subject: [Wikitech-l] "Planet" feed aggregators

body:
On 3/6/07, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Oh, I don't know; Sometimes you get some interesting stuff that's not
> strictly MediaWiki / Wikipedia / Wikimedia - related.

I consider this primarily a strategic tool to improve communication
about what we are doing. Wikimedia is not a generic blog host. This
tool becomes useless to me, and probably many others, if it includes
blog posts about cat tricks and restaurant visits in New Jersey. Not
that I have anything specifically against New Jersey. It's just an
example. Cats, on the other hand, are evil.

If there is an optional, non-frontpage "See all posts" view, it will
not kill me. But please let's try to minimize noise in the default (or
indeed only) view. If people really find something they want to share,
I'm confident they will incorrectly tag it on a reliable basis. It's
the "forward it to a friend" principle. Or, more accurately, "forward
it to a person who could have been your friend if you didn't spam them
with irrelevant crap."

--
Peace & Love,
Erik

DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.

"An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open,
free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Marc Riddell

subject: [WikiEN-l] a final word on Essjay

body:
on 3/6/07 7:13 AM, Zoney at zoney.ie at gmail.com wrote:

>>
> Surely what people should be more worried about are the inherent flaws in
> Wikipedia's organisation rather than Essjay in particular.
>
> I would suspect some of the attention on Essjay personally is partly people
> avoiding some awkward realities about the bigger picture.

Zoney,

Please expand your thoughts on this.

Marc Riddell


from_name: Rob Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Correction to New Yorker Article

body:
On 3/3/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 3 Mar 2007 15:35:45 -0700, "Rob Smith" <nobs03 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >So the question here again, Why did Brandt feel the necessity to "stalk
> and
> >harass" editors?
>
> Because he's an obsessive, and given his occupation why would that
> surprise us?
>
> Guy (JzG)
> --

There's an element of truth to this; Brandt may have a habit of reacting
impulsively prior to analysing a situation.  Given the nature of the
invidious smear leveled at him, how would any one else have reacted?


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Essjay RFC deleted

references:
<45EC3EEB.4070804@scissor.com>
	<bdhou2l6mb6bvmm6kicjn6h9v30lrpo3su@4ax.com>
	<fbad4e140703051006l68381a9aybcc2d20e59cd98c0@mail.gmail.com>
	<o38pu21qcm2nc14jai6rb7h6rl6uvbrsdn@4ax.com>
	<38a7bf7c0703051505t63473e1aw1a1fb4068046c508@mail.gmail.com>
	<oq8pu295hvu0hfal4ee1ctdtis138qb4hd@4ax.com>
	<38a7bf7c0703051523t44e4fc3ak3b1e6374c267ce90@mail.gmail.com>
	<pq9pu21p8l7qc7dav4u84048gbescl9jbk@4ax.com>
	<c52819d30703051552k7e83d959r54bd61bd5cbb1141@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On Mon, 5 Mar 2007 18:52:12 -0500, "Newyorkbrad \(Wikipedia\)"
<newyorkbrad at gmail.com> wrote:

>That is exceptionally sound advice for situations like the current one, but
>I don't think it works as applied in normal times.  I don't think we could
>have no article on, for example, the most recent congressional or
>parliamentary election even if it's been less than a year since
>them.  Deleting routine articles, or sentences within articles, on grounds
>of "too new, not a year yet" would certainly soon before more trouble than
>it was worth.

It might also be more worth than it is trouble :-)  Just think: all
those "controversy" sections padded with the latest crap form the
scandal sheets, all of which can be purged of anything that fails the
one year test.  Since many of the alleged controversies are teapot
tempests, the end result will be better.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Essjay RFC deleted

body:
On Tue, 6 Mar 2007 00:33:06 +0000, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Interesting.  What issue is the RfC going to solve?

>Provideing backup for the assertion that claiming credentials that you
>don't have is a bad idea. Aditional it is never posible to tell what
>records are going to be needed in future.

That is a separate discussion not tied to the person of Essjay,
although the example of Essjay would be valid and relevant in the
context of that discussion.  Start a guideline proposal,
[[WP:NOFAKECREDENTIALS]] or some such.

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


list: foundation-l

from_name: Damian Finol

subject: [Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 36, Issue 20

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

foundation-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org escribi?:
> Send foundation-l mailing list submissions to
> 	foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> 	http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> 	foundation-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> 	foundation-l-owner at lists.wikimedia.org
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of foundation-l digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. How non-free is Flash? (Erik Moeller)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 09:39:25 +0100
> From: "Erik Moeller" <erik at wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Foundation-l] How non-free is Flash?
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
> 	<foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>, 	"Wikimedia Commons Discussion
> 	List" <commons-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<b80736c80703060039y498cc1d7o47796e80e7578c60 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> How non-free do we consider Flash to be? The Gnash player appears to
> be making good progress. Would it be acceptable to permit useful Flash
> files which work in Gnash and don't require non-free codecs to be
> uploaded?
>
> I did not see any issues with patents mentioned in the relevant
> Wikipedia article. The old Macromedia Flash website lists a US patent
> on "creating gradient fills", but that seems so bizarre as to pose no
> real threat.
>
> (Let's keep this separate, for now, from the question when a format
> like Flash would be appropriate, content-wise. I'd like to fully
> understand the "freeness" first.)

Greetings,

Adobe licenses the flash format specifications to others who are willing
to create programs that export to Flash. However, the format itself is
not free as in freedom.

Also, Adobe doesn't allow those licensed users to create software that
would play Flash, Gnash is most likely a reverse engineered player. And
Adobe could change the rules of engagement at any time leaving us with
all the Flash content, a player who isn't free and waiting for the Gnash
people to work on an update.

With all that being said, a full end to end implementation of SVG should
offer the same benefits Flash provides plus it would be free.

Regards,
Dami?n
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list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Jeff Raymond

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> Why don't we do the same thing with administrators? No need to do a
> global search & replace, just change the key pages and MediaWiki
> messages and leave old mentions of "adminship" on talk pages and such
> around. But change it to something like "janitor". Or at least
> something less formidable than "administrator", like "trusted user."

The problem isn't what we call them, it's what the worst of them do.  We
can't keep renaming things or trying to figure out a better way to
identify people if it doesn't get to the root of the problem.

Seriously.  This has probably been the worst 4-6 weeks I've seen on this
site since I started contributing, both on a personal and a social
level.  I don't care to contribute anymore due to the culture, people
are dropping the site left and right (admin Doug Bell is on a wikibreak
now because of the Essjay situation (not that he's part of the
solution), Doc glasgow's scaled back considerably following the
Essjay/Peppers fiascos, Alkivar's gone, a number of lower level users
are giving up, who knows who else that I DON'T know about).  And why?
Because whatever you want to call them can't do their simple jobs
properly (and who cares if they volunteer or not - if you can't do it
right, don't do it), it gets nasty when they get called out on it,
WP:IAR is being embraced like never before, causing massive internal
strife, and ArbCom's only called upon to do something about it when
there's a wheel war, ignoring the other issues.

I'm not sure how much more can be taken.  We're at a record level of
contributing and of attention, and it feels like the damn project is
imploding.  It needs to be fixed, and it needs a massive cleansing, not
some cosmetic "hey, let's change the names of who runs the site" nonsense.

-Jeff

--
Name: Jeff Raymond
E-mail: jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com
WWW: http://www.internationalhouseofbacon.com
IM: badlydrawnjeff
Quote: "As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the
	Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else."
	- Sen. Rick Santorum on the war in Iraq.


from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
"Steve Bennett" wrote

>Or does it imply that
> a conservative stance is actually a neutral one, and therefore that
> Wikipedia is biased simply because it does not adopt that same
> conservative point of view?

There is this basic point: the NPOV concept is more subtle than the concept of 'bias', as is freely thrown around in analysis of media. In fact 'bias' is a really bad concept to use for WP; it in practice application often amounts to people reading down the article to the first thing they object to, and trying to get it edited out.

