subject: [Foundation-l] Re: NEH grant

body:
Anthere wrote:

> Christopher Mahan wrote:
>
>> I too wish to express my misgivings at getting the grant. There's
>> always strings attached, and targets have to be met, and so on. Who's
>> gonna run it? Who's gonna keep track of the money, the milestones,
>> etc...
>>
>> I would rather mav publish a monthly budget and post that to the
>> front page, like this:
>>
>> This month, we need $4000 to meet expenses. So far, users have
>> contributed $2800. Thank you!
>>
>> If budget is met, then you write:
>> This month's budget has been met. Thank you!
>>
>>
>> It needs to be updated daily.
>
> I strongly disagree with this.
> A budget is not something you balance week per week or even month per
> month. We must plan it. In advance. A budget is something you have to
> organise, to take into account structural needs, contingencies, and
> see how to best use the remaining.

With respect to budgets, and also with respect to the financial
management involved in running a grant, Anthere is quite right. The
people who have to do the actual work cannot get the job done if they
have to spend half or more of their time keeping everyone constantly
updated on what they're doing.

However, it would be nice to see more frequent updates just about
fundraising progress, which is what this suggestion focuses on. Those
who are particularly interested in this should be encouraged to donate
the funds necessary so that we can start paying Mav a salary. Otherwise,
it's unfair to expect anyone to assume that burden.

--Michael Snow


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: NEH grant


list: wikien-l

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Abusive email

body:
Mark Richards wrote:

>Well, I didn't appreciate your trolling on my talk
>page, if that's what you are refering to, in general
>though, I do love the ability of talk and user pages
>to represent a diverse range of views. If you want to
>call that trolling, then fine, but it's not a very
>useful definition.
>Mark
>
>--- Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com <http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l>> wrote:
>> This from Mister "I love trolls."
>>
>> RickK
>
I originally thought this subject heading meant that the posts were
_about_ abusive email, not that they _contained_ abusive email. Could
people be so kind as to conduct their personal disputes by private
email? Wikiquette applies on the mailing lists, just like on the wiki
itself.

I haven't checked who does or does not have email delivery enabled
through Wikipedia, but the email addresses of everyone in this little
squabble have been made available through the messages on this list. So
people should be perfectly capable of sending and receiving their
abusive emails without bothering everyone else.

--Michael Snow
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list: wikitech-l

from_name: David Iberri

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikitech-l Digest, Vol 12, Issue 13

body:
--- Bill Clark <wclarkxoom at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Jul 2004 01:03:19 -0400, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > It's not really that complicated, either.
>
> Oh, I think I'm underestimating the problem here.  The stub category
> doesn't just provide a conveniently formatted list, it also
> automatically removes stubs once the template/category link is removed
> from the article.  The method I had in mind would require people to
> edit the list once they expanded a stub, which is more work for
> contributors.

A weekly (or some other frequency) dump of stubs would circumvent this problem.

-- David Iberri


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Category:Stub

body:
Did anyone look at [[Category:Stub]] lately? Well, "There are 10483
articles in this category." And they are all on one page.

Seems we need to break down large categories into several pages after
all. What would be a good number of article links per page? 500? That
would make 21 pages and counting, for this special case.

I'm still fighting with my Linux setup, so it might be a few days before
I can get back into business ;-)

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WHEELER's anti-Semitism

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:

> This brings up a question that I'd like answered: Given that Wikipedia
> is *not* a public forum, can it or its owner be sued for libel?
>
> What happens, for example, if an anonymous user with a determined
> attitude insists on posting something claiming that Michael Moore is a
> pedophile? Since the anonymous user's identity can't be traced,
> Moore's only recourse would be to sue the MediaWiki foundation. And
> even if the user is banned, he could come back forever and keep
> posting the claim on different articles under different sock-puppet IDs.
>
> Doesn't this put Wikipedia in the difficult position of being legally
> responsible for behavior that it doesn't have the power to control?

First of all, it's not necessarily impossible to trace the source of the
information, whether this hypothetical libeller has a username or is
editing as an IP. In a court case, the Wikimedia Foundation might be
required to disclose information to assist in the tracing process. That
sounds more likely to me than being sued directly. Of course, there
would be costs to being involved in a lawsuit, even if we're not being
asked to pay damages.

Since we can't control the behavior, the appropriate way for an injured
party to handle this would be to complain to the Foundation and ask it
to remove the libel (including possibly removing it from the page
history entirely). This is similar to the procedure expected for
copyright violations. I don't see how a sensible court could find the
Foundation at fault unless it continued to publish the libel after a
complaint had been made.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Adding features to Mediawiki

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> For upwards compatibility on upgrading existing wikis, I'd recommend
> using user_email for the 'unconfirmed' address and adding something like
> 'user_confirmed_email' for the confirmed one; thus users would be given
> the opportunity to confirm their e-mail address when they next visit.

I'm not sure why you want two different e-mail fields? Why not just have
a boolean "address confirmed yes/no" field?

Timwi


from_name: Evan Prodromou

body:
> Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>
>>Did anyone look at [[Category:Stub]] lately? Well, "There are 10483
>>articles in this category." And they are all on one page.
>>
>>Seems we need to break down large categories into several pages after
>>all. What would be a good number of article links per page? 500? That
>>would make 21 pages and counting, for this special case.
>
>
> A better solution might be to use this as an opportunity to look at
> these articles to see if they really are stubs.  If not the stub message
> could be deleted.  In the others there is no shortage of work to be
> done. :-)

A third idea is to consider whether Category:stub makes any sense at all.

It's probably a bad idea to conflate the *subject* of an article with
the *article* itself. World War II was a war; [[World War II]] is 57,382
characters long. World War II was not 57,382 characters long; [[World
War II]] is not a war (usually).

A category describes the subject, not the article. The only stuff that
should be in [[Category:stub]] is [[nubbin]] and [[stump]].

It would be useful to have metadata about the article; categories are a
bad way to implement that.

~ESP


list: foundation-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender

body:
This problem with the adress wikilegal-l being
inserted in some messages has been going on for a
while now;

It is a problem with gname, and I have no idea how to
fix it.

I just know that it makes all those prefixed messages
refused by the mailing list system.

I suggested that those still posting to wikilegal-l
remove the adress from their mails, and only post to
foundation-l, so that it does not break the gname
system. But ... :-(

Would anyone caring for mailing list has an idea how
to fix this problem ?

-----

my answer to Michael is at the end of this message :-)

ant

--- Mail Delivery System
<MAILER-DAEMON at mail.wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Date: Fri,  9 Jul 2004 06:11:37 +0000 (UTC)
> From: MAILER-DAEMON at mail.wikimedia.org (Mail
> Delivery System)
> Subject: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender
> To: gowl-wikilegal-l at m.gmane.org
>
> This is the Postfix program at host
> mail.wikimedia.org.
>
> I'm sorry to have to inform you that the message
> returned
> below could not be delivered to one or more
> destinations.
>
> For further assistance, please send mail to
> <postmaster>
>
> If you do so, please include this problem report.
> You can
> delete your own text from the message returned
> below.
>
> 			The Postfix program
>
> <wikilegal-l at wikimedia.org>: unknown user:
> "wikilegal-l"
>

> ATTACHMENT part 2 message/delivery-status

> ATTACHMENT part 3 message/rfc822
> To: wikilegal-l at wikimedia.org
> From: Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Re: NEH grant
> Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2004 08:13:05 +0200
> CC: foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>
>
>
> Michael Snow wrote:
> > Anthere wrote:
> >
> >> Christopher Mahan wrote:
> >>
> >>> I too wish to express my misgivings at getting
> the grant. There's
> >>> always strings attached, and targets have to be
> met, and so on. Who's
> >>> gonna run it? Who's gonna keep track of the
> money, the milestones,
> >>> etc...
> >>>
> >>> I would rather mav publish a monthly budget and
> post that to the
> >>> front page, like this:
> >>>
> >>> This month, we need $4000 to meet expenses. So
> far, users have
> >>> contributed $2800. Thank you!
> >>>
> >>> If budget is met, then you write:
> >>> This month's budget has been met. Thank you!
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> It needs to be updated daily.
> >>
> >>
> >> I strongly disagree with this.
> >> A budget is not something you balance week per
> week or even month per
> >> month. We must plan it. In advance. A budget is
> something you have to
> >> organise, to take into account structural needs,
> contingencies, and
> >> see how to best use the remaining.
> >
> >
> > With respect to budgets, and also with respect to
> the financial
> > management involved in running a grant, Anthere is
> quite right. The
> > people who have to do the actual work cannot get
> the job done if they
> > have to spend half or more of their time keeping
> everyone constantly
> > updated on what they're doing.
> >
> > However, it would be nice to see more frequent
> updates just about
> > fundraising progress, which is what this
> suggestion focuses on.
>
> I agree.
> This is planned to be on the new fundation website,
> as part of the
> feedback the organisation can provide donors.
>
> For more information about the new website content,
> see
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_website
>
> Please add to the page :-)
>
>
>

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
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from_name: Bill Clark

body:
On Thu, 08 Jul 2004 23:47:56 -0400, Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org> wrote:

> It would be useful to have metadata about the article; categories are a
> bad way to implement that.

Yes, I think that sums it up perfectly.  There really shouldn't be any
debate here -- a category for stubs is a bad idea, but there's still a
definite need for useful metadata pages.

