll get around to putting it on my userpage one of these days.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [WikiEN-l] Separate namespace for Deletions and other achives?

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Kat Walsh wrote:
>
>> Strongly agree with giving AfDs their own namespace. (This has been
>> proposed before but never got anywhere.) Wikipedia: space search is
>> all but useless now.
>>
>> One further suggestion: that they not be indexed by Google. Why? It
>> just adds noise to search results, and there are plenty of people who
>> have had nothing to do with Wikipedia other than the fact that someone
>> wrote a miserably bad or pure vanity article about them, and thanks to
>> AfD the first several hits on their names are us and mirrors
>> proclaiming "vanity, kill it quickly with an axe" or "not notable,
>> delete". They usually tend to be upset about this and I can't say that
>> I blame them.
>>
>> -Kat
>> [[User:Mindspillage]]
>>
>
> Absoultely.  Strong strong support from me on this.
>
Instead of a new namespace for AfDs, I can offer one for all tasks
(cleanup, wikify, rewrite, ect.), _including_ AfD. See the "tasks" tab
at [1] and my recent mail on wikipedia-l. The associated talk pages
could become "noindex" for bots.

Magnus

[1] magnusmanske.de/wikipeerdia/index.php


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout

body:
My belief is that in general we should not remove things from page
history so easily.

-Matt


subject: [WikiEN-l] Improve AFD - require rationales (2-step process)

body:
Mark Gallagher wrote:

> Such votes should not be counted, and as far as I'm aware generally are
> not counted (if I'm wrong, you can expect to see my newly-adminified
> arse on Deletion Review rather a lot over the coming months).  WP:NOT a
> democracy, AFD:NOT a vote.

Tony Sidaway got RFCed for not doing a strict numerical count. I said
the RFC was completely fuckheaded (which it was), and then Ed deleted
VFD. So there's some historical precedent for your view ;-)

- d.


from_name: stevertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
--- The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> I actually am so glad that I don't have to
> believe...

I have been trolled! (I had thought it beneath you.) I
will go have a nice day now.

> Not even for the sake of argument?

Not even for that. Its just too advanced for me.
Particularly on tha internet.

> > No denigration was implied.
> Ah. I used my intuition there.

Well, you were wrong to. You may have been 'right' in
the self-fulfilling prophetic sense of predicting
future discussion, but you were entirely off the mark
about the subject of said denigration. Thats an
intuition.

Anyway, you can forget I mentioned it. It was a topic
brought up in good faith and not as a personal attack.
Why you seem to have made it one I dunno.

-Stevertigo

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


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

subject: [WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
stevertigo wrote:
> No, I respectfully disagree. The word isn't a
> designation, because it defers to scientific
> rationality - ie. a particular view. Hence it IS a POV
> term, albeit one which is legitimate to state in the
> context of conflicts between science (rational
> methodology) and everything else. In short:
>
>  pseudoscience is a term from the language of
>  science, and is not a neutral term in the
>  context of debates where science is a partisan
>  party.
>
> Fred linked to Larry Sanger's quotes on the subject,
> which were quite to the point. But the NPOV
> pseudoscience section seems written from the POV of a
> disgruntled SPOV devotee "there was no consensus"
> instead of "was flat out rejected as contradictory
> with NPOV" but thats probably just nitpicking.

Off topic here, but you'd think that 200+ years after the Enlightenment
we'd all accept that scientific (empiric) rationalism isn't just a
'view' but is the only sensible way to understand anything (with an
exception for logical rationalism, i.e. philosophy)!

There are no 'conflicts' between Science (with a capital S) and anything
else. Science, or empirical rationalism, is a method to discover how
something works. Are there any other ways to discover how something
works, (excluding logical rationalism, which has been superseded by
empirical rationalism as using senses is rather more useful than
thinking up the 'answer to the universe' without interaction) that I am
not aware of? In case it needs saying here, I am aware of religion.

The concept of any kind of 'war' between science and religion is
fundamentally wrong. The concept was actually constructed (very
deliberately) by some rationalists in the 19th century who believed that
religion was outdated and superstitious nonsense. Science, with its
empirical nature, seemed a useful ally to have in a campaign to remove
religion from society. It's not science and religion which are in
conflict, it is people. The idea of a war is actually very revisionist,
and a historical study of the trial of Galileo and the Enlightenment
will show the holes in the argument that science and religion are in
some kind of conflict.

