from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [Commons-l] Trademarks

body:
One cannot take photographs of many real-world objects or scenes without
encountering trademarks. Cars bear trademarks (their manufacturer's emblems,
names, sometimes even shapes or paint designs). Streets are covered with
trademarks. And so on and so forth.

I hope that such are not included in any restrictions.

-Matt
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/attachments/20050913/69354859/attachment.htm


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
G'day Andrew,

> On 12/09/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>>>imagine would handle the dozens of silly articles added to Wikipedia each
>>>day which rightfully should be deleted.
>>
>>They can collect for a month while we try to work out a less toxic deletion
>>mechanism that will scale.
>
> This, in itself, would form an interesting experiment. slap together a
> holding page, redirect VfD to it, have people list anything they would
> otherwise have vfd'ed. Then, after a month or so, see how many have
> been speedied, redirected, cleaned-up, or otherwise "neutralised"...

I like it ...

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

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.10.23/99 - Release Date: 12/09/2005


from_name: SPUI

subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
Ral315 wrote:
> Having a vote threshold simply won't work. Last night I closed 4 AfD's, all
> on Bus Stops (result was no consensus). What if each voter could only vote
> on 3 of the 4, and then no more articles at all? Besides, that would just
> increase the number of articles who don't get enough votes to reach
> consensus- they'd have to be relisted, increasing the AfD load.
>
Bus terminals. Not bus stops.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
G'day geni,

> On 9/12/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>>>Phroziac wrote:
>>>>No, afd just needs to *die*. I still don't see why anyone thought
>>>>renaming it would fix the problems.
<snip />
>>I figure a month without it will
>>REALLY FOCUS PEOPLE'S ATTENTION.
 >
> Or we could go the other way and turn all the VFD criteia into speedy
> critia which waould really focus the attention of the inclusionists.

Deletionist or not, I'd favour David's suggestion over *that* one.  It's
a little over-the-top, no?

You see borderline cases on AfD every day.  Deleting them outright, with
no discussion, would be worse than allowing them to be.

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

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.10.23/99 - Release Date: 12/09/2005


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:

>>area can outvote the people who actually know something. WP only
>>works because 99% of the time the ignorant are willing to defer to
>>the knowledgeable; but VfD process works in the opposite way -
>>the knowledgeable are made to do extra work to overcome the
>>objections of the ignorant.
>>
>>Stan
>>
>>
>VFD is part of Wikipedia, why would it work the opposite way from the
>rest of the wiki. It takes me just a minute to substantiate proof
>something is worth of an entry. Yes, it takes some time, but it's time
>well spent. That's exactly why AFD needs knowledgeable people.
>
I could come up with several theories as to why it's evolved
differently; for instance, a random's ill-informed vote for
deletion has traditionally been given as much weight as an
expert's vote to keep, whereas on article talk pages the expert
is more likely to be supported against an ignorant. Talk page
discussion is not on a fixed deadline; sometimes key input is
contingent on a library visit or for the right person to find
time to drop by, so there's no advantage to camping out on the
page. Existing articles tend to have one or several editors
committed to them, and they'll quietly fix bad driveby edits,
while new articles can end up on VfD before potential expert
defenders even notice their existence.

There are a hundred different ways that problematic new articles
could be handled, and I think it's telling that some people seem
unwilling even to consider that there might be better alternatives.

Stan


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Why changing the deletion process is a bad idea

body:
>From: Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com>
>
>I'm going to play Devil's Advocate and call [[WP:NOR]] - but that's not
>a speedy criteria, because an article is no longer original research as
>soon as references are added.

Depends on the kinds of references.

Jay.


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion suggestion

body:
On 9/13/05, Worldtraveller <wikipedia at world-traveller.org> wrote:
> So how about scrapping afd/vfd and replacing with a system whereby an
> editor may tag an article with a 'candidate for deletion' tag and provide
> a rationale.  Admins can patrol the resulting category, assess each case,
> delete as necessary.  If someone disagrees with the deletion, they can
> either contact the admin who deleted to ask them to review their decision,
> or if they want wider community input there's vfu (which could be renamed
> afu?)
>
> This seems to me to have the following advantages:
> 1. It would de-centralise the process if people mainly contact the
> deleting admin to query deletions.  This would avoid a giant page of bad
> feeling.
> 2. An article on vfd might only attract 4-5 votes, which is not enough to
> really determine community consensus and so much is kept that probably
> should be deleted when things end with 'no consensus'.  However, if things
> were deleted more quickly and restorations requested on vfu, the vfu
> decision would result in restoration if there was a clear consensus to
> include.  If an article does not attract sufficient community input to
> determine consensus then it would remain deleted.
That's exactly why I oppose decentralization. If it's on a category
instead of a centralized page, admin's can't see when notices are
removed, and if I visit a category at two different times, it's very
hard to see what's been added and what I've already voted for (I often
work on different machines, so link color isn't always an indicator).

Deletion discussions will cause bad feeling no matter how we do it.
It's best to keep it centralized, so people who don't want anything to
do with it can stay away.

--Mgm


body:
>From: Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com>
>
>Deleting encyclopedic articles harms the encyclopedia.

If only it were easy to decide what articles are "encyclopedic".

>Just because a
>"consensus" of professional deletionists decide that some article or
>another isn't "notable" doesn't make it unencyclopedic.

This kind of partisan language is completely unhelpful.

Jay.


from_name: William M Connolley

subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
On Tue, 13 Sep 2005, Kelly Martin wrote:
> On 9/13/05, William M Connolley <wmc at bas.ac.uk> wrote:
> > How about only permitting people 3 votes per day in total?
>
> How do you propose to enforce that?

If it were thought to be a good idea, some way could be found.

-W.

William M Connolley | wmc at bas.ac.uk | http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/wmc/
Climate Modeller, British Antarctic Survey | (01223) 221479
If I haven't seen further, it's because giants were standing on my shoulders


body:
>From: Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com>
>
>AFD is swarming with professional deletionists, and many deleted
>articles were deleted with input mainly from editors whose main
>contribution to Wikipedia is to vote to delete things.  I question
>whether this group of individuals fairly represents the Wikipedia
>community, and therefore whether AFD actually arrives at community
>consensus, except in obvious cases, and therefore call for admins to
>exercise their judgment in evaluting AFDs for whether they reflect
>true consensus, and also for admins to feel free to boldly undelete
>articles that were clearly deleted in a manner which harms the
>encyclopedia.

What is a "professional deletionist"? Is is a paid position? Does it require
annual certification?

>I know that it has become popular to grill admin candidates on their
>criteria for "consensus" at AFD, and candidates who fail to meet the
>standard that the deletionists have established as "reasonable" get
>dogpiled with oppose votes.  Frankly, I'm worried about this emergent
>mob mentality, which I think is encouraged by having a caste of
>professional deletionists, which is itself a consequence of having a
>centralized deletion mechanism.

This "deletionist cabal" view of the way both RFA and AFD work does not
correspond to any sort of reality that I am aware of.

Jay.


list: commons-l

from_name: David Benbennick

subject: [Commons-l] Trademarks

body:
On 9/13/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> The core goal of Commons is maximal reuse.

Actually, that's incorrect.  Lots of previous discussions have used
arguments similar to the following: Suppose, for example, that Saudi
Arabia bans photographs of nude people.  "Maximal reuse" would require
us to then delete the contents of [[Category:Nudity]].  The decision
has been to simply *ignore* that kind of issue, because the
alternative would mean our content is held hostage to every individual
country's idea of morality.

Personally, I believe we can keep trademark images that are under a
free license, for example [[Image:Gnomelogo.png]], though I suspect
there are not many examples of such images anyway.


from_name: Dan Grey

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: "Pure wiki"

body:
On 13/09/05, dpbsmith at verizon.net <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
> 3) What is the evidence that a "pure" wiki system will work better?

As far as I know, there is none. Sounds like a good reason to put it
live and see what happens :-).

Dan


subject: [WikiEN-l] *Sigh*, AFD is a discussion.

body:
>From: Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com>
>
>[[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and
>Subversives have Penetrated Washington]]
>I just closed this vfd. Apparently someone decided vfd is not a
>discussion, and all discussion should be on the discussion page. Don't
>we have a big notice somewhere saying AFD is a discussion?

Saying AfD discussion should be on an AfD discussion page is not the same as
saying AfD is not a discussion.

Jay.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: MediaWiki default problems

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Unless someone's requested an explicit overwrite run, only messages
> either not present or last edited by 'MediaWiki default' (ie those
> created by the installer or periodic upgrades and refreshes) are
> automatically updated. If something's been auto-updated that shouldn't
> have, perhaps either it's a bug (in which case details always help to
> track it down!) or the language file has changed that way and it's a
> legitimate update from the software's point of view.

Avar recently ran it with --rebuild on ruwiki in order to fix a few
blank messages. This drew complaints, and from what I know of the facts,
rightly so. Maybe he did it on cy as well.

-- Tim Starling


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Muke Tever

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] [Fwd: [Wikitech-l] A small Ultimate Wiktionary
	demo]

body:
Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> quoted:
> http://epov.org/uwd/index.php?title=Tag:Dog&action=edit
>
> (Further demos will be posted on http://epov.org/uwd/ in the coming
> weeks and months.)
>
> It should work in Firefox and IE. The only active component are the
> radio buttons you can click.

Still does nothing in my browser (Opera)...