If it's category-like functionality that's desired, how hard would it
be to duplicate and tweak some of the category code to create a new
tool for displaying this metadata?  Or would it be simpler to just
create a new tool entirely?

-Bill Clark

p.s. Hello, world!  I'm a newcomer, a dot-com veteran doing consulting
work now and thinking of heading back for a PhD in philosophy next
year.  I only got my copy of the wikidb loaded and my MediaWiki
running yesterday, but once I get the time I'll hopefully be
contributing some patches and helping out any other way I can.


from_name: J. Grant

subject: [Wikitech-l] [Fwd: Re: Wikipedia - cookie error]

body:
Hello,

I was directed to email this query here from Jimmy.

> Hello,
>
> All web sites are blocked by default from setting cookies on my system.
>  Now the wikipedia is on the blocked list.  Would it be possible to add
> the specific fully qualified host address of the computer which you
> require cookies to be enabled from please?  Otherwise I get a bizarre
> error with no way of finding out which server you are requesting I
> remove from the blocked list!
>
>
> Kind regards
>
>
> JG
>
>
> This is the present message:
> ==================================================
> The user account was created, but you are not logged in. Wikipedia uses
> cookies to log in users. You have cookies disabled. Please enable them,
> then log in with your new username and password.
> ==================================================
>
>


body:
On Fri, 9 Jul 2004 06:10:46 +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> wrote:

> Coding metadata as categories works just as well.

It may work just as well for the concept of 'category' but it doesn't
work as well as a custom tool would, from an implementation
standpoint.

There are enough stubs that we're in no danger of running out.  The
real problem is that there's no convenient interface for searching
through all of them -- EXCEPT by using the stub category interface.

But the same list can simply be generated from a backup copy of the
database, and formatted so that it has the same type of format as a
category view would.  It wouldn't be real-time, but  simple perl
script could create the proper files from periodic database updates
(and that should be more than sufficient for our purposes).

Stubs are bad enough without having them chew up cycles on the central
database too.

-Bill Clark


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] NEH grant

body:
--- Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Jul 2004 14:28:46 -0700 (PDT), Christopher Mahan
> And we should renew our efforts to get support through donation, no
> matter what.  Demonstrating a strong ongoing base of community support will
> help overcome the obstacle of not yet being a proper 501c3.

I completely agree.

> I agree wholeheartedly with this:
>
> > I would rather mav publish a monthly budget and post that to the
> > front page, like this:

A monthly budget will require a monthly trustee meeting to approve such a
document before posting. But doing so on the front page of any Wikimedia
website seems to be like begging to me (or at least too much emphasis on
financial matters). A permanent link and/or mention on the fundraising page
along with a temporary mention on every page during fund drives seems to be
enough, IMO.

> We should spur donations right away.  I hope we are planning to
> get new machines in the coming week(s?); we need to replace the
> money we are spending.  $2500 a month sounds like a reasonable
> budget estimate for the rest of the year, and I think we could easily
> meet that need through contributions.

I have forecasted that we will need to spend between $25,000 to $30,000 on
hardware this quarter to keep up with the projected increase in traffic over
last quarter. If our growth rate continues at 90% compounded quarterly, then we
should expect to have to spend a bit less than twice that amount in Q4.

Things get a bit scary after that if we continue growing at the same rate (I'm
still working on mitigating factors such as Moores law and still need to check
with the developers to see if page requests, visits, or something else are a
better measure of traffic - I've been using page requests).

In short - $2500 per month will not be enough.

Also, with all those servers the need for a full time on-site server admin
increases.

Daniel Mayer,
Wikimedia CFO

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


subject: [Foundation-l] NEH grant


body:
On Fri, 9 Jul 2004 06:53:13 +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> wrote:

> Why should we use such a complicated setup (with perl scripts and backup copies)
> when simple category would work just as well ?

Because the category method puts more load on the wikimedia database.
I think if it's something that can be done offline from the main
servers, it's something that should be done offline from the main
servers.  The site is too slow as it is.

It's not really that complicated, either.  Now that I have my own
local backup, I'll simply build the tool and show you what I mean.
I'll probably get to it this weekend.

Cheers,

-Bill Clark


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: NEH grant

body:
--- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> ...
> However, it would be nice to see more frequent updates just about
> fundraising progress, which is what this suggestion focuses on. Those
> who are particularly interested in this should be encouraged to donate
> the funds necessary so that we can start paying Mav a salary. Otherwise,
> it's unfair to expect anyone to assume that burden.

Actually please don't donate money for that - giving me money will not increase
the number of hours in the day or reduce the number of hours I need to sleep
(Wikipedia/Wikimedia is nearly a second full time job for me). Also, doing so
would only add a small incentive for me to do more work in this area since I
strongly suspect that such pay would pale in comparison to what I now receive
as a GIS specialist (thus I would have to keep my day job). A full time server
admin is far more important.

More voluneers welcome in the finance department. :)

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: NEH grant


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: NEH grant

body:
--- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> ...
> However, it would be nice to see more frequent updates just about
> fundraising progress, which is what this suggestion focuses on. Those
> who are particularly interested in this should be encouraged to donate
> the funds necessary so that we can start paying Mav a salary. Otherwise,
> it's unfair to expect anyone to assume that burden.

Actually please don't donate money for that - giving me money will not increase
the number of hours in the day or reduce the number of hours I need to sleep
(Wikipedia/Wikimedia is nearly a second full time job for me). Also, doing so
would only add a small incentive for me to do more work in this area since I
strongly suspect that such pay would pale in comparison to what I now receive
as a GIS specialist (thus I would have to keep my day job). A full time server
admin is far more important.

More voluneers welcome in the finance department. :)

-- mav

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


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: NEH grant


body:
On Fri, 9 Jul 2004 01:03:19 -0400, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's not really that complicated, either.

Oh, I think I'm underestimating the problem here.  The stub category
doesn't just provide a conveniently formatted list, it also
automatically removes stubs once the template/category link is removed
from the article.  The method I had in mind would require people to
edit the list once they expanded a stub, which is more work for
contributors.

I'll shut up and think about things some more, now. :)

-Bill Clark


body:
On Fri, 9 Jul 2004 07:14:10 +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> wrote:

> Do you have any numbers to back this claim ?

I was comparing the category method (which requires frequent hits to
the database) to what basically amounted to a user-maintained list.  I
think it's pretty obvious that the list would put a lot less load on
the server -- but as I realized last email, the user-maintained list
doesn't give equivalent functionality to the category method, so it's
not a fair comparison anyway.

>From some of the discussion on the talk page for the stub template
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Stub ) it looks as if the
category method does result in duplicating information in the database
(since the list of pages linking to the template would   essentially
be identical to the category list).

So, comparing apples to apples, it still might be a better idea to
modify the "what links here" page so that it has a display closer to
that of a category listing.  That would give the functionality
desired, without having to maintain two nearly identical and very
large tables in the database.

-Bill Clark


body:
On Thu, 8 Jul 2004 22:39:16 -0700 (PDT), David Iberri <diberri at yahoo.com> wrote:

> A weekly (or some other frequency) dump of stubs would circumvent this problem.

A weekly dump would probably be sufficient for bringing in fresh new
stubs, but it might be irritating to have to wait a week for
already-expanded stubs to disappear from the list.

I'm figuring that many of the existing stubs are on the list for a
reason (i.e. nobody wants to expand them) and that a good portion of
the stub expansion is happening to just the newest stubs.

So with a weekly-updated list, the dedicated group of stub expanders
may find that most of the new interesting-sounding links end up taking
them to articles that are no longer stubs.  That would irritate me, I
know.

-Bill Clark


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: NEH grant

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:
> I too wish to express my misgivings at getting the grant. There's
> always strings attached, and targets have to be met, and so on. Who's
> gonna run it? Who's gonna keep track of the money, the milestones,
> etc...
>
> I would rather mav publish a monthly budget and post that to the
> front page, like this:
>
> This month, we need $4000 to meet expenses. So far, users have
> contributed $2800. Thank you!
>
> If budget is met, then you write:
>
> This month's budget has been met. Thank you!
>
>
> It needs to be updated daily.

I strongly disagree with this.
A budget is not something you balance week per week or even month per
month. We must plan it. In advance. A budget is something you have to
organise, to take into account structural needs, contingencies, and see
how to best use the remaining.

This month, we will spent about 12000 dollars in hardware. I think the
best way is to have this money available in advance, and plan spending
it on time. Not to call for donations during two weeks, then wait 2
weekds for shipping.

I also am not very motivated by the idea of asking money all the time.
That is just showing we do not manage well our funds.
I think it much more positive that we make a call for donation just a
couple of time a year, that donations are set in such a way that they
can be monthly donation, and that the call for donation is made in
parallele to a nice press release.

> I think we can raise more money that way than through grants

> Furtehrmore, once grant moeny starts rolling in, users will be able
> to say: they're funded by grant money, so I'll not contribute.

But asking money all the time will make them think we are heavy, and do
not know how to manage money.

------

Okay, donations is one way to raise money, and we should use it.
It is best that donations calls are made during a special event, when we
can see we are just great.

In about 2 to 3 months, Wikipedia will be 1 000 000 articles.
This is a very serious milestone.
We should at this occasion make a third global press release (this is a
global milestone).

This press release should focus on hardware and software issues and
needs. In short "We have reached an amazing size, but this amazing size
requires a lot of technical resources to go on working. Please help us".
We should focus in particular on potential technical help, and send it
to any hardware magazine (without forgetting more general networks of
course).