Charles

-----------------------------------------
Email sent from www.virginmedia.com/email
Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software and scanned for spam


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jim Hu

subject: [Wikitech-l] Faking multiple category namespaces

body:
Thanks, it works!
=====================================
Jim Hu
Associate Professor
Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
2128 TAMU
Texas A&M Univ.
College Station, TX 77843-2128
979-862-4054

On Mar 6, 2007, at 8:10 AM, Rotem Liss wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Jim Hu wrote:
>> IIRC, there were others besides me who were interested in having
>> multiple namespaces that act like the category namespace.  Playing
>> with my alternate Category page extension, I realized that I could
>> fake having multiple category namespaces by getting the title text
>> of  the category page, analyzing it, and then replacing it with
>>
>> 	$wgOut->setPageTitle( $titleText );
>>
>> Where $titleText is the alternative h1 heading.  I've also figured
>> out how to alter the subheadings and count messages.  But I haven't
>> figured out how to set the text in the leftmost tab.
>>
>> Here's an example of what I'm trying to do:
>>
>> http://ecoliwiki.net/colipedia/index.php/Category:Complex:Flagellum
>>
>> I'd like the tab that says Category to say Complex.  Anyone know how
>> to do that?
>>
>> Jim
>> =====================================
>> Jim Hu
>> Associate Professor
>> Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
>> 2128 TAMU
>> Texas A&M Univ.
>> College Station, TX 77843-2128
>> 979-862-4054
>>
>
> Something like this may work (I didn't test it):
>
> $wgHooks['SkinTemplateTabs'][] = 'wfChangeCategoryTabText';
>
> function wfChangeCategoryTabText( $skin, $content_actions ) {
> 	if ( isset( $content_actions['nstab-category'] ) ) {
> 		$content_actions['nstab-category']['text'] = 'something';
> 	}
> 	return true;
> }
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iD8DBQFF7WhDqahN/0dU8mcRArTaAKDD8gxw35Ey62RYoyBx4AOm66/v6QCePD6S
> YABdbwRYN9UBTGaIRnSGbtU=
> =/FND
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
on 3/6/07 8:25 AM, Jeff Raymond at
jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:

> The problem isn't what we call them, it's what the worst of them do.  We
> can't keep renaming things or trying to figure out a better way to
> identify people if it doesn't get to the root of the problem.
>
> Seriously.  This has probably been the worst 4-6 weeks I've seen on this
> site since I started contributing, both on a personal and a social
> level.  I don't care to contribute anymore due to the culture, people
> are dropping the site left and right (admin Doug Bell is on a wikibreak
> now because of the Essjay situation (not that he's part of the
> solution), Doc glasgow's scaled back considerably following the
> Essjay/Peppers fiascos, Alkivar's gone, a number of lower level users
> are giving up, who knows who else that I DON'T know about).  And why?
> Because whatever you want to call them can't do their simple jobs
> properly (and who cares if they volunteer or not - if you can't do it
> right, don't do it), it gets nasty when they get called out on it,
> WP:IAR is being embraced like never before, causing massive internal
> strife, and ArbCom's only called upon to do something about it when
> there's a wheel war, ignoring the other issues.
>
> I'm not sure how much more can be taken.  We're at a record level of
> contributing and of attention, and it feels like the damn project is
> imploding.  It needs to be fixed, and it needs a massive cleansing, not
> some cosmetic "hey, let's change the names of who runs the site" nonsense.

A climate is the temperature of a culture. And, right now, neither one is
fit for man nor beast. Survival here is going to require some significant
changes; otherwise nothing will.

Marc Riddell


from_name: cohesion

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
On 3/6/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Why don't we do the same thing with administrators? No need to do a
> global search & replace, just change the key pages and MediaWiki
> messages and leave old mentions of "adminship" on talk pages and such
> around. But change it to something like "janitor". Or at least
> something less formidable than "administrator", like "trusted user."
>

I have always liked the name "custodian". It's a little like janitor,
but implies that you are doing your job in order to protect and help
wikipedia rather than solely cleaning up after (messy) people. I think
that term fits much better with the others as well (Bureaucrats etc).
Thoughts?

Judson
enwiki:cohesion


from_name: Ron Ritzman

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
On 3/6/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> I'm sick and tired of people misunderstanding what an "administrator"
> of Wikipedia is. It was a misnomer to begin with........"Administrator"
> could refer to a manager, or someone appointed by a court; it typically
> describes someone in an important official position.

In the computer world,  "System Administrators" and "System Operators"
(sysops) are those with special privileges on a multi user system.
They can do things that ordinary users can't do. Read/delete any file,
restrict user accounts. On some Unix type systems, they are members of
the "wheel" group thus the term "wheel war". Wikipedia is a multi user
system and Admins/sysops on Wikipedia have some of these same powers.
They can delete any article, restrict any user. They need these powers
and they are a necessary evil.

If a user tries to edit a page and can't because he is blocked,
whether he deserved it or not it's an insult to his intelligence to
tell him it was "cleanup" by a "janitor". I came to this list a few
years ago because I was blocked for a month, my whole ISP was because
of one vandal with an army of sock puppets and a slew of throwaway ISP
accounts. You are not going to get me to believe that drastic action
was done by the guy who mops the server room floor.

I say continue to call them what they are, "Administrators".


subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
on 3/6/07 8:35 AM, Earle Martin at wikipedia at downlode.org wrote:

> Actually, I would bet you that the vast majority of people editing
> Wikipedia don't even have the faintest awareness of "the Essjay
> situation". Hyperbole like this doesn't help.

"Hyperbole" is a subjective term. And, again, with the denial! Anything that
puts and keeps a problem in the face of those who can be a part of the
solution helps enormously.

On an infinitely larger and more significant scale, do I need to cite the
recent mess at Walter Reed Hospital? Are the words of the patients (victims)
hyperbole?

Marc


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [Wikitech-l] "Planet" feed aggregators

body:
Eric Moeller wrote:

> Cats, on the other hand, are evil.

True, but that's often what makes them charming -- something that
might be said of Wikipedians too. ;)

--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
|     Banana Republicans
|     The Best War Ever
--------------------------------
|  Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting:
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|
|  Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting:
|  https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118
--------------------------------


list: commons-l

from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Commons-l] How non-free is Flash?

body:
On 3/6/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> How non-free do we consider Flash to be? The Gnash player appears to
> be making good progress. Would it be acceptable to permit useful Flash
> files which work in Gnash and don't require non-free codecs to be
> uploaded?
>
> I did not see any issues with patents mentioned in the relevant
> Wikipedia article. The old Macromedia Flash website lists a US patent
> on "creating gradient fills", but that seems so bizarre as to pose no
> real threat.

For what application? I see that you say 'don't require non-free
codecs', but it's not clear that you're aware of the status of codecs
in flash:

For video support the flash plugin contains a H.263 video and a MP3
audio codec.

It's not possible to write MP3 software which does not infringe
5,105,463 among several other patents
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6388273.stm Weee!).

H.263 is covered by a pool of patents similar to MPEG-4.

Flash player 8 and above also includes the VP6 video codec. On2 has
patents they license for VP6 use, but overall they are pretty cool
company though, so I'm not fully sure where that stands. I expect that
requiring flash player 8 would leave Java as a more compatible web toy
solution.

Unlike the Java video player implementations the codec isn't actually
'written in flash'. Actionscript is a poor match for doing lots of
data manipulation. I understand that someone nearly has a Vorbis codec
working actually written in actionscript, but it's too slow to be
useful.

So for video, flash does not look good. The use of cortado in Java
would be much better. (http://www.flumotion.net/cortado/). Success
rate of the inline Java audio player hasn't been bad, and cortado
should be even more compatible with older JVMs.

A bigger concern I have with the freedom of flash doesn't have
anything to do with patents: There are no free authoring tools, other
than some hacks that are used for dynamic authoring. I think this is a
pretty big killer. Nothing we need for authoring today requires
proprietary software.

If we're looking to allow users to submit flash there another freedom
related issue:

Since the toolchain is proprietary and built around desktop usage
we'll be stuck with the 'opaque object' problem. In short, for
downloadable turing complete software (Java, Flash, JS) it can be
impossible to fully understand what the software will do. Perhaps on
the 3rd of the month it displays the goastse image, perhaps it
exploits the sandbox and steals your data. In cases where we have the
source, it's possible to require the software be simple enough that no
such tricks could be easily inserted.  As a result I previously
suggested that if we ever accept user submitted java that we have
people submit source and we compile it on our side. Because the flash
authoring tools are proprietary this option is closed to us.

These are just some quick points, a little more knowledge of the
intended application would help me drill in and look for freedom
related limitations.

I hope that I'll be given the opportunity to comment on the
non-freedom related aspects, since I think there are some significant
issues. Again, knowing the application is critical.


subject: [Foundation-l] [Commons-l] How non-free is Flash?


from_name: wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Study finds that Wikipedia has evolved from an

body:
> From: Andrew Cady <andrew.cady at gmail.com>

> Plato's Republic was not essentially dissimilar to Soviet Communism;
> the main difference is that the Soviets at least payed lip service to
> democracy and the value of the working class.

And the Soviets didn't insist that the Soviet Union's population be (somehow!) be maintained in such a way as to always constitute exactly 5040 citizens.


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
George Chriss stated for the record:
> Some good alternatives to janitor:
>
> http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/janitor
>
> Personally, I like "super," "doorkeeper," and "watchman."  I agree that a simple
> name change doesn't alter underlying culture, but small steps can add up
> quickly.

I like "super" too, as long as I don't have to wear a cape.  No capes.

--
 Sean Barrett     | Students for the Status Quo:
 sean at epoptic.com | What do we want? What we have!
                  | When do we want it? Now!


subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
on 3/6/07 9:11 AM, Earle Martin at wikipedia at downlode.org wrote:

> 06/03/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>> On an infinitely larger and more significant scale, do I need to cite the
>> recent mess at Walter Reed Hospital? Are the words of the patients (victims)
>> hyperbole?
>
> I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Earle,

If you live in the United States, and have seen or heard any national news
reports in the last week or so, you would.

Marc Riddell


subject: [Commons-l] PDF format issues Was: How non-free is Flash?

body:
On 3/6/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> In a related question, how free is PDF? The format may not be altered
> and still called "PDF", but everyone including the FSF can live with
> that. There's plenty of non-Adobe PDF creators and readers. What there
> is a lack of is editors, but it's essentially a write-once format in
> any case.