	*Muke!
--
website:     http://frath.net/
LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/
deviantArt:  http://kohath.deviantart.com/

FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki:
http://wiki.frath.net/


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] One Where We Blew It

body:
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005, Geoff Burling wrote:

> On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, David wrote:
>
> > Fastfission wrote:
> >
> > >Well, recognizing that Wikipedia itself is becoming a cultural object,
> > >wouldn't it make sense at the very least to say "When it is more notable
> > >than its inclusion in Wikipedia would be"? ;-)
> > >
> > >Put more simply, if I were in EB, it would be pretty amazing and the most
> > >notable thing about me ("Otherwise unnotable man included in Encyclopedia
> > >Brittanica," the headlines would proclaim). However if I was more notable
> > >than my inclusion into EB would be, then it wouldn't be any big deal if they
> > >had an article on me -- it might even be expected, if they specialized in
> > >breadth.
> > >
> > >Of course, the problem with this is that it is self-reinforcing policy! That
> > >is, if the standard for inclusion to Wikipedia went down, then the
> > >likelihood of having a Wikipedia article about something would go up, which
> > >would in turn affect a standard for inclusion based on the likelihood of an
> > >article being in Wikipedia... and so on.
> > >
> > So that's the ultimate standard?  As soon as nobody is surprised that we
> > have an article on a subject, we need the article?
> >
> > I love it! :)
> >
> I guess this is an application of a rule that Jimbo mentions in his
> emails from time to time: the Principle of Least Astonishment. That is,
> if you consider Wikipedia's coverage of a given topic definitive,
> authorative, &/or exhaustive, it would reasonably astonish the reader
> if there was not an article about a specific subject.
>
> After all, I haven't seen anyone argue on VfD that a village of 100
> people in Africa or Asia is not notable: that's difficult to claim
> when there are so many existing articles about communities of that
> size -- or smaller -- in the U.S.
>
Well, I have been shown to be wrong. Check out the debate at
[[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Drigluidjunbl?gruidjundlei]], where
instead of first making an effort to see if the village actually exists
(or focussing on things like who created the article or does any other
article link to it), the debate is another version of "if I haven't
heard of it, & can't find it with Google, then let's delete it" argument.

Geoff


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: HHamilto at doe.k12.ga.us

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Request for ASL/English

body:
Here are some facts you should know about American Sign Language to help
with the discussion. It is a signed language (a great deal of research has
been done to determine this) and does not have a commonly used writing
system
Approximate number of speakers: 500,00
o     Location(s) spoken: American Sign Language is the dominant sign
language in the United States, English-speaking Canada and parts of Mexico.
It is also used in the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, C?te d'Ivoire,
Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Chad, Gabon, Democratic Republic
of the Congo, Central African Republic, Mauritania, Kenya, Madagascar,
Zimbabwe.
o     Closely related languages, if any: French Sign Language
o     External links to organizations that promote the language:

               National Association of the Deaf www.nad.org ,

            Canadian Association of the Deaf, http://www.cad.ca

            American Society for Deaf Children www.deafchildren.org

            Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf  http://www.ccsdeaf.com/

            American Sign Language Teachers of America
            www.rit.edu/~asltawww ,

            Center for Accessible Technology in Sign, www.aasdweb.com/CATS
            .

        You should also know:

        The average deaf adult reads at about the 4th grade level
        http://gri.gallaudet.edu/Literacy/#reading . Thus much of the
        internet  and encyclopedias in general are inaccessible to these
        users due to the level of reading required. A survey of the
        readability of internet sites showed popular sites such a the NY
        Times and Nickelodeon were above 4th grade level (
        www.readability.info). The article on cats from Wikipedia receives
        the following scores

        Readability report for The cat in wikipedia.doc
            readability grades:
                    Kincaid: 11.0
                    ARI: 12.2
                    Coleman-Liau: 13.4
                    Flesch Index: 52.5
                    Fog Index: 14.4
                    Lix: 49.1 = school year 9
                    SMOG-Grading: 12.8
            As you can see these are all well above the 4th grade level.
Although simple.wikipedia.org strives to provide a version of English that
is easier to read it does not totally meet the needs of deaf users. The
readability of the ?cat? article in simple wikipedia hovers at or slightly
above the 4th grade level on 2 measures of readability and is above 7th
grade on 3 measures of readability.

        Readability report for A cat in simple wikipedia.doc
            readability grades:
                    Kincaid: 4.6
                    ARI: 3.9
                    Coleman-Liau: 7.7
                    Flesch Index: 85.4
                    Fog Index: 7.4
                    Lix: 27.0 = below school year 5
                    SMOG-Grading: 7.7
To make information accessible to all deaf users sign language video is
necessary that accompanies the English text. An ASL-English bilingual
Wikipedia would provide deaf users with a tool for not only acquiring
general world knowledge via an accessible medium (sign language video) but
also a powerful educational tool for enhancing literacy by being able to
compare the ASL video and English text.
An ASL-English Wikipedia will also provide deaf students with a national
project that all students can contribute to while producing their everyday
reports for their classes in Social Studies, Science, etc? It will be a
great motivator for  students to produce a product that is actually of use
to others and a great lesson for them to learn that their labor can help
others. It will be a source of pride in the deaf community. A deaf fly
fisherman in Montana may produce a signed article/video on trout and it
will be in a medium (sign language video) that is comprehensible by the
500,000 users of American Sign Language.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion suggestion

body:
Regardless of the all the bad feeling surrounding AfD, it appears to
do its work fine.
If articles are wrongly deleted, people should use VFU more instead of
complaining about the Deletion process.

I'm not talking about making voting easier for fanatics. It's meant to
make closing debates easier for administrators.

Deletion may need some reform, but that should be aimed at people's
mentality and not the place the discussions are done.

(y the way, I just visited Uncyclopedia and I recommend it for people
who need to wind down and have a laugh.)

--Mgm


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] [Fwd: [Wikipedia] DICT protocol]

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> dictd servers [...]
> The computational costs and traffic overhead are low (but unlike http
> no free gzip-on-fly) - it's a really just a very simple protocol with
> clients only reading data from servers.

Judging from the Linux dictd manpage (*), the current
implementation seems to spawn one server process for each
connecting client, non-threaded, which can then stay connected as
long as it sees fit.  Without having tried it, this kind of
solution appears to scale to a few hundred simultaneous users
(workgroup or intranet level), but not to the global web level.
Old webserver programmers will smile and remember how webservers
used to work in 1995, based on late W. Richard Stevens' book.

I think it could be interesting (sometime in the future) to deploy
a global central spelling dictionary server, where users can
update the dictionary in real time (results showing up in
Wiktionary), but the dictd server software would probably have to
be completely rewritten for that level of scalability.  It might
make sense to replace the dict protocol and its need for special
servers with some kind of XML over HTTP, if only to benefit from
the scalability already designed into Apache.

(*) This from http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man8/dictd.8.html :
  OPTIONS
    [...]
  --limit children
    Specifies the number of daemons that may be running
    simultaneously. Each daemon services a single connection. If
    the limit is exceeded, a (serialized) connection will be made
    by the server process, and a response code 420 (server
    temporarily unavailable) will be sent to the client. This
    parameter should be adjusted to prevent the server machine
    from being overloaded by dict clients, but should not be set
    so low that many clients are denied useful connections. The
    default is 100, but may be changed in the dictd.h file at
    compile time (DICT_DAEMON_LIMIT).

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Article deletion (proposed 1 month hiatus)

body:
> Or, both camps could assume good faith and relax a bit, each not
> thinking that the "other guys" are a bunch of deranged
> encyclopedia-haters who want to destroy everything in an orgy of
> deletion and/or garage band stubs. :) A lot of people are currently
> disagreeing over what sorts of articles merit inclusion in Wikipedia,
> but it's not like most of those people think Wikipedia's going to go
> down in flames if the "wrong" standards are picked. At least, they
> shouldn't. Wikipedia is more resistant than that.
>

Well ten out of ten for bring posertive. People have been kicking the
idea of deleteion refome for a while. it hasn't happened becuase we
haven't yet completely exausted the option of doing nothing. untill
that time happens of it's own accord rather than trying to force it
there is very little chance indeed of getting a consensus.

> Are there no inclusionist admins who would go on "deletion log patrol"
> if such a thing became common?

have you any idea how dull that would be? it's not like there is a
shortage of other boring admin tasks.

> Would you worry about a corresponding
> problem of unchecked undeletion?
>
 not really since it is much less common so it would be a lot less
effort to cheack. Pluss everyone can see when something is undeleted.

> As one possible alternative, the "pure wiki deletion" method of simply
> blanking pages would make it a lot easier to double-check and revert by
> non-admins.

See WP:CP for why that isn't even legal.

--
geni


from_name: Netocrat

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: Differential storage

body:
On Mon, 12 Sep 2005 22:51:28 +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> Maybe download a dump and try with xdelta ?

Looks promising.  The only drawback that I can see is that it stores an
md5 sum which for very small changes can make it less space efficient than
ordinary diff in rcs format and is just plain unnecessary for mediawiki.
I'll see if there's a way to disable the md5 sum; perhaps the source will
need to be hacked.

Now I have a David and Goliath problem... 56k dial-up vs 31G xml download.
Can anyone suggest a source for a smaller data set in English with some
representative multiple-revision articles, preferably a few edit wars etc.

--
http://members.dodo.com.au/~netocrat


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Article deletion (proposed 1 month hiatus)

body:
On 9/13/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> "geni" <geniice at gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:f8060843050912185312a86a1c at mail.gmail.com...
> > The inclusionist camp could of course just obstruct everything.
>
> ...and later:
>
> > What risk? Admins on RC patrol will be able to delete stuff before
> > anyone else has time to react and digging thourgh the deletion log
> > when you don't have admin powers is imposible and when you do it is
> > insanely boring.
>
> Not quite managing to see just which of these you are more worried about...
> --
> Phil
> [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]

On balance the second one becuase I can't quite tell where it would
end up. Of course in the first would be a major factactor in causeing
the second that doesn't mean much.