2 months will be there very soon.
I suggest that we start working on that press release very soon.

Part of it could be quite general (and this part could be sent to
general networks), but a good deal of it should insist on our current
technical situation. In short, what we are using, how we are organised
for maintenance, what is needed in terms of software developement, which
skills would be most needed, what hardware could help etc...

It would be nice to add to the general part, information such as
relevant figures or evolution graphs, so that people can gap in amazement

* number of hits per day
* number of pages visited per day
* number of contributors
* size of the database across the ages (well...)
* part of the different wikipedias compared to the whole project
* etc...

Have these all automatically generated as small graphs in as many
languages as possible in one new statistical page. Then, any press
release can use them (include them) in the press release. There are few
things less meaningful than a nice graph.

When we reach the 1 000 000, we send the press release. And put up the
donation banner, plus links for anyone willing to bring help in more
"physical" manner.


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: NEH grant


from_name: Angela

subject:
[Foundation-l] Tim Starling appointed to the position of Developer
	Liaison

body:
The Wikimedia Board would like to announce that Tim Starling has been
appointed to the official position of developer liaison.

Brion Vibber is currently on a wikibreak, but it is expected than he
might also hold an official position related to development tasks when
he is back.

The Board would like to encourage the creation of a developer
committee whereby certain developers are assigned responsibility for
ensuring that tasks, such as buying servers, are carried out in an
efficient and timely way. It is expected that a number of non-official
positions will be created by this committee, and that particular
developers can be named in certain roles if the committee feel that
would be beneficial.
Tim Starling's role would include documenting the activities of this
committee so the community are aware of who to contact about different
issues, and to ensure smooth communication between developers.

The title is not meant to imply they Tim Starling does, or is expected
to do, more development work than anyone else. He will be the first
point of contact between the developers and the Board. The aim of this
position is to improve communication, both within the development
team, and between them, the Board and the community.

Angela Beesley
On behalf on the Wikimedia Foundation


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Tim Starling appointed to the position of Developer
	Liaison


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: NEH grant

body:
> By the way, what are you still doing up? heh :)
>
> =====
> Chris Mahan

I was gonna answer you, when I read that sentence...
Yes, true.
Off to bed I am :-)


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: NEH grant


subject:
[Foundation-l] Tim Starling appointed to the position of
	Developer Liaison

body:
On Fri, 9 Jul 2004 10:00:44 +0800, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote:
> Excellent news.  Is there an "org chart" that has all this info in one
> place? Thanks for keeping us updated on all this.

Just http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_position at the moment.
There will be a clearer list of positions on the new Wikimedia
Foundation website which is under development at
http://wikimedia.org/wiki/ .

Angela.


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fewer personal remarks, please

body:
Personal remarks are out of place on this mailing list. Please consider
whether statements like the following are of any value to our purpose of
improving the Wikipedia:

* I didn't appreciate your trolling
* I would reccomend that you simply unsubscribe from the mailing list
* You should take a course in Wiki etiquette

Ed Poor
English Wikipedia Mailing List Administrator


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Thu, Jul 08, 2004 at 11:47:56PM -0400, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> A third idea is to consider whether Category:stub makes any sense at all.
>
> It's probably a bad idea to conflate the *subject* of an article with
> the *article* itself. World War II was a war; [[World War II]] is 57,382
> characters long. World War II was not 57,382 characters long; [[World
> War II]] is not a war (usually).
>
> A category describes the subject, not the article. The only stuff that
> should be in [[Category:stub]] is [[nubbin]] and [[stump]].
>
> It would be useful to have metadata about the article; categories are a
> bad way to implement that.

Is there any reason why should categories be limited to semantics ?
Coding metadata as categories works just as well.


body:
On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 12:45:05AM -0400, Bill Clark wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Jul 2004 06:10:46 +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> wrote:
>
> > Coding metadata as categories works just as well.
>
> It may work just as well for the concept of 'category' but it doesn't
> work as well as a custom tool would, from an implementation
> standpoint.
>
> There are enough stubs that we're in no danger of running out.  The
> real problem is that there's no convenient interface for searching
> through all of them -- EXCEPT by using the stub category interface.
>
> But the same list can simply be generated from a backup copy of the
> database, and formatted so that it has the same type of format as a
> category view would.  It wouldn't be real-time, but  simple perl
> script could create the proper files from periodic database updates
> (and that should be more than sufficient for our purposes).
>
> Stubs are bad enough without having them chew up cycles on the central
> database too.

Why should we use such a complicated setup (with perl scripts and backup copies)
when simple category would work just as well ?


body:
On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 01:03:19AM -0400, Bill Clark wrote:
> Because the category method puts more load on the wikimedia database.
> I think if it's something that can be done offline from the main
> servers, it's something that should be done offline from the main
> servers.  The site is too slow as it is.

Do you have any numbers to back this claim ?


from_name: David Link

subject: [Wikitech-l] work to do

body:
Hi everybody,

I read on slashdot that you are looking for php / mysql coders. I would
be willing to help because I admire your project. I am  programming
java, php, c, html, mysql etc since 97, so I think I could be able to
contribute. Please write to david at khm dot de directly to give me
hints what to do.

Thanks,

David

___
David Link
Alpha60 technologies
E: david at khm.de
W: http://alpha60.de


from_name: Andrew Lih

body:
Excellent news.  Is there an "org chart" that has all this info in one
place? Thanks for keeping us updated on all this.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Fri, 9 Jul 2004 02:16:28 +0100, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> The Wikimedia Board would like to announce that Tim Starling has been
> appointed to the official position of developer liaison.
>
> Brion Vibber is currently on a wikibreak, but it is expected than he
> might also hold an official position related to development tasks when
> he is back.
>
> The Board would like to encourage the creation of a developer
> committee whereby certain developers are assigned responsibility for
> ensuring that tasks, such as buying servers, are carried out in an
> efficient and timely way. It is expected that a number of non-official
> positions will be created by this committee, and that particular
> developers can be named in certain roles if the committee feel that
> would be beneficial.
> Tim Starling's role would include documenting the activities of this
> committee so the community are aware of who to contact about different
> issues, and to ensure smooth communication between developers.
>
> The title is not meant to imply they Tim Starling does, or is expected
> to do, more development work than anyone else. He will be the first
> point of contact between the developers and the Board. The aim of this
> position is to improve communication, both within the development
> team, and between them, the Board and the community.
>
> Angela Beesley
> On behalf on the Wikimedia Foundation
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Andrew Lih
University of Hong Kong
andrew.lih at gmail.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikitech-l Digest, Vol 11, Issue 1

body:
I suddenly received this digest in my mail box, while
I am not registered to receive ANY of the wikipedia
mailing lists.

What happened ? How come it was turned on while I did
not request it ?

:-)