PDF is a mystery meat format. You never know exactly whats going to be
inside, so you can't speak about PDF as a whole coherently.

There is a subset of PDF which is free by almost any reasonable
standard (as you note, most people don't regard the name control issue
to be material).

Subset PDF is effectively equal to gzipped postscript. It's been
around forever, and shouldn't have any serious problems. With subset
PDF I think the biggest freedom related risk is non-free authoring
tools smuggling in non-free content without the authors knowledge. (We
see this with SVG too, Illustrator loves to embed non-free fully
hinted TTF fonts in the SVGs... At least they are easy to remove since
our rasterizer ignores them anyways)

However, PDF can be a *very* non-free format, and I would be surprised
if some of the PDF's we host were not pretty much maximally non-free.

First there is the patents issue. Modern commercial PDF plugins
contain a JBIG2, and a Jpeg2k codec. Some of the open-source PDF
readers can read these, but not all. JBIG2 clearly requires a patent,
Jpeg2k is just an ambiguous ugly patent mess.  There may be a other
ways that non-subset PDF is a patent minefield, this is just the first
that comes to mind.

Non-subset PDF also includes encryption and digital restrictions
management. The free software PDF tools includes support for the basic
(old) PDF encryption and can be easily modified to ignore the
restrictions. However, using such modified tools is illegal in the US
as is distributing them, under the DMCA.

There are also a TON of features in non-subset PDF that free tools
don't support (acrobat forms), or which present other accessibility
and security related concerns.

Like I pointed out with flash, to really talk about these things we
need to know the application.

For imaged documents especially high resolution bitonal (black/white)
documents, DjVu is a compelling alternative which is gaining adoption
even outside of the world of free software. We have great support for
DjVu in mediawiki, including on the fly transcoding which should
dramatically reduce concerns related to client compatibility.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image%3AMozart_Sonate_%28manuscript%29.djvu&page=10

Play with the page controls on the right side. :)

For vector illustrations, SVG is a much better choice.

But for PDF as a compatible version of gzipped PS is still a reasonable tool.
We need better ability to check files for evilness. Ideally we could
have a client side upload tool that knew how to transcode things into
acceptable formats (using codecs built into your OS) and which could
test for problems like the one I discussed for PDF.


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
On 3/6/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> I'm sick and tired of people misunderstanding what an "administrator"
> of Wikipedia is. It was a misnomer to begin with, and we've had
> nothing but trouble with this name ever since. Users misunderstand it
> (and ask admins to make editorial decisions). Media misunderstand it
> (and either do not explain it, or connect it to power and influence).
> And it's no wonder. "Administrator" could refer to a manager, or
> someone appointed by a court; it typically describes someone in an
> important official position.

Better even than changing the name would be changing the rules. Let people
get admin rights automagically -- see, for example, the suggestion to pick
100 random users who have been around for a while without any trouble and
give them admin rights.


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Commons-l] How non-free is Flash?

body:
How non-free do we consider Flash to be? The Gnash player appears to
be making good progress. Would it be acceptable to permit useful Flash
files which work in Gnash and don't require non-free codecs to be
uploaded?

I did not see any issues with patents mentioned in the relevant
Wikipedia article. The old Macromedia Flash website lists a US patent
on "creating gradient fills", but that seems so bizarre as to pose no
real threat.

(Let's keep this separate, for now, from the question when a format
like Flash would be appropriate, content-wise. I'd like to fully
understand the "freeness" first.)
--
Peace & Love,
Erik

DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.

"An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open,
free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic


subject: [Foundation-l] How non-free is Flash?


subject: [Foundation-l] How non-free is Flash?


from_name: Kutler, Christopher

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Wikitech-l Digest, Vol 44,
	Issue 9: Reordering Navigation, Search and Toolbox in Wiki Skin

body:
Thanks Rob and Jim for your replies. I know a lot of WikiMedia is customisable via stylesheets and through the Special Pages and I've been advised to only touch the source code if I have to... However, in this instance I can probably justify a little bit of hacking!

Chris

-----Original Message-----
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[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org]On Behalf Of
wikitech-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: 06 March 2007 03:51
To: wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Wikitech-l Digest, Vol 44, Issue 9

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When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
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Today's Topics:

   1. Reordering Navigation, Search and Toolbox in Wiki Skin
      (Kutler, Christopher)
   2. Re: Reordering Navigation,	Search and Toolbox in Wiki Skin
      (Rob Church)
   3. Re: Reordering Navigation,	Search and Toolbox in Wiki Skin
      (Jim Wilson)
   4. Re: "Planet" feed aggregators (Jim Hu)
   5. AJAX and .aspx as technologies for MediaWiki? (Virgil Ierubino)
   6. Re: AJAX and .aspx as technologies for MediaWiki? (Kasimir Gabert)
   7. Re: AJAX and .aspx as technologies for MediaWiki? (Rob Church)
   8. Re: AJAX and .aspx as technologies for MediaWiki? (Simetrical)
   9. Re: "Planet" feed aggregators (Nick Jenkins)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 18:44:37 -0000
From: "Kutler, Christopher"
	<Christopher.Kutler at nationalarchives.gov.uk>
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Reordering Navigation, Search and Toolbox in
	Wiki Skin
To: <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
	<88A6AFA61447AC4AB9F280FC6747F908032E1EEF at na-exch1.in.tna.local>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

At the risk of receiving RTFMs, does anyone know if there is a way of changing the order of the Navigation, Search and Toolbox in Wiki Skin so that the Search box comes first, followed by the Nav box then the Toolbox. I was going to just change the order of the code in MonoBook.php, but I'm wondering whether this can be done via one of the stylesheets or something like that.

Any advice would be greatfully appreciated.

Thanks

Chris

Please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to.

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------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 18:51:52 +0000
From: "Rob Church" <robchur at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Reordering Navigation,	Search and Toolbox in
	Wiki Skin
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
	<e92136380703051051q614f06dfi8b5f02a640bd4591 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

On 05/03/07, Kutler, Christopher
<Christopher.Kutler at nationalarchives.gov.uk> wrote:
> At the risk of receiving RTFMs, does anyone know if there is a way of changing the order of the Navigation, Search and Toolbox in Wiki Skin so that the Search box comes first, followed by the Nav box then the Toolbox. I was going to just change the order of the code in MonoBook.php, but I'm wondering whether this can be done via one of the stylesheets or something like that.

Nope, that's more or less the correct method.

Rob Church

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 12:53:55 -0600
From: "Jim Wilson" <wilson.jim.r at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Reordering Navigation,	Search and Toolbox in
	Wiki Skin
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
	<ac08e8d0703051053i4f9eab03t321af72a412ca469 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

It may or may not be possible to do this via CSS - but if you're comfortable
with PHP, hacking the skin is probably the best option.

I'd suggest that you probably make a duplicate skin ("MyMonoBook" or
similar) and then hack that one instead.  This will make future upgrades
easier.

-- Jim R. Wilson (jimbojw)

On 3/5/07, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 05/03/07, Kutler, Christopher
> <Christopher.Kutler at nationalarchives.gov.uk> wrote:
> > At the risk of receiving RTFMs, does anyone know if there is a way of
> changing the order of the Navigation, Search and Toolbox in Wiki Skin so
> that the Search box comes first, followed by the Nav box then the Toolbox. I
> was going to just change the order of the code in MonoBook.php, but I'm
> wondering whether this can be done via one of the stylesheets or something
> like that.
>
> Nope, that's more or less the correct method.
>
>
> Rob Church
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 13:55:17 -0500
From: Jim Hu <jimhu at tamu.edu>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] "Planet" feed aggregators
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID: <E7B9B125-4F0B-4BD0-AB6A-EE2A55705023 at tamu.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed

On Mar 5, 2007, at 1:10 PM, Rob Church wrote:

> On 05/03/07, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 3/5/07, Jim Wilson <wilson.jim.r at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I doubt most Wikimedians even know that the inclusion of new
>>> extensions
>>> would be considered.  I certainly didn't - until you just said
>>> something.
>>>
>>> Is there a sounding-board somewhere that people can make these
>>> suggestions
>>> and the community can discuss it?
>>
>> As far as I've seen, it's mostly harassing Tim and/or Brion until
>> they
>> give you an answer.
>
> You oversimplify too greatly.
>
> A huge proportion of the extensions out there are written by, if I may
> be frank, amateurs.

Indeed...this describes me pretty well. I believe "rank amateur"
comes closer.

> They may be quick and dirty solutions to fulfill
> people's needs at the time. They may not be compatible with the newest
> versions of MediaWiki, or may use appallingly bad and even unsafe
> practices to get things done, which may lead to the inclusion of
> security vulnerabilities; commonly XSS and SQL injection.

For example, I'm pretty sure I used some appalling practices (like
saving state by serializing data into the page output itself instead
of to a session or cookie) in the Table Edit extension I just wrote...

But then I don't think it should actually be enabled on the Wikimedia
cluster.  Since extensions like these are being written by us
amateurs to get things done on our own wikis, it would be nice to get
feedback on which of our appalling practices to look out for.
Perhaps someone with more expertise than the likes of me can add some
more information to the sections on mediawiki.org about writing
extensions and special pages.

But I'm NOT expecting the main devs to have the time to do that.

Jim

>
> If we're to enable an extension on the Wikimedia cluster, then we have
> to be reasonably sure that we can trust the code. This means we have
> to review it for security and for sanity, and for performance. This
> takes time. Time which we don't have, on the whole.
>
> Some of this can be skipped when the extension is written by an
> experienced and trusted developer and uses appropriate techniques to
> do things, although there is still a phase of review which (rightly)
> needs to take place, so it's still not instantaneous.
>
> Another big problem is that people request the installation of the
> most ridiculous and pointless little extensions. There are vast
> arguments over how complex wiki text should be, and internally there
> is a ripple of discontent over how complex it has become. A lot of the
> community's thirst for nonsense was slaked in an efficient and
> effective manner by Tim Starling with the introduction of
> ParserFunctions. Unfortunately, now they want more. Variables. Arrays.
> All sorts of nonsense which, frankly, they *do not need* to write an
> encyclopaedia.
>
> The community frequently bitches at the development and system
> administration teams to do things faster, but it is the development
> and system administration teams which have a responsibility to keep
> the sites alive, and which will take the flak - oh yes, there's a lot
> of flak to come from all our users - when the shit hits the fan, as it
> might do without the proper processes.
>
>
> Rob Church
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

------------------------------

Message: 5
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 02:55:23 +0000
From: "Virgil Ierubino" <virgil.ierubino at gmail.com>
Subject: [Wikitech-l] AJAX and .aspx as technologies for MediaWiki?
To: wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org, mediawiki-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Message-ID:
	<24dce9db0703051855r5eeb1b09he2dc5c5b6fa8f801 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

A quick development question.

If an AJAX-enabled, or "next-gen" MediaWiki were to be built, would it be
acceptable for it to have been made in a format such as .aspx (i.e. built
using Microsoft Visual Web Developer)? I was wondering if this might have
some kind of clash with GFDL/Copyleft principles, or accessibility or
compatibility. Would web pages in the .aspx format be acceptable as the
output of the software that Wikipedia runs on?

Thanks.

------------------------------

Message: 6
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 20:04:34 -0700
From: "Kasimir Gabert" <kasimir.g at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] AJAX and .aspx as technologies for
	MediaWiki?
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
	<52836a540703051904p648e723fvc9dc2770e236c813 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Hello Virgil,

Most web servers that run wikis are run using open source technology.
ASP.NET is closed source and run by Microsoft, and so I doubt that it
would get far in this community.  The two main languages that you want
to build it in would be PHP or Perl (Python, Ruby, etc, as well).

Kasimir

On 3/5/07, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino at gmail.com> wrote:
> A quick development question.
>
> If an AJAX-enabled, or "next-gen" MediaWiki were to be built, would it be
> acceptable for it to have been made in a format such as .aspx (i.e. built
> using Microsoft Visual Web Developer)? I was wondering if this might have
> some kind of clash with GFDL/Copyleft principles, or accessibility or
> compatibility. Would web pages in the .aspx format be acceptable as the
> output of the software that Wikipedia runs on?
>
> Thanks.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Kasimir Gabert

------------------------------

Message: 7
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 03:30:51 +0000
From: "Rob Church" <robchur at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] AJAX and .aspx as technologies for
	MediaWiki?
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
	<e92136380703051930l8af8e0bh2c663b5a51c2ff3d at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

On 06/03/07, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino at gmail.com> wrote:
> If an AJAX-enabled, or "next-gen" MediaWiki were to be built, would it be
> acceptable for it to have been made in a format such as .aspx (i.e. built
> using Microsoft Visual Web Developer)? I was wondering if this might have
> some kind of clash with GFDL/Copyleft principles, or accessibility or
> compatibility. Would web pages in the .aspx format be acceptable as the
> output of the software that Wikipedia runs on?

We are not likely to accept an entirely new wiki engine that's just
been built from scratch as the software to run on our servers, closed
source or otherwise, without us having had significant involvement in
the whole development process and without unbelievably amazing
benefits and a completely compatible data storage backend and layout.

I would also state that, in my view, it is completely pointless
contemplating moving to another implementation language unless there
are significant benefits to doing so.

What I have observed, so far, is that this user seems unduly obsessed
with the idea of "MediaWiki 2.0" and even more so with the idea of
writing it on his own. This is a bad move, and a waste of time. We
have invested significant time and effort into developing this
software, and we aren't going to discard that. If you have suggestions
to make for improving MediaWiki, make them, but don't creep about on
our forums while rubbing your hands together like a dot-com
businessman who thinks he's going to slip the Next Best Thing behind
Wikipedia.

Rob Church

------------------------------

Message: 8
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2007 22:34:35 -0500
From: Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] AJAX and .aspx as technologies for
	MediaWiki?
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
	<7c2a12e20703051934t3f835547h1646ac8f20efa78a at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

On 3/5/07, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino at gmail.com> wrote:
> A quick development question.
>
> If an AJAX-enabled, or "next-gen" MediaWiki were to be built, would it be
> acceptable for it to have been made in a format such as .aspx (i.e. built
> using Microsoft Visual Web Developer)? I was wondering if this might have
> some kind of clash with GFDL/Copyleft principles, or accessibility or
> compatibility. Would web pages in the .aspx format be acceptable as the
> output of the software that Wikipedia runs on?

It would be unacceptable.  The Wikimedia Foundation has (successfully)
made every effort to build its infrastructure using only open-source
software: Apache, lighttpd, Squid, and so forth.  It would, as far as
I'm aware, not be willing to use any kind of proprietary software
without good reason.   Switching from Apache to IIS (mod_aspdotnet is
apparently unsupported) would require a really, really good reason.

As Rob says, though, good luck trying to write an MW2 from scratch by
yourself that has a genuine superset of the functionality MW1 has
accumulated over a few years with a number of developers.

------------------------------

Message: 9
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 15:02:35 +1100
From: "Nick Jenkins" <nickpj at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] "Planet" feed aggregators
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID: <NABBJGECPILFNLFEAPIKEENDKCAA.nickpj at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="us-ascii"

> > I've fiddled a bit with Planet before; if there's no objection I'll set
> > that up later today. If anyone wants in, let me know where to find your
> > blog. :)
>
> No objection from me, but: I want us to make sure that all the blog
> posts appearing are only Wikimedia-related. So I would insist that
> blogs either provide a Wikimedia-specific feed, or that we are able to
> filter them on our side by tag.

Oh, I don't know; Sometimes you get some interesting stuff that's not
strictly MediaWiki / Wikipedia / Wikimedia - related.

For example, you might miss out on stats about the number of people that fake
their identity online ( http://wikiangela.com/blog/a-sad-loss/ ) , videos of
suburbs being hit by asteroids and zapped by aliens
( http://leuksman.com/log/2006/06/17/video-crap/ ), and maybe at some point a
posting about the OLPC's security architecture ( http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ivan/ ).

Isn't it nicer to have something organic and freeform and inclusive and alive,
that flows in unpredictable directions like a good conversation, rather than
something that's narrow and exclusive and walled into a small box?

I say: embrace the weird and the wonderful and eclectic in all its forms, and
let the chips fall where they may - the only criteria should be whether MediaWiki
(core or extensions) / Wikipedia / Wikimedia / wikis-in-general are a major
personal or professional interest to the author, and then wiki-related stuff will
just naturally tend to form a large percentage of the planet's content (although
it will include other stuff too). You see this pattern already in other planets
(e.g. Planet Debian). Or at least maybe try that approach at first, and if it
doesn't work then refine it from there.

All the best,
Nick.

------------------------------

_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

End of Wikitech-l Digest, Vol 44, Issue 9
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from_name: Josh Gordon

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
"Custodian" works nicely. It's properly pretentious. "Sanitation
engineer" is also appealing...

On 3/6/07, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/6/07, cohesion <cohesion at sleepyhead.org> wrote:
>
> > I have always liked the name "custodian". It's a little like janitor,
> > but implies that you are doing your job in order to protect and help
> > wikipedia rather than solely cleaning up after (messy) people. I think
> > that term fits much better with the others as well (Bureaucrats etc).
> > Thoughts?
>
>
> We thought through the title of "admin"/"sysop" when we set up
> Wikiversity - and we named it "custodian"
> <http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Custodianship>. We also
> organised the system by which people become custodians (or lose that
> status) specifically so that it would be seen as having a learning
> curve, and that new custodians would be peer-monitored - similar to
> the system of apprenticeship. It's also something that is "easy come,
> easy go" - it should be "no big deal" to 1) be a custodian, 2) to
> become a custodian, and 3) to lose your custodianship (though we
> haven't yet had to face the latter situation).
>
> My general thoughts are that - no matter what we call it - "adminship"
> should be seen as simply a willingness to help out with the
> maintenance of a wiki - but that it should *not* be fetishised as an
> object of status, which it clearly is by many people. And yes, we're
> here to write an encyclopedia, as John Lee says above - but in a way
> it is and in a way it isn't that simple. As well as writing an
> encyclopedia, we're also here to create the *culture* within which to
> do so - and culture doesn't just exist in policy documents, nor
> materialise out of thin air - culture is something that we all
> actively construct as an inherent part of writing this encyclopedia.
>
> Cheers,
> Cormac
>
> http://cormaggio.org
> http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Cormaggio
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
--jpgordon ????


from_name: Virgil Ierubino

subject: [Wikitech-l] AJAX and .aspx as technologies for MediaWiki?

body:
I beg your pardon, Rob, but this was really quite rude. This mailing list
isn't a private elite club, is it? People interested in the Wikimedia
Foundation's goals are all allowed to voice their opinions right? Isn't that
the Wikimedia ethos?

I am not creeping onto your forums ("your" forums!), how dare you. I am not
trying to usurp anything. I'm genuinely interested in Wikimedia. Just for
the record, I'm a 20-year-old philosophy student at Trinity College,
Cambridge - not a dot-com business man rubbing his hands together looking
for cash.

I don't actually think I could write something on my own anyway. Nor am I
trying to jump in and scream that all your base are belong to me. It's just
that I have so many ideas for a better wiki engine that it would be almost
ridiculous to suggest them as additions to MediaWiki. They comprise a new
engine in themselves (one that would obviously be written to work with any
MediaWiki database), and I was just wondering which languages were preferred
for an implementation so that I could scale any suggestions I made to that.

As for the "obsession with MediaWiki 2.0", I'm keen, sure. I think a major
upgrade to the software would really help the Foundation's goals. I'm keen
on the Foundation. It follows.

On 06/03/07, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 06/03/07, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If an AJAX-enabled, or "next-gen" MediaWiki were to be built, would it
> be
> > acceptable for it to have been made in a format such as .aspx (i.e.
> built
> > using Microsoft Visual Web Developer)? I was wondering if this might
> have
> > some kind of clash with GFDL/Copyleft principles, or accessibility or
> > compatibility. Would web pages in the .aspx format be acceptable as the
> > output of the software that Wikipedia runs on?
>
> We are not likely to accept an entirely new wiki engine that's just
> been built from scratch as the software to run on our servers, closed
> source or otherwise, without us having had significant involvement in
> the whole development process and without unbelievably amazing
> benefits and a completely compatible data storage backend and layout.
>
> I would also state that, in my view, it is completely pointless
> contemplating moving to another implementation language unless there
> are significant benefits to doing so.
>
> What I have observed, so far, is that this user seems unduly obsessed
> with the idea of "MediaWiki 2.0" and even more so with the idea of
> writing it on his own. This is a bad move, and a waste of time. We
> have invested significant time and effort into developing this
> software, and we aren't going to discard that. If you have suggestions
> to make for improving MediaWiki, make them, but don't creep about on
> our forums while rubbing your hands together like a dot-com
> businessman who thinks he's going to slip the Next Best Thing behind
> Wikipedia.
>
>
> Rob Church
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
On 06/03/07, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As Rob says, though, good luck trying to write an MW2 from scratch by
> yourself that has a genuine superset of the functionality MW1 has
> accumulated over a few years with a number of developers.

I never seriously thought I could write a whole engine as good as MW on my
own!

But thanks for the replies now. You've managed to answer my question -
sticking with PHP is, I'm sure, the way to go. I'll have to look into how to
use AJAX with that. For the record again, I'm trying to work out these
coding concepts so I can make my suggestions sensibly.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
On 3/6/07, cohesion <cohesion at sleepyhead.org> wrote:
>
> On 3/6/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > Why don't we do the same thing with administrators? No need to do a
> > global search & replace, just change the key pages and MediaWiki
> > messages and leave old mentions of "adminship" on talk pages and such
> > around. But change it to something like "janitor". Or at least
> > something less formidable than "administrator", like "trusted user."
> >
>
> I have always liked the name "custodian". It's a little like janitor,
> but implies that you are doing your job in order to protect and help
> wikipedia rather than solely cleaning up after (messy) people. I think
> that term fits much better with the others as well (Bureaucrats etc).
> Thoughts?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?


from_name: Erica

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
On 3/6/07, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
wrote:
>
> Marc Riddell wrote
>
> > If you live in the United States, and have seen or heard any national
> news
> > reports in the last week or so, you would.
>
> You know, many people do not live in the USA. About 95%, really. Why not
> just cite [[Walter Reed Army Medical Center]]?

Good grief, give him a break. He already apologized.

Erica


from_name: Rob Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
On 3/6/07, Puppy <puppy at killerchihuahua.com> wrote:
>
> Oh please. Have you clicked "Random entry" there? See
> http://www.conservapedia.com/Cold_War  for an example of the "quality" -
> or Richard Nixon, unless its been fixed.

Says twice he resigned. Maybe overkill.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Accountability: bringing back a proposal I made
	nearly 2 years ago

body:
Andrew Cady wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 03, 2007 at 11:44:39AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> We do not have them for user pages, and it does not strike me as
>> irregular that a fictitious persona would have a fictitious
>> biography.
>
> I find it disturbing that so many here accept this characterization of
> the falsified credentials.

I think that this is really the crux of the disagreement, so let's
state it clearly. There are some people here who think that it is
reasonable and appropriate for Wikipedians to deceive other
Wikipedians about their biography, while others find this unacceptable.

By deceive I mean more than "maintain anonymity" or "use a
pseudonym." Let's be clear about this, because confusion on this
point was evident as early as Jimbo's (now-retracted) statement that
Essjay's false credentials were "a pseudonym and I don?t really have
a problem with it."

Once again: false credentials (or other biographical falsifications,
for that matter) are NOT a pseudonym.

In an attempt to deal with the lessons of the Essjay situation, Jimbo
has proposed a credentials verification system that I think would be
unwieldy and a significant change for Wikipedia. I think there is a
simpler solution that doesn't create any new ongoing work for anyone.
The solution: WIKIPEDIA NEEDS AN HONESTY POLICY. It needs to state
clearly that Wikipedians should be honest and truthful, even on their
user pages. In other words: Anonymity is fine. Pseudonyms are fine.
Humor is fine. Opinions are fine. Deception is not. That's the bright
line.

Currently, Wikipedia has policies on civility, use of bots, and a
host of other topics, but it does not have a policy anywhere that
says Wikipedians should be honest with one another. This has left a
window of ambiguity that makes it possible for many people (even
Jimbo) to imagine that it is okay to falsify facts about oneself for
the purpose of deception.

There is no doubt that this is what Essjay did. He himself in his
explanation of his behavior stated that he engaged in
"disinformation," which he justified as a necessary to protect
himself from trolls and stalkers.

The reality, however, is that people can maintain anonymity without
using deception. Even if we take Essjay's explanation at face value,
it was a mistake to use deception as a means of maintaining
anonymity. Wikipedia should make this point clear in its policies so
that future Essjays won't make the same mistake.

There are, of course, some theoretical gray areas in this policy, but
I think they're more theoretical than real. If I claim on my user
page that I'm a Spanish terrier or Vin Diesel's body double, everyone
except the terminally dense will recognize that I'm not serious. If,
however, I claim that I live in Wisconsin, have a degree from
Princeton, or that I met Jimbo at Wikimania 2006, people have a right
to expect that I'm telling the truth.

The issue isn't just "credentials." It's truthfulness in general.
Someone who has works as a carpenter may not have any formal
credentials per se, but they have knowledge that may enhance their
status as an expert on a particular topic. Ergo, you shouldn't
pretend to be a carpenter unless you are one. Nor should you pretend
to be confined to a wheelchair, terminally ill with cancer, or
anything else that isn't actually true.

I wouldn't suggest imposing any fixed penalties for violating this
code, nor would I suggest creating new procedures for verification.
Merely stating the policy and handling enforcement on a case-by-case
basis should be sufficient. If someone starts an administrative
procedure against me for claiming that I'm a Spanish terrier, I trust
that the community will have the common sense needed to dismiss it
quickly. There is another category of *unverifiable* assertions that
might become grounds for contention, but the onus of proof in those
cases should be on the accuser. Minor, one-time falsehoods can be
handled with Wikilove the same way the community handles minor acts
of newbie vandalism.

If such a policy were in place when Essjay first began his editing
career, it might not have stopped him from initially claiming to be a
professor. (Newbies make all kinds of mistakes.) During the course of
his rise within the project, however, he would have become familiar
with the policy and would have been more likely to bring himself into
compliance with it before it blew up on him.


from_name: Deathphoenix

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [Foundation-l] Accountability: bringing back a
	proposal I made nearly 2 years ago

body:
On 3/5/07, Jeff V. Merkey <jmerkey at wolfmountaingroup.com> wrote:
>
> Erik Moeller wrote:
> >I'm not sure I've provided enough context to fully explain the
> >proposal. The idea is not to _require_ anything, but to only ask for
> >confirmation if people make the claim _themselves_, and then only for
> >people in positions of trust, or those whose credentials have been
> >called into question. Anyone is free to reach any level of trust
> >without professional credentials.
> >
> >
> This is more reasonable. I concur.
>

I agree. People should only verify credentials if they want to, usually for
claims they make on their user pages (or in on-Wiki discussions).


subject: [Commons-l] Audio file sizes

body:
First some background, why do we use compressed audio:

1) Uncompressed audio is huge and uses a lot of disk space for us.
2) Uncompressed audio would be an amazing waste of our bandwidth.
3) Uncompressed audio would be a huge burden on our readers, and would
make clips longer than a few seconds inaccessible to users on dialup.