Chris


body:
Everyone, I hope, recognizes that turning off article creation for a
week would eliminate one of Wikipedia's well-recognized remarkable
successes; that is, responding quickly and informatively to breaking
news of import, from September 11 to the Indonesian tsunami to Nobel
Prize winners.


subject: [WikiEN-l] What are we?

body:
On 12/12/05, steven l. rubenstein <rubenste at ohiou.edu> wrote:
> Some time ago a few people - I was one, but I think Mav may have originated
> the idea - suggested a review board to arbitrate conflicts over content,
> which the ArbCom does not do.  I still think this is a good idea and I
> think it is about time we begin a concrete discussion about what such a
> committee would look like, and what it's procedures would be.  For starts,
> I would say that it could simply arbitrate content disputes by assessing
> the degree to which a contributor is complying with our Verifiability and
> No original research policies.  This would be a well-defined and narrow
> mandate which should limit abuses.  We should also discuss whether the
> current ArbCom or the one I am proposing should also arbitrate conflicts
> over NPOV.

I usually ignore everything written by people who use "it's"
correctly, but I make an exception for Ph.Ds, because they're really
smart.

I think Wikipedia should n extensive peer-review process designed to
make its articles of a quality comparable to professional
encyclopedias. There should be a seven-step editorial process,
consisting of:
1. Assignment
2. Finding a lead reviewer
3. Lead review
4. Open review
5. Lead copyediting
6. Open copyediting
7. Final approval and markup
The bar to becoming a review board member should be relatively high,
with the policy stating, "We wish editors to be true experts in their
fields and (with few exceptions) possess Ph.Ds."   Reviewers should
give criticisms, but not do any actual editing on the articles
themselves.

I bet that would work so much better than Wikipedia does now.


body:
On 12/12/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Mark Gallagher wrote:
>
> > Such votes should not be counted, and as far as I'm aware generally are
> > not counted (if I'm wrong, you can expect to see my newly-adminified
> > arse on Deletion Review rather a lot over the coming months).  WP:NOT a
> > democracy, AFD:NOT a vote.
>
>
> Tony Sidaway got RFCed for not doing a strict numerical count. I said
> the RFC was completely fuckheaded (which it was), and then Ed deleted
> VFD. So there's some historical precedent for your view ;-)
>
>
> - d.
>
Doing things by the book means that conflict is controled. Stop doing
things by the book and the conflict is widened and becomes less
predictable.

--
geni


from_name: John Lee

subject:
[WikiEN-l] No wonder people don't realise that anyone can edit
	Wikipedia

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>Hi all,
>  I've always had my bookmark set to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page,
>where it's prominently written "Welcome to Wikipedia, the free
>encyclopedia that anyone can edit".  However, for any visitor who comes
>directly through www.wikipedia.org, this is not the case.  There is not
>a single reference on the page to the nature of Wikipedia, other than
>"The Free Encyclopaedia".
>
>Search an item, say, "Matt Drudge", and you will be taken directly to a
>fairly authoritative looking bio.  Again, the nature of Wikipedia is not
>made clear anywhere - most people will read "The Free Encyclopedia" as a
>reference to price, since many sites on the net proclaim to be "free".
>In fact, apart from the links "[edit]" and "edit this page", there is
>nothing which would suggest to the user that this page could be edited
>by them - or anyone else.  This page could easily become another
>Siegenthaler - if the paragraph about Drudge's sexuality is made up (and
>you'd have to read an 8 page newspaper article to decide), then you
>couldn't blame him for getting angry.
>
>Can we blame people for thinking Wikipedia is more authoritative than it
>is? Is it not time that a banner "Anyone could have written this.
>Including you." appeared for anonymous users?  What exactly, if anything
>other than possible "aesthetics", would be the argument against warning
>users against taking Wikipedia at its word?
>
>Steve
>
>
I strongly agree with this. The least we could do is make this more
prominent. Wikipedia is just like the Internet, only slightly better in
some parts and slightly worser in others. Everything on it should be
taken with the same grain of salt that the rest of the Internet is.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


subject: [WikiEN-l] Undeletion service

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
> On 12/12/05, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:
>>David Gerard stated for the record:

>>>I hereby declare that I will make deleted content (apart from copyvios
>>>etc) available for reading. Of course, using it to recreate the deleted
>>>content is speedyable, and using it to keep it hanging around in your
>>>userspace may get you penalised as Anthony was for doing so. But that's
>>>what you do with it afterwards.

