from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] mailman :-(

body:
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 16 Aug 2003 12:03:53 +0000 (UTC)
> From: Walter Vermeir <walter at wikipedia.be>
> Subject: [Wikitech-l] New Mailman :-(
> To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Message-ID: <bhl6j9$f8m$1 at sea.gmane.org>
>
> I have now noticed, when i approved a posting, that
> there is a new version
> new in use of mailman.
>
>
> It is good there a update of mailman but why are the
> listadmins not
> informed about this? Or a least a warning on
> Wikitech-l?
>
> I have put a lot of work in modifying the look of
> the listpages so the
> where not so ugly. Now this is al gone.

seconded
and of course, as a big *stupid* one, I did not saved
my changes (which I could have done if I had known
beforehand an update was planned), so all is REALLY
gone.
And I won't make it again, so it will be ugly and in
english again

Walter, that is how english language will eat us.
Replacing our language over and over and over, till we
are too tired.

For those who don't believe it, look at

http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikifr-l

especially second line on top right

and look also below the line where you confirm your
password

it is written

"Which language do you prefer to display your
messages?"

choice ?

Plainly disgusted

Anther (with no e, why bother)

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list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Wikitech-l] deletion special page

body:
Hello

All reporting of deletion anterior to the 10th of
august have disappeared

Is that normal ?
Is it a new feature that the list is purged from time
to time ? If so, what is the frequency ? Could we have
a back up of the deletions done ? Is there a query
which can give us the missing information (that
is...all the deletions made since october 31th of 2002
?)

thanks

anthere

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list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Announce-l] New mailman

body:
--- Jason Richey <jasonr at bomis.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> The mailing list software at Wikipedia has been
> upgraded.  Though
> there seem to still be some problems with new
> subscribers, everything
> should work reasonable well for all of the current
> listmembers.
>
> I realize it would have been more prudent of me to
> say "I'll be
> upgrading the mailing list software on Friday,
> between 2pm and 8pm
> PST", and I'd like to apologize to anyone who was
> adversely affected by the
> upgrade for my lack of notification.  I'll be more
> considerate in the future.
>
> --
> "Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>

and is there any way to recover all the translations
lost in the process please Jason ?

Anthere

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from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] RE: Exciting new statistics!

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:
>Can do. I will add tables/charts for Wiktionary,
>but better not include them in the cross-wiki
>comparisons or project totals, that would be a
>bit confusing.

Uh, Wiktionary is a different project from Wikipedia and should have its own
stats page. Mixing it with Wikipedia stats would not be good. Same for
Wikiquote and Wikibooks.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Jimbo wrote:
>What I'd like to find out is that we have a realistic
>chance of having a Wikipedia 1.0 release 1 year
>from now that rivals Britannica.  But there's no need
>to hurry, if it will take 2 years or 5 years, that's how
>long it will take.

Hm. Is there a machine readable list of all 75,000 of Britannica's articles
somewhere? If we had such a list then we could perform this analysis;
cross-check all article titles in en.Wikipedia with Britannica articles. Then
exclude all Wikipedia articles that are over some set limit in size (2000
bytes, for example). Then everything else will either be mismatched titles
(which require redirects to fix), articles we have but are less than 2000
bytes, and articles we lack but Britannica has. If we really wanted to go
crazy we could compare the size of every matched title and aim to surpass or
match each Britannica article in size, but that would require scriptable
access to all their articles which I'm not sure would be possible even if we
had a Britannica CD.

Then we can have a queue of many thousands of priority articles to work on.

But size is only one part of the puzzle; we also need an approval system to
measure quality. We can use the list of 75,000 Britannica articles as a
priority list.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

in_reply_to:
<3F412A4B.3010505@rufus.d2g.com>;
	from delirium@rufus.d2g.com on Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 12:34:35PM
	-0700

body:
Delirium wrote:
>  From this and another of your posts that suggested 'retail' (or was
> that someone else's post?) am I right in inferring that WP1.0 is
> something along the lines of the "Sifter" project that was proposed
> earlier?

The way I think about it is that 1.0 is a particular result, while
"Sifter" is one proposal for how to to get there, and not necessarily
the only one.

I have a number of ideas about 1.0, ideas that need to be subjected to
community scrutiny and analysis before we actually do anything.  But
here's a thumbnail sketch.  Remember that these are ideas about 1.0,
not ideas about how we should get there:

1.  "Wikipedia 1.0 is about as good as Britannica" -- better in some
areas, not as good in some other areas.  But reasonably complete, and
highly reliable.

2.  "Wiki is not paper, but Wikipedia 1.0 is paper".  The goal of a
push towards 1.0 is specifically to produce a version that's
purposefully edited and limited in some minor ways.  We use 'Wiki is
not paper' as a good reason to be permissive about the addition of
relative obscurities, but we hope for a print publisher to pick up
Wikipedia 1.0 and distribute it profitably and dirt-cheap to all the
people of the world, which means paper and which means constraints.

3.  "Wikipedia 1.0 is *just* Wikipedia 1.0" -- this is to remind us
that this is just a 1.0 release, and so it won't be mature in every
way, and that the mistakes we will inevitably make in 1.0 will be
rectified in 1.2, 1.4, 2.0, 3.0 and beyond.  We'll need to set some
policies for 1.0, and then stick to them until we release, but after
that, we can and should open the whole thing up to critical reflection
for the next round.

I also have some ideas about the Wikipedia 1.0 (or "Sifter") process...

1.  The process should unite and energize the existing Wikipedia
community, not compete with it.  Example: this should not happen
on a different website by new volunteers, but by us, we've earned
it.

2.  The process should not interfere with the miracle that is
Wikipedia.  Example: no one should think that we're going to
close the process of Wikipedia itself.

3.  The process should be as open as possible, more open than anyone
before us could have imagined possible, but only as open as is
consistent with our goals.  Example: since Wikipedia 1.0 is paper,
we may have to be more strict about letting unknown people randomly
do things relating to sifting.

> Part of the advantage of Britannica is that you can be reasonably
> sure that when you read an article that states a fact, that fact is
> correct, or at least at the time of publication was believed to be
> correct by the experts in the field (no one can account for future
> discoveries, of course).  If it is intended to rival Britannica,
> WP1.0 will have to have a similar level of reliability -- when it
> says someone was born on January 7, 1845, they better have actually
> been born on that date -- not, say, January 7, 1854.  And when
> something is mentioned as a mainstream physics topic, it had better
> actually be one, not a fringe theory.

That's to be hoped, yes.  How to get there is a different thing from
saying that we do, in fact, want to get there.

--Jimbo


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] mailman :-(

body:
On Mon, 18 Aug 2003, Anthere wrote:
> > I have put a lot of work in modifying the look of
> > the listpages so the
> > where not so ugly. Now this is al gone.
>
> seconded
> and of course, as a big *stupid* one, I did not saved
> my changes (which I could have done if I had known
> beforehand an update was planned), so all is REALLY
> gone.
> And I won't make it again, so it will be ugly and in
> english again

Well, I've set it to show in French by default, but for the meantime it's
still the default page layout. (Anthere: in the administrative interface,
see under "options de langue", "langue par defaut pour cette liste".)

Jason, is the old data directory backed up somewhere? Or maybe the files
are still in there somewhere...

> For those who don't believe it, look at
>
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikifr-l

Yes, look at it. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] deletion special page

body:
On Mon, 18 Aug 2003, Anthere wrote:
> Hello
>
> All reporting of deletion anterior to the 10th of
> august have disappeared

The language file seems to have reverted to an old version with the broken
name for the deletion log (the one with the space in front of the name).
I'll try and fix it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: maybe time for a document project,
	sometime in the near future?

in_reply_to:
<3F3F1E59.40907@pobox.com>;
	from brion@pobox.com on Sat, Aug 16, 2003 at 11:19:05PM -0700

references:
<20030816204000.45455.qmail@web11504.mail.yahoo.com>
	<shzni86exd.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de> <3F3F1E59.40907@pobox.com>

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> The thing that would make a Project Sourceberg worthwhile is wiki-style
> annotation of the texts.

That's a really cool idea.  But Erik has convinced me not to say 'yes'
willy-nilly to every cool idea that comes along.  :-)

I just finished _East of Eden_, because Oprah Winfrey has it as her
Book Club Selection.  I guess a million Oprah fans are reading it,
too.  And like me, they are eager for more information about the book.

How cool would an annotated text be for something like this?

Except, _East of Eden_ is under copyright.

Well, now that Oprah is choosing classics instead of contemporary
fiction for her club, there's a good chance that she'll choose a
public domain text.  That'd be a nice 'focal point' to make a Wiki
project highly successful, I think.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Jimbo wrote:
>"Wiki is not paper, but Wikipedia 1.0 is paper".
>The goal of a push towards 1.0 is specifically to
>produce a version that's purposefully edited and
>limited in some minor ways.

Whoa! Waitaminute. Does that mean that all the element articles I've written
have to be cut down in size? Most are two to five times longer than any
Encarta, Britannica or Comptoms article on the same elements.

>The process should unite and energize the existing
>Wikipedia community, not compete with it.  Example:
>this should not happen on a different website by new
>volunteers, but by us, we've earned it.