--
geni


from_name: Phroziac

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: "Pure wiki"

body:
Merges are good, and i would have less of a problem with afd if we
could just merge it while the discussion is on. Certainly, if it's
verifiable, sourced, and isn't very long, a merge into something else
won't hurt..

On 9/13/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 13/09/05, dpbsmith at verizon.net <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
> > 3) What is the evidence that a "pure" wiki system will work better?
>
> As far as I know, there is none. Sounds like a good reason to put it
> live and see what happens :-).
>
>
> Dan
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
1)So maybe we should allow a merges during AFD listing.

2)Pure wiki deletion is a nice idea, but if people start blanking you
can't see the difference between page blankers and people who are
actually interested in a discussion about the article's validity.

3) Decentralizing discussion will allow a lot of discussion to go
unnoticed by people interested in Wikipedia as a whole rather than the
article. Centralizing will give visibility to the most people and
therefore reflect much better the views of the community.

4) We should have more centralized discussion on groups of articles to
get a concensus. I've seen a lot of inclusionists, but barely any that
think of the WP:MUSIC guidelines as a bad idea.

5) Moving (again) or changing the deletion process won't fix what's
really wrong with it.

It's people's attitudes that need fixing rather than the process we
use to delete pages.

For example:
*People vote delete on sockpuppet supported articles without as much
as a word on the actual article itself.
*People vote keep or delete merely because an article is a school or a
road without looking at the content.
*People continuously criticize VFD/AFD but VFU rarely ever gets any
requests. To me that says there's barely any stuff that actually needs
to be undeleted.

--Mgm


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] XML dump not well-formed because of unicode

body:
Jakob Voss wrote:
> When I tried to parse the current German XML dump I discovered the
> following malformed sequence (in [[de:India]]):
>
> [[got:��...
>
> It looks like someone tried to encode a unicode surogate pair with
> XML character references. Maybe MediaWiki does not recognize #xD800;
> as an invalid unicode character and transformed it into this form.
> I have not tried to send invalid unicode characters in an edit form
> to reproduce the error.

MediaWiki's UTF-8 validation should reject a literal U+D800, and a
literal � would of course be transformed into &#xD800; in XML
output.

Could be a bug in Mono's XmlWriter implementation. (The dumps from
MediaWiki are filtered and split into multiple streams by a program I
wrote in C# to produce full, current-only, and current-non-talk-
non-userpage dumps from one run.) I'll take a look.

> BTW: I doubt that anyone has ever tried to validate the huge XML dump as
> a whole - as far as I know validating XML streams (given an XML schema)
> is still a research topic. It's not the only part where MediaWiki
> touches the research border of current computer science :-)

I have done test validations of the XML dumps as a whole before, using
Xerces. Here's the shell script wrapper I use:

#!/bin/sh
XERCES=/home/brion/src/xerces/xerces-2_6_2
java -classpath $XERCES/xercesImpl.jar:$XERCES/xercesSamples.jar
sax.Counter -n -v -s -f $@

A working file:
$ schema-check demo2.xml
demo2.xml: 31636 ms (17286 elems, 1736 attrs, 0 spaces, 433774 chars)

With �� slipped in:
$ schema-check demox.xml
[Fatal Error] demox.xml:48:15: Character reference "&#xD800" is an
invalid XML character.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 253 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20050913/a5d29292/attachment.pgp>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
> Revert wars wouldn't get very far due to the 3RR - it would force
> people to come to a *consensus* over whether or not to include an
> article, rather than just voting. I bet most deletions wouldn't be
> controversial (just as a lot of AfD listings aren't opposed). I don't
> see how having vandalism in page histories is a problem.
>
> Dan

The 3RR is not massively effective in stoping revert wars. if you have
an article that runs down the fault line between inclusionist and
deletionist camps then it will have no effect whatsoever (well in
theory it could turn wikipedia into a straight democracy).

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: "Pure wiki"

body:
> 5) USENET resembles a pure wiki system. Articles can only be deleted
> ("cancelled") by the person who created them (and as of 2005 virtually all
> news servers seem to ignore cancellations anyway). It is an inclusionist's
> dream. It is far larger than Wikipedia and far more comprehensive.

And before anyone goes calling him a deletionist. I believe merges and
VFU should be used more. Merges to keep info, but not fragmented
articles. VFU to undo unjust deletions. Both extreme inclusionism and
extreme deletionism have faults that are the root of a lot of
ill-feeling between the groups.

(Sorry for the repeat of my view, but it seemed appropriate here).


body:
On 9/13/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> I also think that there's a case to be made for bold undeletes,
> disregarding any so-called consensus that might have arised on
> VFD/AFD, when the "consensus" is clearly wrong.  In my opinion, an
> admin can ignore AFD "consensus" when following it would harm the
> encyclopedia.

*cough* [[WP:IAR]], [[WP:BOLD]]. That's half the trifecta!


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion suggestion

body:
On 9/13/05, Worldtraveller <wikipedia at world-traveller.org> wrote:
> So how about scrapping afd/vfd and replacing with a system whereby an
> editor may tag an article with a 'candidate for deletion' tag and provide
> a rationale.  Admins can patrol the resulting category, assess each case,
> delete as necessary.  If someone disagrees with the deletion, they can
> either contact the admin who deleted to ask them to review their decision,
> or if they want wider community input there's vfu (which could be renamed
> afu?)
>
> This seems to me to have the following advantages:
> 1. It would de-centralise the process if people mainly contact the
> deleting admin to query deletions.  This would avoid a giant page of bad
> feeling.
> 2. An article on vfd might only attract 4-5 votes, which is not enough to
> really determine community consensus and so much is kept that probably
> should be deleted when things end with 'no consensus'.  However, if things
> were deleted more quickly and restorations requested on vfu, the vfu
> decision would result in restoration if there was a clear consensus to
> include.  If an article does not attract sufficient community input to
> determine consensus then it would remain deleted.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> WT
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

No such descission are much better made by the comunity than admins.
Admins should only make descisions when for logicistical reasons it is
imposible to get wider community input.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Site search

body:
Note that until recently that google search box on wikicities only
searched the internet in general. Now it can do both. I would support
this on wikipedia..make a proposal!

On 9/13/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/09/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I just tried this as an experiment: completely at random, I decided to
> > search for "sheep shearing", and was redirected (I pressed "Go" not
> > "Search") to [[Sheep shearer]].
> >
> > Now, this is where it gets interesting: a large part of that article
> > describes something called "Blade shears". But if you put "Blade
> > shears" into the search box and click Go, you're taken to a search
> > page which doesn't list [[Sheep shearer]] anywhere on the first page.
> > The top two results - [[Shearing]] and [[Shears]] - both lead to a
> > disambiguation page that doesn't mention blade shears at all, either.
>
> On 12/09/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I've seen lots of people unfamiliar with Wikipedia complain because
> > the search engine doesn't list any close matches and the go button
> > confuses them too.
> >
> > Regardless of whether mergism is good or not, I think the search
> > engine could use some upgrading.
>
> Indeed. Personally, I only use Google site search on Wikipedia (which,
> incidently, had [[Sheep shearer]] as the first result for "Blade
> shears").
>
> I've noticed that Wikicities has a google search box below the
> built-in search. I wonder if we could have the same?
>
>
> Dan
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Kelly Martin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
On 9/13/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> VFD is part of Wikipedia, why would it work the opposite way from the
> rest of the wiki. It takes me just a minute to substantiate proof
> something is worth of an entry. Yes, it takes some time, but it's time
> well spent. That's exactly why AFD needs knowledgeable people.

And if you come up with proof of relevance, your work will still be
for naught if the howling boeotians refuse to recant their delete
votes.  And any admin who dares disregard a numerical consensus to
delete when the minority side has a valid argument to keep will be
wikisued: ask Tony Sidaway about this.

There's a lot of editors and admins who've given up on VFD/AFD
precisely because of the problems Stan is talking about, including
many of Wikipedia's best editors.

Kelly


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Tue, Sep 13, 2005 at 02:07:50PM +0200, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
> > dictd servers [...]
> > The computational costs and traffic overhead are low (but unlike http
> > no free gzip-on-fly) - it's a really just a very simple protocol with
> > clients only reading data from servers.
>
> Judging from the Linux dictd manpage (*), the current
> implementation seems to spawn one server process for each
> connecting client, non-threaded, which can then stay connected as
> long as it sees fit.  Without having tried it, this kind of
> solution appears to scale to a few hundred simultaneous users
> (workgroup or intranet level), but not to the global web level.
> Old webserver programmers will smile and remember how webservers
> used to work in 1995, based on late W. Richard Stevens' book.
>
> I think it could be interesting (sometime in the future) to deploy
> a global central spelling dictionary server, where users can
> update the dictionary in real time (results showing up in
> Wiktionary), but the dictd server software would probably have to
> be completely rewritten for that level of scalability.  It might
> make sense to replace the dict protocol and its need for special
> servers with some kind of XML over HTTP, if only to benefit from
> the scalability already designed into Apache.

We're talking Unix here. Per-process overhead is just a few kBs,
tcp/ip buffers are bigger than that.

The real point is of course the ease of replication. Just
put 20 machines, with a dictd on each of them, and a dumb
load balancer in front of them, and you can practically
serve 20x more connections.

I don't think any dictd server actually serves thousands of
simultaneous connections, so nobody cared to write a more
efficient server. But the protocol is so simple that it shouldn't
be any difficult, if it was actually needed.
http://www.dict.org/links.html lists servers written in C,
Perl, Java and Python.

The Perl server (jiten) has (not counting addons/ directory)
about 500 LOC and is fork-less (it uses IO::Select).


subject: [WikiEN-l] Vandalism concerns with commons images

body:
On 9/13/05, uninvited at nerstrand.net <uninvited at nerstrand.net> wrote:
> David Benbennick wrote:
>
> > How about the reverse?  Are we prepared to grant EN adminship to all
> > Commons admins?
>
> I'm confused.  Does vandalism on EN affect commons?