Brion may stab me for saying it, but (1) is fairly unimportant.

The way we are using compressed audio today is not very good from the
perspective of (2), and (3).

I haven't gone and exhaustively checked our files, but most of the
Ogg/Vorbis files I'm seeing people upload are in the 160kbit/sec
range. I believe there are four reasons for this:

1) An incorrect impression created by old data about MP3 performance.
Old MP3 wisdom is that you have to be 160kbit/sec to be good. This was
true five years ago.

All cutting edge perceptual coders have results which are very good at
128kbit/sec, Vorbis better than the others, with results which are
nearly statistically the same as the original on a test using trained
listners.(http://www.listening-tests.info/mf-128-1/results.htm)

2) My recording is a unique and precious snowflake. I want it to be
the highest quality.

3) You can go down but you can't go up, and I have broadband so it's
fast enough for me.

4) Lossless files are bad for editing, less loss is better.

Of these, *none* of them should be a factor is deciding what we send
to our readers.  Yet here we are sending these 160kbit/sec oggs to
joe-average-reader, sucking up his bandwidth and ours.

In terms of what we need uploaded for our own purposes, (4) matters.
It matters a lot, because being able to edit the content is an
important part of what we enable. However,  even the 160kbit/sec lossy
files fail here: Take a file decoded from a 160kbit/ogg and pass it
through a 1500Hz high pass filter ('sox input.wav output.wav highp
1500'  for those with real computers (tm)). The result will have
obvious yucky artifacts. This isn't a bug, it's the behavior of a
perceptual codec by design. The high pass trick is a pathological
worst case, but it is true that even at 160kbit/sec perceptual codecs
do not survive all forms of manipulation well.

What I'd like to see us do instead, is to ask uploaders to send us
losslessly compressed Ogg/Flac files instead. Lossless compression
because disk space isn't totally irrelevant and to avoid people
downloading insanely huge wavs just because they don't want to use the
java player or install a codec.  We already permit uploading these
lossless audio files they can be easily transcoded to Ogg/Vorbis while
preserving all metadata.

Then we would, either via an automatic transcoding bot or via an
upload enhancement to mediawiki automatically generate 40kbit/sec
(dialup) and 96kbit/sec (broadband)  versions from the lossless. These
versions are what we'd link from our other projects.

Considering the quality of most audio/video sharing sites on the
internet, these would still leave us head and shoulders better
quality. (Most youtube videos seem to be using 8 or 16kbit/sec mp3 for
their audio, it's miserable but you don't notice if you're watching
the video)

Thoughts on this?  On using a bot vs some native support?  The biggest
limit I see on this is that we don't have any support for subfiles, or
bundled files... which means that this gunks up commons with two extra
files for our audio.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Audio file sizes


from_name: Marc Riddell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
> On 06/03/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:

>>>> On an infinitely larger and more significant scale, do I need to cite the
>>>> recent mess at Walter Reed Hospital? Are the words of the patients
>>>> (victims)
>>>> hyperbole?

>>> on 3/6/07 10:03 AM, Earle Martin at wikipedia at downlode.org wrote:

>>> I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

>> On 06/03/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:

>> If you live in the United States, and have seen or heard any national news
>> reports in the last week or so, you would.
>
on 3/6/07 10:03 AM, Earle Martin at wikipedia at downlode.org wrote:

> I don't live in the United States. Why would you have assumed that I do?

Earle,

On second reading of my original response to you about this, I feel I could
have phrased it better, and I had no reason to assume you lived in the US -
I apologize.

If you haven't already seen the report I encourage you to do so. It concerns
the physical, cultural and bureaucratic conditions that exist within, what
is supposed to be, one of the best military hospitals in the US. It is a
prime example of a bureaucracy in denial of problems that exist within a
facility they are responsible for - and the effect this denial has had on
the persons depending on them.

I wish I had a link to include here regarding this, but I can't find one at
the moment.

Again, I apologize for the abruptness of by original reply.

Marc Riddell


body:
On 3/6/07, Husky <huskyr at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm pretty impressed by the Cortado demo. I'm not sure how well it competes
> with Flash video on lower-end machines (i'm at a high-end machine right
> now), but it seems like a really good alternative for presenting in-line
> video on Wikimedia projects. One of the main hassles for incorporating
> videos on Wikimedia projects (aside from the copyright and bandwidth issues)
> always seemed to be the lack of widely available Theora support. With
> everyone being accustomed by YouTube working right out of the box it seems a
> bit weird that you ask people to download a codec and install it, or use an
> alternative player. This works right out of the box, in Firefox at least. I
> had to download the J2RE on IE 6.
>
> If we could use this in some way it would be a great addition to the
> projects.

*Sigh* We had a SOC project last year to provide integrated mediawiki
support for this, but it appears to have fizzled.

I threw up an audio only version (using jorbis) a while back to
demonstrate that it could be done for the non-believers. It's used
many tens of thousands of times a week. The only complaint I get about
it these days is due to a longstanding image server problem which
causes us to send zero byte files which get stuck in squid, rendering
some audio files useless.

I was hoping that my quick hack would inspire someone to do it right
and include video support, but it hasn't yet.  It would be easy enough
to do the same kind of hack for video, but we really should get proper
support.

As far as performance goes, it will run great on any system which as
good as the system requirements for modern versions of flash. :)

Depending on who's numbers you believe Java penetration is someplace
between very sightly less than flash and substantially less but still
a clear majority. I suspect it depends on what sort of user's you're
polling.. Java being more commonly found on computers used for
business, while flash is almost excursively used for entertainment.

The last weeks data of 143,530 unique IPs shows that 79% of the IPs
hitting the Java audio player on toolserver have a Java Virtual
Machine. However, of those only 78% (61% of the total) have a JRE new
enough to use Jorbis. I believe Cortando has a resampler in it to
permit it work on the old MSFT JVMs, so it should do better.  The
number is skewed a bit by the fact that people without java are
unlikely to vist again soon since it didn't work, and are somewhat
better than my initial numbers, but I've also improved compatibility
dramatically since then.

These numbers are consistent with the higher estimates of Java
penetration vs flash.


subject: [Commons-l] Audio file sizes

body:
On 3/6/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06/03/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Then we would, either via an automatic transcoding bot or via an
> > upload enhancement to mediawiki automatically generate 40kbit/sec
> > (dialup) and 96kbit/sec (broadband)  versions from the lossless. These
> > versions are what we'd link from our other projects.
>
> I understand Ogg Vorbis was designed such that you can create a
> 96kbit/s frame by taking a 160kbit/s frame and stripping the end off.

It was designed that way, yes. However, various deep technical issue
causes such simplistic conversion to sound bad. As a result a more
sophisticated bitrate peeler is required, and no one has gotten around
to coding one.

On my laptop, doing oggenc -q -1 flacfile is about 45x realtime. ..
it's not something we would want to do on the fly for every load, but
cached or at upload time it's not bad.


from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Essjay RFC deleted

body:
"George Herbert" wrote

> What's ended up happening is, perhaps both typically and tragically,
> Wikipedia standard controversy reaction - it's up, it's down, it's
> back up, it's moved, it's moved again, it's speedy deleted then
> restored then deleted and up for DR and sideways with sugar on top and
> can I please have a little more, sir?


from_name: Anthony

subject: [Foundation-l] Update of Foundation organization

body:
On 3/5/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> You cannot oblige anybody to work a specified number of hours
> per week unless they are getting something out of it.  That something
> may still be intangible, like personal satisfaction, instead of money;
> pure altruism is unlikely to be enough.

What's the difference between having personal satisfaction as the only
reward and pure altruism?  Even if there's a philosophical difference,
there doesn't seem to be a practical one.

That said, a common intangible reward for volunteers is status in a
hierarchical system.  Everything2 has its experience system.  Slashdot
has its karma system.  The volunteer fire department has probies and
drivers and officers etc.  The Wikimedia community has some hierarchy,
but not a lot, and there are strong feelings that it not be used as a
reward.  It'd be perfectly possible to require all admins to commit to
2 hours a week of some particular duty to stay admins, and many people
would still sign up for adminship, but the culture of Wikimedia is
such that this would probably cause a huge backlash.

Anthony


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Accountability: bringing back a proposal I made
	nearly 2	years ago

body:
Bryan Derksen

>  I probably won't bother to get verified myself. I'm satisfied that my
> edits stand on their own merits and they mostly aren't related to my
> degrees anyway.

I pretty much agree. I think it is defensible, as part of our general approach, to continue to 'assume good faith' about people. That isn't naivety so much as an 'honor system'. Exceptions for positions of trust, yes; but not just to be an editor in good standing.