>>Watch out, David.  The AfD crew is vicious -- defy them in public like
>>this, and I won't be surprised to see that you've been put up for
>>deletion, Arbiter or not.
>>And by the bye, I've extended the same offer for quite some time now.

> Me too.  I'll get around to putting it on my userpage one of these days.

I've just added the following to my page. Other admins should feel free
to do so also.

==Undeletion==

If you need access to a Wikipedia article that has been deleted, ask me.
If it's not a copyright violation, libel or similar, I will make the
text available to you. This is because [[WP:DRV|deletion review]] is
infected with a crippling case of [[m:Instruction creep|process]] [[ISO
9000|fetishisation]] over [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia is an
encyclopedia|product]] that ignores the actual [[Wikipedia:deletion
policy|]] and is in need of being made [[WP:IAR|ignorable]].

Note that using the text to recreate the deleted content is speedyable,
and using it to keep it hanging around in your userspace has gotten
editors penalised before. But that's your problem.

[and if Anthony sends me a request a day I will at least raise an eyebrow]

- d.


body:
geni wrote:

> Doing things by the book means that conflict is controled. Stop doing
> things by the book and the conflict is widened and becomes less
> predictable.

And overdoing it is fetishising process over product, which WP:AFD and
WP:DRV in particular have a crippling case of. Rules may be good, but
instruction creep is still bad.

- d.


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 12/12/05, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> Everyone, I hope, recognizes that turning off article creation for a
> week would eliminate one of Wikipedia's well-recognized remarkable
> successes; that is, responding quickly and informatively to breaking
> news of import, from September 11 to the Indonesian tsunami to Nobel
> Prize winners.

This could be great for Wikinews, which is where breaking news of
import should go nowadays anyway (especially if Wikipedia is going to
just repeat false information without attribution, like it did in the
[[Jean Charles de Menezes]] article)..

Anthony


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's fantasy...

body:
Kyle Lutze wrote:

> On a more general note, it would be really cool to get more paid
> people onboard, such as Tim Starling, and some editors that'll
> complete stubs. maybe even some sort of bounty system for the articles
> that could use being done but nobody wants to do?

Paid developers, sure.  Someone needs to make sure that the money is
being allocated where it's needed (buying hardware versus developing
software, and if the latter, what software and who), but there isn't any
sort of huge problem with it.

Paying editors is another matter.  In principle I would support it, but
we have to be *very* careful that it doesn't cause all sorts of
collateral problems, from people gaming any sort of bounty system to get
paid for crap work, to distortions in the community that might cause
greater harm than the paid writers help.  It's not impossible to do
right, but I think it may be hard enough to not be worth it.

-Mark


subject: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's fantasy...


subject: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's fantasy...

body:
On 12/12/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Kyle Lutze wrote:
>
> > On a more general note, it would be really cool to get more paid
> > people onboard, such as Tim Starling, and some editors that'll
> > complete stubs. maybe even some sort of bounty system for the articles
> > that could use being done but nobody wants to do?
>
> Paying editors is another matter.  In principle I would support it, but
> we have to be *very* careful that it doesn't cause all sorts of
> collateral problems, from people gaming any sort of bounty system to get
> paid for crap work, to distortions in the community that might cause
> greater harm than the paid writers help.  It's not impossible to do
> right, but I think it may be hard enough to not be worth it.

I've got an idea: when you come up with an idea that would
fundamentally change the nature of Wikipedia, why don't you just get a
group of people together to start a fork?