My point was simply that "fair is fair".  If you think EN admins
should get to be Commons admins automatically, it's only fair to allow
Commons admins the same privilege.


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Could be a bug in Mono's XmlWriter implementation. (The dumps from
> MediaWiki are filtered and split into multiple streams by a program I
> wrote in C# to produce full, current-only, and current-non-talk-
> non-userpage dumps from one run.) I'll take a look.

Now filed as http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=76095

Will see about fixing...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 253 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20050913/3838bd22/attachment.pgp>


body:
> In my opinion, an admin can ignore AFD "consensus" when following it would harm the
> encyclopedia.
>
> Kelly

Oh please no. Name anything that could harm wikipedia that doean't get
delt with as a speedy or a copyvio.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion suggestion

body:
> Apart from that, I suspect that the undeletion process will become unclogged
> with many accusations of editors/admins acting in bad faith.
>
> I will flag now that I will not vote for any proposal unless that I am
> pretty sure that it will improve the system. I will not vote for any
> proposal which removes the deletion process from the scrutiny of ordinary
> users.
>
> Keith
>
> aka Capitalistroadster
I'll go even further myself. I will oppose any system I believe will
make the deletion worse. By the way, thanks to Keith for the great
wording. He captured my feeling much better than I could ever have
myself.

--Mgm


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Commons-l] Trademarks

body:
The core goal of Commons is maximal reuse.  Commercial logos are
frequently under _both_ trademark _and_ copyright.

Felipe Micaroni Lalli wrote:
>     Short version: Trademarks are very different from copyright. They are
>     more like "other laws which restrict the free use" of (any) content and
>     Commons does already allow seals, flags, coats of arms, Olympic symbols,
>     the Red Cross and Crescent (all of which are protected quite like
>     "commercial" trademarks) as well as Nazi symbols (the use of which is
>     extremly restricted in some legislations such as DE, AT, HU).

I would recommend removing all of those.


from_name: Abigail Brady

body:
On 13/09/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > In my opinion, an admin can ignore AFD "consensus" when following it
> would harm the
> > encyclopedia.
> >
> > Kelly
>
>
> Oh please no. Name anything that could harm wikipedia that doean't get
> delt with as a speedy or a copyvio.

 Original hoaxes. (not speedyable)
 --
Abi


from_name: JAY JG

body:
>From: Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com>
>
>On 9/13/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > >I know that it has become popular to grill admin candidates on their
> > >criteria for "consensus" at AFD, and candidates who fail to meet the
> > >standard that the deletionists have established as "reasonable" get
> > >dogpiled with oppose votes.  Frankly, I'm worried about this emergent
> > >mob mentality, which I think is encouraged by having a caste of
> > >professional deletionists, which is itself a consequence of having a
> > >centralized deletion mechanism.
> >
> > This "deletionist cabal" view of the way both RFA and AFD work does not
> > correspond to any sort of reality that I am aware of.
>
>Check out the number of admin candidates who were asked to specify
>their standard for AFD consensus by Hamster Sandwich.  Sam Vimes got
>dogpiled when his answer was deemed unsuitable (although he may have
>been dogpiled for other reasons as well).

He *may* have been "dogpiled" for other reasons as well?  I've looked over
the RfA, and it is quite apparent that a majority of "Oppose" votes occurred
before Hamster Sandwich even asked the question, and that *none* of the
oppose vote rationales have anything to do with his response to Hamster's
question, including Hamster's own vote.  The only person who seems to have
cared about the question at all was *you*, who voted "Support, to
counterweigh against the oppose votes of the wikilawyers and the deletionist
society."

>JesseW was also
>interrogated closely, although he passed muster and was not dogpiled.
>Marianocecowski was interrogated.  Scimitar was interrogated, but the
>question was removed when it was answered collaterally.

I looked over these votes as well; no-one seems to have cared about the
responses to the question except Hamster Sandwich.

>Hamser
>Sandwich seems to have discontinued this interrogation method, but I'm
>not pleased to see it happening.

In other words, *one* editor asked a question relating to this on *four* RfA
pages, the RfA votes themselves seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with
"deletionist" tendencies, and no-one has ever been "dogpiled" there for
failing to meet some "deletionist" standard.

As I stated above, your "deletionist cabal" view of the way both RFA and AFD
work does not correspond to any sort of reality that I am aware of, and this
only strengthens my point.

Jay.


from_name: Jakob Voss

body:
Hi,

When I tried to parse the current German XML dump I discovered the
following malformed sequence (in [[de:India]]):

[[got:��...

It looks like someone tried to encode a unicode surogate pair with
XML character references. Maybe MediaWiki does not recognize #xD800;
as an invalid unicode character and transformed it into this form.
I have not tried to send invalid unicode characters in an edit form
to reproduce the error.

Anyway the dump is broken. It's not well-formed XML (so it's no XML
at all but "looks-like-XML") and every correct XML-Parser will fail
to parse it.

According the the XML specification (1.0) Chapter 2.2 legal characters
in XML are any Unicode characters, excluding the surrogate blocks,
FFFE, and FFFF.

Char ::= #x9 | #xA | #xD | [#x20-#xD7FF] | [#xE000-#xFFFD] |
[#x10000-#x10FFFF]

Using any the following unicode character will make SpecialExport and
the XML dump fail:

#x0-#x8, #xB-#xC, #x0E-#x1F, #xD800-#xDFFF, #xFFFE-#xFFFF, &#x11000-...

Additionally you can use hexadecimal and decimal character
references - I don't know how the wrong characters were
encoded in the SQL database.

Greetings,
Jakob

BTW: I doubt that anyone has ever tried to validate the huge XML dump as
a whole - as far as I know validating XML streams (given an XML schema)
is still a research topic. It's not the only part where MediaWiki
touches the research border of current computer science :-)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: "Pure wiki"

body:
Why would this be any different then what Willy on Wheels would do?
Why can't you do it now? And, I suggest you name the script "Billy on
Rails".

On 9/13/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ral315 wrote:
> > On 9/13/05, Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On 13/09/05, dpbsmith at verizon.net <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
> >>
> >>> 3) What is the evidence that a "pure" wiki system will work
> >>> better?
> >>
> >> As far as I know, there is none. Sounds like a good reason to put
> >> it live and see what happens :-).
> >>
> >>
> >> Dan
> >>
> >
> > The problem is, I could blank a lot of articles in
> > [[Wikipedia:Cleanup]], and even if someone noticed, they probably
> > couldn't prove I did it with malice. I was simply "deleting
> > unnecessary articles".
> >
>
> I can write a script that will blank any article I edit. Should I put it
> live as soon as PWDS is approved?
>
> --
> Alphax                      |   /"\
> Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
> OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
> http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: steve v

subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposed handling of cumbersome "disambiguation"

body:
Well, think of it like alternate handling. Consider
also the fact that disambiguations (and redirects) are
often anomalies in the encyclopedia model: They arent
entirely encyclopedic (though they are close) nor
Wikipedia pages. Theres the other issue that
disambiguations are in essence "choice redirects", and
have the potential to someday be integrated into
metadata article organization.

In that sense, having Disambiguation sections might be
a hindrance, but its at least more definitive and
organized than hatnotes, which just obstruct from the
article.

SV

--- MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:

> The problem is that in case of say for example a
> name disambiguation
> for John Smith. This section would need to be
> duplicated for all
> articles and if edited, again edited on all the
> pages having the dab
> section. Having it seperate makes editing it easier.
> Adding it as a
> transcluded section could perhaps cut on the number
> of clicks someone
> needs to get somewhere, but it's little gain for a
> major change like
> that IMO.
>
> On 9/13/05, steve v <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > In some cases, I have used the same disambiguation
> > link at top, only it links to a Disambiguation
> section
> > at bottom, rather than on a separate page. The
> link
> > looks the same. In other cases, where the
> > "disambiguation" is misused for overly specific
> links,
> > I will used the {{fn|1}} footnote tag. Thats for
> > linking to a Notes section, put before External
> links.
> > [[Monica Lewinsky scandal]] now has this, and I
> note
> > that people are using these more consistently.
> > Disambiguation could benefit from the same thing.
> > Whoever said that disambiguations needed to be
> > exclusively pages, and not sections? In cases
> where 98
> > percent of traffic links to a main article, or
> where
> > only one separate entry (which people try to stick
> at
> > the top) a simple disambiguation section seems
> > justified.
> >
> > SV
> >
> > --- MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > Disambiguations are there to make it easier for
> > > people to find the
> > > article they're looking for and have a similar
> name
> > > to the article
> > > they end up at. Shortening to a regular "For
> other
> > > uses see Foo
> > > (disambiguation)" seems better than hiding them
> at
> > > the bottom, which
> > > defies the entire point of having them.
> > >
> > > Only expand such top dab notices for stuff
> that's
> > > searched for really often.
> > >
> > > --Mgm
> > >
> > > On 9/13/05, steve v <vertigosteve at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > > > There has been a dislikable tendency to use
> large
> > > > notes -- often dealing with superficial
> aspects of
> > > the
> > > > name -- as disambiguation headers.
> > > >
> > > > As a solution, I suggest using the footnote
> tags
> > > > {{fn|1}} (top) {{fnb|1}} (bottom), under a ==
> > > Notes ==
> > > > section, to move such things down as footnotes
> > > rather
> > > > than hatnotes. Hatnotes should be substantial
> and
> > > as
> > > > brief as possible, not links to punk bands, or
> any
> > > > other thing other than disambiguation, or
> exactly
> > > > similar titles.
> > > >
> > > > In some cases, using a Disambiguation section
> > > (after
> > > > links) seems a better compromise than even
> > > creating a
> > > > disambiguation page.
> > > >
> > > > SV
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> __________________________________________________
> > > > Do You Yahoo!?
> > > > Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam
> > > protection around
> > > > http://mail.yahoo.com
> > > >
> _______________________________________________
> > > > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > > > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > > > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > > >
> > >
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> > > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > >
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > __________________________________
> > Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
> > http://mail.yahoo.com
> >
>

______________________________________________________
Yahoo! for Good
Donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
http://store.yahoo.com/redcross-donate3/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: XML dump not well-formed because of unicode

body:
Hi again,

I wrote:

> When I tried to parse the current German XML dump I discovered the
> following malformed sequence (in [[de:India]]):

You can remove the errors with a little perl script - only
a workaround for the current dump:

#!/usr/bin/perl

while(<>) {
     next if ($_ =~ /^\[\[got:�/);
     if ($_ =~ /^\[\[zh:�/) {
         print "</text>";
     } else {
         print $_;
     }
}


from_name: uninvited at nerstrand.net

body:
Dan Grey wrote:

> It's not "wikipolitics". You had made two edits to the Commons beyond
> your user pages before you applied for adminship. Not suprising you
> were turned down, is it?