--- wikitech-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:
> Send Wikitech-l mailing list submissions to
> 	wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web,
> visit
>
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body
> 'help' to
> 	wikitech-l-request at Wikipedia.org
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> 	wikitech-l-owner at Wikipedia.org
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it
> is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of Wikitech-l digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Re: Wikipedia mysql dump (Brion Vibber)
>    2. wikiDE-l problems (Kurt Jansson)
>    3. Re: mediawiki 1,3 (Anthere)
>    4. Re: Problem with templates and the left
> navigation (Brion Vibber)
>    5. Re: Database Error on 1.3beta3 (Brion Vibber)
>    6. Re: SMILES again (Magnus Manske)
>    7. Re: Re: Categories in 1.3beta (Tomasz
> Wegrzanowski)
>    8. Re: Re: Ariel as a slow query server (Stan
> Shebs)
>    9. Re: br.wikipedia.org broken (database not
> backed up)
>       (Brion Vibber)
>   10. Number of watchers of an article (Marco Krohn)
>   11. Re: Adding features to Mediawiki (Timwi)
>
>
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 4 May 2004 13:18:33 -0700
> From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia mysql dump
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <37648472-9E08-11D8-93B4-000A95DAA284 at pobox.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII;
> format=flowed
>
> On May 4, 2004, at 12:12, Miran Bozicevic wrote:
> > I would like to get hold of a current dump of the
> Wikipedia data for
> > research
> > purposes; Jim Wales said I could just download it
> from somewhere.
> > Could anyone
> > let me know where that would be?
>
> http://download.wikimedia.org/
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 05 May 2004 00:31:17 +0100
> From: Kurt Jansson <jansson at gmx.net>
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] wikiDE-l problems
> To: wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> Message-ID: <409827C5.8010203 at gmx.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1;
> format=flowed
>
> There seems to be a strange problem with wikiDE-l: I
> didn't get any
> messages from April 17 to 20. Another person
> reported the same. And
> yesterday someone said he didn't get any digests
> since May 1.
>
> Could someone please look into this? Thanks!
>
>
> Kurt
>
> --
>   http://leihnetzwerk.de -- Teile B?cher, Videos und
> CDs mit anderen!
>   http://wikipedia.de    -- Arbeite mit bei der
> freien Enzyklop?die!
>   Kurt Jansson, Wiener Str. 7, 10999 Berlin,
> http://jansson.de
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 00:57:35 +0200
> From: Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: mediawiki 1,3
> To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Message-ID: <40B27DDF.10304 at yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1;
> format=flowed
>
>
>
> Evan Prodromou a ?crit:
> >>>>>>"A" == Anthere  <anthere9 at yahoo.com> writes:
> >>>>>
> >
> >     A> Hi, I know it is a lot of work and stress
> for some of you, so I
> >     A> hardly dare asking this.  Wikipedia will be
> presented (with a
> >     A> demo of the website), on tuesday, during a
> meeting in Lyon. It
> >     A> will likely be tuesday morning or beginning
> of afternoon,
> >     A> France time.  Please, do the best you can
> so that at least
> >     A> either the french (preferably) or the
> english wikipedia works
> >     A> at that time, so that we can show a
> successful website, rather
> >     A> than a non accessible one.
> >
> > Have you thought about setting up a local mirror
> to use for the
> > presentation?
> >
> > ~ESP
>
> Euh Evan... this is a good idea for a computer-able
> person :-(
> Which is hardly a description fitting with me. What
> I love with
> Wikipedia, is that I can edit it without needing to
> learn all these
> complicated things about ... well about things I
> really know nothing
> about :-(
>
> but thanks for the suggestion
>
> (keep the site working for me please ;-))
>
> ant
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 12:03:10 -0700
> From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Problem with templates and
> the left
> 	navigation
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <40CA01EE.5060701 at pobox.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Jens Wolfgarten wrote:
> > First of all, I want to change the left
> navigation. Can you please tell me,
> > where I can archive this? Where can I change the
> header and the footer and
> > so on?
>
> There's not a clean way to do this; mess around with
> Skin.php to get
> what you want.
>
> > Moreover I want to use templates. From everything
> I read, I just have to
> > insert a link in the form {{test}}. The wiki
> should automatically display
> > an edit link. I can't make this work. Can you
> please help me? My wiki only
> > displays {{test}} as plain text.
>
> Sounds like you're running 1.2. Templates are in
> 1.3.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 13:22:26 -0700
> From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Database Error on 1.3beta3
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <40D1FD82.4050302 at pobox.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> tic at tictric.net wrote:
> > When attempting to delete a page I get an Database
> Error.
> > That's what mysql complains about.
> >
> > X-----snip
> >
> > DELETE FROM linkscc WHERE lcc_pageid='717')
> > aus der Funktion "". MySQL meldete den Fehler
> "1064: You have an error
> > in  your SQL syntax. Check the manual that
> corresponds to your MySQL
> > server  version for the right syntax to use near
> ')' at line 1".
>
> This was a bug caught after beta3. Remove the ) from
> that query or grab
> REL1_3_0beta4 from CVS (not in a release package
> yet).
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 10:31:14 +0200
> From: Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] SMILES again
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <40D2A852.7000704 at web.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1;
> format=flowed
>
> I just found another GPL tool, which can convert
> SMILES (among other
> things) into other formats:
>     http://openbabel.sourceforge.net/
> Is any of the *output* formats of that software
> convertable into PNG
> through other GPL software?
>
> Magnus
>
>
> Neil Harris wrote:
>
> > Magnus Manske wrote:
> >
> >> I saw a nice command line utility which can
> generate GIFs from
> >> SMILES, a simple chemical markup language.
> Examples can be found here:
> >>
>
http://www.daylight.com/dayhtml/tests/test-smi2gif.html
> >>
> >> Can anyone find out
> >> * if this is PD/GPL
> >> * how to integrate it into wikipedia
> (SMILES->GIF->PNG???)
> >>
> >> I would really like to have that one.
> >>
> >> Magnus
> >>
> >>
> > No, smi2gif appears to be proprietary
> closed-source software. Quote:
> > "The program is a combination of the Daylight
> SMILES, DEPICT, and DCGI
> > toolkits and the CEX gif-formatting utility."
> >
> > On the other hand, _this_ Java-based project:
> > http://jmdraw.sourceforge.net/ _does_ appear to be
> what we want.
> > Quote: "The JMDraw/SMILESViewer project was
> started by Christoph
> > Steinbeck <http://www.ice.mpg.de/%7Estein> from
> the ChemoInformatics
> > group <http://www.ice.mpg.de/departments/ChemInf/>
> at the
> > Max-Planck-Institute of Chemical Ecology
> <http://www.ice.mpg.de> in
> > Jena. It is an Open Source project, the sources
> are published under
> > GNU Lesser General Public License, LGPL
> > <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html>. " Next
> question -- can it
> > be run on an entirely open-source infrastructure?
> >
> > -- Neil
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> >
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 06:23:14 +0200
> From: Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories in 1.3beta
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <20040622042314.GA26032 at wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 04:41:51PM -0700, Ray
> Saintonge wrote:
> > Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> >
> > >There's nothing wrong with displaying
> grammatically correct "Albert
> > >Einstein",
> > >even when its ordered by family name.
> > >
> > >"Einstein, Albert" is ugly - it looks like a
> paper encyclopedia.
> >
> > Some people may very well consider "Einstein,
> Albert" to be ugly, but
> > it's not grammatically incorrect.  There are
> languages (like Hungarian)
> > where it's considered normal.
>
> It is gramatically incorrect in languages which put
> personal name first,
> family name later. English is one of such languages.
> Wouldn't Hungarians
> have the article under "Einstein Albert" anyway ?
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 8
> Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 17:21:57 -0700
> From: Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Ariel as a slow query
> server
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <40D8CD25.9090001 at apple.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii;
> format=flowed
>
> Timwi wrote:
>
> >
> > Apparently all our lovely maintenance pages are
> working again!
> >
> > Orphaned pages!
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Lonelypages
>
> Sort of - look at the "links here" for [[Valerie
> Bertinelli]],
> who's on the list.
>
> Stan
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 00:44:47 -0700
> From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] br.wikipedia.org broken
> (database not backed
> 	up)
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <40D934EF.2060602 at pobox.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> I wrote last week:
> > brwiki didn't get added to the proper database
> lists, so wasn't included
> > in the backups used to rebuild the database after
> last week's crash.
> >
> > It should be recoverable from the old database
> files, but this will
> > require being very very careful. Rather than risk
> blowing up suda, I'll
> > try moving the files somewhere else and working
> with it isolated.
>
> I just haven't had a chance to do this. It would
> take several days just
> to download the full database files to my house, and
> I'm not sure we've
> got a spare machine with the disk space in the
> server cluster, and I
> definitely don't want to risk running a second mysql
> on suda right now.
>
> In the meantime, a (blank) editable wiki is back up
> at br.wikipedia.org
> (also added a Wiktionary, br.wiktionary.org).
> Hopefully we will be able
> to recover whatever was there at some point and
> reinsert it.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 10
> Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 22:00:49 +0200
> From: Marco Krohn <marco.krohn at web.de>
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] Number of watchers of an
> article
> To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Message-ID: <200407022200.51178.marco.krohn at web.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain;  charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Hi all,
>
> during a Wikipedia meeting in the city of Hannover
> we discussed about review
> systems for Wikipedia and similar things. Someone
> asked if it would be
> possible to show on each article page how many users
> have this article on
> their watchlist.
>
> The ratio behing this is the following: one of the
> big problems of Wikipedia
> is that when you read an article in Wikipedia you
> never can be sure if the
> page was vandalized a short time before you arrived.
> If a page is watched
> more closely, meaning many people have added the
> article to their watchlist,
> then the period of time the article is in a bogus
> state should be smaller,
> then an article which nobody has on their watchlist.
>
> Of course this is just a rough approximation, there
> are other things that
> influence the chance for a bogus state, such as
> recent changes list, people
> that don't check their watchlist items or haven't
> logged in for a long time,
> and so on.
>
> I don't think that it's good for Wikipedias
> performance to show the "number of
> watchers" (=now) on every article page, especially
> since the use is rather
> limited. Nevertheless I became interested in the
> idea, in particular since I
> started thinking about a review process for
> Wikipedia
>
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Marco_Krohn/Distributed_Review_Process
> - this work is far from being complete).
>
> Could anyone help me getting the following numbers:
>
> * the number of articles in dependence of "now",
> that means I would like to
> know how many of the articles are 0 times on a
> watchlist, how many are
> exactly 1 time on a watchlist, ...
>
> * the same as above, but limit the watchers to those
> whose last login was max.
> 7 days ago (in order to include only the currently
> active members)
>
> If it needs to much performance it surely would be
> sufficent to take a random
> sample of say 1000 articles.
>
> Sorry if this is the wrong mailing list for my
> request,
>
> best regards
>   Marco
>
>
> --
> Marco Krohn
> Theoretical Physics
> University of Hannover
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 11
> Date: Fri, 09 Jul 2004 17:08:07 +0100
> From: Timwi <timwi at gmx.net>
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Adding features to
> Mediawiki
> To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Message-ID: <ccmfts$rbk$1 at sea.gmane.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii;
> format=flowed
>
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> > Timwi wrote:
> >
> >> I'm not sure why you want two different e-mail
> fields? Why not just
> >> have a boolean "address confirmed yes/no" field?
> >
> > I wrote:
> >
> >> Reconfirmation would need to be required when the
> user changes the
> >> address stored in their preferences; this leads
> to the possibility of
> >> storing 'confirmed' and 'new' e-mail addresses to
> tide over the time
> >> between changing and confirming.
> >
> > Not doing so means locking out the account between
> change and
> > confirmation, which would be rather a trouble
> given a typo in the address.
>
> Oh, I see. I'm still not sure what level of access
> you want to give
> logged-in users with unconfirmed e-mail addresses. I
> would have thought
> the only restriction to place on them would be to
> disallow editing until
> they validate the e-mail address. Thus they would be
> able to fix a
> misspelled e-mail address easily.
>
> Timwi
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
> End of Wikitech-l Digest, Vol 11, Issue 1
> *****************************************
>

