subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Communication,
	being up-to-date and Mailing List issue

body:
First, I agree that there is a problem with communication.

Ronny Raschkowan wrote:
 > Hello!
 >
 > When i talked yesterday on IRC with another wikipedian, we had both the
 > same opinion that there's a problem with the communication, and staying
 > up-to-date.
 >
 > The problem is that people don't know for example, a feature had been
 > enabled or similar (high priority?) news concerning Wikimedia. Also,
 > most Wikis aren't up to date: They don't know for example, that it is
 > also possible to block logged in people using the IP - Ban interface.
 > Another problem is, that Wikis also couldn't know where they have to do
 > requests like: Request for Permission, for switching the logo path, for
 > queries, for updating a LanguageXX.php.

There are two different type of information here :
* new and sudden information (how to get informed)
* basic day to day information (who to contact, or where to go to have
something done)

I think work has definitly to be done on the first (such as warning of a
fundraising event).

Not so much on the second, other than regularly pointing out to a couple
of good starting pages.

When I started reorganising the meta main page, I am quite sure very few
could find what was needed.

I think now, they do much more than before. In spite of numerous new
projects, there are far fewer requests on the mailing lists than before
to ask for a new logo, or sysop status. I believe most people now find
the right pages quite well.

Of course, documentation has to be written.

Possibly they don't know there
 > are IRC Channels and Mailing Lists, too. I would purpose two possible
 > ways to change that, but feel free to purpose other ways :)
 >
 > 1) "Reactivating" the Announce-l Mailinglist. As far, as there are a lot
 > of changed going on, (creation of language specific wikibooks, quote for
 >  example), it'd be a good idea to have this ML working, as far as people
 > could post the announces there and people interested in the changes
 > could suscribe to that list and get informed.

I am really unsure it will be valuable, but am ready for an experiment.
The first announcement list set by Walter did not work, and I think
there are a couple of difficulties to solve, if you want to make it work.

You need the *largest* audience possible, and you need *all* relevant
but *only* relevant information.

1) largest audience : Have everyone REGISTERED to yet another list and
READ the mails

2) largest audience : Have messages TRANSLATED on that mailing list,
BEFORE going on the mailing list

3) Have people THINK of using that list (comment : many still not use
goings-on, but put everything in the huge mess of village-pumps)

4) Have people UNDERSTAND what to post and what not to post (need to
define the goal very well).

Nothing impossible, but... that essentially mean, imho, that such a list
will only will work IF someone is taking the responsibility and
leadership of that solution and really put time in it.

 > 2) Creating a new Special page for all wikis (or similar), called
 > "Useful_Links" or similar ( I haven't found a good title yet ;) ).
 > People could read there where they can found the IRC Chat, where they
 > can found specific mailing lists, and where they can post request (for
 > permission, logo, query, etc), (Embassies?), etc. As far, people would
 > have a good reference page and would fastly find a way where  they can
 > report a problem to the community, request and communicate within the
 > community and with other users.
 >
 > These are just ideas how to do that. If you have another idea, feel free
 > to add it :).

I suppose most of this is more or less on all developped projects, some
in the FAQ, some in other places. A central place is never a bad idea.

I am glad you are interested by all that Fire :-)

I hold on to my proposal to have a technical feature allowing to post a
message from meta, to all (or part of) wikimedia projects.

--------

I think we should put some more work on meta, such as

1) making a multilingual home page
2) translating the english speaking main page in more languages
3) develop a feature to support more easily multilingualism on one wiki
4) improve flow of information for the whole area of
wikimediafoundation. The information on the main page is now outdated.


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Anthere


list: wikitech-l

from_name: leercontainer-wikimedia at yahoo.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Important bug fix for MediaWiki phase4

body:
I should mention that the bugs that have been holding me back and that
Enrico didn't mention are 718089, 950375 and
959622. I consider the first one especially important.

--- Enrico Weigelt <weigelt at metux.de> wrote:
> * Guttorm Flataboe <dittaeva at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> > Hi Enrico, its nice to see that some refreshing new developer
> effort
> > for the MediaWiki software!
> >
> > I also would like to use Mediawiki for something non-wikipedian,
> but
> > there are some bugs that have been holding me back.
> >
> > Currently the Mediawiki software will not detect and show all
> changes
> > to a text, and it does not do mark changes consistently. This is
> very
> > unfortunate since users will be under the impression that when they
> do
> > a diff they will be shown all changes, while infact some will not
> be
> > shown and therefore overlooked.
>
> hmm, I'm currently fighting on other frontiers.
<snipped>


list: wikien-l

from_name: David Gerard

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Fwd: National Alliance article (was
	Communist	Censorship)

body:
On 07/24/04 08:08, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> On Friday 23 July 2004 15:23, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

>><POV>
>>If they think that "white supremacist" is a pejorative insult, whereas
>>"white separatist" is a delightful explanation of their terribly
>>enlightened ideals, well, the joke is on them.  They still sound like
>>morons to me.
>></POV>

> Don't these two terms describe two different groups?

In theory. In practice, they tend to interact and interchange
pretty freely and be part of the same thing.

- d.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] web of trust

body:
--- Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
> Just in case some other wikipedias are interested, too:
> In the german wikipedia we started an experimental web of trust
> yesterday. It works by the "what links here functionality". A user who
> wants to participate creates a page [[User:Name/trust]] and lists there
> all the people he trusts in the form [[User:Otheruser/trust]]. By
> visiting a trust page (existing or not) and clicking on "what links
> here" you can see which people are trusting this user.

Not sure if having this public will be useful. My idea all along was to have
this as part of the software not unlike the watchlist function.

Then edits by people you trust (and perhaps people you trust by proxy) would be
in small, grayed out text on your watchlist and in Recent Changes.

That way your attention is drawn away from edits that you would almost
certainly find to be OK.

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Trust_network

-- mav

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


from_name: Enrico Weigelt

body:
* Guttorm Flataboe <dittaeva at yahoo.com> wrote:

Hi,

> Hi Enrico, its nice to see that some refreshing new developer effort
> for the MediaWiki software!
>
> I also would like to use Mediawiki for something non-wikipedian, but
> there are some bugs that have been holding me back.
>
> Currently the Mediawiki software will not detect and show all changes
> to a text, and it does not do mark changes consistently. This is very
> unfortunate since users will be under the impression that when they do
> a diff they will be shown all changes, while infact some will not be
> shown and therefore overlooked.

hmm, I'm currently fighting on other frontiers.
My wiki setups are normally sitting behind a masquerading firewall.
This sometimes makes trouble on redirections (redirect goes to the
local host named instead the virtual host name). I've fixed most of
them, but some are still unfixed.

I've also splitted off the common wiki code from individual instance
stuff in a way, that the wiki code is imported by the actual instance
just like a library. Here's a little example:

Directory listing:

drwxr-xr-x    2 subsys/p root         4096 Jul 12 15:33 .
drwxr-xr-x   10 subsys/p wwwrun       4096 Jul 12 22:38 ..
-rw-rw-rw-    1 subsys/p nobody       2382 Jul 12 22:05 LocalSettings.php
lrwxrwxrwx    1 subsys/p root           40 Jul 12 15:22 _mediawiki_current_ -> /home/subsys/borg/lib/packages/mediawiki
lrwxrwxrwx    1 subsys/p root           26 Jul 12 15:22 images -> _mediawiki_current_/images
lrwxrwxrwx    1 subsys/p root           28 Jul 12 15:22 includes -> _mediawiki_current_/includes
-rw-r--r--    1 subsys/p root          228 Jul 12 22:06 index.php
lrwxrwxrwx    1 subsys/p root           29 Jul 12 15:22 languages -> _mediawiki_current_/languages
lrwxrwxrwx    1 subsys/p root           31 Jul 12 15:22 maintenance -> _mediawiki_current_/maintenance
lrwxrwxrwx    1 subsys/p root           24 Jul 12 15:22 math -> _mediawiki_current_/math
lrwxrwxrwx    1 subsys/p root           31 Jul 12 15:22 stylesheets -> _mediawiki_current_/stylesheets
lrwxrwxrwx    1 subsys/p root           29 Jul 12 15:22 templates -> _mediawiki_current_/templates

index.php:

<?php

error_reporting ( E_ALL );

define ( 'MEDIAWIKI_ROOT',		'_mediawiki_current_/' );
define ( 'MEDIAWIKI_INSTANCE',		'./' );
define ( 'MEDIAWIKI_BREAKPOINT',	1 );

require_once ( MEDIAWIKI_ROOT.'includes/common-page.php' );

-------

The changes are not too huge, so I'd suggest we try to get this in
the current wiki branch before forking off.

cu
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
 Enrico Weigelt    ==   metux IT service

  phone:     +49 36207 519931         www:       http://www.metux.de/
  fax:       +49 36207 519932         email:     contact at metux.de
  cellphone: +49 174 7066481
---------------------------------------------------------------------
 -- DSL ab 0 Euro. -- statische IP -- UUCP -- Hosting -- Webshops --
---------------------------------------------------------------------


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Image resizing questions...

body:
Robert Graham Merkel wrote:

> Seeing we want the ability to make printed material out of Wikipedia
> content, uploading full-resolution images is IMO the way to do it.
> However, such images currently break the image description page.

Suggestion: Have a magic word, __SCREENSIZE__ or something like that,
which you can put on an image description page, and it will set
style="width: 100%" on the image (thus telling the browser to size the
image in such a way that its width fits the bounding rectangle). Of
course, __SCREENSIZE__ should be omitted when the image is very small,
because then "width: 100%" would tell the browser to enlarge it.

Of course, this isn't without problems. If someone's bounding rectangle
is about 800 pixels wide (it's 826 for me at 1024x768 with Monobook) for
someone, but 1000 pixels for someone else (possibly using 1280x1024),
then one of them will want __SCREENSIZE__ to be inserted, while the
other will complain that it enlarges the image unnecessarily. :/

Timwi


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Arbitration Committee Elections (11th and 12th
	spots)?

body:
Anthere wrote:

> Believe it or not, I did it. I changed the headings of the gmane message
> to forward the mail to wikien.

Oh, you mean a Followup-To header? Yeah, I've tried setting one of those
before to redirect a thread to a different list, and I got a weird error
message. I think I'll contact Gmane about it.