If that is the case then can we finally accept a bit of reality and admit that
Nupedia is a dead project that has been superceded by Wikipedia? We can then
focus on picking the carcass of Nupedia clean and forward that domain name to
Wikipedia. I tried to express an idea about how to revive Nupedia by making
it a stable distribution of Wikipedia, but there was little support for it
(and in fact some initial hostility). IMO, that was Nupedia's only hope.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


list: wikien-l

from_name: Steve Vertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] Votes for RK (Votes for deletion)

body:
Im checking in and out today- so ill be brief. Erik, your removal of RK from the VFA page was contradictory to the rules, principles, etc of voting. Period. I agree with it however, and I thank you for correcting me. It led to my taking the issue seriously, and making

On the issue of RK's imminent sysopdom, I dont understand how you can accuse me of trolling. I have yet to state my case clearly - I will do so now, and you can copy it or refer to it as you like.  RK is not a problem user. Hes not a vandal. He occupies a particular niche of intelligent annoyance, and as such will continue to be so unless things change.

Responsibility breeds self-esteem, standards of conduct and trust between parties. I dont expect anyone to change - rather that an anti-RK sentiment (regardless that he alone is responsible for engendering it -- as you say, highly unpopular ) is not grounds alone for denial into more elevated capapilities and duties. Sysops have more to do, and their roles require a concern for their community, moderation, and quality.  Do the clothes make the man or does the man make the clothes. I dunno. All I know is that Im sincere in wanting to see him be more productive, less polarized, and

I believe that he has made gradual progress toward this end and that he has earned the right to be nominated for a position of sysop. I have the right to nominate him, and to campaign on his behalf.  Many others see my meaning and are supportive ( I havent seen my talk page yet, and will not answer anyone for a while )  RK has not accepted or rejected the nomination -- you should acknowledge that you have little statutory justification in removing his nomination after only two comments.

The worst thing that may happen is that he will ignore his responsibility to be civil, and that he will go back to being a plebian contributor. I dont think this will happen, and I find distasteful those opinions that prejudicially say otherwise. Give people a chance - and they will give you your due.

I dislike doing this all third person, but I felt a response your rather sharp critique was justified, Erik. By this I mean your comments have substance, but nothing that cant be dispensed with by patience and fairness.

Respectfully,
SV

Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
Steve-
> I agree with the sentiments expressed by Oliver here
> -- not that I dont understand Eriks comment as tongue
> in cheek ;)-- but Erik's recent "unilateral removal"
> of RK from nomination was a bit too "unilateral" -- as
> such a philosophy of unilateralism tends to contradict
> the more general notions of voting, democracy, and so
> forth.

The only thing you will accomplish with this RK sysop nomination nonsense
(which he himself never asked for) is yet another flamewar because you
know exactly from the initial reaction that there is strong opposition to
this nomination. I consider your actions harmful to the community and
counter-productive. If RK wants to apply for sysop status, let him. But
there's no reason for you to nominate specifically controversial
Wikipedians. This kind of behavior reminds me very much of the
troublemaking that got Lir banned. Not only do you insist on starting this
flamewar, you also spammed many user talk pages to make sure that the
maximum number of people get involved in the flamewar. Great thinking
there! Here's a selection of your recent edits:

# 01:25, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Danny
# 01:24, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Cyp (top) [rollback]
# 01:24, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Cprompt
# 01:23, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Camembert
# 01:23, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Dante Alighieri (top) [rollback]
# 01:22, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Delirium (top) [rollback]
# 01:22, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:The Epopt (top) [rollback]
# 01:21, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Fred Bauder (top) [rollback]
# 01:20, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Goatasaur (top) [rollback]
# 01:20, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Hephaestos (top) [rollback]
# 01:19, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Infrogmation (top) [rollback]
# 01:19, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:JeLuF (top) [rollback]
# 01:19, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Karen Johnson (top) [rollback]
# 01:18, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Maveric149
# 01:16, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:LittleDan (top) [rollback]
# 01:16, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Evercat (top) [rollback]
# 01:13, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Jtdirl
# 01:11, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:AntonioMartin (top) [rollback]
# 01:10, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Andre Engels
# 01:09, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Anthere (top) [rollback]
# 01:09, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Brion VIBBER
# 01:08, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Olivier (top) [rollback]
# 01:06, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:The Cunctator (top) [rollback]
# 01:06, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Maveric149
# 01:05, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Deb (top) [rollback]
# 01:05, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Ed Poor (top) [rollback]
# 01:04, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Eloquence
# 01:01, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Jtdirl
# 01:00, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Lee Daniel Crocker (top) [rollback]
# 00:59, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Slrubenstein
# 00:59, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Tim Starling (top) [rollback]
# 00:58, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Tim Starling (form letter)
# 00:55, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Angela (2 messages -- gotta run)
# 00:54, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Mbecker (top) [rollback]
# 00:52, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:MyRedDice
# 00:40, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Angela
# 00:20, Aug 17, 2003 User talk:Angela

Frankly, I am increasingly convinced that you are deliberately trolling.
Maybe you could concentrate on writing articles for a change.

Regards,

Erik
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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body:
Jimbo wrote:
>Well, now that Oprah is choosing classics instead
>of contemporary fiction for her club, there's a good
>chance that she'll choose apublic domain text.
>That'd be a nice 'focal point' to make a Wiki project
>highly successful, I think.

Wikibooks already plans to include public domain books with the aim of
wikifying and annotating them.

--mav


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Hm. Is there a machine readable list of all 75,000 of Britannica's
> articles somewhere?

Presumably on the CD version and the online version, and I would
imagine they could be matched up to the print version pretty well.

>If we had such a list then we could perform this analysis;

(details of analysis snipped)

Yes, that's right.  If we had computerized data on what Britannica
contains, we could use it to guide our work.

>Then we can have a queue of many thousands of priority articles to
>work on.
>
> But size is only one part of the puzzle; we also need an approval
> system to measure quality. We can use the list of 75,000 Britannica
> articles as a priority list.

That's right.  I think that's a good approach.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Whoa! Waitaminute. Does that mean that all the element articles I've
> written have to be cut down in size? Most are two to five times
> longer than any Encarta, Britannica or Comptoms article on the same
> elements.

No, those are sweet.
I just reviewed:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium
for example.  Sweet.

I say that we absolutely need to keep all the content where we really
shine -- our ultimate goal is to be better than Britannica, to be the
finest encylopedia in history.  We won't get there by leaving out our
best stuff.

But in a print version, maybe this article wouldn't be included:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Plutonium

Because as entertaining as it is, I'm not sure it would pass the test
of universal interest that we might need to employ.

But I don't want any of us to prejudge right now just how we might
proceed towards 1.0, nor about the details of what it'd look like,
other than "roughly as good as Britannica".

> If that is the case then can we finally accept a bit of reality and
> admit that Nupedia is a dead project that has been superceded by
> Wikipedia? We can then focus on picking the carcass of Nupedia clean
> and forward that domain name to Wikipedia. I tried to express an
> idea about how to revive Nupedia by making it a stable distribution
> of Wikipedia, but there was little support for it (and in fact some
> initial hostility). IMO, that was Nupedia's only hope.

Well, I'm with you on all of this.  I have always liked the Nupedia
name better, and wish that I had just opened a wiki on Nupedia a long
long time ago, and left it at that.  On the other hand, a clean break
with the past avoided a *lot* of internal political wrangling.

(And as is well known, we never have any internal political wrangling
now, ha ha!)

But now, Wikipedia is the bomb.  The name is well known, unique, and
perhaps a little less 'dot-com' and more 'organic' if you see what I
mean.

One thing I never want is for Wikipedia proper, the site that we all
know and love, be 'ghettoized' by a 1.0/"Sifter".

--Jimbo


from_name: Jason Richey

subject: [Wikitech-l] mailman :-(

body:
I am going through and making it so that every list supports all
languages that are currently available to mailman, and setting default
languages as possible.

I'll see what I can do about the layout.

Jason

Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Mon, 18 Aug 2003, Anthere wrote:
> > > I have put a lot of work in modifying the look of
> > > the listpages so the
> > > where not so ugly. Now this is al gone.
> >
> > seconded
> > and of course, as a big *stupid* one, I did not saved
> > my changes (which I could have done if I had known
> > beforehand an update was planned), so all is REALLY
> > gone.
> > And I won't make it again, so it will be ugly and in
> > english again
>
> Well, I've set it to show in French by default, but for the meantime it's
> still the default page layout. (Anthere: in the administrative interface,
> see under "options de langue", "langue par defaut pour cette liste".)
>
> Jason, is the old data directory backed up somewhere? Or maybe the files
> are still in there somewhere...
>
> > For those who don't believe it, look at
> >
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikifr-l
>
> Yes, look at it. :)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


subject: [Wikitech-l] mailman :-(

body:
I have some files from the old list that indicate that they were
modified by Anthere and Giskart.  I can look into getting these in
place.

Jason

Jason Richey wrote:

> I am going through and making it so that every list supports all
> languages that are currently available to mailman, and setting default
> languages as possible.
>
> I'll see what I can do about the layout.
>
> Jason
>
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 18 Aug 2003, Anthere wrote:
> > > > I have put a lot of work in modifying the look of
> > > > the listpages so the
> > > > where not so ugly. Now this is al gone.
> > >
> > > seconded
> > > and of course, as a big *stupid* one, I did not saved
> > > my changes (which I could have done if I had known
> > > beforehand an update was planned), so all is REALLY
> > > gone.
> > > And I won't make it again, so it will be ugly and in
> > > english again
> >
> > Well, I've set it to show in French by default, but for the meantime it's
> > still the default page layout. (Anthere: in the administrative interface,
> > see under "options de langue", "langue par defaut pour cette liste".)
> >
> > Jason, is the old data directory backed up somewhere? Or maybe the files
> > are still in there somewhere...
> >
> > > For those who don't believe it, look at
> > >
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikifr-l
> >
> > Yes, look at it. :)
> >
> > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
> --
> "Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Votes for deletion and due process

body:
Nicholas Knight wrote:
>This latest effort at increasing the amount
>of work one has to do to get anything useful
>done is just helping that perception along.
>Every time I turn around there's another
>largely political detail I have to be aware of,
>and  it's doing anything but encourage me to
>contribute to Wikipedia.