__________________________________
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from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Sheldon Rampton wrote:
>
>> Hi there...Sheldon Rampton here, at Disinfopedia. After some
>> irritating and time-consuming encounters with trolls, we have decided
>> that we want to be able to require contributors to register and to
>> provide a confirmed email address when they do so.
>
>
> It would separately be nice to require that an e-mail address _if given_
> be confirmed, even where having an address is not itself required. (The
> main concern here being the possibility of using wiki accounts to send
> interuser e-mail with false return addresses.)
>
> Reconfirmation would need to be required when the user changes the
> address stored in their preferences; this leads to the possibility of
> storing 'confirmed' and 'new' e-mail addresses to tide over the time
> between changing and confirming.
>
> (It *is* necessary to allow people to change their addresses. In the
> real world, people gain and lose e-mail access at various institutions
> over the course of their online lives.)
>
> The address-required mode that Sheldon would like could then basically
> require that the confirmed address be set in order to allow login.
>
> For upwards compatibility on upgrading existing wikis, I'd recommend
> using user_email for the 'unconfirmed' address and adding something like
> 'user_confirmed_email' for the confirmed one; thus users would be given
> the opportunity to confirm their e-mail address when they next visit.
> (But not doing so would not disable their accounts. Might show a message
> up top akin to the 'new messages' notification.)

I started writing a feature which did exactly that. An extra email field
in the user table, Special:Userlogin modifications to allow email
confirmation, even IIRC a modification to Article.php and User.php to
inform users that they can't post because they haven't confirmed. My
intention was to use this feature to allow Halifax residents to
contribute to Wikipedia if they have a confirmed email address, hence I
also made some changes to ipblocks to allow email confirmation to be
switched on and off depending on IP address. I got maybe 60% of the way
through it before deciding that it wasn't such an important feature for
Wikipedia, and I shelved it. I'll see if I can dig  up and post what
I've done.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Start of a patch far Article Infopage

body:
Josh Cogliati wrote:
> Timwi, Thanks for the version of the patch.  I have some questions though.
> On Thu, Jul 08, 2004 at 12:07:08PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
>
>>>* Change it to a special page?
>>
>>No, please not!... I don't like special pages because they make the tabs
>>disappear. :) I'd really rather prefer if Special:Movepage were
>>converted to a simple &action=move thingie.
>
> Tim Starling made the argument that
> special pages were easier to link to and did not involve adding more
> UI stuff to Article.php.

I said something else too, but you left IRC a few seconds before I was
able to say it.

> Would it be quicker to turn this into two query? Where the second query is
> something like:
> +                       $sql = "SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT old_user_text) FROM old WH
> ERE ".$old_clause . " AND old_user_text != " . $cur_author;
> Then you can always $authors++ since the current author will not appear in
> the second query.  So the second query is becomes more complicated, but
> the third query is unneeded.

It doesn't matter which way you do it, it's going to be very slow on the
live site. Any query which involves loading every row of the old table
for a particular article will take at least a couple of minutes to
complete for pages with large histories. This query:

SELECT old_user FROM old WHERE old_title ='Main_Page' and
old_namespace=0 UNION SELECT cur_user FROM cur WHERE cur_title
='Main_Page' and cur_namespace=0;

...took almost 2 minutes on suda in a relatively quiet part of the day.
I wasn't game to try it on the village pump. Before we can include this
on the live site, we will need to make it efficient. Have you considered
keeping a list of authors in a field in the cur table, and updating it
when the article is saved?

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] Ad-hoc DB load balancing

body:
To people with shell access, especially Shai: please note that the
force(0) in Setup.php is there for a reason. Just because a query is
slow doesn't mean you can send it to Ariel. It also has to be acceptable
for the data retrieved to be seconds, or quite often, several minutes
out of date. This is most certainly not the case with the link table
select statements, which cause link table corruption as it is due to
being non-locking.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: N.T. Riche

body:
ok I won't do any ed poor

"Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:Personal remarks are out of place on this mailing list. Please consider
whether statements like the following are of any value to our purpose of
improving the Wikipedia:

* I didn't appreciate your trolling
* I would reccomend that you simply unsubscribe from the mailing list
* You should take a course in Wiki etiquette

Ed Poor
English Wikipedia Mailing List Administrator
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

__________________________________________________
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subject: [Foundation-l] Status of logo copyright

body:
(forwarded from wikipedia-l)

> --- David Friedland <david at nohat.net> wrote on wikipedia-l
> > Before I left on my unannounced wikivacation, Jimbo
> > e-mailed me about
> > the copyright logo. He seemed to be under the
> > impression that I had
> > assigned my rights to the logo to the Wikimedia
> > foundation, but I don't
> > believe that I had.
> >
> > I am happy to assign my copyrights over the logo to
> > the Wikimedia
> > Foundation. However, I am unsure how to do that in a
> > binding way.
> > Furthermore, I don't believe that the Foundation
> > actually owns any
> > copyrights yet and I have some questions about how
> > this will be handled.
> > Has anyone else assigned their copyrights to the
> > Foundation? Are there
> > policies about how the foundation is going to handle
> > the copyrights it
> > holds? What benefit would there be to my assigning
> > the copyright to the
> > foundation rather than just licensing it at no cost
> > for various purposes?
> >
> > As I said, I am happy to assign the copyrights to
> > the foundation, but I
> > want to be sure of what I am doing before I jump in
> > and do it, because
> > there are no "take-backs" in the world of copyright.
> >
> > - David Friedland

David, it's great to hear you are happy to do this. As far as I know,
the only copyrights assigned to the Foundation so far are those of
Jimbo and certain edits by Bomis staff. The Foundation doesn't
currently have any policies on the handling of its copyrights. I don't
know how binding making an informal assignment on the mailing list
would be; perhaps a lawyer could advise whether you need to physically
sign something.

In terms of benefits, for the Foundation, owning the copyright would
be easier than having a licence, as it means it is free to do what it
likes with the logo, rather than having any restrictions that might
cause problems later on. I'm not sure what the benefits to you are
though, other than not having to worry about writing a licence, and
not having the Foundation bothering you in years to come about whether
they can use the logo for some purpose not originally mentioned in the
licence.

Angela
(just my thoughts, not on behalf of Wikimedia)


subject: [Foundation-l] Status of logo copyright


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] status of logo copyright

body:
David, it's great to hear you are happy to do this. As far as I know,
the only copyrights assigned to the Foundation so far are those of
Jimbo and certain edits by Bomis staff. The Foundation doesn't
currently have any policies on the handling of its copyrights. I don't
know how binding making an informal assignment on the mailing list
would be; perhaps a lawyer could advise whether you need to physically
sign something.

In terms of benefits, for the Foundation, owning the copyright would
be easier than having a licence, as it means it is free to do what it
likes with the logo, rather than having any restrictions that might
cause problems later on. I'm not sure what the benefits to you are
though, other than not having to worry about writing a licence, and
not having the Foundation bothering you in years to come about whether
they can use the logo for some purpose not originally mentioned in the
licence.

Angela
(just my thoughts, not on behalf of Wikimedia)

> --- David Friedland <david at nohat.net> wrote on wikipedia-l
> > Before I left on my unannounced wikivacation, Jimbo
> > e-mailed me about
> > the copyright logo. He seemed to be under the
> > impression that I had
> > assigned my rights to the logo to the Wikimedia
> > foundation, but I don't
> > believe that I had.
> >
> > I am happy to assign my copyrights over the logo to
> > the Wikimedia
> > Foundation. However, I am unsure how to do that in a
> > binding way.
> > Furthermore, I don't believe that the Foundation
> > actually owns any
> > copyrights yet and I have some questions about how
> > this will be handled.
> > Has anyone else assigned their copyrights to the
> > Foundation? Are there
> > policies about how the foundation is going to handle
> > the copyrights it
> > holds? What benefit would there be to my assigning
> > the copyright to the
> > foundation rather than just licensing it at no cost
> > for various purposes?
> >
> > As I said, I am happy to assign the copyrights to
> > the foundation, but I
> > want to be sure of what I am doing before I jump in
> > and do it, because
> > there are no "take-backs" in the world of copyright.
> >
> > - David Friedland


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] Postfix testmail

body: this is a test. pls ignore.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Thumbnails

body:
On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 12:01:11 +0200, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu> wrote:

> As I said, specifying image width to 200 in HTML will show an image 200 pixels
> wide even if the image in the file is 213 pixels wide.

> OTOH, browsers actually achieve that by re-scaling the image; it might end up
> with the same problem but now at the client side.

That's correct; the browser would simply resize the image and you'd
have the same image quality issues all over again.

If somebody requests a thumbnail that's 200px wide, they should get a
thumbnail that's 200px wide.  I don't see any problem with telling
them that one 213px wide would look better, but the choice should be
theirs.