Thanks for reminding me.

Timwi


from_name: Abe Sokolov

subject: [WikiEN-l] Russian constitutional crisis of 1993 (Fred Bauder)

body:
fredbaud at ctelco.net wrote:

You have made it abundantly clear that other editors are definitely not
welcome. Thus the sorry state of our articles in this area. I know your
interpretation of the "Russian constitutional crisis of 1993" is not to be
trusted. Yet I wonder what did happen... Not much chance I'll be able to
find out by consulting Wikipedia any time soon.

The page histories and talk pages say otherwise. (1) On Russian
constitutional crisis of 1993, I did not revert recent copyediting
(User:Sj's in particular); and I support those changes. (2) On History of
post-Soviet Russia, the only other user who has made a substantial
contribution is User:Paranoid; I welcomed his/her changes a few weeks ago as
well. (3) Before your latest personal attack, I put History of post-Soviet
Russia on peer review. (4) Another user posted an excerpt of the FAC process
on the talk page of Russian constitutional crisis of 1993. This page will
also demonstrate that your claims are clearly wrong and mean-spirited. For
example, after User:A. Shetsen laid out several sets of concerns on FAC, he
had apparently felt satisfied enough with my responses on FAC and my changes
to the article that he withdrew his objections to the featuring of the
article. A couple of users made briefer comments. I then addressed their
concerns; they were satisfied as well and their objections were subsequently
withdrawn as well.

I can't think of too many other examples off the top of my head, but keep in
mind that this wasn't a heavily edited area to begin with before I started
recent work on post-Soviet Russia. The record will show that I have made a
number of good-faith efforts to bring other users into the fold on an area
of articles that haven't been getting as much attention as they should be
getting.

Finally, I challenge Fred Bauder to find ONE clear factual inaccuracy in
Russian constitutional crisis of 1993. Back up your personal attacks with
evidence for one.

-172

_________________________________________________________________
Don?t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Russian constitutional crisis of 1993 (some responses)

body:
Exactly.  172 will only allow you to edit one of "his" articles if you cling to his pro-socialist, anti-American slant on things.

RickK

Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
You have made it abundantly clear that other editors are definitely not
welcome. Thus the sorry state of our articles in this area. I know your
interpretation of the "Russian constitutional crisis of 1993" is not to be
trusted. Yet I wonder what did happen... Not much chance I'll be able to
find out by consulting Wikipedia any time soon.

Fred

> And I sincerely hope that this does get other users into the fold on recent
> Russian history. Our articles in this area are very underdeveloped and I'm
> not getting very far very fast being virtually the only one making
> substantial contributions to them.
>
> -172

---------------------------------
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New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: web of trust

body:
Elisabeth Bauer wrote:

> Just in case some other wikipedias are interested, too:
> In the german wikipedia we started an experimental web of trust
> yesterday. It works by the "what links here functionality". A user who
> wants to participate creates a page [[User:Name/trust]] and lists there
> all the people he trusts in the form [[User:Otheruser/trust]]. By
> visiting a trust page (existing or not) and clicking on "what links
> here" you can see which people are trusting this user.

This is asking for trouble. Although you state that "even if you're not
on this list, that doesn't mean people find you untrustworthy", people
are inevitably going to feel that way. I think this gives the community
of experienced users too powerful a tool to make newbies feel unwelcome
and have them leave. (I suppose this isn't as much of a problem on the
German Wikipedia because you already do that on a regular basis.)

To counteract this, a lot of newbies would be encouraged to flood other
people's User talk pages with requests to be added to their trust list.
I can already foresee the annoyance of it.

Lastly, there's also the lot of us who don't really care much about the
other contributors and just go their own way. They wouldn't want to
create a trust page because they wouldn't know whom to trust and whom to
mistrust, but they would be thought of as anti-social jerks who don't
trust anybody if they don't.

Timwi


from_name: Michael Diederich

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Special:AskSQL

references:
<1370636.4qQF7LjVUm@mobil.md-d.org>	<742dfd0604072219506ab3e3e5@mail.gmail.com>
	<cdqm2a$bsf$1@sea.gmane.org> <cdsdbd$8ae$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
<begin name="Tim Starling" date="Saturday 24 July 2004 03:20"/>

>> I don't want to enable that feature again or try to enhance it, I'll
>> just come under attack from Erik yet again.
> Sorry, that was a silly thing to say. Consider this a retraction. Of
> course I'll enable your feature.

Thank you very much. Could you please make the textarea a little bit bigger?
on my opera i have problems to read the standard text, it is worse to read
pasted code in such a small box..

<textarea name="wpSqlQuery" cols=80 rows=4 wrap="virtual">

maybe double?

Best regards,

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


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [MediaWiki-CVS] phase3/includes Skin.php, 1.234,
	1.235

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
>
> could all developpers please ensure that their text editor doesn't mess
> up whitespaces in the files?

Well, personally, I wouldn't call it "messing them up"; all I'm doing is
removing whitespace at the end of lines.

So, alternatively, I could ask all developers not to introduce
whitespace at the end of the lines. :)

But I'll see what I can do.

Timwi


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Abe Sokolov wrote:

> Stan Shebs shebs at apple.com wrote:
>
> And the bulk of the content is from - you guessed it - 172! This
> is the hallmark of his style; while there are usually no gross
> misrepresentations of fact, the wording is so relentlessly slanted
> it would take a week to clean up, at the end of which he would just
> revert it all in one fell swoop. It's completely exasperating; I
> finally stopped looking at anything he touches, scrubbed it all
> out of my watchlist, and regained Wikipedia-nirvana. Even so, I still
> worry that the unabashed socialist viewpoint will
> hurt WP's credibility as an impartial recorder.
>
>
> None of the sources are "socialist" by any stretch of the imagination.
> Go check them. All of them fall with in the mainstream of the academic
> literature, in the mainstream of Western political science and Russia
> studies, which you'll find is quite often far harder on Yeltsin than
> this article. (see, e.g., the analyses of democratization inspired by
> Guillermo O'Donnell's "delegative democracy").
>
I have indeed compared your wording with the purported sources
(not on this article, but on others that we have discussed
previously), and there are significant differences. Your additions
almost always describe rightwingers in ways that suggest that they
have dishonorable ulterior motives, while leftwingers are described
in ways that suggest their motives are pure and aboveboard. For
instance, if a rightwinger gives a reason, you usually put it in
doublequotes and follow up immediately with an counterstatement,
while leftwingers' stated reasons for an action are usually given
without qualification or counterstatement. It's a sly technique -
nothing untrue is ever being said, but the audience gets a message
nonetheless.  As a leftwinger myself, I don't really mind that
rightwingers get a few putdowns, but I think objective reporting is
sufficient to demonstrate their evil :-) and rightwingers reading WP
will seize upon slanted wording as "proof" that WP as a whole is not
to be believed.

When Jimbo posted his message, from the way he described his reaction,
I knew right away where the content must have come from. As scientists
know, the best evidence for a theory is its predictive power!

> All fair minded users will recognize that Stan Shebs, along with Fred
> Bauder, have been haplessly sniping at me for over a year and a half.
> As usual, not one iota's worth of evidence is offered, but Stan
> launches into the ad hominem bluster.

You know full well there's been all kinds of evidence offered, both
on this mailing list and on the talk pages. It's not really a good idea
to try to mislead people about this sort of thing, because it's all been
logged, archived, and indexed by Google even. For instance, there was
the episode where Somoza was a dictator but Stalin was not, and then
where the Berlin Airlift was mainly a publicity stunt.

>
> And I sincerely hope that this does get other users into the fold on
> recent Russian history. Our articles in this area are very
> underdeveloped and I'm not getting very far very fast being virtually
> the only one making substantial contributions to them.

Perhaps they've been discouraged by your unenviable track record of
reverting other people's work? I certainly wasn't going to put an
hour of effort into something that you would revert in a second
without discussing it first.

Stan


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Communication,
	being up-to-date and Mailing List issue

body:
Sj wrote:

>>Related to this, just want to make sure everyone knows about these two
>>pages for announcements and goings-on.
>>
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Goings-on
>>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Goings-on
>
>
> Not to mention the other sidebar-linked page, Wikimedia News!

That is part of the problem. When there are several WikiMedia news
channels the compete whit there self. There should be one source page
whit WikiMedia wide news. That page can be translated by all the
WikiMedia wikis who care.

That page should be
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_News

It's setup is easy. A date and some news. That is easy to translate. I
do it for NL. The setup of "goings-on" is not so good for translating.
To complicated.

"Wikimedia News" should include to news no on "Meta goings-on". Also now
there is a lot of non-news on "Wikimedia News". Wikipedia is now so big
it is no news anymore that some wikipedia now has X articles. That type
of news should be limited as much possible to big steps of a wiki. A new
wiki, the first 10 000 articles, 100 000 articles, 500 000 arcticles, ..

The Announce-l list is a good idea. I (know as "Giskart" in those days)
have done a attempt to use it some years ago without succes.

See;
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/announce-l/2002-November/thread.html

Maybe the time is there now for this. But but for it to work people need
to be disciplined enough to send the information to the correct list the
correct way.

Now I see on Wikipedia-l still a lot of postings that should be on
WikiEN-l. Even this tread does not belong here. The stuff about the
Arbitration Committee is for wikiEN-l and talk about inter WikiMedia
communciation is for Foundation-l

--
[[wikipedia:nl:gebruiker:walter]]


from_name: Jens Frank

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Why are special pages not working on danish
	Wikipedia?

body:
On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 02:21:03PM -0400, Christian List wrote:
> It looks like the special pages are working on all the other Wikipedias, but
> not the danish.
> Is there any special reason for that?

Fixed it.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Gutza

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Plain text of page?

references:
<20040723125203.D4C591791B@mailrelay1.informatik.tu-muenchen.de>	<cdr3kv$ber$2@sea.gmane.org>	<410127FC.2070000@moongate.ro>
	<cdrru6$dvn$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:

> Gutza wrote:
>
>> Speaking of which (don't want to start a new thread for this), is
>> there any way to retrieve only the status of a page? Meaning, "0" if
>> it doesn't exist, "1" if it does or an URL if it's a redirect -- I
>> guess that would be the logical way to do it. I think it would be
>> nice to have for automated quick searches.
>
>
> Well, if you try this with a non-existent page:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Nonexistantpage&action=raw&ctype=text/css
>
>
> you get "". Not the most professional of
> ways of saying "this page doesn't exist", but since it's unlikely to
> be the body of a real article, I suppose you can use this.
>
> Redirects are ridiculously easy to parse with a regular expression.

