from_name: Nick Boalch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: #wikipedia-en-admins

body:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:

> We need more people on OTRS and helpdesk-l, and no the two are NOT
> mutually exclusive, so long as they both exist they will both get
> traffic. The more sets of eyeballs the faster things will get done - I'm
> trying to sort through a backlog of 2300 messages, which may or may not
> have been dealt with already, including a heck of a lot of noise, and
> there's a heap of stuff I can't deal with directly (eg. tricky deletions
> and moves) because I'm not even an admin, not to mention that which I'm
> having to forward to board people like Danny.

While I suppress a parenthetical shudder at the extra work, the 'right
thing' to do with helpdesk-l mail that is too complex or time-consuming
to deal with, or that can't be dealt with directly by helpdesk-l
volunteers, is probably to forward it to info-en.

Cheers,

N.

--
Nicholas Boalch
School of Modern Languages & Cultures       Tel: +44 (0) 191 334 3456
University of Durham                        Fax: +44 (0) 191 334 3421
New Elvet, Durham DH1 3JT, UK               WWW: http://nick.frejol.org/


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: David Carson

subject:
[WikiEN-l] illegel removal By Ragib to try modification of some
	parts

body:
joalex wrote:

>friends,
>this user  *Ragib* had banned my IP adress since I edited a page.He alleged
>me as  "*vandalism* " even without a sufficient cause.I think he banned me
>because he is in favour of PAKISTAN in which I modified some parts according
>to my knowledge.my IP is  *202.56.231.116* and my username is Cutejoe.
>This is a attack on the freedom of press in which I tried to keep
>up.ShameWikipedia Shame, of this unmatured Admin.
>
>

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pakistan&diff=36388390&oldid=36387526

You consider editing "Pakistan" and changing the national anthem from
"Blessed Be The Sacred Land" to "Fuck off The Ugly Land" to be an
expression of the freedom of the press?

Grow up, and spend your block period thinking about how pathetic and
childish that is, before calling other people "unmatured".

Cheers!
David...


list: wikitech-l

from_name: FxParlant

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Google doesn't index the Commons

body:
This issue and others related to referencement (see SEO: search engine
optimizer) can be overcome through :
1)addition of a variable in the template, so that the DESCRIPTION meta
is different between the pages. For example, add the title at the
beginning of the description.
2)Without any description meta and only the KEYWORD meta... variables
can be adapted

To assess different sites type directly in google:

site:commons.wikimedia.org
or
site:wikimedia.org

These are only ideas

Fran?ois

Rob Church wrote:
>>I'm using lastest mediawiki 1.4.X,
>
>
> Hint: MediaWiki 1.4 is nowhere near the latest release, which is
> 1.5.5. I'd imagine the problem still affects that however; and it
> affects HEAD, given that that's what Commons runs. Seems to be a
> Google oversight rather than our fault.
>
>
> Rob Church
>
> On 18/01/06, erchache2000 <erchache2000.enciclopedia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Christof Damian escribi?:
>>
>>>On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, Brianna Laugher wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>A related problem is that Google does not index the commons. Well,
>>>>more or less. It is basically impossible to find any commons content
>>>>in there - as you normally can by going ' keyword
>>>>site:commons.wikimedia.org '. Personally I find this rather
>>>>unbelievable and appalling on Google's behalf. Does anyone else
>>>>think we should, um, make them aware of this? pfctdayelise 13:26, 16
>>>>January 2006 (UTC)
>>>>
>>>
>>>It is rather annoying. I have a wiki wit a large amount of images too
>>>and description on the "Image:" pages.
>>>
>>>I thought about hacking mediawiki so that it changes the Image:*.jpg
>>>to something else, without having to change any wiki text.
>>>
>>>I don't think google will fix their bot soon, this has been broken for
>>>ages.
>>>
>>>christof
>>>
>>>
>>
>>I'm using lastest mediawiki 1.4.X, and has same problem....google bot
>>caching me but dont show any results on search google webpage :-S
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wikitech-l mailing list
>>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>>


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] An article rescued simply by changing its subject

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Sean Barrett wrote:
>
>>Tony Sidaway stated for the record:
>
>
>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TomorrowNow
>
>
>>Yeah, sure, Tony, but you're being very inconsiderate here.  Think of
>>all the people who wouldn't have been able to go to sleep with that warm
>>glow of satisfaction that only comes from a day spent deleting other
>>people's work.
>
>
>
> That's a terribly negative way of looking at it. The most
> inconsiderate thing is that there is no process to do what Tony did,
> so therefore the restoration was OUT OF PROCESS! This is an
> unforgivable offence to the community (all praise) and Tony should
> probably be blocked again for the effrontery. Or RFCed again. Or
> something.
>
>

Tony & David for Deletion Coordinators?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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subject: [Flag] Re: [WikiEN-l] [Fwd: [HelpDesk-l] Complaint: Service abuse]

body:
Luigi30 wrote:
> Plus don't forget. To 99% of people who send things like this, all
> wikis are Wikipedias, and we run all of them. Even
> harrypotter.slashopedia.org (for the love of god, that had better be
> not a real site.)
>

They'd better learn that Wikipedia is a registered trademark, and we are
perfectly capable of suing them (you know where) :)

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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body:
Travis Mason-Bushman wrote:
>> Actually, ED is a Wikipedia fork, much the way the Comixpedia wiki is:
>> it was set up when a number of articles the founders thought important
>> were deleted by VfD.
>
>
> ED and Uncyclopedia are two forks which benefit Wikipedia in two ways -
> they provide a place to blow off steam from Wikipedia and they provide a
> place for all the random Internet shite and bloggerel which may in some
> way be interesting to someone but is in no way particularly encyclopedic.
>

Uncyclopedia is not a fork, it's a parody, and a damn funny one.

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

from_name: Jeremy Tobacman

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Figures, and what made the fundraiser take off?

body:
Many thanks for the ideas and the link.

Two follow-up questions:  Is there a way to extract the numerical traffic
data from Alexa?  Or, better yet, is there publicly-available data of page
requests made of the WMF servers?  Then perhaps I could analyze the fraction
of page requests (of regular pages and of fundraising-specific pages
including Jimbo's appeal) that resulted in donations.

And one question looking further ahead:  might it be possible to test out
different fundraising strategies systematically?  What information would we
need to collect in the future in order to figure out what works best?

Jeremy

2006/1/23, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com>:
>
> Jeremy Tobacman wrote:
> > To see in more detail how the recent fund drive went, I started looking
> at
> > the raw data and put some figures together here:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tobacman/Stats/Fundraising
> > .  Comparing this most recent fundraiser to the two earlier fundraisers
> in
> > 2005, it seems very clear that *something* happened to make the week
> > following 12/28/2005 a very good one for the Foundation.  More
> specifically,
> > previous fundraisers had tended to fizzle, and this one seemed to be
> taking
> > a similar path until its New Year's fireworks.
> >
> >    How can we figure out what made this fundraiser take off?
> >
> > Maybe additional data, tests, or experiments could help in future
> planning--
> > It would be great if we could have the techniques in place for such
> > remarkable success from the very beginning of the next fundraiser.
> >
> > Jeremy
>
>
> Hiya,
>
> Very interesting !
> Another point of comparison that might be worth... Alexa's traffic
> during that time.
>
> http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=3m&size=large&compare_sites=&y=t&url=http://www.wikipedia.org#top
>
> More visitors ---> more donations ?
>
> Ant
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbcom Committee announcement

body:
Peter Mackay wrote:

>>From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
>>[mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Garion1000
>>
>>
>
>
>
>>On 1/24/06, Ilya N. <ilyanep at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Allow me to be the first to congratulate the new Arbitrators.
>>>
>>>
>>Or offer sympathy. :)
>>
>>But yes, congratulations.
>>
>>Garion (just browsed through some arb cases)
>>
>>
>
>Congratulations to the appointees. May you be blessed with wisdom, justice
>and the good will of the community.
>
>The notes of commiseration and sympathy ring far too true, and I wonder if
>there is anything that can be done to reduce the stress level on our senior
>magistrates.
>
>I note that High Court judges have assistants and staffs to help them
>perform their work, and I wonder if something of the same sort could be
>implemented here. Perhaps long-serving admins could be appointed to serve as
>assistants for the ArbCom members, doing research and presenting summaries,
>dealing with correspondence, maintaining and archiving pages and so on - the
>sort of administrative work that requires knowledge and experience, but does
>not intrude on the duties of the members. Or perhaps a senior admin could be
>appointed to each case as an administrative assistant on a rotational basis.
>
>I say this, knowing that I have been guilty of adding to the stress and
>workload of the Arbcom in the past, and for those sins I am heartily sorry.
>
>Peter (Skyring)
>
>
>
I think this is a swell idea. Not only would I be glad to volunteer for
this, but it would greatly speed up the process of arbitration, IMO.
Currently the main problems causing the slowness at the arbcom are (IMO)
the lack of staff to look into the evidence and add "eyeballs" (as per
Linus' law) to the cases, and the lack of a lower-level form of binding
dispute resolution (currently being hashed out at [[Wikipedia:Requests
for comment/Enforcement]]). It would be great to have clerks for the
arbcom, since many hands make light work. Without actually judging the
cases themselves, the clerks could help compile evidence, propose things
at the workshop, help format new cases properly, and deal with enquiries
from the Wikipedia public. Oh, and before I forget, congratulations to
the new (and old) arbcom members, especially Filiocht and Mackensen (who
says keeping your head down and doing a swell job editing can't win you
a popularity contest?) and JamesF (you really deserved this).