-Bill


from_name: C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons]

from_email: a

body:
Does this suggestion hold for sysops, or is it just advice for general users? ---------------------ok I won't do any ed poor

"Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com<http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l>> wrote:Personal remarks are out of place on this mailing list. Please consider
whether statements like the following are of any value to our purpose of
improving the Wikipedia:

* I didn't appreciate your trolling
* I would reccomend that you simply unsubscribe from the mailing list
* You should take a course in Wiki etiquette

Ed Poor
English Wikipedia Mailing List Administrator
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org<http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l<http://mail.wikipediaorg/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l>

__________________________________________________
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from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: NEH grant

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net <http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l>> wrote:
>> ...
>> However, it would be nice to see more frequent updates just about
>> fundraising progress, which is what this suggestion focuses on. Those
>> who are particularly interested in this should be encouraged to donate
>> the funds necessary so that we can start paying Mav a salary. Otherwise,
>> it's unfair to expect anyone to assume that burden.
>
>Actually please don't donate money for that - giving me money will not increase
>the number of hours in the day or reduce the number of hours I need to sleep
>(Wikipedia/Wikimedia is nearly a second full time job for me). Also, doing so
>would only add a small incentive for me to do more work in this area since I
>strongly suspect that such pay would pale in comparison to what I now receive
>as a GIS specialist (thus I would have to keep my day job). A full time server
>admin is far more important.
>
Sorry, I meant that to be tongue-in-cheek, not as a particularly serious
suggestion (yet). My point was mostly that if people have expectations
like that, they need to consider whether they're prepared to contribute
what's necessary to make it possible. There's only so much you can
"require" from volunteers. And I agree that for the future day when we
start hiring salaried employees, a server admin is a bigger priority.

--Michael Snow
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subject: [Foundation-l] Re: NEH grant

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net <http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l>> wrote:
>> ...
>> However, it would be nice to see more frequent updates just about
>> fundraising progress, which is what this suggestion focuses on. Those
>> who are particularly interested in this should be encouraged to donate
>> the funds necessary so that we can start paying Mav a salary. Otherwise,
>> it's unfair to expect anyone to assume that burden.
>
>Actually please don't donate money for that - giving me money will not increase
>the number of hours in the day or reduce the number of hours I need to sleep
>(Wikipedia/Wikimedia is nearly a second full time job for me). Also, doing so
>would only add a small incentive for me to do more work in this area since I
>strongly suspect that such pay would pale in comparison to what I now receive
>as a GIS specialist (thus I would have to keep my day job). A full time server
>admin is far more important.
>
Sorry, I meant that to be tongue-in-cheek, not as a particularly serious
suggestion (yet). My point was mostly that if people have expectations
like that, they need to consider whether they're prepared to contribute
what's necessary to make it possible. There's only so much you can
"require" from volunteers. And I agree that for the future day when we
start hiring salaried employees, a server admin is a bigger priority.

--Michael Snow
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subject: [Foundation-l] Re: NEH grant

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net <http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l>> wrote:
>> ...
>> However, it would be nice to see more frequent updates just about
>> fundraising progress, which is what this suggestion focuses on. Those
>> who are particularly interested in this should be encouraged to donate
>> the funds necessary so that we can start paying Mav a salary. Otherwise,
>> it's unfair to expect anyone to assume that burden.
>
>Actually please don't donate money for that - giving me money will not increase
>the number of hours in the day or reduce the number of hours I need to sleep
>(Wikipedia/Wikimedia is nearly a second full time job for me). Also, doing so
>would only add a small incentive for me to do more work in this area since I
>strongly suspect that such pay would pale in comparison to what I now receive
>as a GIS specialist (thus I would have to keep my day job). A full time server
>admin is far more important.
>
Sorry, I meant that to be tongue-in-cheek, not as a particularly serious
suggestion (yet). My point was mostly that if people have expectations
like that, they need to consider whether they're prepared to contribute
what's necessary to make it possible. There's only so much you can
"require" from volunteers. And I agree that for the future day when we
start hiring salaried employees, a server admin is a bigger priority.

--Michael Snow
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subject: [Foundation-l] Re: NEH grant

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net <http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l>> wrote:
>> ...
>> However, it would be nice to see more frequent updates just about
>> fundraising progress, which is what this suggestion focuses on. Those
>> who are particularly interested in this should be encouraged to donate
>> the funds necessary so that we can start paying Mav a salary. Otherwise,
>> it's unfair to expect anyone to assume that burden.
>
>Actually please don't donate money for that - giving me money will not increase
>the number of hours in the day or reduce the number of hours I need to sleep
>(Wikipedia/Wikimedia is nearly a second full time job for me). Also, doing so
>would only add a small incentive for me to do more work in this area since I
>strongly suspect that such pay would pale in comparison to what I now receive
>as a GIS specialist (thus I would have to keep my day job). A full time server
>admin is far more important.
>
Sorry, I meant that to be tongue-in-cheek, not as a particularly serious
suggestion (yet). My point was mostly that if people have expectations
like that, they need to consider whether they're prepared to contribute
what's necessary to make it possible. There's only so much you can
"require" from volunteers. And I agree that for the future day when we
start hiring salaried employees, a server admin is a bigger priority.

--Michael Snow
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from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: action=new

body:
On Wednesday 30 June 2004 00:46, Timwi wrote:
> Evan Prodromou wrote:
> > It's uncommon but not impossible
> > that someone creates [[New page]] while I'm looking at this link, and
> > when I click it to start a new page, there's text in the textarea.
>
> Is that really so much of a problem? I would think it happens rarely
> enough that no newbie will probably ever see this more than once, and
> experienced users will already know what was going on.

You're right, this happens quite rarely, but other Evan's suggestions do sound
exciting:

> >      * Show some set of instructions on how (or why) to start a new
> >        page, and give some other possibilities (I think the [[meta:new
> >        page page]] discusses this).
> >     * Do some cool functionality, like _new_page_templates_ (create
> >        new pages with some existing format already filled in).

The idea is, with action=new, it is easy to make creating a new page different
than editing an existing one.


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation Meeting, 4 July 2004

body:
--- Angela_ <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1) Wikimedia website
> ...
> Global policies, such as privacy and terms of use, will be included on
> this website. While respecting the "wiki way", these will need to be
> approved by the board before they are changed for legal reasons.
>
> The wiki will not be open to anonymous edits and only authorized
> accounts will be opened.

Things like the fundraising page need to use forms in order to work. Securuity
issues are greatly lessoned due to the fact that the website will only allow
edits from pre-screened users. Given that, I think that allowing full HTML on a
sitewise basis will be a good idea. Wiki markup, of course, will be encouraged
where it is possible, but we also need more functionality than a traditional
wiki.

The wiki should also eventually be moved to the wikimediafoundation.org domain
name since;
1) wikimedia.org is easily confused with wikipedia.org
2) we don't own wikimedia.com and some people instinctively always put .com at
the end of urls (this is done for wikipedia all the time).

A distinctive skin should be default (since the site will not be generally
editable, that aspect should be downplayed).

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: jheiskan at welho.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] NEH grant (possible shot to nothing & excercise run)

body:
Initially I had much the same misgivings about the NEH grant as others have
voiced  on this mailing list.

On reflection though, I think I see a glimmering of a possible way to have our
grant and enchance our incentives for individual contributors too. This however
would require some (possibly controversial) decisive action from the board.

What I would envision is a deliberate self-limitation of amount of grant money
applied for from any single source. The *ideal* heuristic (albeit probably much
too complex for reality) IMHO would be for a change in the by-laws whereby the
Wikimedia Foundation will only solicit grants _from_ _any_ _single_ _source_ for
no more than one third of "lifetime" accrued individual donations to the
foundation, plus one fifth of the aggregate of other grants previously confirmed
during the preceding equivalent period.

This would guarantee that individual donations would remain in the driving seat,
and even provide a "multiplier effect" whereby somebody who gives 5 dollars by
paypal will know that not only is he contributing that fiver, but she is
permanently enhancing the foundations wherewithal to finance itself.

Metaphorically this would be like using grants as stilts rather than
prosthetics; remove them, and we can still walk.

Beyond this concept, I would add that one thing not yet commented upon is the
possibility of grants exposing us to Robert Mappelthorpe/NEA type of political
football. Even though becoming a topic on the McLaughlin group and equivalents
would guarantee publicity, it is prudent and strategically to our advantage to
be able to actually believably be able to offer to return any grant money if our
articles on Felching, Rimming etc. are taken up by Limbaugh and co.

So maybe one way forward would be to apply for a very modest grant from the NEH
with a skeleton (minimum required) application form, establishing that we are
interested in the grant, and may apply for a larger one in the future, with more
comprehensive plans indicated. That way, if we do not get it, we will not have
fallen on our collective faces, but we do not give the impression that we
spurn the NEH either, nor lack future ambition.

----

jussi-ville heiskanen


subject: [Wikitech-l] Thumbnails

body:
On Thursday 01 July 2004 09:26, Magnus Manske wrote:
> * Apparently, automatically generated thumbnails look nicer when they
> are recaled by an exact even number. For example, for a 640x480 image, a
> thumbnail of 200px is requested, generate one with a width of 213px
> instead, as this is a factor of 33.3%, or 1/3. I propose to use a
> variation of up to 10% from the requested width.

Sometimes people might need images EXACTLY so-and-so wide. I'm for this if it
would still create <img width=200 ...> tags with actual image being 213px
wide.


from_name: Michael Diederich

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: https

body:
<begin name="Timwi" date="Friday 09 July 2004 23:55"/>

>> did some think about an secure web implentation? When https would be
>> offered, i (and i am sure other also) would prefer it. :)
> Do you mean the entire site? Do you mean you want to be able to submit
> edits completely anonymously?
> I can understand someone wanting complete anonymity if they're editing a
> controversial or sensitive topic, but isn't HTTPS a little bit overkill?