Yes, but you see, if you want for instance to highlight words in a text
which can be linked to articles in Wikipedia, then you would need to
retrieve all pages for no real reason. Don't get me wrong, I'm not
really saying that I *need* this functionality right now, nor am I
pushing towards it in any way, I'm just saying that once it's in place,
it might help others to write applications around Wikipedia, thus adding
value to the project, at least due to the extra exposure, if nothing else.

--Gutza


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Question about categories

body:
Hello,
I have a question about categories: when a category has a sub-category,
should a page belonging to this sub-category be displayed in the main
category listing?

I have this main category:

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categoria:Astronomia_e_Astrofisica

With, among others, two sub-categories:

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categoria:Stelle
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categoria:Costellazioni

All articles in the second sub-category are also displayed in the main
one, but not the ones inside the first sub-category.

All those articles were recently changes from the main category to one or
the other sub-category. Are there any server-side caching issue?

Thanks,
Alfio


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: __ADDSEC__ keyword - A new (unfinished) feature

body:
?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
> I thought of a neat feature today while browsing the Village pump,
> pages in all talk namespaces have a neat + link besides the Edit link
> so you can add a new section to it, so i thought it would be nice for
> things like the Village pump to be able to have that link added with a
> keyword to every page that had that keyword in the wikitext. I named
> that keyword ADDSEC for "add section" and it's invoked with
> __ADDSEC__.

<snip>

Why not moving that talk page to the talk namespace ?

Aka : [[Talk:Village pump]] instead of [[Village pump]] :o)

--
Ashar Voultoiz


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] web of trust

body:
Hello,

Just in case some other wikipedias are interested, too:
In the german wikipedia we started an experimental web of trust
yesterday. It works by the "what links here functionality". A user who
wants to participate creates a page [[User:Name/trust]] and lists there
all the people he trusts in the form [[User:Otheruser/trust]]. By
visiting a trust page (existing or not) and clicking on "what links
here" you can see which people are trusting this user.

A description in german can be found at
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vertrauensnetz
An example page is at
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Elian/Vertrauen

greetings,
elian
PS: english wikipedia has a page
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Trust_network> with another
proposal.


body:
Hello,

could all developpers please ensure that their text editor doesn't mess
up whitespaces in the files? Those CVS commit messages are totally
useless if the text editor adds or removes whitespace all over the file.
Thank you.

JeLuF

On Sat, Jul 24, 2004 at 01:18:17PM +0000, Timwi wrote:
> Update of /cvsroot/wikipedia/phase3/includes
> In directory sc8-pr-cvs1.sourceforge.net:/tmp/cvs-serv27133/includes
>
> Modified Files:
> 	Skin.php
> Log Message:
> Tim Starling removed the line where $func is set to 'makeLink', but left it in where
> it is used as a function name. I'm pretty sure that would give rise to a bug. :)
> Replacing $func with makeLink.
>
>
>
> Index: Skin.php
> ===================================================================
> RCS file: /cvsroot/wikipedia/phase3/includes/Skin.php,v
> retrieving revision 1.234
> retrieving revision 1.235
> diff -C2 -d -r1.234 -r1.235
> *** Skin.php	24 Jul 2004 10:55:35 -0000	1.234
> --- Skin.php	24 Jul 2004 13:18:14 -0000	1.235
> ***************
> *** 67,71 ****
>   		return "standard";
>   	}
> !
>   	# Get/set accessor for delayed link colouring
>   	function postParseLinkColour( $setting = NULL ) {
> --- 67,71 ----
>   		return "standard";
>   	}
> !
>   	# Get/set accessor for delayed link colouring
>   	function postParseLinkColour( $setting = NULL ) {
> ***************
> *** 1477,1483 ****
>   					}
>   				}
> !
>   				# Allows wiki to bypass using linkcache, see OutputPage::parseLinkHolders()
> ! 				$retVal = '<!--LINK ' . implode( ' ', array( $nt->getNamespace(), $nt->getDBkey(),
>   					$query, $prefix . $text . $inside ) ) . "-->{$trail}";
>   			} else {
> --- 1477,1483 ----
>   					}
>   				}
> !
>   				# Allows wiki to bypass using linkcache, see OutputPage::parseLinkHolders()
> ! 				$retVal = '<!--LINK ' . implode( ' ', array( $nt->getNamespace(), $nt->getDBkey(),
>   					$query, $prefix . $text . $inside ) ) . "-->{$trail}";
>   			} else {
> ***************
> *** 1488,1494 ****
>   				} else {
>   					$threshold = $wgUser->getOption('stubthreshold') ;
> ! 					if ( $threshold > 0 ) {
>   						$dbr =& wfGetDB( DB_SLAVE );
> ! 						$s = $dbr->selectRow( 'cur', array( 'LENGTH(cur_text) AS x', 'cur_namespace',
>   							'cur_is_redirect' ), array( 'cur_id' => $aid ), $fname ) ;
>   						if ( $s !== false ) {
> --- 1488,1494 ----
>   				} else {
>   					$threshold = $wgUser->getOption('stubthreshold') ;
> ! 					if ( $threshold > 0 ) {
>   						$dbr =& wfGetDB( DB_SLAVE );
> ! 						$s = $dbr->selectRow( 'cur', array( 'LENGTH(cur_text) AS x', 'cur_namespace',
>   							'cur_is_redirect' ), array( 'cur_id' => $aid ), $fname ) ;
>   						if ( $s !== false ) {
> ***************
> *** 2500,2508 ****
>   			if ( preg_match( '/^' . $medians . '(.*)$/i', $match[1], $submatch ) ) {
>   				# Media link
> ! 				$comment = preg_replace( '/\[\[(.*?)\]\]/', $this->makeMediaLink( $submatch[1], "", $text ),
>   				  $comment, 1 );
>   			} else {
>   				# Other kind of link
> ! 				$comment = preg_replace('/\[\[(.*?)\]\]/', $this->$func( $match[1], $match[1] ),
>   				  $comment , 1);
>   			}
> --- 2500,2508 ----
>   			if ( preg_match( '/^' . $medians . '(.*)$/i', $match[1], $submatch ) ) {
>   				# Media link
> ! 				$comment = preg_replace( '/\[\[(.*?)\]\]/', $this->makeMediaLink( $submatch[1], "", $text ),
>   				  $comment, 1 );
>   			} else {
>   				# Other kind of link
> ! 				$comment = preg_replace('/\[\[(.*?)\]\]/', $this->makeLink( $match[1], $match[1] ),
>   				  $comment , 1);
>   			}
>
> _______________________________________________
> MediaWiki-CVS mailing list
> MediaWiki-CVS at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-cvs
>
>


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

body:
Because sometimes thats just not feasable, In tha case of the village
pump for example the talk page is where people talk about the actual
chat page, it's layout and such. There is a need for this because
people already have "Add to this conversation" links all over the
place and this would just provide a standard way to let people do this
on all pages.

On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 15:06:12 +0200, Ashar Voultoiz <thoane at altern.org> wrote:
> ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
> > I thought of a neat feature today while browsing the Village pump,
> > pages in all talk namespaces have a neat + link besides the Edit link
> > so you can add a new section to it, so i thought it would be nice for
> > things like the Village pump to be able to have that link added with a
> > keyword to every page that had that keyword in the wikitext. I named
> > that keyword ADDSEC for "add section" and it's invoked with
> > __ADDSEC__.
>
> <snip>
>
> Why not moving that talk page to the talk namespace ?
>
> Aka : [[Talk:Village pump]] instead of [[Village pump]] :o)
>
> --
> Ashar Voultoiz
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Sj

body:
Fred,

This is unfair.  Regardless of how much you trust 172, that article is
better-referenced
than most of Wikipedia's great articles -- one of the reasons that it
was featured despite
its tone.  Please take out any anger you have towards this article on
the peer review
system, so that we can make it better.

>>sj>>

On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 05:18:17 -0600, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> I know your interpretation of the "Russian constitutional crisis of 1993" is not to
> be trusted. Yet I wonder what did happen... Not much chance I'll be able to
> find out by consulting Wikipedia any time soon.
>
> Fred

--:-------.-.--------.--.--------.-.--------.--.--------


references:
<E1BoMPp-00077n-ES@sc8-pr-cvs1.sourceforge.net>	<20040724133954.GA27180@jeluf.mine.nu>
	<cdtp00$8c0$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Jens Frank wrote:
>
>>
>> could all developpers please ensure that their text editor doesn't mess
>> up whitespaces in the files?
>
>
> Well, personally, I wouldn't call it "messing them up"; all I'm doing is
> removing whitespace at the end of lines.
>
> So, alternatively, I could ask all developers not to introduce
> whitespace at the end of the lines. :)
>
> But I'll see what I can do.
>
> Timwi

Another solution is to commit two changes :
   1st to remove white spaces
   2nd to patch thing

--
Ashar Voultoiz


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Question about categories

body:
Alfio Puglisi wrote:
> Hello,
> I have a question about categories: when a category has a sub-category,
> should a page belonging to this sub-category be displayed in the main
> category listing?
>
> I have this main category:
>
> http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categoria:Astronomia_e_Astrofisica
>
> With, among others, two sub-categories:
>
> http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categoria:Stelle
> http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categoria:Costellazioni
>
> All articles in the second sub-category are also displayed in the main
> one, but not the ones inside the first sub-category.
>
> All those articles were recently changes from the main category to one or
> the other sub-category. Are there any server-side caching issue?
>
> Thanks,
> Alfio

Hello,

On the french wikipedia I will remove articles flagged with "Astronomia"
if they already belong to a sub category of "Astronomia".

Maybe this topic should be raised to the italian community  ? :o)

--
Ashar Voultoiz


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: French hardware donation - technical choices made

references:
<1090420006.a621479cuser_Jamesday@myrealbox.com>	<40FE85A9.5040602@tonal.clara.co.uk>	<cdnuvh$atc$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40FFB33E.6050904@tonal.clara.co.uk>
	<410009DF.60608@yahoo.com>

body:
Anthere wrote:
> Perhaps.
> But hosting servers is one thing. Having human technical help now and
> then is necessary as well. There are people to do this in Paris.