So who is most harmed; the person who has to paste a small boilerplate message
into an article, or the person who wrote that article or helped improve it,
have the article mysteriously disappear one day without any obvious reason
why?

Not placing proper notice on an article falling under the 7 day rule and
marked for deletion, is akin to trying a person without bothering to tell
them about the trial! Yeah sure it is on a publicly viewable page, but then
so are court records; should society expect ordinary people to periodically
check those records just to make sure they are not on trial for something?
This lack of due process is very unwiki.

The tiny bit of extra work is also a technical detail that can be fixed by
semi-automating the Votes for deletion process (as it was in Phase II).

>I've had to put up with pointless procedures on
>volunteer projects before. I'm not about to do it again.

Sorry, but the deletion of anything that falls under the 7 day rule is a big
deal and needs to be discussed. Providing the boilerplate gives the author of
the article and its readers a chance to properly argue their case. Not
providing the boilerplate, IMO, is a bit sneaky.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Richard Grevers wrote:
> But aren't a third of those 1500-byte+ articles the machine-generated ones
> on US small towns?

Yes -- reams of information that Britannica doesn't have!

Take *THAT*, Britannica! Hoo-wah!!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Calif recall candidates --

body:
>In that case can we do the same for the Canterbury Regional
>Council elections?
>Or all of the God knows how many hundreds of electoral districts
>in India? Each of those elections is just as significant to the
>local residents as the state of California is to Californians, and
>just as insignificant to the rest of the world.
>
>
Given that the California recall election was covered on the front page
of several European newspapers, I'd say there's some empirical evidence
that "insignificant to the rest of the world" is inaccurate.

-Mark


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Jimbo wrote:
>No, those are sweet.
>I just reviewed:
>http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium
>for example.  Sweet.

Alas, [[plutonium]] hasn't been converted to the WikiProject Elements format
yet. Lithium (along with all elements outside the f-block) have:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium

Along with the table, the text is often greatly expanded for each convertion.
Would that make it into the print version pretty much as-is?

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

body:
> So who is most harmed; the person who has to paste a
> small boilerplate message
> into an article, or the person who wrote that
> article or helped improve it,
> have the article mysteriously disappear one day
> without any obvious reason
> why?
>
What if the person doesn't check the page? Why not
just contact the author instead of a boilerplate thing
on the article, which, IMO, is just as bad a
defacement.
>
> Not placing proper notice on an article falling
> under the 7 day rule and
> marked for deletion, is akin to trying a person
> without bothering to tell
> them about the trial! Yeah sure it is on a publicly
> viewable page, but then
> so are court records; should society expect ordinary
> people to periodically
> check those records just to make sure they are not
> on trial for something?
> This lack of due process is very unwiki.
>
Deleting a page really isn't as bad as sending someone
to prison. And no one's arguing that we should make
any deletion records private.
LDan

__________________________________
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from_name: Robert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Public note to Jtdirl

body:
Dear Jtdirl,

A couple of weeks ago I reacted to your remarks concerning
the Israel page. I saw a small number of similarities
between what you were writing and what a small group of
other people were writing, and I mistakenly inferred that
you had the same beliefs as them.

However, I have re-read your statements, and have come to
the conclusion that I was in error. When you challenged my
work, I can see now that you were trying to do so from the
perspective of an essayist trying to maintain NPOV. I thus
apologize to you for my earlier comments.

BTW, I am sending you this note in public, on the WikiEn
list, because I made remarks about you on this list. It
isn't proper to say one thing in public, but then take it
back in private.

Robert ("RK")

__________________________________
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references:
<oprtyuj7gpzs1r4a@localhost>	<8s694YntbzB@westermayer-74391.user.cis.dfn.de>
	<oprt4hwy0ozs1r4a@localhost>

body:
Richard Grevers wrote:

> Well even the smaller states of India are more populous than most US
> states.
>
> Excuse my ignorance of the US electoral system, but are there
> gubnertorial contests happening in some or all of the other states at
> the same time? If there are, then why should California be singled
> out, other than for the reason that California tends to be self
> aggrandizing? And the reason for that might be that it is home to the
> third-largest film and TV industry in the world and the accompanying
> media circus?

Well, one reason is that it's a recall election, not a normal election,
which is somewhat unusual in non-parliamentary systems.  Secondly,
Arnold Schwarzenegger is running an apparently serious campaign, which
makes people take notice.  If, say, David Hasselhof were running a
serious campaign for a state governorship in Germany, it'd probably make
the US papers too.

-Mark


body:
LDan wrote:
>What if the person doesn't check the page?
>Why not just contact the author instead of a
>boilerplate thing on the article, which, IMO, is
>just as bad a defacement.

What? If the page is listable on VfD then at least somebody thinks it has
serious issues. Therefore a notice that the page is being considered for
deletion is valuable information for the reader of the page.

>Deleting a page really isn't as bad as
>sending someone to prison.

Where oh where did I mention prison?

>And no one's arguing that we should
>make any deletion records private.

? And where did I say that they were? I specifically mentioned that VfD is a
publicly viewable page and compared it with publically viewable court
documents.

-- mav


body:
On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Richard Grevers wrote:
> Excuse my ignorance of the US electoral system, but are there gubnertorial
> contests happening in some or all of the other states at the same time? If
> there are, then why should California be singled out, other than for the
> reason that California tends to be self aggrandizing? And the reason for
> that might be that it is home to the third-largest film and TV industry in
> the world and the accompanying media circus?

It's not a regularly scheduled election, but a highly unusual recall of a
governor who was elected less than a year ago.

Imagine if the prime minister of New Zealand or Ireland were being thrown
out on his ear, and tell me we shouldn't cover it?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Richard Grevers wrote:
>Excuse my ignorance of the US electoral system,
>but are there gubnertorial contests happening in
>some or all of the other states at the same time?

I don't know how it works elsewhere, but the title of the article on this
subject (or this thread) alone gives you the answer; it is a special *shock*
recall election. This means that it isn't necessarily going to happen during
a the regular gubernatorial election cycle. And different states have
different schedules on when to elect their governors.

-- mav


body:
On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Richard Grevers wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Aug 2003 16:06:36 -0700 (PDT), Brion Vibber
> > Imagine if the prime minister of New Zealand or Ireland were being thrown
> > out on his ear, and tell me we shouldn't cover it?
> >
> I would expect us to cover it, but not with 200 articles on individual
> candidates.

Well, as I've already said, most of the registeredcandidates are of no
note and will probably never be covered.

But if they are, what's wrong with that? I'd have no objection to having
articles on 200 NZ candidates, should such exist and should be people be
interested in making such articles, and NZ is much smaller and less
relevant on the world stage than California. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] mailman :-(

body:
Okay.  After spending a bit of time looking them over, it seems that
the old templates will not work with the new software.  The new
software (and the new templates) have far more options than the old
ones.  So, rather than install those templates which List admins (like
Anthere) spent so much time beautifying, I have copied the old
templates into a publicly accessible area of the archives.

So, the old templates are available like this:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/[listname]/oldtemplates/

Jason Richey

Jason Richey wrote:

> I have some files from the old list that indicate that they were
> modified by Anthere and Giskart.  I can look into getting these in
> place.
>
> Jason
>
> Jason Richey wrote:
>
> > I am going through and making it so that every list supports all
> > languages that are currently available to mailman, and setting default
> > languages as possible.
> >
> > I'll see what I can do about the layout.
> >
> > Jason
> >
> > Brion Vibber wrote:
> >
> > > On Mon, 18 Aug 2003, Anthere wrote:
> > > > > I have put a lot of work in modifying the look of
> > > > > the listpages so the
> > > > > where not so ugly. Now this is al gone.
> > > >
> > > > seconded
> > > > and of course, as a big *stupid* one, I did not saved
> > > > my changes (which I could have done if I had known
> > > > beforehand an update was planned), so all is REALLY
> > > > gone.
> > > > And I won't make it again, so it will be ugly and in
> > > > english again
> > >
> > > Well, I've set it to show in French by default, but for the meantime it's
> > > still the default page layout. (Anthere: in the administrative interface,
> > > see under "options de langue", "langue par defaut pour cette liste".)
> > >
> > > Jason, is the old data directory backed up somewhere? Or maybe the files
> > > are still in there somewhere...
> > >
> > > > For those who don't believe it, look at
> > > >
> > > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikifr-l
> > >
> > > Yes, look at it. :)
> > >
> > > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > > Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >
> > --
> > "Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
> --
> "Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


subject: [Wikitech-l] [wbrown@inktomi.com: Inktomi web crawler]

body:
Very nice of them to let us know!

----- Forwarded message from Warren Brown <wbrown at inktomi.com> -----

From: "Warren Brown" <wbrown at inktomi.com>
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 17:25:08 -0700
To: root at wikipedia.org
Subject: Inktomi web crawler

The wikipedia.org server is blocking Inktomi's "Slurp" web crawler by
returning 403 errors for all access attempts.  Presumably, this block
was set up because we were crawling the site too aggressively at some
time in the past.  We would like to include wikipedia.org content in our
search database, and would be happy to work with you to match whatever
crawling limits you need to set.