I honestly do wonder how long it will be before the first Great Pedia
Fork takes place. I've found the standard germ time for idea cycles to
overturn is about 7 years, which means that we've got another three
years to go...


subject: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's fantasy...


body:
Ryan Delaney wrote:

> The RFC *was* fuckheaded, but there might have been a point somewhere in the
> nonsense.  That admins can execute as much discretionary power when it comes
> to what "consensus" means in an AFD is worrisome; it implies that the
> closing admin can alter the result of the vote substantially according to
> whatever arbitrary view he or she might have on deletion.  Tony doesn't
> think this is a problem, because (I get the impression-- please correct me
> if I'm wrong here) that he's happy that he can close AFDs with an inflated
> standard for consensus, because he wants more articles to be kept.
> Whatever you think about the question of whether more articles need to be
> kept,

No, this is a misrepresentation of what happened. He was RFCed for
following the actual deletion policy.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] As reported on Slashdot, Wikipedia prankster confesses

body:
On 12/12/05, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> I'm surprised nobody else has suggested combining this with the new
> article template - seed it with the lengthy description of how the
> "harmless prankster" was tracked down and lost his job, see whether
> it has any salutary effect. I imagine the prospect of unpleasant
> real-world consequences would discourage many vandals and trolls.

I think we should all arm ourselves with guns and post pictures of us
wielding them on our userpages and write "TROLLS, WE WILL HUNT YOU
DOWN".

I think that would set just about the right tone for Wikipedia contributors.

Hasn't anybody learned that a sense of risk and minor illegality is
what *encourages* vandalistic behavior?

Anyone?


subject: [WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
stevertigo wrote:

> Translation: "Its not the dark ages anymore, so
> everyone should just accept SPOV as the One True POV."
> Hrmph.

So what term do you suggest for the thing that is currently usefully
described by the word "pseudoscience"?

- d.

(how about "BCE/CE", that's a good inoffensive term)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
On 12/12/05, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm so glad that I don't have to believe in science
> > for all those
> > engineers and scientists who do make my nice pretty
> > computers and
> > internets and lightbulbs and keyboards and mp3
> > encodings and electric
> > guitars so i can listen to blink 182, which rocks
> > the hardest.

> Lets not be sarcastic. Science is largely a process of
> exclusion; Sherlock Holmes style reduction of possible
> explanations. Granted its ground rules are reasonable
> enough to contain some interesting debates which
> stretch the boundaries. But if we say for sake of
> argument that science has little compatibility with
> religion, why then do a reasonable percentage of
> scientists hold religious personal views? Is it just
> for the church dating scene?

What evidence do you have that I'm being sarcastic?

Why do you say that science has little compatibility with religion?

Are you making the claim that science is inconsistent with religion? If so, how?

Speaking of the church dating scene, I wouldn't denigrate the
biological imperative for a reason for people's behavior.


subject: [WikiEN-l] SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
stevertigo wrote:
> Translation: "Its not the dark ages anymore, so
> everyone should just accept SPOV as the One True POV."
> Hrmph.

I've been brainwashed! My conditioned mind does not understand the
possibility that SPOV is not NPOV.

Chris


subject: [WikiEN-l] Undeletion service

body:
On 12/12/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
> > On 12/12/05, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:
> >>David Gerard stated for the record:
>
> >>>I hereby declare that I will make deleted content (apart from copyvios
> >>>etc) available for reading. Of course, using it to recreate the deleted
> >>>content is speedyable, and using it to keep it hanging around in your
> >>>userspace may get you penalised as Anthony was for doing so. But that's
> >>>what you do with it afterwards.
>
> >>Watch out, David.  The AfD crew is vicious -- defy them in public like
> >>this, and I won't be surprised to see that you've been put up for
> >>deletion, Arbiter or not.
> >>And by the bye, I've extended the same offer for quite some time now.
>
> > Me too.  I'll get around to putting it on my userpage one of these days.
>
>
> I've just added the following to my page. Other admins should feel free
> to do so also.
>
>
> ==Undeletion==
>
> If you need access to a Wikipedia article that has been deleted, ask me.
> If it's not a copyright violation, libel or similar, I will make the
> text available to you. This is because [[WP:DRV|deletion review]] is
> infected with a crippling case of [[m:Instruction creep|process]] [[ISO
> 9000|fetishisation]] over [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia is an
> encyclopedia|product]] that ignores the actual [[Wikipedia:deletion
> policy|]] and is in need of being made [[WP:IAR|ignorable]].
>
> Note that using the text to recreate the deleted content is speedyable,
> and using it to keep it hanging around in your userspace has gotten
> editors penalised before. But that's your problem.
>
>
> [and if Anthony sends me a request a day I will at least raise an eyebrow]
>
>
> - d.

Make sure you give them the list of authors or link to where they can be found.

--
geni


from_name: Brian

subject: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's fantasy...

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>On 12/12/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>
>>Kyle Lutze wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>On a more general note, it would be really cool to get more paid
>>>people onboard, such as Tim Starling, and some editors that'll
>>>complete stubs. maybe even some sort of bounty system for the articles
>>>that could use being done but nobody wants to do?
>>>
>>>
>>Paying editors is another matter.  In principle I would support it, but
>>we have to be *very* careful that it doesn't cause all sorts of
>>collateral problems, from people gaming any sort of bounty system to get
>>paid for crap work, to distortions in the community that might cause
>>greater harm than the paid writers help.  It's not impossible to do
>>right, but I think it may be hard enough to not be worth it.
>>
>>
>
>I've got an idea: when you come up with an idea that would
>fundamentally change the nature of Wikipedia, why don't you just get a
>group of people together to start a fork?
>
>I honestly do wonder how long it will be before the first Great Pedia
>Fork takes place. I've found the standard germ time for idea cycles to
>overturn is about 7 years, which means that we've got another three
>years to go...
>
Ugh... 3 more years until we've got a 'pedia that consists entirely of
AFD entries?? I can't wait!


subject: [Foundation-l] Jimbo's fantasy...


from_name: Mark Gallagher

body:
G'day Blackcap,

> On 12/10/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>A lot of the poisonous feelings on AFD seems to come from sheep voting
>>and people voting without providing rationales. Perhaps we should
>>improve the debate-percentage and require people to provide
>>rationales.
>
> One of the things that's often bothered me is people voting, not without
> reasons, but with illogical/irrelevant reasons and knowing that they're
> still being counted as a "delete" or "keep" vote (e.g. the notorious RFA
> vote which said, "I oppose because I don't like X who supported"). That
> one's more frustrating to me that anything else: the voter's immunity to
> reason. "My vote's just as good as yours and I refuse to change it,
> regardless to any decent information you may put forth."

Such votes should not be counted, and as far as I'm aware generally are
not counted (if I'm wrong, you can expect to see my newly-adminified
arse on Deletion Review rather a lot over the coming months).  WP:NOT a
democracy, AFD:NOT a vote.

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

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.371 / Virus Database: 267.13.13/197 - Release Date: 9/12/2005


from_name: Aron Rubin

subject: [Wikitech-l] SVG To User Agent

body:
Now that Firefox 1.5 has been deployed for my user base I would like to
start sending SVG content directly to the browser. I realize that
Firefox 1.5 is not deployed everywhere but it is to my user base. That
being now established (hopefully) I noticed that there are many
workarounds within mediawiki that prevent SVG content from getting to
the browser as an image source. Can someone give me a hand at switching
all the locks?

Thank you,
Aron


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: SPOV threatens NPOV

body:
On 12/12/05, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > What evidence do you have that I'm being sarcastic?
>
> Intuition.

I actually am so glad that I don't have to believe in science for all those
engineers and scientists who do make my nice pretty computers and
internets and lightbulbs and keyboards and mp3 encodings and electric
guitars so i can listen to blink 182, which rocks the hardest.

> > Why do you say that science has little compatibility
> with religion?
>
> I wrote 'for sake of argument, if we say...'

Okay, why, for the sake of argument, do we say that? I mean, is there
any evidence to support that claim? Because if there's not, it's
pretty silly to start a discussion based on the claim.

> > Are you making the claim that science is
> > inconsistent with religion? If so, how?
>
> No. See above.

Not even for the sake of argument?

> > Speaking of the church dating scene, I wouldn't
> > denigrate the biological imperative for a reason
> > for people's behavior.
>
> No denigration was implied.

Ah. I used my intuition there.