Clearly one of the most important points :o)

--
Ashar Voultoiz


from_name: Peter Danenberg

body:
On Sat, Jul 24, 2004 at 03:39:55PM +0200, Jens Frank wrote:
> Those CVS commit messages are totally useless if the text editor
> adds or removes whitespace all over the file.

     Speaking of which: does wiki policy on indentation pro-
vide tab=8?

     Best, Peter


from_name: Denni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Pedophilia Article

body:
Jimbo said

> I don't know if "single article" is the right solution, but there is
> no question that the way he advocates presenting the topic is very
> good NPOV writing.  The reader deserves to be informed that "some
> groups advocate..." because that's solid encyclopedic information.
> But the structure of articles must not give rise to a perception that
> we condone pedophilia.
>
> An additional subtle point that could be misconstrued is that we also
> must not _condemn_ pedophilia.  We are an encyclopedia, not a body of
> polemics.  We report, the reader decides.  We can (and must) report on
> the consensus of medical scientists, etc.  I trust that we can do this
> in a way that allows the reader to draw the right conclusion
> effortlessly.

I agree totally. There are many disagreeable and distasteful things which occupy space
in an encyclopedia. [[Murder]], [[suicide]], [[holocaust]], and [[rape]] are but a few
unsettling topics which have separate sub-articles. Because people may not agree with a
viewpoint or may find it uncomfortable to consider or discuss is not adequate reason to
limit discussion or analysis of it.

This topic is worthy of especial attention because it brings out the Spanish
Inquisition in all of us. Any topic which is so emotionally, socially, and politically
volatile deserves more than a vulgarity, a sour face, and a dismissal.

My only concern with Jimbo's comment is that he suggests there is a way to do this
which "allows the reader to draw the right conclusion efortlessly." What precisely =is=
the right conclusion, Jimbo, and if it is drawn effortlessly, is that a good thing?


from_name: Tony

subject: [Wikitech-l] Image resizing questions...

body:
On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 17:04:35 +1000, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:

>2. How best should the Wikipedia deal with convenient viewing of multi-megapixel images
> Would the automatic resizing from "really big" to "screen size" cause the same kind of image
>quality issues that Tannin mentioned with  thumbnailing?

Technically speaking, yes. But in practice, the difference would be insignificant and virtually invisible. Image quality problems
really only start to bite when you have a small number of pixels to deal with. As a rough guide, if the destination image is:

~200 pixels: major problem
~500 pixels: minor problem
~1000 pixels: no problem.

It's probably worth doing a ''very'' mild sharpening on large resizes (by "large" I mean (e.g.) a 3 or 4 thousand px shrunk to
(e.g.) 1024px), but it needs to be just a tiny touch.


from_name: Robert Graham Merkel

body:
A couple of image-related questions...

1. Magnus mentioned that he has added code to CVS that lets you do
 [[Image:blah.jpg|thumb=blah_manually_thumbnailed.jpg]]

Has that gone live on the Wikipedia?

2. How best should the
Wikipedia deal with convenient viewing of multi-megapixel images like
the image on the following page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Library_of_Victoria

Seeing we want the ability to make printed material out of Wikipedia
content, uploading full-resolution images is IMO the way to do it.
However, such images currently break the image description page.

Should the image description page automatically resize images larger
than screen width and have a link to download the full image?  Would
such a feature be enough to deal with the problem?   Would the automatic
resizing from "really big" to "screen size" cause the same kind of image
quality issues that Tannin mentioned with  thumbnailing?

--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                           Robert Merkel
                                     robert.merkel at benambra.org
                                        http://benambra.org

Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids
we'd be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills, and
listening to repetitive electronic music.
               ---Marcus Brigstocke
                  (sometimes attributed to
		  Kristian Wilson, Nintendo Inc, 1989 - probably apocryphal)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


from_name: Dori

subject:
[Wikitech-l] loggued vs non-loggued in (was:Re: French hardware
	donation - technical choices made)

body:
On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 23:51:42 +0200, David Monniaux
<david.monniaux at ens.fr> wrote:
> In a discussion with French developers, it was apparent that the
> proposed colocation choice implied that, so as to minimize bandwidth to
> the US, the logged-in users should *not* be routed through the European
> squid proxies, but should be redirected to the US proxies.
>
> The simplest solution for this would be to have two sets of hostnames:
>
> language.wikipedia.org for non logged-in users (where language = en, fr,
> de, jp, whatever...)
> language.logged.wikipedia.org for logged-in users

Noooo, please, that would look ugly as hell and it would piss off
logged in users (myself included :)

--
[[en:User:Dori]]


list: foundation-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Membership fees proposal

body:
The proposal is available at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Membership_fees.

This proposal was set based on discussions with many editors, on meta,
on irc, by email. Though it is probably not perfect, I believe it is a
fair proposal trying to take into consideration all comments made.

I tried at the same time to propose something

* which keeps in mind that membership is meant to collect money. It is
important because it is the safest and strongest and least controversial
method of financing

* which is fairly simple

* which takes into account the existing community and recognition of its
diversity (allowing to join less wealthy good contributors for a rather
low amount)

* which allow people to indicate what they would prefer the money to be
used for

* which will set relationships between local chapter and foundation.

I would like to remind editors that whether they give money or not, they
are members of the Foundation. Contributing to articles, organisation,
software, maintenance etc... is a great way to help. Giving money is
another. If people can do both, fine. But you will still be important to
us if you do not give money. Only provide what you feel like providing,
time/energy or money, only time/energy, only money. You will be welcome
in any cases.

I'll add to this, that members joining local chapters, will be
contributing members to the foundation as well, provided that there is
an agreement between the local chapter and the Foundation. Next step is
to see how we can legally and technically do this :-) I have a proposal,
which I shall explain tomorrow to current and future chapters.

For now, I would like you to read this membership fee proposal, and
explain it to non english people please, as all languages will be
concerned. I tried to be rather descriptive, to avoid misunderstandings.
But I guess the proposal might be summarized in just a few lines.

Thanks for your attention :-)

Florence


subject: [Foundation-l] Membership fees proposal


from_name: Frank Pinter

subject: [WikiEN-l] Some links to look at

body:
On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 11:03:15 -0700, "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales"
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Kim_Jong-il&action=history
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Fidel_Castro&action=history
>
> I really have no comment about this, other than "good grief".
>
> --Jimbo
>

If [[User:172]] and [[User:Trey_Stone]] want to keep fighting each
other, they should do it outside of Wikipedia. All they're doing is
polluting the history page.

I definitely agree with [[User:Cyprus2k1]] about the consensus on the talk page.

--[[User:Wikiacc]]


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikibiliographie (Re: A WikiJamSession Fantasy)

body:
Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> writes:

> Thinking about it some more (instead of working, ahem), it might
> work better to start small - organize as regular sessions with 10-20
> people, which requires nothing from the library, but still gives you
> synergy from the f2f discussion.

Yes, this has some value in itself.

> There could be some interesting specializations with this; for
> instance, one person to run to the stacks and find the books with the
> needed factoids, another to check articles against books, and a third
> to type in the bibliographical details about the books used.

Strictly spoken, the third stage isn't required.  You can fetch the
book records from libraries as the LoC using Z39.50 software.  Checkput
the YAZ toolkit provided by http://www.Indexdata.dk (it already comes
with some GNU/Linux distribution).

An example session goes as follows:

yaz-client
Z> marccharset auto
Z> open z3950.loc.gov:7090/voyager
Z> find @and @attr 1=4 code @attr 1=1003 lessig
Z> show

001 11950921
005 20030619102947.0
008 000323s1999    nyua     b    001 0 eng d
906    $a 7 $b cbc $c copycat $d 1 $e ncip $f 20 $g y-gencatlg
925 0  $a acquire $b 2 shelf copies $x policy default
955    $a CAD uf18 03-23-00; 1 copy to CIP uf18 03-23-00
955    $a HAND CARRY to HLCD pb11 03-31-00; lh08 to subj. 04-06-00; lf14 HLCD/Rom subj. to SL 04-06-00 12:50 p.m.; lj05 04-06-00 to Dewey; aa11 04-10-00 $a ld11 2001-07-02 cp2 to BCCD
010    $a    00271772
035    $a (OCoLC)ocm42860053
040    $a GWL $c GWL $d DPL $d DLC
042    $a lccopycat
020    $a 046503912X
050 00 $a K564.C6 $b L47 1999
082 00 $a 303.48/33 $2 21
100 1  $a Lessig, Lawrence.
245 10 $a Code and other laws of cyberspace / $c Lawrence Lessig.
246 30 $a Code
260    $a New York : $b Basic Books, $c c1999.
300    $a xii, 297 p. : $b ill. ; $c 25 cm.
504    $a Includes bibliographical references (p. [241]-288) and index.
650  0 $a Information superhighway $x Law and legislation.
650  0 $a Computers $x Law and legislation.
650  0 $a Electronic commerce $x Law and legislation.
650  0 $a Freedom of information.
650  0 $a Privacy, Right of.

The more readable XML format is possible as well.

And then when copyright issues are cleared we can store the records in
a database; a specialized system is idzebra also provided by IndexData:
http://www.indexdata.dk/zebra/ .  Please, make use of such a
standardized system; don't try to invent "something better" ...

> Our computerphobic friends might especially appreciate the opportunity
> to participate without needing to be a speed typist.

:-)

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Erik Zachte

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Could someone find out why EasyTimeline.pl is not
	invoked any more on any Wikipedia. Thx.

body:
Someone must have made a change that disabled EasyTimeline on all
Wikipedias.
The script is not invoked at all, quick test: it would respond to faulty
input like
<timeline>bla bla</timeline> with an error box.

EasyTimeline.pl is at
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/extensions/timeline/

Thanks, Erik Zachte


body:
Walter Vermeir wrote:

> That is part of the problem. When there are several WikiMedia news
> channels the compete whit there self. There should be one source page
> whit WikiMedia wide news. That page can be translated by all the
> WikiMedia wikis who care.
>
> That page should be
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_News

I disagree.