Well, sniffing of passwords and user accounts is not so difficult, and i am
often in unsecure networks with my notebook. It is not about sensitive
topics - it is about the secure of the accounts.

Best regards,

da didi
--
===========================================================================
Gentoo Linux:                   Gentoo Base System version 1.5.1
kernel-2.6.7                    Pentium III (Coppermine)
===========================================================================


subject: [Wikitech-l] Thumbnails

body:
On Thursday 01 July 2004 18:04, Tony wrote:
> I pointed out (elsewhere) that thumbnail image quality is better  when the
> rescale uses an exact even number. (50%, 33.3%, etc.). (Not under all
> circumstances, by the way. It depends of the resolution of the source
> image. In general, the larger the original the less it matters.)
>
> Magnus proposed that the software generate a thumbnail *close* to the
> requested size (and thus preserve as much image quality as possible, at the
> cost of producing (e.g.) a 213px rather than a 200px thumb.
>
> Erik said please don't do it as it would break many layouts.

As I said, specifying image width to 200 in HTML will show an image 200 pixels
wide even if the image in the file is 213 pixels wide.

OTOH, browsers actually achieve that by re-scaling the image; it might end up
with the same problem but now at the client side.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fwd: Multiple categories

body:
On Wednesday 30 June 2004 00:35, Timwi wrote:
> Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> > I have made a patch which enables display of all articles that belong to
> > multiple categories.
>
> I think the following patch is slightly more efficient.

I don't think that checking inside a loop is generally more efficient than a
single call to preg_replace; however, it could be for smaller number of
iterations which is the most likely case. It really should be checked.

> The database query itself is very inefficient though. If this was Perl,
> I could make it way more efficient. In short, the "DISTINCT" and "ORDER
> BY" are performance killers. They should be done in PHP instead.

These take place after WHERE is executed and should have no effect on database
performance other than that which already exists for selecting of a single
category.


from_name: Luc Van Oostenryck

body:
Anthere wrote:
> I suddenly received this digest in my mail box, while
> I am not registered to receive ANY of the wikipedia
> mailing lists.
>
> What happened ? How come it was turned on while I did
> not request it ?
>
> :-)
>

Same for me; also since yesterday I receive again the mails
fron MediaWiki-CVS while I have unsubscribed me from this list
several weeks ago.

-- Looxix


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Trolling poll

body:
sannse wrote:
> My other concern is directed at Jimbo.  Until now banning policy has
> basically be set by him, and I wonder about the validity of any major policy
> change in this area set by poll.  I'd be interested to know - if this is
> agreed, would it be a valid policy?

If there appears to be widespread consensus, as expressed informally
through general agreement or formally through a vote with a very
significant majority, then assuming I personally don't find the policy
contrary to the values that I regard as non-negotiable for the project
as a whole, then I will give my backing.

If the policy affects identifiable sub-groups of stakeholders, for
example the arbitration committee, the sysops, or whatever, then in
addition to general consensus, it would be important to carefully be
sure that there is significant consensus within those subgroups as
well.

Even in the past when banning policy was basically set by me, I have
endeavored to set policy that is consistent with community consensus.
For example, on many occassions, I resisted a ban that I thought was
justified, because I felt that community consensus had not been
reached.

--Jimbo


subject: Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Multiple categories

body:
On Saturday 03 July 2004 11:44, Jens Frank wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 01:16:43AM +0200, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> > ----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
> >
> > Subject: [Wikitech-l] Multiple categories
> > Date: Sun, 30 May 2004 12:07:09 +0200
> > From: Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at EUnet.yu>
> > To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>
> >
> > I have made a patch which enables display of all articles that belong to
> > multiple categories. Thus, for example, Category:Female/Orthodox/Saint
> > would return all female orthodox saints (that is, all articles which are
> > categorised with at least [[Category:Female]], [[Category:Orthodox]] and
> > [[Category:Saint]]).
>
> There are several category names with a / in some languages:

Well, I submitted the patch before people started categorising massively, if
someone took care about it there might be no such categories. Now, it should
be decided is a slash in category name really neccesary; if it isn't, then
those categories could be renamed and slash used, and if it is, some other
token could be suggested.

By the way, I was already thinking about more precise queries and this might
just be the place and time to discuss them.

Displaying all but a single category:

Category:Female/-Orthodox/Saint

would return all female saints which are not Orthodox. I hope that there are
no categories which start with - .

Displaying articles which are in one of several cathegories:

Category:Female/Catholic,Protestant/Saint

would return all female saints which are either Catholic or Protestant.It
would not be possible for comma to have higher priority than slash, but such
a need occurs rarely and if such approach is good enough for Google it should
be good enough for us. I again hope that there are no categories which have a
comma not followed with a space in their names.


references:
<200406290116.43045.smolensk@eunet.yu>
	<cc634g$m04$1@sea.gmane.org> <cc6m1r$nlq$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Saturday 03 July 2004 18:14, Timwi wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
> > Jens Frank wrote:
> >> There are several category names with a / in some languages:
> >
> > It seems that the pipe ("|") character is disallowed in our article
> > titles (and hence, in categories too), but allowed in URLs (I couldn't
> > find the relevant RfC on this for definite confirmation; can someone
> > find it?). How about we use that instead?
>
> Actually, I have a better idea now. How about two slashes (//)? Then we
> can have something like "Category:9/11//People" to have the intersection
> of Category:9/11 and Category:People.

I like this idea. By the way, whichever is done,

$t = preg_replace("'///+'","//",$t);
if(strchr($t,"//")) {

should really be

if(strchr($t,"//")) {
$t = preg_replace("'///+'","//",$t);


from_name: Fennec Foxen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Thumbnails

body:
On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 08:20:35 -0400, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom at gmail.com> wrote:
> If somebody requests a thumbnail that's 200px wide, they should get a
> thumbnail that's 200px wide.  I don't see any problem with telling
> them that one 213px wide would look better, but the choice should be
> theirs.

Exactly- there should be a way to say "about 200px wide, whatever size
looks best in that region".


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: https

references:
<3312661.6QDcuGLpZV@mobil.md-d.org> <ccn48o$bic$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<5086636.gSrsNgYLy7@mobil.md-d.org>

body:
Michael Diederich wrote:
> <begin name="Timwi" date="Friday 09 July 2004 23:55"/>
>>>did some think about an secure web implentation? When https would be
>>>offered, i (and i am sure other also) would prefer it. :)
>>
>>Do you mean the entire site? Do you mean you want to be able to submit
>>edits completely anonymously?
>>I can understand someone wanting complete anonymity if they're editing a
>>controversial or sensitive topic, but isn't HTTPS a little bit overkill?
>
> Well, sniffing of passwords and user accounts is not so difficult, and i am
> often in unsecure networks with my notebook. It is not about sensitive
> topics - it is about the secure of the accounts.

Are you asking about Wikipedia in specific or on MediaWiki in general?

MediaWiki in general should work fine over HTTPS. If it doesn't, please
send patches.

For Wikipedia, we briefly discussed the possibility a couple years ago
but were stymied by the nasty virtual server problem: basically, HTTPS
and name-based virtual servers don't mix.

In order to determine which hostname & configuration to use, the web
server needs the Host: header sent by the client. BUT, before we get
there an encrypted connection has to be set up. BUT, the certificate is
verified based on the hostname. BUT, we don't know which hostname to use
yet.

D'oh!

A possible way around this is to rearrange everything to different paths
on a single hostname, but this could be a big pain in the ass. Further,
maintaining two different sets of paths or URLs might be a problem for
[parser] cache consistency.

Additionally there's the issue that any HTTPS access won't be cached at
the squid level (or perhaps even the client level); if we restrict this
to logins only (perhaps even optionally) then this oughtn't to impact
performance too much.

Further there's the certificate issue; would we be content with a
self-signed certificate (BIG WARNINGS in your browser every time you
login) or will we spend the foundation's money for a big fancy
corporation's stamp of approval?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On Thursday 08 July 2004 13:07, Timwi wrote:
> > * Break down the watchers into active and passive watchers (somehow).
>
> How do you define this distinction?

It could be: people who watch but have/have not edited the page.


from_name: Bill Clark

subject: [Wikitech-l] Thumbnails

body:
On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 12:43:39 -0400, Fennec Foxen <fennec at gmail.com> wrote:

> Exactly- there should be a way to say "about 200px wide, whatever size
> looks best in that region".

Maybe the sizing option could be given as both a dropdown (with
precisely 1/2 size, 1/3 size, 1/4 size, etc.) and a regular text input
that allows arbitrary dimensions.

Or a checkbox that says "allow the dimensions to vary slightly, to
improve image quality."

I think the second way would be better, but that's just me.

-Bill


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: https

body:
Bill Clark wrote:
> On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 12:44:20 -0700, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>>For Wikipedia, we briefly discussed the possibility a couple years ago
>>but were stymied by the nasty virtual server problem: basically, HTTPS
>>and name-based virtual servers don't mix.
>
> HTTPS and IP-based virtualhosts work just fine, however.

We have over 300 wikis, each with a virtual subdomain. Each "major"
project which supports all languages will add about 150 wikis: right now
that's Wikipedia and Wiktionary.

Our IP subnet is a /27, with 32 addresses available. Between Wikimedia's
machines, a few second IPs for failover of the squids, and a few Bomis
boxes, it's pretty near full. I don't know what it would cost to secure
300 more IP addresses, but that's not a sustainable route...

