subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)

body:
Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>
>>Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>The one characteristic that is unique to a charitable foundation is that
>>>>it distributes funds to others, and does not primarily perform the
>>>>charitable works itself.  In Canada charitable designation is a federal
>>>>matter, and is in addition to whatever is done to constitute the
>>>>organization.  It may be based on formal incorporation, an irrevocable
>>>>trust or an unincorporated organization.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>Churches are non-profits in the US as well and can use the funds for
>>>internal expenses. In fact, most religious organizations don't
>>>distribute monies at all
>>>and they are all consumed in-house in programs supporting their
>>>organizations . They have whatever rules they wish for members and they
>>>are not regulated. Our Corporation Sole by laws are a single page and
>>>simply state the corporation has the rights to acquire assets and real
>>>property
>>>and receive funds and dispose of them how it wishes. It varies state by
>>>state, but Utah is pretty open on how non-profits can operate. There just
>>>cannot be and co-mingling of personal funds with non-profit monies.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>To avoid a misunderstanding there is a distinction made in Canadian law
>>between charitable foundation and charitable organization.  What you
>>describe is more characteristic of a charitable organization.
>>
>>Ec
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>foundation-l mailing list
>>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>In most US States, they can operate just about any way they want (except
>they cannot divert or co-mingle personal monies). There are Corporation
>Soles and Non-Profit Corporations. What you name them doesn't matter.
>The IRS and most states stopped granting Corporation Sole status to new
>entities about 2004 due to a wave of tax fraud that swept the US with
>individuals creating Corporation Soles and diverting personal assets to
>dodge Income Tax, but some states still allow them for legitimate
>organizations. Utah banned any new ones after 2004. Ours was formed in
>2001 so we still have it. One nice thing about a Corporation Sole is you
>are not required to ever file an annual report in Utah -- ever.
>
>

And all of your finanacial records are immune from Subpoena except from
the State legislature. The Mormom Church is
also a Corporation Sole.

Jeff

>Jeff
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey

subject: [Foundation-l] bylaws (second call)


list: foundation-l

from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject:
[Foundation-l] Wikimania 2008 and reflecting on what Wikimania
	is all about

body:
On 8/17/06, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> And yet all those US people whose involvement in en.wikipedia.org is
> significant and who should be allowed to come to a conference, if they
> are interested.
>
> The foundation has competing interests with the conference: one
> predominantly huge-sized project, and the whole of everything
> including the much smaller ones and the global picture.
>
> If the interests of the two collide to some degree, there are
> solutions: split the conference into World and US conferences,
> dual-track the conference, etc.

I am not sure I understand you correctly, but I seem to read that you
are hinting at the fact that the English Wikipedia is predominantely
US contributors. If that is the case, and although I am not a
contributor there myself, I believe this is forgetting the diversity
of our biggest project. My take is there are enough international
contributors who contribute to the English Wikipedia to never fall
into a US/rest of the world kind of split, which at any rate, would
seem to be an ultimate failure of Wikimedia ever pretending to any
kind of international scope.

> Rather than artificially constraining the size of Wikimania,
> structural solutions and a review of the goals of the conference and
> foundation are in order.

I believe this is what I have proposed.

Delphine
PS. It might be that I have not exactly understood what you meant,
being an Englis as Foreign language pkind of person and all. In which
case, I thank you for making sure I get your point.
--
~notafish


from_name: Sabine Cretella

subject: [Foundation-l] Removal of Cherokee Translators from Wikimedia

references:
<44E4AA84.7090105@wolfmountaingroup.com>	<2A080EDA-D759-4579-B76E-B9C0922BAC9D@saewyc.net>	<44E4CCB2.6030205@yahoo.it>
	<44E4D853.50406@wolfmountaingroup.com>

body:
> Then why was the name of the translator removed along with the website?
> You removed not only the website, but the name of the translator
> as well (both entries were removed and were unrelated to one another). I
> really could care less if the website is there or not. I get massive
> traffic and search engine scraping on the site and it matters little if
> its listed on your translators page or not.
>
> Do you have an explanation for this as well?
>
> quote:
>
> "...we very much welcome Cherokee translators if they give us a direct contact..."
>
> Jeff
>
>
Hi Jeff,

sorry I did not note this - I suppose because the Cherokee wiki is not a
wikimedia project  - I'll talk to Aphaia as soon as I meet her online
and will let you know.

Best wishes,

Sabine
Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
 http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Thanks to Brion Vibber and Gregory Maxwell

body:
WikiGadugi is now 100% functional and renders all the content from the
current Wikipedia XML Dumps without errors, so it's plug and play with
the current Wikipedia.  Many thanks to Brion Vibber and Gregory Maxwell
for their awesome help.  I am integrating the full suit of mirroring and
translation tools for the MediaWiki appliances and can now ship with
flawless content.

Thanks All.

Jeff


body:
Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote:

>WikiGadugi is now 100% functional and renders all the content from the
>current Wikipedia XML Dumps without errors, so it's plug and play with
>the current Wikipedia.  Many thanks to Brion Vibber and Gregory Maxwell
>for their awesome help.  I am integrating the full suit of mirroring and
>translation tools for the MediaWiki appliances and can now ship with
>flawless content.
>
>Thanks All.
>
>Jeff
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
I'll roll in all the fixes and extensions into an updated MediaWiki
1.7.1 build and post it to the FTP server tommorrow so the foundations
dumps will be plug and play for anyone else who wants to host it.

Jeff


references:
<44E4AA84.7090105@wolfmountaingroup.com>	<2A080EDA-D759-4579-B76E-B9C0922BAC9D@saewyc.net>	<44E4CCB2.6030205@yahoo.it>	<44E4D853.50406@wolfmountaingroup.com>	<44E4F7C5.3040302@yahoo.it>	<44E50534.6070207@wolfmountaingroup.com>
	<44E505C4.9090905@wolfmountaingroup.com>

body:
> Sorry,
>
> I don't edit on the english wikipedia at present nor do I plan to
> anytime soon.
>
> here's the URL.
>
> chr.wikipedia.org
>
> Jeff
>
>
>> I think it is a wikimedia project.
>>
>> Jeff
>>
Yes, this is a wikimedia project, but has less than 10,000 articles.
Therefore your entry does not go into the first part of the list but
under "other languages". And that is where I now moved your entry.

I hope you understand that we understand well how relevant Cherokee for
the regional languages is (please don't understand the term regional).
Nonetheless all of us have to follow these rules and many languages are
still below the 10,000 hurdle. I hope to see the number 1000 soon - let
me know when you reach it ... it is hard work for a small community.
Once you have 1000 the step to reach 5000 is much faster and from there
to 10,000 is faster again.

I know you are doing loads of work with machine translation on the
non-wikimedia wiki - unfortunately, up to now I did not manage to
install a proper font to be able to read that wiki - I tried more than
once, but for some reason my computer refuses to install the font :-(

Best wishes from Italy,

Sabine
Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
 http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Simetrical

subject: [Wikitech-l] Dajoo: a Java-based offline editor/viewer

body:
Join the dark side, Jay.  You know you want to.  ;)

On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> Yeah; and which processor that XML<->WT conversion happened on would be
> critical for load reasons...

Well, I wouldn't expect WT -> XML to be any slower than our current
parser (we could just modify it to output the XML instead of the
wikitext); actually, it would be quite a lot faster, no doubt, because
all sorts of things like template substitutions wouldn't have to
occur.  So it would probably be slow but manageable.

XML -> WT should be virtually instantaneous, as should XML -> HTML,
because parse time would be one-pass at C speed (so probably a few
milliseconds or less, as opposed to 800 ms for the current parser).
There would of course be all sorts of weirdness in XML -> WT, so it
might not be as fast as XML -> HTML, but the WMF gets a *hell* of a
lot more cache misses on page views than on page edits, I would bet a
substantial sum of money.


list: wikien-l

from_name: Sarah

subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

body:
On 8/18/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/18/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Who put that in, and what do they say?
>
> An anon changed "posted to articles or talk pages" to "this article or
> its talk page(s)".
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Blp&diff=next&oldid=67169836
>
> SlimVirgin added the original text on 28 June:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Blp&direction=next&oldid=60739990
>
The BLP policy in essence is that Wikipedia must take care not to
initiate or spread nonsense about living people, whether via our
articles or posts on talk.

The requirement not to move potentially defamatory material to talk
pages is because they're cached by Google (and even if they weren't,
they're read by a lot of people), and the point is to stop the spread
of the defamation. Editors who wanted to damage someone had begun to
realize that getting the material onto a talk page was as useful as
getting it into the article itself, and with no annoying restrictions
like NPOV, V, and NOR. There was also an ArbCom ruling that material
of that nature should be removed from a talk page, and I'm speaking
from memory now, but I believe it was the CBerlet/Nobs01 case. Someone
in that case was posting long screeds of damaging claims to the talk
page because editors were resisting allowing it into the article.

There are lots of ways material can be discussed with directly
referring to it, and people can ask for a reliable source for all
edits without specifying the particular edit that's caused the
problem. We don't need to say: "Do you have a source for the claim
that Professor Sir John Doe was seen with a woman not his wife in a
nightclub last night?"

Sarah


subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

body:
On 8/18/06, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> There are lots of ways material can be discussed with directly
> referring to it, and people can ask for a reliable source for all
> edits without specifying the particular edit that's caused the
> problem. We don't need to say: "Do you have a source for the claim
> that Professor Sir John Doe was seen with a woman not his wife in a
> nightclub last night?"
>
Sorry, a typo turned one of my sentences into nonsense. I meant to say
that there are lots of ways material can be discussed *without*
directly referring to it.