I think Wikimedia_News should focus on news about Wikimedia for
outsiders. While goings-on should focus on our internal kitchen stuff,
which is not the business of outside people.

Now, if it is only a question of naming, I do not care, but we should
have a page giving news for press, for potential donators and similar
people, and this page should absolutely not be the goings on as
currently are.

I think most firms have internal and external communication. This is
what intranet and extranet are about. This is the same idea. Our
internal little problems of organisation are not of interest for press
people.

> It's setup is easy. A date and some news. That is easy to translate. I
> do it for NL. The setup of "goings-on" is not so good for translating.
> To complicated.

We may change the set up of goings on if another is best.

> "Wikimedia News" should include to news no on "Meta goings-on". Also now
> there is a lot of non-news on "Wikimedia News". Wikipedia is now so big
> it is no news anymore that some wikipedia now has X articles. That type
> of news should be limited as much possible to big steps of a wiki. A new
> wiki, the first 10 000 articles, 100 000 articles, 500 000 arcticles, ..

Actually, this Wikimedia News might be something meant to be on
wikimediafoundation site if it is not welcome on meta ?

> The Announce-l list is a good idea. I (know as "Giskart" in those days)
> have done a attempt to use it some years ago without succes.
>
> See;
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/announce-l/2002-November/thread.html

Yes, I remember very well. But there was noone willing to participate to
it then. It might be different now ?

> Maybe the time is there now for this. But but for it to work people need
> to be disciplined enough to send the information to the correct list the
> correct way.
>
> Now I see on Wikipedia-l still a lot of postings that should be on
> WikiEN-l. Even this tread does not belong here. The stuff about the
> Arbitration Committee is for wikiEN-l and talk about inter WikiMedia
> communciation is for Foundation-l

Sigh


subject: [Foundation-l] Rewards for developers

body:
I would like that all developers (others may
participate as well of course) help setting up a list
to define how development tasks completed could be
rewarded.

This will be followed by a public poll to define how
the rewards would be perceived...

and a private poll for developers to know what their
opinion on the matter is

Please, contribute to
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bounty

thanks :-)

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


subject: [Foundation-l] Rewards for developers


subject: [Wikitech-l] Rewards for developers


from_name: Médéric BOQUIEN

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Some news of the french servers. Access to the
	developers

body:
Hi list!

Here is some stuff about the new servers.

I installed the three 1U Celeron 600 servers with Debian testing, after a
short talk on #mediawiki about what to install. The configuration is the
following :
- 20Gb HD divided in 3 parts : 100Mb for /boot (ext2), 2Gb for swap and the
rest for / (xfs)
- minimum install. I just added ntp to keep the time and ssh to allow
developers to set up the squid remotely
- vi and emacs both installed to avoid trolls ;)
- net access through eth1 using dhcp and my home computer connection. I
reserve eth0 for the colo
- timezone is GMT+0 and locale is US

The first thing needed to be done is to give the developers access to the
machine to set up the squid. So i need to know who needs access, and who
needs root access. For everyone i'll create an account. These people will
have to send me their public ssh key that i will put in
~/.ssh/authorized_keys . For the people with root access, i'll send the
password of each server (preferably different passwords or the same
password? Who said paranoid? ;) ) through a secure channel (anyone knows a
? GPG for the dummies? ? for me?). The access to the server is made by dnat
through my computer. If some more ports need to be open to test the squids,
i can do that in 10 seconds upon request. My connection is 5.5Mbps/384kbps,
i hope it is sufficient. I also can't sleep with the noise of 4 computers
near my bed so i turn them off during the night (from 2h00 to 10h00, Paris
time, very approximatively), but during the remaining of the day all
computers can be turned on with no problem.

If things go well, i think it would be a good idea to buy quite fast some
more RAM before I bring the computers to the colo. Right now, they only
have 128Mb each.

About the 6-Xeon, it is laying in my room now, waiting for someone to pick
it up. I was told it runs Mandrake 10 (installed by Mandrakesoft to make
the tests) and installation of a different OS can apparently only be done
by pxe.

If i am not clear in what i said, just ask, i'm often on irc (especially in
the evening, from 22h00) #fr.wikipedia and #mediawiki . I'm also ready to
do things differently if necessary.

Med


from_name: Timwi

references:
<E1BoMPp-00077n-ES@sc8-pr-cvs1.sourceforge.net>	<20040724133954.GA27180@jeluf.mine.nu>	<cdtp00$8c0$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<cdtr2b$bkd$2@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:

> Another solution is to commit two changes :
>   1st to remove white spaces
>   2nd to patch thing

Yes; I did that before with a larger file that was laden with trailing
whitespace. I wouldn't have thought that new trailing whitespace would
creep in this quickly.


body:
On Sat, 24 Jul 2004, Ashar Voultoiz wrote:

>
>On the french wikipedia I will remove articles flagged with "Astronomia"
>if they already belong to a sub category of "Astronomia".
>
>Maybe this topic should be raised to the italian community  ? :o)

Hi, thanks for the answer, but probably my explanation was not clear:
there are articles that are explicitly assigned to a sub-category. Some of
them are automatically displayed in the main category also, while others
are not (I was under the impression that this was the correct behaviour).
Since all the first group is in one subcategory, and all the second group
is in another subcategory, I suspected a software glitch, or some errors
or my part :-)

Alfio


body:
Now that I looked again at it, all the "wrong" articles disappeared from
the main category. So it was some caching problem.

Alfio

On Sat, 24 Jul 2004, Alfio Puglisi wrote:

>On Sat, 24 Jul 2004, Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
>
>>
>>On the french wikipedia I will remove articles flagged with "Astronomia"
>>if they already belong to a sub category of "Astronomia".
>>
>>Maybe this topic should be raised to the italian community  ? :o)
>
>Hi, thanks for the answer, but probably my explanation was not clear:
>there are articles that are explicitly assigned to a sub-category. Some of
>them are automatically displayed in the main category also, while others
>are not (I was under the impression that this was the correct behaviour).
>Since all the first group is in one subcategory, and all the second group
>is in another subcategory, I suspected a software glitch, or some errors
>or my part :-)
>
>Alfio
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Russian constitutional crisis of 1993 (Fred Bauder)

body:
Abe,

please could you stop creating new threads? Please reply to the relevant
thread, and make sure you use e-mail software that generates correct
"References" headers.

Thanks!
Timwi


body:
On Sun, 25 Jul 2004 01:28:03 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Jens Frank wrote:
>
> > Client-side scaling has the additional downside that the entire high-res
> > image has to be downloaded.
>
> Which is already the case.

As a dialup user I can attest that in the current setup I most
certainly am not downloading the entire image, and I would be pretty
pissed if that changed :)

--
[[en:User:Dori]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: bug for steward tool

body:
Anthere wrote:

> I tried to change the sysop rights for Triebt?ter (notice the a with
> umlaut), and it did not work. Could someone check what is going on with
> special caracters ?

Have you tried Triebt??ter?


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Rewards for developers

body:
On Sun, 25 Jul 2004 02:26:49 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
> > I would like that all developers (others may
> > participate as well of course) help setting up a list
> > to define how development tasks completed could be
> > rewarded.
>
> Heh. I was going to suggest a payment system for developers after my
> project deadline next week.
>
> The core idea of my proposal is:
>
> * developers should be paid every month
> * developers who received money the previous month receive "voting
>    power" (i.e. power to influence the proportions how money will be
>    distributed) for the next month
> * how much total money is awarded for the completion of a particular
>    feature or bugfix is determined by the donors: with every donation,
>    the donor can say "this-and-this much of this donation (but no more
>    than, say, 25% of the donation) should go towards rewarding the
>    completion of this-and-that feature/bugfix".
>
> Then the whole thing would work approx. like this:
>
> * Alice donates $20 and says "$5 of this should go to feature X"
> * Bob donates $50 and says "$10 of this should go to feature X"
> * Charlie The Developer suggests an implementation plan for X
> * Doris The Developer makes a major start towards feature X
> * Emily The Developer finishes feature X
> * Developers who received money last month vote on what percentage of
>    the feature was done by Charlie, Doris and Emily
> * The votes are averaged out and may yield something like
>    Charlie - 5%, Doris - 75%, Emily - 20%
> * Charlie's Wikimedia account is increased by 75?
> * Doris's Wikimedia account is increased by $11.25
> * Emily's account is increased by $3.00
>
> This is my basic idea.
>
> It is in part modelled after the "Bazaar" that LiveJournal once used to
> have (albeit only for one month, ironically).
> Timwi

It seems too convoluted and prone to conflicts to work effectively
IMO. Donors are unlikely to identify all the features/bugs needing
work. Likewise, we're unlikely to reach an agreement to the
percentages. It might also lead to races between developers who start
stepping on each other's work in order to get more money.

--
[[en:User:Dori]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Image resizing questions...

body:
snip
> Please read the entire thread. We're talking about the image description
> page. You *are* downloading the entire image when you view that.
>
> Timwi

Not my fault, I blame gmail's conversation collapse feature :)

--
[[en:User:Dori]]


from_name: Ronny Raschkowan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Researching a new Wikien-l mailing list admin.

body:
Hello.

No, it isn't. The main thing to do is to watch the moderation queue of
the list, where mails are held because of several things ( posted by a
non-member, etc). The list administrator would have to check that
moderation queue, delete the spam and accept non-spam mails. It's easy
and does not take a lot of time: The l.a. would just have to check the
mail if he's unsure. Doing that on a daily basis, it would take maximun
ten minutes. The second thing a list admin would have to do is to change
a settings of the ML when there's a require for that (set archive to
private, hide the list in the Mailing List overview, etc), what is done
on a html interface. The last thing he has to do is regulary the list :).
If a list admin would be unsure of the options he can do, i'd explain
him (or her).