It's becoming clearer to me that, for better or worse, commons sees
itself as a separate entity that does not have close ties to Wikipedia.
 In that light, it is unsuprising that people's history and involvement
at en.Wikipedia, or meta, or on other sister projects isn't much of a
consideration in granting or denial of adminship at commons.

I do want to make it very clear that I'm not bringing this up here on
the mailing list in an effort to try to get adminship for myself on
commons.  That is not my goal.  My goal, instead, is to address the
much broader matter of coordination and shared trust between projects.
I realize that commons policies are not identical to en. policies, and
that the projects despite their overlap do each have their own
decisionmaking.

On the other hand, I believe that the en admins (and the de and fr
admins, and those of other large wikipedias) are trustworthy,
responsible people who are familiar with wikis and respect the rules.
En (and de and fr) admins, in the course of dealing with vandalism, are
likely to encounter it on commons images.  If there is a shared goal
between the projects, and shared trust, there is no reason that I can
see to refrain from granting adminship on some sort of reciprocal
basis.

I don't think that it's fair or appropriate to insist that admins from
these large projects leave a message for someone from commons when they
need to protect an image.  They should be empowered to do so themselves.


references:
<bd4c411e050913065352990f2a@mail.gmail.com>
	<BF4C3FB4.5A80%travis@gpsports-eng.com>
	<bd4c411e05091308422dea2be2@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 9/13/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > So would that mean that admins could invoke [[WP:IAR] to ignore a "keep"
> > consensus if, in their opinion, following it would harm the encyclopedia?
>
> As long as they're prepared to explain their reasoning, absolutely.
> IAR is a two-edged sword: if you invoke it and can't defend it, you
> lose community respect.
>
> Kelly
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
Stop talking about me! heh. Seriously though, I agree with Kelly.


body:
David Benbennick wrote:

> > > How about the reverse?  Are we prepared to grant EN adminship to all
> > > Commons admins?
>
> > I'm confused.  Does vandalism on EN affect commons?

> My point was simply that "fair is fair".  If you think EN admins
> should get to be Commons admins automatically, it's only fair to allow
> Commons admins the same privilege.

I'm dismayed that you see this as a game of tit-for-tat rather than the
serious policy and coordination question that it is.

As a practical matter, I believe that most of the commons admins are
already administrators on their "home" wikipedias.  As I stated in my
opening post, I would support granting commons adminship to admins from
any of the larger wikipedias, including de and fr and perhaps others.


body:
> If commons is a completely independent of en.wikipedia, perhaps we
> should reconsider our present drive to move images to commons.  I don't
> think that would be wise.  The original intent of commons was to create
> a project that would serve all wikipedias rather than to create a
> freestanding media archive unrelated to any of them.
>

what drive? Last I cheacked the backlog at now commons was quite
impressive. I'm quite happy to leave it that way for now.  Othere
wikis are somewhat more proacitve in this area. I don't know what
their experence has been.

--
geni


from_name: Mike B

body:
Hej,

You cannot use automatic redirects from inflected
forms - how would you differentiate between two lemmas
which gives equal inflections? E.g. the Swedish word
[[kors]] is a word in its own right (i.e.
uninflected), but also an inflection of (at least) two
different lemmas ([[ko]] and [[kor]])

I don't know if it is the best model, but I envision
a list, in say the right margin of the screen, of the
possible lemma which can be inflected into the form
displayed in the article.

\Mike

--- "James R. Johnson" <modean52 at comcast.net> wrote:

> 2 things - When will the OE be up? And - will UW
> allow full inflection
> charts for inflected languages (singular/plural, and
> nom/gen/dat/instr/acc
> inflections)?  You said, "We could also
> automatically make use of synonyms,
> plurals and inflections (though this requires
> further changes to the
> category code beyond internationalization)."  Would
> the genitive Tags, or
> dative Tagen (German) be auto-redirects to Tag, or
> how would you envision
> that being handled?
>
> James
>
---snip-----

___________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - NEW crystal clear PC to PC calling worldwide with voicemail http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
>> Could be a bug in Mono's XmlWriter implementation. (The dumps from
>> MediaWiki are filtered and split into multiple streams by a program I
>> wrote in C# to produce full, current-only, and current-non-talk-
>> non-userpage dumps from one run.) I'll take a look.
>
>
> Now filed as http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=76095
>
> Will see about fixing...

Have submitted a patch. The next dump should be correct.

Have I mentioned how much I hate UTF-16 and how a 16-bit "char" type
promotes the writing of naive code that doesn't take surrogate pairs
into account?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 253 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20050913/019e00df/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

references:
<t2+LFqCyDiJDFw5O@cartref.demon.co.uk> <432630A1.1060400@pobox.com>
	<dg5iej$ejp$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
2005/9/13, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au>:
> Avar recently ran it with --rebuild on ruwiki in order to fix a few
> blank messages. This drew complaints, and from what I know of the facts,
> rightly so. Maybe he did it on cy as well.

I just did it on ruwiki and shoudln't have, it was done to fix a
problem with msg:linkprefix being empty and I didn't realise the
implications it would have, sorry;(


body:
On 9/13/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Oh please no. Name anything that could harm wikipedia that doean't get
> > delt with as a speedy or a copyvio.
>
> Deleting encyclopedic articles harms the encyclopedia.  Just because a
> "consensus" of professional deletionists decide that some article or
> another isn't "notable" doesn't make it unencyclopedic.  See
> Snowspinner's post that started this iteration of this discussion.
>
> Kelly
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

So instead you want to give more power to admins? Wikipedia descisions
are not made by professional professional deletionists. Most seem to
be made by random peopel who just happened to find out about the
deleteion listing. As for your claim "Deleting encyclopedic articles
harms the encyclopedia" it can only be true if you assume that
survival of the fitest type evolution does not apply to wikis.
--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] *Sigh*, AFD is a discussion.

body:
[[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and
Subversives have Penetrated Washington]]
I just closed this vfd. Apparently someone decided vfd is not a
discussion, and all discussion should be on the discussion page. Don't
we have a big notice somewhere saying AFD is a discussion?


from_name: J_Laventure-Johnston at Dell.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] My Compliments

body:
I just wanted to compliment the entire wikipedia team on a truly
remarkable contribution to our entire world.

An encyclopedia of this magnitude made free to anyone with internet
access, in multiple languages, is in my opinion the greatest gift of
knowledge ever given to much of the worlds less fortunate.

Thank you very much, I use it all the time, and plan to donate what I
can regularly.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Laventure-Johnston

jbowski at gmail.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

body:
On 9/13/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Half is a little high

Actually i think half is a little low.


from_name: Doug

subject: [Wikitech-l] Print Interface

body:
I have been tasked with making a print interface for MediaWiki.  The user
would select and article and specifiy how many internal links deep to print.

How can I do this?

Doug


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

body:
Bryan Derksen writes:

"Are there no inclusionist admins who would go on "deletion log patrol"
if such a thing became common? Would you worry about a corresponding
problem of unchecked undeletion?"

I'm the only person I know who does this regularly at present--there
aren't presently a lot of articles being wrongly speedied so it only takes
one person to check.  I think the RC patrollers generally exercise good
judgement.  There is a tendency to stretch speedy criteria but this is
mostly done with commonsense.


from_name: Alphax

subject: [Commons-l] Creative Commons -NC Considered Harmful

body:
Brian wrote:
> "Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful
> <http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html>
>
> ;)
>
> /Alterego
>

Top posting and HTML email considered harmful!

--
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \


from_name: Sam Korn

subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
> On 12/09/05, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Revert wars wouldn't get very far due to the 3RR - it would force
> people to come to a *consensus* over whether or not to include an
> article, rather than just voting. I bet most deletions wouldn't be
> controversial (just as a lot of AfD listings aren't opposed). I don't
> see how having vandalism in page histories is a problem.

But you are advocating setting up a system that encourages
revert-warring.  Not good.  As in, NOT good.  Revert wars are bad.
They encourage bad faith and aggression more than anything else
_including_ AfD/VfD.

> > This may be "pure wiki" and therefore desirable from a social point of
> > view, if you take the viewpoint that Wikipedia is a wiki as would
> > conventionally be seen.  I suggest, however, that many ideas about
> > wikis do not apply to Wikipedia because of the difference in scale and
> > therefore vandalism.
>
> I simply disagree!

Fair enough.  But would you agree that Wikipedia is _more_ than the
wiki as it was originally envisaged?