Slurp observes /robots.txt rules for user-agent "Slurp".   The crawler
access rate is normally limited to 4 pages per minute from a web server;
we can set that rate lower if you require.  The Slurp access rate can
also be controlled by a "crawldelay" instruction in /robots.txt.

Inktomi search service is used MSN Search and a number of other web
portal and business sites worldwide.  We are now a subsidiary company of
Yahoo!

Regards,
Warren Brown
Partner Service and Support
Inktomi, a Yahoo! Company

----- End forwarded message -----


subject: [Wikitech-l] mailman :-(

body:
On Mon, 18 Aug 2003, Jason Richey wrote:
> Okay.  After spending a bit of time looking them over, it seems that
> the old templates will not work with the new software.  The new
> software (and the new templates) have far more options than the old
> ones.  So, rather than install those templates which List admins (like
> Anthere) spent so much time beautifying, I have copied the old
> templates into a publicly accessible area of the archives.

Thanks, Jason!

Upgrades never go as smoothly as we like, but as long as the data is
recoverable, we'll survive.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Along with the table, the text is often greatly expanded for each convertion.
> Would that make it into the print version pretty much as-is?

Yeah, I would hope so!  It's sweeter than I thought!

I see what you're asking, and I guess the real answer right now is 'I
don't know'.

Some people have raised the question -- 'Is Wikipedia 1.0 the same
thing as Paper Wikipedia?'  Well, I think it should be, but I know
that's a proposition that needs some defense.

One of my defenses for that proposition is just that "1.0 is just
1.0".  Maybe later we'll have 2.0p and 2.0e, but I'd like to keep the
'push for 1.0' simple and straightforward.  A single goal, a simple
goal.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikitech-l Digest, Vol 1, Issue 704

body:
> Yes, look at it. :)
> > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

oooo, thanks brion

and thanks for the deletion (very busy the deletion
this evening)

------

Message: 11
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 14:02:07 -0700
From: Jason Richey <jasonr at bomis.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] mailman :-(
To: A mailing list for discussing about the technical
organization of
	the	Wikipedias <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>
Message-ID: <20030818140207.D22575 at joey.bomis.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

I have some files from the old list that indicate that
they were
modified by Anthere and Giskart.  I can look into
getting these in
place.

Well, whether you succeed or not, thanks anyway for
your help Jason. It is sweet.

Ant

__________________________________
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
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from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Votes for deletion

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com> wrote:

I like the policy before you changed it better.
LDan

Eh?

*I* didn't change anything?

RickK

---------------------------------
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SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
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body:
> ----- Forwarded message from Warren Brown <wbrown at inktomi.com> -----
> From: "Warren Brown" <wbrown at inktomi.com>
> Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 17:25:08 -0700
> To: root at wikipedia.org
> Subject: Inktomi web crawler
>
> The wikipedia.org server is blocking Inktomi's "Slurp" web crawler by
> returning 403 errors for all access attempts.  Presumably, this block
> was set up because we were crawling the site too aggressively at some
> time in the past.  We would like to include wikipedia.org content in our
> search database, and would be happy to work with you to match whatever
> crawling limits you need to set.
>
> Slurp observes /robots.txt rules for user-agent "Slurp".   The crawler
> access rate is normally limited to 4 pages per minute from a web server;
> we can set that rate lower if you require.

That should be fine; I've taken 'Slurp' out of our bot-blocker list.
Thanks for dropping us a note!

>  The Slurp access rate can
> also be controlled by a "crawldelay" instruction in /robots.txt.

<files away for future reference>

It'd be lovely if all spiders supported this. 4 pages per minute is fine
for one or two big spiders, but if fifty search engines are _each_
spidering our entire site at 4 pages per minute, it may be a bit more than
we'd like. :)

I assume the line would go something like:

User-agent: Slurp
crawldelay: 20
# 20 second delay between hits

?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Votes for deletion

body:
J.-
>      Erik wrote:

>      > I choose not to follow this policy as I consider it unnecessary extra
>      > work, but I don't mind if others add the boilerplate notice.

> Umm, everyone, this is a computer we're dealing with here. It's good at
> repetitive, mindless tasks. (And, yes, I know some poor overworked soul is
> going to have to write the code... :-)

> Why not add a button that i) adds said notice to the top of the page, and
> ii) adds the page to the bottom of VfD? You could go through an intermediate
> screen that offers a little edit window for you to add whatever message to
> the listing, if any, you feel is appropriate, and has Confirm/Cancel
> buttons. That'll make everybody's life even easier than it is now, even.

I'd prefer to turn VfD into an automatically generated list, using a
category flag (the category system should go live soon). But this approach
would work, too (with a caveat: the current VfD page is separated into
section by day; just appending a new page would possibly place them in a
wrong section).

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Exciting new statistics!

body:
"Brion Vibber" <brion at pobox.com> wrote in
message news:3F400376.7060203 at pobox.com...
> Okay, I think I've managed to semi-automate this now. In the future,
> updates should appear within a day of new backup dumps going up.
>
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/Sitemap.htm

Perhaps the statistics should only go up to last month, not this month.
Otherwise it looks like we've had a sudden drop in new wikipedians, active
wikipedians, edits per month, etc. I assume that's what happened, anyway.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Richard Grevers wrote:

> On 18 Aug 2003 23:15:00 +0200, Till Westermayer <till at tillwe.de> gave
> utterance to the following:
>
>> I'd say there is a difference between the local level ("Canterbury
>> Regional Council", "Indian electoral districts", "Orange County School
>> Board") and the sub-national state level ("England", "States of India",
>> "California"). These difference is especially visible in the
>> significance to the rest of the world.
>
> Well even the smaller states of India are more populous than most US
> states.

I think that there is a "market" for some of this oddball information.

> Excuse my ignorance of the US electoral system, but are there
> gubnertorial contests happening in some or all of the other states at
> the same time? If there are, then why should California be singled
> out, other than for the reason that California tends to be self
> aggrandizing? And the reason for that might be that it is home to the
> third-largest film and TV industry in the world and the accompanying
> media circus?

The media circus only adds flavour of the event.  Each US state has its
own rules to determine the length of term of office for state officials,
often even with some logic to the matter.  The current events in
California are irregular in that it first involves an attempt to recall
the current governor, Gray Davis, from office in the middle of his term.
 This way the California process won't be upstaged by any similar events
in other states.  (I'm sorry but the states of India with the same
reverance in the mind of the average American, even if there are more
West Bengalis than Californians.)
Californians will receive two ballots on October 7.  In the first they
will be asked if Gray Davis is to keep his job; that matter can be
decided by a simple majority of votes cast.  If he does keep his job the
second vote will be moot.  The real fun begins in the very likely
possibility that Californians shoose to give him the boot.  The winner
will be the top vote getter in a list of 135 candidates who have bought
lottery tickets.  In theory the winner could be governor with the
support of less than 1% of the voters... which then means very much less
than 1% of Californians.

The laughter is being shared by citizens of the other states equally
with those of other countries, and perhaps wryly even with some
good-humoured Californians.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logo submission deadline: August 20

body:
On Mon, 18 Aug 2003, The Cunctator wrote:
> The reality is that the contest should continue until candidates of
> evident quality exist.

This comment belongs in the 'California recall' thread. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l]  Votes for RK (Votes for deletion)

body:
> This is your theory. Regardless of your theory, it
> is inevitable that a
> nomination of RK will raise many opposing voices
> (including my own),

Regardless of all of that -- you state honestly  that
you have both a polarized opinion and claim a further
"right" to act unilaterally to "avoid a flame war" --
not consistent with your usual, reasonable manner. End
comment.

As for the sysop issue -- I see now that this is all
academic -- that RK has rejected the nomination.

-S-

__________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
>1. Wouldn't it be cool if instead of the way to
>geeky sounding name "Wikipedia 1.0" we named
>it "Wikipedia 2004" or whichever year it gets
>released? Just like Windows and Windows is successful!

Why not Wikipedia XP while we are at it?

Yuck!

Wikipedia stable 1.0 is fine by me.

-- mav


subject: [Wikipedia-l] OFFLIST

body:
Glad that is all over -- you make an excellent
straight man.

Toda.
-S-

__________________________________
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Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Exciting new statistics!

body:
>> Perhaps the statistics should only go up to last month,
>> not this month. Otherwise it looks like we've had a sudden
>> drop in new wikipedians, active wikipedians, edits per month,
>> etc. I assume that's what happened, anyway.

> Well, it'd be extra fun if the current month data were extrapolated to
a
> full month and both to-date and extrapolated figures shown.

I will add this, except for active wikipedians. Their number is not
twice as high in four weeks than in two weeks, so no forecast possible.

Erik Zachte


body:
It looks great!  As one of those who spends time with Wiktionary, I
would really love it if it could be included.
> As one of those who spends time with Wiktionary, I
would really love it if it could be included.

Can do. I will add tables/charts for Wiktionary, but better not include
them in the cross-wiki comparisons or project totals, that would be a
bit confusing.

Erik Zachte


body:
Steve-
> Responsibility breeds self-esteem, standards of conduct and trust between
> parties.

This is your theory. Regardless of your theory, it is inevitable that a
nomination of RK will raise many opposing voices (including my own),
especially now that you have announced your plans to so many parties. A
sysop nomination, like a deletion, must have near unanimous support to be
successful. I see no reason to go into a process that is unlikely to have
any outcome other than bickering over several days or weeks and finally
the removal of the nomination text because no consensus has been reached.

This is not about your "rights" to nominate other persons. This kind of
insistence is also what characterized Lir's behavior. Like Lir, you insist
on embarking on a mission that will only plant the seeds of alienation and
accomplish nothing productive whatsoever.