> TLS also works with name-based virtualhosts (although it isn't supported
 > in all browsers).

Can you give some pointers on setting this up with an Apache server, and
providing a sane failure mode for clients that don't support it?

> Can't squid be reconfigured to handle the SSL portion itself?  In
> other words, can it simply treat all requests to the backend as if
> they were HTTP, and simply serve out cached/fresh copies of pages via
> SSL?

I don't know, can it?

> That said, I tend to think that only logins really need to be secure anyway.

Right.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On Friday 09 July 2004 05:47, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> > Magnus Manske wrote:
> >>Did anyone look at [[Category:Stub]] lately? Well, "There are 10483
> >>articles in this category." And they are all on one page.
> >>
> >>Seems we need to break down large categories into several pages after
> >>all. What would be a good number of article links per page? 500? That
> >>would make 21 pages and counting, for this special case.
> >
> > A better solution might be to use this as an opportunity to look at
> > these articles to see if they really are stubs.  If not the stub message
> > could be deleted.  In the others there is no shortage of work to be
> > done. :-)
>
> A third idea is to consider whether Category:stub makes any sense at all.

I don't think it does, but regardless of whether it does or doesn't, there
might be large categories and there is need to display them decently.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: https

body:
Bill Clark wrote:
> On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 13:10:38 -0700, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>>Can you give some pointers on setting this up with an Apache server, and
>>providing a sane failure mode for clients that don't support it?
>
>
> I've never actually used TLS myself, but this seems as good an excuse
> as any to look into it.  I'll get back to you on this.

Cool, thanks.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Stevertigo

body:
--- Angela_ <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> The situation regarding the rights to use the logo
> is not yet clear.
> Jimbo is in contact with David Friedland (Nohat)
> about this. It was
> felt important that David would not have veto rights
> over where the
> logo is used.

User:Pallusmagnus (may be misspelled) was the actual
originator of the 3d logo, which Nohat simply
augmented, (albeit substantially). If there's an issue
of IP/conceptual ownership (GFDL??) PM would have far
more rights to it than NH.

==~~~~

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: "DaB." at gmx.de

from_email: "DaB." at gmx.de

body:
On 10/Jul/2004 12:38:16, Nikola Smolenski  wrote:
 On Saturday 03 July 2004 18:14, Timwi wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
> > Jens Frank wrote:
> >> There are several category names with a / in some languages:
> >
> > It seems that the pipe ("|") character is disallowed in our article
> > titles (and hence, in categories too), but allowed in URLs (I couldn't
> > find the relevant RfC on this for definite confirmation; can someone
> > find it?). How about we use that instead?
>
> Actually, I have a better idea now. How about two slashes (//)? Then we
> can have something like "Category:9/11//People" to have the intersection
> of Category:9/11 and Category:People.

Hello,
short Question: Why you don't use "&&" like in Java? If you do so, you can later use "||" for OR and "!!" for NOT.

With this you can realise "Category:9/11&&People" and more complexe querys like "Category:9/11&&People||buildings" which gives all People or Buildings which have to do with 9/11.

Sincerly
DaB.

P.S:Sorry for my bad english.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Stevertigo <utilitymuffinresearch2 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Angela_ <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The situation regarding the rights to use the logo
> > is not yet clear.
> > Jimbo is in contact with David Friedland (Nohat)
> > about this. It was
> > felt important that David would not have veto rights
> > over where the
> > logo is used.
>
> User:Pallusmagnus (may be misspelled) was the actual
> originator of the 3d logo, which Nohat simply
> augmented, (albeit substantially). If there's an issue
> of IP/conceptual ownership (GFDL??) PM would have far
> more rights to it than NH.

It was my understanding that all logos were released under terms of the GNU FDL
and with implicit permission granted to the foundation to use the images as its
trademarks.

-- mav

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


body:
On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 14:40:04 +0200, "dab."@gmx.de <"dab."@gmx.de> wrote:
> short Question: Why you don't use "&&" like in Java? If you do so, you can later use "||" for OR and "!!" for NOT.

&& may have some special magical properties in URLs
(http://page?this=that&foo=bar&etc=junk) and has special properties in
pages as well (for escape sequences). It might not be desirable.

BTW, ! is not, not !!, so !! is not-not. Which is not not. ;)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: https

references:
<3312661.6QDcuGLpZV@mobil.md-d.org> <ccn48o$bic$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<5086636.gSrsNgYLy7@mobil.md-d.org> <40F04714.3090108@pobox.com>

body:
On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 12:44:20 -0700, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> For Wikipedia, we briefly discussed the possibility a couple years ago
> but were stymied by the nasty virtual server problem: basically, HTTPS
> and name-based virtual servers don't mix.

HTTPS and IP-based virtualhosts work just fine, however.  TLS also
works with name-based virtualhosts (although it isn't supported in all
browsers).

> Additionally there's the issue that any HTTPS access won't be cached at
> the squid level (or perhaps even the client level); if we restrict this
> to logins only (perhaps even optionally) then this oughtn't to impact
> performance too much.

Can't squid be reconfigured to handle the SSL portion itself?  In
other words, can it simply treat all requests to the backend as if
they were HTTP, and simply serve out cached/fresh copies of pages via
SSL?  I understand why squid can't cache pages that IT has to retrieve
via SSL, but that's not the case here.

That said, I tend to think that only logins really need to be secure anyway.

> Further there's the certificate issue; would we be content with a
> self-signed certificate (BIG WARNINGS in your browser every time you
> login) or will we spend the foundation's money for a big fancy
> corporation's stamp of approval?

You can pick up "wildcard" certificates (i.e. *.wikipedia.org) for
only a few hundred bucks from some providers.  Most big e-commerce
companies shell out the big bucks for one from Verisign for brand
recognition, but since that's not a concern here, one of the cheaper
providers should suffice.

Even if we wanted to go the free self-signed route, it's possible to
accept the certificate as valid so that it doesn't give a warning
every time, only the first time.

-Bill Clark


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: https

references:
<3312661.6QDcuGLpZV@mobil.md-d.org> <ccn48o$bic$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<5086636.gSrsNgYLy7@mobil.md-d.org> <40F04714.3090108@pobox.com>
	<45396622.8FMapZu6ct@mobil.md-d.org>

body:
On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 22:04:09 +0200, Michael Diederich <dev-null at md-d.org> wrote:

> the german Chaos Computer Club (CCC) signs ssl-certificates for free.

Yes, but the CCC probably isn't listed as a trusted signing authority
in most browsers.  We'd get a slightly different warning message that
way, but there'd still be a warning message.

-Bill Clark


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: https

body:
On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 13:10:38 -0700, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> We have over 300 wikis, each with a virtual subdomain. Each "major"
> project which supports all languages will add about 150 wikis: right now
> that's Wikipedia and Wiktionary.

Oh right, I forgot that every language has its own subdomain.

Yeah, I guess IP-based virtualhosts aren't really an option then, are they? :)

> Can you give some pointers on setting this up with an Apache server, and
> providing a sane failure mode for clients that don't support it?

I've never actually used TLS myself, but this seems as good an excuse
as any to look into it.  I'll get back to you on this.

> > Can't squid be reconfigured to handle the SSL portion itself?  In
> > other words, can it simply treat all requests to the backend as if
> > they were HTTP, and simply serve out cached/fresh copies of pages via
> > SSL?

> I don't know, can it?

I'm not sure, and honestly I look for any excuse I can NOT to play
with squid.  IMHO that software is simply too flaky for production
use, and I'm frankly astonished you have it working as well as you
(apparently) do.  When it works, it's great... but when it doesn't...

I watched squid flat-out lie to me about checking for more recent
copies of a requested file once.  I was sitting there watching the
webserver logfile and squid logs simultaneously, and squid claimed it
contacted the webserver when I could see for myself that it was
completely full of shit.  I uninstalled it immediately afterwards.

I play with squid every couple years, hoping that it will surprise me
with how stable and reliable it's become... but I keep finding myself
disappointed instead.

-Bill Clark


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: https

body:
On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 16:23:43 -0400, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've never actually used TLS myself, but this seems as good an excuse
> as any to look into it.  I'll get back to you on this.

Looks like I was wrong.

RFC 2817 claims that TLS should be capable of doing name-based virtualhosts:

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2817.html

This has been implemented in Apache 2.x, but from what I've been able
to find so far, it's not currently supported by any browsers.  Those
browsers that currently have TLS support don't have the "Upgrade TLS"
option, which is what's necessary for named-based virtualhosting to
work over SSL.  (Basically, the initial handshake takes place over a
standard HTTP connection so that Host information and such can be
sent, and THEN the connection is upgraded to TLS for the actual
request transfer).

So this doesn't appear to be an option (yet).

-Bill Clark


from_name: Imran Ghory

subject: [Foundation-l] Status of logo copyright

body:
On Sat, 10 Jul 2004, Angela_ wrote:

> David, it's great to hear you are happy to do this. As far as I know,
> the only copyrights assigned to the Foundation so far are those of
> Jimbo and certain edits by Bomis staff. The Foundation doesn't
> currently have any policies on the handling of its copyrights. I don't
> know how binding making an informal assignment on the mailing list
> would be; perhaps a lawyer could advise whether you need to physically
> sign something.

The FSF have a standard copyright assignment contract they get
contributors to GNU projects to sign, I'm sure if we asked them they'd let us use a
modified version of their contract.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


subject: [Foundation-l] Status of logo copyright