Sarah


from_name: Anthony

subject: [Foundation-l] Foundation's position on non-free images

body:
On 8/17/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> >I'll state for the record my disagreement with that. I think copyright
> >policy should be made on the Foundation level in cooperation with the
> >projects. The current situation is an unsustainable mess.
> >
> Having this set at the Foundation level would create just as much of a
> mess.  Fair use is only one part of the problem.  There are other
> matters that cannot be resolved with a single policy.  The merger
> principle is of great concern to Wiktionary, and it is not unusual to
> find publications that include copyright notices on material that is
> essentially uncopyrightable.
>
> It's useful for the Foundation to have a broadly worded policy
> supporting the principle of respect for copyright.  It's also useful for
> the Foundation to establish protocols for dealing with formal requests
> to take down copyright violating material.  Beyond that projects need to
> learn how to deal with such matters responsibly.
>
> Ec
>
The lack of unity is a problem, but what's less clear is how to solve
it.  The Free Software Foundation takes the position that *all*
*software* should be free.  While they try to accomplish this within
the framework of the law, I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say there
is policy instituting a principle of respect for copyright, at least
as it pertains to software.  Remember that copyright on software was
never a given in the first place - there were those who thought at the
time software started becoming widespread that software was not
legally of the form of expression that can be copyrighted.

So how does that relate to Wikimedia?  Well, ask people working on the
projects whether or not they believe that *all* *content* should be
free.  I'd even ask it of the people on this list.  And I don't think
many people would say that yes, it should.  Wikimedia, assuming you
can refer to more than just the board as Wikimedia, seems to have a
diverse set of opinions on this issue - many people don't even believe
in free software, and that seems to be OK.

Jimmy Wales and others have been recently using the term "free
knowledge" to describe the product of Wikipedia.  I wonder how many
people reading this email believe that *all* *knowlege* should be
free.  If it's significant, maybe that's a starting point on how to
formulate a copyright policy which answers questions about fair use.
But I'm not sure even that can be agreed upon.  Either way, I think
it's an important question to answer from the outset.

Anthony


from_name: Dabljuh

subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
On Thu, 17 Aug 2006 19:04:17 -0700 (PDT)
stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:

> > >  Calls to CITE are too often just smokescreen for a weak
> > > or incivil or POV argument,
> >
> > And objections to CITE are sometimes just smokescreens for
> > disagreement with the verifiability policy itself.
>
> Indeed. And calls for verifiability are themselves sometimes
> just a smokescreen for pushing a POV.
>
> -Stevertigo

Again: The problem isn't WP:CITE. Reliability of sources
and necessity of citation are purely subjective. Someone
with the POV that the sky is yellow will call the NYT
unreliable on the matter of sky-color, and if the NYT
offers a picture of the blue sky, he'll call it fabricated
and promptly find tons of evidence that the NYT used
doctored pictures in the past. If scientists proclaim
the sky is blue, they'll be called fringe, countered
by someone saying the sky isn't blue, formulated in
a confusing manner, and eventually removed in an
article cleanup.

This isn't a problem you can ever hope to resolve
by changing wp:cite. Its a problem intrinsic to human
nature that people tend to adapt their perception
of reality to their ideas of the world, rather than
adapting their idea. This is because it is,
psychologically, easier and cheaper to manage one's
perception than to manage one's ideas of the world.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Translate gnu text

body:
On 8/18/06, Thomas Pedersen <thomas at klassisk.dk> wrote:
> Yes. I want to write an article in danish based on an article in english
> (from wikipedia).
> Whats the GFDL correct procedure if
> * The article in danish is an almost word for word translation of the
> original english article
> * The article in danish just use SOME of the information in the original
> english article

For translations within Wikipedia itself, it's more common to just add
an interlanguage link, though more recently, translators have added a
note like "This article includes information translated from the
French Wikipedia". There has been some discussion of this at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Translation_into_English

Angela.


from_name: stevertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] CITE

body:
--- Dabljuh <dabljuh at gmx.net> wrote:
> Again: The problem isn't WP:CITE...
...
> If scientists proclaim
> the sky is blue, they'll be called fringe, countered
> by someone saying the sky isn't blue, formulated in
> a confusing manner, and eventually removed in an
> article cleanup.
>
> This isn't a problem you can ever hope to resolve
> by changing wp:cite. Its a problem intrinsic to human
> nature that people tend to adapt their perception
> of reality to their ideas of the world, rather than
> adapting their idea. This is because it is,
> psychologically, easier and cheaper to manage one's
> perception than to manage one's ideas of the world.

Your perceptions are both insightful and funny, but there are
a couple problems though with making such exagerrations.

For one, where does collective truthiness fit into your
perception of things?

-Stevertigo

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


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Webaroo package of en: wikipedia?

body:
Does anyone know anything about this?

    http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/index.cfm?reviewid=462

Presumably it's not the whole thing, but a production-ready subset.

- d.


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

body:
On 18/08/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> So our "living persons" banner contains the following text:
>
> "This article is about or directly concerns one or more living people
> and therefore must adhere to the biographies of living persons policy.
> Specifically, unsourced or poorly sourced negative material about
> living persons should not be posted to this article *or its talk
> page(s)*. Such material must be removed without hesitation. "
> (emphasis in original)
>
> I'm particularly concerned about the "or its talk page" bit. Is
> someone just confused, or should we actually *not* move material from
> the talk page like this:
>
> I have removed the following text because it sounds defamatory and
> probably isn't true: "John B Smith was busted twice for frequenting
> prostitutes in the 1970s". Anyone have a source?
>
> How can we realistically work with potentially defamatory statements -
> eg, requesting sources for them - if we can't even repeat them on talk
> pages?

The problem is, even though we consider it an "internal page", it's
still visible to the public as a whole and people are just as able to
read it and get upset. Writing around the claim is probably a good way
to mark it as disbelieved, though, or you could go with something like
"I've removed an unsourced claim about involvement with prostitution
from the text - does anyone have a source for this? It seems
unlikely..."

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

body:
On 18/08/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

> So our "living persons" banner contains the following text:
> "This article is about or directly concerns one or more living people
> and therefore must adhere to the biographies of living persons policy.
> Specifically, unsourced or poorly sourced negative material about
> living persons should not be posted to this article *or its talk
> page(s)*. Such material must be removed without hesitation. "
> (emphasis in original)
> I'm particularly concerned about the "or its talk page" bit. Is
> someone just confused, or should we actually *not* move material from
> the talk page like this:
> I have removed the following text because it sounds defamatory and
> probably isn't true: "John B Smith was busted twice for frequenting
> prostitutes in the 1970s". Anyone have a source?
> How can we realistically work with potentially defamatory statements -
> eg, requesting sources for them - if we can't even repeat them on talk
> pages?

Who put that in, and what do they say?

(A lot of stupid stuff in the living bio and verification policies -
and in a lot of other policies - is because someone edit warred it in
and no-one could be bothered arguing in a querulous fashion. And then
it stays because it's POLICY rather than because it makes sense.)

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

body:
--- Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:

> The requirement not to move potentially defamatory material to talk
> pages is because they're cached by Google (and even if they weren't,
> they're read by a lot of people), and the point is to stop the spread
> of the defamation.

In the context of WP:OFFICE, as well as more recently, Jimbo and others have
written somethings about "hurt feelings," as if it was a policy ( WP:CODDLE
maybe) which could circumvent even important policy ( WP:NPOV maybe). Could
you explain this?

I agree with the idea of treating bios with care, but that does not necessarily
necessitate the use of an entirely different methodology than any other wiki
page - including censoring talk pages. You may as well start a biowiki that
operates under entirely different rules.

Your characterisation of "the point" as being "to stop the spread of the
defamation" is interesting in that, as you have formulated it, its quite
easy to attack. Are there higher values being employed here other than
WP:TEDDYBEAR, WP:ANTIDEFAMATION, and WP:THRONE ?

- stevertigo

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

body:
--- Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:

> there are lots of ways material can be discussed *without*
> directly referring to it.

Like what?

- Stevertigo

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


body:
On 18/08/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:

> For the record:
>
> Contributors to enwiki:
> 53% US
> 15% GB
> 7% CA
> 4% AU
> 2% DE
> 1% NL, FR, SE, IE, NZ, JP
> 11% everywhere else.
>
> This is based on geolocated IP addresses from a few months back.  Note
> that these are based on number of EDITS, not on number of EDITORS
> (which is harder to evaluate).  A slim majority of edits to enwiki
> come from the US.

The corrolary to this, incidentally, is that 50% (give or take) of all
actively contributing Wikimedia accounts just now are on en.wp. I know
there'll be overlap, so a more reliable (ha!) method, edit count...

A shade under half of the edits to all Wikimedia projects made in May
(since the figures were handy) are on en.wp. Allowing for some US
participation on other projects, that's ~ 1/4 to 1/3 of all
"involvement" across all Wikimedia projects being from the US. Which
seems a fair enough, if arbitrary, figure.

(It'd be interesting to see the statistics for US involvement on
es.wp, the other major language wikipedia I would expect them to
contribute to, if they're available.)

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

body:
So our "living persons" banner contains the following text:

"This article is about or directly concerns one or more living people
and therefore must adhere to the biographies of living persons policy.
Specifically, unsourced or poorly sourced negative material about
living persons should not be posted to this article *or its talk
page(s)*. Such material must be removed without hesitation. "
(emphasis in original)

I'm particularly concerned about the "or its talk page" bit. Is
someone just confused, or should we actually *not* move material from
the talk page like this:

I have removed the following text because it sounds defamatory and
probably isn't true: "John B Smith was busted twice for frequenting
prostitutes in the 1970s". Anyone have a source?

How can we realistically work with potentially defamatory statements -
eg, requesting sources for them - if we can't even repeat them on talk
pages?

Steve


body:
On 8/18/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does anyone know anything about this?
>
>    http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/index.cfm?reviewid=462

No, but this caught my eye: "We might query the way in which entries
are sorted, putting Hercules the TV character above Hercules the
mythological figure, for example."

I wonder what that refers to? [[Hercules]] certainly isn't like that,
and [[Hercules (disambiguation)]] technically puts the main article
first (though it's hard to see compared to all the other links). Maybe
that's some weird aspect of the Webaroo search mechanism?

Steve


from_name: Gianluigi Gamba

subject: [Foundation-l] Unauthorized usage of the Wikipedia logo

body:
I apologize if this ML is not the proper one for handling such cases.

Do we have any standard letter for someone using the Wikipedia logo in their site without any authorization?

A user reported this misuse (OTRS ticket #2006081710006508) at the site http://www.nafura.it/ - scroll down and the wiki-globe will appear on the left, linking to content which is not related anyway with wikipedia.

Thank you.
G. (aka Paginazero)


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 02:26:29AM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
> Join the dark side, Jay.  You know you want to.  ;)

Perhaps, but you ain't my daddy.  :-)

> On 8/17/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > Yeah; and which processor that XML<->WT conversion happened on would be
> > critical for load reasons...
>
> Well, I wouldn't expect WT -> XML to be any slower than our current
> parser (we could just modify it to output the XML instead of the
> wikitext); actually, it would be quite a lot faster, no doubt, because
> all sorts of things like template substitutions wouldn't have to
> occur.  So it would probably be slow but manageable.

You're suggesting to ship XML to the browser and let XSSSL do the
translation actually *in* the browser?

That makes me a bit queasy, though perhaps it shouldn't.

> XML -> WT should be virtually instantaneous, as should XML -> HTML,
> because parse time would be one-pass at C speed (so probably a few
> milliseconds or less, as opposed to 800 ms for the current parser).

Hmmm...

> There would of course be all sorts of weirdness in XML -> WT, so it
> might not be as fast as XML -> HTML, but the WMF gets a *hell* of a
> lot more cache misses on page views than on page edits, I would bet a
> substantial sum of money.

Oh, I'm sure.  Except on the top 5% current events-y pages.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Blank pages being delivered at en?

body:
On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 03:12:13PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> Could be just me, but occasionally today I'm getting totally blank
> pages being delivered straight away from en.wikipedia.org. Upon
> refresh, I usually get the real page.
>
> It's probably me, but thought I'd check :)

Not seeing it here (Firefox 1.5.0.6, Win2K, RoadRunner).

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

body:
On 8/18/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Who put that in, and what do they say?

An anon changed "posted to articles or talk pages" to "this article or
its talk page(s)".
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Blp&diff=next&oldid=67169836

SlimVirgin added the original text on 28 June:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Blp&direction=next&oldid=60739990

I've hacked the text a bit. Who knows?

> (A lot of stupid stuff in the living bio and verification policies -
> and in a lot of other policies - is because someone edit warred it in
> and no-one could be bothered arguing in a querulous fashion. And then
> it stays because it's POLICY rather than because it makes sense.)

I think in many cases you can replace "edit warred" with "tentatively added". !

Steve


from_name: Joe Szilagyi

subject: [WikiEN-l] en.wikipedia.org down?

body:
Is something happening?
--

Regards,
Joe


subject: [WikiEN-l] wikipedia interview

body:
On 17/08/06, Martin Uhl?? - t?den?k Respekt <uhlir at respekt.cz> wrote:

You asked for a picture - I don't have a good press photo of myself! I
need to arrange one ... In the meantime, I hope you can use this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/David_gerard_and_akardy_at_london_wikimeet_sept_05.jpg

It's Arkady Rose (another Wikipedia user) and me at a Wikipedia meetup
in London in September 2005. The photographer is Caroline Ford and the
photo is freely reusable under any of GFDL, CC-by-sa 1.0, CC-by-sa 2.0
and CC-by-sa 2.5 - so if you note the photographer's name and that
it's licensed under Creative Commons by-sa 1.0, 2.0 and 2.5, that
should satisfy all copyright requirements at no cost to you.

(cc'd to Caroline)

> If you have time, please allow me one or two more questions:
> Do you think that Britanica considers Wikipedia to be serious competition?
> Are they afraid of Wikipedia?

I think they behave as though they are afraid of Wikipedia. This is
unfortunate, because they spend a lot of time and effort fighting
Wikipedia rather than working on and selling their own encyclopedia.

They don't have to act this way - compare to Brockhaus, which is the
German encyclopedia with the same quality and reputation as
Britannica. Brockhaus seem unsure of what to make of Wikipedia, and
don't seem to like it much, but they are at least talking to people
from the German Wikipedia and from Wikimedia Deutschland (the
German-based Wikimedia nonprofit).

The Encyclopedia Britannica reallly is the best in the English
language for both quality and consistency of quality - those of us who
work on the English Wikipedia are big fans of Britannica and aspire to
being as good as Britannica. It's the gold standard we work to.

It would be in the best interests of the readers for the high-quality
encyclopedias to continue to exist workably and coexist with the
Wikipedia model. And Britannica is very cheap on DVD now - they had a
special offer earlier this year where US customers could get the
DVD-ROM for US$25. Imagine that shelf of books for US$25!

> Then I would need to know you role in Wikipedia to characterize you. You are
> described as sysadmin, but I think that it is not your only role in
> Wikipedia. Is that right?

I'm a sysadmin in my day job, but I'm actually not one on Wikipedia!
My work on Wikipedia is editing and organisational.

My user page lists all my different jobs around Wikimedia:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Gerard

* I'm an editor and administrator on English Wikipedia, and I
administer several en:wp-related mailing lists.
* I'm a UK press contact for the Wikimedia Foundation.
* I'm one of the people working on starting Wikimedia UK - to be a
UK-based nonprofit for furthering the aims of Wikimedia. Wikimedia UK
has put in its application for charitable status and is currently
waiting to hear back from the Charity Commissioner.

- thanks, David.


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

body:
On 8/18/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/18/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Does anyone know anything about this?
> >
> >    http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/index.cfm?reviewid=462
>
> No, but this caught my eye: "We might query the way in which entries
> are sorted, putting Hercules the TV character above Hercules the
> mythological figure, for example."
>
> I wonder what that refers to? [[Hercules]] certainly isn't like that,
> and [[Hercules (disambiguation)]] technically puts the main article
> first (though it's hard to see compared to all the other links). Maybe
> that's some weird aspect of the Webaroo search mechanism?
>
> Steve

Even wierder, we don't have an article about Hercules the TV
character! Which is very strange, since we have articles on basically
all characters to appear in popular fiction (just look at [[Will
Hunting]] fer chrissakes). We do have an article on the TV show, but
isn't sorted first either alphabetically or chronologically.

--Oskar


body:
On 8/18/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Even wierder, we don't have an article about Hercules the TV
> character! Which is very strange, since we have articles on basically
> all characters to appear in popular fiction (just look at [[Will
> Hunting]] fer chrissakes). We do have an article on the TV show, but
> isn't sorted first either alphabetically or chronologically.

We have a couple of weird instances where characters are blended with
the show/book about them. See [[Asterix]] for a good example - the
article is mostly about the series (despite the dablink "This article
is about the comic book character"), and has very little about him -
less than the content of [[Obelix]], for instance.

It probably comes down to editors blurring the two concepts in their
minds. Or maybe sometimes the concepts are blurry - what *would* you
write about Hercules the TV character? Mostly you would want to
describe the relationship between him and the "real" Hercules, but you
might as well describe the faithfulness of the whole Hercules TV show
to the whole Hercules legend. Dunno.

Steve


body:
On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 05:41:49PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> You mean, when the characters that immediately precede "://" are in
> some defined list like "ftp", "http" etc? Ok, from a quick test, I see
> that we recognise http, ftp, https, gopher, and mailto, but not vrml
> or unsurprisingly file.
>
> And presumably the 9 characters is counting the case https://a
>
> Btw, anyone want another funny corner case (as I gather these things
> are called?)
> http://     <- not recognised as a "magic word"
> http://.     <- recognised as a "magic word", but only the "http://"
> is linked - the . isn't.
>
> Heh. Are we going to put that in the formal grammar?

I don't think we would need to.

That's not actually "part of wikitext".  It's a special case,
implemented by the browser in a late pass to make users' lives easier,
as several other things are which are not "really" part of wikitext.

Strictly speaking, parser functions aren't part of wikitext either, I
don't think...

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: Ligulem

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikEd editor extension

body:
I just found

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cacycle/wikEd

Quoting from said page:

"wikEd (alpha) is an editor extension that adds enhanced text processing
functions to Wikipedia edit pages. Currently it works only for Mozilla
Firefox, Mozilla, and Mozilla SeaMonkey browsers. wikEd is a complete
rich-text editor and comes with many MediaWiki features."

Might be interesting regarding WYSIWYG discussions.

Apologies if this is already well known (I did some quick searches but
found nothing here).

--Ligulem


from_name: Florence Devouard

subject: [WikiEN-l] [Wmfcc-l] Webaroo package of en: wikipedia?

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>Does anyone know anything about this?
>
>    http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/index.cfm?reviewid=462
>
>Presumably it's not the whole thing, but a production-ready subset.
>
>
>- d.
>_______________________________________________
>Wmfcc-l mailing list
>Wmfcc-l at mail.wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wmfcc-l
>
>
>

The publisher gave a lightning talk about it at Wikimania and left some
CDs of demo in the press room as well.
I could not give it a look as it is not a mac-friendly product.

Ant


body:
On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 05:55:45PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/18/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Heh. Are we going to put that in the formal grammar?
>
> Oh, it gets better. Ok, here's a test for everyone. Without actually
> testing these, predict how each of the following will be parsed:
>
> *http://[[foo]].com
> *http://www.[[foo]].com
> *[[http://foo.com]]
> *[[the site http://foo.com is cool]]
> *[[http://foo.com is cool]]
> *[[foo http://foo.com]]
> *[[ http://foo.com]]
> *[[http://foo.com ]]

I very strongly suspect that no one who hasn't lived intimately with
the parser code (that's, what, 4 or 5 people? :-) could predict what
those things would do; they all seem implementation defined to me.

Or almost all...

They do illustrate why making a late pass to hotlink URLs might not be
a safe approach, though.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


body:
On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 06:08:56PM +0100, Rob Church wrote:
> On 18/08/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > I very strongly suspect that no one who hasn't lived intimately with
> > the parser code (that's, what, 4 or 5 people? :-) could predict what
> > those things would do; they all seem implementation defined to me.
>
> Being intimate with the parser leads to bad, bad things. Post-commit,
> it's like waking up the morning after to find your one-nighter's led
> to her stealing your cash and anything else you had on you.

Well, that's why we're on about this, right?  Trying to replace Hooker
0.6 with Wife 1.0?

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Network outage

body:
Somewhere around 17:20-17:30 UTC, Cogent readvertised routing to our primary IP
address block in Tampa, blocking access to the site for most people.

Partway through the period, wikis were placed into read-only lock so the few
people who could access it (mostly from AOL ;) were unable to edit without
review from the public.

The route was temporarily restored around 19:55, and read-write was restored to
the wikis at 19:59.

The old IP range will no longer be available to us as of Monday.

PowerMedium has assigned us a new IP space which is under their control (unlike
the old IPs which were leased from Cogent under an older contract), and we will
be transitioning to them over the weekend.

We have heard several conflicting things about exactly why and how our IP space
got dropped; more will be said when we have firmer knowledge.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: HappyDog

subject:
[Wikitech-l] 404 on en.wikipedia.org: Server-side HTTP
	headerinstead of client-side meta-refresh?

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Bennett" <stevage at gmail.com>
>
> (However, having a list of all articles that point to B would be great ;))
>

I recently logged a bug for this:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6934

- Mark Clements (HappyDog)


from_name: Sydney aka FloNight

subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

body:
---- David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

=============
On 18/08/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

> So our "living persons" banner contains the following text:
> "This article is about or directly concerns one or more living people
> and therefore must adhere to the biographies of living persons policy.
> Specifically, unsourced or poorly sourced negative material about
> living persons should not be posted to this article *or its talk
> page(s)*. Such material must be removed without hesitation. "
> (emphasis in original)
> I'm particularly concerned about the "or its talk page" bit. Is
> someone just confused, or should we actually *not* move material from
> the talk page like this:
> I have removed the following text because it sounds defamatory and
> probably isn't true: "John B Smith was busted twice for frequenting
> prostitutes in the 1970s". Anyone have a source?
> How can we realistically work with potentially defamatory statements -
> eg, requesting sources for them - if we can't even repeat them on talk
> pages?

Who put that in, and what do they say?

(A lot of stupid stuff in the living bio and verification policies -
and in a lot of other policies - is because someone edit warred it in
and no-one could be bothered arguing in a querulous fashion. And then
it stays because it's POLICY rather than because it makes sense.)

- d.

David,

The arbcom uses Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons in their findings and sanctions quite a bit. If it is good enough for them, it is good enough for me.

Take care
Sydney aka FloNight


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [Wikitech-l] Network outage

body:
On 8/18/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 18/08/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > We have heard several conflicting things about exactly why and how our
> IP space
> > got dropped; more will be said when we have firmer knowledge.
>
> <Insert obligatory joke about the US government or your preferred
> conspiracy or religious theories here.>
>
> It could just be gross incompetence.
>
>
> Rob Church
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

If you don't control your own IP space and have your own BGP ASN, things
like this happen.

They happen if you control it yourself, but you are responsible, and usually
end up being able to know the actual root cause... 8-P

Has there been any interest towards getting Wikipedia / WMF projects an AS
number and a dedicated portable IP space allocation?

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


from_name: James Hare

body:
Ack. Reminds me of Rude Kitty.

I would do a good ol' cease and desist or a DMCA takedown notice, but I'll
leave it to Brad to get angry.

On 8/18/06, Gianluigi Gamba <gigamb at tin.it> wrote:
>
> I apologize if this ML is not the proper one for handling such cases.
>
> Do we have any standard letter for someone using the Wikipedia logo in
> their site without any authorization?
>
> A user reported this misuse (OTRS ticket #2006081710006508) at the site
> http://www.nafura.it/ - scroll down and the wiki-globe will appear on the
> left, linking to content which is not related anyway with wikipedia.
>
> Thank you.
> G. (aka Paginazero)
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

body:
On 8/18/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > there are lots of ways material can be discussed *without*
> > directly referring to it.
>
> Like what?

Like saying "the material I removed from the article" without saying "the
claims about marital infidelity with person X that I removed from the
article".  There are lots of ways to talk around an issue without actually
saying the defamatory thing.

Ian


from_name: GerardM

subject: [Foundation-l] African languages and MediaWiki

body:
Hoi,
Wikimania was a conference that I expect to be of great importance for
stimulating the African interest in MediaWiki and Wikipedia content. I was
excited that both Kasper Souren and Martin Benjamin gave a presentation.  I
was thrilled to meet Paa Kwesi Imbeah at Wikimania, who was informed that
the work on InstantCommons can start.

As a result of the Wikimania, a yahoo group was started, afrophonewikis, and
it has already a lifely and interesting group of people interesting in
making. Topics range from using machine translation to the number of women
being literate in the indigenous languages. The overriding theme is: how do
we get people interested in creating content in the languages of Africa that
is of interest to the people of Africa in African Wikipedias.

The first hurdle to take is by making MediaWiki easy to use. There are
several technical things that can be done; the user interface can be
localised, the user instructions can be translated and we could experiment
with the WYSIWYG. On a community level, we can have provide help by
demonstrating MediaWiki and Wikipedia in a workshop format, we can create
technically great articles with examples of how you can do things, thing
that are there to be copied. We can help with the conversion of closely
related languages.

Practically, we have started in cooperation with the IICD, a Dutch NGO
active in Africa, with a project plan to localise MediaWiki and stimulate
the use of MediaWiki in Ghana. On the kasaharow wiki we have started writing
in a wiki format a project plan on doing all that. This plan is a plan that
is to be truly for the people involved in this project. So when you write
their, be sure that you want to put your effort where your mouth is.

The kasahorow people are working on dictionaries for the languages of Ghana,
one of their aims is to use it for machine translation. With the current
interst in machine translation (the Cherokee project - apertium) it would be
really great if these efforts come together and the content created in one
language can become available in another as well. Using tools like OmegaT is
one other option in easing the translations from one language to another.

IICD and many other NGO's have a wealth of information often specific to
"their" topics that they would love to make available, certainly if this
results in providing their content with more eyeballs. They are quite ready
to make it available as either Wikibooks or Wikipedia content. The current
phase of the projectplan is very much one of brainstorming.

There are many opportunities to open up Africa to the way of the wiki.
Important is that the aim is to make it work in Africa for Africans. Some of
our preconceptions about wikis will prove to be culturally biased. It will
be exciting, relevant and important to observe how we will morph in a more
international organisation.

For me, the localisation of MediaWiki will help make WiktionaryZ useful. I
have discussed in the past cooperating with kasahorow in sharing our content
and technology. When we can do this in Ghana, we can do it in Nigeria and in
India and.... Spending time on this will have big benefits. The key factor
for success is and will always be that the people that use it feel that it
is THEIR Wikipedia, THEIR WiktionaryZ and THEIR MediaWiki.

Thanks,
     GerardM

Some links:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/afrophonewikis/
http://joitskehulsebosch.blogspot.com/2006/08/technology-wikipedia-in-local.html
http://www.kasahorow.org/wiki
http://WiktionaryZ.org


list: commons-l

from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] Rethinking [[COM:DEL]]

body:
On 18/08/06, Florian Straub <flominator at gmx.net> wrote:
> > There's nothing inherently wrong with that approach... except there
> > are currently 48 days listed on [[COM:DEL]].... instead of the 7-10
> > you might expect. I don't know that making those ancient debates (back
> > to June 25, what is that, 7 weeks?) less visible is going to make them
> > more likely to be resolved.
>
> Since we have the chance to restore deleted images where should be the
> problem in deleting everything that isn't clear after 7 or 14 days?

That would create a lot of badwill. Articles have always been
undeletable, but there's a good reason WP's never had a "delete first,
discuss later" policy. For one thing, it's often hard to discuss an
item if you can't see what it is.

Brianna


from_name: Simetrical

body:
On 8/18/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> You're suggesting to ship XML to the browser and let XSSSL do the
> translation actually *in* the browser?

Actually, I wasn't.  Interesting idea, but I don't think there's any
point, since a wikiXML -> HTML parser probably wouldn't be a
noticeable bottleneck and so we may as well maintain support for
non-XSL-supporting clients (does your Blackberry support XSL? :) ).  I
hadn't actually thought of using XSL definitions at all, but in fact,
that may be the obvious choice.  I'll have to look at that some more .
. . I never paid much attention to it before now.

> > There would of course be all sorts of weirdness in XML -> WT, so it
> > might not be as fast as XML -> HTML, but the WMF gets a *hell* of a
> > lot more cache misses on page views than on page edits, I would bet a
> > substantial sum of money.
>
> Oh, I'm sure.  Except on the top 5% current events-y pages.

Those too.  Those get tons of edits, but even more views.


from_name: Christian Richardt

subject: [Commons-l] Commons SumItUp

body:
Hallo Markus,

Das ist eine wirklich gute Idee, die du da umgesetzt hast.

Ich h?tte nur eine kleine Anmerkung: Wenn ich dein Tool mit "en:Soup"
bef?lle, zeigt es auf der Ergebnisseite "{{de|----}}" an, weil der Artikel
mit einer Vorlage und einer horizontalen Linie beginnt. W?re toll, wenn du
das beheben k?nntest.

Sch?ne Gr??e,

Christian

On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 14:07:22 +0100, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de>
wrote:

> I've worked some more on my SumIrUp tool [1], which can generate a list
> of language templates with one-line descriptions for a new article. All
> it needs is a starting point, namely this article in any language. From
> there, it will spider all the language links, and gather the initial
> paragraph/sentence of each article. It then generates a
> copy-and-paste-ready text, including language links.
>
> I was wondering - why not link to this tool in the instructions text for
> new articles? There could be a link to this tool using the name of the
> page to be created, and en.wikipedia as default. If an article with that
> name exists on en.wikipedia, it will generate said list of one-line
> descriptions which can be copied into that article. As this is exactly
> what commons articles/categories *should* contain, it might be a huge
> help.
>
> Magnus
>
> [1] http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/commons_sumitup.php


subject: [Commons-l] Commons SumItUp

body:
I'd like to apologise for my German post to everybody. I didn't check the
"To:" in my email client and this mailing list is configured to send
replies to back to the list -- I didn't intend that and would like to
apologise for it.

Christian

On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 14:39:50 +0100, Christian Richardt <cr333 at cam.ac.uk>
wrote:

> Hallo Markus,
>
> Das ist eine wirklich gute Idee, die du da umgesetzt hast.
>
> Ich h?tte nur eine kleine Anmerkung: Wenn ich dein Tool mit "en:Soup"
> bef?lle, zeigt es auf der Ergebnisseite "{{de|----}}" an, weil der
> Artikel
> mit einer Vorlage und einer horizontalen Linie beginnt. W?re toll, wenn
> du
> das beheben k?nntest.
>
>
> Sch?ne Gr??e,
>
> Christian
>
> On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 14:07:22 +0100, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de>
> wrote:
>
>> I've worked some more on my SumIrUp tool [1], which can generate a list
>> of language templates with one-line descriptions for a new article. All
>> it needs is a starting point, namely this article in any language. From
>> there, it will spider all the language links, and gather the initial
>> paragraph/sentence of each article. It then generates a
>> copy-and-paste-ready text, including language links.
>>
>> I was wondering - why not link to this tool in the instructions text for
>> new articles? There could be a link to this tool using the name of the
>> page to be created, and en.wikipedia as default. If an article with that
>> name exists on en.wikipedia, it will generate said list of one-line
>> descriptions which can be copied into that article. As this is exactly
>> what commons articles/categories *should* contain, it might be a huge
>> help.
>>
>> Magnus
>>
>> [1] http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/commons_sumitup.php
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l


from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Amazon up Alexa creek

body:
For those who watch the Alexa numbers. Seems WP has just overtaken Amazon.com; which recovers the place lost when YouTube passed us.

Charles

-----------------------------------------
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Network outage

body:
On 8/18/06, River Tarnell <river at attenuate.org> wrote:
>
> George Herbert:
> > Has there been any interest towards getting Wikipedia / WMF projects an
> AS
> > number and a dedicated portable IP space allocation?
>
> we're working on it at the moment.
>
>         - river.
>
>
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>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
I don't want to butt in, but if you want or need some help, I have plenty of
experience with the networking aspects.

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


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Commons-l] Commons SumItUp

body:
I've worked some more on my SumIrUp tool [1], which can generate a list
of language templates with one-line descriptions for a new article. All
it needs is a starting point, namely this article in any language. From
there, it will spider all the language links, and gather the initial
paragraph/sentence of each article. It then generates a
copy-and-paste-ready text, including language links.

I was wondering - why not link to this tool in the instructions text for
new articles? There could be a link to this tool using the name of the
page to be created, and en.wikipedia as default. If an article with that
name exists on en.wikipedia, it will generate said list of one-line
descriptions which can be copied into that article. As this is exactly
what commons articles/categories *should* contain, it might be a huge help.

Magnus

[1] http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/commons_sumitup.php

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from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
Could be just me, but occasionally today I'm getting totally blank
pages being delivered straight away from en.wikipedia.org. Upon
refresh, I usually get the real page.

It's probably me, but thought I'd check :)

Steve


from_name: Anthony

subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

body:
On 8/18/06, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> The requirement not to move potentially defamatory material to talk
> pages is because they're cached by Google (and even if they weren't,
> they're read by a lot of people), and the point is to stop the spread
> of the defamation. [snip]
>
> There are lots of ways material can be discussed with directly
> referring to it, and people can ask for a reliable source for all
> edits without specifying the particular edit that's caused the
> problem. We don't need to say: "Do you have a source for the claim
> that Professor Sir John Doe was seen with a woman not his wife in a
> nightclub last night?"
>
I'm sorry, but I don't see how that question is "potentially
defamatory", assuming that someone actually did make such a claim.

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] wikipedia interview

body:
On 8/18/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think they behave as though they are afraid of Wikipedia. This is
> unfortunate, because they spend a lot of time and effort fighting
> Wikipedia rather than working on and selling their own encyclopedia.

I think David made a typo. He meant "rather than writing new articles
for it." :)

Seriously though if I was Britannica I would be looking for new ways
to make money. Selling encyclopaedias just isn't going to be a viable
model several years from now, if it still is. There are lots of good
business models that involve getting the right information to the
right people - but attempting to charge a premium for being
"authoritative" just doesn't cut it these days.

> The Encyclopedia Britannica reallly is the best in the English
> language for both quality and consistency of quality - those of us who
> work on the English Wikipedia are big fans of Britannica and aspire to
> being as good as Britannica. It's the gold standard we work to.

Do we? Is there any single area where Britannica is the best reference
work? They may be a good broad reference, but for any single area,
like US pop culture of the 1970s, or tribes of the southern Sahara or
something, there are surely much better works. *Those* are what we
should be trying to equal and better.

> It would be in the best interests of the readers for the high-quality
> encyclopedias to continue to exist workably and coexist with the
> Wikipedia model. And Britannica is very cheap on DVD now - they had a
> special offer earlier this year where US customers could get the
> DVD-ROM for US$25. Imagine that shelf of books for US$25!

Yes, and apparently it's easy to find pirated on the web as well. When
I mentioned earlier that I didn't have access to the EB page on
Wikipedia, no fewer than six (6!!) people emailed the page source. Or
maybe they all have legit copies :) (thanks again, those nice people!)

> I'm a sysadmin in my day job, but I'm actually not one on Wikipedia!
> My work on Wikipedia is editing and organisational.

Funnily enough my day job is pretty similar to editing Wikipedia -
organising documentation, translating, copyediting etc. Just the
subject matters are different...

Steve


from_name: Rob Church

body:
On 17/08/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Other places require fixed, but large, amounts of lookahead... freelinks
> > require at least 9 characters, for example. Technically, I'll admit that a
>
> What's a freelink?

I think he's referring to the parser's behaviour of replacing anything
that looks like a valid UR[IL] when the protocol is in a specific
configuration array.

Rob Church


subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

body:
On 8/18/06, Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> like NPOV, V, and NOR. There was also an ArbCom ruling that material
> of that nature should be removed from a talk page, and I'm speaking

Ok, in that case that should be part of a more general policy. I
removed the reference to talk pages from template:blp because it's
specifically designed for talk pages of living people articles.
Whereas, defaming people is apparently out on all talk pages...

Though for that matter, defaming living people on articles about
extinct frogs is just as bad, but we don't put the template on those
talk pages. Hmm.

> There are lots of ways material can be discussed with[out] directly
> referring to it, and people can ask for a reliable source for all
> edits without specifying the particular edit that's caused the
> problem. We don't need to say: "Do you have a source for the claim
> that Professor Sir John Doe was seen with a woman not his wife in a
> nightclub last night?"

Ouch. I don't like it. Can't we just tell google not to spider our
talk pages? Would you expect the editors of a "real" encyclopaedia to
have to talk in circumspect terms when discussing potentially
libellous material? Do Mr and Mrs Britannica say "You know that claim
about Mr Smith on page 878...you know...there's allegedly with an
apparently non-married female person and a, uh, allegedly drinking
establishment...with me?" when they're working on it? No. The solution
should never be "don't discuss it", but rather "discuss it in a way
which isn't going to spread the defamation".

Steve


from_name: Michael Davis

body:
Thanks.  I've forwarded your message to our legal group.

Michael

Gianluigi Gamba wrote:
> I apologize if this ML is not the proper one for handling such cases.
>
> Do we have any standard letter for someone using the Wikipedia logo in their site without any authorization?
>
> A user reported this misuse (OTRS ticket #2006081710006508) at the site http://www.nafura.it/ - scroll down and the wiki-globe will appear on the left, linking to content which is not related anyway with wikipedia.
>
> Thank you.
> G. (aka Paginazero)
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>


body:
On 18/08/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> You mean, when the characters that immediately precede "://" are in
> some defined list like "ftp", "http" etc? Ok, from a quick test, I see
> that we recognise http, ftp, https, gopher, and mailto, but not vrml
> or unsurprisingly file.

It's completely configurable by the site administrator. Incidentally,
adding "file://" to the array doesn't guarantee success, since many
modern browsers will point-blank refuse to render such links in their
default configuration.

Rob Church


subject: [Wikitech-l] An error occur when send a mail

body:
On 17/08/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 11:05:52AM +0100, Rob Church wrote:
> > http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4979. Windows-based SMTP
> > servers can't handle the "John Smith <john at smith.org>" email address
> > format, and croak on it. The workaround in comment #2 on the
> > referenced URL should help.
>
> Windows SMTP servers violate RFC2822, huh?

Upon reading one of the Notes on
http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.mail.php, it seems it's not the
Windows SMTP server, but PHP's incompetent parsing, since it handles
headers in the message differently under that platform.

Rob Church


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Magic word parsing (was: Re: Dajoo: a Java-based
	offline editor/viewer)

body:
On 8/18/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> The most interesting revelation of the above tests, for those who
> missed it, is that it *is* possible to link to a page named after a
> URL, but [[http://foo.com]] won't do it (that generates a, what was
> it, "direct link"). However, [[ http://foo.com]] works, although the
> page ends up being called "Http://foo.com". It's not completely
> inconceivable to me that one day we might want to write an article
> about a URL, like if some postmodern band names an album
> "http://stupid.com" or something.

True (album names, ugh).  Note the following in Parser.php:

			# Don't allow internal links to pages containing
			# PROTO: where PROTO is a valid URL protocol; these
			# should be external links.
			if (preg_match('/^(\b(?:' . wfUrlProtocols() . '))/', $m[1])) {
				$s .= $prefix . '[[' . $line ;
				continue;
			}

Any reason that we explicitly ban pages from having titles that look like URLs?


from_name: jahiegel

subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy hypothetical

body:
Sam's comments surely invite the question around which, relative to BLP, we
often dance: ought ethical or moral impulses ever to affect our editing?

I'd appended a hypothetical at the end of my post but, realizing that any
sane individual won't reach the end of my comments, I have moved it here; an
expanded argument follows...

Consider a situation in which unsourced criticism appears in a biography.
Assume arguendo that we can be certain that the subject will not essay a
legal claim against the Foundation and that we can be relatively certain
that bad press will not entail (an issue that, for the purposes of this
discussion, we set aside in any case).  Should, then, we treat that
unsourced negativity in a fashion different from that in which we'd treat
unsourced comments in, to pick the first three random articles I find,
[[Mancor de la Vall]], [[Sherston Software]], or [[Danzig III: How the Gods
Kill]]?  I imagine that there are those who will say "yes", and I suppose I
can appreciate their justifcations; I rather think, though, that an
exceedingly large portion of the community would say "no", although I am
less-than-confident that a meta-discussion that might bear out such view
might be undertaken.

Concerns w/r/to prospective legal liability and bad press aside (which
concerns can be, I think, persuasively allayed), a certain "do no harm"
motivation tends to underline BLP.  In view of the failure to command a
consensus of either [[Wikipedia:Wikiethics]] or [[WP:NOT EVIL]], and of the
disfavoring by the community of Jimbo's "human dignity" formulation with
respect to deletion, I cannot abide the suggestion that the community writ
large truly believe, legal/publicity concerns aside, that we ever ought to
concern ourselves with the external consequences of our editing.

Such consideration is plainly, IMHO, unencyclopedic; not only ought we to
edit with dispassion (NPOV), but so too ought we to edit with disinterest,
such that we ought not to care whether the Googling of a biographical
subject returns results that contain inaccurate and defamatory material (I,
fof course, cannot comprehend why any individual editor, in view of
other-than-project-related concerns, would ever care).

To say that BLP is necessary because, even as it may infrequently forcelose
an editor's adding encyclopedic information, it prevents the project from
incurring costs related to defending the Foundation against legal action or
helps the project to avoid bad publicity, from which might follow the
departure of editors, the departure of readers, and/or the departure of
donors, is one thing; to say that the moral concerns of editors, legal/bad
publicity concerns notwithstanding, is quite another.

Cordially,

Joe
[[User:Jahiegel]]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sam Korn" <smoddy at gmail.com>
To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Friday, August 18, 2006 2:07 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

> On 8/18/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> In the context of WP:OFFICE, as well as more recently, Jimbo and others
>> have
>> written somethings about "hurt feelings," as if it was a policy (
>> WP:CODDLE
>> maybe) which could circumvent even important policy ( WP:NPOV maybe).
>> Could
>> you explain this?
>
> No. No no no no no.  That is not the aim at all.  NPOV can never be
> compromised.  All that is different between a biography of a living
> person and, for example, an article on the geography of southern
> Brazil is that it is more likely that the article on the living person
> will have potentially defamatory information added.  This may or may
> not lead to legal action, but it most certainly is likely to lead to
> bad press for Wikipedia.
>
> All that is required is a more *rigourous* application of our
> verifibility policy for these more sensitive articles.  That is not a
> bad thing; indeed it is the real essence of NPOV.
>
> We don't live in some cloud-cuckoo land where our mistakes don't have
> consequences.  They do.  The answer is to make sure that our mistakes
> are quickly corrected and that the damage does not continue.
>
>> I agree with the idea of treating bios with care, but that does not
>> necessarily
>> necessitate the use of an entirely different methodology than any other
>> wiki
>> page - including censoring talk pages.
>
> No, an "entirely different methodology" is not needed.  All that is
> needed is a more rigourous application of our current policies.  These
> rely upon (yes, rely upon, not just use as a bonus) the use of common
> sense.  Most unsourced claims do not need to be blitzed into oblivion.
> Yet some do, and it is this balance that WP:LIVING must attempt to
> measure.  It is better to be cautious in this area, because it is
> reckless and thoroughly unacceptable to say "Oh, don't blame us that
> our encylopaedia accuses you of being a repeat sex offender, it just
> happens because of the wiki process.  It's your problem you're getting
> so upset."
>
> --
> Sam
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Florian Straub

subject: [Commons-l] Commons SumItUp

body:
Hi Magnus,

vielen Dank f?r das tolle Tool. Ich h?tte da aber noch zwei kleine
Vorschl?ge f?r "Missing language links". Zum einen w?re ein Zeilenumbruch
nach jedem fehlenden Interwiki-Link zum Rauskopieren praktischer - zum
anderen w?re ein [edit]-Button neben dem Link zur Seite mit den fehlenden
IW-Links eine Kleinigkeit, die die Produktivit?t trotzdem noch minimal
steigern k?nnte und die Ladezeit und damit die Serverbelastung reduzieren
w?rde.

Vielen Dank im Voraus,

Flo

--
Wie nennt man den Gro?vater des ?gyptischen Sonnengottes?
- Opera
----- Original Message -----
From: "Magnus Manske" <magnus.manske at web.de>
To: "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List" <commons-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Friday, August 18, 2006 3:07 PM
Subject: [Commons-l] Commons SumItUp

> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>


body:
On 8/18/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> Not seeing it here (Firefox 1.5.0.6, Win2K, RoadRunner).

Actually I bet it's "Google Web Accelerator" being stupid. Sorry for
the dud report.

Steve


subject: [Commons-l] Commons SumItUp

body:
"Christian Richardt" <cr333 at cam.ac.uk> wrote on Friday, August 18, 2006 3:39
PM:

> Das ist eine wirklich gute Idee, die du da umgesetzt hast.

I second that :)

What exactly does "Suggest categories for images on commons page" do?

Thanks for the great tool,

Flo

--
=> ICQ# 40528212
=> flominator at gmx.net
=> http://www.flominator.de


subject: [Commons-l] Rethinking [[COM:DEL]]

body:
 "Brianna Laugher" <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote on Friday, August 18,
2006 6:26 AM:

> On 18/08/06, Florian Straub <flominator at gmx.net> wrote:

>> Since we have the chance to restore deleted images where should be the
>> problem in deleting everything that isn't clear after 7 or 14 days?
>
> That would create a lot of badwill. Articles have always been
> undeletable, but there's a good reason WP's never had a "delete first,
> discuss later" policy. For one thing, it's often hard to discuss an
> item if you can't see what it is.

I've talking about copyvios and these should be deleted asap. Imagine
someone promises to get a permission and it takes 2 months. That's a lot of
administration overload that will just slow down the progress in solving the
del requests, because we can't close a complete day because of one slow
person or process ...

Regards,

Flo


body:
On 8/18/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17/08/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Other places require fixed, but large, amounts of lookahead... freelinks
> > > require at least 9 characters, for example. Technically, I'll admit that a
> >
> > What's a freelink?
>
> I think he's referring to the parser's behaviour of replacing anything
> that looks like a valid UR[IL] when the protocol is in a specific
> configuration array.

You mean, when the characters that immediately precede "://" are in
some defined list like "ftp", "http" etc? Ok, from a quick test, I see
that we recognise http, ftp, https, gopher, and mailto, but not vrml
or unsurprisingly file.

And presumably the 9 characters is counting the case https://a

Btw, anyone want another funny corner case (as I gather these things
are called?)
http://     <- not recognised as a "magic word"
http://.     <- recognised as a "magic word", but only the "http://"
is linked - the . isn't.

Heh. Are we going to put that in the formal grammar?

Steve

Steve


body:
On 8/18/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Heh. Are we going to put that in the formal grammar?

Oh, it gets better. Ok, here's a test for everyone. Without actually
testing these, predict how each of the following will be parsed:

*http://[[foo]].com
*http://www.[[foo]].com
*[[http://foo.com]]
*[[the site http://foo.com is cool]]
*[[http://foo.com is cool]]
*[[foo http://foo.com]]
*[[ http://foo.com]]
*[[http://foo.com ]]

The difference in the tooltips generated by the last two is
particularly interesting!

How did you score?

Steve


body:
On 18/08/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> I very strongly suspect that no one who hasn't lived intimately with
> the parser code (that's, what, 4 or 5 people? :-) could predict what
> those things would do; they all seem implementation defined to me.

Being intimate with the parser leads to bad, bad things. Post-commit,
it's like waking up the morning after to find your one-nighter's led
to her stealing your cash and anything else you had on you.

Rob Church


from_name: Jeff V. Merkey

subject:
[Foundation-l] MediaWiki 1.7.1.WG posted with Native Cherokee
	Language Support

body:
I rolled Brion's fixes together and this tar.gz of MediaWiki 1.7.1 runs
with the unmodified XML Dumps currently posted at
Wikimedia.org for the Native Wikipedia.  This version also rolls in all
of the Native Cherokee MediaWiki language messages and editing tools --
Machine translators and mirroring tools not included in this mediawiki
release.

ftp.wikigadugi.org/wiki/MediaWiki/mediawiki-1.7.1.WG.tar.gz

Jeff


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Amazon up Alexa creek

body:
So, ehmm, people are preferring to read wikipedia to, ehmm, actually
read a book? Well, that's good news. Right? For us atleast, whether
it's good news for humanity is another question...........

On 8/18/06, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> For those who watch the Alexa numbers. Seems WP has just overtaken Amazon.com; which recovers the place lost when YouTube passed us.
>
> Charles
>
> -----------------------------------------
> Email sent from www.ntlworld.com
> Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software
> Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Sarah

body:
> On 8/18/06, jahiegel <jahiegel at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> > Sam's comments surely invite the question around which, relative to BLP, we
> > often dance: ought ethical or moral impulses ever to affect our editing? ...
> >
> > Concerns w/r/to prospective legal liability and bad press aside (which
> > concerns can be, I think, persuasively allayed), a certain "do no harm"
> > motivation tends to underline BLP.  In view of the failure to command a
> > consensus of either [[Wikipedia:Wikiethics]] or [[WP:NOT EVIL]], and of the
> > disfavoring by the community of Jimbo's "human dignity" formulation with
> > respect to deletion, I cannot abide the suggestion that the community writ
> > large truly believe, legal/publicity concerns aside, that we ever ought to
> > concern ourselves with the external consequences of our editing.
>
Of course we should "concern ourselves with the ... consequences of
our editing." No responsible publication operates a
"publish-and-be-damned" policy. I agree with Sam that BLP, in effect,
simply emphasizes the need to stick to NPOV, NOR, and V in the case of
living persons, and the reasons for this aren't only legal. They're
also based on issues of morality and fairness, and pride in our own
work. I don't want a mistake on Wikipedia to have a negative impact on
a real person, with or without a legal consequence. Most frequent
contributors believe strongly in the moral basis of this project, so
of course ethical concerns are going to kick in. You make it sound
like a bad thing to care about whether we cause harm, but this would
be a horrible project if we didn't care.

Sarah


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd:  Defamation policy

body:
On 18/08/06, Sydney aka FloNight <poore5 at adelphia.net> wrote:

> The arbcom uses Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons in their findings and sanctions quite a bit. If it is good enough for them, it is good enough for me.

The arbcom has also notably ruled that admins who follow written
policy to the letter to do something jawdroppingly stupid can and will
be desysoped. Thankfully.

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] EN down?

body:
Ok this time I'm sure it's not me :)

I'm getting alternating this:

------------
ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

The following error was encountered:

    * Valid document was not found in the cache and only-if-cached
directive was specified.

You have issued a request with a only-if-cached cache control
directive. The document was not found in the cache, or it required
revalidation prohibited by only-if-cached directive.

Your cache administrator is nobody.
Generated Fri, 18 Aug 2006 17:27:37 GMT by lily.knams.wikimedia.org
(squid/2.5.STABLE13)
----------

and the normal donation request page.

Steve


body:
On 8/18/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> I very strongly suspect that no one who hasn't lived intimately with
> the parser code (that's, what, 4 or 5 people? :-) could predict what
> those things would do; they all seem implementation defined to me.
>
> Or almost all...
>
> They do illustrate why making a late pass to hotlink URLs might not be
> a safe approach, though.

(oops, I should have changed the subject earlier)

Depends what you mean by a "late pass". Any "early pass" is wrong -
basically, a URL should only match if absolutely nothing else does -
no normal links, for instance. But what kind of "late pass" - is there
a parse tree that you can check to see whether the token has been
matched against anything fancier than plain text?

The most interesting revelation of the above tests, for those who
missed it, is that it *is* possible to link to a page named after a
URL, but [[http://foo.com]] won't do it (that generates a, what was
it, "direct link"). However, [[ http://foo.com]] works, although the
page ends up being called "Http://foo.com". It's not completely
inconceivable to me that one day we might want to write an article
about a URL, like if some postmodern band names an album
"http://stupid.com" or something.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Amazon up Alexa creek

body:
On 8/18/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> So, ehmm, people are preferring to read wikipedia to, ehmm, actually
> read a book? Well, that's good news. Right? For us atleast, whether
> it's good news for humanity is another question...........

Stay positive. They were only at amazon to buy porn videos.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

body:
On 8/18/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> In the context of WP:OFFICE, as well as more recently, Jimbo and others have
> written somethings about "hurt feelings," as if it was a policy ( WP:CODDLE
> maybe) which could circumvent even important policy ( WP:NPOV maybe). Could
> you explain this?

Here's my attempt to reconcile things:
We all have different experiences at Wikipedia and think various
things are more or less important depending on what part of the system
we're in contact with. Some of us think fighting vandalism is very
important because we see a lot of it. Some of us think it's really
important to reduce bias in articles regarding the Middle East. Some
of us think it's really important to avoid hurting the feelings of
people who might be written about in Wikipedia.

However: Some things are so important that everyone needs to take them
seriously, whether you find them personally interesting or not.
Concrete legal advice like "do not allow unsourced defamatory
statements about living individuals to remain or we will get our arses
sued off" are like that.

Steve


from_name: Sam Korn

subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

body:
On 8/18/06, stevertigo <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> In the context of WP:OFFICE, as well as more recently, Jimbo and others have
> written somethings about "hurt feelings," as if it was a policy ( WP:CODDLE
> maybe) which could circumvent even important policy ( WP:NPOV maybe). Could
> you explain this?

No. No no no no no.  That is not the aim at all.  NPOV can never be
compromised.  All that is different between a biography of a living
person and, for example, an article on the geography of southern
Brazil is that it is more likely that the article on the living person
will have potentially defamatory information added.  This may or may
not lead to legal action, but it most certainly is likely to lead to
bad press for Wikipedia.

All that is required is a more *rigourous* application of our
verifibility policy for these more sensitive articles.  That is not a
bad thing; indeed it is the real essence of NPOV.

We don't live in some cloud-cuckoo land where our mistakes don't have
consequences.  They do.  The answer is to make sure that our mistakes
are quickly corrected and that the damage does not continue.

> I agree with the idea of treating bios with care, but that does not necessarily
> necessitate the use of an entirely different methodology than any other wiki
> page - including censoring talk pages.

No, an "entirely different methodology" is not needed.  All that is
needed is a more rigourous application of our current policies.  These
rely upon (yes, rely upon, not just use as a bonus) the use of common
sense.  Most unsourced claims do not need to be blitzed into oblivion.
 Yet some do, and it is this balance that WP:LIVING must attempt to
measure.  It is better to be cautious in this area, because it is
reckless and thoroughly unacceptable to say "Oh, don't blame us that
our encylopaedia accuses you of being a repeat sex offender, it just
happens because of the wiki process.  It's your problem you're getting
so upset."

--
Sam


from_name: stevertigo

body:
--- Sarah <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Of course we should "concern ourselves with the ... consequences of
> our editing." No responsible publication operates a
> "publish-and-be-damned" policy.

Um... "publish and be damned" is um... exactly "why wiki works."

The philosophical understanding of Wikipedia has always been "dont
trust anything you read on the web, but then you shouldnt trust anything
you read in print either anyway."

> I don't want a mistake on Wikipedia to have a negative impact on
> a real person, with or without a legal consequence.

I dont think anyone is in disagreement with the basics of being fair to
people. But we do of course sense the slippery slope that Wikipedia should be
influenced, through offsite and non-NPOV means, to change its content.

-- stevertigo

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


from_name: Andrew Lih

body:
David,

Ann Burgraff of Webaroo was at Wikimania 2006 in Boston, and she gave a very
quick Lightning Talk about Webaroo and handed out DVDs of their product.
Windows only unfortunately, but pretty neat.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On 8/18/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Does anyone know anything about this?
>
>     http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/index.cfm?reviewid=462
>
> Presumably it's not the whole thing, but a production-ready subset.
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: River Tarnell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Network outage

body:
George Herbert:
> Has there been any interest towards getting Wikipedia / WMF projects an AS
> number and a dedicated portable IP space allocation?

we're working on it at the moment.

	- river.
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Network outage

body:
On 18/08/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> We have heard several conflicting things about exactly why and how our IP space
> got dropped; more will be said when we have firmer knowledge.

<Insert obligatory joke about the US government or your preferred
conspiracy or religious theories here.>

It could just be gross incompetence.

Rob Church


subject: [WikiEN-l] Defamation policy

body:
On 18/08/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:

> No. No no no no no.  That is not the aim at all.  NPOV can never be
> compromised.  All that is different between a biography of a living
> person and, for example, an article on the geography of southern
> Brazil is that it is more likely that the article on the living person
> will have potentially defamatory information added.  This may or may
> not lead to legal action, but it most certainly is likely to lead to
> bad press for Wikipedia.
> All that is required is a more *rigourous* application of our
> verifibility policy for these more sensitive articles.  That is not a
> bad thing; indeed it is the real essence of NPOV.

Then please, please use your arbitrational powers to hack those policy
pages into a shape that is actually usable by editors.

> No, an "entirely different methodology" is not needed.  All that is
> needed is a more rigourous application of our current policies.  These

Well, yes. Now we need to get overreaching specific cases out of the
policy document. You can't legislate clue, but by God that doesn't
stop some people trying.

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Network outage

body:
On 8/18/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Partway through the period, wikis were placed into read-only lock so the few
> people who could access it (mostly from AOL ;) were unable to edit without
> review from the public.

Lol.

Steve


from_name: Austin Hair

body:
On 8/18/06, Michael Davis <mdavis at wikia.com> wrote:
> Thanks.  I've forwarded your message to our legal group.

... which can be contacted at <juriwiki-l at wikimedia.org> (see
[[m:Juriwiki-l]]).  If you're dealing with this in OTRS, though, you
should take a look at the option/select field marked "change
queue"?there's one called "legal" which is generally appropriate for
this sort of thing.

Austin


from_name: xaosflux

subject: [Wikitech-l] $wgEnableScaryTranscluding

body:
It sounds no worse then the classic netcat comile switch
"-DGAPING_SECURITY_HOLE".

xaosflux
----- Original Message -----
From: "Timwi" <timwi at gmx.net>
To: <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Friday, August 18, 2006 9:25 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] $wgEnableScaryTranscluding

> Alex Powell wrote:
>>
>> $wgEnableScaryTranscluding = false;
>
> Who comes up with such variable names, why isn't that person given a
> lesson on code maintainability?
>
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Commons-l] Commons SumItUp

body:
Florian Straub wrote:
> Hi Magnus,
>
> vielen Dank f?r das tolle Tool. Ich h?tte da aber noch zwei kleine
> Vorschl?ge f?r "Missing language links". Zum einen w?re ein Zeilenumbruch
> nach jedem fehlenden Interwiki-Link zum Rauskopieren praktischer - zum
> anderen w?re ein [edit]-Button neben dem Link zur Seite mit den fehlenden
> IW-Links eine Kleinigkeit, die die Produktivit?t trotzdem noch minimal
> steigern k?nnte und die Ladezeit und damit die Serverbelastung reduzieren
> w?rde.
>
Done.


subject: [Commons-l] Commons SumItUp

body:
Christian Richardt wrote:
> Hallo Markus,
>
> Das ist eine wirklich gute Idee, die du da umgesetzt hast.
>
> Ich h?tte nur eine kleine Anmerkung: Wenn ich dein Tool mit "en:Soup"
> bef?lle, zeigt es auf der Ergebnisseite "{{de|----}}" an, weil der Artikel
> mit einer Vorlage und einer horizontalen Linie beginnt. W?re toll, wenn du
> das beheben k?nntest.
>
Done.


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 02:28:53PM -0400, Simetrical wrote:
> On 8/18/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > You're suggesting to ship XML to the browser and let XSSSL do the
> > translation actually *in* the browser?
>
> Actually, I wasn't.  Interesting idea, but I don't think there's any
> point, since a wikiXML -> HTML parser probably wouldn't be a
> noticeable bottleneck and so we may as well maintain support for
> non-XSL-supporting clients (does your Blackberry support XSL? :) ).

It does not.

:-)

> I hadn't actually thought of using XSL definitions at all, but in fact,
> that may be the obvious choice.  I'll have to look at that some more .
> . . I never paid much attention to it before now.

Yeah; I gather you can do it server side as well...

> > > There would of course be all sorts of weirdness in XML -> WT, so it
> > > might not be as fast as XML -> HTML, but the WMF gets a *hell* of a
> > > lot more cache misses on page views than on page edits, I would bet a
> > > substantial sum of money.
> >
> > Oh, I'm sure.  Except on the top 5% current events-y pages.
>
> Those too.  Those get tons of edits, but even more views.

Yes, but those views *hit* the cache.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


subject: [Commons-l] Commons SumItUp

references:
<44E5BB8A.2030700@web.de>	<op.tehewoq516vp41@uk-richardc.mathworks.co.uk>
	<01ce01c6c2da$25d6efe0$6401a8c0@flo>

body:
Florian Straub wrote:
> "Christian Richardt" <cr333 at cam.ac.uk> wrote on Friday, August 18, 2006 3:39
> PM:
>
>
>> Das ist eine wirklich gute Idee, die du da umgesetzt hast.
>>
>
> I second that :)
>
Thanks, both of you :-)
> What exactly does "Suggest categories for images on commons page" do?
>

It will have that WikiSense tool suggest categories. It's probably not
an important function in this context. I'll leave it in for sentimental
reasons ;-)

Magnus


body:
On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 07:33:24PM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 8/18/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
> > I very strongly suspect that no one who hasn't lived intimately with
> > the parser code (that's, what, 4 or 5 people? :-) could predict what
> > those things would do; they all seem implementation defined to me.
> >
> > Or almost all...
> >
> > They do illustrate why making a late pass to hotlink URLs might not be
> > a safe approach, though.
>
> (oops, I should have changed the subject earlier)
>
> Depends what you mean by a "late pass". Any "early pass" is wrong -
> basically, a URL should only match if absolutely nothing else does -
> no normal links, for instance. But what kind of "late pass" - is there
> a parse tree that you can check to see whether the token has been
> matched against anything fancier than plain text?

No, my suggestion had been to do a final pass that handled that and
several other things (like MAGIC words)... but on reflection, I think
you *don't* want that processing applied to things which have already
been parser-expanded, so I guess you have to let the parser handle them
in-line as well.

> The most interesting revelation of the above tests, for those who
> missed it, is that it *is* possible to link to a page named after a
> URL, but [[http://foo.com]] won't do it (that generates a, what was
> it, "direct link"). However, [[ http://foo.com]] works, although the
> page ends up being called "Http://foo.com". It's not completely
> inconceivable to me that one day we might want to write an article
> about a URL, like if some postmodern band names an album
> "http://stupid.com" or something.

Hee.

Cheers,
-- jr 'http://www.washme.com/soap.html'a
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 8/18/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech at gmail.com> wrote:
> True (album names, ugh).  Note the following in Parser.php:
>
>                         # Don't allow internal links to pages containing
>                         # PROTO: where PROTO is a valid URL protocol; these
>                         # should be external links.
>                         if (preg_match('/^(\b(?:' . wfUrlProtocols() . '))/', $m[1])) {
>                                 $s .= $prefix . '[[' . $line ;
>                                 continue;
>                         }
>
> Any reason that we explicitly ban pages from having titles that look like URLs?

Hmm, can't vouch for that, but I just tried this at another wiki, and
the result was quite strange.
I created a link to [[ http://test.com]].
I clicked the redlink and saved some text.
At that point, the page was apparently renamed http:/test.com (note
the missing slash), and I was told that that page was empty.
Returning to the original page, my redlink is now blue, and definitely
points to http://test.com
However, clicking on it takes me to http:/test.com, which doesn't exist.

Oh, now here's fun. I repeated the experiment with [[ mailto:foo]].
This time, the link behaved as expected, and I was able to save text
to the page "mailto:foo".
I return to the original page, and click the blue link. Guess what
happens? My mail editor opens...

Strangely, neither {{http://test.com}} nor {{mailto:foo}} works, but
that could be a namespace issue, where it's treating http: and mailto:
as the namespace, and for some reason deciding to tack template: on
the front, or something.

Anyway, anyone believe me yet that these magic words are a bad idea? :)

Steve


from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Commons-l] Commons SumItUp

body:
On 18/08/06, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> I was wondering - why not link to this tool in the instructions text for
> new articles?

What instruction text for new articles, exactly? You're welcome to add
it yourself, as is anyone.

 Or do you mean the "this page doesn't exist. click here to create it"
type text?

As this is exactly
> what commons articles/categories *should* contain, it might be a huge help.

Well, I have encountered some opposition to the idea that an article
with six pictures should have 30 different language introductions. :)

For proper nouns (people & places, mostly), I tend to feel only
different scripts are necessary. eg for the Australian city
'Melbourne', there would be at least 40 different articles on it, but
28 of those articles are at exactly "Melbourne". Although if we ever
want to supply better quality lang support, it would be best to supply
all. Hm. Perhaps better 'hiding' would be better, less annoying at
least...

cheers
Brianna


subject: [Wikitech-l] $wgEnableScaryTranscluding

body:
On Sat, Aug 19, 2006 at 02:25:48AM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> Alex Powell wrote:
> > $wgEnableScaryTranscluding = false;
>
> Who comes up with such variable names, why isn't that person given a
> lesson on code maintainability?

The person who came up with it, Timwi, very clearly never ever wanted
to have to deal with a moron who turned it on, had problems, and
claimed they weren't sufficiently warned.

It's a pretty common tactic.

Code maintainability is not the only thing for which large software
systems must be optimized.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	The Internet: We paved paradise, and put up a snarking lot.