from_name: Dufrenoy, Alexis

body:
In fact the question is no more the choice between Debian, RedHat and SuSE,
but only between RedHat and SuSE, since Debian does not really fit on Athlon
64 for the moment. So this software, which could be an interesting feature
for Wikipedia could make a difference, isn't it ?

Traroth

-----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
Well, Taw, I appreciate that you remember my request. Some people at
Japanese
wikipedia indicated that being able to use Japanese in TeX would be good.

I personally do not know much about how good, or how crucial, it is. But I
have
seen japanese wikipedians mentioning to it multiple times, and one time I
specifically
asked if I should make a request to others (outside japanese wikipedia).
Some wikipedians responded that that would be nice. So I believe it is at
least somewhat
meaningful thing for math and other TeX-intensive articles.

Regards,

Tomos


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikitech-l] Need developers

body:
Tim,

After enthusiastically accepting Jimbo's offer to provide me
with "developer access", I quickly soured on having any
hands-on participation.

It was as I feared: no requirements documents, nothing about
architecture or detailed design. The hardest-working, most
universally respected developer(s) kept basically saying
"just read the code".

So I've kept on the sidelines. I've been a cheerleader and
catalyst (for speed tweaks) and for many months a sort of
chief sysop (carrying out bans and promotions).

As for your request for suggestions, I think the best thing
would be to adopt some sort of "best practices" methodology.
I don't care if it's XP, CMM, or just a checklist of common-
sence guidelines from Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development".
Adopt some mutually agreeable (and useful!) guiding
principles, and follow them: that's what I suggest.

Ed Poor
Highly Paid Professional Software Engineer


subject: AW: AW: [Wikitech-l] Maybe we should try to reach a consensus

body:
Oh. Yes, that's right.

Traroth

>Also note that this machine will be running the database only, not the
>web servers, so the TeX packages don't make any difference here.

>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikien-l

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Eternal Ephemeral

body:
Geoff Burling wrote:
> I've been trying to determine for myself a good rule of thumb to answer
> this very question: when is something too trivial for inclusion in
> Wikipedia?

I think this question should be broken down into some subquestions
before you can get a valid answer...

1.  When is something too trivial for me to work on it?

2.  When is something so trivial that I would frown on others working
on it?

3.  When is something so trivial that I think it should actually be
deleted?

I recommend that people take a very strict view of #1, a more lenient
view of #2, and really really relax a lot about #3.  For #3 the least
controversial rule is confirmability.

> An obvious example for exclusion that I believe all of us can agree on
> are the occasional articles that pop up about average people & promptly
> get deleted.

These are generally full of non-confirmable information, right?

> Likewise, there are thousands of individuals mentioned in historical
> records only once, & of whom nothing more can be known or guessed.

But even _that_ is worthy of a mention, or could be, if someone wants
to bother.  Suppose, for example, a name is mentioned only once, in
passing, in the Bible.  (All those 'begats'!)  Nothing, let us
suppose, is known beyond that.

Even so, that name is likely to appear somewhere in literature or
what-not.  Or perhaps someone will come across that name _in the
Bible_ and wonder "hmm, I wonder what else is known about that
person".  Then, wikipedia can tell them "This name appears in the
Bible.  That's all anyone knows."  Good information!

> The point I am trying to make is this: we should keep in mind that
> Wikipedia, because it is an encyclopedia, is a reference
> work. People will want to consult it to answer questions about
> people, events or facts. This leads to the critereon that before
> adding an article, one should consider whether it would be of
> interest beyond a clearly limited audience.

Does it lead to that?  I don't think so.  *Other* considerations might
lead to that answer, but the fact that Wikipedia, because it is an
encyclopedia, is a reference work, implies for me a criterion of
"well, someone somewhere might be looking for that, so why bother
deleting it?"

Now, let me be the first to also say that I think that there *can be*
answers to that question!  One answer is namespace pollution.  I would
be very opposed to turning "Thomas Jefferson" into a disambiguation
page like this:

"Thomas Jefferson is the name of at least two people:

[[Thomas Jefferson (president)]] - 3rd President of the United States

[[Thomas Jefferson (plumber)]] - plumber in Des Moines, Iowa from
1943-1947, subsequent whereabouts or activities unknown"

But I really think that the confirmability rule helps with almost all
cases like that.

--Jimbo


from_name: Louis Kyu Won Ryu

subject: [Wikitech-l] Obstacles to development (was Re: Need developers)

body:
> Is there anyone out there who has considered contributing to the
> MediaWiki PHP script, but decided it against for reasons such as:
>[...]
> Or perhaps you've contributed on occasion but you're deterred from
> contributing again for reasons such as those above?
>
> If so, please speak up! What areas could we improve to make it easier to
> contribute?

Tim, Everyone,

Your list of objections seems to sort of miss the mark so I thought I'd
share some ideas.

 > * Don't know PHP/MySQL
PHP and MySQL, though not particularly common, are simple enough that
anyone with a reasonably strong background in things like Perl, Java,
and other SQL database should have little difficulty with them.

 > * Poor documentation, can't understand the code
I don't get it.  The code is simple.  The Wikimedia server is not nearly
big enough, or complicated enough, to pose much of a challenge or
obstacle for people who have the background.  By that I mean, that
people who know HTML, Apache, SQL, OOP, and the basics of data-driven
web site operation -- it's straightforward.

 > * Don't have a test server
Well, it has been run with minimal changes now on Apple, Windows, and
Linux environments.  For functional changes, that's a sufficient
environment for development and preliminary testing.

 > * Don't have CVS/server access, and you find contributing otherwise to
 > be tedious and frustrating
Since the project is CVS readable to the world, I don't think this is
germane.

 > * Wouldn't know where to start
Yes, that's part of it.

---

The first obstacle, for me, is motivation.  After twenty years of
writing code the novelty has worn off (though I still enjoy what I do)
and I only write software for the best of reasons.  In most cases these
reasons involve money.  Now, I'm willing to volunteer my time and
talents, but it better be fun, or for some sort of just cause or greater
good, or have some sort of non-financial reward involved.

The Wikimedia software needs work like profiling, tuning, index
analysis, and careful analysis of performance issues.  It needs
implementation of fiddly things like deletion management and automated
software installation, and some basic, boring maintenance and bugfixing.
  These are not particularly fun tasks as development goes, which should
be unsurprising, because there are plenty of volunteers for the
high-level architecture, initial implementation of sexy features, and
the like.

Now, developers at Wikipedia, as a rule, don't get much in return for
their efforts.  They don't get any greater input into policy discussions
than anyone else, they don't get any real special access or anything,
and they don't get particularly much in the way of credit, fame, or job
leads.

To some extent these motivational problems are present on any
open-source project, though they seem particularly acute at Wikimedia
since the software is not a good candidate for reuse for other projects,
given that UseModWiki is the most frequent choice.

So, what to do?

First, a greater recognition of the odious yet important nature of some
of the tasks.

Second of all, it would help to publicize software development credits
more prominently on the site.

Third, some sort of remuneration, even if token and noncash, would be
helpful.  Maybe we could start with a gift registry, and people could
send boxes of fancy fruit, expensive scotch, and candy to their favorite
developer.  Or raffle off a free winter vacation for two to some sunny
island villa.  Or just pay a small hourly stipend for development work,
even if it is only a fraction of the market rate.

--

Louis


subject: [WikiEN-l] Mailing list guidelines

body:
Thank you, Jimbo. These are good guidelines. I'll follow them.

Sorry about BOTH being a jerk and antagonizing jerks. One time recently,
you had to write me privately to get me shut up.

Sorry about extending the, um, controversial medical procedure
discussion.

It's going to be a lot harder to curb the one-lines, though. I used to
think I was quite a wit until someone pointed out I was only half-right.

;-) Ed Poor :=> Get, it? "Half-witted!"


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Test server idea

body:
Tim wrote:
>Perhaps we could set up test.wikipedia.org ....

Wikipedia is not the only project that runs MediaWiki. Please use
test.wikimedia.org instead. Part of the problem with attracting users and
developers of MediaWiki has been the very strong perception that MediaWiki is
for encyclopedias only.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Eternal Ephemeral

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>
>  I would
>be very opposed to turning "Thomas Jefferson" into a disambiguation
>page like this:
>
>"Thomas Jefferson is the name of at least two people:
>
>[[Thomas Jefferson (president)]] - 3rd President of the United States
>
>[[Thomas Jefferson (plumber)]] - plumber in Des Moines, Iowa from
>1943-1947, subsequent whereabouts or activities unknown"
>
(We would usually make a [[Thomas Jefferson (disambiguation)]] and link
to it from the top of the president's page, since the degree of fame is
so different.)

>
>But I really think that the confirmability rule helps with almost all
>cases like that.
>
Beware of genealogical publications though. My mother's side of the
family is
Mormon, and they have lots and lots of confirmable people and dates.

So I think you do need some notion of importance. One of the ideas I've
thrown
out is to count the people to whom the article subject matters in some
way; London
is in because it affects billions of people, the cat in the tree is out
because
it only affects the people on the street and the writer for the newspaper,
100 people tops.

I've been testing this mentally on various topics, and a number somewhere
between 500 and 5,000 seems plausible. I don't think it would make sense to
try and pick a number and impose it as a rule, but it makes a good sniff
test
for things that seem obscure.  For instance, most consuls of ancient
Rome are
very obscure today, but once upon a time they ruled millions, and are
for that
reason encyclopedia-worthy.

Stan


subject: [Wikitech-l] Test server idea

body:
I wrote:
>Wikipedia is not the only project that runs MediaWiki.
>Please use test.wikimedia.org instead. Part of the problem
>with attracting users and developers of MediaWiki has
>been the very strong perception that MediaWiki is for
>encyclopedias only.

I should have wrote "for Wikipedia only."

--mav


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Following up -

body:
Delirium wrote:

> Rick wrote:
>
>> No, it isn't.  Morality is hardly "permissable" or not "permissable",
>> but what the person in question values.
>
> That's not true under any definition of morality I've heard.  Morality
> (or Ethics, if you prefer) is the study of what is required, what is
> permissible, and what is optional.  For example, most moral theories
> hold that it is *impermissible* to rape people.  This is not even
> remotely close to saying that I personally do not value rape.