If you think RK needs to be a sysop to learn responsibility, then ask him
on his talk page if he *wants* to be a sysop and inform him of the process
of requesting sysop access. Feel free to tell him that you would support
that request. But it is silly and pointless for you to extensively
campaign on behalf of someone else who never asked you to do so.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Jimmy-
> But in a print version, maybe this article wouldn't be included:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Plutonium

Agreed. So long as the decision of what to print and what to avoid is
never political (e.g. "Controversies about Jehovah's Witnesses are of
limited interest -- they don't need to be put in the print version"), I
have no problem with it. But all the fictional character stuff, for
example, could be seriously trimmed for the printed edition.

> Well, I'm with you on all of this.  I have always liked the Nupedia
> name better

I always found "Nupedia" kind of vacuous, and people would probably
constantly misspell it as "Newpedia". One thing I really like about
Wiki[mp]edia is that it raises awareness of what wikis are and what they
can be used for. In many articles about Wikipedia, people have noted that
"Wikipedia is the largest wiki, but not the only one" and mentioned other
wiki sites like TolkienWiki. Wikipedia has greatly contributed to the use
of wikis as a technology. If Nupedia had used the wiki concept, some
people might have successfully lobbied for not using the term wiki at all,
because it is slightly obscure, eliminating this positive effect.

In a few years, everyone who knows Google will hopefully also have an idea
what a wiki is. This would never be possible if we wouldn't openly promote
the fact that we *are* a wiki. Also of note, many aspects of wiki
philosophy have rubbed off on us, generally positively, and we are a
recognized part of the wiki community.

I think the name Wikipedia resonates very well with our mission. It is
fresh and different -- not just another encyclopedia -- while not being
impossible to spell or pronounce (like "Kuro5hin"). I love the facial
expressions it creates when people hear it for the first time. The
immediate response I always received was curiosity.

Now the name Wiktionary, that's another story...

Regards,

Erik


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
> From: Erik Moeller
>
> The deadline for submissions of new Wikipedia logos is August 20. For
> those who think this is too short, I have started a vote on whether
the
> deadline should be extended or not.
>
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:International_logo_contest
>
> All Wikipedians interested in the contest should participate,
otherwise
> the vote will be biased in favor of extending the deadline (and again
..
> and again ..).

The reality is that the contest should continue until candidates of
evident quality exist.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica / Statistics

body:
Erik Z.-

> - image, external  and interwiki links and hidden part of internal
> links, are stripped (so the focus is on the article proper)

External link text and interwiki link text should not be stripped. This is
part of the article proper. Image captions should not be stripped either.

> - now all series of 0-9,a-z,A-Z,?-? characters of length >=2 are counted

Single character words, numbers etc. must be counted. This is normal in
word counting. Not doing so is not conservative but wrong.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Richard-
> But aren't a third of those 1500-byte+ articles the machine-generated ones
> on US small towns?

It's fair to include these in our regular count, but the fact that they
are concluded should be prominently noted. I am personally somewhat
opposed to having articles about <100 person towns (but could live with
these being merged into one overview article).

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Till Westermayer

body:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .

Richard wrote:

>In that case can we do the same for the Canterbury Regional
>Council elections?
>Or all of the God knows how many hundreds of electoral districts
>in India? Each of those elections is just as significant to the
>local residents as the state of California is to Californians, and
>just as insignificant to the rest of the world.

I'd say there is a difference between the local level ("Canterbury
Regional Council", "Indian electoral districts", "Orange County School
Board") and the sub-national state level ("England", "States of India",
"California"). These difference is especially visible in the
significance to the rest of the world.
 __ .
 / / / /                            ... Till Westermayer - till we *)
. .
  . mailto:till at tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072
  . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179
  . . . . .


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Bj?rn Lindqvist said:
> 2. I want pictures! WP is SERIOUSLY lacking in the graphics department.
> Like http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle doesn't even have a picture of
> a circle! My utopian wish is for every article to have a nice picture of
> the article's topic on it. If I want to read about
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilcox%2C_Nebraska then I probably want to
> see a photo of it too. Unfortunately there aren't many good FDL
> photographs out there.

Ooh, now there's an idea. Once I get the new digital camera I'm looking at,
mayhap I should go on a massive photography spree... anything and
everything, and public domain the lot of it. I just might do that. (and I
travel a -lot-...)

--Jake


body:
The deadline for submissions of new Wikipedia logos is August 20. For
those who think this is too short, I have started a vote on whether the
deadline should be extended or not.

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:International_logo_contest

All Wikipedians interested in the contest should participate, otherwise
the vote will be biased in favor of extending the deadline (and again ..
and again ..).

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Nicholas Knight

body:
On Monday 18 August 2003 14:06, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Nicholas Knight wrote:
> >This latest effort at increasing the amount
> >of work one has to do to get anything useful
> >done is just helping that perception along.
> >Every time I turn around there's another
> >largely political detail I have to be aware of,
> >and  it's doing anything but encourage me to
> >contribute to Wikipedia.
>
> So who is most harmed; the person who has to paste a small boilerplate
> message into an article, or the person who wrote that article or helped
> improve it, have the article mysteriously disappear one day without any
> obvious reason why?
>
> Not placing proper notice on an article falling under the 7 day rule and
> marked for deletion, is akin to trying a person without bothering to tell
> them about the trial! Yeah sure it is on a publicly viewable page, but then
> so are court records; should society expect ordinary people to periodically
> check those records just to make sure they are not on trial for something?

a) Most people have their freedom abruptly denied before recieving any notice.
Cops show up, say "you're under arrest", and cart them off to jail. The
analogy really doesn't work.

b) Speaking of the analogy not working... The article is on trial, not the
author. The article should have all the time in the world to check vfd and
prepare its defense (what, you mean reason and sanity are part of policy
discussions?).

> This lack of due process is very unwiki.

"unwiki" means very different things to very different people. To me,
personally, "wiki" is purely a TECHNICAL term, not a philosophy.

> The tiny bit of extra work is also a technical detail that can be fixed by
> semi-automating the Votes for deletion process (as it was in Phase II).

Then go do it. This isn't about the notice being there, it's about adding yet
another step.

> >I've had to put up with pointless procedures on
> >volunteer projects before. I'm not about to do it again.
>
> Sorry, but the deletion of anything that falls under the 7 day rule is a
> big deal and needs to be discussed.

That's what vfd is there for.

> Providing the boilerplate gives the
> author of the article and its readers a chance to properly argue their
> case. Not providing the boilerplate, IMO, is a bit sneaky.

If you want to add it manually to every page that gets listed on vfd, go
ahead. I don't have a problem with the text being there, though apparently
some people have some concerns. What I have a problem with is being told I'll
have to go through yet another irritating step that was never needed until
somebody decided for themselves that it was.

Why wasn't this little "policy" decision advertised far and wide? I never saw
any mention of it until Saturday. Speaking of "sneaky"...


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
tarquin-

> But "Paper" is definitely something we need to look into.
> However, it is more complex than sifting -- for example, we'd need a
> single article on "Lord of the Rings" that we would have to distill from
> the current dozens on characters, places, films, etc

Count me as a supporter of that idea for the online version as well ;-).
Truthfully, we need a better way to handle multiple versions of a page --
effectively something like branches in CVS. This is useful for handling
protected pages (edit a branch copy of the page and merge changes into
main page once a certain time has elapsed or when a sysop approves the
changes), for handling temp pages, and for handling permanent branches for
the printed version. To do this we would need some good merging code which
would also be useful to mostly get rid of those damn edit conflicts. Of
course we would have to be careful to avoid overbranching into POV
versions, perhaps by requiring each new branch to be approved in
consensus.

We'll also need a flag for whether to include an article in the printed
version or not (at this point the number of page-flags is getting so big
that it is becoming increasingly useful to separate them into a meta
namespace).

Hehehe, lots of work for our team of trained code monkeys ;-)

> But I *really* like the idea Jimbo raised a long time ago about
> producing an at-cost encyclopedia for third world school. :)

So do I. How cheap can we get? It might be more cost effective to build
Wikipedia reader computers using old machines and cheap harddrives in the
single digit gigabyte range (of course that requires the cheap
availability of electric power, which makes it a non-starter for the
poorest countries). With some crack Linux hackers we should be able to
whip up something that runs on a 486 (using a miniature Linux distro for
embedded devices and a very lean webbrowser like Dillo).

Regards,

Erik


body:
> Really, how important is it that we be always looking
> over our shoulders

Britannica is a well respected encyclopedia and rightly so. I think it
won?t hurt to set ourselves a goal and learn from the strengthes and
weaknesses of the 'competition'. It is not a deathmatch though, just for
honours. I would hate to see Wikipedia push Britannica out of the market
in four years time.

------

Statistics:

A
I would like to change the stats on 'mean article size' and 'number of
articles over x bytes': now they are counted in the traditional
all-inclusive way. I think it would be fairer as a comparison with
Britannica and other printed reference books to count only readable
text, so no html/wiki markup, no hidden links. This will lower the
counts a bit (5-10%?), but will counter possible claims that we use
inflate figures.

B
Word count and page size distribution are on my todo list. Here also I
would like to the counts to be conservative.

> Beware, the remainder of this post deals with the dirty details <

It seems there is no standard method for counting words. Tools like wc
tend to inflate counts, since every character between linebreaks,
spaces, tabs is seen as a word.