Sincerly yours,
Ronny

Mark Ryan wrote:
> Is it difficult?
>
> On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 18:53:20 +0200, Ronny Raschkowan
> <ronny at kopfrechnung.de> wrote:
>
>>Hello!
>>
>>As far as Jeronim is no longer admin of the list, i would like to know
>>if there is another person who would like to keep up the list and
>>administrate it.
>>
>>I would of course explain the things what a list administrator should do
>>to the user(s?) interested in it. The main -  activity is spam-deletion
>>though..
>>
>>Volunteers? :)
>>
>>Sincerly yours,
>>Fire
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>WikiEN-l mailing list
>>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>


subject: [Wikitech-l] bug for steward tool

body:
Hi

I tried to change the sysop rights for Triebt?ter (notice the a with
umlaut), and it did not work. Could someone check what is going on with
special caracters ?

ps : I tried by replacing with Triebt%E4ter, and it did not work either

ant


from_name: Walter Vermeir

body:
Anthere wrote:

  > I disagree.

> I think Wikimedia_News should focus on news about Wikimedia for
> outsiders. While goings-on should focus on our internal kitchen stuff,
> which is not the business of outside people.

Outsiders and Wikipedia & co? How can we be more public then we are now?
Even this posting will go to several archives for prosperity. Internal
stuff does not exist at wikipedia.

>
> Now, if it is only a question of naming, I do not care, but we should
> have a page giving news for press, for potential donators and similar
> people, and this page should absolutely not be the goings on as
> currently are.
>
> I think most firms have internal and external communication. This is
> what intranet and extranet are about. This is the same idea. Our
> internal little problems of organisation are not of interest for press
> people.

The current "Wikipedia News" page is not the good way to go for external
communciation.

I suggest for that;

Make a WikiMedia Foundation newsletter. Not to many. 4 or 5 editions a
year. Whit to most important news about WikiMedia and its project. It
can include once in a year a notice to beg for money.

Put it on the foundation website and include an option to subscribe to
the newsletter by email.

But that is more WikiMedia Foundation PR and not about what I care. I
care about good internal news distribution and so helping to keep the
family together.

>> It's setup is easy. A date and some news. That is easy to translate. I
>> do it for NL. The setup of "goings-on" is not so good for translating.
>> To complicated.
>
>
> We may change the set up of goings on if another is best.

Lets do that. Like you say the name is not important. The basic listing
style is the way to do it i find. It is about news not make-up.

Now whit the template system the "WikiMedia Foundation intern all wikis
wide news" can be put in specific template. It is the information of
that template that can be translated and spread accros the world of
WikiMedia wikis.

>> "Wikimedia News" should include to news no on "Meta goings-on". Also
>> now there is a lot of non-news on "Wikimedia News". Wikipedia is now
>> so big it is no news anymore that some wikipedia now has X articles.
>> That type of news should be limited as much possible to big steps of a
>> wiki. A new wiki, the first 10 000 articles, 100 000 articles, 500 000
>> arcticles, ..
>
>
> Actually, this Wikimedia News might be something meant to be on
> wikimediafoundation site if it is not welcome on meta ?

If Wikimedia News is supposed to be for external readers the Foundation
website is the place for it.

--
[[wikipedia:nl:gebruiker:walter]]


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Abe Sokolov wrote:

>
> (1) Stan Sheb's disingenuous claims of bias on the Berlin blockade and
> airlift are emphatically refuted by Wikipedia's article on the Berlin
> blockade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Blockade), which I wrote.
>
Except, of course, for the part of it that was written by other
people and that you collected from Berlin Airlift and redirected,
after the expected couple rounds of reversion vs Kingturtle. I note
that your addition to that one contains a bunch of creative excuses
justifying the Soviet use of Berlin civilians as hostages, with no
hint that anyone might possibly consider blockading a city an
inhuman act.

Also, the external link on the page points out that the British were
already flying in supplies by the time Truman made his decision, plus
there was at least one discusion with the British about what to do, so
the "consulting no one else but just several cabinet members" line is
a perfect example of the kind of slant I was talking about - while it
may be true that Truman personally only talked to a few people, it was
not a secret dead-of-night-type decision. I believe there was also a
public outcry to "do something" at the time, so Truman knew that it
would be politically popular in the US; he didn't have to make up
stories about WMDs in Berlin (oops, wrong context :-) ).

The "publicity stunt" line I referred is from an old version of a
Cold War article anyway.

I could easily come up with hundreds more examples like this, but
in the end, WP isn't paying me enough to get into endless arguments
that are ultimately pointless because of your reverting habit.

>
> Perhaps I might have slipped up a few times and referred to the
> "obvious cases" (personalistic leaders) as dictators over the past
> year and a half that I've been working on Wikipedia. Fair-minded users
> will put this in context, tough, and note my substantial contributions
> to this site; note that my articles tend to make the best use of
> references on Wikipedia (e.g., history of post-Soviet Russia has over
> 30); and note that I have garnered praise even from fair-minded,
> conservative U.S. users for being able to write neutrally on
> difficult, controversial topics (e.g., Franco-U.S. relations).
>
I'm not saying you haven't done good stuff, but that's not an excuse
for aggressively reverting people who try to fix articles.

> In close, Stan is only bringing up these red herrings to distract
> everyone from the real issue. He launched into a personal attack
> against me over my work on Russian constitutional crisis of 1993 on
> the mailing list with no evidence, no command of the facts, and no
> inclination to do any reading or check the list of sources I added to
> the article. Once again, his unwarranted defamation is a dishonor only
> to him, not to me.

Jimbo was puzzled, I helped fill him in on a situation that he
probably would have been just as happy knowing nothing about.
When non-experts can smell the fishiness, that should be a pretty
strong hint.

Stan


body:
On Sun, 25 Jul 2004 02:51:19 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Dori wrote:
>
> > It seems too convoluted and prone to conflicts to work effectively
> > IMO. Donors are unlikely to identify all the features/bugs needing
> > work.
>
> Aw, come on now. That's not really a problem. We can certainly give
> Jimbo and/or the Board of Trustees the additional power to assign up to
> 25% of unassigned donated money to development task.

I don't know that we could. It might piss off some donors if we said
we'll use this for hardware, and we end up using it for software
features. Although we do have some money that wasn't donated, and we
could certainly advertise that doners could donate toward a specific
feature/bug. However, that's not what I was talking about. I simply
thought that the process had too many rules to be properly understood
and to work well.

>
> The point is just anyone who personally thinks a particular feature or
> bug is really overdue, should be able to directly encourage developers
> by saying "I offer you $xyz for this". The more important a bug or
> feature is to the community, the greater the amount of money will be.
>
> > Likewise, we're unlikely to reach an agreement to the
> > percentages.
>
> I think you didn't understand this part. There is no agreement or
> consensus required. Everyone specifies percentages of their own (in some
> sort of designated user interface; they're kept secret). At the end of
> the month, they are averaged out.

Yes, I did misunderstand that. I still don't see it as a fair method
though. Averages could give some screwey results which might leave
people who made more work, receive less compensation.

>
> Example:
> * I say: Alice has done 5% of feature X, Bob has done 10%, Charlie has
> done 85%.
> * You say: Alice has done 15% of feature X, Bob has done 15%, Charlie
> has done 70%.
> * Jimbo says: Alice has done 10% of feature X, Bob has done 26%, Charlie
> has done 64%.
>
> Then the end-result will be: Alice - 10%, Bob - 17%, Charlie - 73%.
>
> Of course, the averaging could optionally be weighted by the amount of
> money the voters received in the previous month.
>
> > It might also lead to races between developers who start
> > stepping on each other's work in order to get more money.
>
> I don't think that will be a problem. Such blatantly un-co-operative
> people can easily be penalised with very low percentages. People will
> know they will get more money if they use their common sense to behave
> within proper forms of etiquette.

It's not necessarily blatant. It could even be inadvertant, or it
could be as simple as if I am going to do this part I might as well do
that part or I would prefer that part to work like I plan it. Coding
is much harder to do collaboratively than editing (unless we're
talking about unrelated parts).

--
[[en:User:Dori]]


body:
On Sat, Jul 24, 2004 at 09:46:56AM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Sane people use 4-space tabs.

     I  thought  as  much; GNU C dictates nevertheless two,1
and PEAR four spaces (not tabs).2

     Taking Phase Three's cue, however, I'll assume the team
favours  tabs  (not  spaces); and that despite Emacs' native
disposition.

     Best, Peter

-----------
  1 http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_23.html
  2 http://pear.php.net/manual/en/standards.php


from_name: Pablo Saratxaga

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: web of trust

body:
Kaixo!

On Sat, Jul 24, 2004 at 02:33:25PM +0100, Timwi wrote:

> >wants to participate creates a page [[User:Name/trust]] and lists there
> >all the people he trusts in the form [[User:Otheruser/trust]]. By
>
> This is asking for trouble. Although you state that "even if you're not
> on this list, that doesn't mean people find you untrustworthy", people

Well, it depends what it is used for.

Myself i think such a feature is indeed needed; simply the last changes
list is growing too large; and we can hide only three kind of
contributions (robots, minors and oneself changes); it would be
a good thing if each registered used could build his own list
of other users that he doesn't need to appear on last changes;
or conversly, a list of those that should be highlited (like the
"watchlist" but not based on articles but on users to watch).

--
Ki ?a vos v?ye b?n,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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from_name: David Monniaux

subject:
[Wikitech-l] IP classification (Re: French hardware donation -
 technical choices made)

body:
> Normally it would be a pain to (efficiently) determine location based
> on IP, but since the distinction between ARIN and RIPE addresses

A few years ago, I took the databases of RIPE and the APNIC (ARIN's were
unavailable) and, using a little bit of C and Perl, converted them into
multiple-terminal binary decision diagrams mapping each IP address to a
country. The resulting database fit on a floppy disk. Checking one IP
address needed at most 32 pointer dereferences in a table that easily
fits into a small part of the RAM of modern computers.

I haven't updated the database since then but this may be done by
downloading tables from RIPE and APNIC and processing them.

Regards


subject:
[Wikitech-l] loggued vs non-loggued in (was:Re: French hardware
 donation - technical choices made)

body:
In a discussion with French developers, it was apparent that the
proposed colocation choice implied that, so as to minimize bandwidth to
the US, the logged-in users should *not* be routed through the European
squid proxies, but should be redirected to the US proxies.

The simplest solution for this would be to have two sets of hostnames:

language.wikipedia.org for non logged-in users (where language = en, fr,
de, jp, whatever...)
language.logged.wikipedia.org for logged-in users

The former would be redirected to the latter when they log-in, and the
latter to the former at log-out.

Only the former would be subject to DNS answers depending on the
geographical region.

This seems a very easy solution to implement.


from_name: Mark Ryan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Researching a new Wikien-l mailing list admin.

body:
Is it difficult?

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 18:53:20 +0200, Ronny Raschkowan
<ronny at kopfrechnung.de> wrote:
> Hello!
>
> As far as Jeronim is no longer admin of the list, i would like to know
> if there is another person who would like to keep up the list and
> administrate it.
>
> I would of course explain the things what a list administrator should do
> to the user(s?) interested in it. The main -  activity is spam-deletion
> though..
>
> Volunteers? :)
>
> Sincerly yours,
> Fire
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
 > I see it regurlarly that german people are carrying IP's from other
 > countries depending on their service provider in my shop.
 > AOL for instance assigns US registered IP's to whoever they feel fit.

In my experiments with per-country IP classification, the main issue,
apart from ARIN's reluctance to give their list, was AOL. They have
enormous blocks of addresses registered in the US. I don't know how to
tell apart European and American AOL users.

(This goes back to some years ago, so my information may not be current.)


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] web of trust

body:
On 07/24/04 20:20, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Not sure if having this public will be useful. My idea all along was to have
> this as part of the software not unlike the watchlist function.
> Then edits by people you trust (and perhaps people you trust by proxy) would be
> in small, grayed out text on your watchlist and in Recent Changes.
> That way your attention is drawn away from edits that you would almost
> certainly find to be OK.

Absolutely. Something that only affects *your* view of Wikipedia and that
those on the list cannot see.

We *must not* reimplement high school popularity games on Wikipedia.

- d.


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Sat, Jul 24, 2004 at 01:55:41PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
>
> >Seeing we want the ability to make printed material out of Wikipedia
> >content, uploading full-resolution images is IMO the way to do it.
> >However, such images currently break the image description page.
>
> Suggestion: Have a magic word, __SCREENSIZE__ or something like that,
> which you can put on an image description page, and it will set
> style="width: 100%" on the image (thus telling the browser to size the
> image in such a way that its width fits the bounding rectangle). Of
> course, __SCREENSIZE__ should be omitted when the image is very small,
> because then "width: 100%" would tell the browser to enlarge it.
>
> Of course, this isn't without problems. If someone's bounding rectangle
> is about 800 pixels wide (it's 826 for me at 1024x768 with Monobook) for
> someone, but 1000 pixels for someone else (possibly using 1280x1024),
> then one of them will want __SCREENSIZE__ to be inserted, while the
> other will complain that it enlarges the image unnecessarily. :/

Client-side scaling has the additional downside that the entire high-res
image has to be downloaded.

JeLuF


body:
Jens Frank wrote:

> Client-side scaling has the additional downside that the entire high-res
> image has to be downloaded.

Which is already the case.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: bug for steward tool

body:
Anthere wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> Anthere wrote:
>>
>>> I tried to change the sysop rights for Triebt?ter (notice the a with
>>> umlaut), and it did not work. Could someone check what is going on
>>> with special caracters ?
>>
>> Have you tried Triebt??ter?
>
> ~these letters do not belong to my keyboard, nor do they to german
> language ihmo :-)

You haven't answered my question. Have you tried it?

I don't know anything about stewards and how/where they set sysop rights
or anything, but if by any chance you're trying to access a database
where the username is stored in UTF-8 (German Wiktionary perhaps?) via
an interface that uses Latin-1 (English Wikipedia perhaps?), you will
want to enter "Triebt??ter".

Timwi


from_name: Abe Sokolov

subject: [WikiEN-l] Russian constitutional crisis of 1993 (some responses)

body:
shebs at apple.com wrote:

I have indeed compared your wording with the purported sources
(not on this article, but on others that we have discussed
previously), and there are significant differences.

Stan Shebs claims that there is a discrepancy between my work on Wikipedia
and my sources, yet he insults the intelligence of mailing list readers by
only offering this as evidence, "For instance, there was the episode where
Somoza was a dictator but Stalin was not, and then
where the Berlin Airlift was mainly a publicity stunt." [I've made over
10,000 edits to Wikipedia, so it's easy for someone with an ax to grind to
cherry-pick examples and then throw in gratuitous accusations]

(1) Stan Sheb's disingenuous claims of bias on the Berlin blockade and
airlift are emphatically refuted by Wikipedia's article on the Berlin
blockade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Blockade), which I wrote.

(2) I shy away from the term "dictator" altogether on Wikipedia (see, e.g.,
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Fidel_Castro&diff=4721758&oldid=4721669)
I also changed the reference to Pinochet as a "dictator" to "military ruler"
on the in the news box on the main page several days ago. Yet, this matter
is more complicated than Stan Shebs is making it out to be (as usual).
Notice the following conversation taken from Talk:Fidel Castro:

::Not exactly. Dictator is not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact,
so it's not POV (though some try to twist the facts). While Batista is
called a dictator in Britannica, BSE and probably other encyclopedias, Fidel
is not. Fidel is not a dictator, because no matter how popular he is, he
doesn't rule Cuba, the party  does (and people too). Batista, on the other
hand, was clearly a dictator (the second time he was in power) because of
the way he ruled. So I think we should call Batista a dictator, but not do
the same for Fidel. [[User:Paranoid|Paranoid]] 06:56, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)
:::Good point, Paranoid. Cuba is a single party state, not a personalistic
regime. (Not to say that this is mutually exclusive. Ceausescu's Romania and
North Korea, where the power of the party was strongly subverted by the
leader, are considered "sultanistic" and "personalistic" regimes by a number
of prominent comparativists, e.g., Linz and Stepan, who have drawn from Max
Weber's concept of personalized power in a "sultanism.") However, many
Wikipedians aren't going to grasp these nuances, and will be suspicious that
the term is being applied arbitrarily. So, it's best to just shy away from
the term altogether, even in obvious cases, like the Somozas, Idi Amin, Papa
Doc and Baby Doc, Bokassa, Saddam Hussein, Mobutu, etc. [[User:172|172]]
07:38, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps I might have slipped up a few times and referred to the "obvious
cases" (personalistic leaders) as dictators over the past year and a half
that I've been working on Wikipedia. Fair-minded users will put this in
context, tough, and note my substantial contributions to this site; note
that my articles tend to make the best use of references on Wikipedia (e.g.,
history of post-Soviet Russia has over 30); and note that I have garnered
praise even from fair-minded, conservative U.S. users for being able to
write neutrally on difficult, controversial topics (e.g., Franco-U.S.
relations).

In close, Stan is only bringing up these red herrings to distract everyone
from the real issue. He launched into a personal attack against me over my
work on Russian constitutional crisis of 1993 on the mailing list with no
evidence, no command of the facts, and no inclination to do any reading or
check the list of sources I added to the article. Once again, his
unwarranted defamation is a dishonor only to him, not to me.

-172

_________________________________________________________________
Don?t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Server side compression

body:
Gerard.Meijssen wrote:
> As the servers are already strugling, have you wondered what
> serverside compression will cost in server side CPU consumption?

Are you referring to scaling of images or compression of HTML output?

> With the new upload limit of 5Mb this is a more serious issue. What
> could be a middle ground is to only server 1 Mb max pictures when the
> thumbs are used and leave the 5Mb pictures to a detail screen. The 1
> Mb pictures would be saved. This would cost a lot of harddisk but it
> is easier to upgrade harddisks than processors.

A particular image only has to be scaled to a particular size once,
ever. At that point the scaled file already exists and is simply shoved
out as bits which is not really CPU intensive; these files are also
cached on the squids, so if accessed frequently should not burden the
Apache machines.

> On that subject, has a SAN ever been contemplated for wikimedia ?

Don't know anything about that.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: bug for steward tool

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>> I tried to change the sysop rights for Triebt?ter (notice the a with
>> umlaut), and it did not work. Could someone check what is going on
>> with special caracters ?
>
>
> Have you tried Triebt??ter
> ?

~these letters do not belong to my keyboard, nor do they to german
language ihmo :-)

ant


body:
Anthere wrote:

> I would like that all developers (others may
> participate as well of course) help setting up a list
> to define how development tasks completed could be
> rewarded.

Heh. I was going to suggest a payment system for developers after my
project deadline next week.

The core idea of my proposal is:

* developers should be paid every month
* developers who received money the previous month receive "voting
   power" (i.e. power to influence the proportions how money will be
   distributed) for the next month
* how much total money is awarded for the completion of a particular
   feature or bugfix is determined by the donors: with every donation,
   the donor can say "this-and-this much of this donation (but no more
   than, say, 25% of the donation) should go towards rewarding the
   completion of this-and-that feature/bugfix".

Then the whole thing would work approx. like this:

* Alice donates $20 and says "$5 of this should go to feature X"
* Bob donates $50 and says "$10 of this should go to feature X"
* Charlie The Developer suggests an implementation plan for X
* Doris The Developer makes a major start towards feature X
* Emily The Developer finishes feature X
* Developers who received money last month vote on what percentage of
   the feature was done by Charlie, Doris and Emily
* The votes are averaged out and may yield something like
   Charlie - 5%, Doris - 75%, Emily - 20%
* Charlie's Wikimedia account is increased by 75?
* Doris's Wikimedia account is increased by $11.25
* Emily's account is increased by $3.00

This is my basic idea.

It is in part modelled after the "Bazaar" that LiveJournal once used to
have (albeit only for one month, ironically).
Timwi


body:
Dori wrote:

> On Sun, 25 Jul 2004 01:28:03 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>>Jens Frank wrote:
>>
>>>Client-side scaling has the additional downside that the entire high-res
>>>image has to be downloaded.
>>
>>Which is already the case.
>
> As a dialup user I can attest that in the current setup I most
> certainly am not downloading the entire image, and I would be pretty
> pissed if that changed :)

Please read the entire thread. We're talking about the image description
page. You *are* downloading the entire image when you view that.

Timwi


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: web of trust

body:
Elisabeth Bauer wrote:

> For the problem of newbies which Timwi brought up: I think that can be
> handled the same way the community greets newbies - we can encourage
> people to add newbies to their trustlist after good contributions and it
> can be turned into a tool to make feel people welcome rather than
> excluded from a circle of "oldies": "Oh, someone added me to his
> trustlist" - the first step of an admin candidature?.

Of course I'm aware that the feature could be used that way, and that
attempts can be made to encourage the community to follow this kind of
standard. However, in practice I firmly believe that people won't do that.

Things aren't objective, you know. From the point of view of the
community, many inexperienced users are vandals at first, or the
socially not-so-competent appear like mentally disturbed people or
something of the sort. The experienced users won't hesitate to try to
get rid of them, under the belief that it's in the interest of the
community.

The more tools there are to enable this sort of behaviour, the more the
community of a particular Wikipedia (or other Wikimedia project) will
turn into a static group of permanent insiders who welcome very few newbies.

Timwi


body:
Dori wrote:

> It seems too convoluted and prone to conflicts to work effectively
> IMO. Donors are unlikely to identify all the features/bugs needing
> work.

Aw, come on now. That's not really a problem. We can certainly give
Jimbo and/or the Board of Trustees the additional power to assign up to
25% of unassigned donated money to development task.

The point is just anyone who personally thinks a particular feature or
bug is really overdue, should be able to directly encourage developers
by saying "I offer you $xyz for this". The more important a bug or
feature is to the community, the greater the amount of money will be.

> Likewise, we're unlikely to reach an agreement to the
> percentages.

I think you didn't understand this part. There is no agreement or
consensus required. Everyone specifies percentages of their own (in some
sort of designated user interface; they're kept secret). At the end of
the month, they are averaged out.

Example:
* I say: Alice has done 5% of feature X, Bob has done 10%, Charlie has
done 85%.
* You say: Alice has done 15% of feature X, Bob has done 15%, Charlie
has done 70%.
* Jimbo says: Alice has done 10% of feature X, Bob has done 26%, Charlie
has done 64%.

Then the end-result will be: Alice - 10%, Bob - 17%, Charlie - 73%.

Of course, the averaging could optionally be weighted by the amount of
money the voters received in the previous month.

> It might also lead to races between developers who start
> stepping on each other's work in order to get more money.

I don't think that will be a problem. Such blatantly un-co-operative
people can easily be penalised with very low percentages. People will
know they will get more money if they use their common sense to behave
within proper forms of etiquette.

Timwi


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] web of trust

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> On 07/24/04 20:20, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>> Not sure if having this public will be useful. My idea all along
>> was to have this as part of the software not unlike the watchlist
>> function. Then edits by people you trust (and perhaps people you
>> trust by proxy) would be in small, grayed out text on your
>> watchlist and in Recent Changes. That way your attention is drawn
>> away from edits that you would almost certainly find to be OK.
>
> Absolutely. Something that only affects *your* view of Wikipedia and
> that those on the list cannot see.

that was the origin of the discussion. But as the feature request queue
is long, we decided to experiment with the tools we have. It would be
wonderful, however, to see such a system implemented.

> We *must not* reimplement high school popularity games on Wikipedia.

At the moment I don't have the impression the system develops into a
game of such kind. Sure, there are questions like "why I am not on your
list", but people are dealing with this problem in different,
responsible ways. Many added a personal note taking all the blame on
their shoulders for having forgotten someone, or offer to answer that
question frankly on their talk page etc. Personally, I've some people on
my list with whom I have serious personal problems, but however trust
them as responsible wikipedians.

For the problem of newbies which Timwi brought up: I think that can be
handled the same way the community greets newbies - we can encourage
people to add newbies to their trustlist after good contributions and it
can be turned into a tool to make feel people welcome rather than
excluded from a circle of "oldies": "Oh, someone added me to his
trustlist" - the first step of an admin candidature?.

Everything depends on the use the community makes of it - in itself the
system is neither good nor bad. And despite of all hazzles and little
quarrels, I have some trust in the wikipedia community ;-)

greetings,
elian


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: bug for steward tool

references:
<4102B4AD.9030501@yahoo.com>
	<cdudcm$e47$1@sea.gmane.org>	<4102F971.5020409@yahoo.com>
	<cduv1b$sjr$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>> Timwi wrote:
>>
>>> Anthere wrote:
>>>
>>>> I tried to change the sysop rights for Triebt?ter (notice the a with
>>>> umlaut), and it did not work. Could someone check what is going on
>>>> with special caracters ?
>>>
>>>
>>> Have you tried Triebt??ter?
>>
>>
>> ~these letters do not belong to my keyboard, nor do they to german
>> language ihmo :-)
>
>
> You haven't answered my question. Have you tried it?
>
> I don't know anything about stewards and how/where they set sysop rights
> or anything, but if by any chance you're trying to access a database
> where the username is stored in UTF-8 (German Wiktionary perhaps?) via
> an interface that uses Latin-1 (English Wikipedia perhaps?), you will
> want to enter "Triebt??ter".
>
> Timw
> i

Na. I certainly did not try such caracters Timwi.

If this is the way steward should do utf 8 on meta, I think steward
needs a good documentation book.

However, meta is on utf8 (I should know, I broke it for months). So, I
do not think it is the problem :-(


body:
Timwi wrote:

> The point is just anyone who personally thinks a particular feature or
> bug is really overdue, should be able to directly encourage developers
> by saying "I offer you $xyz for this". The more important a bug or
> feature is to the community, the greater the amount of money will be.

The point is that we currently have no decision making procedure for
which features _should_ be implemented.

Encouraging donators to offer money for features they want to be
realized would make the situation even worse since most people not
involved in coding don't "wish" things which would be necessary from a
developer's point of view.

My vision:
* we should clean up these immense lists of feature wishes
* we should establish priorities
* the developers should say what makes sense and what doesn't
* the developers should give an estimate for the most important features:
** how complicated it is to implement
** if someone's willing to do it
** or if there should be a bounty set out for it (because noone wants to
do it or noone can do it)

greetings,
elian


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
I think the first thing you should do (after trying to ignore the attacks,
trying to act as though they don't matter, etc) is to consult
[[Wikipedia:Dispute resolution]]. This may be even useful before you have
problems or even if you personally never have any, as the first suggestion
is to avoid disputes which you can do to a certain extent by controlling
your own editing behavior. For example, by not editing aggressively in
controversial areas, and if you do by phrasing your edits in the neutral way
in the first place.

As you note, reminding the other party of Wikipedia policy is good and to a
certain extent a requirement for proceding further.

Mediation, while a long shot with personal attacks, can be tried.

Arbitration over personal attacks is available, however it is not instant,
unlikely to be responsive to isolated attacks, and if confusing issues
exist, for example, you did something too, possibly inconclusive or only a
side issue to a proceeding in which you are the defendent. Users who go way
overboard with personal attacks have been banned for long periods however.

Fred

> From: Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 15:50:28 +0430
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] What to do when you are attacked personally
>
> Hi. I've been with the English Wikipedia for quite some time, I'm even
> an admin, but I still don't know what to do when I'm personally
> attacked (sometimes heavily). I usually go forward and simply
> [[Wikipedia:remove personal attacks]], but where should I exactly go
> for these, after I am attacked even after mentioning the related
> Wikipedia policy? The arbitration committee? Or to another admin for a
> block?
>
> For some example, see
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:JBOC#External_links>.
>
> roozbeh
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
Just what role do "the people" play?

And what is the fate of any Party member who opposes Castro's rule?

Such nonsense. Garbage is not food.

Fred

> From: "Abe Sokolov" <abesokolov at hotmail.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 01:33:07 +0000
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Russian constitutional crisis of 1993 (some responses)
>
> Fidel is not a dictator, because no matter how popular he is, he
> doesn't rule Cuba, the party  does (and people too).


subject: [Wikitech-l] All wiktionaries are not reachable

body:
When I try to reach en:wiktionary.org or nl:, de:, I get an error message: redirection limit exceeded or cookie problems. So I tried Internet Explorer which does not load the page either, no error message though.

Can someone please find out what the problem is ??

Thanks,
  GerardM


list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] All wiktionaries are not reachable


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] I blocked User:JBOC

body:
I have blocked User:JBOC for one year. His harrassment of User:Roozbeh is
utterly unwarranted, and should be a warning sign for us. I do not want to
discuss this on the mailing list any further. If anyone has a problem with it, i
invite you to take it up with me in a personal email.

Danny
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from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] I blocked User:JBOC

body:
I fully support this and if anyone has a problem about Danny
doing this, please consider it to be an action fully endorsed by
me and coming as it if came from me directly.

I'm on vacation more or less right now, so please email Danny for more
details if you have a problem with it.  Next week when I get back, we
can have a public -- but abstract -- discussion of cases of this type.

--Jimbo

daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

> I have blocked User:JBOC for one year. His harrassment of User:Roozbeh is
> utterly unwarranted, and should be a warning sign for us. I do not want to
> discuss this on the mailing list any further. If anyone has a problem with it, i
> invite you to take it up with me in a personal email.
>
> Danny

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


from_name: Henry H. Tan-Tenn

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: RSS-Feeds

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
>Feed requests seems to be hardcoded to a limit of
> 50.

Hmm, weird (and I hope I'm not belaboring this) but the limit can be
much greater than 50, at least with the installed version.  Such that
this dumps more than 100 items regardless:

http://minnan.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Newpages&limit=100&offset=0&feed=rss

DE returns a whooping 8 MB feed (nearly 3500 articles).  I don't think
anyone would be requesting this on frequent schedule (I hope not :) ):

http://de.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Spezial:Newpages&limit=250&offset=0&feed=rss


subject: [Wikitech-l] Patent nonsense proposal

body:
 > And recognise that, however much we may like it, Windows 95 may not
have support for Ogg.

Neither does it for MP3. As far as I remember, Windows 95, 98,
Millenium, 2000 all need third-paty software, such as Winamp, installed,
in order to play MP3's.

Interestingly, the full install of Winamp plays OGG's.

 > Libraries, schools, offices and many other places prohibit software
installation without permission and we probably don't want to bar those
users from our content,

Libraries, offices etc.. also often prohibit users from playing sound
and/or do not provide sound cards.

Granted, some of those libraries may have installed some older audio
player (an old version of Winamp), or a reduced version, and may not be
willing to upgrade it.

 > nor third world or poor users who may have older equipment.

Which probably cannot play MP3 either. Again, if this is a question of
equipment, I think that a 486 cannot play MP3 or OGG, and most Pentiums
should do fine. This is more a question of software than a question of
hardware.