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: #wikipedia-en-admins

body:
On 1/24/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> John Lee wrote:
> > Sam Fentress (Asbestos) wrote:
> >
> >> On 1/23/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> I don't think anyone is disputing the desirability of having an admin
> >>> discussion list where non-admins can't post. Non-admins shouldn't be
> >>> able
> >>> to
> >>> participate in such a list, and the reasons given above go a long way
> >>> towards justifying this.
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> I think some people are disputing precisely this.  I hate the idea of an
> >> admin-only room, list or anything else. It's written in a dozen places
> >> all
> >> over the project: Admins are janitors; admins just get to use a few extra
> >> buttons; admins are not above regular editors; adminship should be no big
> >> deal.
> >>
> >> There is nothing that we could discuss that we would need to bad
> >> others from
> >> listening to and contributing to. Policy? Nowhere is it written or even
> >> suggested that admins only make policy. Blocking decisions? This is
> >> always
> >> open on the wiki and admin decisions are always transparent and open to
> >> accountability. How to use admin buttons? Use a talk page, write an
> >> email,
> >> or go to #wikipedia. People we don't like? Edit wars we'd like assistance
> >> on? Notable polls we want our friends voting in? If people need to
> >> discuss
> >> any of these things, there are plenty of other venues.
> >>
> >> This isn't a trivial matter. Outside of email lists, this is the first
> >> time
> >> (as far as I'm aware) that we have any forum designed specifically to
> >> hide
> >> from the rest of the community, to discuss things in secret, to set one
> >> group over and above another.
> >>
> >> I'm not against an admin-oriented channel: just against a hidden,
> >> exclusive,
> >> admin-only channel.
> >>
> >>
> > I've said it before, I'll say it again: Delegate this sort of thing --
> > i.e. the Foundation pushing things down to the guys in the trenches --
> > to the 'crats. They don't have enough work as it is. ;-)
> >
>
> We need more people on OTRS and helpdesk-l,

Does OTRS get many copyvio compliants? If so how do I join?

--
geni


from_name: Sam Korn

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: #wikipedia-en-admins

body:
On 1/24/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does OTRS get many copyvio compliants? If so how do I join?

Actually, one of the most common emails is "I uploaded this from my
website and XXX admin deleted it", with various levels of civility.

--
Sam


from_name: Ivan Krstic

subject: [Wikitech-l] How mediawiki stores data and page links

body:
Eugenia Tenneriello wrote:
> Hello, i would like to know how mediawiki stores data and page links.
> I've also another question. Does any indexation of the db tables
> start when a new article is added or a link is created?

I'm not sure I understand your question, but the MediaWiki table schema,
complete with a specification of indices, is available in the
'maintenance' directory of any MediaWiki distribution, as 'tables.sql'.

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


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Sabine Cretella

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Namespace manager and its potential use

body:
Hi, I suppose this is a mail that Brian can answer (nooo ... don't kill
me ... I know you are overloaded with work).

On the Neapolitan wikipedia we have one particularity: it is a language
without stadardised writing (up to now) and it has local varieties that
sometimes vary really a lot. Besides that there are regions that are
attributed to the Neapolitan language group that really "far away" from
Neapolitan - this means that there are languages (that are not
considered as such) that are not understandable for us when we hear
those people talk.

Now as much as I understand the namespace manager could help us in that.

We could create namespaces for:

*standardised Neapolitan
*phonetic Neapolitan (at the moment, this would have the majority of
articles at the moment)
*language A (attributed to the NAP language group)
*language B (attributed to the NAP language group)
etc.

The mainpage would then become a page that leads to the several
namespaces where the NAMESPACE:Main_page would actually hold the main
page of that specific namespace and that could be different according to
contents etc.

So is the namespace manager made for such an approach? If yes, this
really helps us a lot since we do not need a single wikipedia for each
of these languages, we do not need to have more than one or two persons
to contribute to a language and this way these few people can start to
create contents and others will follow by time. It would not delude
people who join the projects just to be able to work in their language
and then see the possibility denied, since very often it is easier to
decide on a local level if something is to be considered "so different"
to be a separate language or just a local variety that should go into
the phonetic part (for example this would be the case for "Maiorese, the
Neapolitan spoken in Maiori - it is different from Neapolitan of Naples,
but it is easy to be understood by Neapolitans ... it is just a
different way to pronounce words, but not having a standardised way of
writing you can imagine that people from Maiori write a different
Neapolitan than people from Naples).

Another advantage of having groups of languages on one wiki is that
organising and administration becomes more effective and less time
consuming - this does not mean that we should merge big wikis (this
would be problematic- there are already too many edits to really be able
to really check everything) - but wikis of a certain "language group
region" or maybe languages with different writing standards (like nds
for example) there it would make sense.

Well I need to answer an e-mail of the Neapolitan discussion group and
therefore it would be helpful to know if this was possible or not.

Thanks!!!

Best, Sabine

___________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger with Voice: chiama da PC a telefono a tariffe esclusive
http://it.messenger.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Namespace manager and its potential use


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Re: Admin meeting

body:
Phil Boswell wrote:
> "Angela" <beesley at gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:8b722b800601231915x5fa3fbf6pbc33423d675608ff at mail.gmail.com...
>
>>>That looks like a handy tool. Could it be used for *all* of the
>>>Wikipedia
>>>channels?
>>>I can't get to IRC because it's blocked by our firewall, so an HTTP
>>>solution
>>>would be great.
>>
>>It could be used for all channels if it was hosted somewhere more
>>reliable. I wouldn't want to risk having a large channel like
>>#wikipedia on it right now since it's sharing a server with our
>>mailing lists.
>
>
> How much power does this particular tool require?
>
> Maybe it could be hosted on the tool-server, or maybe there's an older
> machine, retired from regular grunt-work, which could be given this task in
> its old age :-)

Given the load the machines receive, I'd be surprised if any of the old
ones even worked anymore.

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

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Friendship and trust

body:
Walter van Kalken wrote:

> Also the soap opera in which users were in a revert war over jimbo's
> vote as it is a vote against the rules. And people including some very
> langtime mods were arguing that Jimbo doesn't have any say in
> nl.wikipedia affairs at all and that he was trying to influence the
> vote. Which is an interesting debating point.
>
> I myself was also told by longterm mods after I gave my apologies that
> I shouldn't do that as I was influencing the vote.

Since when is it wrong to influence votes when you do so in a completely
transparent fashion? If you ban all influence from votes, nobody will
have any information or arguments on which to base a vote. Next thing
you know, using rational argument and persuasion to convince someone
that articles should be written from a neutral point of view will become
a violation of the "no-influence" policy.

--Michael Snow


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: #wikipedia-en-admins

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>Anthere wrote:
>
>
>
>>By why are you so little using the #wikipedia-en ?
>>
>>
>
>
>#wikipedia is on-topic enough for me, and I find it amusing (or I
>wouldn't bother). I suppose I should log into #wikipedia-en as well.
>
>More generally, I expect no-one's there because no-one's there yet -
>it's yet to take off.
>
>
>- d.
>
>
Back on topic, I'm having trouble getting into #wikipedia-en-admins, as
there is absolutely nobody online whenever I logon to IRC who can invite
me to the channel. JamesF is the exception, but more often than not,
he's away. :-(

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


subject: [WikiEN-l] [Fwd: [HelpDesk-l] Complaint: Service abuse]

body:
On 1/24/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
> So where are these people applying to join our football academy coming from?

Nigeria, apparently.  Where we should also soon be expanding our range
of aluminium pipes.

--
Sam


body:
Travis Mason-Bushman wrote:
> On 1/23/06 11:20 PM, "Alphax (Wikipedia email)" <alphasigmax at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>>Travis Mason-Bushman wrote:
>>
>>>>Actually, ED is a Wikipedia fork, much the way the Comixpedia wiki is:
>>>>it was set up when a number of articles the founders thought important
>>>>were deleted by VfD.
>>>
>>>
>>>ED and Uncyclopedia are two forks which benefit Wikipedia in two ways -
>>>they provide a place to blow off steam from Wikipedia and they provide a
>>>place for all the random Internet shite and bloggerel which may in some
>>>way be interesting to someone but is in no way particularly encyclopedic.
>>>
>>
>>Uncyclopedia is not a fork, it's a parody, and a damn funny one.
>
>
> Either way, I simply meant "fork" in the broadest general sense of the term,
> meaning Wiki users related to Wikipedia but not on Wikipedia. And yes, I
> agree it's a damn funny one :)
>

But there are also plenty of people who edit both.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: #wikipedia-en-admins

body:
Sam Fentress (Asbestos) wrote:

>On 1/23/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>>I don't think anyone is disputing the desirability of having an admin
>>discussion list where non-admins can't post. Non-admins shouldn't be able
>>to
>>participate in such a list, and the reasons given above go a long way
>>towards justifying this.
>>
>>
>
>
>
>I think some people are disputing precisely this.  I hate the idea of an
>admin-only room, list or anything else. It's written in a dozen places all
>over the project: Admins are janitors; admins just get to use a few extra
>buttons; admins are not above regular editors; adminship should be no big
>deal.
>
>There is nothing that we could discuss that we would need to bad others from
>listening to and contributing to. Policy? Nowhere is it written or even
>suggested that admins only make policy. Blocking decisions? This is always
>open on the wiki and admin decisions are always transparent and open to
>accountability. How to use admin buttons? Use a talk page, write an email,
>or go to #wikipedia. People we don't like? Edit wars we'd like assistance
>on? Notable polls we want our friends voting in? If people need to discuss
>any of these things, there are plenty of other venues.
>
>This isn't a trivial matter. Outside of email lists, this is the first time
>(as far as I'm aware) that we have any forum designed specifically to hide
>from the rest of the community, to discuss things in secret, to set one
>group over and above another.
>
>I'm not against an admin-oriented channel: just against a hidden, exclusive,
>admin-only channel.
>
>Sam
>
>--
>Asbestos
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Asbestos
>
>
I've said it before, I'll say it again: Delegate this sort of thing --
i.e. the Foundation pushing things down to the guys in the trenches --
to the 'crats. They don't have enough work as it is. ;-)

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Alphax wrote:
>
>
>>Uncyclopedia is not a fork, it's a parody, and a damn funny one.
>
>
>
> I particularly recommend today's front page to our Unix geek readers.
> In honour of the current featured article, [[man uncyclopedia]].
>

I just got a Google ad for "VMS migration" :)

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

subject: [WikiEN-l] An outsider's view on en-admin-only whatever and the rest

body:
crossposting to wikipedia-l as this is an international issue
=========
Hi all,

as a totally non-en person, admin on other wikis and actually working
"behind the scenes", I would like to give my view on what I believe is
needed, and why an en-admin-only channel and list won't help to the
extent that is needed. This is long, but please bear with me.