> > In the end, we are going to force discussions over the matter.  It is
> > conventional WP philosophy that edit wars are not good.  They attract
> > trolls and POV-pushers and, in the end, force a tyranny of the
> > majority, as the 3RR will always win.  However, the discussions would
> > essentially be AfD discussions about controversial articles.
>
> No, AfD doesn't have "discussions", it has simple majority votes. PWDS
> would force *discussion* over voting, as the power to delete/undelete
> would belong to everyone, therefore everyone would have to agree on a
> course of action :-).

AfD emphatically _does_ have discussions.  They are _not_ majority
votes.  If they are being closed as such by some, then fry those who
are closing incorrectly.  Wikipedia works by consensus.  Moving the
discussion to the talk page does precisely nothing to alter that.  AfD
is _not_ a majority vote.  (Incidentally, just to dispel a popular
myth, in the English language, vote != majority vote.  I do
distinguish between them.)

> > So we are back where we started.
> >
> > So I ask this:
> >
> > 1) What do we hope to gain by introducing PWDS?
> > 2) How do we handle the vandals who will blank a page (as many already
> > do for vandalism) then to claim "but I was deleting the article"?
>
> 1.See everything I've written and the above link
> 2. Any deletion blanking would still have to be justified on the talk
> page as per the Deletion policy, and also indicated in the edit
> summary - if not, it would simply be reverted as vandalism.

1.  The only reason that I see is consistency.  That is not enough for
me to support a whole new approach to much of Wikipedia.
2.  OK, I'll take a slightly different tack.  Administrators are given
the power to delete articles because they are trusted.  People know
that they will not go and delete a little out-of-the-way page.  But
what is to stop a vandal or a troll from doing that?  We are given no
level of safety against this behaviour.

Bureaucracy may not be pretty.  It may not be democratic.  But I
firmly believe it is for the good of the encyclopaedia.

And that's the key.

Sam


from_name: Worldtraveller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion suggestion

body:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Keith Old [mailto:keithold at gmail.com]
> Sent: 13 September 2005 11:31 AM
> To: English Wikipedia
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Deletion suggestion
>
> Let us look at an article about a person who is notable in Australia but
> not elsewhere (for example) which is in a poor state. Editor A comes and
> tags the article for deletion. Editor B comes through and deletes it.
> Neither editor is aware of the significance of the person in Australia
> and the article is deleted.
>
> If it was listed on articles for deletion, an editor or editors from
> Australia could argue for its retention and improve it meaning we have a
> better article.

If the article started by providing enough information, references and
links to other articles for any reader to understand why the subject of
the article was notable, then surely the problem wouldn't arise?  No
assertion of notability is already a criterion for speedy deletion.  If
the article was a two-line stub then it would surely be no major issue for
someone familiar with the topic to create a more encyclopaedic article
that wouldn't get tagged for deletion.

WT


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Differencing Engine

body:
Ivan Krstic wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
>
>>It uses the standard Linux tool "diff", doesn't it?
>
> No, since per-character instead of per-line granularity is needed.

That is not mutually exclusive. I have done such a thing before, using
the standard Linux tool "diff".

> MediaWiki ships its own PHP diff implementation. A tremendously
> faster-performing C++ implementation is available in CVS along with a
> SWIG interface, module 'wikidiff', which is in use at Wikimedia sites.

Alright, I didn't know that.

Timwi


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

body:
On 9/13/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> Bryan Derksen writes:
>
> "Are there no inclusionist admins who would go on "deletion log patrol"
> if such a thing became common? Would you worry about a corresponding
> problem of unchecked undeletion?"
>
>
> I'm the only person I know who does this regularly at present--there
> aren't presently a lot of articles being wrongly speedied so it only takes
> one person to check.  I think the RC patrollers generally exercise good
> judgement.  There is a tendency to stretch speedy criteria but this is
> mostly done with commonsense.
>

I feel sorry for you if you cheack out all those copyvios.

--
geni


from_name: Felipe Micaroni Lalli

subject: [Commons-l] Trademarks

body:
The system is free but the Gnome logo isn't under free license. Try create a
System with this logo. You can't. Like the Wikimedia logo.

hugs,
Felipe.

2005/9/13, David Benbennick <dbenbenn at gmail.com>:
>
> On 9/13/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> > The core goal of Commons is maximal reuse.
>
> Actually, that's incorrect. Lots of previous discussions have used
> arguments similar to the following: Suppose, for example, that Saudi
> Arabia bans photographs of nude people. "Maximal reuse" would require
> us to then delete the contents of [[Category:Nudity]]. The decision
> has been to simply *ignore* that kind of issue, because the
> alternative would mean our content is held hostage to every individual
> country's idea of morality.
>
> Personally, I believe we can keep trademark images that are under a
> free license, for example [[Image:Gnomelogo.png]], though I suspect
> there are not many examples of such images anyway.
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>

--
um abra?o,
Felipe
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/attachments/20050913/0ea4e486/attachment.htm


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: One Where We Blew It

body:
On 9/13/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 13, 2005, at 11:44 AM, Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
> >
> > I'm the only person I know who does this regularly at present--there
> > aren't presently a lot of articles being wrongly speedied so it
> > only takes
> > one person to check.  I think the RC patrollers generally exercise
> > good
> > judgement.  There is a tendency to stretch speedy criteria but this is
> > mostly done with commonsense.
>
> As what looks like the most radical inclusionist in this debate, I
> should note that when I have the stomach for new pages patrol, about
> half the pages should die. Not all of these are clear cut speedies,
> but most of them are clear cut deletes. Since new pages patrol is
> pure hell, and your eyes burn rapidly from the stupid, I tend to be
> very supportive of people being given a long leash when they do it.

Half is a little high

> The number of people who can contribute at least moderately OK
> articles on first edit is such that we can afford to lose the wholly
> illiterate to Comixpedia and other sites.
>
> But as I look at Comixpedia, that's pretty obviously not who we lost.
>
> -Snowspinner

People will leave for one reason or another. I work on a non wikimedia wiki.

--
geni


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Is it possible to download wikipedia images using
	FTP connection?

body:
Darwin Sadeli wrote:
>
> I just wondered, since I failed to download the wikipedia image dump
> using HTTP connection, do you provide an FTP server and port for us to
> download using FTP

There are millions of tools available to download files via HTTP. If all
of them have failed for you, then either your connection or your system
is probably misconfigured and you are likely to experience similar
problems with FTP. It is therefore wiser for you to fix those problems
and use HTTP. My guess, though, would be that you tried only one
download program (Internet Explorer perhaps?) and decided it was the
server that was broken.


body:
Arwel Parry wrote:
>
> On the cy: wikipedia we have noticed that user "MediaWiki default" (a
> bot?) seems to run every 6 months or so and repeatedly resets many of
> the MediaWiki strings either to an older version which has been
> corrected or (even worse) to English.  I've just had to edit
> :cy:MediaWiki:Go from "mynd" (travel) to "ewch" (imperative) again!

There was only one edit by "MediaWiki default" that changed "ewch" to
"mynd" and that was in May 2004. I don't call that "every 6 months". :)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
On 9/13/05, SPUI <drspui at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ral315 wrote:
> > Having a vote threshold simply won't work. Last night I closed 4 AfD's,
> all
> > on Bus Stops (result was no consensus). What if each voter could only
> vote
> > on 3 of the 4, and then no more articles at all? Besides, that would
> just
> > increase the number of articles who don't get enough votes to reach
> > consensus- they'd have to be relisted, increasing the AfD load.
> >
> Bus terminals. Not bus stops.
>

(sigh) See what happens when you don't pay attention when you post to the
list? My point still stands nevertheless.

--
Sincerely,
Ral315
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ral315


from_name: Tomer Chachamu

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Is it possible to download wikipedia images using
	FTP connection?

body:
On 13/09/05, Darwin Sadeli <darwin.sadeli at gmail.com> wrote:
> I just wondered, since I failed to download the wikipedia image dump
> using HTTP connection, do you provide an FTP server and port for us to
> download using FTP
> connection. Or maybe, is there any other methods of downloading the
> file besides using HTTP connection? Thank you in advance for your
> assistance.

The dumps are only offered via HTTP. This make sense, because HTTP
allows for resuming downloads (which FTP does not).

Use a download manager or something like that. Just because it didn't
work once doesn't mean it won't work next time - with networks,
anyway. :)


body:
Tomer Chachamu wrote:
>
> because HTTP allows for resuming downloads (which FTP does not).

FTP does have a (widely-supported) command to resume a download.


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Site search

body:
The Wikipedia search option is a regularly returning topic with newbie
question on the Help desk and info-en mailing list. A lot of people
like the options Google has, but don't like going off-line to use
them.

Go ahead and write that proposal. :)


body:
Fair enough, but I was responding more to an apparent
trend to use disambiguations as hatnotes - above
article notes which say things like 'this article is
about the bar with the fubbly fub, know as foo. For
the fub with the bubbly bar, see [[Barfoo]].' etc.

A short 'for other uses, see [[Foo (disambiguation)]]
should always suffice, and if there is only one thing
to link to, then that should be in a section. It costs
an extra click, but spares us article clutter, which I
really dislike.

SV
--- Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 9/13/05, steve v <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > In that sense, having Disambiguation sections
> might be
> > a hindrance, but its at least more definitive and
> > organized than hatnotes, which just obstruct from
> the
> > article.
> >
> > SV
> By hatnotes, do you mean the notes at the top of
> pages that
> disambiguate? If so, I really see no problem with
> these, other then
> sometimes the primary disambiguation is set up
> stupid. (Imagine band
> called USA, and someone decided to give them primary
> disambiguation
> over the country...). I think a disambiguation
> section would be much
> worse. If there's more then one other thing the name
> could be, and the
> article has primary disambiguation, and *really*
> should have it, then
> there should be a link to the disambiguation on the
> top of the page.
>
> I happen to like our current disambiguation setup.
> > _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


body:
On 9/13/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Oh please no. Name anything that could harm wikipedia that doean't get
> > delt with as a speedy or a copyvio.
>
> Deleting encyclopedic articles harms the encyclopedia.  Just because a
> "consensus" of professional deletionists decide that some article or
> another isn't "notable" doesn't make it unencyclopedic.  See
> Snowspinner's post that started this iteration of this discussion.
>
> Kelly
That's the attitude I'm talking about. If anything gets deleted, it's
blamed on deletimonists, whether involved or not. I said wrongly
deleted stuff should be put on VFU more. It's easy to complain and say
it won't work because of deletionists without trying. VFU gets a
disproportionate amount of visitors from AFD, not because deletionism
is rampant, but because there's so much drivel being deleted that
doesn't deserve to be resurrected.