It's important not to confound morality and ethics.  Morality refers to
the principles that distinguish right and wrong, often dealing with
issues that are far less sensational than rape.  Ethics goes beyond a
simple determination of right and wrong.  Morality has a greater
affinity to the letter of the law, while ethics attaches to the spirit
of the law.  The political domain in particular is full of examples of
activites that may be moral but of questionable ethics.

Ec


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Peter Gervai

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Public Library of Science GFDL Compatible

body:
how about wikipedia-legal, folks? it's fun to watch players debating
laws without being a lawyer, but doesn't help much.

I think this, you think that; unless someone KNOWS, would be nice to cease
fire. Or ask the EFF.

grin


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Eternal Ephemeral

body:
Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:
> Jimbo Wales wrote:
> > For [articles so trivial as to deserve deletion] the least
> >controversial rule is confirmability.
>
> That policy doesn't help the project much.

Is it that it doesn't help much, or that you don't like the answer
that it gives?  Do you see what I'm asking, here?

It seems to me that most objections to confirmability is that it
doesn't encourage us to delete stuff that the objector would like to
see deleted.

> Shall we modify the Rambot to upload the U.S. Census tapes prior to
> 1890 (or whatever year they are now available for)?

The actions of Bots, versus human entered entries, are a different
matter, for which we should exercise much stricter scrutiny.

Also, we need not make policy for imagined problems that don't really
exist.  If lots and lots of people start adding confirmable but
allegedly pointless information, *to the point where it looks likely
to cause some actual problem* (like excessive namespace collisions, or
a cluttered search engine), then we will have a problem.

If someone asks "Can I make a bot to upload the Census tapes?" we will
just say no, but this has little to do with the current discussion, I
think.

> Similarly, some states now have property tax information on line,
> including photos.  Shall we upload all this, and have an article on
> every address?  "No, they would just be stubs!"  "Then merge them into
> articles on each street in each town that can be 32k long!"  Clearly
> importance of the topic becomes a criteria, not just verifiability.

I will gladly concede that there are conceivable circumstances that
would lead us to be forced to include something more specific, but
_until we have that problem_, I don't see why we should bother having
a deletion policy to deal with *forcing* it out.

The encouragement of good social graces seems enough, and also just
leaving people alone instead of hassling them seems good, too.

(If someone wants to start making a point by entering a bunch of
information about their ancestors, I'll remind them that I am all in
favor of social pressure to not do such a thing, and not absolutely
opposed to deletion in specific cases designed specifically to troll
us!)

A little leniency and common sense will go a long way towards
mitigating any possible problems.

--Jimbo


body:
Peter Gervai wrote:

>On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 04:44:49AM -0700, Fred Bauder wrote things.
>
>My only question is: are you a lawyer?
>
>If you are not, then it's just a guess.
>
A fallacy!  What makes the opinion of a lawyer more valid than a guess?

If lawyers ever start accepting "personal" responsibility for their
wrong opinions, my opinion could change.  In the meantime I would prefer
to not idolize lawyers.

Ec


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Need developers

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

>
>
> * Don't know PHP/MySQL
> * Poor documentation, can't understand the code
> * Don't have a test server

Yes to the above.

>
> Or perhaps you've contributed on occasion but you're deterred from
> contributing again for reasons such as those above?

Not having  test server is the main problem.
I can use CVS to a certain extent, but when Brion started talking about
"branches" I was completely lost :(

I would still like to work on a new template system, but not having a
test server is a problem.
Also, the *endless* logo votes and debates are not encouraging -- the
idea that new site design would be subject to the same sort of thing is
really not encouraging


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Need developers

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> On Windows? What if someone wrote an installation package, which
> installed and configured Apache, PHP and MediaWiki on Windows? Click
> next a few times and it thinks for a while then opens a browser window
> for you. Would that help?

Yes! Yes! Yes!

For Windows users confused by WinCVS, I REALLY recommend
http://www.tortoisecvs.org/
It's fantastic!!!!!!


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Need developers

body:
Is there anyone out there who has considered contributing to the
MediaWiki PHP script, but decided it against for reasons such as:

* Don't know PHP/MySQL
* Poor documentation, can't understand the code
* Wouldn't know where to start
* Don't have a test server
* Don't have CVS/server access, and you find contributing otherwise to
be tedious and frustrating

Or perhaps you've contributed on occasion but you're deterred from
contributing again for reasons such as those above?

If so, please speak up! What areas could we improve to make it easier to
contribute?

If you prefer, you can contact me privately at tstarlingphysicsunimelbeduau.

-- Tim Starling.


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Need developers

body:
On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, Fred Bauder wrote:

>
>The lack of comments on what the purpose of most of the code is pretty much
>precludes almost anyone who didn't write it from participating. All changes
>together with comments should also be dated.

Same argument here: when writing my toy wiki parser, I checked out
phaseIII software from CVS to get ideas from the code. I was amazed at the
lack of comments - given a target to search for, finding the right bit is
very time-consuming, unless you already know where to look at.
(disclaimer: I'm not a PHP expert, but I thought that I could parse it
quite well)

Ciao,
Alfio


subject: [WikiEN-l] Creationists (was: Following up -)

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>We should move this offlist.
>
>Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
>>Off topic, but is it really this high?  I'd heard lower.
>>I guess like all surveys and statistics, it depends how you
>>ask the question and how you work the data ...
>>
>
>According to a survey released the other day, "half the atheists and
>agnostics surveyed believed that everyone had a soul, that heaven and
>hell existed and that there was life after death.
>
I note the use of the past tense in these statments.  Saying that life
after death (or eternal life) once existed but no longer does has some
interesting logical implications.   ;-)

Ec


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Need developers

body:
> Tim Starling wrote:
> > Is there anyone out there who has considered
> > contributing to the
> > MediaWiki PHP script, but decided it against for
> > reasons such as:
> >
> > * Don't know PHP/MySQL

Am learning. Professional db dev with MYSQL2k, ASP, Python. PHP not
hard.

> > * Poor documentation, can't understand the code

Yes.

> > * Wouldn't know where to start

> > * Don't have a test server

Yes.

> > * Don't have CVS/server access, and you find
> > contributing otherwise to
> > be tedious and frustrating

Yes.

> > Or perhaps you've contributed on occasion but you're
> > deterred from
> > contributing again for reasons such as those above?

No. Deterred before contributing.

> > If so, please speak up! What areas could we improve
> > to make it easier to
> > contribute?

Docs. Good commenting of the code. A SINGLE document that details all
aspects of the development and code. (It's hard when you have to go
fishing and you're never sure if you got it all, or the latest.

Maybe to a wiki for the code... Imagine that, a wiki at the W!

Instructions and downloadables for Apache+php+mySQL on Win2k.

A visual cvs a la mozdev.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears
http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Need developers

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Tim,
>
>So I've kept on the sidelines. I've been a cheerleader and
>catalyst (for speed tweaks) and for many months a sort of
>chief sysop (carrying out bans and promotions).
>
"Senior" sysop sounds better.  It avoids the possibly contentious
implications of the word "chief". :-)   We would hate to have people
jump to conclusions.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Need developers

body:
--- Christopher Mahan <chris_mahan at yahoo.com> wrote:
Previous post, MYSQL2k should be MSSQL2k ... Woah, what a slip of the finger...

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears
http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Need developers

body:
Chris Seaton wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-10-31 at 00:29, Tim Starling wrote:
>
>>Is there anyone out there who has considered contributing to the
>>MediaWiki PHP script, but decided it against for reasons such as:
>>
>>* Don't know PHP/MySQL
>>* Poor documentation, can't understand the code
>>* Wouldn't know where to start
>>* Don't have a test server
>>* Don't have CVS/server access, and you find contributing otherwise to
>>be tedious and frustrating
>>
>>Or perhaps you've contributed on occasion but you're deterred from
>>contributing again for reasons such as those above?
>
>
> I know PHP, MySQL, CVS, HTML et cetera all to a reasonable standard, and
> thought you would all be gagging for me.
>
> I tried to start developing, but found myself largely ignored. I asked
> for suggestions as to where to start, what were the areas that needed
> work, but was just vaguely pointed towards the bug reports.
>
> If someone had said you can do X - something attainable within a few
> hours - I would have probably been hooked.
>
> I made one commit to CVS, but it still hasn't gone onto the English
> Wikipedia (it was only one line).
>
> That's why I gave up trying. Anyway, that was the summer holidays. Now I
> at Uni with much less free time.
>
> My pointers:
> - Be very enthusiastic when someone comes forward
> - Give them something to get hooked on
> - Access to a test server
>

Thanks Chris, your points are well taken. A few notes:

Pushing a feature right through to the live version currently takes a
fair bit of work, and knowledge of our opaque development process. But
seeing your feature hit the live version is a real buzz -- it makes the
hard work worthwhile. Perhaps Brion and I could help out with getting
new features up ASAP.

I found the lack of access to a test server very difficult when I was
first starting. But giving people SSH access to larousse carries with it
all sorts of security/trust implications. For example:

* The live scripts are readable by all, and often writeable by all. This
includes the non-root database passwords. So as a result, anyone with
SSH access to larousse also has full access to the en: database
* All the server logs are readable by all.

This makes people with larousse access effective editorial
administrators, capable of violating the privacy of editors in various ways.

Perhaps we could give people access to larousse, but not give them
wikidev group membership -- instead give them a different group. Then we
could carefully set up the permissions and groups so that these people
have full access to the test database, the test script directory, the
server log and the debug log for test, but not to the main database. We
would also have to be careful with copies of LocalSettings.php in our
home directories.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Need developers

body:
On Friday, Oct 31, 2003, at 06:47 US/Pacific, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> It was as I feared: no requirements documents, nothing about
> architecture or detailed design. The hardest-working, most
> universally respected developer(s) kept basically saying
> "just read the code".

I hate to say it, Ed, but if nobody writes the documentation there
isn't going to be any.

Complaining is great and all, and it sounds even better when the
complaints are about real problems, but it doesn't get things done in a
volunteer project.

If you feel documentation is what this project needs, and you want to
help, then *write some*.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Load balancing

body:
On Friday, Oct 31, 2003, at 09:18 US/Pacific, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Beyond that, I think that the easiest thing to do would be to have en
> served by one machine, and everything else by the other machine.
> Based on total article count, which is roughly comparable for en vs
> rest-of-the-world, that seems good, but is it really?  What about
> traffic?

The European languages peak during the English wiki's trough, and they
almost vanish completely during the English wiki's peaks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/stats/hourly_usage_200310.png
http://de.wikipedia.org/stats/hourly_usage_200310.png

While there is some overlap in the fairly-heavy regions, there are some
times where one server is much more heavily loaded than the other. The
peaks could be flattened out by spreading them with a round-robin
arrangement.

> In the longer term, the right way to do this is not to load balance by
> domain names, but to load balance properly.
>
> I have had very good success in the past using iptables and a
> configuration that looks a lot like this picture:
>
> http://www.ultramonkey.org/2.0.1/topologies/lb-eg.html

Sounds workable.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Need developers

body:
On Friday, Oct 31, 2003, at 03:27 US/Pacific, tarquin wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
>> On Windows? What if someone wrote an installation package, which
>> installed and configured Apache, PHP and MediaWiki on Windows? Click
>> next a few times and it thinks for a while then opens a browser
>> window for you. Would that help?
>
> Yes! Yes! Yes!

This seems a popular idea. Does anyone want to claim this task? (I have
no experience using these things on Windows.)

> For Windows users confused by WinCVS, I REALLY recommend
> http://www.tortoisecvs.org/
> It's fantastic!!!!!!

Incidentally, I once tried to try out MacCVS, which is the same thing
as WinCVS but the Mac version. My eyes glazed over and I quickly went
back to the comfort of my carefully memorized handful of command-line
sigils. So I feel your pain. :)

If TortoiseCVS is as handy as the screenshot looks, that looks
*awesome*.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Need developers

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Thursday, Oct 30, 2003, at 16:36 US/Pacific, Chris Seaton wrote:
>
>> I tried to start developing, but found myself largely ignored. I asked
>> for suggestions as to where to start, what were the areas that needed
>> work, but was just vaguely pointed towards the bug reports.
>>
>> If someone had said you can do X - something attainable within a few
>> hours - I would have probably been hooked.
>
>
> What we need are bug fixes and performance improvements. Unfortunately
> this isn't very sexy; you need to have some familiarity with the code to
> understand how it works and track down the bits that don't work right or
> don't run well, and that's work:
>
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_tasks
>
> Instead, newcomers tend to want to add sexy new features that scratch
> their personal itches. These can be neat, but they also introduce new
> bugs and new slowdowns. We don't need new features right now. We need
> ugly, unpleasant grunt work that no one wants to do.

There are a fair few sorely needed features which won't slow down there
server. For example, a warning when people overwrite images, or the
ability to access the source of protected pages. However, I'm certainly
not doing new features at the moment -- it's been far too long since the
branches were last merged, so I'm working on cleaning up the unstable
branch, not optimisation.

New features do indeed introduce new bugs, but I'd be willing to
tolerate a few new bugs in exchange for a new developer.

>> I made one commit to CVS, but it still hasn't gone onto the English
>> Wikipedia (it was only one line).
>
>
> We're *all* overworked. If something isn't getting done, you have to
> either do it yourself or speak up. In this case, speak up.
>
>> My pointers:
>> - Be very enthusiastic when someone comes forward
>> - Give them something to get hooked on
>> - Access to a test server
>
>
> A public test server that won't wipe out our live server if something
> goes wrong would be great. Who wants to set that up? Lee at least did
> provide access to his server for this purpose, I don't know if that's
> still going on.

Lee's server is still around, although it's a bit broken. The database
schema needs to be updated, for one thing. I seem to remember I either
didn't know how to fix the database, or I didn't have the required
password. Possibly both. Also, the installed software needed updating --
texvc and memcached and all that. I was also put off by a long network
lag. It was all very annoying, so I basically stopped developing until I
had my own test server.

-- Tim Starling.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Need developers

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> I tried to learn PHP because I wanted to help program
> MediaWiki, but I couldn't figure out how to configure
> Apache and the internet resources for it weren't good
> enough.
> LDan

On Windows? What if someone wrote an installation package, which
installed and configured Apache, PHP and MediaWiki on Windows? Click
next a few times and it thinks for a while then opens a browser window
for you. Would that help?

And which internet resources did you mean: PHP, or Apache?

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] Need developers

body:
On Friday, Oct 31, 2003, at 11:51 US/Pacific, Bj?rn Lindqvist wrote:
> Sooo... suppose a random noob writes PHP Document Generator comments
> for all the code. Would it then be included?

They'd be most welcome, yes.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Eternal Ephemeral

body:
Stan Shebs wrote:
> Beware of genealogical publications though. My mother's side of the
> family is
> Mormon, and they have lots and lots of confirmable people and dates.
>
> So I think you do need some notion of importance. One of the ideas I've
> thrown
> out is to count the people to whom the article subject matters in some
> way  [...]

I believe this is being discuseed at someplace like [[Wikipedia:Criteria
for inclusion of Biographies]].  Biographical entries seem to have the
greatest potential for the addition of pointless trivia to the project.
Much of this trivia is verifiable, as several recent article skirmishes
have shown.

Simple, objective criteria for importance have been elusive, and it does
not help that there isn't much agreement about the project mission in
this area.

Jimbo Wales wrote:

 > For [articles so trivial as to deserve deletion] the least
controversial rule is confirmability.

That policy doesn't help the project much.  Shall we modify the Rambot
to upload the U.S. Census tapes prior to 1890 (or whatever year they are
now available for)?  There is all manner of data about people, that is
arguably of interest to at least someone, since, after all, people pay
for the tapes.  And it may make more than a stub, in that census forms
then as now asked a variety of questions other than name and address.

Similarly, some states now have property tax information on line,
including photos.  Shall we upload all this, and have an article on
every address?  "No, they would just be stubs!"  "Then merge them into
articles on each street in each town that can be 32k long!"  Clearly
importance of the topic becomes a criteria, not just verifiability.

Louis


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Following up -

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Delirium wrote:
>
>> Rick wrote:
>>
>>> No, it isn't.  Morality is hardly "permissable" or not
>>> "permissable", but what the person in question values.
>>
>>
>> That's not true under any definition of morality I've heard.
>> Morality (or Ethics, if you prefer) is the study of what is required,
>> what is permissible, and what is optional.  For example, most moral
>> theories hold that it is *impermissible* to rape people.  This is not
>> even remotely close to saying that I personally do not value rape.
>
>
> It's important not to confound morality and ethics.  Morality refers
> to the principles that distinguish right and wrong, often dealing with
> issues that are far less sensational than rape.  Ethics goes beyond a
> simple determination of right and wrong.  Morality has a greater
> affinity to the letter of the law, while ethics attaches to the spirit
> of the law.  The political domain in particular is full of examples of
> activites that may be moral but of questionable ethics.

This is not the generally accepted definition by people in the field.
The European Journal of Ethics, for example, basically does moral
philosophy, and all major moral philosophers considered themselves to be
essentially doing both at the same time.

-Mark


body:
On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 04:44:49AM -0700, Fred Bauder wrote things.

My only question is: are you a lawyer?

If you are not, then it's just a guess.

If CC say "you can change our license of the derivated work to anything else
you like" then it's solved, change it to GFDL.

If not, I'm pretty sure *GPL/GFDL denies conflicting sublicensing.

And IANAL. Go, check CC folks about it. Don't debate my knowledge since I
have none. :-)

And summarize the results here. If there's any.

g


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Eternal Ephemeral

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>>>For [articles so trivial as to deserve deletion] the least
>>>controversial rule is confirmability.
>>
>>That policy doesn't help the project much.
>
> Is it that it doesn't help much, or that you don't like the answer
> that it gives?  Do you see what I'm asking, here?
>
> It seems to me that most objections to confirmability is that it
> doesn't encourage us to delete stuff that the objector would like to
> see deleted.

I gave up on Wikipedia being an encyclopedia long ago.  It's not; it's
merely an aggregation of articles.  As a consequence of giving up the
vision of an encyclopedia, I no longer have any interest in having
things deleted.  So, no, I myself don't seek out the deletion of anything.

We write articles reasonably well, with many excellent examples;
further, the work of many have made for some excellent topic areas,
particularly in the sciences.

Perhaps someday there will be interest in editing these articles into an
encyclopedia.

Encyclopedias are unique works that share certain characteristics beyond
topical breadth and NPOV:
- They are secondary source works;
- They are comprehensible to a lay person;
- They are edited for a certain uniformity of style and content across
articles;
- They cover topics that in nearly all cases can be checked and
researched further in any undergraduate college library
- They are editorial in nature, that is, they are not mere aggregations
of data such as sports scores or stock prices
- They serve a specific niche in a reference collection, with other
publications having related roles.

At present, Wikipedia is a repository and means for consensus editing
for a wide variety of articles, perhaps putting it somewhere next to
UseNet and GeoCities in 'netspace.

> Also, we need not make policy for imagined problems that don't really
> exist.  If lots and lots of people start adding confirmable but
> allegedly pointless information, *to the point where it looks likely
> to cause some actual problem* (like excessive namespace collisions, or
> a cluttered search engine), then we will have a problem.
>
> If someone asks "Can I make a bot to upload the Census tapes?" we will
> just say no, but this has little to do with the current discussion, I
> think.

The main problem, as I have stated in earlier posts, is that the effort
involved on the part of others to verify such trivia is high enough that
it doesn't get done, so the trivial articles remain, unchecked and in
most cases, inaccurate.  Do you think that is benign?  Moreover, this
sort of policy issue is at the root of most of the ongoing friction at
VfD.  Imagined problems, indeed.

> (If someone wants to start making a point by entering a bunch of
> information about their ancestors, I'll remind them that I am all in
> favor of social pressure to not do such a thing, and not absolutely
> opposed to deletion in specific cases designed specifically to troll
> us!)

Is it really too much work to try to agree on some sort of policy rather
than have to start the conversation from the beginning for each and
every case?

Louis


from_name: Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons]

subject: [WikiEN-l] New Mailing List

body:
I think it would be sensible to create a new mailing list: WikiEN-A -- which is primarily for the purposes of discussing articles which, for whatever reason, have become unwieldy to discuss via the talk page. Frankly, its time that a message board was created; and, time more people started using the mIRC chatroom.
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Eternal Ephemeral

body:
Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:

>
> Perhaps someday there will be interest in editing these articles into
> an encyclopedia.
>
> Encyclopedias are unique works that share certain characteristics
> beyond topical breadth and NPOV:
> - They are secondary source works;

Check - I've seen very little primary material.

>
> - They are comprehensible to a lay person;

Check - I'm a lay person in everything but CS, and I can understand
random articles;
with the exception of math articles, most of which need more
context-setting.

>
> - They are edited for a certain uniformity of style and content across
> articles;

Check - at least half of the torrent of edits are to enforce unformity.
Noobs usually
learn pretty quickly to follow standard style if they want to see their
text live
intact for more than a day. :-)

>
> - They cover topics that in nearly all cases can be checked and
> researched further in any undergraduate college library

Check - that's where I go for my source material. Actually, "any college
library" is
setting the bar pretty low - college libraries aren't what they used to be.

>
> - They are editorial in nature, that is, they are not mere
> aggregations of data such as sports scores or stock prices

Check, although the unfinished articles will be lacking here.

> - They serve a specific niche in a reference collection, with other
> publications having related roles.

Check - when I write articles, I'm hitting the highlights and key
points, and make refs and ext
links point to the exhaustively in-depth stuff, and I see most other
people doing the same thing.
References are too few and far between still, I've been thinking about
efficient ways to fix that.

So that's great, looks like WP generally fits your criteria!

Stan


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Eternal Ephemeral

body:
> From: Louis Kyu Won Ryu
> I gave up on Wikipedia being an encyclopedia long ago.  It's not; it's
> merely an aggregation of articles.  As a consequence of giving up the
> vision of an encyclopedia, I no longer have any interest in having
> things deleted.  So, no, I myself don't seek out the deletion of
anything.
>
> We write articles reasonably well, with many excellent examples;
> further, the work of many have made for some excellent topic areas,
> particularly in the sciences.
>
> Perhaps someday there will be interest in editing these articles into
an
> encyclopedia.
>
> Encyclopedias are unique works that share certain characteristics
beyond
> topical breadth and NPOV:
> - They are secondary source works;
> - They are comprehensible to a lay person;
> - They are edited for a certain uniformity of style and content across
> articles;
> - They cover topics that in nearly all cases can be checked and
> researched further in any undergraduate college library
> - They are editorial in nature, that is, they are not mere
aggregations
> of data such as sports scores or stock prices
> - They serve a specific niche in a reference collection, with other
> publications having related roles.
>
> At present, Wikipedia is a repository and means for consensus editing
> for a wide variety of articles, perhaps putting it somewhere next to
> UseNet and GeoCities in 'netspace.
>
Let's analyze the above. LKWR makes a claim: Wikipedia is not an
encyclopedia. He establishes criteria for what he considers an
encyclopedia.
He concludes the Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia.

What's missing?

That's right. He fails to show how Wikipedia does not meet his criteria.

Looking at them, I suppose one could argue that Wikipedia's articles
don't have sufficient uniformity of style and content, and that the
articles are not sufficiently editorial in nature.

But he didn't make that argument, and to do so would require examples.

So there's more needed.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Need developers

body:
> From: Ray Saintonge
> Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 2:56 PM
> To: Wikimedia developers
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Need developers
>
> Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
> >Tim,
> >
> >So I've kept on the sidelines. I've been a cheerleader and
> >catalyst (for speed tweaks) and for many months a sort of
> >chief sysop (carrying out bans and promotions).
> >
> "Senior" sysop sounds better.  It avoids the possibly contentious
> implications of the word "chief". :-)   We would hate to have people
> jump to conclusions.
>
"Sysop with developer access" sounds better. Ed is neither chief nor
senior.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Eternal Ephemeral

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>"Stan Shebs" <shebs at apple.com> schrieb:
>
>>So I think you do need some notion of importance. One of the ideas I've
>>thrown
>>out is to count the people to whom the article subject matters in some
>>way; London
>>is in because it affects billions of people, the cat in the tree is out
>>because
>>it only affects the people on the street and the writer for the newspaper,
>>100 people tops.
>>
>>I've been testing this mentally on various topics, and a number somewhere
>>between 500 and 5,000 seems plausible. I don't think it would make sense to
>>try and pick a number and impose it as a rule, but it makes a good sniff
>>test
>>for things that seem obscure.  For instance, most consuls of ancient
>>Rome are
>>very obscure today, but once upon a time they ruled millions, and are
>>for that
>>reason encyclopedia-worthy.
>>
>
>I find this kind of rule little convincing. 'Affected' is much too
>ill-defined. My mailman delivered post to hundreds of addresses today.
>Leif Ericsson made a colony of a few dozen people in North America, and
>fought with what may have been not more than a similar number of natives
>there. So does this mean that my postman should be in, but Leif Ericson
>should be out? Don't think so...
>
Heh, that's why I haven't wrote it up on a [[Wikipedia:]] page. But speaking
to your examples, I would refine "affects" to mean that which people are
conscious of; the recipients of mail are not really aware of the postal
carrier, and the maintenance person who fixes a phone switch and thereby
enables a million people to make phone calls is still anonymous. Leif
affects
people via his story, which is taught to millions of students; thus his
notability derives from being written about, just as it does for victims
of sensational crimes - and voila, things are brought full circle. :-)

Stan


from_name: Gutza

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>So, you know, not to disparage anyone's personal beliefs or anything,
>but really it seems that people believe all manner of, ah, interesting
>things.
>
>
>
I'd be curious to see a similar study elsewhere in the world, basically
on any other major continent (Africa, Asia or Europe) for comparison, I
guess the views wouldn't be so... mixed.

--Gutza


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: AW: [Wikitech-l] Maybe we should try to reach a consensus

body:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Brion Vibber
>
> I can't imagine any reason to replace the SuSE that ships with the
> machine.

I would stick with SuSE too.  It has shown to be a reliable and
dedicated provider for 64-bit Linux.  Have been using on a POWER4
architecture with great results.

-Fuzheado


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Maybe we should try to reach a consensus

body:
On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 09:02:39AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> MY CONCLUSION: Debian is not ready yet, and there's so little
> difference for our purposes between RedHat and SuSE that we should
> just go with the pre-install.
>
> But... what's your opinion?

RedHat doesn't have CJK LaTeX which is needed for texvc to be able
to generate math with CJK characters, what was requested by some people
from Japanese Wikipedia. Debian and SuSE seem both to have it.
So I'd advice against RedHat.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Need developers

body:
tarquin wrote:
> For Windows users confused by WinCVS, I REALLY recommend
> http://www.tortoisecvs.org/
> It's fantastic!!!!!!

Yep. I use it too on my windows machines. It integrates very well with
the explorer, no "classical" stand-alone application needed.

Magnus


from_name: Louis Kyu Won Ryu

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Eternal Ephemeral

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
>>
> What's missing?
>
> That's right. He fails to show how Wikipedia does not meet his criteria.
>
>
> So there's more needed.

All right.  You asked.

 >>- They are secondary source works

This means that original research and criticism doesn't belong.  To me,
that means that material should really be sourced back to topical
surveys rather than original documents, because of the need for balance.
  Therefore, for example, in areas of music, art, literature, theater,
and film, we should be drawing to a considerable degree from the reviews
and criticism written by other authorities rather than doing our own.
For an encyclopedic article, the ideal footnote for an article about a
film is not the film itself, but rather a book or magazine article about
the film.  This, among other things, helps with NPOV, and makes sure
that we are a summary of human knowledge rather than having a strange
and wonderful new perspective on something.

 >>- They are comprehensible to a lay person;

For the most part we are OK on this, though there are some mathematics
and philosophy articles that push it.  Douglas R. Hofsteader, Asimov,
and Sagan, despite their many critics, all have the allegorical style of
writing that must be adopted when explaining complex scientific subjects
to the uninitiated.  They all value ease of comprehension over rigor,
and we should too.

 >>- They are edited for a certain uniformity of style and content across
 >>articles;

I believe that this remains the largest problem area, encyclopedically
speaking.  We lack uniformity across articles.  Now, some of this will
naturally improve with time, but it will never totally correct itself
without greater effort.  The various & sundry WikiProjects have helped
enormously with this, and those who have participated are to be
commended.  However, this is where there should be some judicious
merging and editing of some of the overdone contemporary culture
articles, and where the unencyclopedic articles should be dropped so
that the criteria for inclusion are reasonably uniform.  Without getting
into disputed ground, it is fair to say that we need to have more on
Dominco Scarlatti than on Phish; more on J.S. Bach than F. Joseph Haydn;
  and at least as much on John Steinbeck as J.R.R. Tolkien.  What we
have instead is the mantra of Wikipedia Is Not Paper which, while true,
has undermined any sort of effort for consistency of treatment.

 >>- They cover topics that in nearly all cases can be checked and
 >>researched further in any undergraduate college library

Many of the affectatious articles added on whims cannot; persons with
local and ephemeral fame cannot be researched outside of the area where
they were prominent, nor can obscure pop culture figures from decades past.

 >>- They are editorial in nature, that is, they are not mere
 > aggregations
 >>of data such as sports scores or stock prices

Well, that describes some of the Rambot entries where they have not been
updated, and there are a handful of articles about CDs and so on that
aren't much more than track listings.

 >>- They serve a specific niche in a reference collection, with other
 >>publications having related roles.

And last, the sense of Wikipedia as having a certain role, that is
shared with other works that are better for their specific purposes, is
a view that is not widely held.  It is, at present, a dumping ground for
whatever article anyone wishes to write.  That's a start.  Maybe that's
OK in the long run too, if that's what we want.  But it is most
assuredly not what makes a good encyclopedia.

Louis


from_name: Björn Lindqvist

subject: [Wikitech-l] Need developers

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Friday, Oct 31, 2003, at 06:47 US/Pacific, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
>> It was as I feared: no requirements documents, nothing about
>> architecture or detailed design. The hardest-working, most
>> universally respected developer(s) kept basically saying
>> "just read the code".
>
>
> I hate to say it, Ed, but if nobody writes the documentation there isn't
> going to be any.
>
> Complaining is great and all, and it sounds even better when the
> complaints are about real problems, but it doesn't get things done in a
> volunteer project.
>
> If you feel documentation is what this project needs, and you want to
> help, then *write some*.

Sooo... suppose a random noob writes PHP Document Generator comments for
all the code. Would it then be included?

BL


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Donation message interferes with Google summary

body:
It might be advisable to move the donation message somewhere else, since
  it is included in the Google summaries, leaving only very little room
for lines from the article that are relevant to the search term.

The Google result for "Otto Rank" for instance looks like this:

=====
Otto Rank - Wikipedia
Otto Rank. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Find out how you can help
support Wikipedia's phenomenal growth. ... External link. Otto Rank.com. ...
=====

Not all Google results show the donation message, possibly because they
haven't been indexed recently.

The whole repetition of "Otto Rank. From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia." is redundant. Maybe it is possible to add "the free
encyclopedia" to the  HTML title of the page, and then reorder the
contents so that Google will pick up directly at the first sentence of
the article (which will typically contain the search term).

Axel


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Eternal Ephemeral

references:
<bnue4t$9fn$3@sea.gmane.org>
	<007d01c39fe9$f78fab10$74001c12@reflection>
	<bnv6fl$ceq$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:

>
> >>- They are secondary source works
>
> This means that original research and criticism doesn't belong.  To
> me, that means that material should really be sourced back to topical
> surveys rather than original documents, because of the need for
> balance.  Therefore, for example, in areas of music, art, literature,
> theater, and film, we should be drawing to a considerable degree from
> the reviews and criticism written by other authorities rather than
> doing our own. For an encyclopedic article, the ideal footnote for an
> article about a film is not the film itself, but rather a book or
> magazine article about the film.  This, among other things, helps with
> NPOV, and makes sure that we are a summary of human knowledge rather
> than having a strange and wonderful new perspective on something.

WP is flawed because [[Arachnophobia (movie)]] doesn't quote a film critic's
opinion about it? That's a pretty strange criterion for quality.

>
> >>- They are edited for a certain uniformity of style and content across
> >>articles;
>
> I believe that this remains the largest problem area, encyclopedically
> speaking.  We lack uniformity across articles.  Now, some of this will
> naturally improve with time, but it will never totally correct itself
> without greater effort.  The various & sundry WikiProjects have helped
> enormously with this, and those who have participated are to be
> commended.  However, this is where there should be some judicious
> merging and editing of some of the overdone contemporary culture
> articles, and where the unencyclopedic articles should be dropped so
> that the criteria for inclusion are reasonably uniform.  Without
> getting into disputed ground, it is fair to say that we need to have
> more on Dominco Scarlatti than on Phish; more on J.S. Bach than F.
> Joseph Haydn;  and at least as much on John Steinbeck as J.R.R.
> Tolkien.  What we have instead is the mantra of Wikipedia Is Not Paper
> which, while true, has undermined any sort of effort for consistency
> of treatment.

Ah-ha, the tautological "unencyclopedic" gives you away. You want to
make people write
about what you think is the  "important" stuff, and ignore the
"unimportant". If none of
the thousands of Wikipedia editors see any point in writing about
Scarlatti or Steinbeck,
that maybe tells you something about how much they really matter. I've
read both
Steinbeck and Tolkien, and Tolkien works on 20th-century readers in a
way that Steinbeck
never will. Editorial boards dictating the length and content of
articles according to
the biases of the literary etc establishments just end up with those
biases enshrined
in the encyclopedia, where they trick the gullible into taking those
biases as Truth.

>
> >>- They cover topics that in nearly all cases can be checked and
> >>researched further in any undergraduate college library
>
> Many of the affectatious articles added on whims cannot; persons with
> local and ephemeral fame cannot be researched outside of the area
> where they were prominent, nor can obscure pop culture figures from
> decades past.

Sure they can. There are a lot of books out there. Take any article
title and
search for it in Amazon, and of course Google will usually yield thousands
of hits, and many of those websites refer to good primary sources. The
manual labor of typing in references is mind-numbing and errorprone
though, and I've been thinking about adding a [[Book:]] namespace that
could be mass-generated and easy to add refs to from articles.

Stan


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: mirror sites?

body:
Chuck Smith wrote:

[cut]
> Wikipedia?  Basically, I want a place to go where I
> can read the Wikipedia when the server is
> sloooooooooooooooooooow.  If not, it might be a good
> idea to set one up.  Perhaps
> http://www.wikipedia-imitation.org/ ?  ;-)
>
> Thanks,
> Chuck

A official program to setup wikipedia mirrors would be nice. So that
anybody can setup a read-only mirror of a wikipedia and become a
official mirror when the follow some rules. The "edit this page" can
point to the root-wikipedia, the real wikipedia.

It can spread the traffic and the expense of it for Wikimedia. And be
faster also.

Walter


from_name: Luc Van Oostenryck

subject: [Wikitech-l] Need developers: update the status on sourceforge ?

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
>
> Is there anyone out there who has considered contributing to the
> MediaWiki PHP script, but decided it against for reasons such as:
>
> * Don't know PHP/MySQL
> * Poor documentation, can't understand the code
> * Wouldn't know where to start
> * Don't have a test server
> * Don't have CVS/server access, and you find contributing otherwise to
> be tedious and frustrating
>
> Or perhaps you've contributed on occasion but you're deterred from
> contributing again for reasons such as those above?
>
> If so, please speak up! What areas could we improve to make it easier to
> contribute?
>
> If you prefer, you can contact me privately at
> tstarlingphysicsunimelbeduau.
>
> -- Tim Starling.

I suppose that it will be usefull if someone try to update the status of all the
bugs entries on sourceforge.
If so then I'm volonteer for this; it will be a good exercice!

-- Looxix


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Test server idea

body:
Perhaps we could set up test.wikipedia.org as an ISP-style user script
directory, i.e. with open_basedir and disable_functions and all that. We
could then make a simple upload form which allows people to upload
scripts to it using a web interface.

I'm not suggesting someone else do this, I'm suggesting someone try to
talk me out of it, if there's any reason it won't work.

-- Tim Starling.


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [WikiEN-l] Eternal Ephemeral

body:
"Stan Shebs" <shebs at apple.com> schrieb:
> Beware of genealogical publications though. My mother's side of the
> family is
> Mormon, and they have lots and lots of confirmable people and dates.

I also have at least two books that have been written of certain parts of my descent. I even
used one of them as my source for a (Dutch) Wikipedia article (although for someone who
had a more important claim to fame than just having been born and died and gotten
a family in between).

> So I think you do need some notion of importance. One of the ideas I've
> thrown
> out is to count the people to whom the article subject matters in some
> way; London
> is in because it affects billions of people, the cat in the tree is out
> because
> it only affects the people on the street and the writer for the newspaper,
> 100 people tops.
>
> I've been testing this mentally on various topics, and a number somewhere
> between 500 and 5,000 seems plausible. I don't think it would make sense to
> try and pick a number and impose it as a rule, but it makes a good sniff
> test
> for things that seem obscure.  For instance, most consuls of ancient
> Rome are
> very obscure today, but once upon a time they ruled millions, and are
> for that
> reason encyclopedia-worthy.

I find this kind of rule little convincing. 'Affected' is much too
ill-defined. My mailman delivered post to hundreds of addresses today.
Leif Ericsson made a colony of a few dozen people in North America, and
fought with what may have been not more than a similar number of natives
there. So does this mean that my postman should be in, but Leif Ericson
should be out? Don't think so...

Andre Engels
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Eternal Ephemeral

body:
"Stan Shebs" <shebs at apple.com> schrieb:
> Heh, that's why I haven't wrote it up on a [[Wikipedia:]] page. But speaking
> to your examples, I would refine "affects" to mean that which people are
> conscious of; the recipients of mail are not really aware of the postal
> carrier, and the maintenance person who fixes a phone switch and thereby
> enables a million people to make phone calls is still anonymous. Leif
> affects
> people via his story, which is taught to millions of students; thus his
> notability derives from being written about, just as it does for victims
> of sensational crimes - and voila, things are brought full circle. :-)

I would not use the word 'affect' for something like that. It's more like
a measure of how "famous" a person is.

Andre Engels


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Need developers: update the status on sourceforge
	?

references:
<3FA1ACF9.9030802@hotmail.com> <3FA2CE4F.3020409@easynet.be>
	<bnv2di$7j7$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> Luc Van Oostenryck wrote:
>
>>I suppose that it will be usefull if someone try to update the status of
>
> all the
>
>>bugs entries on sourceforge.
>>If so then I'm volonteer for this; it will be a good exercice!
>>
>>-- Looxix
>
>
> Most of the entries in the bug tracker are tedious, minor problems that the
> other developers have put into their "delay indefinitely" basket. If that's
> what you want to do, then I wish you well. But you may well be better off

Yes I have seen.
Somes are "nice to have"/"features request", somes are probably resolved,
other are unreproducible.

> fixing the problems identified by developers, rather than users. Brion's
> MediaWiki to-do list is at:
>
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_tasks
>
> That page mainly has decent sized projects. By my judgement, most of them
> require a day or more. My current scratch pad is:
>
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_status
>
> This contains some significant, fairly easily fixed bugs with the unstable
> branch. These bugs are currently preventing the unstable branch from
> becoming stable. It's been a few months since the unstable branch was last
> merged with stable, much to the annoyance of people like Chris Seaton, who
> find their code makes its way to the live version exceedingly slowly.
> There's also a list of new features which need some more testing, preferably
> by a different set of eyes.

Yes, I hav eseen these pages, but I don't know the code yet (and PHP also).
I will look at it this WE.

> Have you got your own test server?

My own PC, with wikimedia installed and more or less working.

> -- Tim Starling.
>

-- Looxix


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Test server idea

references:
<bnuttr$1ev$1@sea.gmane.org> <3FA247ED.6050507@hotmail.com>
	<1FBF434F-0B97-11D8-890B-000A95DAA284@pobox.com>
	<bnuttr$1ev$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
>On Saturday 01 November 2003 01:17, Tim Starling wrote:
>> faster. Our code is also inelegant, poorly commented, and lacks
>> important features. All these things require work, not load management.
>
>I noticed that it is poorly commented but not that it is inelegant. And
>despite the poor commenting, I could do everything I wanted.

It is people such as myself who lack experience in coding, who when they
need to change something need the comments, however even the most
experienced programers reasonably expect good commenting.

Fred


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Allowing use of the Creative Commons license as an
	option

body:
I have decided to offer the  different Creative Commons licenses as an
option on Internet-Encyclopedia and have changed the notice at the bottom
of the page to this:

"gnunote" => "Unless some other copyright license such as one of the Creative Commons licenses
has been selected by the original author of an article all text is
available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. Use of images may be
restricted, check the description of the image for details.

This should allow the use of the Public Library of Science articles and
material available under any other licence including material available
only for non-profit use or otherwise restricted available for use.

As to whether Wikipedia should make a similar change...

Fred


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Test server idea

body:
On Saturday 01 November 2003 01:17, Tim Starling wrote:
> faster. Our code is also inelegant, poorly commented, and lacks
> important features. All these things require work, not load management.

I noticed that it is poorly commented but not that it is inelegant. And
despite the poor commenting, I could do everything I wanted.


body:
On Friday 31 October 2003 15:33, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> We should move this offlist.
>
> Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> > Off topic, but is it really this high?  I'd heard lower.
> > I guess like all surveys and statistics, it depends how you
> > ask the question and how you work the data ...
>
> According to a survey released the other day, "half the atheists and
> agnostics surveyed believed that everyone had a soul, that heaven and
> hell existed and that there was life after death. One in eight

Believed, and the other sentence say believe. So, this probably means that
they believed before they became atheists/agnostics.

> atheists and agonistics believe that accepting Jesus Christ as savior
> probably makes life after death possible."

Agnostic is one who believe that it could not be proven whether God exists or
not. It is nothing wrong for some agnostics to believe that something
PROBABLY makes life after death possible.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Eternal Ephemeral

body:
On Friday 31 October 2003 17:41, Geoff Burling wrote:
> The point I am trying to make is this: we should keep in mind that
> Wikipedia, because it is an encyclopedia, is a reference work. People will
> want to consult it to answer questions about people, events or facts. This
> leads to the critereon that before adding an article, one should consider
> whether it would be of interest beyond a clearly limited audience.

Once when search is back to Wikipedia, it would be possible to see unsuccesful
searches - to see what people wanted to find, but didn't.


from_name: Nick Reinking

subject: [Wikitech-l] Load balancing

body:
> I took the number "90%" as an example. You can make it 99% if you like,
> the result remains the same: One loadbalancer in front of two webservers
> reduces availability. Simple maths.
>
> I also think that load balancing a farm of web servers is the way to go,
> I just want to point out that availability will not increase.

This is not only wrong, but silly at the same time.  Load balancers have
better availability than web servers - if they didn't, nobody would even
bother with them.  They'd just have crazy schemes where web servers
automatically take over for each other when others go down.

Plus, consider that when you add a load balancer in front of a farm of
web servers, you no longer care about the availability of the web
servers - because when a web server goes down, the load balancer takes
care of it.  So, by your 90% rule of availability, given one load
balancer and four web servers:

10% (load balancer downtime) + (.1 * .1 * .1 * .1 = .0001) = 10.0001%
downtime.  Not noticable over just the plain 10% of having just a web
server.  When you take into account the extra speed you get with the
load balancer, plus the fact that load balancers are more reliable than
web servers, it's a no brainer.

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] Load balancing

body:
On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 09:18:43AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> I have had very good success in the past using iptables and a
> configuration that looks a lot like this picture:
>
> http://www.ultramonkey.org/2.0.1/topologies/lb-eg.html
>
> Of course, I did this years ago, and the "poor man's" way -- I think
> there are probably packages (like ultramonkey!) that are quick
> solutions now.
>
> The beauty of this kind of architecture is:
>
> 1.  high availability -- if one webserving node falls over, traffic
> automatically goes to the ones that are still up

Well, the architecture shown does not increase availability since
it adds a single point of failure. Let's assume a server's availability
is 90% (It's higher, of course, but numbers will become too ugly for this
example). Having one webserver and one database server the overall
system availability would be 81%.

Clustering two web servers will increase the web servers availability
to 99%. But now the system has three components: Load balancer (90%),
Web servers (99%), database (90%). That's a total availability of 80.19%.
Oops.

If we really would need to increase hardware availability, we would have
to either have a cluster of load balancers or a cluster of webservers
using round robin DNS and IP takeover.

> 2.  easy expandability -- just add more webservers, at $2000 a crack
> for 'good enough' machines, and install the software and there you go.

That's true, if TeX and image directory can be shared or something.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Alex R.

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Allowing use of the Creative Commons license as
	an	option

body:
From: "Fred Bauder" <fredbaud at ctelco.net>
To: <wikilegal-l at Wikimedia.org>

> I have decided to offer the  different Creative Commons licenses as an
> option on Internet-Encyclopedia and have changed the notice at the bottom
> of the page to this:
>
> "gnunote" => "Unless some other copyright license such as one of the  href='http://creativecommons.org/licenses/'>Creative Commons licenses
> has been selected by the original author of an article all text is
> available under the terms of the
href='http://www.internet-encyclopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=GNU_Free_Documen
tati
> on_License'>GNU Free Documentation License. Use of images may be
> restricted, check the description of the image for details.
>
> This should allow the use of the Public Library of Science articles and
> material available under any other licence including material available
> only for non-profit use or otherwise restricted available for use.
>
> As to whether Wikipedia should make a similar change...
>
> Fred

The question is, does invoking the group of CC licenses create invariant
sections? Or is it possible to look at this as a copyright notice under
GFDL?
I am not quite sure.

This,might just adds to the due dilligence that someone has to do if their
fork is much more than a mirror of the original site, i.e, wishes to publish
a large
number of non-transparent (i.e. paper) copies of WP. That begs the question:
is the adding all these different licenses with different conditions in
the best interests of "free" or "open content"?  Not clear to me.

 Maybe this is creating a copyleft internet ghetto where everyone speaks
about freedom, open content and sharing knowledge, but no one outside
the ghetto wants to adapt the material for fear of all the complicated
legal questions that relate to licensing conflicts, attribution rules,
and fair use provisions may rear their ugly head.

I saw an innocently incorporated song make an independently produced  film
undistributable because of copyright clearance problems. I know these
issues can be devastating to individuals who do not have the resources
to obtain the proper clearances who believed that a minor infringement
would be tolerated by a copyright owner. Wrong! These issues need to
be examined _very_ carefully in order to determine their consequences if
the intent is to make this content available for wide distribution with
varied uses.

Of course we could just do what is being done with those Dibold memos
and just keep posting them on different servers even if those sec. 512
takedown
notices keep being sent out for each alleged infringment.

Alex T.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Test server idea

body:
I tried to send this 12 hours ago but I put the wrong from address on it.

Brion wrote:
> On Friday, Oct 31, 2003, at 03:30 US/Pacific, Tim Starling wrote:
> > Perhaps we could set up test.wikipedia.org as an ISP-style user script
> > directory, i.e. with open_basedir and disable_functions and all that.
> > We could then make a simple upload form which allows people to upload
> > scripts to it using a web interface.
> >
> > I'm not suggesting someone else do this, I'm suggesting someone try to
> > talk me out of it, if there's any reason it won't work.
>
> Part of my concern is simply load management. A script gone wild can
> thrash through a big database and eat up memory and CPU cycles, while
> we're _trying_ to serve Wikipedia to the world at large.
>
> Security-wise, in addition to files there's the database and memcached;
> memcached has no application-level security, so we'd probably want a
> separate daemon for it. Also the memcached daemon would need to be
> restarted for some tests to clear out bad data, which again would be
> better if it didn't interfere with the main servers.

* Disable set_time_limit
* Disable socket_create (in the long term, the restricted scripts could
call unrestricted scripts, which check to make sure the first four
letters of any memcached key are "test")
* Restrict access to the script upload function to only trusted users.
* Require these users to not test any feature likely to put strain on
the database -- i.e. not more than ordinary page loading/saving. If
anyone repeatedly violates this rule, then we take away their access.

Our code is slow because there are not enough people working on
optimisation. If there were more people working on it, it would get
faster. Our code is also inelegant, poorly commented, and lacks
important features. All these things require work, not load management.

-- Tim Starling.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Obstacles to development (was Re: Need developers)

body:
Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:
> > Is there anyone out there who has considered contributing to the
> > MediaWiki PHP script, but decided it against for reasons such as:
> >[...]
> > Or perhaps you've contributed on occasion but you're deterred from
> > contributing again for reasons such as those above?
> >
> > If so, please speak up! What areas could we improve to make it easier to
> > contribute?
>
> Tim, Everyone,
>
> Your list of objections seems to sort of miss the mark so I thought I'd
> share some ideas.
> [...]
> The first obstacle, for me, is motivation.  After twenty years of
> writing code the novelty has worn off (though I still enjoy what I do)
> and I only write software for the best of reasons.  In most cases these
> reasons involve money.  Now, I'm willing to volunteer my time and
> talents, but it better be fun, or for some sort of just cause or greater
> good, or have some sort of non-financial reward involved.
>
> The Wikimedia software needs work like profiling, tuning, index
> analysis, and careful analysis of performance issues.  It needs
> implementation of fiddly things like deletion management and automated
> software installation, and some basic, boring maintenance and bugfixing.
>   These are not particularly fun tasks as development goes, which should
> be unsurprising, because there are plenty of volunteers for the
> high-level architecture, initial implementation of sexy features, and
> the like.
>
> Now, developers at Wikipedia, as a rule, don't get much in return for
> their efforts.  They don't get any greater input into policy discussions
> than anyone else, they don't get any real special access or anything,
> and they don't get particularly much in the way of credit, fame, or job
> leads.
>
> To some extent these motivational problems are present on any
> open-source project, though they seem particularly acute at Wikimedia
> since the software is not a good candidate for reuse for other projects,
> given that UseModWiki is the most frequent choice.
>
> So, what to do?
>
> First, a greater recognition of the odious yet important nature of some
> of the tasks.
>
> Second of all, it would help to publicize software development credits
> more prominently on the site.
>
> Third, some sort of remuneration, even if token and noncash, would be
> helpful.  Maybe we could start with a gift registry, and people could
> send boxes of fancy fruit, expensive scotch, and candy to their favorite
> developer.  Or raffle off a free winter vacation for two to some sunny
> island villa.  Or just pay a small hourly stipend for development work,
> even if it is only a fraction of the market rate.

Not everyone has 20 years of programming experience. Many potential
Wikipedia developers don't have that kind of skill level. That doesn't mean
they don't have a useful contribution to make. And their skill will increase
over time, as they work with us.

A number of people have posted messages saying that my list of objections
were reasonably close to their own reasons for not contributing. I don't
intend to tell them all that they should go get a decade of experience and
come back later, I intend to do my best to address their concerns.

As for financial incentives: let's just say opinions are divided. Maybe if
Louis pushed it for long enough, and made a good enough case, it might
happen. But I think there's a fairly large potential labour pool who will
work for nothing (except for a bit of support).

Extra recognition sounds nice. It wouldn't be hard to increase the
prominence of software credits -- it is a wiki after all. I won't do it
myself though -- that would kind of defeat the purpose in emotional terms.

-- Tim Starling.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Test server idea

body:
"Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote in
message news:200310310937.50883.maveric149 at yahoo.com...
> Tim wrote:
> >Perhaps we could set up test.wikipedia.org ....
>
> Wikipedia is not the only project that runs MediaWiki. Please use
> test.wikimedia.org instead. Part of the problem with attracting users and
> developers of MediaWiki has been the very strong perception that MediaWiki
is
> for encyclopedias only.

We can move it to test.wikimedia.org, but it will still have "from
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" on every page. The project bias is built
into the code. The default language is English Wikipedian. Fixing that would
go a long way to the kind of project independence you're talking about.

-- Tim Starling.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Need developers

body:
"Brion Vibber" <brion at pobox.com> wrote in
message news:C48D19A6-0BDD-11D8-BCB7-000A95DAA284 at pobox.com...
> On Friday, Oct 31, 2003, at 06:47 US/Pacific, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> > It was as I feared: no requirements documents, nothing about
> > architecture or detailed design. The hardest-working, most
> > universally respected developer(s) kept basically saying
> > "just read the code".
>
> I hate to say it, Ed, but if nobody writes the documentation there
> isn't going to be any.
>
> Complaining is great and all, and it sounds even better when the
> complaints are about real problems, but it doesn't get things done in a
> volunteer project.
>
> If you feel documentation is what this project needs, and you want to
> help, then *write some*.

The unfortunate thing about writing documentation is that it requires a high
level of familiarity with the code. But anyone with familiarity is also
highly in demand for the other necessary tasks. So writing documentation is
a very expensive task. But judging by the opinions expressed in this thread,
it may well be worth spending a significant amount of time on.

In the meantime, it would be nice if new code additions were more heavily
commented.

-- Tim Starling.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Need developers (Windows installer)

body:
"Brion Vibber" <brion at pobox.com> wrote in
message news:A17F0007-0BDF-11D8-BCB7-000A95DAA284 at pobox.com...
> On Friday, Oct 31, 2003, at 03:27 US/Pacific, tarquin wrote:
> > Tim Starling wrote:
> >> On Windows? What if someone wrote an installation package, which
> >> installed and configured Apache, PHP and MediaWiki on Windows? Click
> >> next a few times and it thinks for a while then opens a browser
> >> window for you. Would that help?
> >
> > Yes! Yes! Yes!
>
> This seems a popular idea. Does anyone want to claim this task? (I have
> no experience using these things on Windows.)

I could probably handle it, and I gather Magnus could as well. I'm not sure
where to put it on my priorities list, though. And I'm also not sure of the
feasibility -- it depends on how hard it is to automate the installation
process of the individual packages. My basic idea is to only allow
installation onto a system with none of the constitutent packages installed.
So the installation process would consist of installing the constituent
packages, then simply overwriting the configuration files with pre-prepared
ones.

> > For Windows users confused by WinCVS, I REALLY recommend
> > http://www.tortoisecvs.org/
> > It's fantastic!!!!!!
>
> Incidentally, I once tried to try out MacCVS, which is the same thing
> as WinCVS but the Mac version. My eyes glazed over and I quickly went
> back to the comfort of my carefully memorized handful of command-line
> sigils. So I feel your pain. :)
>
> If TortoiseCVS is as handy as the screenshot looks, that looks
> *awesome*.

Yeah, it's great. I was disappointed when I installed Linux and attempted to
find something similar on that platform. gcvs is pretty useless compared to
TortoiseCVS.

-- Tim Starling.


body:
On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 12:46:05AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Friday, Oct 31, 2003, at 00:40 US/Pacific, Dufrenoy, Alexis wrote:
> >In fact the question is no more the choice between Debian, RedHat and
> >SuSE,
> >but only between RedHat and SuSE, since Debian does not really fit on
> >Athlon
> >64 for the moment. So this software, which could be an interesting
> >feature
> >for Wikipedia could make a difference, isn't it ?
>
> I can't imagine any reason to replace the SuSE that ships with the
> machine.
>
> Also note that this machine will be running the database only, not the
> web servers, so the TeX packages don't make any difference here.

So what about replacing RedHat with something else on other machines too ?


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Need developers: update the status on sourceforge ?

body:
Luc Van Oostenryck wrote:
> I suppose that it will be usefull if someone try to update the status of
all the
> bugs entries on sourceforge.
> If so then I'm volonteer for this; it will be a good exercice!
>
> -- Looxix

Most of the entries in the bug tracker are tedious, minor problems that the
other developers have put into their "delay indefinitely" basket. If that's
what you want to do, then I wish you well. But you may well be better off
fixing the problems identified by developers, rather than users. Brion's
MediaWiki to-do list is at:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_tasks

That page mainly has decent sized projects. By my judgement, most of them
require a day or more. My current scratch pad is:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_status

This contains some significant, fairly easily fixed bugs with the unstable
branch. These bugs are currently preventing the unstable branch from
becoming stable. It's been a few months since the unstable branch was last
merged with stable, much to the annoyance of people like Chris Seaton, who
find their code makes its way to the live version exceedingly slowly.
There's also a list of new features which need some more testing, preferably
by a different set of eyes.

Have you got your own test server?

-- Tim Starling.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] [Dr_Sex@telus.net: Wikipedia]

body:
----- Forwarded message from "Dr. David Hersh" <Dr_Sex at telus.net> -----

From: "Dr. David Hersh" <Dr_Sex at telus.net>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 16:37:38 -0800
To: jwales at bomis.com
Subject: Wikipedia

I'm not thrilled to see the following from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexology#History_of_the_study_of_sex

"Sexology is the systematic study of
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//wiki/Human_sexuality>human sexuality. It
encompasses all aspects of sexuality, including:
   *
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//w/wiki.phtml?title=Sex_addiction&action=edit>Sex<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//w/wiki.phtml?title=Sex_addiction&action=edit>
addiction "
I would say that most of us who identify as sexologist do not use the above
terminology.  I cite the following from the eminent Dr. Charles Moser,
"Addiction is a physiological dependence.  When alcoholics stop drinking,
they get the sweats, their heart rate goes up, their reflexes increase,
etc.  They can even develop the DT's.  Heroin addicts have their own
withdrawal syndrom, but again it involves physiological changes (I do not
mean to imply that there are not psychological changes as well.).  If sex
"addicts" are denied sex, they may have all sorts of psychological
problems, but they do not go into a physiological
withdrawal.  FYI,addiction is not listed in the DSM-IV, it is called
dependence."

Please eliminate this category and stop perpetuating a false condition.

David Hersh
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
David S. Hersh, Ed.D., FAACS
Clinical Sexologist
http://Doctor-Sex.org
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] [m.bomb@verizon.net: wikipedia]

body:
There seems to be a trend lately of people writing to me personally to
complain about articles.

I'm half joking here, but possibly we should have a link "Complain
about this article".  But when people click on it, we say "Hey, don't
complain, get involved!  Go back and click 'edit this page'.  But
first, please read _this_, _that_, and _the other_ to understand
what's going on around here."

The reason I'm only half-joking is that it's actually better for
people with ideologically-based complaints to just send me email,
which I pass along for us to try to accomodate in an NPOV manner, than
to futher encourage partisans to get involved.

----- Forwarded message from MINDBOMB <m.bomb at verizon.net> -----

From: "MINDBOMB" <m.bomb at verizon.net>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 20:17:32 -0500
To: <jwales at bomis.com>
Subject: wikipedia

checking something today and found the link I put there

under Islam external links

picture and text about the victims of Islam was removed

http://fruitofislam.com

this site is culled almost entirely from the haddith and the Koran and from
statements from spokespersons for Islam also studied refutations from
scholars.  there are also links to current events concerning Islam  like the
recent statements from the PM of Malaysia

I would like to reedit this entry  to allow people the opportunity to read
the quotes that show the politically incorrect side of Islam.

there are refutation of Islam from ex PLO trained terrorists  who left Islam
behind.

This one topic "Islam"is by far the most crucial subject concerning the
future of terrorism and peace and it is unwise to allow it to sit there
without allowing some of the facts to be illuminated.

I could begin to edit in the dozens of derogatory suras  concerning killing
pedophile rape but these are

 inflammatory and expose Islam for what it is Nazism

but I'm satisfied to leave the one link there it seems childish to have to
constantly re-update this particular page as you have come to know.

so let me know how to proceed and to what extent. thanks

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Load balancing

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
> Well, the architecture shown does not increase availability since
> it adds a single point of failure. Let's assume a server's availability
> is 90% (It's higher, of course, but numbers will become too ugly for this
> example). Having one webserver and one database server the overall
> system availability would be 81%.
>
> Clustering two web servers will increase the web servers availability
> to 99%. But now the system has three components: Load balancer (90%),
> Web servers (99%), database (90%). That's a total availability of 80.19%.
> Oops.

Your assumptions are wrong.  The probability of a server falling over
in some fashion depends on what's going on in the server.  For a busy
webserver, falling over is much more likely than for the load balancer.

In my experience, a load balancer setup with good (I mean reliable,
speed isn't an issue) hardware doing *nothing* but NAT via iptables
will have a huge uptime.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Load balancing

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
> I took the number "90%" as an example. You can make it 99% if you like,
> the result remains the same: One loadbalancer in front of two webservers
> reduces availability. Simple maths.

Simple but wrong maths, though.

The key is that the "availability" we're talking about is a function
of what a given machine is doing.  Individual webservers are likely to
become unusable for many reasons -- apache problems, unbalanced
traffic, etc.  But the loadbalancer is nearly bulletproof.. and
shields the user from failures of individual webservers in the
cluster!

--Jimbo


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] NPOV disputes in Polish-German articles

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> Gdansk definitely was never a "German" city. Its Slavonic name is original,
> and Slavonic inhabitants of that city has been always calling it that way.
> That Germans living there used different name doesn't matter much

After having seen Gdansk, I cannot agree with this description.  The
old town's entire architecture and purpose as a trading port of the
Teutonic Orden, with its monopoly on the amber trade, is what I would
describe as "German".  This includes the St. Mary church, inspired
directly from the brick castle of Marienburg / Malbork.

I cannot claim to be an expert on anything Polish or German, but my
disagreement should be interpreted as an indication of an area where
Wikipedia should provide more background in the form of verifiable
facts rather than assertions that it "was never a German city".  Such
assertions only serve to disqualify those who utter them.

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


from_name: Delirium

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>terminology.  I cite the following from the eminent Dr. Charles Moser,
>"Addiction is a physiological dependence.  When alcoholics stop drinking,
>they get the sweats, their heart rate goes up, their reflexes increase,
>etc.  They can even develop the DT's.  Heroin addicts have their own
>withdrawal syndrom, but again it involves physiological changes (I do not
>mean to imply that there are not psychological changes as well.).  If sex
>"addicts" are denied sex, they may have all sorts of psychological
>problems, but they do not go into a physiological
>withdrawal.  FYI,addiction is not listed in the DSM-IV, it is called
>dependence."
>
>Please eliminate this category and stop perpetuating a false condition.
>
>
Perhaps you are unaware of the long-held acceptance among medical
practitioners and researchers that there are two major types of
addictions, physiological and psychological?  This is neither a new nor
a fringe development.  Perhaps "sexologists" do not recognize it, but
the majority of doctors do.

-Mark


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] NPOV disputes in Polish-German
	articles

body:
Peter Gervai wrote:
> In english, I believe either you have one which is used in
> _English_speaking_ countries (eg. dictionaries, encyclopedias, other
> references), or if there are more, first come first serve, others can
> redirect at their own pleasure.
>
> I'd probably use "danzig" to describe the darned place and "history of
> gdansk" when talking about its heroic past. And I wouldn't forget to

Relying on tradition is not necessarily NPOV, as English (as well as
Swedish) readers have traditionally got their information about Poland
through German sources.  England has strong historic ties with Hanover
(even its own spelling of the city's name), and Sweden's main trading
partner has most often been Germany.

When I travel from Sweden to Finland to Russia, I feel that I am
abroad when I enter Finland, but on my way back, I feel that I am
coming home when I re-enter Finland.  The same goes for
Sweden-Germany-Poland.  Brits or Americans might feel the same if they
return to Spain from Morocco.  This doesn't mean we should limit
ourselves to the traditional Spanish view of Morocco.  I think we
should be aware that the traditional perspective might be biased, and
actively seek other sources of information.  But of course that
information (too) should be NPOV and verifiable.

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Load balancing

body:
Jens Frank wrote:
> Clustering two web servers will increase the web servers availability
> to 99%. But now the system has three components: Load balancer (90%),
> Web servers (99%), database (90%). That's a total availability of 80.19%.

Jens, have you ever seen a real load balancer that had as little as
90% availability, or are you just dreaming up some numbers that will
prove your prejudice?

Here are my recent observations for www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden
(slowness means response time was 5-60 seconds, downtime means no
answer at all within 60 seconds, this page is circa 50 kbytes):

  Week       Beginning     Downtime    Slowness   Avg access time
  --------   -----------   --------    --------   ---------------
  2003-w44   27 Oct 2003     1 %         54 %        8.51 seconds
  2003-w43   20 Oct 2003     1 %         39 %        6.75
  2003-w42   13 Oct 2003     2 %         11 %        3.66
  2003-w41    6 Oct 2003     2 %         22 %        3.42
  2003-w40   29 Sep 2003     6 %         29 %        4.84
  2003-w39   22 Sep 2003     5 %         26 %        4.06
  2003-w38   15 Sep 2003     1 %         25 %        3.66
  2003-w37    8 Sep 2003     5 %         36 %        4.90
  2003-w36    1 Sep 2003     2 %         10 %        2.26
  2003-w35   25 Aug 2003     0 %          1 %        1.42
  2003-w34   18 Aug 2003     0 %          2 %        1.48
  2003-w33   11 Aug 2003     0 %         12 %        2.41
  2003-w32    4 Aug 2003     0 %          6 %        2.06
  2003-w31   28 Jul 2003     1 %          2 %        1.52
  2003-w30   21 Jul 2001    26 %          1 %        1.90

I think these numbers indicate that slowness (performance) is the
problem, not low availability.  The server is capable of delivering
a response in 1.5 seconds, but in the last week prefers to add seven
seconds of dead weight (dead wait, uhuh) to this.

If I could decide, we should build a time machine that brings us back
to August.  I guess this is vacation month with less traffic.  Or is
there any other explanation?

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


body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>What the complainer is asking us to do is to conform to the latest DSM-IV
>which is a catalog of mental disorders which the psychiatric community have
>determined actually exist and for which they have designated certain
>descriptive names. The content of this catalog changes over time, for
>example, not too long ago homosexuality was removed from the list. It is
>hazardous to ignore DSM-IV since the psychiatric community is in touch with
>the symptoms people present and consequently speak with some authority.
>
>However dependence and addiction seem pretty synonymous to a layperson.
>
>
It's hazardous to ignore it, but as you pointed out, it's hazardous to
accept it as well.  If we accepted the DSM-III, we'd define
homosexuality unequivocally as a "mental disorder" in some cases
requiring treatment; I see no reason to believe that the revision from
III to IV has magically made the DSM free of all such egregiously biased
points of view.

On this particular issue I'd rather take our guidance from Intro to
Biology textbooks, which are a pretty good indication of what's
generally accepted knowledge among the wider biological community.

In fact I'd consider that a pretty good principle in general.  If most
intro textbooks on the subject generally say one thing, we should say
the same thing, even if some "authorities" disagree (though we should of
course point out such disagreements where they exist, as in "most
textbooks on the subject.say 'blah blah'; however X says 'blah blah'
instead").

-Mark


body:
>Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>>terminology.  I cite the following from the eminent Dr. Charles Moser,
>>"Addiction is a physiological dependence.  When alcoholics stop drinking,
>>they get the sweats, their heart rate goes up, their reflexes increase,
>>etc.  They can even develop the DT's.  Heroin addicts have their own
>>withdrawal syndrom, but again it involves physiological changes (I do not
>>mean to imply that there are not psychological changes as well.).  If sex
>>"addicts" are denied sex, they may have all sorts of psychological
>>problems, but they do not go into a physiological
>>withdrawal.  FYI,addiction is not listed in the DSM-IV, it is called
>>dependence."
>>
>>Please eliminate this category and stop perpetuating a false condition.
>>
>>
>Perhaps you are unaware of the long-held acceptance among medical
>practitioners and researchers that there are two major types of
>addictions, physiological and psychological?  This is neither a new nor
>a fringe development.  Perhaps "sexologists" do not recognize it, but
>the majority of doctors do.
>
>-Mark

What the complainer is asking us to do is to conform to the latest DSM-IV
which is a catalog of mental disorders which the psychiatric community have
determined actually exist and for which they have designated certain
descriptive names. The content of this catalog changes over time, for
example, not too long ago homosexuality was removed from the list. It is
hazardous to ignore DSM-IV since the psychiatric community is in touch with
the symptoms people present and consequently speak with some authority.

However dependence and addiction seem pretty synonymous to a layperson.

Fred


subject: [Wikitech-l] Load balancing

body:
On Sat, Nov 01, 2003 at 03:56:37PM +0100, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Jens Frank wrote:
> > Clustering two web servers will increase the web servers availability
> > to 99%. But now the system has three components: Load balancer (90%),
> > Web servers (99%), database (90%). That's a total availability of 80.19%.
>
> Jens, have you ever seen a real load balancer that had as little as
> 90% availability, or are you just dreaming up some numbers that will
> prove your prejudice?

Please try reading the entire mail. It says:

	(It's higher, of course, but numbers will become
	 too ugly for this example)

I took the number "90%" as an example. You can make it 99% if you like,
the result remains the same: One loadbalancer in front of two webservers
reduces availability. Simple maths.

I also think that load balancing a farm of web servers is the way to go,
I just want to point out that availability will not increase.

Regards,

JeLuF