Let me try to make this more concrete.

OTRS (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OTRS) receives a lot (and here I
mean "A LOT") of complaints.

Those range from:
 "there's a mistake in this article, please fix it", to:
"You're defaming me, delete this article/those revisions, or I will
sue you!"  through
"this page is an enormous copyvio from my site!"

with as Sam Korn already pointed out, various degrees of civility.

The problem is the following:

Only a few people have agreed to help on OTRS. It's one thing to spend
hours editing wikipedia, it's another to want to spend hours alone on
a boring screen answering (most of the time) crazy emails. We have
appealed to the en population several times (why en? because it is the
one most attacked, but actually, other wikipedias are suffering from
the same problem, and as we grow, these will get bigger and more
numerous) and have gotten only very few answers. Fine, I can
understand that.

The people who *are* working on OTRS are for some "good editors", for
others "better e-mail answerers" than "editors" (me, for example). In
the end, I think anyway that we *will* have to pay someone to answer
those emails. As I speak, there are 280 unanswered emails in the
info-en queue. Probably most of these are spam, but even sorting spam
takes an awful lot of time.

What happens is this: you get an email with a complaint, you go see
the page, realize there's about 2 hours of work on the page, and get
discouraged. Because on one hand, you can't really go "public" with
the complaint (it's, after all, an email, gives personal information
etc.) and on the other, you *know* that something needs to be done.
Here you have two options:
-either you take the two hours to fix the article, but then, there are
still 279 emails to be answered in OTRS.
-or you go to a person you know, who you think could be good at fixing
the article.
Here two options again:
-the person you chose to tell does have two hours and can fix the article
-they don't and it gets forgotten
and maybe a third one:
-They don't have the time, go to other people, the "issue"  is somehow
broadcasted, makes the front page of USA Today... and you know the
rest.

So what's the solution?

I don't think that the solution is en-admin-only anything. I think the
solution is something that would be more like:
- The wikipedia community at large realizes that there *are* problems
with some articles
- The wikipedia community at large *knows* who is: "good at NPOV",
good at "speedy deleting", good at "cleaning histories", good in
"Famous people stuff", good at "sourcing an article".
-The wikipedia community at large *does* agree that something needs to
be done to clean up Wikipedia in a (sorry, but it's true) hidden kind
of fashion.
-The wikipedia community at large decides to "appoint", "elect",
"designate" (whatever suits the wikipedia community at large) a few
trusted users who are reknown for the things listed above and agrees
that they should all get together on one list where the people working
behind the scenes (in OTRS) can just forward the email and are *sure*
that it is going to be taken care of in a timely and discreet fashion.

NB. This list should not be of 800, it should not either be of 20, I
am thinking something along the lines of 50-70 people from all across
the wikipedias (because there are problems that may be repercuted from
one language to the other- see tron for example), admins and
non-admins (I can cite at least 5 people on fr who are not admins whom
I would trust to do that kind of stuff better than many admins).

I am not sure how we can do that without ever falling in the "clique"
type thing. But how different is it from all the "associations" of
every kind that I have come across on en? Not sure.

What I am sure of is this: either the wikipedia community at large
acknowledges the problem and tries to find a solution *together*, or
we'll end up (not tomorrow, but soon enough) by having to "pay" some
"NPOVers", or "history-cleaners", or choose them in a cabal-fashion,
to do the work. Because the work to be done is there and most of it
has to stay a little private.

The idea is to have people who know how to do this stuff (NPOV,
sourcing), who are recognized for doing it well, who can get together
on an article and work together on it when the complaint comes in, who
are ok with doing it as part of their "normal" participation on
wikipedia. The only thing is that their "work" will be a little
directed. ie. "Please look at these 20 articles, that are a copyvio of
this site". They can be tasked with asking people outside the list to
help them etc.

This is what it's all about.

Hope this long email helped a little, and that it will spark ideas...
I am for my part, short on ideas about how to deal with this stuff,
and afraid that some day it will backfire in a much nastier way than
just the front page of USA Today.

Delphine
--
~notafish


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] An outsider's view on en-admin-only whatever and the
	rest


from_name: Ryan Delaney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: #wikipedia-en-admins

body:
On 1/24/06, Luigi30 <luigi30 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> And this isn't a cabal... how?
>
>
There is no cabal.

Ryan


from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] We aren't here to write an encyclopaedia, are we?

body:
I have decided to try to clean up the [[List of ethnic slurs]] article -
it's a mess of uncited and apparently unverifiable information.  In trying
to get the ball rolling I have been opposed at (almost) every turn by an
editor whose view of Wikipedia seems to be:

"''Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged defines
an encyclopedia as 'a work that treats comprehensively all the various
branches of knowledge and that is usually composed of individual articles
arranged alphabetically'. Thus, in Wikipedia--the largest encyclopedia ever
created--any knowledge can be included. Stroll by a library reference
section and you will find encyclopedias of agriculture, of computing, of
'slang,' and so on. This article shows just how much encyclopedic Wikipedia
is."

I tried to counter this with policy - WP:V, WP:CITE, and "Wikipedia is not
an indiscriminate collection of nformation" to which I received the
following reply:

"In any case, I'd encourage you not to live your life based on regulations,
because life is too complicated to regulate. To do so makes one a
[[wiktionary:simpleton|simpleton]]. In any case, regulations must be
interpreted, and the consensus of the Wikipedia community appears to be that
the rules should not be enforced. Since you are the first editor I have ever
met to actually try to enforce these rules, you are in uncharted terrritory,
for sure."

While this editor is relatively new s/he is not a total newbie - s/he has
over 1300 edits, been editing for several months.  While I realise that WP:V
and WP:CITE tend to only get a lot of attention in content disputes (the
Intelligent design article being the one where I have seen it most) the idea
that "the consensus of the Wikipedia community appears to be that the rules
should not be enforced" just boggles the mind.  While this editor appears to
live at the opposite end of the world from the AFD addicts, I suspect that
both of these are symptoms of an underlying problem of people who don't
appear to be here to write a high-quality encyclopaedia.  Suddenly I long to
argue with POV-pushers -  I would rather argue the validity of references
than have someone tell me that consensus is that we don't need references...

Wow.

Ian


from_name: Cormac Lawler

subject: [WikiEN-l] WikiProject Education

body:
Hi all,

to remedy the general weakness of Wikipedia's articles on education
(just look at [[Pedagogy]] for example), I've set up a new Wikiproject
on Education, at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Education

It's fairly scant right now, and will also need splitting up into
sub-projects, some of which exist, like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Schools or the
newly set up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Alternative_education

Many of these articles are quite poor, and since Wikipedia's core *is
education*, I feel it's high time we did something about it. So, if
you're interested, please sign up, and let's get cracking..

Cheers,

Cormac / Cormaggio


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: #wikipedia-en-admins

body:
John Lee wrote:
> Sam Fentress (Asbestos) wrote:
>
>> On 1/23/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> I don't think anyone is disputing the desirability of having an admin
>>> discussion list where non-admins can't post. Non-admins shouldn't be
>>> able
>>> to
>>> participate in such a list, and the reasons given above go a long way
>>> towards justifying this.
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> I think some people are disputing precisely this.  I hate the idea of an
>> admin-only room, list or anything else. It's written in a dozen places
>> all
>> over the project: Admins are janitors; admins just get to use a few extra
>> buttons; admins are not above regular editors; adminship should be no big
>> deal.
>>
>> There is nothing that we could discuss that we would need to bad
>> others from
>> listening to and contributing to. Policy? Nowhere is it written or even
>> suggested that admins only make policy. Blocking decisions? This is
>> always
>> open on the wiki and admin decisions are always transparent and open to
>> accountability. How to use admin buttons? Use a talk page, write an
>> email,
>> or go to #wikipedia. People we don't like? Edit wars we'd like assistance
>> on? Notable polls we want our friends voting in? If people need to
>> discuss
>> any of these things, there are plenty of other venues.
>>
>> This isn't a trivial matter. Outside of email lists, this is the first
>> time
>> (as far as I'm aware) that we have any forum designed specifically to
>> hide
>> from the rest of the community, to discuss things in secret, to set one
>> group over and above another.
>>
>> I'm not against an admin-oriented channel: just against a hidden,
>> exclusive,
>> admin-only channel.
>>
>>
> I've said it before, I'll say it again: Delegate this sort of thing --
> i.e. the Foundation pushing things down to the guys in the trenches --
> to the 'crats. They don't have enough work as it is. ;-)
>

We need more people on OTRS and helpdesk-l, and no the two are NOT
mutually exclusive, so long as they both exist they will both get
traffic. The more sets of eyeballs the faster things will get done - I'm
trying to sort through a backlog of 2300 messages, which may or may not
have been dealt with already, including a heck of a lot of noise, and
there's a heap of stuff I can't deal with directly (eg. tricky deletions
and moves) because I'm not even an admin, not to mention that which I'm
having to forward to board people like Danny. Now surely the bcrats, who
are supposedly the most experienced and clueful people on the project,
would be better suited for this sort of thing?