Deleting encyclopedic articles harms Wikipedia, that's true. But
keeping unencyclopedic ones hurts Wikipedia too. Inclusionists are on
the other extreme end of the spectrum and just as wrong.

--Mgm


from_name: Zephram Stark

subject: [WikiEN-l] Indefinite Bans with No Oversight

body:
Dear Sirs,

It is not usually my nature to bring others into my problems, but I think this has gone too far.  People are effectively being banned indefinitely without any oversight, in order to associate their misdeeds with me.  I don't have anything to do with these people, and I can't figure out, from their edit history, what they have done wrong.  Yet, I am blamed for being them and blocked for periods of up to 48 hours for each instance.

1) I am not these people.
2) Nobody has presented any evidence on the Administrator Board that I am in any way associated with these people.
3) According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_policy#When_blocks_may_be_used, there is nothing in the edit history of these people that warranted a block.
4) I'm being blocked based on unfounded accusations that I'm associated with these people who have done nothing wrong.  I'm being accused of something, with no evidence, that's not even on the "exhaustive list of the situations that warrant blocking."

The two administrators involved, User:Jayjg and User:SlimVirgin, apparently think they can make up whatever rules they want and enforce them with no oversight.  In trying to hurt me, they have blocked at least twelve other people, some of them permanently, for doing nothing that could remotely be considered against the rules of Wikipedia.  They are all accused of being my sockpuppets, even though most of them have IP addresses from other nations or states.

EXAMPLES

   User:Go_Cowboys was blocked indefinitely on the accusation that he is me.  Looking through his list of contributions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Go_Cowboys), it appears that the worst thing he did was catch Jayjg's friend Smyth misquoting the OED (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Terrorism#I_draft_a_proposal:).
   User:Felice_L%27Angleterre was blocked indefinitely before posting a single change to an article.  Apparently, Jayjg's buddies User:Jpgordon and User:Calton didn't like her refusal to give up personal information on her User_talk page. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Felice_L%27Angleterre).  I received another 48 hours block for being accused of being her.  I didn't even know who SlimVirgin was talking about, until someone emailed me, because she misspelled her name "Felix" on my discussion page and only referred to her as a sockpuppet on my block description.
HISTORY

After resolving the long-standing NPOV dispute for the article on al Qaeda, I thought I would try to do the same for the article on Terrorism.  It took over a month, but after many compromises with all other editors involved, I successfully posted a proposal on the talk page that nobody expressed disagreement with for three days.  At that point, I updated the article with the introductory text that I had proposed, along with an editing request that all intro changes first be proposed in discussion.  Even though he had not been involved with the discussion for months, Jayjg immediately gutted the article and demanded that I replace the obvious holes he had made with something that he liked better.  I suggested that he was the best person to know what he would like better, but he said he didn't have time for that.  He made a few vague demands and then disappeared.  Of course, I reverted the article to what I had written, with a reminder to everyone involved with editing the intro to
 first make their suggestions in Talk.

SlimVirgin, someone who had not been involved with the article at all but is often accused of working with Jayjg as a team, threatened to revert the article to an older definition unless I did as Jayjg said.  When I refused, she wiped out all of the changes we had made over the past month and called in her friends to support the revert.  A revert-war started between the people who wanted to keep the new article and those who were loyal to Jayjg/SlimVirgin.  When it became obvious that more people wanted to keep the new article, Jayjg and SlimVirgin started blocking everyone who voted for it or expressed any support for it.  Despite the blocks, people kept reverting SlimVirgin's punitive efforts anonymously (without logging in).

Pretty soon, the discussion of terrorism had more administrators than I've ever seen at one article.  Virtually none of them had ever expressed the slightest interest in terrorism before.  Even after arriving, none of them seemed interested in making any proposals for a better article.  Everyone merely wanted to express their support for Jayjg and for the old article.  It didn't seem to matter that the old article was not definitive: it didn't convey information.

Ever since reading a spread in Wired Magazine and joining Wikipedia, I had been in heaven.  This promised to be the fulfillment of a dream introduced by Ray Kurzweil over a dozen years ago: a large society of true equals, enabled for the first time through global communication.  However, at that point, my blinders came off.  The best articles were not automatically rising to the top.  Bad articles were being used as punishment to get editors to do administrator bidding.  Terms like "original research" were being thrown around as excuses to delete factual information until sources were sighted, at which point relevance was questioned.  When relevance was shown, "original research" was questioned again.  The cat & mouse game continued until the administrator got bored and threatened to block the editor for being a trouble maker.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:State_terrorism).

One of the most humorous examples I've seen of this was when User:Pmanderson accused User:Go_Cowboys of creating "original research" with his assertion that John Locke's "Two Treatise of Government" preceded the United States "Declaration of Independence."  It may be true that no scholar has ever specifically said that 1689 came before 1776, and using the same logic, Jayjg's arguments with Zain in Talk:State_terrorism might make a certain kind of sense, but is deleting information on these grounds going to make Wikipedia "the sum of all human knowledge?"

I'm not one to sit around and let corruption destroy something I admire.  I spoke up in the discussion of terrorism.  I defended myself against attacks and I said exactly why I thought the article for terrorism was not definitive: that a few administrators were so wrapped up in securing power, and subverting information failing to show their group in a positive light, that they were willing to make articles worse and accuse innocent people to accomplish their aims.

This made people mad enough to propose that I be banned for life.  The proposal was rejected and cited as a definitional dispute because it related to one article and involved personal comments from both sides.  SlimVirgin apparently took it upon herself to override consensus and keep me blocked for things that have no link to me whatsoever.  It doesn't seem to matter to her that, in doing so, she is effectively banning other editors who have broken no rules and sometimes have made considerable contributions.

CONCLUSION

I'm sure that SlimVirgin and Jayjg are nice people, but some folks can't handle administrative power without it getting mixed up in their personal life.  Jayjg and SlimVirgin use their administrative tools to artificially increase their influence on articles.  When people call them on it, they use their administrative tools to cover up the truth of their actions.  I think it's fair to say that Wikipedia cannot accomplish its goal of NPOV articles when administrator power is used to bias the content of articles.  I ask that you remove administrative privileges from SlimVirgin and Jayjg so that everyone can contribute equally to the articles.

Thank you for your consideration,
Zephram Stark (zephramstark at yahoo.com)
(432) 224-6991

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Re: new request for ASL/English wikipedia

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
> On 12/09/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
>>
>> I can see very little difference between providing
>> [[en:Wikipedia:Spoken Wikipedia]] for those who have a problem with
>> their sight and providing [[en:Wikipedia:Signed Wikipedia]] for
>> those who have a problem with their hearing.
>>
>> If the idea takes off and a great many articles are converted into
>> Sign Language, and someone comes up with a brilliant way of editing
>> Sign Language in a wiki-like manner, then this material could be
>> used to jump-start a new Wikipedia.
>>
>> It seems to me that we could get a great deal done using the
>> material we already have, rather than waiting for the requisite
>> wheel to be invented.
>>
>> I sit ready to be corrected, of course, and I await developments
>> eagerly.
>
> Again, there are many different mutually incomprehensible signed
> languages. Countries where English is the primary language don't all
> have the same signed language (British sign language is not even
> related to American sign language), and American Sign Language is
> also used in countries where English is NOT the primary language
> (most notably in parts of Mexico).
>
> Mark
>

It sounds an awful lot to me like sign language is an othorgraphy, not a
distinct language. Having "American sign language" to the exclusion of
Auslan, British sign language, et. al. is incredibly US-centric.

Can I ask just one question: how many deaf people with Internet access
are illiterate in whatever the audible version of their language is?
Any? Are there any websites which are "written" in sign language?

Until these questions are answered, I don't see why (or indeed *how*)
Sign Language Wikipedias can exist.

--
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \


body:
On 9/13/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> AFD is swarming with professional deletionists, and many deleted
> articles were deleted with input mainly from editors whose main
> contribution to Wikipedia is to vote to delete things.  I question
> whether this group of individuals fairly represents the Wikipedia
> community, and therefore whether AFD actually arrives at community
> consensus, except in obvious cases, and therefore call for admins to
> exercise their judgment in evaluting AFDs for whether they reflect
> true consensus, and also for admins to feel free to boldly undelete
> articles that were clearly deleted in a manner which harms the
> encyclopedia.
Name one article that was wrongly deleted in the past 3 days.

--Mgm


from_name: Michal Migurski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia API?

body:
Hi everyone,

I'm new to the list and somewhat-new to Mediawiki.

I am trying set up some wrapper code that automates certain MediaWiki
functions, such as page creation or renaming. For example, an
external application would attempt to create a new article in MW. It
might check to see whether the article exists, and create it if it
does not. It might append some content to the article text. It might
move the article, or set up a redirect. At the moment, I'm
accomplishing this by issuing HTTP sub-requests to MediaWiki and
interpreting the response.

MediaWiki does not seem to have a public-facing API, is that right?
Are there any F/OSS projects that provide such functionality without
requiring screen-scraping? Alternatively, is there any way to
interface with the internals of the MW, *without* invoking an entire
request, i.e. the stuff that requires the MEDIAWIKI constant? Failing
*that*, does documentation exist that explains MW's DB schema so I
can begin to write my own?