Charles

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
> Marc Riddell wrote
>
>> If you live in the United States, and have seen or heard any national news
>> reports in the last week or so, you would.

on 3/6/07 10:53 AM, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com at
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:
>
> You know, many people do not live in the USA. About 95%, really. Why not just
> cite [[Walter Reed Army Medical Center]]?
>
 Thanks, you're right, that is what I should have done.

Marc


from_name: Puppy

subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
Oh please. Have you clicked "Random entry" there? See
http://www.conservapedia.com/Cold_War  for an example of the "quality" -
or Richard Nixon, unless its been fixed.

Steve Bennett wrote:
> Hi all,
>   Not sure if I've seen any discussion of this, but this was interesting:
>
> http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/wikipedia-foes-set-up-right-site/2007/03/02/1172868789933.html
>
> Their "Conservapedia Commandments" are intetresting too:
> #  Everything you post must be true and verifiable.
> # Always cite and give credit to your sources, even if in the public domain.
> # Edits/new pages must be family-friendly, clean, concise, and without
> gossip or foul language.
> # When referencing dates based on the approximate birth of Jesus, give
> appropriate credit for the basis of the date (B.C. or A.D.). "BCE" and
> "CE" are unacceptable substitutes because they deny the historical
> basis. See CE.
> # As much as is possible, American spelling of words must be used.[1]
> # Do not post personal opinion on an encyclopedia entry.
>
> I find it bizarre that the CE/AD thing is so important that it rates a
> mention in the Commandments. And the "true and verifiable" is a cute
> reference to our "verifiable, not true" :)
>
> Steve
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
On 3/6/07, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.com> wrote:
> George Chriss stated for the record:
> > Some good alternatives to janitor:
> >
> > http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/janitor
> >
> > Personally, I like "super," "doorkeeper," and "watchman."  I agree that a simple
> > name change doesn't alter underlying culture, but small steps can add up
> > quickly.
>
> I like "super" too, as long as I don't have to wear a cape.  No capes.

It's not the capes to be feared.  It's the tights.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
On 3/6/07, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> > But change it to something like "janitor". Or at least
> > something less formidable than "administrator", like "trusted user."
>
> Trusted user is the wrong term. Many people are trusted but not admins
> on a specific project. (Not to mention some admins can't be trusted).

Truster user is how a lot of people interpret it.  If you look at en
WP:ANI, for example, a lot of the stuff coming to that venue doesn't
really need an admin's power to deal with - any trusted and reasonable
user can handle a lot of the situations just by intervening politely
and talking to people.  And a fair number of non-admins do participate
there.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
On 3/5/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> In response to the EssJay scandal, I want to bring back an old proposal
> of mine from 2 years ago for greater accountability around credentials:
>
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-May/022085.html
>
> At the time, this seemed like a plausibly decent idea to me, and the
> reaction at the time was mostly positive, with some reasonable caveats
> and improvements:
>
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-May/thread.html
> to read the entire thread of "An idea".

Frankly, I think one of the benefits of Wikipedia is that it forces people
to become disabused of Arguments by Authority, to force people to engage in
critical thinking, etc.

Why? Because it doesn't rely on the lazy trappings of credentials and
curricula vitae and titles and celebrity endorsement, etc.

Any credentialling system can be gamed. So why encourage people to have a
false sense of security about something that isn't really needed for the
goals of the project?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia "Commandments"

body:
"Daniel P. B. Smith" wrote

> IMHO there's nothing totally crazy about Conservapedia saying "_our_
> house style is American Usage," although making it one of the
> "Commandments" seems... amusing.

It really takes an American conservative to imply that Noah Webster changing spellings to make them incompatible with the Brits was acting 'conservatively'.

Charles

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from_name: Ken Arromdee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
On Tue, 6 Mar 2007, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Why don't we do the same thing with administrators? No need to do a
> global search & replace, just change the key pages and MediaWiki
> messages and leave old mentions of "adminship" on talk pages and such
> around. But change it to something like "janitor". Or at least
> something less formidable than "administrator", like "trusted user."

That'll be like claiming that RFCs, TFDs, etc. are not votes.  The main thing
you accomplish is that you make it easier to [[WP:BITE]] the newbies since
now everyone has to avoid certain shibboleths in order to be taken seriously.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Look Who's Using Wikipedia

body:
> As students begin their online research, they could view the
> prevalence of Wikipedia references in Google as proof of the accuracy
> and reliability of the source. Given the search exposure and sheer
> volume of data available on the site, they might fall into the trap of
> relying on a single source for their education.
What we *really* want is for people to pass through WP on the way to our
sources and references and external links, and use those for citations
instead of WP. I think we say that somewhere, but what else can we do to
drive home the point? I've added some really topnotch books as
references for articles, and yet when I go back to the library, those
books are still sitting on the shelves, when they should be checked out
nonstop.

Stan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
On Tue, 6 Mar 2007, John Lee wrote:
> You can argue that the meta stuff we do is essential to the encyclopaedia in
> the long run. But honestly, it doesn't matter to me whether we merge
> [[WP:V]] with [[WP:ATT]] or we delete some stupid RfC about a departed user,
> because I'll still be working on the encyclopaedia even if these things
> happen. And so will many others.

It should matter to you.  Becuase although it may not affect what you and
"many others" do, it will affect what many more do.  Having rules that make it
hard for people to work on the encyclopedia can have drastic, long term,
effects.


from_name: Brianna Laugher

body:
thanks for sharing all this info, anthere!
It's really nice to read and makes me feel positive that the people in
charge are working hard on transitioning to the kind of world-leading
and -influencing organisation that we all imagine WMF to be.

cheers
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise

On 06/03/07, Florence Devouard <anthere at anthere.org> wrote:
> this is not an official announcement
>
> ==========


from_name: Thomas Dalton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia "Commandments"

body:
> It really takes an American conservative to imply that Noah Webster changing spellings to make them incompatible with the Brits was acting 'conservatively'.

Actually, I think the American spellings are closer to the originals.
(I hate to admit it, though, since I'm British.)


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Commons-l] How non-free is Flash?

body:
2007/3/6, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>:
>
> How non-free do we consider Flash to be? The Gnash player appears to
> be making good progress. Would it be acceptable to permit useful Flash
> files which work in Gnash and don't require non-free codecs to be
> uploaded?
>
> I did not see any issues with patents mentioned in the relevant
> Wikipedia article. The old Macromedia Flash website lists a US patent
> on "creating gradient fills", but that seems so bizarre as to pose no
> real threat.
>
> (Let's keep this separate, for now, from the question when a format
> like Flash would be appropriate, content-wise. I'd like to fully
> understand the "freeness" first.)
>

I know too little about the specific case to say something about it, but in
my opinion the following should hold in freedoms:
* one should be free to create material in the format
* one should be free to change and republish what others have made in the
format, provided that other person agrees
* one should be free to build one's own program to show/play/whatever the
format and translate material in the format into other applicable formats
* one should be free to build one's own program to create or edit material
in the format
* the definition of the format should be freely available

Furthermore, there should also be some 'free as in beer' freedoms:
* free players should be available for all three major systems (Windows,
Linux and Mac)
* preferably, all common players and editors for that type of media should
support the format (that is, if Photoshop or GIMP does not support a certain
image format, it might be better to not include it)

Non-freedoms which in my opinion are NOT a reason to reject a format would
be:
* Not being allowed to change or extend the format itself
* Any patents that could not be used to encumber the abovementioned
freedoms, or for which the patent holder has explicitly stated to allow the
abovementioned without restrictions

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Essjay RFC deleted

body:
> Not really.  However long the RfC turns out to be it's not going to
> change the simple fact that EssJay is still only one person.  The lack
> of evidence that others have done this only tells me that this is a
> one-off situation.

Essjay is one person out of maybe half a dozen with a similar level of
responsibility. 1 out of 6 is quite a high rate...


from_name: Boris Eetgerink

body:
Virgil Ierubino wrote:
> On 06/03/07, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As Rob says, though, good luck trying to write an MW2 from scratch by
>> yourself that has a genuine superset of the functionality MW1 has
>> accumulated over a few years with a number of developers.
>
>
> I never seriously thought I could write a whole engine as good as MW on my
> own!
>
> But thanks for the replies now. You've managed to answer my question -
> sticking with PHP is, I'm sure, the way to go. I'll have to look into how to
> use AJAX with that. For the record again, I'm trying to work out these
> coding concepts so I can make my suggestions sensibly.

As you can see here: http://w3schools.com/ajax/default.asp PHP files can
be called from the Javascript code to handle the input and return the
output. It works just the same as ASP, only the server side coding is
different.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia "Commandments"

body:
"Thomas Dalton" wrote

> > It really takes an American conservative to imply that Noah Webster changing spellings to make them incompatible with the Brits was acting 'conservatively'.
>
> Actually, I think the American spellings are closer to the originals.
> (I hate to admit it, though, since I'm British.)

Yes, but that's not a Tory argument (as in Burke good, Rousseau bad).

Charles

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from_name: Zoney

subject: [WikiEN-l] a final word on Essjay

body:
On 04/03/07, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
>
> It is my sincere hope that people will just stop discussing this whole
> Essjay episode ad nauseum.
>
> Here is someone who made a mistake. You may even say a big mistake.
> For  that
> mistake he lost his credibility, he lost his community, he lost his  job
> at
> Wikia, and he is the subject of disparaging articles and opinions  both
> online
> and in print.
>
> Apart from a public lynching, what else do people want from him?
>
> Let him go in peace. There is no need to stomp on every last shred of
> dignity he still has.
>
> Danny
>
>
>
Surely what people should be more worried about are the inherent flaws in
Wikipedia's organisation rather than Essjay in particular.

I would suspect some of the attention on Essjay personally is partly people
avoiding some awkward realities about the bigger picture.

Zoney
--
~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Commons-l] How non-free is Flash?

body:
In a related question, how free is PDF? The format may not be altered
and still called "PDF", but everyone including the FSF can live with
that. There's plenty of non-Adobe PDF creators and readers. What there
is a lack of is editors, but it's essentially a write-once format in
any case.

- d.


from_name: George Chriss

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
Some good alternatives to janitor:

http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/janitor

Personally, I like "super," "doorkeeper," and "watchman."  I agree that a simple
name change doesn't alter underlying culture, but small steps can add up
quickly.

Thanks, George
en_wp: [[User:GChriss]]
irc.freenode.net: GChriss


from_name: cohesion

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
On 3/6/07, Ron Ritzman <ritzman at gmail.com> wrote:

> If a user tries to edit a page and can't because he is blocked,
> whether he deserved it or not it's an insult to his intelligence to
> tell him it was "cleanup" by a "janitor". I came to this list a few
> years ago because I was blocked for a month, my whole ISP was because
> of one vandal with an army of sock puppets and a slew of throwaway ISP
> accounts. You are not going to get me to believe that drastic action
> was done by the guy who mops the server room floor.
>
> I say continue to call them what they are, "Administrators".

I do think janitors is a problem, because it sort of implies normal
users are the kind of people that are constantly making messes. I do
spend a lot of time reading what people online say about wikipedia,
and admins are nearly unanimously misunderstood. I do think a name
change would be helpful. Custodian isn't too pretentious, and it
implies caretaking, while at the same time not having too strong an
implication that people need cleanup up after.

Another idea, how about Caretaker? That kinda makes me think of
keeping a garden, which isn't a bad analogy at all.

Judson
enwiki:cohesion


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Audio file sizes

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

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
[snip]
> Thoughts on this?  On using a bot vs some native support?

Definitely prefer native support, as with images.

The way we handle thumbnailing with arbitrary sizes kind of sucks,
though: making only specific versions, and probably generating them on
upload, would be most sensible.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFF7ad2wRnhpk1wk44RAgAzAKDaw6zUjn9LjcojCxM5KXgTGbWTkgCgj5TF
Yr0J3BJF215Yvrr8o4VoiHI=
=nMtD
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

body:
On Mar 6, 2007, at 11:47 AM, wikien-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org wrote:

> Actually the right thing to do, in case of a false start as editor,
> is a 'chrysalis move', if I could call it that. Shed the old
> account while bringing in a new one, dropping a note to the ArbCom
> about what you're doing and why. Not good for the edit count,
> maybe, but much better for the soul.

Sure, that's one possible approach, but as long as Wikipedia lacks an
explicit policy stating that Wikipedians should be honest even on
their user pages, editors may not realize that they need to avoid
what they see as "harmless" deceptions.

--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
|     Banana Republicans
|     The Best War Ever
--------------------------------
|  Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting:
|  http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html
|
|  Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting:
|  https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118
--------------------------------


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com wrote:

>"Erik Moeller" wrote
>
>
>
>>Why don't we do the same thing with administrators?
>>
>>
>
>We could call them, I don't know, sysops.
>
>I'm not convinced there is a serious problem to solve here.
>
>
As they say, exceptional cases make for bad law, and letting PR concerns
run the show is even worse.

-Mark


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
Hi all,
  Not sure if I've seen any discussion of this, but this was interesting:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/wikipedia-foes-set-up-right-site/2007/03/02/1172868789933.html

Their "Conservapedia Commandments" are intetresting too:
#  Everything you post must be true and verifiable.
# Always cite and give credit to your sources, even if in the public domain.
# Edits/new pages must be family-friendly, clean, concise, and without
gossip or foul language.
# When referencing dates based on the approximate birth of Jesus, give
appropriate credit for the basis of the date (B.C. or A.D.). "BCE" and
"CE" are unacceptable substitutes because they deny the historical
basis. See CE.
# As much as is possible, American spelling of words must be used.[1]
# Do not post personal opinion on an encyclopedia entry.

I find it bizarre that the CE/AD thing is so important that it rates a
mention in the Commandments. And the "true and verifiable" is a cute
reference to our "verifiable, not true" :)

Steve


from_name: Keith Old

subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
On 3/6/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
> Not sure if I've seen any discussion of this, but this was interesting:
>
>
> http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/wikipedia-foes-set-up-right-site/2007/03/02/1172868789933.html
>
> Their "Conservapedia Commandments" are intetresting too:
> #  Everything you post must be true and verifiable.
> # Always cite and give credit to your sources, even if in the public
> domain.
> # Edits/new pages must be family-friendly, clean, concise, and without
> gossip or foul language.
> # When referencing dates based on the approximate birth of Jesus, give
> appropriate credit for the basis of the date (B.C. or A.D.). "BCE" and
> "CE" are unacceptable substitutes because they deny the historical
> basis. See CE.
> # As much as is possible, American spelling of words must be used.[1]
> # Do not post personal opinion on an encyclopedia entry.
>
> I find it bizarre that the CE/AD thing is so important that it rates a
> mention in the Commandments. And the "true and verifiable" is a cute
> reference to our "verifiable, not true" :)
>
> Steve
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list

WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

Steve,

Thanks for the link.

It probably isn't that surprising that a site set by conservative Christians
in the US is keen on AD rather than CE.

Many of the other policies have probably been cribbed from us given that we
are the only online encyclopedia that publishes our guidelines online.

It will be interesting to see what they produce. I also wonder if they have
compatible licenses.

Regards

*Keith Old*


from_name: Simetrical

body:
On 3/6/07, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's just
> that I have so many ideas for a better wiki engine that it would be almost
> ridiculous to suggest them as additions to MediaWiki. They comprise a new
> engine in themselves (one that would obviously be written to work with any
> MediaWiki database), and I was just wondering which languages were preferred
> for an implementation so that I could scale any suggestions I made to that.

Well, two things here.  First of all, "obviously be written to work
with any MediaWiki database" is not at all obvious, and borders on
impossible.  There are a huge number of little quirks and corner cases
in the code, especially in the parser, that people will have come to
expect and rely upon even if they weren't originally intended.
Reproducing every single one of those is impossible and probably not
even desirable, but it should be borne in mind that a rewrite will
*never* behave the same way as the original except broadly.

Second of all, to achieve even approximately the same functionality,
so that people could carry on what they were doing without having to
go through major adaptation, you will quite literally have to rewrite
every line individually into your new language of choice, test to make
sure there aren't glaring problems, and then refactor the code if you
like.  Essentially, to keep the same featureset you'll basically need
to keep the same codebase, and in that case, all your improvements
will have to be incremental anyway.  So you may as well make the
incremental changes in PHP.

On 3/6/07, Virgil Ierubino <virgil.ierubino at gmail.com> wrote:
> But thanks for the replies now. You've managed to answer my question -
> sticking with PHP is, I'm sure, the way to go.

Well, I never said *that*.  IMO you should go with Python or something
if you wanted to rewrite MW.  (Of course, the downside there is that
then all the Perl-lovers will hate MediaWiki *and* its developers
eternally, whereas now everyone can loathe the language it's written
in in total harmony, but there's always a cost.)  But as stated, it's
probably not a good idea to rewrite MW.


from_name: Earle Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
On 06/03/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Why don't we do the same thing with administrators? No need to do a
> global search & replace, just change the key pages and MediaWiki
> messages and leave old mentions of "adminship" on talk pages and such
> around. But change it to something like "janitor". Or at least
> something less formidable than "administrator", like "trusted user."

How about "housekeeper"? It's a term with a long history in the wiki context:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020621223248/http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?VolunteerHousekeeper

> Seriously, people.

Quite.

--
Earle Martin
            http://downlode.org/
http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/


subject:
[Wikitech-l] [MediaWiki-CVS] SVN: [20174]
	branches/REL1_9/phase3/languages/messages/MessagesHe.php

body:
On 3/6/07, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06/03/07, rotem at svn.wikimedia.org <rotem at svn.wikimedia.org> wrote:
> > Revision: 20174
> > Author:   rotem
> > Date:     2007-03-06 06:50:45 -0800 (Tue, 06 Mar 2007)
> >
> > Log Message:
> > -----------
> > Fix.
>
> Are these critical?

They're changing plural to singular, i.e., "$1 bytes" to "$1 byte".
Presumably the latter is more correct in Hebrew, but I can't see how
there would be much confusion, so no, doesn't seem critical.