So I propose the following count :

- all html/wiki markup is stripped
- image, external  and interwiki links and hidden part of internal
links, are stripped (so the focus is on the article proper)
- &#...; html tags are replaced by single character, say 'x'
- numbers (consecutive digits,comas,points) are converted to say 'word',
so 234,345.56 counts as one
- now all series of 0-9,a-z,A-Z,?-? characters of length >=2 are counted

I know there are one characters words, so I miss a tiny fraction, but
counting those would also encompass single characters in formula's,
calculations and what have you. The error will be minimal.

So for example the following counts as 19 words (wc counts 29).

Yesterday's temperature was 35.5? Celsius, 95 Fahrenheit ( F = 1.8 C +
32 ) ; fresh water (H 2 O) was in high demand, 234,345
icecreams were sold.

counts as 19 words.

Any comments?

Erik Zachte


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>
>2.  "Wiki is not paper, but Wikipedia 1.0 is paper".  The goal of a
>push towards 1.0 is specifically to produce a version that's
>purposefully edited and limited in some minor ways.  We use 'Wiki is
>not paper' as a good reason to be permissive about the addition of
>relative obscurities, but we hope for a print publisher to pick up
>Wikipedia 1.0 and distribute it profitably and dirt-cheap to all the
>people of the world, which means paper and which means constraints.
>
>
I'm not sure 1.0 and "paper-wikipedia" are necessarily the same thing.

But "Paper" is definitely something we need to look into.
However, it is more complex than sifting -- for example, we'd need a
single article on "Lord of the Rings" that we would have to distill from
the current dozens on characters, places, films, etc

This would require a clear plan --
* how much space do we have?
* how many articles can we have in each subject?
* how many words do we have for each article -- how do we weigh them
relatively
... etc
-- basically, all the sorts of editorial decisions that Brittanica & co
have to make

This sort of work would best be done by a relatively small group of
editors -- this is why I don't think that "paper" is the same as 1.0
But I *really* like the idea Jimbo raised a long time ago about
producing an at-cost encyclopedia for third world school. :)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .

>> single digit gigabyte range (of course that requires the cheap
>> availability of electric power, which makes it a non-starter for
>> the poorest countries). With some crack Linux hackers we should
>> be able to whip up something that runs on a 486 (using a
>> miniature Linux distro for embedded devices and a very lean
>> webbrowser like Dillo).
>>
>I recall seeing a TV item where the South African Government had
>developed an English inventor's idea of a $5 hand (crank) powered
>radio and put it into production, and that they were looking at
>the possiblilty of doing something similar with a computer.

[[Simputer]]
 __ .
 / / / /                            ... Till Westermayer - till we *)
. .
  . mailto:till at tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072
  . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179
  . . . . .


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
Nicholas Knight wrote:
>a) Most people have their freedom abruptly denied
>before recieving any notice. Cops show up, say
>"you're under arrest", and cart them off to jail. The
>analogy really doesn't work.

That is talking about probable cause for cops to make an arrest. My analogy is
akin to providing proper notices to appear in court. The analogy is very
sound and mentioning cops making arrests is a strawman.

>b) Speaking of the analogy not working... The article
>is on trial, not the author.

Thus the notice goes on the article itself; the author may or may want to act
in the article's defense. Your reasoning is weak.

>The article should have all the time in the world
>to check vfd and prepare its defense

You have any idea how odd that sounds? The article cannot be its own advocate.

>"unwiki" means very different things to very
>different people. To me, personally, "wiki" is
>purely a TECHNICAL term, not a philosophy.

Wiki is a philosophy, a very radical one in which websites are open to
contributions by complete strangers. Thus "unwiki" is anything which tends to
make things less open (like listing articles for deletion without providing
notice on the article itself).

>What I have a problem with is being told I'll
>have to go through yet another irritating step
>that was never needed until somebody decided
>for themselves that it was.

It became necessary once the volume of submissions to the VfD page became as
large as it is today. Since so many things are listed there is less debate on
each item. Thus the chances of something being unfairly deleted increases.
Our policies have evolved this way; at first everything was very informal and
lax, but as we have grown we have needed to develop written policies to make
things run smoothly.

>Why wasn't this little "policy" decision advertised
>far and wide?

It was an extension of our current largely un-written policies of openness,
accountability and fairness. IMO, the Admin that made the written change was
just codifying these precepts to apply in this particular case.

>I never saw any mention of it until Saturday.

You are well aware of it now.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Richard Grevers wrote:

> On 19 Aug 2003 01:06:00 +0200, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> gave
> utterance to the following:
>
>>
> I recall seeing a TV item where the South African Government had
> developed an English inventor's idea of a $5 hand (crank) powered
> radio and put it into production, and that they were looking at the
> possiblilty of doing something similar with a computer.

Trevor Baylis, BayGen radio
we need an article on this! ;)


body:
Cunc-
> The reality is that the contest should continue until candidates of
> evident quality exist.

I take this as a vote for the current deadline. Oops, sorry, expression of
consensus.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] access counter

body:
Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:
> Brion-
>
> I use several different combinations of IE and Windows, but Win 98 2nd
> ed. and IE 6, Win XP and IE 6 seem to cause the problem. XP & Netscape 7
> does not. I will send you further details via email.

After some time spent with a Win98 box and a packet sniffer, I think
I've found the problem.

The presence of this line in our HTTP response headers:

   Vary: Accept-Encoding

causes IE6 to avoid caching the page. I've disabled it on
ja.wikipedia.org, please confirm if the behavior is changed for you.

The intent of this line is to keep proxy servers from re-serving
gzip-compressed cached pages to clients that don't advertise gzip
support. It shouldn't really matter, though, as we also tell proxies to
only re-serve pages to the original requesters as a protection against
leaking logged-in users' pages to other people (who would then see the
wrong user name, etc). (Further, compressed output is not yet supported
except through the anonymous user page cache, and is not enabled on the
server that ja.wiki is running on.)

I don't _think_ it will be problematic to remove it.

I'm pretty sure our usage is in accordance with specs, though. Extract
from RFC 2616, which defines HTTP 1.1:

------------------------------------
13.6 Caching Negotiated Responses

    Use of server-driven content negotiation (section 12.1), as indicated
    by the presence of a Vary header field in a response, alters the
    conditions and procedure by which a cache can use the response for
    subsequent requests. See section 14.44 for use of the Vary header
    field by servers.

    A server SHOULD use the Vary header field to inform a cache of what
    request-header fields were used to select among multiple
    representations of a cacheable response subject to server-driven
    negotiation. The set of header fields named by the Vary field value
    is known as the "selecting" request-headers.

    When the cache receives a subsequent request whose Request-URI
    specifies one or more cache entries including a Vary header field,
    the cache MUST NOT use such a cache entry to construct a response to
    the new request unless all of the selecting request-headers present
    in the new request match the corresponding stored request-headers in
    the original request.
------------------------------------

IE is technically not out of specs as far as I can tell; it seems to err
on the side of caution of that "MUST NOT" by just not caching anything
instead of doing the checks to determine matching. :P

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] access counter

body:
More detail: apparently IE _will_ handle a 'Vary: User-Agent', but no
other value of Vary:

http://lists.over.net/pipermail/mod_gzip/2002-December/006826.html

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Richard Grevers wrote:
> But aren't a third of those 1500-byte+ articles the machine-generated ones
> on US small towns?

You must stop feeling guilty for this.  Those are good articles, a lot
better than many initial Wikipedia articles.  Just assume that any
commercial encyclopedia contains machine-generated articles too.

The real difference is that they don't contain so detailed information
on every little place-name.  They are more focused on "relevant"
topics (how ever you define that) and have left out the irrelevant.

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia-l Digest, Vol 1, Issue 1280

body:
Bj wrote:

> Why cant ALL elections and ALL candidates in ALL countries be covered?
> Its important enough for alot of people, it is googleable information
> and it can be easily verified. Meh, usually when people say an article
> is unimportant it's because they are ignorant about the subject. :-)
>
> Which leads me to another question I've been aching(sp?) to ask for
> quite some time. When is an article to narrow or not important enough
> to be on Wikipedia? Are there any rules or policies explaining it?

I agree that it's appropriate to cover all election.  We can end up
carrying material that nobody else has.  There can be no hard rule about
what is relevant in human knowledge.  We can only have guidelines that
tend to be accepted by the community.  I tend to favour a broad
interpretation of what is worth including.  Changing that standard could
be a problem when we prepare a publishable version.

Ec


references:
<oprtyuj7gpzs1r4a@localhost>	<8s694YntbzB@westermayer-74391.user.cis.dfn.de>	<oprt4hwy0ozs1r4a@localhost>
	<3F4175CC.9080909@telus.net> <20030819011054.GA25793@tavaiah>

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 05:56:44PM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>The laughter is being shared by citizens of the other states equally
>>with those of other countries, and perhaps wryly even with some
>>good-humoured Californians.
>>
>
>What's funny about having recall voting ?
>We're doing it all the time here for local government (but
>if current city council is recalled, full new elections
>are made, not just plurality voting)
>
It's not the concept of recall that provokes laughter; it's the way the
Californians have turned it into a circus.

Ray


from_name: Lightning

subject: [Wikitech-l] stats

body:
How come there is only 22 languages in the stats from the db-dumps?
Where is the rest? is there a techincal reason or is it just a practical
issue, or is it simply that not enough people have wnated to see them?

just wondering

Lightning


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
Bj?rn-
> 1. Wouldn't it be cool if instead of the way to geeky sounding name
> "Wikipedia 1.0" we named it "Wikipedia 2004" or whichever year it gets
> released? Just like Windows and Windows is successful!

Way to shoot down your own argument there by comparing us to a criminal
proprietary software vendor ;-). I can live with something like "Wikipedia
2004" as long as whatever naming scheme is used is consistently used for
each release, not changed all the time, and as long as the 2004 edition is
actually released in 2004.

> 2. I want pictures!

Join this WikiProject:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Illustration

I think we already have quite a few brilliant pictures, but we can
certainly always use more.

> My utopian wish is for every article to have a nice picture of
> the article's topic on it.

Difficult to do for copyrighted/trademarked characters and brands. There
won't always be a workaround solution like on [[Mickey Mouse]].

> Unfortunately there aren't many good FDL
> photographs out there.

There are heaps of US gov'T PD photos which we haven't yet put to use, and
the awareness of open content is increasing thanks in large part to
Wikipedia itself.

> 3. Better search. The current one doesn't work very well. And the fact
> that if you search for "Stalin" for example, takes you to the Stalin
> page instead of a listing of pages containing the word Stalin is annoying.

It doesn't. There is a "Search" and a "Go" button. The Go button tries to
display the page you search for directly, the Search button gives you a
list of results. See [[Wikipedia:Go button]] on en:.

> 4. Some organisation. WP is very chaotic. If I was to find the article
> about Stalin without using the search function it would be very hard.

Well, the people on
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Six_degrees_of_Wikipedia
have demonstrated that it's possible to get to almost anywhere from almost
anywhere reasonably quickly. The upcoming category scheme will be of
additional help.

> 5. Maybe we could start with releasing just a segment of the wiki-web?
> It is very possible that there isn't enough interest in a printed WP
> version. Maybe not in a CD version either and then someone has done alot
> of wasted work. So instead why not release "Wikipedia: Organic
> Chemistry" or "Wikipedia: World War II" as a litmus tet? There are
> thousands of articles just waiting to be written in each of those subjects.

May be a good idea in any case, as not every potential user of Wikipedia
material is interested in US celebrities, porn vocabulary or Tolkien
fandom.

> 6. How would wiki-links be implemented in a text version?

Translate links to existing pages (in that edition) to underlines, hide
links to non-existent pages.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Björn Lindqvist

body:
 >> Excuse my ignorance of the US electoral system, but are there
gubnertorial
 >> contests happening in some or all of the other states at the same
time? If
 >> there are, then why should California be singled out, other than for the
 >> reason that California tends to be self aggrandizing? And the reason for
 >> that might be that it is home to the third-largest film and TV
industry in
 >> the world and the accompanying media circus?

 >It's not a regularly scheduled election, but a highly unusual recall of >a
 >governor who was elected less than a year ago.

 >Imagine if the prime minister of New Zealand or Ireland were being >thrown
 >out on his ear, and tell me we shouldn't cover it?

Why cant ALL elections and ALL candidates in ALL countries be covered?
Its important enough for alot of people, it is googleable information
and it can be easily verified. Meh, usually when people say an article
is unimportant it's because they are ignorant about the subject. :-)

Which leads me to another question I've been aching(sp?) to ask for
quite some time. When is an article to narrow or not important enough to
be on Wikipedia? Are there any rules or policies explaining it?

BL


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

references:
<oprtyuj7gpzs1r4a@localhost>
	<8s694YntbzB@westermayer-74391.user.cis.dfn.de>
	<oprt4hwy0ozs1r4a@localhost> <3F4175CC.9080909@telus.net>

body:
On Mon, Aug 18, 2003 at 05:56:44PM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> The laughter is being shared by citizens of the other states equally
> with those of other countries, and perhaps wryly even with some
> good-humoured Californians.

What's funny about having recall voting ?
We're doing it all the time here for local government (but
if current city council is recalled, full new elections
are made, not just plurality voting)


from_name: Tomos at Wikipedia

subject: [Wikitech-l] access counter

body:
Brion-

I use several different combinations of IE and Windows, but Win 98 2nd ed.
and IE 6, Win XP and IE 6 seem to cause the problem. XP & Netscape 7 does
not. I will send you further details via email.

Tomos

_________________________________________________________________
<b>Get MSN 8</b> and help protect your children with advanced parental
controls.  http://join.msn.com/?page=features/parental


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
These are my thoughts/suggestions/wishes for WP 1.0:

1. Wouldn't it be cool if instead of the way to geeky sounding name
"Wikipedia 1.0" we named it "Wikipedia 2004" or whichever year it gets
released? Just like Windows and Windows is successful!

2. I want pictures! WP is SERIOUSLY lacking in the graphics department.
Like http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle doesn't even have a picture of
a circle! My utopian wish is for every article to have a nice picture of
the article's topic on it. If I want to read about
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilcox%2C_Nebraska then I probably want to
see a photo of it too. Unfortunately there aren't many good FDL
photographs out there.

3. Better search. The current one doesn't work very well. And the fact
that if you search for "Stalin" for example, takes you to the Stalin
page instead of a listing of pages containing the word Stalin is annoying.

4. Some organisation. WP is very chaotic. If I was to find the article
about Stalin without using the search function it would be very hard. I
think narrow topics are often hidden this way because it is hard to
browse for a topic.

5. Maybe we could start with releasing just a segment of the wiki-web?
It is very possible that there isn't enough interest in a printed WP
version. Maybe not in a CD version either and then someone has done alot
of wasted work. So instead why not release "Wikipedia: Organic
Chemistry" or "Wikipedia: World War II" as a litmus tet? There are
thousands of articles just waiting to be written in each of those subjects.

6. How would wiki-links be implemented in a text version? It's the most
important feature of WP imho, and I cant imagine how it could be made in
a practical manner.

BL


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Images [was: Wikipedia v. Britannica]

body:
On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 03:42:13AM +0200, Bj?rn Lindqvist wrote:
> 2. I want pictures! WP is SERIOUSLY lacking in the graphics department.
> Like http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle doesn't even have a picture of
> a circle! My utopian wish is for every article to have a nice picture of
> the article's topic on it. If I want to read about
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilcox%2C_Nebraska then I probably want to
> see a photo of it too. Unfortunately there aren't many good FDL
> photographs out there.

That's a problem we're having since the beginning.
Adding image upload and math mode helped a lot, but ...

	= 1 =

See http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maps for one thing that
I'm currently working on that could improve situation a lot.

	= 2 =

We could add more TeX-diagraming abilities similar to math mode.

The problem is that most of them would have rather limited usage.
For example Wikipedia won't need more than a few dozens of go diagrams
in close future, and that many can just be made offline.

The only TeX modes that I've seen that are general enough to be worth
implementing on server side of Wikipedia (xypic) seemed extremely hard to use.

But we still need some modules for chemical formulas and "general" diagrams.
If anybody knowns a TeX module that's both general enough and reasonably
easy to use, please write about it.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Images [was: Wikipedia v. Britannica]


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

in_reply_to:
<8s9BTXVSpVB@erik_moeller>;
	from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 05:06:00AM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Way to shoot down your own argument there by comparing us to a
> criminal proprietary software vendor ;-). I can live with something
> like "Wikipedia 2004" as long as whatever naming scheme is used is
> consistently used for each release, not changed all the time, and as
> long as the 2004 edition is actually released in 2004.

I agree with all of this.  I think our 'code name' should be '1.0',
but as we get close to release, maybe we can give it a year name
instead.

> Difficult to do for copyrighted/trademarked characters and
> brands. There won't always be a workaround solution like on [[Mickey
> Mouse]].

Actually, and I'm sure some legal eagles will pop in to correct me if
I'm wrong, there's nothing wrong with us illustrating an article about
Mickey Mouse with a picture of Mickey Mouse, if the copyright on the
photo itself is clear.  Trademark shouldn't interfere with
encyclopedic/journalistic reporting.

If we illustrated an article about McDonald's restaurants with 3-4
photos of 'typical' McDonald's from around the world, that'd be
totally fine.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

in_reply_to:
<20030819094117.4041A3DD2@xmxpita.excite.com>;
	from limholt@excite.com on Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 05:41:17AM -0400

body:
limholt at excite.com wrote:
> One of the goals generally included in the Wiki 1.0 discussion is
>the creation of a paper Wikipedia. This sems to have an assumption
>that lot's of material gets dropped or summarized.

Well, I don't *think* so.  Right now, we're in the ballpark of the
size of Britannica, possibly a bit bigger.  But then, we have a fair
amount of questionable fluff lurking around.  So if we're thinking of
1.0 being approximately equivalent in size and quality to Britannica,
we shouldn't have to cut anything good from where we are today.

In the future, this will likely be a problem.  If Wikipedia 2.0
follows 1.0 by a 3 year time span, for example, it's likely that it
would be twice as big and totally problematic as a print version.

But for 1.0, I don't envision a lot of cutting.

I can totally imagine in the future that we'll have multiple sifted
editions, for example:

Wikipedia 2.0p - full version, paper
Wikipedia 2.0d - desktop paper, a highly shortened version
Wikipedia 2.0e - electronic, no size constraints at all
Wikipedai 2.0r - raw, sifted articles plus everything else, too

But rather than get into a game of excessive a priori design, I think
we should stick to "1.0 is just 1.0" as a mantra.  And what I mean by
that is that we keep a 1.0 release simple, a single release, and the
approval process focussed on openness and reliability of articles,
rather than infinite flexibility for potential
printers/publishers/distributors.

I do also like the idea of Wikipedia: History of Rock Music and
similar.  But "1.0 is just 1.0".  :-)

--Jimbo


in_reply_to:
<8s9BKM4SpVB@erik_moeller>;
	from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 12:21:00AM +0200

body:
One requirement I'd like to add here -- the winning entrant must be
willing to sign over all ownership to the Wikimedia Foundation.  There
could be a lot of confusion about copyright versus trademark rights
and I wouldn't want anyone to end up unhappy.

--Jimbo


from_name: limholt at excite.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

body:
One of the goals generally included in the Wiki 1.0 discussion is the creation of a paper Wikipedia. This sems to have an assumption that lot's of material gets dropped or summarized. I agree with the necessity of that, since paper must be more limited that a hard drive file to be practical. But what about those areas where we have lots more info than a general encyclopedia?

This is a thought about some of the leftover material. I don't mean to imply a well thought out procedure, but a procedure outline sems the most direct way t explain this idea. So, here comes a three step procedure.

1. Complete a list of possible additional paper books to go with the paper Wikipedia 1.0. Examples would be "The Encyclopedia of Rock", "The Enc. of Science Fiction, with Character Ibdex", "Star Trek Encyclopedia", "Enc. of American Biography", etc., etc.

2. When reviewing Wiki articles to include in the paper 1.0, see if a copy goes in any other stacks. For articles droped, put them in their specialized stack.

3. When finished, examine the other stacks to see which have publishable volume and content. Then see if a publisher is interested.

Just a thought....

Thanks,  Lou Imholt (LouI at Wiki)

_______________________________________________
Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com
The most personalized portal on the Web!


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
>>a) Most people have their freedom abruptly denied before recieving
>>any notice. Cops show up, say "you're under arrest", and cart them
>>off to jail. The analogy really doesn't work.

> That is talking about probable cause for cops to make an arrest. My
> analogy is akin to providing proper notices to appear in court. The
> analogy is very sound and mentioning cops making arrests is a
> strawman.

I'd like to also add that the entire analogy is strained from the
outset.  Wikipedia is a privately run website.  While the privilege of
editing is extended very generously, Wikipedia is nonetheless *not* a
city park or free speech zone.  No one has an inherent right to edit
on our website, except as authorized by the Wikimedia Foundation.
(Which is *very* generous about this, obviously.)

No one is ever locked up, not even figuratively.  It's a free country,
and people can always take the database and open their own website if
they want, and write whatever they please.

[Actually, I realize that 'It's a free country' is a peculiarly
American, er, United States-ian expression, and I tried to retype it
as 'It's a free world', but that's not really true.  Well, you know
what I mean.]

I just say all this so that people remember that our policies of
openness and due process are policies, not constitutional rights, and
so any discussion of what we ought to do should be founded in the best
interests of the encyclopedia, as opposed to abstract and stretched
analogies to what rights governments must respect in order to be
proper governments.  It isn't the same thing at all.

--Jimbo


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

body:
> I'd like to also add that the entire analogy is
> strained from the
> outset.  Wikipedia is a privately run website.
> While the privilege of
> editing is extended very generously, Wikipedia is
> nonetheless *not* a
> city park or free speech zone.  No one has an
> inherent right to edit
> on our website, except as authorized by the
> Wikimedia Foundation.
> (Which is *very* generous about this, obviously.)
>
No, wikipedia is a wiki. Anyone can edit it and anyone
can delete it.
>
> No one is ever locked up, not even figuratively.
> It's a free country,
> and people can always take the database and open
> their own website if
> they want, and write whatever they please.
>
> [Actually, I realize that 'It's a free country' is a
> peculiarly
> American, er, United States-ian expression, and I
> tried to retype it
> as 'It's a free world', but that's not really true.
> Well, you know
> what I mean.]
>
There must be some equivalent in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Unfortunately, we USians
know nothing of it, and I'm not aware of any condensed
formes of the sections of it, except for "right to
life", which doesn't apply.

Oh, here's one: Freedom of opinion and expression
>
> I just say all this so that people remember that our
> policies of
> openness and due process are policies, not
> constitutional rights, and
> so any discussion of what we ought to do should be
> founded in the best
> interests of the encyclopedia, as opposed to
> abstract and stretched
> analogies to what rights governments must respect in
> order to be
> proper governments.  It isn't the same thing at all.
>
> --Jimbo

Well, won't they become constitutional rights when we
form our orginizational bylaws?
LDan

__________________________________
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http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

in_reply_to:
<oprt4dgej6zs1r4a@localhost>;
	from lists@dramatic.co.nz on Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 09:18:04AM +1200

body:
Richard Grevers wrote:
> But aren't a third of those 1500-byte+ articles the
> machine-generated ones on US small towns?

That's a very good point.  That's just the sort of issue we're going
to have to wrestle with as we proceed with a refinement process
towards 1.0.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

in_reply_to:
<000101c3664e$eeab45b0$01000001@mdb29>;
	from wikipedia@jumpingjackweb.com on Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at
	08:39:28AM -0400

body:
Michael Becker wrote:
> How about we call it "Wikipedia:  The People's Encyclopedia".

Well, lots of people call us that.  I'm a little uncomfortable with
the 'communist' ring to it.  Traditionally "The People's Republic"
means "A system under which the people are benefitted by being told
exactly what to do under penalty of law".  :-) Not exactly the Wiki
philosophy of openness and freedom.

On the other hand, I do sort of like it as a playful subversion of
that older meaning.

--Jimbo


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipeda 1.0  Paper Plus

body:
At 05:41 AM 8/19/03 -0400, Lou wrote:

>One of the goals generally included in the Wiki 1.0 discussion is the
>creation of a paper Wikipedia. This sems to have an assumption that lot's
>of material gets dropped or summarized. I agree with the necessity of
>that, since paper must be more limited that a hard drive file to be
>practical. But what about those areas where we have lots more info than a
>general encyclopedia?
>
>This is a thought about some of the leftover material. I don't mean to
>imply a well thought out procedure, but a procedure outline sems the most
>direct way t explain this idea. So, here comes a three step procedure.
>
>1. Complete a list of possible additional paper books to go with the paper
>Wikipedia 1.0. Examples would be "The Encyclopedia of Rock", "The Enc. of
>Science Fiction, with Character Ibdex", "Star Trek Encyclopedia", "Enc. of
>American Biography", etc., etc.

Some of these exist, and probably more thorough than we could manage any
time soon.
There are very thorough encyclopedias of science fiction and of fantasy,
for example.
The online Encyclopedia of Arda is probably a better/more thorough work
than we'd have
if we pulled out all our Tolkien articles.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


from_name: Michael Becker

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
How about we call it "Wikipedia:  The People's Encyclopedia".  Or "Human
Knowledge 200*?"  Then on the inside cover with all the copyright info,
we put the revision number, and the year that revision was made?

--
Michael Becker

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Jimmy Wales
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2003 8.26
To: wikipedia-l at Wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

I agree with all of this.  I think our 'code name' should be '1.0', but
as we get close to release, maybe we can give it a year name instead.

--Jimbo


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia v. Britannica

body:
On Mon, 18 Aug 2003 07:22:40 -0700, Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> gave
utterance to the following:

> According to their website, Britannica's Deluxe Edition 2004 CD
> has 75,000 articles.
>
> http://store.britannica.com/escalate/store/DetailPage?pls=britannica&bc=britannica&clist=158032f0dd&pc=B_2004DLX&cc=allcats
>
> Presumably, many of these are longer and of higher quality than our
> 150,000 English-language articles.
>
>> From our groovy new stats tool, we know that the average Wikipedia
> article is 2,115 bytes.  Perhaps of greater interest, 53% of our
> articles, or right around 75,000, are longer than 1,500 bytes.
>
> So a question naturally comes to mind - how do our 75,000 >1,500 byte
> articles stack up again Britannica's 75,000 articles?
>
But aren't a third of those 1500-byte+ articles the machine-generated ones
on US small towns?

--
Richard Grevers
I'm not lost - I'm directionally challenged


subject: [Wikipedia-l] encyclopedia

in_reply_to:
<3F3E887D.5030002@telus.net>;
	from saintonge@telus.net on Sat, Aug 16, 2003 at 12:39:41PM -0700

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
>We have harnessed the power of boredom.

Oooh, an advertising slogan!  I like it. :-)

And: "Boredom: The Power Too Cheap To Meter"

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] 'wikidown@bomis.com' address

body:
Well, there's more spam coming on that address, and in any case I've
removed the error message that used to put up the link to it a while
ago. (Now the wiki displays a cached copy of the requested page if
possible, or else just an error message.)

It probably makes sense to just close down the wikidown address so it's
not forwarding spam to the entire dev team on a regular basis. :P

sigh...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Alex R.

body:
Absolutely necessary, would not want the creator to use
the logo on some other project (which according to the general
approach here would be acceptable), though once it is used
by Wikipedia then trademark rights begin to attach. Federal
trademark registration should be sought ASAP once the
winner is picked (perhaps even before any public announcements)
and the TM (or SM) sign be attached pending registration
(you can use the R in a circle ONLY after registration is completed).
Alex756
 "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com> said on Tuesday, August 19, 2003 8:34 AM

> One requirement I'd like to add here -- the winning entrant must be
> willing to sign over all ownership to the Wikimedia Foundation.  There
> could be a lot of confusion about copyright versus trademark rights
> and I wouldn't want anyone to end up unhappy.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Saddam Hussein

body:
Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
> >What is the sense of other people about not only the name of Saddam
> >Hussein as a User name, but the fact that the User has copied the entire
> >content of the [[Saddam Hussein]] article to his/her User page?
>
> We could buy a *lot* of servers for the money being offered as a reward
> for that man. :-)

Quick, somebody trace the IP number!  Maybe he's in Iowa. ;-)

--Jimbo