I'm using the current-stable version, 1.4.9, if that matters.

-mike.

----------------------------------------------------------------
michal migurski- mike at stamen.com
                  415.558.1610


from_name: MAURICE FRANK

body:
Message: 4
Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 10:20:12 -0500
From: Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Why changing the deletion
process is a bad
	idea
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
Message-ID:
<bd4c411e05091308201e654122 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Deleting encyclopedic articles harms the encyclopedia.
 Just because a
"consensus" of professional deletionists decide that
some article or
another isn't "notable" doesn't make it
unencyclopedic.  See
Snowspinner's post that started this iteration of this
discussion.

Kelly

Then exactly the same applies to deletion of links.
This proves that if there is a well-organised mob
opinion claiming to be a consensus, that a link isn't
notable while an opposing one is, to argue with that
view and reinstate the link for balance's sake is not
"link spam" or a blocking offence. Least of all is it
grounds for an admin-imposed block without any due
processes,followed by a permanent block for the
offence of claiming to have any rights against it.

So Kelly has here proved conclusively that I was
abused, and is proposing that Wiki's functioning
pattern should incorporate that proof.

___________________________________________________________
How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday
snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
geni wrote:

>>As one possible alternative, the "pure wiki deletion" method of simply
>>blanking pages would make it a lot easier to double-check and revert by
>>non-admins.
>>
>>
>
>See WP:CP for why that isn't even legal.
>
>
We're discussing an alternative to VfD/AfD. Copyright problems is a
completely different matter, handled by a different process. I don't see
the relevance or connection between the two.


from_name: Phroziac

subject: [WikiEN-l] *Sigh*, AFD is a discussion.

body:
the afd *page* should be a discussion. That fragmented it.

On 9/13/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >From: Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com>
> >
> >[[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and
> >Subversives have Penetrated Washington]]
> >I just closed this vfd. Apparently someone decided vfd is not a
> >discussion, and all discussion should be on the discussion page. Don't
> >we have a big notice somewhere saying AFD is a discussion?
>
> Saying AfD discussion should be on an AfD discussion page is not the same as
> saying AfD is not a discussion.
>
> Jay.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: David Benbennick

subject: [Commons-l] Trademarks

body:
On 9/13/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> The core goal of Commons is maximal reuse.

On 9/13/05, David Benbennick <dbenbenn at gmail.com> wrote:
> Actually, that's incorrect.

As another example, the Commons has consistently decided to keep the
various Wikimedia Foundation logos, which are "all rights reserved"
and hence not reusable at all outside of Wikimedia.  (I've always
voted to delete them for that reason, but I'm in a small minority.)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion suggestion

body:
On 9/13/05, Worldtraveller <wikipedia at world-traveller.org> wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Keith Old [mailto:keithold at gmail.com]
> > Sent: 13 September 2005 11:31 AM
> > To: English Wikipedia
> > Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Deletion suggestion
> >
> > Let us look at an article about a person who is notable in Australia but
> > not elsewhere (for example) which is in a poor state. Editor A comes and
> > tags the article for deletion. Editor B comes through and deletes it.
> > Neither editor is aware of the significance of the person in Australia
> > and the article is deleted.
> >
> > If it was listed on articles for deletion, an editor or editors from
> > Australia could argue for its retention and improve it meaning we have a
> > better article.
>
> If the article started by providing enough information, references and
> links to other articles for any reader to understand why the subject of
> the article was notable, then surely the problem wouldn't arise?  No
> assertion of notability is already a criterion for speedy deletion.  If
> the article was a two-line stub then it would surely be no major issue for
> someone familiar with the topic to create a more encyclopaedic article
> that wouldn't get tagged for deletion.
>
> WT
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
You're absolutely right, but unfortunately articles rarely start the
way they should.
It's good to have more input to make sure something's not deleted,
just because the deleting admin can't verify it.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
JAY JG wrote:

>> From: Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca>
>>
>> Hear hear. Instead of moving VfD to AfD, we might as well have moved
>> it to "Wikiproject Deletion." The last thing we need is a group of
>> people who _specialize_ in deciding what articles are allowed in
>> Wikipedia. The small, obscure articles don't get many people from
>> outside the VfD regulars to consider the matter.
>
>
> The last thing we need is a group of specialists who actually care
> about what kinds of articles are encyclopedic, and fall within
> Wikipedia's mandate and policies, and what kinds are not?

The problem is not that they "care", but that they're the ones who are
_deciding_.

And a VfD that's justified with the code "NN, D" is clearly not the work
of someone who cares, IMO. The fact that such VfDs aren't removed out of
hand is what makes me so concerned with the current system.

>  Who aren't actually emotionally tied up in the subject matter, but
> instead are able to view the topic with dispassionate reason?

Who don't actually know anything about the subject matter, but instead
come up with a vote based on a moment's thought about whether they've
heard of it before?

I'm not going to go through and state the flipside of every point you
make, hopefully this is sufficiently illustrative. Different people have
very different views on what's "good", and a heck of a lot of people
(myself included) are voicing views that the current system is ungood.
In the spirit of consensus-building, please at least consider that maybe
things will have to change to satisfy the complainers, but that perhaps
there's some system to change to that we will all like. This doesn't
have to be adversarial.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] new request for sign language Wikipedia

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
>>It sounds an awful lot to me like sign language is an othorgraphy, not a
>>distinct language. Having "American sign language" to the exclusion of
>>Auslan, British sign language, et. al. is incredibly US-centric.
>
>
> No, this is not the case. Signed languages are completely independent
> languages, with different grammar, vocabulary, and syntax than
> whatever spoken languages with which they may coexist.
>

Ok, thanks for explaining that. Is Braille a language or an orthography?

> As I noted, American Sign Language is used in parts of Mexico, even
> though the spoken language there is Spanish.
>

Ok, so a person who signs American Sign Language from Mexico can
understand someone who signs American Sign Language from Rhode Island
(to pick somewhere in the US at random)?

> I never proposed having ASL to the exclusion of other signed
> languages... in fact, I don't believe anybody did.
>

Ok, the subject should have been changed to reflect that a while ago then.

>
>>Can I ask just one question: how many deaf people with Internet access
>>are illiterate in whatever the audible version of their language is?
>>Any? Are there any websites which are "written" in sign language?
>
>
> "audible version"? What do you mean?? Signed languages are languages
> completely independent of all spoken languages. They are distinct
> languages, and are no more "primitive" or "advanced" than spoken
> languages. Each signed language is a language in its own right.
>

Ok, thanks for explaining that.

> Now, to answer your question assuming that by "audible version of
> their language", you mean the primary written language of their area.
>

Yes, although I actually meant "spoken language" (since there are
arguments about which languages are and aren't written, but I won't go
into that).

> It was noted earlier that the average deaf American has a 4th-grade
> reading level (may be different for other countries).
>

I'm hesitant to accept data from one country where there are other
countries which have a better reputation as being leaders in the
particular area the data is reporting on (eg. I couldn't care less about
data from Iceland on sugar cane production, because Iceland is not known
for producing sugar cane). Similarly, I won't accept literacy statistics
about the deaf population from the US when there are countries with
higher literacy rates. What is the literacy rate amongst the deaf
population in Sweden?

> Also, what about Catalan? How many Catalan speakers with internet
> access are illiterate in Spanish? Any?? Yet, we have a Catalan
> Wikipedia, and it's quite large now...
>

I don't know, you tell me? Is software available in Catalan? Or did they
have to understand some other language (Spanish? English?) in order to
get to the site in the first place?

My point is, how will people who "only understand sign language" even be
able to access a Wikipedia in whichever sign language? How will they be
able to edit? How will they be able to provide references? Have any
books been written in sign language?

>
>>Until these questions are answered, I don't see why (or indeed *how*)
>>Sign Language Wikipedias can exist.
>
>
> I have already answered both of these questions over and over. By
> choosing to ignore my messages (and, indeed, those of others, as most
> of the things I've said have been said in this thread by others as
> well) as you seem to have done, you are wasting the time of everybody
> involved -- including yourself -- by asking questions which have
> already been answered.
>

Actually, I think you've still failed to answer the *how*, even if
you've answered the *why*. The "why do we need a Wikipedia written in
sign language" I can understand. The "how will it work", I don't.

--
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \


subject: [WikiEN-l] Why changing the deletion process is a bad idea

body:
On 9/13/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey, I've got this really great idea! Let's make everything static HTML,
> and have a 12-step review stage through an academic committee before
> anything gets changed! Some sort of New Encyclopedia!

Yeah, good idea!  Let's be all modern and textish with the name as
well!  This is going to be such a success!

Sam


from_name: Kelly Martin

body:
On 9/13/05, Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com> wrote:
> Do you realize how much disk space an article takes?

Deleting an article actually increases the amount of disk space required.

Kelly


subject: [WikiEN-l] Article deletion

body:
Phroziac wrote:
> Then it simply becomes a vote, and not a straw poll to build
> consensus. For example, when closing an afd, if someone says it's a
> copyvio of www.google.com, it'll be deleted no matter how many keep
> votes there are. And [[George W. Bush]] always gets speedy kept. And
> [[Wikipedia:Votes for Deletion]] too. The big thing i hate about vfd
> is the ban on merging or moving an article for a week. You don't need
> consensus other then what any other regular editorial function would
> need to merge something. And non-admins can't speedy keep, can they?
>

Yes, they just punch the right buttons. The only thing a non-admin can't
do in closing a VFD is to delete the page. (What that can do is mark it
with {{db|per AFD [[|link]]}}). I should know; I've closed quite a few
in the backlog, and I'm not an admin.

--
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \