subject: [Wikitech-l] Automatic subject classification

body:
Axel Boldt wrote:

>I think that a subject classification of articles would vastly improve
>"soft security" and would save regulars a lot of time, since not
>everyone would have to check every edit as currently seems to be the
>case.
>
>>I'd still like to see if we couldn't build those subjects
>>automatically in some way based on links in the database.
>>
>How about this: the possible topics coincide with the major pages
>listed on [[Main Page]] (from "Astronomy" to "Visual Arts"). The
>shortest link path from such a topic page to an article defines that
>article's topic. If there is no such path, then the article is
>classified as a topic orphan.
>
>To compute these topics quickly, the cur table gets two new columns:
>topic and distance, where distance stands for the link distance from the
>Main Page topic page. If a new article is created, looking at the
>distance entries of all articles that link to the new one, and taking
>the minimum, immediately classifies the new one. If an existing
>article is saved, the topic and distance entries of all articles it
>links to (and their children) may need to be updated; these changes
>can be propagated in a recursive manner.
>
>Would that work?
>
>Axel
>
Interesting!  I had a very similar thought a couple months ago, and
never bothered to mention it.  I guess that qualifies Axel for the4
moral copyrights.on the idea.

The orphan (like the main page) would simply have a distance value of 0.

The path for a page could appear at the top of the article.  This
already happens in some places, and we manually do something similar in
our Tree of Life project.  I hope nobody complains about polyphyletic
Wikipedia pages.

As for saving time for regulars, that may be a very limited benefit.  We
all have certain subject areas where we tend to track things and tend to
ignore topics outside of that.  The real time loss often doesn't appear
until we have looked at an article to see if a minor change really is minor.

Eclecticology


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Murder, hatred and banning

body:
>> Experts will continue to stay away in droves, as long as we
>> bicker amongst ourselves.  To increase from 200 talented
>> amateurs to 300, 400 or 500 people with even the sparsest
>> sprinkling of subject matter experts, we must do something to
>> make Wikipedia a more congenial environment.
>> I'm not sure how to do this. I'm only sure that we must.

> I'm not exactly sure of this. So-called "experts" like a good
> bicker as much as the rest of us. Have you ever read the
> letters page of an academic journal? The insults fly between
> the ivory towers as viciously as in the grimy bars, you know :).
> So don't expect so-called "experts" to be necessarily put off
> by argument, and also don't expect them not to indulge in it
> should they ever turn up :)

I agree; lively, vigorous argument is a good thing in itself,
and won't drive away anyone who's worth keeping.  We're not a
social club here, we're producing a product, and if a little
shouting helps that project, that's fine.  What drives people
away is when they feel they aren't contributing.  If they spend
more time arguing than writing, and the arguments don't actually
serve to improve the articles, then they feel their time is being
wasted.

So arguments here should be judged not on their belligerance,
but on their productivity.  Is the argument truly seeking to
make a better article, or is it just arguing for the sake of
argument, or to push an agenda?


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Article meta information proposal

body:
> Nope. I mean that if, in German, [[Zeug]] links to [[en:Stuff]],
> _then_ the en: article [[Stuff]] should automatically link back
> to [[de:Zeug]].  Now, if someone linked the [[Stuff]] article to
> its Esperanto counterpart, then the eo: article should link back
> to [[Stuff]], and "following" the language links from there, link
> to [[Zeug]] as well, which then would link back to the eo: article
> as well.

I think Ray understood what you were suggesting; I think you
missed what he was saying--namely, that it is an incorrect
assumption that because English article X links to German
article Y, that therefore German article Y should link back
to English article X.  Different wikis will divide up the
space of ideas differently, as do different languages and
different cultures.  Disambiguation pages will have entirely
different sets of links in each language, yet it still might
make sense for a language link to go to a disambiguation page
if there's some overlap.  It's very likely that many one-page
topics in the foreign wikis will be split into several pages
on the English wiki, and some topics will be split further on
foreign wikis than they are on the English one.  At any rate,
the simplistic one-to-one link idea will probably create as
many problems as it solves.


from_name: Helga Hecht

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Honr. B. Carroll Reece, Tennessee

body:
To Adam Williamson,

Thank you for your answer. The Communist influence went pretty deep and is indeed a complicated story. The short wiki page on American Communists was changed to Communist Party of the United States, where I added a link to : Should Communists teach in American Colleges? and a link to Hoover Institute 1999 Guilty as charged.
H. Jonat
--
__________________________________________________________
Sign-up for your own FREE Personalized E-mail at Mail.com
http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup


from_name: Tesla Coil

body:
On 9 Sept 2002, Adam Williamson wrote:
>>> Everyone else - is there a Wikipedia policy on balance in external
>>> links?
>>
>> Neutral Point of View covers that. On their face the two links look ok.
>
> I don't agree. There's nothing exactly wrong with including those
> links, but they're just odd as the first and only links on the page.

What's really "just odd" is that amid calls for Helga to be banned,
she offers a link to an article that with minor editing would join
the argument on behalf doing so:

"Out of this long and painstaking examination I have come reluctantly
 to the conclusion that nazi-sympathizer internet kooks should not be
 allowed to write Wikipedia articles.  I am now convinced that a nazi-
 sympathizer internet kook is not a free person.  Freedom, I believe
 is the most essential ingredient of Wikipedia and democracy."

I propose the "Communists Should Not Teach in American Colleges"
link be moved to [[Censorship]] under the heading "Philosophical
arguments for censorship," as its contribution to the topic of
the [[Communist Party of the United States of America]] appears
relatively inessential.


from_name: wojtek pobratyn

subject: [Wikipedia-l] external links

body:
At 12:12 09.09.2002, adamw wrote:

>Everyone else - is there a Wikipedia policy on balance in external
>links?

Not that I know of. Just common sense
should be enough.

I do recall removing direct links on [[Hate sites]] though.

WojPob


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
>On 9 Sept 2002, Adam Williamson wrote:
>>>> Everyone else - is there a Wikipedia policy on balance in external
>>>> links?
>>>
>>> Neutral Point of View covers that. On their face the two links look ok.
>>
>> I don't agree. There's nothing exactly wrong with including those
>> links, but they're just odd as the first and only links on the page.
>
>What's really "just odd" is that amid calls for Helga to be banned,
>she offers a link to an article that with minor editing would join
>the argument on behalf doing so:
>
>"Out of this long and painstaking examination I have come reluctantly
> to the conclusion that nazi-sympathizer internet kooks should not be
> allowed to write Wikipedia articles.  I am now convinced that a nazi-
> sympathizer internet kook is not a free person.  Freedom, I believe
> is the most essential ingredient of Wikipedia and democracy."
>
>I propose the "Communists Should Not Teach in American Colleges"
>link be moved to [[Censorship]] under the heading "Philosophical
>arguments for censorship," as its contribution to the topic of
>the [[Communist Party of the United States of America]] appears
>relatively inessential.

It could go there too, and possibly in an article about McCarthyism,  but I
think it belongs as one link among others which have a more friendly view.
That sort of policy was eventually overturned by decisions of the Supreme
Court, but it illustrates how a portion of the American  public felt about
Communists.

Fred


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
There is conflict in the world, and therefore in Wikipedia (including this mailing list). For selfish reasons, people murder other people: a fight with a stranger in a bar, a family quarrel, clans fighting (Hatfield vs. McCoy), ethnic/national/religious groups fighting over land, people or ideology. There is no rule or procedure that will end conflict. When there is no love, fighting is inevitable.

Ironically, the 2 biggest areas of conflict on the Wikipedia are the articles about murder and hatred. The history of warfare and conquest in Europe is what Helga and Dr. Kemp were contending over. The aspirations of the Jewish people for a homeland (i.e., Zionism) and the largely Arab aspiration for a "Palestinian homeland", in the Middle East, is a cauldron ever bubbling over and scalding us all. Debates over what is or is not "anti-Semitism" or "racism" consume us with their flames.

I think what Jimbo and Larry were hoping is that co-operating contributors could collaborate on creating neutral articles: i.e., articles which did not champion any side but rather described the various points of view.

We keep getting away from the neutral stance -- all of us, me included -- and lapse into championing the "right" point of view. All right-thinking people agree that XYZ is bad and PQR is good. Yeah, sure, all except that significant minority who insists on something else, and the cauldron boils over again.

Experts will continue to stay away in droves, as long as we bicker amongst ourselves. To increase from 200 talented amateurs to 300, 400 or 500 people with even the sparsest sprinkling of subject matter experts, we must do something to make Wikipedia a more congenial environment.

I'm not sure how to do this. I'm only sure that we must.

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
>At 2002-09-09 10:19 -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>After much deliberation, and after due consideration for all of the
>>arguments and discussions here, and taking into account what appears
>>to me to be a general consensus, I have chosen to ban Helga for a
>>period of 3 months.

>Was she tried before a competent judge? Or before a jury of
>here peers?

I would say her peers.

>Sure, and some sex on the side.

What crap!

>
>Bah,
>Jaap

Fred


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
>> Was she tried before a competent judge? Or before a jury
>> of her peers?

Yes, on both counts.  We all bent over backwards to try
to help her become a useful contributor and gave her every
opportunity to state her side of the case.  But in the end,
her peers concluded that she was more a hindrance to the
project than a help, and our judge did what was necessary
to get our work done.

And I disagree that short bans of 2 days or so are of any
use; this isn't a punishment, really.  We're not just issuing
a slap on the wrist and saying "don't do that"--we've already
done that ad nauseam for a long time now.  She's already
gotten any message there was for her to get.  The ban is a
practical measure to allow the rest of us to simply edit
articles without having to waste any more time cleaning up
her messes.  That's not useful unless it's for a reasonable
period of time.


body:
> That reminds me. Whatever happend to the code for grouping edits
> on the recent changes page? I remember you made a test site and
> then ... nothing?

I'm still not happy with my latest code, and I've been working
on other matters.  But I'll get back to that shortly, because I
think I have a solution to the one thing I didn't like.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Note to the militia:  Reciprocal System of Theory

body:
Speaking of kooks, it looks like Doug Bundy is back in
force editing the development version of Reciprocal
System of Theory article (he's logged-in now). I've
already placed a criticism section at the end of that
version but physics and mathematics are not my strong
points so I fear my counter-arguments are at best weak
(much of the last "paragraph" is a set of unfinished
notes, so it may read strange). Could somebody
knowledgeable in either physics or mathematics take a
look at that article?

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_System_of_Theory/Temp

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Speaking of kooks, it looks like Doug Bundy is back in
>force editing the development version of Reciprocal
>System of Theory article (he's logged-in now). I've
>already placed a criticism section at the end of that
>version but physics and mathematics are not my strong
>points so I fear my counter-arguments are at best weak
>(much of the last "paragraph" is a set of unfinished
>notes, so it may read strange). Could somebody
>knowledgeable in either physics or mathematics take a
>look at that article?
>
I really don't think that articles of this sort can be adequately
refuted by directly attacking all of its details.  If the premises that
underlay such a system are questionable, then everything that follows
from those premises is questionable.  The entire debate beyond those
premises is GIGO.

The burden of proof for a new theory rests with its proponents.
 Labelling it with the pejorative "pseudoscience" does not advance the
discussion at all; it just shifts some of the burden to the opponents
who now introduce a new claim in the form of a pejorative that also
needs proving.

The originator of theretical framework such as this one is the sole real
authority about what he has said or meant, but that doesn't do him much
good.  For most of us they remain unintelligible.  As long as articles
of this sort don't spread out to infect other articles I would mostly
let them be. Adding a paragraph or two explaining the fallacies in the
premises for the sake of NPOV is a good idea, but I would stop there.
 Such articles are Wikipedia's benign tumours; why prod them into
malignancy?
Eclecticology


subject: [Wikipedia-l] little earthquakes page - song extract?!

body:
> The page for Little Earthquakes, a Tori Amos album, includes an
> extract from one of the album's songs. This seems a bit dubious,
> copyright-wise! I've removed the link for now, to be safe. Does
> anyone know if the extract is legally OK for inclusion in
> Wikipedia? Check the history of Tori Amos/Little Earthquakes to
> see the page with the link (damn subpages).

If you are talking about "Ta_crucify.ogg", that's a 17-second
sample as is noted on the description page for the upload. Short
samples like these (I've done others on the Simon & Garfunkel and
Beatles pages as well) should be no problem under US fair use law.
I cannot comment on the laws of other nations.


body:
> Ah, that's a point. Forgot about the 5% of copyright material rule.
> HOWEVER, I believe in music isn't the track as well as the entire
> recording under copyright? i.e., you could only take 5% of a track?

There is no such thing as a "5%" rule in American law.  Fair use
is judged on a combination of subjective factors, all of which we
should meet easily here.


from_name: Adam Williamson

body:
On Mon, 2002-09-09 at 03:37, Fred Bauder wrote:

> Neutral Point of View covers that. On their face the two links look ok.

I don't agree. There's nothing exactly wrong with including those links,
but they're just odd as the first and only links on the page.
Unfortunately I don't know of better places to link to...

> Back on list of political parties there is a link to what purports to be
> the Communist Party website, that could be included in the article

Is it OK to have links to external pages in the main text of articles? I
was under the impression they had to be contained in a separate External
Links section, as is done on this page.

> I am by the way, the one who deleted Helga's material on infiltration of
> the Truman administration. It is not apparent because after deletion I
> redirected the article to [[Communist Party]], then someone else deleted
> the page Helga had made. Now apparently you (adamw) have created a page
> with the correct contemporay title.

? I've not created or edited any pages on this topic, all i've done is
have a look at some of Helga's stuff and sent some comments here.
--
adamw


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
>
>
>> Please put the language links in a separate table, otherwise you are
>> violating the first normal form of database design theory. Any
>> introductory
>> text on database design will tell you why that is bad.
>>
> I doubt that many of us have such a text in their libraries.  OTOH
> Wikipedia is a real database rather than a theoretical one so the
> rules for theoretical databases shouldn't apply. :-)

IMHO, a separate *database* would be even better than a separate
*table*. The database would then consist of a single table, with items
like :
lang_from, lang_to, title_from, title_to

If we'd store the language links in the "source" language database,
cross-referencing would have to compare two different databases. I am
uncertain if that can be done in a single SQL request; probably not.
Think of "all articles that link to the en: wikipedia, but are not
linked back from there". How would you do that if your links are
scattered in two dozen different databases?

Comments from the database wizard? :)

Magnus


body:
lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:

>I'm not yet convinced that it would be worth
>the effort, though.  I'm more inclined to think that the
>international wikis should be more independent and encapsulated.
>
On the de: wikipedia, they're adding en: links like crazy. eo: and pl:
are also very popular ;)
If someone made a link from de: to en:, I (and many other Germans, I'm
sure) would very much like for a link from en: to de: to be added
automatically, if there isn't one already.
Yes, you don't like the software altering article text, but it wouldn't
be altering, it would be the special case "appending", which should be
safe enough.
Also, we'd like to automatically list all the pages that don't link to
en:, for example; either to insert the link, or to write the en:
counterpart, based on the German article.
By the way, there's about a dozen or so links in the German "links"
table that start with "en:"...
(SELECT bl_to FROM brokenlinks WHERE bl_to LIKE "en:%")

>>I like the idea of links for categories ('biography', 'country',
>>'mathematical theorem', 'book', 'movie', ...) by the way.
>>
>>
>
>We discussed tings like that early on, and initially rejcted it
>as an attempt to categorize articles in a non-wiki way; we wanted
>different organization schemes to evolve out of normal wiki
>editing and linking, rather than imposing order from the outside.
>
As far as I remember, the categories we discussed were more like
"Biology" or "Chemistry". What I suggest is a more technical thing, like
"biography", "year", "day", "city", "book", "movie", etc. There could
also be tags like "plant" and "animal", because these are easy to tell.
Wether an article belongs to "Chemistry", "Biology", "Biochemistry",
"Genetics" or "Molecular Biology" is *way* harder to tell.

The obvious way (to me;) here is a new namespace, one that "doesn't
exist", but is generated on-the-fly, like "special:". I suggest "type:".

Magnus


body:
On Mon, 2002-09-09 at 19:34, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> Experts will continue to stay away in droves, as long as we bicker amongst ourselves.
> To increase from 200 talented amateurs to 300, 400 or 500 people with even the sparsest
> sprinkling of subject matter experts, we must do something to make Wikipedia a more
> congenial environment.
>
> I'm not sure how to do this. I'm only sure that we must.

I'm not exactly sure of this. So-called "experts" like a good bicker as
much as the rest of us. Have you ever read the letters page of an
academic journal? The insults fly between the ivory towers as viciously
as in the grimy bars, you know :). So don't expect so-called "experts"
to be necessarily put off by argument, and also don't expect them not to
indulge in it should they ever turn up :)
--
adamw


from_name: Axel Boldt

body:
I think that a subject classification of articles would vastly improve
"soft security" and would save regulars a lot of time, since not
everyone would have to check every edit as currently seems to be the
case.

>I'd still like to see if we couldn't build those subjects
>automatically in some way based on links in the database.

How about this: the possible topics coincide with the major pages
listed on [[Main Page]] (from "Astronomy" to "Visual Arts"). The
shortest link path from such a topic page to an article defines that
article's topic. If there is no such path, then the article is
classified as a topic orphan.

To compute these topics quickly, the cur table gets two new columns:
topic and distance, where distance stands for the link distance from the
Main Page topic page. If a new article is created, looking at the
distance entries of all articles that link to the new one, and taking
the minimum, immediately classifies the new one. If an existing
article is saved, the topic and distance entries of all articles it
links to (and their children) may need to be updated; these changes
can be propagated in a recursive manner.

Would that work?

Axel


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Mon, Sep 09, 2002 at 08:34:24PM +0200, Axel Boldt wrote:
> I think that a subject classification of articles would vastly improve
> "soft security" and would save regulars a lot of time, since not
> everyone would have to check every edit as currently seems to be the
> case.
>
> >I'd still like to see if we couldn't build those subjects
> >automatically in some way based on links in the database.
>
> How about this: the possible topics coincide with the major pages
> listed on [[Main Page]] (from "Astronomy" to "Visual Arts"). The
> shortest link path from such a topic page to an article defines that
> article's topic. If there is no such path, then the article is
> classified as a topic orphan.
>
> To compute these topics quickly, the cur table gets two new columns:
> topic and distance, where distance stands for the link distance from the
> Main Page topic page. If a new article is created, looking at the
> distance entries of all articles that link to the new one, and taking
> the minimum, immediately classifies the new one. If an existing
> article is saved, the topic and distance entries of all articles it
> links to (and their children) may need to be updated; these changes
> can be propagated in a recursive manner.
>
> Would that work?

1.
No, it wouldn't.

Both deletion and creation of links are hard problems:

Main page -> Biology   -> A1
          -> Chemistry -> A2 -> A3 -> A4 -> Target
				      A5 -> Target

Now what happens when we add link from A1 to A5 ?
There are lot of links from A5 to other articles,
recursion here would mean recalculating major part of topology.

Deletion of any of links in current shortest path (if we store it
somewhere) require recalculation of whole topology too.

2.
But it would be possible to create initial classification that way.


body:
I don't think it would be a good idea to hardwire article *subject
categories* at all. We had that discussion some time ago, as Lee said. I
was talking about *article types*.


body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> The automatic linking would seem to have one big problem:
> translation. Depending on the machine translation of article title
> could give frighteningly unpredictable results.  At the English word
> "law" my English/German dictionary gives "Gesetz". "Recht", "Jura",
> and "Jurisprudenz" as possible translations.  A native German speaking
> human may have no problem sorting this out, but a machine has only a
> 25% chance of getting it right.
> A possible solution might be have the source language term as an
> article title in the target language Wikipedia, perhaps titled in the
> form [[Topic (source language)]] to avoid inadvertant ambiguation.
> The source language titled article would be nothing more than a
> redirect to the correctly titled article in the target language, or
> (in the absence of such an article to a single article perhaps named
> [[Articles to be translated from (source language)]]. where all of
> these would be listed.

Nope. I mean that if, in German, [[Zeug]] links to [[en:Stuff]], _then_
the en: article [[Stuff]] should automatically link back to [[de:Zeug]].
Now, if someone linked the [[Stuff]] article to its Esperanto
counterpart, then the eo: article should link back to [[Stuff]], and
"following" the language links from there, link to [[Zeug]] as well,
which then would link back to the eo: article as well.

Basically, it should just logically complete a "network" that is already
up manually, but in parts.


from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
On 09-09-2002, Jimmy Wales wrote thusly :
> After much deliberation, and after due consideration for all of the
> arguments and discussions here, and taking into account what appears
> to me to be a general consensus, I have chosen to ban Helga for a
> period of 3 months.
> After that time, she can reapply to me personally for re-instatement.
> I know that not everyone will be happy with this decision, although
> the vast majority will be.  Such is the nature of consensus.  I can't
> wait for unanimity, or we will wait forever.
> I am fully aware of the dangers of precedent, which is why I have
> waited so long to take action in this case.  Banning should always be
> a "last resort".  After more than a year of trying to work with Helga,
> and after losing more than one highly valued contributor because of
> her, we are now at a last resort stage.
> To my mind, the difficulty with Helga is not her idiosyncratic views
> on history, but her inability or refusal to work co-operatively to
> resolve differences.  Even here, on the mailing list, where I invited
> her to discuss these issues, she prefers to ignore discussions about
> her posting style in order to re-iterate accusations of censorship and
> to repeat her strange historical claims.
> In order to contribute to a restoration of the peace, I will be mostly
> avoiding further public comment, although everyone who likes is more
> than invited to write to me privately to support or decry this
> decision.
> Helga, in particular, is welcome to write to me to discuss this, but
> there is really no appeal possible at this point.  The ban is not
> permanent, and with good behavior, she can come back and try again in
> 3 months time.

Decision hard to take and uneasy one but the right one IMO.

Is she also banned from the German Wikipedia ?

Regards,
kpjas.


from_name: Steve Callaway

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
I can only concur. It is a pity that we did not grasp this particular nettle
sooner.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz" <kpj at kki.net.pl>
To: <wikipedia-l at nupedia.com>
Sent: Monday, September 09, 2002 8:26 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

> On 09-09-2002, Jimmy Wales wrote thusly :
> > After much deliberation, and after due consideration for all of the
> > arguments and discussions here, and taking into account what appears
> > to me to be a general consensus, I have chosen to ban Helga for a
> > period of 3 months.
> > After that time, she can reapply to me personally for re-instatement.
> > I know that not everyone will be happy with this decision, although
> > the vast majority will be.  Such is the nature of consensus.  I can't
> > wait for unanimity, or we will wait forever.
> > I am fully aware of the dangers of precedent, which is why I have
> > waited so long to take action in this case.  Banning should always be
> > a "last resort".  After more than a year of trying to work with Helga,
> > and after losing more than one highly valued contributor because of
> > her, we are now at a last resort stage.
> > To my mind, the difficulty with Helga is not her idiosyncratic views
> > on history, but her inability or refusal to work co-operatively to
> > resolve differences.  Even here, on the mailing list, where I invited
> > her to discuss these issues, she prefers to ignore discussions about
> > her posting style in order to re-iterate accusations of censorship and
> > to repeat her strange historical claims.
> > In order to contribute to a restoration of the peace, I will be mostly
> > avoiding further public comment, although everyone who likes is more
> > than invited to write to me privately to support or decry this
> > decision.
> > Helga, in particular, is welcome to write to me to discuss this, but
> > there is really no appeal possible at this point.  The ban is not
> > permanent, and with good behavior, she can come back and try again in
> > 3 months time.
>
> Decision hard to take and uneasy one but the right one IMO.
>
> Is she also banned from the German Wikipedia ?
>
> Regards,
> kpjas.
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
Jaap,

There is a long and tedious history to this which your posting plainly
reveals your are unaware of.

I am certainly no advocate of blanket bans etc, however this is one which is
seriously belated, and our failure to act and remove the troubled and
troublesome Ms Hecht has severely set back work on several key areas of
historical work. Every effort has been made to accommodate her within the
programme and she has studiously and assiduously refused to comply with even
simple requests to conform with good or even acceptable practice.

The corollary of not banning the likes of Ms Hecht is that the historical
effort has to date lost two highly valued and valuable contributors: how
many more is her infantile and inflammatory gibberish to alienate before we
act? This is overdue and not precipitate action.

Steve Callaway

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jaap van Ganswijk" <ganswijk at xs4all.nl>
To: <wikipedia-l at nupedia.com>
Sent: Monday, September 09, 2002 9:19 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

> At 2002-09-09 10:19 -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> >After much deliberation, and after due consideration for all of the
> >arguments and discussions here, and taking into account what appears
> >to me to be a general consensus, I have chosen to ban Helga for a
> >period of 3 months.
>
> Banned from what? This list? The English Wikipedia. All Wikipedia?
>
> 3 months is too long to ban people anyway. Try 2 days first, then
> a week, then twice that.
>
> As an European this reminds me of communism and nazisme.
>
> Was she tried before a competent judge? Or before a jury of
> here peers?
>
> How can new Wikipedia-aspirant writers expect to be treated
> fairly whenever they will try to introduce a new aspect in
> say 20 years when you are all over 40?
>
> Anyway I think that legal matters like this should be handled
> more carefully.
>
> What I object most to, it that the subject itself may have
> been disallowed to right to rebuttle.
>
> >After that time, she can reapply to me personally for re-instatement.
>
> Sure, and some sex on the side.
>
> >I know that not everyone will be happy with this decision, although
> >the vast majority will be.
>
> Not me.
>
> >Such is the nature of consensus.
>
> The nature of consensus is that you achieve it first.
>
> >I can't wait for unanimity, or we will wait forever.
>
> Is there some voting mechanism or did you just ask your
> friends?
>
> >I am fully aware of the dangers of precedent,
>
> So don't do it.
>
> >which is why I have
> >waited so long to take action in this case.
>
> Ok, so because you waited so long, it makes it
> right? And from which did you ban here exactly?
> And why?
>
> >Banning should always be a "last resort".
>
> Yes. Like the death penalty.
>
> And we don't like that in Europe.
>
> >After more than a year of trying to work with Helga,
> >and after losing more than one highly valued contributor because of
> >her,
>
> So we lost one contributor, who may have had other
> things to do (like me), and Helga is to blame!
>
> Conflicts like this with Helga motivate
> me to stay. Like my heroes Caesar, Machiavelli
> etc. I like conflict.
>
> >we are now at a last resort stage.
>
> No, don't over dramatize matters. Buy I good 3D-video-card
> and play games like 'Gore', Unreal etc. to relax.
>
> >To my mind, the difficulty with Helga is not her idiosyncratic views
> >on history, but her inability or refusal to work co-operatively to
> >resolve differences.
>
> Strangeligy enough you seem to reverse the classical
> pattern of man versus woman.
>
> >Even here, on the mailing list, where I invited
> >her to discuss these issues, she prefers to ignore discussions about
> >her posting style
>
> Huh, you expect someone obviously new to the mailing
> list fenomenon to immediately reflect on her own behaviour?
>
> How un-in-touch-with reality are you?
>
> >in order to re-iterate accusations of censorship and
> >to repeat her strange historical claims.
>
> You should distinguish between asocial behaviour and
> between having the 'wrong ideas'.
>
> >In order to contribute to a restoration of the peace, I will be mostly
> >avoiding further public comment, although everyone who likes is more
> >than invited to write to me privately to support or decry this
> >decision.
>
> And since this was done in public, I do this in public.
>
> >Helga, in particular, is welcome to write to me to discuss this,
>
> Sure and in exchange for sex perhaps?
>
> >but there is really no appeal possible at this point.
>
> Why not? Ban me too!
>
> Freedom of speech is not for the easy cases, but for the
> cases that you'd like to censor.
>
> >The ban is not
> >permanent, and with good behavior, she can come back and try again in
> >3 months time.
>
> Three months is like a life sentence for freedom of speech.
>
> Bah,
> Jaap
>
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Jaap van Ganswijk

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
At 2002-09-09 10:19 -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>After much deliberation, and after due consideration for all of the
>arguments and discussions here, and taking into account what appears
>to me to be a general consensus, I have chosen to ban Helga for a
>period of 3 months.

Banned from what? This list? The English Wikipedia. All Wikipedia?

3 months is too long to ban people anyway. Try 2 days first, then
a week, then twice that.

As an European this reminds me of communism and nazisme.

Was she tried before a competent judge? Or before a jury of
here peers?

How can new Wikipedia-aspirant writers expect to be treated
fairly whenever they will try to introduce a new aspect in
say 20 years when you are all over 40?

Anyway I think that legal matters like this should be handled
more carefully.

What I object most to, it that the subject itself may have
been disallowed to right to rebuttle.

>After that time, she can reapply to me personally for re-instatement.

Sure, and some sex on the side.

>I know that not everyone will be happy with this decision, although
>the vast majority will be.

Not me.

>Such is the nature of consensus.

The nature of consensus is that you achieve it first.

>I can't wait for unanimity, or we will wait forever.

Is there some voting mechanism or did you just ask your
friends?

>I am fully aware of the dangers of precedent,

So don't do it.

>which is why I have
>waited so long to take action in this case.

Ok, so because you waited so long, it makes it
right? And from which did you ban here exactly?
And why?

>Banning should always be a "last resort".

Yes. Like the death penalty.

And we don't like that in Europe.

>After more than a year of trying to work with Helga,
>and after losing more than one highly valued contributor because of
>her,

So we lost one contributor, who may have had other
things to do (like me), and Helga is to blame!

Conflicts like this with Helga motivate
me to stay. Like my heroes Caesar, Machiavelli
etc. I like conflict.

>we are now at a last resort stage.

No, don't over dramatize matters. Buy I good 3D-video-card
and play games like 'Gore', Unreal etc. to relax.

>To my mind, the difficulty with Helga is not her idiosyncratic views
>on history, but her inability or refusal to work co-operatively to
>resolve differences.

Strangeligy enough you seem to reverse the classical
pattern of man versus woman.

>Even here, on the mailing list, where I invited
>her to discuss these issues, she prefers to ignore discussions about
>her posting style

Huh, you expect someone obviously new to the mailing
list fenomenon to immediately reflect on her own behaviour?

How un-in-touch-with reality are you?

>in order to re-iterate accusations of censorship and
>to repeat her strange historical claims.

You should distinguish between asocial behaviour and
between having the 'wrong ideas'.

>In order to contribute to a restoration of the peace, I will be mostly
>avoiding further public comment, although everyone who likes is more
>than invited to write to me privately to support or decry this
>decision.

And since this was done in public, I do this in public.

>Helga, in particular, is welcome to write to me to discuss this,

Sure and in exchange for sex perhaps?

>but there is really no appeal possible at this point.

Why not? Ban me too!

Freedom of speech is not for the easy cases, but for the
cases that you'd like to censor.

>The ban is not
>permanent, and with good behavior, she can come back and try again in
>3 months time.

Three months is like a life sentence for freedom of speech.

Bah,
Jaap


from_name: Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
On Mon, 9 Sep 2002, Jaap van Ganswijk wrote:

> Was she tried before a competent judge? Or before a jury of
> here peers?
>
> Anyway I think that legal matters like this should be handled
> more carefully.
>
> What I object most to, it that the subject itself may have
> been disallowed to right to rebuttle.

You have obviously not been following the discussion on this matter at all.
This is just not what happened at all. You're welcome to check the archives for
this mailing list if you're in doubt.

-- Daniel


from_name: Jan Hidders

in_reply_to: <200209091730.g89HUoM09171@ross.bomis.com>; from lcrocker@nupedia.com on Mon, Sep 09, 2002 at 10:30:50AM -0700

body:
On Mon, Sep 09, 2002 at 10:30:50AM -0700, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
>
> > Please put the language links in a separate table, otherwise you are
> > violating the first normal form of database design theory. Any
> > introductory text on database design will tell you why that is bad.
>
> The Wikipedia database layout is already pretty far from
> normalized (mainly because MySQL is too slow on joins), but if
> I did add this feature I would make it a proper one-to-one
> mapping table.

Ok. It's just that denormalization is a bad idea in this case because if
you have a "two-way access pattern" here, i.e., you are going to look up the
Bs for a certain A and the As for a certain B. Nesting the Bs with an A or the
As with a B is then almost always a bad idea.

> I'm not yet convinced that it would be worth the effort, though.  I'm more
> inclined to think that the international wikis should be more independent
> and encapsulated.

Why? Until now this approach has resulted in the non-English Wikipedias
feeling highly neglected. I still wonder what Jimbo's opinion on this is.

> >I like the idea of links for categories ('biography', 'country',
> >'mathematical theorem', 'book', 'movie', ...) by the way.
>
> We discussed tings like that early on, and initially rejcted it
> as an attempt to categorize articles in a non-wiki way; we wanted
> different organization schemes to evolve out of normal wiki
> editing and linking, rather than imposing order from the outside.

It should of course be as non-constraining, open and as editable as
possible. All I'm thinking of here is an extra edit field called "category"
that will result in a link to "category:book" if you typed in "book". On
that page we could then put tips, tricks, hints, policies et cetera on book
descriptions. If the category doesn't exist you get a ... big surprise ...
edit link.

> But it might be time to revisit the idea, because at 2,500 edits
> a day and growing, it's just no longer possible for one person to
> keep track of edits to articles he's interested in,

That reminds me. Whatever happend to the code for grouping edits on the
recent changes page? I remember you made a test site and then ... nothing?

> and subject is the only filter that really makes sense for reducing that
> data to a manageable level.  I'd still like to see if we couldn't build
> those subjects automatically in some way based on links in the database.

Ah, you mean a real subject hierarchy, like in ... er ... that other big
encyclopedia, so you could simply watch a subject area? I don't see how that
can be derived. Having an editable list if "subject areas" for articles
would be great. It could give us a nice subject tree that you could navigate
through. Actually I never liked having both a description of mathematics and
a list of subjects in the same article.

-- Jan Hidders


body:
The page for Little Earthquakes, a Tori Amos album, includes an extract
from one of the album's songs. This seems a bit dubious, copyright-wise!
I've removed the link for now, to be safe. Does anyone know if the
extract is legally OK for inclusion in Wikipedia? Check the history of
Tori Amos/Little Earthquakes to see the page with the link (damn
subpages).
--
adamw


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] Move article with spaces in name still doesn't work

body:
> I reported this bug a while ago. Attempting to move a page with
> spaces in its name produces a URL with spaces...

Yes, I'm showing that as a still open bug in Sourceforge.
It will get fixed eventually.  I'm just working on things I
consider more important for now.


body:
On Mon, 2002-09-09 at 23:32, Giskart wrote:
> Adam Williamson wrote:
>
> >The page for Little Earthquakes, a Tori Amos album, includes an extract
> >from one of the album's songs. This seems a bit dubious, copyright-wise!
> >I've removed the link for now, to be safe. Does anyone know if the
> >extract is legally OK for inclusion in Wikipedia? Check the history of
> >Tori Amos/Little Earthquakes to see the page with the link (damn
> >subpages).
> >
> >
> There was some talk about this a few weeks ago, somthing about the
> articel of Simon and Garfunkel (there is also audio there).
> The English Wikipedia calls it "fair use"  and allow it. The Dutch
> Wikipedia calls it a copyright violation and does not allow it.  Do not
> know of the others. -- giskart

Ah, that's a point. Forgot about the 5% of copyright material rule.
HOWEVER, I believe in music isn't the track as well as the entire
recording under copyright? i.e., you could only take 5% of a track?
Anyone know?
--
adamw


in_reply_to: <3D7CF21E.9060604@epost.de>; from Magnus.Manske@t-online.de on Mon, Sep 09, 2002 at 09:10:22PM +0200

body:
On Mon, Sep 09, 2002 at 09:10:22PM +0200, Magnus Manske wrote:
> I don't think it would be a good idea to hardwire article *subject
> categories* at all.

What do you mean with "hardwiring"? I don't think anyone suggested a fixed
list of subject categories.

-- Jan Hidders


from_name: Giskart

body:
Adam Williamson wrote:

>The page for Little Earthquakes, a Tori Amos album, includes an extract
>from one of the album's songs. This seems a bit dubious, copyright-wise!
>I've removed the link for now, to be safe. Does anyone know if the
>extract is legally OK for inclusion in Wikipedia? Check the history of
>Tori Amos/Little Earthquakes to see the page with the link (damn
>subpages).
>
>
There was some talk about this a few weeks ago, somthing about the
articel of Simon and Garfunkel (there is also audio there).
The English Wikipedia calls it "fair use"  and allow it. The Dutch
Wikipedia calls it a copyright violation and does not allow it.  Do not
know of the others. -- giskart


from_name: Pierre Abbat

body:
I reported this bug a while ago. Attempting to move a page with spaces in its
name produces a URL with spaces. This elicits the error "400 Bad Request Bad
Request Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
The request line contained invalid characters following the protocol string."
Changing the spaces to plus signs makes it work.

phma


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
Jaap van Ganswijk wrote:
> >After that time, she can reapply to me personally for re-instatement.
>
> Sure, and some sex on the side.
[...]
> >Helga, in particular, is welcome to write to me to discuss this,
>
> Sure and in exchange for sex perhaps?

Boy, my dream of empowering people to build a great free encyclopedia
for the benefit of all humankind sure does introduce me to a variety
of people.

*laugh*

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Automatic subject classification

body:
>> Would that work?

>No, it wouldn't.

You're probably right; too much computation for every article save
operation. On the other hand, it is not of utmost importance that
every article always carries the precisely correct and current topic
classification; rough approximations are good enough. New pages can
then still be assigned topics quickly. I doubt that topic assignments
of a given article would change very often anyway. And every couple of
weeks or so, we can recompute every article's topic from scratch in a
breadth first manner.

Would that work?

>As for saving time for regulars, that may be a very limited benefit.
>We all have certain subject areas where we tend to track things and
>tend to ignore topics outside of that.

Yup, but I would like to see a list of the 10-20 daily edits in my
subject area without having to wade through 2000+ RecentChanges
entries.

Axel


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Watch this user

in_reply_to: <3D7E1458.2050707@planetunreal.com>; from tarquin@planetunreal.com on Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 04:48:40PM +0100

body:
tarquin wrote:
> It might be useful for users who don't actually vandalize, but who make
> what appear to be mistakes, or just pop in to post a few links to their
> crackpot pseudoscience site.

Or, who write really interesting and high quality stuff on topics
that I'm interested in....

Sounds useful to me, but I fear feature creep.

--Jimbo


body:
Imran Ghory wrote:

>>How about this: the possible topics coincide with the major pages
>>listed on [[Main Page]] (from "Astronomy" to "Visual Arts"). The
>>shortest link path from such a topic page to an article defines that
>>article's topic. If there is no such path, then the article is
>>classified as a topic orphan.
>>
>An alternative idea:
>
>For any page follow all the links from it down to about 3-4 levels,
>and assume these are all on related topics. To make this more
>accurate we could follow only two way links. Then strip out any
>article which has more then say 50 double links as it's likely to be
>the front page, or something similar unrealted to the topic.
>
I think that this would be more problematical than using "what links
here".  The links on a page include ones to years and countries where
the discussion usually has nothing to do with our subject of interest.
 "What links here" had more specific reason to link to our subject.

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Jaap van Ganswijk wrote:
>
>>>After that time, she can reapply to me personally for re-instatement.
>>>
>>Sure, and some sex on the side.
>>
>[...]
>
>>>Helga, in particular, is welcome to write to me to discuss this,
>>>
>>Sure and in exchange for sex perhaps?
>>
>
>Boy, my dream of empowering people to build a great free encyclopedia
>for the benefit of all humankind sure does introduce me to a variety
>of people.
>
>*laugh*
>
Jaap has made an assumption that Helga is a blond and blue-eyed Teutonic
goddess that would attract such a conquest.  Others of us might imagine
her as a dried and shrivelled crone, entirely unsuitable for such
purposes,.and who may even have Carroll Reece personally.

It's funny how we imagine people to look like base on a few net postings.

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Copyrighted images

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>If I take a photograph with my own camera, of a copyrighted image on the cover of a videotape -- then am do I own the copyright of my photograph? May I include my photograph on a website?
>
>Or, does the copyright of the original image deny me the "right" to "copy" by photographing it?
>
>See [[Raiders of the Lost Ark]] and other articles illustrated with fan photos of apparantely copyrighted images. I'm worried about liability issues that threaten the Wikipedia.
>
Yes, you have a new copyright in your photo, but it does not invalidate
any previous copyrights that the movie production company may have,  The
way you are using it on Wikipedia certainly strikes me as fair use.

It also strikes me that there's not much of a liability question here.
 Are there any cases of the movie industry going after people for such
use of their promotional material?  What concerns the movie industry far
more is the wholesale copying of entire new movies.  Using your
photograph of their material on Wikipedia may be viewed by them as so
much more free advertising..

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikitech-l] [Stephen.Thornton@mic.ul.ie: Popper Entry]

body:
Any ideas?

----- Forwarded message from Stephen Thornton <Stephen.Thornton at mic.ul.ie> -----

From: Stephen Thornton <Stephen.Thornton at mic.ul.ie>
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 12:26:14 +0100
To: "'comments at nupedia.com'" <comments at nupedia.com>
Subject: Popper Entry

Hi There,

I'm the author of the Popper entry in Nupedia.com, and I haven't been able
to access it for some time now.

Can you shed any light on this?

Regards,

Stephen Thornton

Dr. Stephen Thornton,
Co-Ordinating Director of Postgraduate Studies in the Arts,
Department of Philosophy,
Mary Immaculate College (University of Limerick),
South Circular Road,
Limerick,
Ireland.

http://www.mic.ul.ie/

Tel:  +353 61 204341
Fax:  +353 61 313632

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Copyrighted images

in_reply_to: <3D7E114D.5080607@telus.net>; from saintonge@telus.net on Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 08:35:41AM -0700

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote, about the use of boxcover art:
> The way you are using it on Wikipedia certainly strikes me as fair
>use.

Absolutely.

> It also strikes me that there's not much of a liability question here.
>  Are there any cases of the movie industry going after people for such
> use of their promotional material?  What concerns the movie industry far
> more is the wholesale copying of entire new movies.  Using your
> photograph of their material on Wikipedia may be viewed by them as so
> much more free advertising..

I think this is right, too.  With all the stuff going on in the world,
I can't imagine why a studio would bring an unwinnable suit against
such a sympathetic defendant doing something so obviously within "fair
use".

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Copyrighted images

body:
> If I take a photograph with my own camera, of a copyrighted image
> on the cover of a videotape -- then am do I own the copyright of
> my photograph? May I include my photograph on a website?

You own the copyright to your photo, but there still might be
copyright and trademark issue depending on how you choose to
use it.  Using it to illustrate an article here is certainly
fair use, and not a problem.

Isis knows what she's doing, and we've been over this many
times on various talk pages.  It's good to pay attention to
copyright issues, but let's not fall into paranoia about it.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Watch this user

body:
>> It might be useful for users who don't actually vandalize,
>> but who make what appear to be mistakes, or just pop in to
>> post a few links to their crackpot pseudoscience site.

> Or, who write really interesting and high quality stuff on
> topics that I'm interested in....
> Sounds useful to me, but I fear feature creep.

Don't worry, there's a very powerful force limiting feature
creep: the laziness of the main programmer.


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Watch this user

body:
I think that's a fantastic idea.  And then there are also those users who simply make consistently good edits, and I like to watch them too.  :-)

kq

tarquin Wrote:
>Has anyone yet suggested a "Watch this user" function?


from_name: Brion VIBBER

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
 > ----- Forwarded message from Stephen Thornton
<Stephen.Thornton at mic.ul.ie> -----
 > I'm the author of the Popper entry in Nupedia.com, and I haven't been
able
 > to access it for some time now.
 >
 > Can you shed any light on this?
 > ---------------------------------
> Any ideas?

Well, I know nothing about how Nupedia is *supposed* to work, but I find
it odd that a search for "popper" turns up:

   Nupedia
   1.  Karl Raimund Popper

   0 articles found.

and clicking on the link for Karl Raimund Popper shows an empty article.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Jason Richey

body:
Looking at the database, it looks like this article has an empty
body.  I only see data for the "further reading" section.  I'll do a
little more research to see if I can find the body...

Jason Richey

Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Any ideas?
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Stephen Thornton <Stephen.Thornton at mic.ul.ie> -----
>
> From: Stephen Thornton <Stephen.Thornton at mic.ul.ie>
> Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 12:26:14 +0100
> To: "'comments at nupedia.com'" <comments at nupedia.com>
> Subject: Popper Entry
>
> Hi There,
>
> I'm the author of the Popper entry in Nupedia.com, and I haven't been able
> to access it for some time now.
>
> Can you shed any light on this?
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
> Stephen Thornton
>
> Dr. Stephen Thornton,
> Co-Ordinating Director of Postgraduate Studies in the Arts,
> Department of Philosophy,
> Mary Immaculate College (University of Limerick),
> South Circular Road,
> Limerick,
> Ireland.
>
> http://www.mic.ul.ie/
>
> Tel:  +353 61 204341
> Fax:  +353 61 313632
>
>
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at nupedia.com
> http://nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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


from_name: Imran Ghory

body:
On 9 Sep 2002, at 20:34, Axel Boldt wrote:

> I think that a subject classification of articles would vastly improve
> "soft security" and would save regulars a lot of time, since not
> everyone would have to check every edit as currently seems to be the
> case.

Maybe a way around it would be to have a new level of op, say op1,
one which would be awarded to anyone who has had an account
for 30 days or so and hasn't been banned.

Whenever someone who isn't at op1 level makes an edit to a page
a "edit check" counter appears and counts days. When anyone
with op1 status looks at this page after checking it for vandalism
they could reset the counter back to zero.

That way we wouldn't get multiple people needlessly checking the
same page for vandalism, and we could ensure that every newbie
edit was checked for vandalism.

> How about this: the possible topics coincide with the major pages
> listed on [[Main Page]] (from "Astronomy" to "Visual Arts"). The
> shortest link path from such a topic page to an article defines that
> article's topic. If there is no such path, then the article is
> classified as a topic orphan.

An alternative idea:

For any page follow all the links from it down to about 3-4 levels,
and assume these are all on related topics. To make this more
accurate we could follow only two way links. Then strip out any
article which has more then say 50 double links as it's likely to be
the front page, or something similar unrealted to the topic.

Not only will this provide autoclassification but we could also use it
for finding pages that needed to be written on a specific topic by
automatically generating a list of unwritten articles related to a
topic.

Imran


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
At 03:35 AM 10/09/02 -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>Jaap van Ganswijk wrote:
> > >After that time, she can reapply to me personally for re-instatement.
> >
> > Sure, and some sex on the side.
>[...]
> > >Helga, in particular, is welcome to write to me to discuss this,
> >
> > Sure and in exchange for sex perhaps?
>
>Boy, my dream of empowering people to build a great free encyclopedia
>for the benefit of all humankind sure does introduce me to a variety
>of people.

I had no idea that this was one of the perks of running Wikipedia. I
thought you were just in this for the noble ideal of expanding human
knowledge and freedom and such.

Hm... does it work for people who run mirrors too? I think I can get some
web space...

:)


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Copyrighted images

body:
If I take a photograph with my own camera, of a copyrighted image on the cover of a videotape -- then am do I own the copyright of my photograph? May I include my photograph on a website?

Or, does the copyright of the original image deny me the "right" to "copy" by photographing it?

See [[Raiders of the Lost Ark]] and other articles illustrated with fan photos of apparantely copyrighted images. I'm worried about liability issues that threaten the Wikipedia. (Jimbo has enough on his plate right now.)

Ed Poor


body:
Contrary to my first opinion, I am now seeing that the full body of
the article is intact.  I don't know how I missed it before...

That being said, I don't know why the system isn't displaying the
article properly...

Jason

>Looking at the database, it looks like this article has an empty
>body.  I only see data for the "further reading" section.  I'll do a
>little more research to see if I can find the body...
>
>Jason Richey

Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Any ideas?
>
> ----- Forwarded message from Stephen Thornton <Stephen.Thornton at mic.ul.ie> -----
>
> From: Stephen Thornton <Stephen.Thornton at mic.ul.ie>
> Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 12:26:14 +0100
> To: "'comments at nupedia.com'" <comments at nupedia.com>
> Subject: Popper Entry
>
> Hi There,
>
> I'm the author of the Popper entry in Nupedia.com, and I haven't been able
> to access it for some time now.
>
> Can you shed any light on this?
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
> Stephen Thornton
>
> Dr. Stephen Thornton,
> Co-Ordinating Director of Postgraduate Studies in the Arts,
> Department of Philosophy,
> Mary Immaculate College (University of Limerick),
> South Circular Road,
> Limerick,
> Ireland.
>
> http://www.mic.ul.ie/
>
> Tel:  +353 61 204341
> Fax:  +353 61 313632
>
>
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at nupedia.com
> http://nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
>Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>>Jaap van Ganswijk wrote:
>>
>>>>After that time, she can reapply to me personally for re-instatement.
>>>>
>>>Sure, and some sex on the side.
>>>
>>[...]
>>
>>>>Helga, in particular, is welcome to write to me to discuss this,
>>>>
>>>Sure and in exchange for sex perhaps?
>>>
>>
>>Boy, my dream of empowering people to build a great free encyclopedia
>>for the benefit of all humankind sure does introduce me to a variety
>>of people.
>>
>>*laugh*
>>
>Jaap has made an assumption that Helga is a blond and blue-eyed Teutonic
>goddess that would attract such a conquest.  Others of us might imagine
>her as a dried and shrivelled crone, entirely unsuitable for such
>purposes,.and who may even have Carroll Reece personally.
>
>It's funny how we imagine people to look like base on a few net postings.

Keep in mind that the real Helga is still here, reading what you post.

Fred


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A related ban issue

body:
> What with the recent discussion of banning "problem" users, I thought I'd
> bring this up for discussion/re-discussion.
>
> Our policy on banning people for vandalism is (as I interpret what I've
> read) that we restrict it to "repeated and sustained" non-useful alterations
> of articles.
>
> However, it's September, the high school and college students are back with
> their free school accounts, and inevitably the amount of drive-by vandalism
> seems to be on the increase. Several of us constantly check new edits by
> unknown contributors, and even then, we're missing vandalism that only turns
> up later when paging through via "Random Page" or otherwise coming across an
> article. As the number of articles goes up, the chance of locating such
> vandalism goes down.
>
> I've tried a few approaches to ameliorating this.   I regularly check "this
> user's contributions" for vandals, and even sometimes for unfamiliar IP's
> (*thank* you folks for adding that code feature!) I do keyword searches for
> common obscenities, et cetera.  (No, Cunctator, I don't remove them if
> they're obviously part of the article.)  And, of course, I haunt the "Recent
> Changes" page. But I think it's getting harder to keep up.
>
> I would like to suggest we add "obviously malicious vandalism" to reasons
> for an immediate (if temporary) IP ban: a single "Ths page is stupid"
> should be, in my opinion, enough to ban the address. This saves us from
> having to spend time on the next five instances of vandalism from that
> contributor, which could be better spent searching for other graffiti or
> *gasp* actually adding content.