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

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Friendship and trust

body:
The first thing is we have got over 5 mods now who are either having a
break for now or have desysopped themselves and a multitude of users who
are on temp or indefinite breaks. This whole episode has done
considerable damage to nl.wikipedia.

Also the soap opera in which users were in a revert war over jimbo's
vote as it is a vote against the rules. And people including some very
langtime mods were arguing that Jimbo doesn't have any say in
nl.wikipedia affairs at all and that he was trying to influence the
vote. Which is an interesting debating point.

I myself was also told by longterm mods after I gave my apologies that I
shouldn't do that as I was influencing the vote.

Waerth/Walter

>Andre Engels wrote:
>
>
>>Regarding the Waerth on Dutch Wikipedia, Jimbo came in to say:
>>
>>"Rather, I have voted because I would prefer to see a different
>>approach taken in cases like this, an approach which is less
>>confrontational and more about building up friendships and trust among
>>good users."
>>
>>I wonder what kind of approach he would mean here. Could you please expound?
>>
>>
>
>It seems to me that having the same percentage to *become* an admin and
>*be removed* as an admin is perplexing.
>
>And I think that many or most of those who voted 'no' on Waerth would
>agree with this: Waerth crossed the line on a few occassions but has
>been, overall, a very good user, and we can all understand the reasons
>for his frustration, even if we don't agree.
>
>I don't know enough of the details of what all has been tried in this
>case, but it seems sad to me to have a very good user (a steward, well
>trusted internationally, very often a press spokesperson for dutch
>wikipedia) desysopped on such a slim process.
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>


from_name: Itake

subject: [WikiEN-l] FeloniousMonk's admin powers

body:
Username: Itake
IP: 213.67.50.30.

I was banned by the user "FeloniousMonk" because he felt I violated
wikipedia's civility code even though I was warned several times. Not only
is this untrue, but it is clear that the user in question has a bias against
me because he and I are involved in an ongoing AfD dispute.

First off, I'd like to say that I did indeed violate the rules in question.
At that time, I wasn't aware that there even existed rules for civil conduct
on wikipedia. I was warned that my behavior was against the rules.
I replied to the warnings on my talk page. I didn't even edit the AfD
disputes any further, or violate the civil conduct rules again, but then
suddenly I was banned. So user FeloniousMonk is lying. I wasn't warned
several times, I was told I violated it one time and continious violations
would lead to my ban. I didn't continue to violate it, yet I was banned.

Further, I belive the user FeloniousMonk should have his admin powers
removed. He is quite clearly abusing them. I direct your attention first to
examples of uncivil conduct found on the wikipedia page about it:

rudeness
judgmental tone in edit summaries ("fixed sloppy spelling," "snipped
rambling crap")
belittling contributors because of their language skills or word choice
ill-considered accusations of impropriety of one kind or another
starting a comment with: "Not to make this personal, but..."
calling someone a liar, or accusing him/her of slander or libel. Even if
true, such remarks tend to aggravate rather than resolve a dispute.
More serious examples include:

Taunting
personal attacks
racial, ethnic, and religious slurs
profanity directed at another contributor
lies
defacing user pages
calling for bans and blocks
First off, the users Feloniousmonk is grouping with fit in on several of
these criteries. Yet he didn't ban them. For example:


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] user rights and logins - bug?

body:
John D. Mann wrote:
> http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&action=edit
>
> When I hit enter to see if I could edit that page (yeah right), surprise
> surprise!!!  You can't edit it
>
> INSTEAD, it loads up the other text boxes to create an account and even the
> submit button for the create account form!

Can't reproduce this.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
John D. Mann wrote:
> Something must be wrong with my setup, then?

Could be. URL?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: SPUI

subject: [WikiEN-l] It now only takes a simple majority to delete

body:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VFU#R.40ygold_etc. - these articles were
speedy deleted with the reason "Delete as gives info useful to child
pornographers". Thanks to VFU being intended as an appeals court, meant
to deal with process, only a majority is needed to keep deleted. Goodbye.


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Sabine Cretella:
> Hi, I suppose this is a mail that Brian can answer (nooo ... don't kill
> me ... I know you are overloaded with work).

<snip>

Yes, theoretically, you could use the namespace manager (or the existing
$wgExtraNamespaces) to create custom namespaces for language variants.
As a long term solution, however, I think you'd want something like the
functionality of
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_MediaWiki for a subset of
languages/variants, because logically, a language is different from a
namespace. For example, you might want to have user pages in all those
language variants, and policy pages, and so forth - if you do this on
the namespace level, it quickly ceases to be manageable. You also want
interlanguage-link like functionality, and more features related
specifically to languages, rather than namespaces.

Erik


from_name: John D. Mann

body:
Question...

I have the following in my LocalSettings.php file, and the important part
here is that I am not allowing anyone to edit the pages unless they are a
user.  I am also not allowing guests to create user accounts, and therefore
I am the only one who can edit the wiki or create accounts.  This makes
sense with the following settings, right?

My question, though, is that I found some kind of bug, it seems.  I was
messing around today, and I logged out of my account on my wiki.  I then
clicked on the link that says "log in or create account" (even though no one
but me can do that lol)  On the page that is shown, I get a box for username
and password, the remember me box, and two buttons... a login button and a
mail me a new password button.  It also shows the text for the creation of a
new account, but the new account text-entry boxes are not shown, and neither
is the create account button.  This is fine, but I wanted to clean it up,
and I have no idea how to remove this portion of the Special:Userlogin
page...

Here's where it gets tricky, though...
I decided to try something out, to see if it would work for the heck of it.
I doubted it, but who knows, right?  I edited the URL address bar of my
browser, and typed in:

http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&action=edit

When I hit enter to see if I could edit that page (yeah right), surprise
surprise!!!  You can't edit it

INSTEAD, it loads up the other text boxes to create an account and even the
submit button for the create account form!

This is not a good thing at all :(

MediaWiki 1.5.6, Debian Sarge 3.1, Kernel 2.6.8-2-686, Apache
1.3.33(GNU/Linux)

$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['createaccount']   = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['read']            = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['edit']            = false;

$wgGroupPermissions['user' ]['move']            = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['user' ]['read']            = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['user' ]['edit']            = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['user' ]['upload']          = true;

$wgGroupPermissions['bot'  ]['bot']             = true;

$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['block']           = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['createaccount']   = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['delete']          = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['editinterface']   = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['import']          = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['importupload']    = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['move']            = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['patrol']          = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['protect']         = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['rollback']        = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['upload']          = true;

$wgGroupPermissions['bureaucrat']['userrights'] = true;


body:
Something must be wrong with my setup, then?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-
> bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Brion Vibber
> Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 5:05 AM
> To: Wikimedia developers
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] user rights and logins - bug?
>
> John D. Mann wrote:
> > http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&action=edit
> >
> > When I hit enter to see if I could edit that page (yeah right), surprise
> > surprise!!!  You can't edit it
> >
> > INSTEAD, it loads up the other text boxes to create an account and even
> the
> > submit button for the create account form!
>
> Can't reproduce this.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Could an Administrator please look
	into	this	conflict?

body:
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Hash: SHA1

Ray Saintonge stated for the record:
> Luigi30 wrote:
>
>>> So at what point does attempting to assert your copyright become
>>> "making a
>>> legal threat"?
>>>
>>
>> Saying "you'll hear from my lawyer" before telling them kindly to
>> remove it, I imagine.
>>
> I guess we all react to this kind of thing differently.  I don't
> interpret legal threats as much of a big deal.  Outlawing them seems a
> bit like changing the rules of poker to forbid bluffing.  I prefer to
> respond with comments like, "I dare you!" or more simply, " :-P ."  I
> refuse to be intimidated by such nonsense.
>
> Ec

The reason for getting rid of them is that a person who has stated
(almost certainly as a bluff, but possibly not) his desire and intention
of either ruining an editor's life or of financially destroying the
project is clearly not an asset to the encyclopedia.  We don't simply
want someone who want to do us harm to have write-access to the
sum-total of human knowledge.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | A book should serve as the ax for the
 sean at epoptic.org | frozen sea within us. --Franz Kafka
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: #wikipedia-en-admins

body:
On 1/25/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Secret IRC channels of "trusted users" consulted on important
> decisions may make me rethink this.

The point is, as I see it, not that admins are inherently more trustworthy
due to some intrinsic property, but that the set of all non-admins includes
a much higher precentage of batty and untrustworthy folk than the set of all
admins. It's not a personal slight against you, and it's not even a
generalization of any kind. It's a pragmatic decision. People who have
jumped through the hoops to become admins are by and large more experienced
and thoughtful people, so when you want to get something done, you're more
likely to get it done if you ask an admin.

Really, I don't see how any evil can come of this.

Ryan


body:
On 1/24/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>
> After we see who is really on board, perhaps we can split up the
> cases between two subcommittees.
>
> Fred

This keeps coming up, but in the last big "arbcom reform" thread that idea
got shot down because it could (and probably will) factionalize the
arbitration committee and create authoritative inconsistency problems when
one panel receives a high-profile case and rules on it differently than how
the other panel would have. If a similar case comes up in the future, it
will create an environment where the result you get will be determined
significantly by which subcommittee rules on it, and that's something we
don't want.

Ryan


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Foundation-l] Copyright of Vatican stuff

body:
Tomasz Ganicz wrote:

>Hello,
>
>There is a problem of potential copyright violation of putting to the
>Wikisources and other Wikimedia projects encyclis and other documents
>signed by Pope. According to:
>
>http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2005615,00.html
>
>and several other newspapers all these documents are copyrighted, and
>Vatical officials are currently trying impose strict copyright.
>
>We have quite a lot of this stuff in Wikisources. See for example:
>
>http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_Encyclicals
>
>and
>
>http://pl.wikisource.org/wiki/Kategoria:Religia
>
>What should we do with this? Send a formal letter to the Vatican,
>asking for GFDL or PD licence agreement - or we should simply delete
>all these documents?
>
>--
>Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
>http://www.ceti.pl/kganicz/poli/kontakt.html
>
>
As an independent soverign nation, the Vatican is free to do many things
in regard to copyright law that would normally not be acceptable in most
other countries, including retroactive copyright and other weird issues
as well.  The problem here is to see what sort of copyright enforcement
would generally be enforced through international treaties (is the
Vatican a member of the international copyright convention?) and general
common sense on things like this.  Common sense would seem to indicate
that the older encyclicals from the 19th Century and earlier would be
reasonable to keep on Wikisource, although I could see the Vatican even
trying to assert copyright on that as well.

As far as sending a letter to the Vatican, I think it would be a very
good idea, but try to really do a good job of explaining the goals of
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, and point out how we are trying
to make faithful reproductions of these documents and to try and keep
them in context as well.  In addition, point out that by having this
documentation available on Wikisource that we are making this content
available to people in not just wealthy countries, but some of the
poorer countries of the world including to people who don't necessarily
even have internet access and through multiple languages.  There are
many other points I'm sure you could come up with to really hit the
point home, and I would recommend that you get some Roman Catholics,
preferably some Catholic clergy who are also active Wikimedians (there
must be a few somewhere) to help draft the letter.  The purpose here is
to try to use language styles that fits within the heirarchical culture
of the Church rather than catch phrases common to Wikimedians.

It is likely that the Vatican is simply going to reply that they have
their own website, and internet users can download the content from
there instead if they really want to get network access to the
documents.  It is worth a try to ask somebody from the Vatican however.

--
Robert Scott Horning


body:
On 1/24/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>
> After we see who is really on board, perhaps we can split up the
> cases between two subcommittees.
>
> Fred

Also, we have no idea how many of the new arbitrators will be able to stick
with the job for their full terms. I'm still anticipating a healthy
percentage to burn out after the first year, which obviates a two-panel
system.

Ryan


body:
Tomasz Ganicz wrote:

>2006/1/25, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org>:
>
>
>>Robert Scott Horning wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I would recommend that you get some Roman Catholics,
>>>preferably some Catholic clergy who are also active Wikimedians (there
>>>must be a few somewhere) to help draft the letter.  The purpose here is
>>>to try to use language styles that fits within the heirarchical culture
>>>of the Church rather than catch phrases common to Wikimedians.
>>>
>>>
>>Essjay (on English-language Wikipedia) isn't clergy, but he is a
>>professor of theology with a speciality in Catholicism. He's probably a
>>great person to get in touch with:
>>  --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Essjay
>>
>>
>
>OK. I will contact him - but I guess if it make sence to send a letter
>to the Vatican it should be done officialy by Foundation?
>
>--
>Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
>http://www.ceti.pl/kganicz/poli/kontakt.html
>
>
This doesn't have to be an "official" contact.  Simply write the letter
as a group of interested Wikimedia users who are interested in adding
original content that comes from official Vatican sources.  That just
keeps the legal hassles of writing a formal letter representing the
foundation and lets the Vatican know that this is a volunteer project as
well.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Peter Mackay

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Google Earth copyright (now that you bring it up)

body:
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Anthony DiPierro
>
> On 1/23/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
> > I wonder at what point an image is so downgraded by
> > thumbnailing as to be exempt from any challenge to fair use.
...
> > I ask because there are some articles that would be well served by
> > even a low-quality image, but it is all but impossible to find an
> > image that we can use. An example would be in the case of an air
> > disaster, where photographs would almost certainly be the
> property of news agencies.
> >
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tenerife_Disaster_Collision_afterma
> > th_27_ March_1977.png is one example, where the image is
> scanned in at
> > low resolution.
> >
> > Peter (Skyring)
>
> I really don't see what encyclopedic knowledge a photo of a
> burning wing adds to the [[Tenerife disaster]] article.  The
> computer generated image of the impact, on the other hand,
> that's somewhat informational.

Both are useful. The CG image shows how the accident happened in a way that
no photograph can, simply because there was no camera present at an
appropriate vantage point and the visibility was very poor.

The photograph of the burning wing illustrates the conditions at the crash
scene. I don't think anyone who has ever travelled on an airliner can look
at that photograph and not get a sense of how horrific the crash must have
been, in a way that is going to be difficult to convey in text alone.

> Of course, the computer generated image was apparently ripped
> off some website, even though it's perfectly possible for a
> Wikipedia to generate it herself.
>
> "It is believed that the use of low-resolution images of
> works of art for critical commentary on the work in question,
> the artistic genre or technique of the work of art or the
> school to which the artist belongs on the English-language
> Wikipedia, hosted on servers in the United States by the
> non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, qualifies as fair use under
> United States copyright law. Any other uses of this image, on
> Wikipedia or elsewhere, may be copyright infringement."
>
> Which of those three uses is [[Image:Tenerife collision.jpg]]
> being used under?

Obviously none of them, and I will not defend the uploader for picking that
usage, except to say that they have only been editing for a few months and
could perhaps use guidance more than criticism.

However, thanks for spotting it, and perhaps you or some other
public-spirited editor could take appropriate action?

Do you have any useful views on the question I asked about thumbnailing?
Perhaps there is a detailed guideline already in place, but I haven't been
able to spot it in perusing [[WP:FU]], where policy serials two and three
are vague:

"2. The material should not be used in a manner that would likely replace
the original market role of the original copyrighted media; our use of
copyrighted material should not make it so that one no longer needs to
purchase the actual product. For example, large copyrighted photographs from
agencies that make their income selling photographs, for example, would
likely not be "fair use" as it would be undermining the ability of the
copyright holder to make money off of their work.
3. The amount of copyrighted work used should be as little as possible.
Low-resolution images should be used instead of high-resolution images
(especially images that are so high-resolution that they could be used for
piracy). Do not use multiple images or media clips if one will serve the
purpose adequately."

Is there some acceptable percentage, or do we just have to hope that a court
will say that 5% or 10% or whatever is degraded enough that we can use it?

Peter (Skyring)


from_name: Maru Dubshinki

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] An outsider's view on en-admin-only whatever and
	the rest

body:
On 1/24/06, Delphine M?nard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
...
> What happens is this: you get an email with a complaint, you go see
> the page, realize there's about 2 hours of work on the page, and get
> discouraged. Because on one hand, you can't really go "public" with
> the complaint (it's, after all, an email, gives personal information
> etc.) and on the other, you *know* that something needs to be done.
> Here you have two options:
> -either you take the two hours to fix the article, but then, there are
> still 279 emails to be answered in OTRS.
> -or you go to a person you know, who you think could be good at fixing
> the article.
> Here two options again:
> -the person you chose to tell does have two hours and can fix the article
> -they don't and it gets forgotten
> and maybe a third one:
> -They don't have the time, go to other people, the "issue"  is somehow
> broadcasted, makes the front page of USA Today... and you know the
> rest.
>
> So what's the solution?
...
> Delphine
> --
> ~notafish

If the problem is really apparent, why can't you tag the page appropriately?
I don't think adding a new layer of procedure will help anything;
people who already have the time and such will already be working on
the cleanup category.

~Maru


body:
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Ray Saintonge
>
> Peter Mackay wrote:
> >Pete, who can whip up a convincing Wikicademy article at a moment's
> >notice, complete with ivy-covered halls and photographs of our
> >impressive sporting facilities
> >
> Hmmm. A moment's notice for what nobody will notice seems
> like a fair exchange.

So where are these people applying to join our football academy coming from?

And I am reasonably confident that if I whipped up an article on this
non-existent academy for the purpose of scamming money from the stupid and
gullible, quite a few people would notice!

However, if you think we can get away with it, perhaps we could share in the
modest profits?

Pete, picking out the colour scheme for his private Boeing


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
We want you to enforce WP:CITE but not to use it to delete blocks of
information. Start with something that seems dubious. Ask for a cite,
delete it if neither you nor anyone else can find a source. Don't
jump in and say the whole thing is no good. I did that once at
Kennedy assassination theories. Didn't accomplish much. Still no
decent sources, but a least a notice saying that we ought to find some.

Fred

On Jan 24, 2006, at 11:22 PM, Guettarda wrote:

> I have decided to try to clean up the [[List of ethnic slurs]]
> article -
> it's a mess of uncited and apparently unverifiable information.  In
> trying
> to get the ball rolling I have been opposed at (almost) every turn
> by an
> editor whose view of Wikipedia seems to be:
>
> "''Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged
> defines
> an encyclopedia as 'a work that treats comprehensively all the various
> branches of knowledge and that is usually composed of individual
> articles
> arranged alphabetically'. Thus, in Wikipedia--the largest
> encyclopedia ever
> created--any knowledge can be included. Stroll by a library reference
> section and you will find encyclopedias of agriculture, of
> computing, of
> 'slang,' and so on. This article shows just how much encyclopedic
> Wikipedia
> is."
>
> I tried to counter this with policy - WP:V, WP:CITE, and "Wikipedia
> is not
> an indiscriminate collection of nformation" to which I received the
> following reply:
>
> "In any case, I'd encourage you not to live your life based on
> regulations,
> because life is too complicated to regulate. To do so makes one a
> [[wiktionary:simpleton|simpleton]]. In any case, regulations must be
> interpreted, and the consensus of the Wikipedia community appears
> to be that
> the rules should not be enforced. Since you are the first editor I
> have ever
> met to actually try to enforce these rules, you are in uncharted
> terrritory,
> for sure."
>
> While this editor is relatively new s/he is not a total newbie - s/
> he has
> over 1300 edits, been editing for several months.  While I realise
> that WP:V
> and WP:CITE tend to only get a lot of attention in content disputes
> (the
> Intelligent design article being the one where I have seen it most)
> the idea
> that "the consensus of the Wikipedia community appears to be that
> the rules
> should not be enforced" just boggles the mind.  While this editor
> appears to
> live at the opposite end of the world from the AFD addicts, I
> suspect that
> both of these are symptoms of an underlying problem of people who
> don't
> appear to be here to write a high-quality encyclopaedia.  Suddenly
> I long to
> argue with POV-pushers -  I would rather argue the validity of
> references
> than have someone tell me that consensus is that we don't need
> references...
>
> Wow.
>
> Ian
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Thoughts on admin-only IRC channels and RC patrol

body:
First off, thank you for a very thoughtful and polite email. At the risk of
taking this off-topic, I would like to address one point you made at the end
with a quick point:

On 1/25/06, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
>
> Another - and better - solution, however, is to grant the rollback
> privilege to good contributors who are not admins. This would make the
> jobs of RC patrollers much easier - and will have the knock-on effect of
> lowering the amount of complaints the Foundation gets. The Foundation
> agrees that this is a great solution to the big problem we face. There
> is a poll to gauge community consensus on the issue:
>   -->
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_rollback_privileges/Poll
>

While I support this idea (and I would even approve of a measure where the
software automatically granted rollback to all users after they passed a
certain number of edits), this can also be accomplished with godmode light.
I suggest that more non-admin vandal patrollers familiarise themselves with
this and other powerful monobook.js scripts.

Ryan


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Could an Administrator please look into this
	conflict?

body:
On 1/23/06, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So at what point does attempting to assert your copyright become "making a
> legal threat"?
>
> Should a copyright holder whisper very gently "you're violating my
> copyright, but that's OK, we wouldn't want the lawyers involved"?
>

The point of the "no legal threats" policy is that legal threats end
discussion. Once lawyers and courts are involved, discussion is over and
you're on to adjudication. In other words, when someone is actually carrying
out legal action, talking about it on Wikipedia is pointless- which means
that legal threats have absolutely no value for any kind of rational
discussion.

So, as you are asking, how should someone enforce their legal rights?
Answer: By pointing out their legal rights, without making threats. "This
item is my intellectual property and you do not have permission to use it."
At that point, we should remove it immediately. There is no need to mention,
or benefit from mentioning, lawyers or lawsuits.

Ryan


body:
We don't disagree with each other all that often and we notice and
focus on the cases where we do. If something is going that way we
could all jump in.

Fred

On Jan 25, 2006, at 5:04 AM, Ryan Delaney wrote:

> On 1/24/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> After we see who is really on board, perhaps we can split up the
>> cases between two subcommittees.
>>
>> Fred
>>
>
>
>
> This keeps coming up, but in the last big "arbcom reform" thread
> that idea
> got shot down because it could (and probably will) factionalize the
> arbitration committee and create authoritative inconsistency
> problems when
> one panel receives a high-profile case and rules on it differently
> than how
> the other panel would have. If a similar case comes up in the
> future, it
> will create an environment where the result you get will be determined
> significantly by which subcommittee rules on it, and that's
> something we
> don't want.
>
> Ryan
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
But we have a number of other users who ran and had substantial
community support who could be appointed.

Fred

On Jan 25, 2006, at 5:39 AM, Ryan Delaney wrote:

> On 1/24/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> After we see who is really on board, perhaps we can split up the
>> cases between two subcommittees.
>>
>> Fred
>>
>
>
> Also, we have no idea how many of the new arbitrators will be able
> to stick
> with the job for their full terms. I'm still anticipating a healthy
> percentage to burn out after the first year, which obviates a two-
> panel
> system.
>
> Ryan
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Namespace manager and its potential use

body:
"Carlos Thompson" <chlewey at cable.net.co> wrote in
message news:002901c62128$d3b9dea0$0601a8c0 at thompson.local...
> Sabine Cretella wrote:
>> On the Neapolitan wikipedia we have one particularity: it is a language
>> without stadardised writing (up to now) and it has local varieties that
>> sometimes vary really a lot. Besides that there are regions that are
>> attributed to the Neapolitan language group that really "far away" from
>> Neapolitan - this means that there are languages (that are not considered
>> as such) that are not understandable for us when we hear those people
>> talk.

Can these languages not use the same written forms? I could understand the
problem if you were speaking to each other aloud, but what does this have to
do with the written text?

If they do not use exactly the same written forms, can they easily be
"translated"? (see below)

> If I understand this correctly, this would also help for languages with
> different scripts like Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) which is written in either
> Roman or Hebrew script.  With this we could have different namespaces for
> each script (orthography), interlink between scripts, etc.

There's a utility on the Chinese Wikipedia which converts back-and-forth
between Traditional and Simplified.

I believe that steps are being taken to enable this to be used for some
Eastern European languages which can use Latin or Cyrillic scripts.

This enables an article to be "written" in either script, and read back in
either. This would presumably be more helpful than splitting articles.

HTH HAND
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Vatican is asserting copyright

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

Anthere stated for the record:

> Is that legal to retrospectively apply a copyright on communications ?
>
> ...
> I must say I am abashed by this news...I seem to remember that the key
> point of a religion was to carry on a deity words so as to ensure a good
> number of believers...
>
> Weird
>
> ant

The British Crown claims to own the King James Bible.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | A book should serve as the ax for the
 sean at epoptic.org | frozen sea within us. --Franz Kafka
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

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from_name: Fastfission

body:
On 1/23/06, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> I don't know that it has to be "basic facts", but certainly when we're
> talking about images in an encyclopedia we're talking about
> communicating facts.

Well, that was just an example. But I am talking about things like
scientific facts, which are not copyrightable. If I use someone's
drawing of an atom to make my own drawing of an atom, that's fine,
even more so if I make my own graphical choices about it in the
process. What's copyrighted is the specific presentation, and whatever
"creative" decisions went into it, not the underlying "factual"
information.

Mickey Mouse is not quite the same thing as this, I don't think. Here
the underlying information is a fictional creation, based entirely on
someone's creativity. Hence it is copyrightable "all the way down", as
I understand it.

> If a picture really is worth a thousand words, and that's probably not
> a bad order of magnitude for the purposes of this statement, then it'd
> take about as much work to make a "copyright-safe" version of the same
> "size" text or image, at least given the same level of communication
> skills in each medium.  Maybe that isn't fair, though, as most people
> communicate more effectively with words than with pictures.

Again, copyright affects media differently and I think assuming that
it shouldn't is entirely wrong. It is very easy to make a "copyright
safe" paragraph about World War II based on a secondary source (take
the basic information, rewrite it in your own words, cite the original
source as a reference). It is not easy if even possible to make a
"copyright safe" version of a photograph of World War II.

> Doesn't a [[clean room design]] allow you to make "free" versions of
> copyrighted things?  If a textual description of a photograph is
> non-infringing, and you give that textual description to a sketch
> artist (who's never seen the original), then isn't the sketch likewise
> non-infringing?

The [[clean room design]] is another example of copyright affecting
different media differently. Programming code is more like text than
it is like an image -- if I find another way to do the same thing you
do, without copying your code, I don't infringe on the copyright.
(Software _patents_ are a different matter entirely, of course, which
is why they are so controversial.)

But about your specific hypothetical: what is copyrighted in a picture
of Mickey Mouse is the creative aspect of it, not the specific lines
and whatnot. If you strive to copy that , no matter what machinations
you add in the execution is going to be ruled infringement. Again, if
the opposite were true then you'd see tons and tons of knockoffs of
every copyrighted image on the market.

FF


body:
On 1/24/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay at bigpond.com> wrote:
> Is there some acceptable percentage, or do we just have to hope that a court
> will say that 5% or 10% or whatever is degraded enough that we can use it?

There's no number built into the law, and in the various case rulings
it is determined in a very arbitrary way. We purposely avoid specific
numbers (i.e. "no more than 3 per page" or "no more than 400 pixels
wide") because it would just provide a false sense of accuracy and
specificity. It has to come down to good judgment in the end -- it is
easier to say what is definitely not fair use than it is to say what
definitely is.

FF


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
I think your approach is the right one.  For things like "List of ethnic
slurs" the only approach I've ever seen to turn them into good articles
is to get positively hardcore about cites.  Ask around for help, a lot
of good editors will back you up.

[[Inherently funny words]] used to be nonsense, but now it is (usually)
a quite interesting and quirky article, because it has sources.

Guettarda wrote:
> I have decided to try to clean up the [[List of ethnic slurs]] article -
> it's a mess of uncited and apparently unverifiable information.  In trying
> to get the ball rolling I have been opposed at (almost) every turn by an
> editor whose view of Wikipedia seems to be:
>
> "''Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged defines
> an encyclopedia as 'a work that treats comprehensively all the various
> branches of knowledge and that is usually composed of individual articles
> arranged alphabetically'. Thus, in Wikipedia--the largest encyclopedia ever
> created--any knowledge can be included. Stroll by a library reference
> section and you will find encyclopedias of agriculture, of computing, of
> 'slang,' and so on. This article shows just how much encyclopedic Wikipedia
> is."
>
> I tried to counter this with policy - WP:V, WP:CITE, and "Wikipedia is not
> an indiscriminate collection of nformation" to which I received the
> following reply:
>
> "In any case, I'd encourage you not to live your life based on regulations,
> because life is too complicated to regulate. To do so makes one a
> [[wiktionary:simpleton|simpleton]]. In any case, regulations must be
> interpreted, and the consensus of the Wikipedia community appears to be that
> the rules should not be enforced. Since you are the first editor I have ever
> met to actually try to enforce these rules, you are in uncharted terrritory,
> for sure."
>
> While this editor is relatively new s/he is not a total newbie - s/he has
> over 1300 edits, been editing for several months.  While I realise that WP:V
> and WP:CITE tend to only get a lot of attention in content disputes (the
> Intelligent design article being the one where I have seen it most) the idea
> that "the consensus of the Wikipedia community appears to be that the rules
> should not be enforced" just boggles the mind.  While this editor appears to
> live at the opposite end of the world from the AFD addicts, I suspect that
> both of these are symptoms of an underlying problem of people who don't
> appear to be here to write a high-quality encyclopaedia.  Suddenly I long to
> argue with POV-pushers -  I would rather argue the validity of references
> than have someone tell me that consensus is that we don't need references...
>
> Wow.
>
> Ian
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
On 1/25/06, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VFU#R.40ygold_etc. - these articles were
> speedy deleted with the reason "Delete as gives info useful to child
> pornographers". Thanks to VFU being intended as an appeals court, meant
> to deal with process, only a majority is needed to keep deleted. Goodbye.

I saw these on Deletion Review (or Votes for Undeletion as it used to
be known).  If you have citations to verify *any* of these terms
(criminal case reports, court transcripts, newspaper or magazine
articles, etc) I will happily undelete the relevant articles with a
view to discussing possible keep or perhaps merging to other
appropriate articles.

For now I see that ther terms were not verified in the text of the
original articles (sample below) and so much for the  same reason that
I say "fuck process" whenever I see Deletion Review obstructing
undeletion of a potentially good article, here I say "fuck process"
because Wikipedia is better off without unverifiable articles.  I can
certainly verify that the keywords named in the articles show up a
remarkable amount of  "lolita" come-ons, but this isn't really enough
for an article.

Sample of one of the deleted articles:

"Hussyfan" is a keyword commonly used to search for or identify child
pornography on file sharing networks.

The keyword has become sufficiently well-known that it is rarely used
to identify actual child porn; most files with the keyword show legal
but young looking performers in an attempt to attract individuals
looking for child porn.

The Kazaa file-sharing software does not allow searches for the
keyword, but it is allowed by eDonkey/eMule, Shareaza, Limewire,
Bearshare, and WinMX.


from_name: david weiss

subject: [WikiEN-l] blocking policy was violated by Eliezer

body:
eliezer imposes an unfair, seriously biased and inaccurate article
dealing with messianic judaism.  when i had previously raised my concerns
in the discussion page and point out the gross misinformation in the main
article, eliezar would delete my comments.  (as a side note, i observed
others tag this article as violating the npov policy only to have their
tags deleted without explanation.)

i wove my editorial comments into the main article and eliezer deleted my
comments- saying it belonged on the discussion page (though he had
already deleted my comments from the discussion page).  i attempted to
repost my woven comments on the discussion page and he deleted there
again.  i attempted to repost my comments woven into the main article to:
1. highlight where the npov policy was violated in several places; 2.
show where the facts were seriously inaccurate and, 3. show where the
author contradicted himself.  eliezer blocked me without sufficient
warning per the blocking policy.

while i strongly disagree with eliezer's anti-messianic agenda, i do not
feel i vandalized the article or site in any way.  this site's policy
allows me the freedom to edit articles that violate the npov in a good
faith effort to make them more accurate.

i believe eliezer will only force his anti-messianic agenda upon the
public and a new administrator needs to be appointed who will fairly
address the topic.  if no other unbiased third party is willing to take
that responsibility, i am willing to volunteer.  (just tell me what i
need to do to qualify)  thank you for your prompt and open-minded
attention to this matter.

--
___________________________________________________
Play 100s of games for FREE! http://games.mail.com/


from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: #wikipedia-en-admins

body:
Sam Fentress (Asbestos) wrote:

>On 1/24/06, Sam Fentress (Asbestos) <asbestos999 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>There is nothing that we could discuss that we would need to ban others
>>from listening to and contributing to. Policy? Nowhere is it written or even
>>suggested that admins only make policy. Blocking decisions? This is always
>>open on the wiki and admin decisions are always transparent and open to
>>accountability. How to use admin buttons? Use a talk page, write an email,
>>or go to #wikipedia. People we don't like? Edit wars we'd like assistance
>>on? Notable polls we want our friends voting in? If people need to discuss
>>any of these things, there are plenty of other venues.
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>>This isn't a trivial matter. Outside of email lists, this is the first
>>time (as far as I'm aware) that we have any forum designed specifically to
>>hide from the rest of the community, to discuss things in secret, to set one
>>group over and above another.
>>
>>I'm not against an admin-oriented channel: just against a hidden,
>>exclusive, admin-only channel.
>>
>>Sam
>>
>>
>>
>
>Since no one else has mentioned this, I just thought I'd throw the question
>out again: Is there anything that we, as administrators, need to discuss
>that we'd need to ban others from listening to and contributing to?
>
>If not, then I don't care about the odd benefit of being able to have "a
>quiet word with a group of trusted editors": the idea of a secret, exclusive
>channel needs to be thrown out. You can still have your quiet word on a
>moderated, on-topic, non-exclusive admin channel.
>
>Sam
>
>
>
>--
>Asbestos
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Asbestos
>
>
Jimbo is mainly concerned about legal stuff, etc. Personally, I think
we'd be better off if the 'crats handled this, since their job *is* a
big deal, and they're fewer in number, so cabal-ish accusations won't
stick any more than accusations that the Board is a cabal. The problem
is that the 'crats don't really keep in touch with those in the
trenches, except for some of the more recent and active ones, like
Raul654 and Linuxbeak.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Phil Boswell wrote:
> "Carlos Thompson" <chlewey at cable.net.co> wrote in
> message news:002901c62128$d3b9dea0$0601a8c0 at thompson.local...
>
>> Sabine Cretella wrote:
>>
>>> On the Neapolitan wikipedia we have one particularity: it is a language
>>> without stadardised writing (up to now) and it has local varieties that
>>> sometimes vary really a lot. Besides that there are regions that are
>>> attributed to the Neapolitan language group that really "far away" from
>>> Neapolitan - this means that there are languages (that are not considered
>>> as such) that are not understandable for us when we hear those people
>>> talk.
>>>
>
> Can these languages not use the same written forms? I could understand the
> problem if you were speaking to each other aloud, but what does this have to
> do with the written text?
>
> If they do not use exactly the same written forms, can they easily be
> "translated"? (see below)
>
>
They could if there was a standardised form. Without such
standardisation is it is not possible. Within the Neapolitan language
GROUP there are variants that qualify as a /language /when you accept
that a language is different from another when people speaking one do
not understand the other.

A language is not only about how you write things, it is also
vocabulary, grammar and stuff. They do not use the same written forms.
>> If I understand this correctly, this would also help for languages with
>> different scripts like Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) which is written in either
>> Roman or Hebrew script.  With this we could have different namespaces for
>> each script (orthography), interlink between scripts, etc.
>>
>
> There's a utility on the Chinese Wikipedia which converts back-and-forth
> between Traditional and Simplified.
>
> I believe that steps are being taken to enable this to be used for some
> Eastern European languages which can use Latin or Cyrillic scripts.
>
> This enables an article to be "written" in either script, and read back in
> either. This would presumably be more helpful than splitting articles.
>
> HTH HAND
>
It is well known that this utility exists. However as I understand it,
Chinese is a written language that is largely divorced from the spoken
language. While some Eastern European languages are seen by some as
being identical, it is denied by many of the people who live there.
Having a tool for Chinese does not mean that you can use the same took
for Judeo-Spanish, the number of people speaking Chinese or the "Eastern
European" languages is vastly different.

When you allow for articles to be started in a namespace according to a
script used, you can still do all the technical machinations when they
are available. I think it was Danny who once said that there are
multiple ways in which a Hebrew text can be written. I think it helps
when you can identify text to how they were originally written. Using a
namespace is one way of accomplishing it. Articles are not split this
way any more than an English article is split from a Dutch or a French
article.


body:
Also, [[List of gay, lesbian or bisexual people]].  It has stringent rules
and a few editors who enforce them regularly.  I have to tell you, though,
that it needs constant policing to make sure the list is accurate.  But
that's the only way that page can possibly work.

-k

On 1/25/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>
> We want you to enforce WP:CITE but not to use it to delete blocks of
> information. Start with something that seems dubious. Ask for a cite,
> delete it if neither you nor anyone else can find a source. Don't
> jump in and say the whole thing is no good. I did that once at
> Kennedy assassination theories. Didn't accomplish much. Still no
> decent sources, but a least a notice saying that we ought to find some.
>
> Fred
>
> On Jan 24, 2006, at 11:22 PM, Guettarda wrote:
>
> > I have decided to try to clean up the [[List of ethnic slurs]]
> > article -
> > it's a mess of uncited and apparently unverifiable information.  In
> > trying
> > to get the ball rolling I have been opposed at (almost) every turn
> > by an
> > editor whose view of Wikipedia seems to be:
> >
> > "''Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged
> > defines
> > an encyclopedia as 'a work that treats comprehensively all the various
> > branches of knowledge and that is usually composed of individual
> > articles
> > arranged alphabetically'. Thus, in Wikipedia--the largest
> > encyclopedia ever
> > created--any knowledge can be included. Stroll by a library reference
> > section and you will find encyclopedias of agriculture, of
> > computing, of
> > 'slang,' and so on. This article shows just how much encyclopedic
> > Wikipedia
> > is."
> >
> > I tried to counter this with policy - WP:V, WP:CITE, and "Wikipedia
> > is not
> > an indiscriminate collection of nformation" to which I received the
> > following reply:
> >
> > "In any case, I'd encourage you not to live your life based on
> > regulations,
> > because life is too complicated to regulate. To do so makes one a
> > [[wiktionary:simpleton|simpleton]]. In any case, regulations must be
> > interpreted, and the consensus of the Wikipedia community appears
> > to be that
> > the rules should not be enforced. Since you are the first editor I
> > have ever
> > met to actually try to enforce these rules, you are in uncharted
> > terrritory,
> > for sure."
> >
> > While this editor is relatively new s/he is not a total newbie - s/
> > he has
> > over 1300 edits, been editing for several months.  While I realise
> > that WP:V
> > and WP:CITE tend to only get a lot of attention in content disputes
> > (the
> > Intelligent design article being the one where I have seen it most)
> > the idea
> > that "the consensus of the Wikipedia community appears to be that
> > the rules
> > should not be enforced" just boggles the mind.  While this editor
> > appears to
> > live at the opposite end of the world from the AFD addicts, I
> > suspect that
> > both of these are symptoms of an underlying problem of people who
> > don't
> > appear to be here to write a high-quality encyclopaedia.  Suddenly
> > I long to
> > argue with POV-pushers -  I would rather argue the validity of
> > references
> > than have someone tell me that consensus is that we don't need
> > references...
> >
> > Wow.
> >
> > Ian
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Vatican is asserting copyright

body:
All,

CNN this morning was reporting that the Vatican has decided to assert
copyright on basically all papal communications (speeches, encyclicals,
etc.) made by every pope during the last 50 years, with the exception of
"the news media."  I don't know how much material we might have that could
fall afoul of this new declaration, or whether the Vatican would consider
Wikipedia and Wikisource under that umbrella, but someone more familiar with
Catholic information in Wikimedia areas should probably get involved.

I don't know if there's any reason to think the Vatican would be willing to
grant a PD or GFDL licensing exception for Wikipedia. The spokesman said
that "newspapers have the right to publish texts as news" (such as
encyclicals), presumably because there's no profit made specifically from
their use.  But I'm not sure how this would apply to WP or WS.

-k

http://www.forbes.com/technology/feeds/ap/2006/01/25/ap2475804.html


from_name: Philip Welch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Blue sky thinking around "neutral point of view"

body:
> \Just some blue sky thinking:
>
>   Our neutral point of view policy has aroused a fair bit of
> discussion at [[WP:NPOV]]
>   recently, and this has got me thinking:
>
>   We've all seen arguments where people keep arguing that this is
> "POV" or someone
>   is being "POV" where in normal English we'd just call something
> an "opinion" and
>   note that someone has an opinion on something. Indeed, the made-
> up term POV
>   is bandied around usually to mean something along the lines of -
> you are wrong,
>   I am right, and because it is a NPOV issue, the point is non-
> negotiable, which isn't
>   a very good place to start from if the issue is to be resolved.
> Plus far too many
>   people read NPOV as equating to "no point of view" as opposed to
> the real requirement, which is to write from a neutral viewpoint.
>
>   My blue sky thinking (which I don't claim to be a panacea, just
> an interesting thought) is why don't we rename the policy page
> [[Wikipedia:Neutral viewpoint]] and make
>   the shortcut link to it [[WP:NEUVIEW]] (or [[WP:NEUTVIEW]]). It
> goes without
>   saying that the underlying concept behind the policy would remain
> completely
>   unchanged - just the name of the page would change - plus it
> would enhance
>   people's perceptions that it is about requiring a neutral
> viewpoint, rather than no
>   viewpoint, or neutrality more generally: it would help define the
> policy in positive terms
>   and (and perhaps I'm going too far here:) ) may help stop content
> disputes escalating
>   in scale and viciousness.

That might work. On the other hand, that might be about as effective
as changing "Votes for Deletion" to "Articles for Deletion". Renaming
things only serves to disguise problems in a quasi-Orwellian manner--
it doesn't really solve them.

--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
On 1/25/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/25/06, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VFU#R.40ygold_etc. - these articles were
> > speedy deleted with the reason "Delete as gives info useful to child
> > pornographers". Thanks to VFU being intended as an appeals court, meant
> > to deal with process, only a majority is needed to keep deleted.
> Goodbye.
>
> I saw these on Deletion Review (or Votes for Undeletion as it used to
> be known).  If you have citations to verify *any* of these terms
> (criminal case reports, court transcripts, newspaper or magazine
> articles, etc) I will happily undelete the relevant articles with a
> view to discussing possible keep or perhaps merging to other
> appropriate articles.
>
> For now I see that ther terms were not verified in the text of the
> original articles (sample below) and so much for the  same reason that
> I say "fuck process" whenever I see Deletion Review obstructing
> undeletion of a potentially good article, here I say "fuck process"
> because Wikipedia is better off without unverifiable articles.  I can
> certainly verify that the keywords named in the articles show up a
> remarkable amount of  "lolita" come-ons, but this isn't really enough
> for an article.
>
> Sample of one of the deleted articles:
>
> "Hussyfan" is a keyword commonly used to search for or identify child
> pornography on file sharing networks.
>
> The keyword has become sufficiently well-known that it is rarely used
> to identify actual child porn; most files with the keyword show legal
> but young looking performers in an attempt to attract individuals
> looking for child porn.
>
> The Kazaa file-sharing software does not allow searches for the
> keyword, but it is allowed by eDonkey/eMule, Shareaza, Limewire,
> Bearshare, and WinMX.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

Try reading the discussion at WP:DRV. I think there's some very good reasons
to keep them deleted. Basically those words are just search terms.

Mgm


body:
> The point of the "no legal threats" policy is that legal threats end
> discussion. Once lawyers and courts are involved, discussion is
> over and
> you're on to adjudication. In other words, when someone is actually
> carrying
> out legal action, talking about it on Wikipedia is pointless- which
> means
> that legal threats have absolutely no value for any kind of rational
> discussion.
>
> So, as you are asking, how should someone enforce their legal rights?
> Answer: By pointing out their legal rights, without making threats.
> "This
> item is my intellectual property and you do not have permission to
> use it."
> At that point, we should remove it immediately. There is no need to
> mention,
> or benefit from mentioning, lawyers or lawsuits.

I don't think we should penalize copyright holders for serving WP
with a cease-and-desist for a copyvio, whether formally or
informally, although we might want to require them to, as a
prerequisite for their future participation, state that their
grievances are met and that no further action will be taken.

--
Philip L. Welch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: #wikipedia-en-admins

body:
>> I'm still not convinced #wikipedia-en-admins is a great idea as it
>> stands, but it *does* tend to be on-topic more often.

> There are many many times when I need to quiep of trusted
> editors to look at a problematic article -- for extly ask a grouample, we get a
> complaint from someone fairly obscure, on a topic I know nothing about,
> and I look at the article and it is obvious crap.  The channel is
> already proving useful in that regard.

Trusted editors == admins? Should I feel vaguely insulted?

So far I've resisted the temptation to want to be an admin. I don't
have much interest in stopping vandals at the day-to-day level, and
there are plenty of admins to carry out tasks like renaming pages,
deleting, undeleting etc. I occasionally wish that admins would be a
little less enthusiastic about impressing their personal preferences
on others (the Wikipedia tagline being a good example). But in
general, not being an admin hasn't caused me any hardship, or caused
me to feel "left out" of anything.

Secret IRC channels of "trusted users" consulted on important
decisions may make me rethink this.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: #wikipedia-en-admins

body:
On 1/24/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> There's an obvious security problem here, of course, in that you have
> no way of knowing that someone who claims to be a given admin and who
> then gets into the channel is actually that admin.

A: I'm the admin "tinkywinky"
B: Ok, put the word "lala" on your talk page.
A: Done
B: So I see. In you come.

Steve