I would be against this. In the first place, you mention fresh students - what
if student #1 does something funny, leaves, student #2 takes the computer and
just happens to want to contribute to Wikipedia? It might be too rare an
occasion to take care of, but it's not impossible.

Secondly, I think it might well cost more work for us than it saves. MOST
acts of vandalism are single occurences. Most that are not are caught only
after already more than one has been made. Thus, blocking after one act of
vandalism will result in many blockings to avoid one act of vandalism. And
to block someone means that you will have to do a blocking, and later someone
has to do an unblocking. I think that that might actually cost more time than
it saves to have to clean up the second to fifth act of the same vandal also
when you could have blocked him directly.

Andre Engels


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
> Axel Boldt wrote:
>
>> How about this: the possible topics coincide with the major pages
>> listed on [[Main Page]] (from "Astronomy" to "Visual Arts"). The
>> shortest link path from such a topic page to an article defines that
>> article's topic. If there is no such path, then the article is
>> classified as a topic orphan.
>
I looked a little more into this, manualy tracing the path of 10
randomly chosen articles.  I don't know what it does to the automatic
path tracing idea but it did lead to a number of observations.

First the data:

1. Abu Zubaydah <- Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi <- Abu Zubaydah
    (Circular orphan) nothing else leads to these two
    (Score 0)

2. Analysis of variance <- Statistics <- Main Page
    (Score 2)

3. Indianapolis Colts <- National Football League <- American football
<- Sport <- Main Page
    (Score 4)
-- ". <- Indiana <- United States (=United States of America) <- List of
Countries (=Countries of the World) <-   Geography <- Main Page
    (Score 5)
- ", <- 1969 <- 20th century <- Historical timeline|Centuries <- Main Page
    (Score 4)

4. Jerry Springer <-List of television programs <-List of reference
tables (=Reference tables) <- Main Page
    (Score 3)

5.Heinrich Schliemann <- Archaelogy <- Main Page
    (Score 2)

6. Hitchhiking <- User: Branko <- Special Pages: Registered Users (=User
list) <- Main Page
    (Score 3) Same via User: Rootbeer
    Access is only through two user pages; it's an orphaned orphan!

7. Nursing <- Health science <- Main page
    (Score 2)

8. Vsevolod I, Prince of Kiev <- Kievan Rus' <-History of Russia
(=Russian history) <- History <- Main Page
    (Score 4)
    A score of 3 was possible through the page [[User: H. Jonat]].  (I
swear this was random; I didn't ask for THAT user to appear)

9. Morrisville <- Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages <- Wikipedia:
utilities <- Main Page
    (Score 3)

10. Celestial sphere <- Astronomy and astrophysics <- Main Page
    (Score 2)

Observations:
1. In the samples the longest minimum path to the Main Page was only 4
articles.  Any article linked from a user page would be 3 steps away
from the user page, but this should not be considered a meaningful path.

2. Two kinds of effectively orphan pages became evident, but these would
never appear on the special page listing of orphans.  In the first
example two pages link to each other but nothing else links to them.  In
example 6 the only links to the article are on user pages.  Who would
ever think to look there for a reference to an article?

3.  [[List of countries]] and  [[United States]] should probably be
linked from the Main Page.  The numberr of paths through these is enormous.

4. Many of the links to [[United States]] are excessive.  Many of the
uses are in passing where more information about the United States is
unlikely to be needed.  I think we can always assume a very basic level
of understanding about what is meant by  "United States"  What would
surprise me most about those who don't have that very basic level of
understanding is how they managed to find Wikipedia in the first place.

Eclecticology


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Watch this user

body:
On Tuesday 10 September 2002 10:00 am, you wrote:
> Has anyone yet suggested a "Watch this user" function?
>
> This would be a link on an IP user page, which then highlights that
> user's edits on Recent Changes.
> It might be useful for users who don't actually vandalize, but who make
> what appear to be mistakes, or just pop in to post a few links to their
> crackpot pseudoscience site.
> (someone recently added a paragraph on omelettes to an completely
> unrelated article... bizarre!)
>
> That way we can keep an eye on their activities in RC, catch up with
> well-meaning beginners & clean up behind non-damaging but undesirable
> edits.

I have already suggested exactly the same thing -- silence was the result.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Watch this user

body:
>But people should be able to tell who is watching them. :)
>
>-- Daniel (Mikkelsen)

That's easy.  If you're in the U.S., on any given day it's the FBI,
CIA, DEA, ATF, FTC, FCC, NSA, RIAA, MPAA, local police, surveillance
cameras at any store or bank, and possibly John Ashcroft himself.  Oh,
and also your neighbor, who believes all the stuff on TV about how
unsafe it is to walk outside.

In most of those cases, I care.  As far as who's watching what I edit,
I don't really.  I suppose that's because I try to avoid writing about
controversial subjects (you can see why).  ;-)  What do others think?

kq


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Watch this user

body:
koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:

>>But people should be able to tell who is watching them. :)
>>
>>-- Daniel (Mikkelsen)
>>
>That's easy.  If you're in the U.S., on any given day it's the FBI,
>CIA, DEA, ATF, FTC, FCC, NSA, RIAA, MPAA, local police, surveillance
>cameras at any store or bank, and possibly John Ashcroft himself.  Oh,
>and also your neighbor, who believes all the stuff on TV about how
>unsafe it is to walk outside.
>
>In most of those cases, I care.  As far as who's watching what I edit,
>I don't really.  I suppose that's because I try to avoid writing about
>controversial subjects (you can see why).  ;-)  What do others think?
>
You forgot the IRS.

>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Japanese stub wiki moved to new software

body:
I've moved the Japanese stub wiki (only a few pages) over to the new
software; it's now set up at ja.wikipedia.org. At some point if the
ja.wikipedia.com address can be reassigned to the new server, that'd be
great.

The interface has never been localized, so it's (still) in English. If
someone would like to help with a translation, I'd be quite happy about
it. (I could convert all the English words to katakana, but that
wouldn't be very helpful. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Watch this user

body:
>> I think that's a fantastic idea.  And then there are also
>> those users who simply make consistently good edits, and I
>> like to watch them too.  :-)

Why not just put a link to that user's contributions page
on your user page?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Watch this user

body:
> I have already suggested exactly the same thing -- silence was
> the result.

I'm not showing any open feature request for that.  It wouldn't
be a high priority for me because I'm working on other things,
but I guarantee it will never be considered unless it's logged
in Sourceforge and multiple people comment on it there.  And of
course nothing's stopping anyone else from implementing it.

But I still think it's supurfluous since one can make a link
to the user contribution page on one's user page to accomplish
the same thing without further complicating the software.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Watch this user

body:
Fair enough.

Lee wrote:
>But I still think it's supurfluous since one can make a link
>to the user contribution page on one's user page to accomplish
>the same thing without further complicating the software.


in_reply_to:
<200209092255.g89Mthf16141@ross.bomis.com> from "lcrocker@nupedia.com"
 at "Sep 9, 2002 03:55:43 pm"

body:
>
> > Ah, that's a point. Forgot about the 5% of copyright material rule.
> > HOWEVER, I believe in music isn't the track as well as the entire
> > recording under copyright? i.e., you could only take 5% of a track?
>
> There is no such thing as a "5%" rule in American law.  Fair use
> is judged on a combination of subjective factors, all of which we
> should meet easily here.

The most important is that the quoting should be done 'for evalution
purposes', that is, to give the reader or listener the chance to evaluate
the work as a whole by.

Regarding popular music, a few years ago I looked around on the Internet
and found remarkably many parts of 26-30 seconds length, so I assume that
30 seconds has been taken as the maximum length of 'fair use' for this kind
of material.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] A projection

body:
Using the data set given, and assuming averaged daily growth between
given days, Wikipedia has since 2001-03-07 had an average over all daily
growth of 0.632%

The average growth rate (r) between two sampling days was calculated using

1+r=(d2/d1)^(1/n)

where d1 and d2 are the sample amounts on the first and second days and
n is the number of days between samplings.

The 0.632% amount is a weighted mean of these results over a period of
551 days. Applying the formula:

n=log(100,000/42021)/log(1+r)

gives 138 days when rounded up to the nearest whole number. Thus the
formula projects that article number 100,000 will be reached on
2003-01-24 Using the same techniques, growth in the last 30 days has
been at the more modest rate of 0.410% per day. Projecting this gives a
figure of 212 days or 2003-04-08


from_name: Michael R. Irwin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

<snip>

> Jaap has made an assumption that Helga is a blond and blue-eyed Teutonic
> goddess that would attract such a conquest.  Others of us might imagine
> her as a dried and shrivelled crone, entirely unsuitable for such
> purposes,.and who may even have Carroll Reece personally.
>
> It's funny how we imagine people to look like base on a few net postings.
>
> Eclecticology

I agree with Jaap.

Replace "sex" with "impose personal/community moral views upon"
and he expresses my view of what is occurring adequately.

Mike Irwin


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Watch this user

body:
koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
>
> >But people should be able to tell who is watching them. :)
> >
> >-- Daniel (Mikkelsen)
>
> That's easy.  If you're in the U.S., on any given day it's the FBI,
> CIA, DEA, ATF, FTC, FCC, NSA, RIAA, MPAA, local police, surveillance
> cameras at any store or bank, and possibly John Ashcroft himself.  Oh,
> and also your neighbor, who believes all the stuff on TV about how
> unsafe it is to walk outside.
>
> In most of those cases, I care.  As far as who's watching what I edit,
> I don't really.  I suppose that's because I try to avoid writing about
> controversial subjects (you can see why).  ;-)  What do others think?

I think watching and harassment should have some
symmetrical characteristics.

At a minimum any "watch this user" function should
be available to all users so it is easy for them
to watch back on the sysops and other active watchers.

At another extreme, the watch function could be
activated only in symmetrical pairing.  When you
click to watch somebody you are also activating their
watch function on you.   This would allow sysops and
other regulars to set a good example for erring users.

This would also discourage peeping toms, people who
like to watch but not be watched.

Regards,
Mike Irwin


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Watch this user

body:
Has anyone yet suggested a "Watch this user" function?

This would be a link on an IP user page, which then highlights that
user's edits on Recent Changes.
It might be useful for users who don't actually vandalize, but who make
what appear to be mistakes, or just pop in to post a few links to their
crackpot pseudoscience site.
(someone recently added a paragraph on omelettes to an completely
unrelated article... bizarre!)

That way we can keep an eye on their activities in RC, catch up with
well-meaning beginners & clean up behind non-damaging but undesirable edits.


from_name: Julie Hofmann Kemp

subject: [Wikipedia-l] User watch

body:
I'm sorry -- I must have gotten stupid all of a sudden, because I could
swear that, with a minimum of effort, any user could watch any other
user.  One simply bookmarks the user's contribution list -- this can be
done with IP addresses.  There's a watch page function -- that's another
way to keep an eye on what's going on.  Why is the suggestion of a
"watch user" function getting people's knickers in a twist?  The only
people I think have a right to get uptight about this are the
programmers, because it's extra work for functionality that's already
there.

As for all the nasty comments about banning Helga -- well, first, this
particular playground belongs to Jimbo and BOMIS -- if Jim wants to make
a rule and enforce it, that's his prerogative.  The fact that he waited
so long to take such an action is admirable, although I think a serious
threat at an earlier date might have helped to define the actions worthy
of a ban.  Moreover, the fact that Jim is willing to allow the people
who use the playground to help define the rules of participation is
generous and encourages wikipedians to feel part of a larger good.
Still, this is a little community, and communities generally need some
rules and boundaries to keep people from feeling put-upon.  No one has
any inalienable rights here, except the right (and perhaps the
obligation) to leave if they don't like how things are done.

That said, I think that, if bans are to be used, there should be a clear
statement of the kinds of things that warrant a ban, as well as a posted
escalation process (like  a formal warning that the person is being
considered for a ban, request to join the list, etc.).

Jules, who has only looked at recent changes once (so far) today.
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from_name: Stephen Gilbert

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Watch this user

body:
--- tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:
> Has anyone yet suggested a "Watch this user"
> function?

If I want to watch anyone in particular, I just
bookmark their "Contributions" page.

Stephen Gilbert

__________________________________________________
Yahoo! - We Remember
9-11: A tribute to the more than 3,000 lives lost
http://dir.remember.yahoo.com/tribute


subject: [Wikipedia-l] User watch

body:
--- Julie Hofmann Kemp <juleskemp at yahoo.com> wrote:
> That said, I think that, if bans are to be used,
> there should be a clear
> statement of the kinds of things that warrant a ban,
> as well as a posted
> escalation process (like  a formal warning that the
> person is being
> considered for a ban, request to join the list,
> etc.).

Yes, that seems to be prudent. If we write up a formal
statement, banning someone will look less shadowy and
subjective.

> Jules, who has only looked at recent changes once
> (so far) today.

I'm sure you'll be able to simply watch RC and not
make any edits...

Stephen Gilbert

__________________________________________________
Yahoo! - We Remember
9-11: A tribute to the more than 3,000 lives lost
http://dir.remember.yahoo.com/tribute


from_name: Mark Christensen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
> I agree with Jaap.
> Replace "sex" with "impose personal/community moral views upon" and he
expresses my view of what is occurring adequately.

Look, Nobody is forcing any moral views on anybody.

What morall judgement is implied by a ban?  I think there is none at
all, a ban is simply that, and all it means is that we'd rather go about
working on our encyclopedia project without the kind of "help" Helga is
currently equipped to give.

Is it Helga's natural right to be included in the team which develops a
free encyclopedia?  I don't think so.  We are doing something worth
doing, and if Helga is making it harder to do that we don't need to feel
bad about not including her in the wikipedia team.

Do you expect that the red cross is forcing their views on others when
they fail to accept any volinteers who only want to handle blood, and
who are infected with a life-threatening disease.  Or to make the
example less extreeme, the Red Cross is unlikely to an clumsy person to
cary around expencive containers of medication.  My point is that the
Red Cross, and like most volenteer groups, isn't under the impression
that they are required to let a volenteer do anything she wants, even if
the labor of that volenteer is counterproductive.  So can you explain to
me why a free encyclopedia project should be be any different?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Watch this user

body:
> This would also discourage peeping toms, people who
> like to watch but not be watched.

I'm all for having everybody be able to watch everybody else, since I
think the wikipedia community should be as transparent as is reasonably
practical.

However, I think you allusion to peeping toms is totally overblown and
slightly absurd. By the nature of the act itself, posting on the
wikipedia is a public act, with public consequences, and therefore it
cannot reasonably be considered private.  While we allow a certain
degree of anonymity, the wiki is by nature a public space, and so nobody
is invading the private sphere just by tracking which articles someone
edits.


body:
On Tuesday 10 September 2002 05:28 pm, you wrote:
> Correction: We didn't arrive at a consensus on the Dutch Wikipedia.
> I think that a small fragment should be fair-use. Also under Dutch
> law (which is basically the same as current USA/international law
> as I explained here earlier). On the Dutch Wikipedia we decided
> to 'disallow' such audio fragments for now because there was little
> need for it yet and we didn't want to pursue the matter further
> at this stage.
>
> Greetings,
> Jaap

Unless I am mistaken, the Dutch Wikipedia is hosted in the United States
along with the other Wikipedias. Therefore US law is the only one that
counts. But you can make any policies you wish for your own 'pedia so long as
it doesn't break US law (which I do believe is a lot more permissive in this
case).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
Jaap wrote:
>PS. Would it be possible that people use their real name
>on this mailing list and in personal email? Please use
>something like I do in my 'from address'. I don't think
>it's civil to presend oneself as a movie with Philip Glass
>music in it, however good the music is. I have the CD...

Yes, it would be possible.  It, however, will not be practiced, at least by the person you are directing this part of your message to.  I have very particular reasons to mind my privacy, none of which I'll discuss, thank you, because I won't be convinced otherwise.

I certainly don't expect anyone who's done their homework to believe that koyaanis qatsi is my real name, however it is as convenient a handle as my real name, which is possibly less believable.

If the pseudonym is distasteful to you, perhaps you can suggest one you like better.  Louis Friend is one you may recognize, or if not, perhaps "Mark Twain."  I'm the same person I've been for the last 27 years, at any rate, 1 1/2 of them on wikipedia, and I believe a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

kq, or lf, or mt


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Watch this user

body:
On Tuesday 10 September 2002 05:28 pm, LDC wrote:
> Why not just put a link to that user's contributions page
> on your user page?

Devil's advocate (that is, don't take me too seriously):
Then why do we have watch lists? We can simply put links to the articles we
want to watch on our user page. I'm currently watching a couple hundred pages
so in order to see what has been happening with those articles when I was
away from Wikipedia I would have to spend at least a couple of hours opening
each page and looking at its history each day (either that or look through
thousands of edits on Recent Changes). End Devil's advocate.

The whole point of my original idea was to quickly move many IPs off the IP
blocked list. In order to do this with a minimum amount of risk, some type of
"watch IP" functionality would be needed. Therefore if I temporarily block an
IP for posting vulgarities on several pages I would like to know when this IP
makes another edit after the block is lifted. This would be a type of
probation (liftable any time by any sysop).

My original idea was to have a separate Recent Changes of edits made my all
IPs on probation but simply having their IP bolded in the regular Recent
Changes would be a good idea too.

The reason I have not posted this to SorceForge is because this is a
policy-level feature request and needs to be discussed before it is even
considered for implementation.

The idea of having a general "watch user" function was not part of my
original idea (but should be easy to implement if the IP probation idea is
implemented). I don't know how useful general "watch user" function would be,
however. If the two functions lived side-by-side then it might be confusing
to differentiate between those IPs on probation and those users you simply
are interested in tracking.  Different colors would work I guess; bolded red
(or other warning color) for IPs on probation (this would be viewable to at
least every logged-in user) and simply bold for those on your personal 'watch
user' list (which is unique to your own settings).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] User watch

body:
Jaap van Ganswijk wrote:
> It's my oppinion that any matters of importance like
> those of politics, science, economics, philosophy
> should not be dicussed with women.
>
> One should never engage in serious discussions
> with women anyway. They are not genetically
> equiped for it.

Is this what passes for humor in the Netherlands or are you just an
asshole? I can never tell.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Christian List

subject: [Wikitech-l] Danish translation ready

body:
The translation of LanguageDa.php into danish is complete, I have asked LDC to put it in CVS.
We at the danish Wikipedia hope this means we can soon get it upgraded to the new Phase III software. I will be very happy to take care of any technical issues that might arise.

There is a couple of things to note on the danish Wikipedia.

We are using both the country code "dk" and the language code "da", this means that both dk.wikipedia.com and da.wikipedia.com points to the same place. After the upgrade we would like to have dk.wikipedia.org and da.wikipedia.org. Maybe dk.wikipedia.org ought to be set up as a redirect to da.wikipedia.org, but to a danish speaker there is really no difference.

Danish has 3 special letters ?,? and ? in uppercase ?, ? and ?. These have ISO 8859-1 numbers 230, 248, 229, 198, 216 and 197 respectively. These will hopefully get translated correctly when the database is converted.

Christian List (user: Christian)


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
It is listed in the database (try the search function for "Popper"), but
it can not accessed. It looks as if all fields except the title were
empty. I can't say more without access to the database.

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Any ideas?
>
>----- Forwarded message from Stephen Thornton <Stephen.Thornton at mic.ul.ie> -----
>
>From: Stephen Thornton <Stephen.Thornton at mic.ul.ie>
>Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 12:26:14 +0100
>To: "'comments at nupedia.com'" <comments at nupedia.com>
>Subject: Popper Entry
>
>Hi There,
>
>I'm the author of the Popper entry in Nupedia.com, and I haven't been able
>to access it for some time now.
>
>Can you shed any light on this?
>
>
>Regards,
>
>
>Stephen Thornton
>
>Dr. Stephen Thornton,
>Co-Ordinating Director of Postgraduate Studies in the Arts,
>Department of Philosophy,
>Mary Immaculate College (University of Limerick),
>South Circular Road,
>Limerick,
>Ireland.
>
>http://www.mic.ul.ie/
>
>Tel:  +353 61 204341
>Fax:  +353 61 313632
>
>
>
>----- End forwarded message -----
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at nupedia.com
>http://nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

body:
> USA law is the same as European/international law since about
> 1990 when the USA adopted the Berne convention rules.
> http://www.chipdir.nl/about/ under 'Legal stuff'

That's not quite true; we signed the Berne Convention in 1989,
but since then many countries have made further changes in IP
law (such as the WIPO treaty) which the US does not participate
in.  Also, "fair use" law is is a US statute applying only in
the US.


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
You Wrote:
>At 2002-09-10 18:09 -0700, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
>>Jaap wrote:
>>Yes, it would be possible.  It, however, will not be practiced, at least by the person you are directing this part of your message to.  I have very particular reasons to mind my privacy, none of which I'll discuss, thank you, because I won't be convinced otherwise.
>
>This sentence doesn't contain a valid argument.

It does.  You don't agree with it.

>>I certainly don't expect anyone who's done their homework to believe that koyaanis qatsi is my real name,
>
>That's not the issue.

You're right.  The issue is this: 1) you want me to use my real name, or a less obvious pseudonym.  2) I don't care.

kq


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
>>> PS. Would it be possible that people use their real name
>>> on this mailing list and in personal email? ...

>> Yes, it would be possible.  It, however, will not be
>> practiced, at least by the person you are directing this part
>> of your message to...

Jaap, there is a long tradition on the net that accepts
pseudomyms routinely for several reasons: first, there's
no way to tell if a "real" sounding name is real anyway,
and many people like to express opinions their employers
or family might object to, and others (my employer is
clueless and my family has long since given up on trying
to understand me, so I'm free to use my real name :-).

You are of course free to judge how seriously to take
someone based on their choice of pseudonym (or even the
choice to use one at all).  I do just that--I generally
take someone less seriously if they use a pseudonym until
they've proven otherwise.  KQ has certainly proven
otherwise, and he is deservedly well-respected here.

And considering you're the one who wrote:

  > One should never engage in serious discussions
  > with women anyway. They are not genetically
  > equiped for it.

I now know I no longer have to take you seriously,
unless of course you're just /really/ bad at sarcasm.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] User watch

body:
Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
>
> At 03:08 AM 9/11/02 +0200, Jaap wrote:
> >At 2002-09-10 16:54 -0700, Julie Hofmann Kemp wrote:
> > >As for all the nasty comments about banning Helga -- well, first, this
> > particular playground belongs to Jimbo and BOMIS
> >
> >
> > >Still, this is a little community, and communities generally need some
> > rules and boundaries to keep people from feeling put-upon.  No one has
> > any inalienable rights here, except the right (and perhaps the
> > obligation) to leave if they don't like how things are done.
> >
> >Is your real name perhaps: Eva Perron? Or Eva Braun?
>
> I believe we have an article on [[Godwin's Law]]. Please read it.
>
> >It's my oppinion that any matters of importance like
> >those of politics, science, economics, philosophy
> >should not be dicussed with women.
> >
> >One should never engage in serious discussions
> >with women anyway. They are not genetically
> >equiped for it.
>
> If I said anything equivalent about men, you and lots of other people would be,
> justifiably, up in arms.
>
> If this is really your attitude, you are not mature enough to be working on
> this, or
> any, project with adults of any sex. If it isn't, I want an apology for the
> insult. No,
> it isn't funny. And saying you were only joking will not convince anyone of
> anything
> except that you don't have the guts to admit you said something stupid.

Actually, I got quite a laugh out of it.

Relieved a lot of recent built up tension.  Might be an
American blue collar trait which shares characteristics
of the Netherland's history of commercial imperialism.
OTOH I worked in a plywood plant in Oregon to finance my
education, so I might just be a redneck.

I apologize for finding something humerous
which you do not.

If that offends you, I truly think it is
unfortunate that you find me offensive.

Regards,
Mike Irwin

P.S.  See the newcomer orientation pages history.
I removed a few sexist remarks (admittedly not originated
by you) there aimed at men but, did not request an apology.
Nor did I pick up arms.  Perhaps people vary in how
they approach gender biases and humor.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] "genetically unequiped" women

body:
On Tuesday 10 September 2002 07:10 pm, Jaap wrote:
> >It's my oppinion that any matters of importance like
> >those of politics, science, economics, philosophy
> >should not be dicussed with women.
> >
> >One should never engage in serious discussions
> >with women anyway. They are not genetically
> >equiped for it.

On Tuesday 10 September 2002 07:10 pm, Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
> If this is really your attitude, you are not mature
> enough to be working on this, or any, project with
> adults of any sex. If it isn't, I want an apology for the
> insult. No, it isn't funny. And saying you were only
> joking will not convince anyone of anything except
> that you don't have the guts to admit you said something stupid.

I agree. That is the second provocatively stupid thing I've hear Jaap say in
the last few days - if for no other reason that it detracts from policy
discussion and leads to unproductive posts (like the one I am making now
simply to back up Vicki's point -- which wouldn't have been needed if the
stupid comment wasn't made to begin with).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikitech-l] A projection

body:
Jaap van Ganswijk wrote:

>At 2002-09-10 14:09 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>Using the data set given, and assuming averaged daily growth between given days, Wikipedia has since 2001-03-07 had an average over all daily growth of 0.632%
>>
>>The average growth rate (r) between two sampling days was calculated using
>>
>>1+r=(d2/d1)^(1/n)
>>
>>where d1 and d2 are the sample amounts on the first and second days and n is the number of days between samplings.
>>
>>The 0.632% amount is a weighted mean of these results over a period of 551 days. Applying the formula:
>>
>>n=log(100,000/42021)/log(1+r)
>>
>>gives 138 days when rounded up to the nearest whole number. Thus the formula projects that article number 100,000 will be reached on 2003-01-24 Using the same techniques, growth in the last 30 days has been at the more modest rate of 0.410% per day. Projecting this gives a figure of 212 days or 2003-04-08
>>
>And suppose I hadn't wasted 10 years of my life on a
>technical university, how would you explain this to me?
>
>What for example is the growth per year?
>
The underlying premise is that growth is exponential.  People more
commonly encounter this with compound interest calculations.  Thus
$1,000 invested at 12% for one year will give $1,120 at the end of the
year.  If it is compounded semi-annually it will give 1.06 * 1.06 * 1000
or $1,123.60 at the end of the year.  If it is compounded monthly it
will give (1.01)^12 * 1000 =  $1,126.83 at the end of the year. The
calculationsa that I made are similar, although I have not taken into
account any limitations that may exist upon Wikipedia's growth.

The annual growth rate based on 0.632% per day would be (1.00632)^365  -
1 = 896.861%
Based on 0.410% per day it would be 345.239%
These figures do seem quite high, but for a reality check Wikipedia's
size on September 9 of this year was 42,021 and on September 9, 2001 it
was 11,208.   42021/11208 is 3.44920, i.e. growth of 274.920%.  but this
does include some periods when the growth was considerable lower than it
has been in the last 30 days.

Eclecticology


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikitech-l] Nupedia Popper article

body:
The Popper article has existed at some point since it is archived at
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.nupedia.com/article/short/Karl+Raimund+Popper/

Axel


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga banned

body:
Jaap van Ganswijk wrote:

>Yes, but I try to use the same name since my birth.
>Names aren't unique, but it gives others at least a slight
>handle on other's person's being. In trade it's quite
>essential to know from which person money is due.
>
>And:
>Honost people have nothing to hide.
>
Having a handle on somebody's being because of their birth name sounds a
lot like an invitation to racial profiling to me.

There is a well known stereotype of Dutchmen as being overly obstinate.
 Are you out to prove the stereotype?

Perception is everything, many of the muslims who have been targeted in
the last year have been honest people with nothing to hide.

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikipedia-l] pseudonyms

body:
On Tuesday 10 September 2002 07:10 pm, Jaap wrote:
> Yes, but I try to use the same name since my birth.
> Names aren't unique, but it gives others at least a slight
> handle on other's person's being. In trade it's quite
> essential to know from which person money is due.
>
> And:
> Honost people have nothing to hide.
>
> >kq, or lf, or mt
>
> Grow up.

Jaap why the hell is this an issue? If KQ wants to be only known as KQ both
on Wikipedia itself and the list then that is KQ's choice.

Who knows KQ may be Rupert Murdock or some other high profile person that
just wants to contribute without having to carry the baggage of famoushood.
Or KQ just may be a person who wants to have a clean separation between an
online persona and a real world one.

There is nothing at all wrong with that. Freedoom to be anonymous if you want
to is one of the /primary/ reasons why Wikipedia is so successful.

Given names are often stupid and arbitrary; I've always hated my own name
because it doesn't at all fit my personality. So I created a online pseudonym
7 years ago (maveric149) which is explained on my user page. I also often go
by the less obvious pseudonym Sean Avery which I much prefer over my real
name.

I still would be using by pseudonym if I hadn't forgot to reset my email
client to display Sean Avery instead of my real name. But alas.

Again - something you have said has caused yet another string of unproductive
posts. Can we get back to policy please and stop making provocative comments?

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Watch this user

body:
On Tue, 10 Sep 2002 koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:

> I think that's a fantastic idea.  And then there are also those users who
> simply make consistently good edits, and I like to watch them too.  :-)

But people should be able to tell who is watching them. :)

-- Daniel


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A related ban issue -- auto unblocking

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>[cut]
>Secondly, I think it might well cost more work for us than it saves. MOST
>acts of vandalism are single occurences. Most that are not are caught only
>after already more than one has been made. Thus, blocking after one act of
>vandalism will result in many blockings to avoid one act of vandalism. And
>to block someone means that you will have to do a blocking, and later someone
>has to do an unblocking. I think that that might actually cost more time than
>
>
[cut]

For blocking abuse form schools mayby a auto unblock-function can be
usefull. When you block a ip you can select a option to unblock that ip
automatic after a time period. Say 60 minutes. -- giskart