from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Frankly, I don't see what the "(Ultimate) Wiktionary redirect problem"
is all about. You want to keep old links working, but not use #REDIRECTs
for bad spelling?

Why not introduce #MISPEELING ? (or a variant ;-)

That would function like a redirect, with the exception that the
destination page will, additonally, say on the very first line
    "You looked for the word or phrase WRONSPELLING. We believe you
might mean GOODSPELLING (this page), of which WRONGSPELLING is a
misspelled form."

Am I missing some intricate problem here?

Magnus
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list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: A. Nony Mouse

subject: [WikiEN-l] userpage and user subpage protection

body:
Yeah, you do so - but as I have noticed on multiple occasions reading
your own userpage, you freely use your admin powers to lock yours down
whenever someone is defacing your user page.

Ordinary users don't have that right. Their options are to request
getting it locked and wind up having to beg an admin to lock it, wait
for them to edit, and then relock it whenever they make changes or
else constantly revert the vandalism.

It gets worse when an Admin decides to step in and make
unwanted/unneeded/unjustified changes to someone's user page: they can
freely lock the user out of their own space.

You, as an admin, have the power to edit your own user page even
through a page lock. I see no reason why ordinary users shouldn't be
allowed to edit their own user space even when it's locked to
outsiders; as far as I know, we have yet to have an instance of users
vandalizing their own user space, but we have PLENTY of instances
where user pages or talk pages have been vandalized by POV warriors or
just plain assholes and the ordinary users have no real defense while
the Admins sit idly by doing nothing.

A. Nony Mouse

On 7/25/05, Theresa Knott <theresaknott at gmail.com> wrote:
> > In practice, though, users are generally considered to "own" their user
> > pages.  If someone edited my user page, I would probably move their
> > comments to my talk page, and this seems to be standard practice---a
> > user's user page is only for them to edit, barring extenuating
> > circumstances such as the user being banned.
> >
> > -Mark
>
> What you are saying is true, People do generally feel they own thier
> user page. But it's very unwiki and not something to be encoraged by
> allowing admins to protect their user pages. I allow people to edit my
> user page. So does Jimbo, So do several others.
>
>
> Theresa
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tomer Chachamu

subject: [Wikitech-l] Ultimate Wiktionary and design decisions

body:
On 25/07/05, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Tomer Chachamu wrote:
> >Actually, ideally every word would have a "search name" which is
> >worked out based on the language. It would only contain the compulsory
> >characters, with a certain decision on e.g. German ? ? ? (to transform
> >them in one direction or the other). It could also decompose all
> >precomposed characters into sets of characters. This is a little bit
> >like how some databases store the soundex index.
> >
> >I think this would handle most cases. I certainly agree that redirects
> >are a necessary technical feature for the rarer cases.
> >
> Hoi,
> Redirects will not exist in the UW. There is no need for them. Either
> they are correct spelling or they are not. If we MUST have a situation
> where links into UW need to be maintained, the words will go into
> Misspelling. Consequently the information will be utterly different from
> what it had before and consequently it cannot be maintained that the
> exterior party will have the URL point to the same information. Because
> in stead of a word with a meanin and all the other stuff it will now
> give a "You are wrong". This will be handled either at the Spelling
> level or at the Misspelling level.

There can be more than one correct spelling, as Andrew Dunbar
detailed. Where exactly is the database design?

> Then again, a user may want to see only a limited number of languages,
> and consequently what is shown will also not be the same for everyone.
> The word "dei" and "die" or both common typos, they are but for
> different languages. So what are we going to show when someone asks for
> dei of [or] die ??

ult.wiktionary.org/wikt/dei: like current wiktionary i.e. list of all
meanings in all languages.
ult.wiktionary.org/wikt/dei/de: german meaning only


from_name: Frank Pinter

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Template:Libertarianism

body:
On 7/24/05, steve v <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> Is it just me, or is this thing just plain overused?
> Make a nice "pruning project" maybe?

Generally, series boxes are limited to articles within that series (as
defined by inclusion in the box). That may be a good direction here.

>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Libertarianism
>
> SV

> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we.
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
>

Frank (User:Wikiacc)

--
Double-ROT13 Encoded - circumvention will be prosecuted.


from_name: tpryor at media.mit.edu

subject:
[Wikitech-l] request; access to (anonymized) apache log data for a
	recommendation system

body:
Hello,

Apologies for this being a repeat; I was just informed that the original ended
up being read as part of an existing thread.

I'd like to make a request to obtain access to anonymized apache logs for
wikipedia user data.

I am creating a browsing interface for wikipedia that requires clustered user
data
(in that sense it is akin to finding articles using the amazon recommendation
system or the earlier movielens recommendation system).

For this I need access to user page requests over time- preferably stored in a
database. I can provide a script that will translate users' ip addresses to a
unique signature so that the users themselves remain anonymous, stuff the data
into a reasonably size efficient mysql table, etc.

I was told that I might need to talk to Kate about the feasibility of doing
this. Are there any existing objections to retaining anonymized apache log data
for research purposes?

Tony Pryor


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] adding HTML headers from an extension

body:
Jama Poulsen wrote:
> I'm trying to add an HTML header from a MediaWiki extension using
> $wgOut->addScript(), but nothing is included in the output page.
>
> Adding things after the <body> element does work fine, eg. using addHTML(),
> so it seems the extensions can't currently modify the HTML header parts.
>
> Is this assumption correct, or am I doing something wrong here?

Parser extensions take input:
* text within the open and close tags
* attribute parameters on the open tag (in 1.5)

and create output:
* HTML fragment

They do not know anything about the page they're on, nor have any
contact with the HTTP headers or the output template. Since parser
output is cached, your extension isn't even necessarily run when a page
is displayed.

Anything outside that in a parser extension is not supported; 'cheating'
will surprise the system and may break.

If you're making a special-page extension you can of course manipulate
$wgOut all you like, or disable it and construct your output completely
as you wish.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Cool URIs don't change (Ultimate Wiktionary and
	design	decisions)

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

>Frankly, I don't see what the "(Ultimate) Wiktionary redirect problem"
>is all about. You want to keep old links working, but not use #REDIRECTs
>for bad spelling?
>
>Why not introduce #MISPEELING ? (or a variant ;-)
>
>That would function like a redirect, with the exception that the
>destination page will, additonally, say on the very first line
>    "You looked for the word or phrase WRONSPELLING. We believe you
>might mean GOODSPELLING (this page), of which WRONGSPELLING is a
>misspelled form."
>
>Am I missing some intricate problem here?
>
>Magnus
>
Hoi,
I am afraid you miss the point. At issue is the big muddle that are the
current en.wiktionary redirects. Where you can find technical redirects
and the redirects because of an implied meaning (linkt to correct
spelling, link to a headword etc)

The Ultimate Wiktionary will not have redirects the reason being that it
starts from nothing and all removals will be done as per the policies of
the project. This is true for any project anyway. Articles are removed
when this is decided upon.

Thanks,
    Gerard


from_name: Andrew Dunbar

body:
On 7/24/05, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
>
> I had an interesting conversation with Brion. We do not agree on
> everything. One of the things we do not agree on are redirects.
>
> In my opinion, Wiktionary should not have redirects. A word is either
> spelled correctly and it will have its lemma or it is not and there will
> not be a lemma with the incorrect spelling.
> In Brions opinion there are links to lemmas and as we need to ensure
> that these links remain ok, we need redirects to make this possible.
>
> In a Wikipedia context I am 100% with Brion. In a Wiktionary context it
> is a different matter. As only correctly spelled words should be in a
> Wiktionary, errors should be deleted. Some of our Wiktionaries for
> historical reasons are capitalising their articles.

"Historical reasons" is surely not the only reason a Wiktionary uses
first-character capitalisation, turning off first-character capitalisation is
not the only way to achieve correctly spelled article titles, and having
correctly spelled article titles has been denied as a reason for turning
off first-character capitalisation by some.

Don't forget that capitalisation of the first letter is only one issue as
regards correct orthography in article titles. Another thing to watch out
for is the three variations for making English compounds: two words
with a space, two words with hyphenation, and one compound word.
For any term, any one, two or three of these variants may be
considered correct.

Other test cases which have recently met strong resistence are Latin
words correctly spelled in all capitals as was the only possible spelling
while Latin was a living language, and using the correct non-ambiguous
apostrophe character which has been widely available on home
computers for 20 years.

Other languages also have optional or compatibility spellings:
In French it is officially correct to indicate accents on capital
letters but there is a de facto rule to leave them out. German
specifically allows ?, ?, and ? to be spelled as ae, oe, and ue.
In Switzerland there is no letter ?, the correct spelling to be ss
instead. This is also spefically considered correct in the other
German-speaking countries. Latin and Old English often have
macrons to show long vowels and rarely have breves to show
short vowels.

Old English and Middle English also had various fashions but
no official spelling, with various exotic letters being used at
different times and under various circumstances, resulting in
varied spellings of many words. For example, ? and ? were
mostly interchangeable.

Ancient Greek and Modern Greek have different accent marks
which look quite similar but have different names and different
places in Unicode. But the Modern Greek accents are still much
more commen in Ancient Greek on the Internet.

Hebrew geresh is often represented by ASCII apostrophe, Hebrew
gershayim is often represented by ASCII double quote, Hebrew
maqaf is often represented by ASCII hyphen, Hawaiian okina is
often represented by ASCII apostrophe, Turkish long vowels (actually
more complicated than this) can be indicated by use of the circumflex
accent according to the offical orthographical rules, Russian (and some
other Cyrllic script languages) can optionally indicate where the stress
is and in some contexts it is the norm. With Hebrew and most
languages in Arabic script, all short vowels are optional as are a
number of other "letters" such as dagesh, shada, sukun, and a host
of more exotic ones.

Hebrew also has accents which only occur in religious works plus
there are plene and defective spellings and both have vowels etc as
optional extras on top.

In some Polynesian languages, it is macrons and glottal stops are
optional, in others they are compulsory.

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have written variants of many
characters which have the same meaning and sound with all being
correct. They also have variants which exist only due to computer
encodings and quirks in how various fonts were designed.

For some languages different optional features of orthography can
interact to from many combinations and permutations all of which
are correct spellings.

There are surly quite a few more examples I haven't even become
aware of yet.

> In essence this
> means that from a spelling point of view the name of the lemmas are
> irrelevant. However, many people assume that the name of the article
> indicates that a word is spelled correctly. To remedy this, more and
> more wiktionaries are moving away from first character capitalisation
> and make it possible to have correctly spelled words as a lemma.

Or they are moving due to rhetoric like this email rather than for any
good reason. Remember that in print dictionaries the norm is to
include different meanings and parts of speech, and even derivatives -
regardless of capitalisation - into one article or at least on the one page.

English Wiktionary still considers only first letter capitalisation and
ASCII apostrophes and Russian without stress marks to be correct
enough to be titles, in the last case even as redirects! (if this is the
meaning of "lemma" you mean). What do other Wiktionaries do?

> When a wiktionary has made this move away from first character
> capitalisation, the interwiki and interproject links within the
> Wikimedia projects need to be fixed. After this, the redirects can in my
> opinion be removed. I think this is appropriate because users expect
> that an application behaves in certain ways. When new content is added
> to a non-capitalised Wiktionary, the word foo will not have a redirect
> in Foo and consequently it behaves differently from the content
> predating the move to non-capitalisation. Also words like Kinder and
> kinder are not related at all.

Don't you mean that "not all words like Kinder and kinder are related"?
This is almost the opposite meaning. Also many words are related.
Even in German it is common for a noun and another part of speech
to be intimately related and share an identical spelling apart from
capitalisation.

> The redirect at Kinder will be replaced
> at some stage breaking the existing redirect and consequently not
> providing the continuance that Brion holds dear.
>
> For the Ultimate Wiktionary I have documented some of the design
> criteria. It can be found here:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Wiktionary_decisions_on_its_usage
> The Data design can be found here:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Wiktionary_data_design
>
> One crucial decision is that only correct spelling is allowed. This
> means that all incorrect spelling will be amended or deleted. As
> Ultimate Wiktionary is a database, it does not cater for things like
> redirects. I urge you to have a look at both the design criteria and the
> design itself because this is the time when it is relatively easy to
> make changes. Once Erik starts coding the UW database, having finished
> Wikidata and the GEMET implementation, the moment has passed us by.

Please list out of the above points what is and what is not considered
a correct spelling as Ultimate Wiktionary is concerned. Please then
indicate whether every correct spelling is also suitable as a headword/
article title/lemma or whatever you wish to call it.

Hippietrail.

> Thanks,
>   GerardM
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
http://linguaphile.sf.net


from_name: steve v

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pipermail Privacy Concern

body:
Don't worry about it.

SV

--- andyl2004 at sympatico.ca wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm a bit concerned because two wikien-l emails
> contained in the online archives at pipermail have
> my full name and I believe these pages have been
> "googled" in the past by individuals angry at the
> content of articles. I've been harassed as a result
> by two individuals in the past few months.
>
> I really would like to avoid this problem in the
> future and either have these pipermail entries
> edited so as to remove my full name or have them
> hidden from search engines by having a "NOINDEX"
> command placed in the html codes for those pages.
>
> The pages in question are
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-April/012194.html
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-April/012194.html
> (previous entry title)
>
> If this can be attended to I would be very grateful.
>
> Thanks,
>
> AL
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Template:Libertarianism

body:
Well, there we go with the "stay within the lines or
get deleted" view of templates. I dont agree with
either extreme, but it seemed like a good idea to
publicise the problem with Template:Libertarianism, as
it's used in various bio stubs, etc. I commented on
this long ago, but with WP growth has come thinning of
WP consensus responsiveness, except in clear cases.
Of course I could just BE BOLD and remove it, but that
would be too unilateralist.

SV
Wait a minute, Ive got no problem being
unilaterialist...

--- David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

> Frank Pinter (francis.pinter at gmail.com) [050726
> 07:43]:
> > On 7/24/05, steve v <vertigosteve at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
> > > Is it just me, or is this thing just plain
> overused?
> > > Make a nice "pruning project" maybe?
>
> > Generally, series boxes are limited to articles
> within that series (as
> > defined by inclusion in the box). That may be a
> good direction here.
>
>
> [[WP:CLS]] notes that a good way for a template to
> be sent to [[WP:TFD]] is
> to be seen to be attempting to push a POV on
> articles.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Example vs. Original research

body:
For all concerned: I used the Flat Earth Society as an
extreme example -- not as a kind of important
precedent. The real issue is, as others have said,
that  NOR is a for the most part a guideline and not
an absolute rule, to apply to anything which hasn't
been checked over by a physicist or physician.

SV

--- Skyring <skyring at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 7/26/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> > Without such a mechanism, we could end up with
> more footnotes than there
> > are sentences in many articles.  Just looking at
> [[en:Paris]] for the
> > moment, this is the first paragraph:
> >
> > "Paris is the capital city of France, as well as
> the capital of the
> > Ile-de-France region, whose territory encompasses
> Paris and its
> > suburbs.  The city of Paris proper is also a
> departement, called Paris
> > departement (French: departement de Paris)."
> >
> > These are facts that might be worth getting
> citations for:
> > [1] Paris is the capital city of France.
> > [2] Paris is the capital of the Ile-de-France
> region.
> > [3] The Ile-de-France region's territory
> encompasses Paris and its suburbs.
> > [4] The city of Paris proper is also a
> departement, called Paris
> > departement.
> >
> > Presumably citations for these can be found in
> French law, and would be
> > useful to have somewhere---someone might
> conceivably actually want to
> > know exactly where it is specified officially that
> Paris is the capital
> > city of France.  But I'm not sure we'd want to
> present readers with a
> > barrage of footnotes for all these facts that they
> might take as fairly
> > obvious---by the time you got the end of the
> article we might be on
> > footnote #200.
>
> The difference is that some people actively argue
> that the earth is
> not a sphere, whereas those who argue that Paris is
> not the capital of
> France so far have kept their activities secret.
>
> If a fact is contentious, then it should be backed
> up with a cite.
>
> --
> Peter in Canberra
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

____________________________________________________
Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs


body:
Fine. But what about the theoretical idea of allowing
for private discussion/scoop spaces on wikinews, for
example? Part of what makes news organizations work is
their ability to privately collaborate in gathering
news before its published.

SV
Off topic? Certainly.

--- Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:

> > In general, its been principle to keep things
> open,
> > open, and open, though probably nobody would
> complain
> > if you became a sysop and protected your own
> subpages.
>
> Actually, they would. Protection is meant as a
> defense against
> persistent vandalism, not as a reward for admins.
>
> If you want a non-editable page, please don't use a
> wiki. I see no
> reason user pages need to be protected any more than
> any other page.
> You don't own these pages just because you created
> them in the user
> namespace. See
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership>
> and
>
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Protected_pages_considered_harmful>.
>
> Angela.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

____________________________________________________
Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Template:Libertarianism

body:
--- Frank Pinter <francis.pinter at gmail.com> wrote:

> Generally, series boxes are limited to articles
> within that series (as
> defined by inclusion in the box). That may be a good
> direction here.

You're quite right, Frank.

SV

____________________________________________________
Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs


body:
Tomer Chachamu wrote:

>On 25/07/05, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Tomer Chachamu wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Actually, ideally every word would have a "search name" which is
>>>worked out based on the language. It would only contain the compulsory
>>>characters, with a certain decision on e.g. German ? ? ? (to transform
>>>them in one direction or the other). It could also decompose all
>>>precomposed characters into sets of characters. This is a little bit
>>>like how some databases store the soundex index.
>>>
>>>I think this would handle most cases. I certainly agree that redirects
>>>are a necessary technical feature for the rarer cases.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>Hoi,
>>Redirects will not exist in the UW. There is no need for them. Either
>>they are correct spelling or they are not. If we MUST have a situation
>>where links into UW need to be maintained, the words will go into
>>Misspelling. Consequently the information will be utterly different from
>>what it had before and consequently it cannot be maintained that the
>>exterior party will have the URL point to the same information. Because
>>in stead of a word with a meanin and all the other stuff it will now
>>give a "You are wrong". This will be handled either at the Spelling
>>level or at the Misspelling level.
>>
>>
>
>There can be more than one correct spelling, as Andrew Dunbar
>detailed. Where exactly is the database design?
>
>
Obviously there can be more than one correct spelling for the same
language. Different orthografies need to be identified as such ..

The design can be found here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Wiktionary_data_design including
an ERD and some notes on its usage can be found here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Wiktionary_decisions_on_its_usage

>
>
>>Then again, a user may want to see only a limited number of languages,
>>and consequently what is shown will also not be the same for everyone.
>>The word "dei" and "die" or both common typos, they are but for
>>different languages. So what are we going to show when someone asks for
>>dei of [or] die ??
>>
>>
>
>ult.wiktionary.org/wikt/dei: like current wiktionary i.e. list of all
>meanings in all languages.
>ult.wiktionary.org/wikt/dei/de: german meaning only
>
The URL as you state do not take into account the effect that filtering
will have. Filtering will be specified on a user level. You may filter
to only include zu de fr and xh or nl it nds fy. It just depends on user
settings in the userinterface. So your suggested URL's are a bit off
with what is proposed.

Thanks,
    GerardM


subject: [WikiEN-l] Criticism of Islam being suppressed at Wiki

body:
Controversy can be controversial to deal with. The
more controversial the issue, the more likely it is
that only moderates will find a place to edit the
work. This means that writing in both extreme support
and extreme criticism are removed--preferably to the
talk page for review. You wrote:  "Islam would not be
controversial if muslim had not gone around beheading
infidels on TV, suicide bombing in London, Madrid,
Kashmir, and today Egypt.  I have been advocating
including a link to a Ex-Muslim site directory that
contains links to many anti-Islam sites."

By your own comments you have demonstrated your goal
is to promote extreme views. Like other extreme
anti-Muslim people, you claim that "Muslim"
automatically equates to terrorist, and that in
response to terrorism, you are promoting a "ex-Muslim"
and "anti-Islam" sites.  As you have expressed them,
your views are not fitting for inclusion on Wikipedia,
as they are not well enough formulated to represent
legitimately critical views of Islam, by both Muslims
and non-Muslims. And your stated agenda to promote
links is in violation of policies that "wikipedia is
not a soapbox" [[WP:SOAP]] and "wikipedia is not a
links repository."

SV

--- "T. Khan" <oldlahori at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I have been blocked by Administrator SlimVirgin for
> an
> indefinate period.  The charge is that I have
> created
> Sock puppets to get around the 3RR policy on the
> Islam
> page.  I have done no such thing.
>
> Islam page is controversial because Islam is
> controversial these days.  Islam would not be
> controversial if muslim had not gone around
> beheading
> infidels on TV, suicide bombing in London, Madrid,
> Kashmir, and today Egypt.  I have been advocating
> including a link to a Ex-Muslim site directory that
> contains links to many anti-Islam sites.  Instead of
> attempting to discuss this on the talk page, the
> action has been to ban myself, who is not an
> ex-muslim, and others who are for an indefinate
> period.
>
> I am new to the Wiki routine and hence do not know
> the
> proper protocols to follow, but I do know that free
> speech dies when attempts to quash criticism is not
> given the maximum exposure in every possible venue
> ...
> hence this letter.
>
> I wish nothing but the best for Wiki, and I hope
> that
> this matter will be resolved to the open Wiki
> standards.
>
> Thanks for reading,
>
> Nickbee.
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam
> protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikimedia website

body:
Hi,

Le Monday 25 July 2005 01:18, Yvonne Davis a ?crit :
> I'm not sure who to contact, so I hope you may be able to pass on the
> information:
> July 28 - it states that Julian McMahon an Australian actor died in
> 1968, don't think so, he's alive and well and was recently on tv in
> Australie in "This is your life" - I'm not sure when his father died,
> but even that must be later. His father was a prime Minister of
> Australia, I think his name was Bob McMahon, but Julian is certainly not
> dead!

Please specify on which page did you see this information.
Beside all web sites from the Wikimedia Foundation are wikis, which means that
you can correct this information yourself, clicking on the edit tab.

> Yvon Davis
>
> Executive Producer
> SBS Radio Melbourne
>
> phone: 61 (03) 9949 2169
> fax: 61 (03) 9949 2385 (att: Dutch)
> www.sbs.com.au/dutch
>
> P.O. Box 294
> South Melbourne 3205
> Victoria - AUSTRALIA

Thanks for your input,
Yann
--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux


from_name: slimvirgin at gmail.com

body:
On 7/23/05, T. Khan <oldlahori at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I have been blocked by Administrator SlimVirgin for an
> indefinate period.  The charge is that I have created
> Sock puppets to get around the 3RR policy on the Islam
> page.  I have done no such thing.

Nickbee, I've unblocked you, as I said I would earlier today. Message
for you on your talk page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Nickbee

Sarah


list: foundation-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimania

body:
Walter van Kalken a ?crit:
> In the name of openness I am really interested in seeing a complete list
> of the people receiving complete or partial sponsorships to go to wikimania.
>
> Waerth/Walter van Kalken

Walter van Kalken a ?crit:
 > In the name of openness I am really interested in seeing a complete list
 > of the people receiving complete or partial sponsorships to go to
wikimania.
 >
 > Waerth/Walter van Kalken

I am aware only of those who received a sponsorship from OSI,
sponsorship which I coordinated. The name of the people may be found
below. They received complete sponsorship from OSI to come to Wikimania.

We have been in contact with OSI for several months now. We met with
their board in december 2004. They would like to help development of our
projects and help distribution of our content in particular on the
african continent, which will be the topic of my talk at Wikimania.

Over 30 people were considered and eventually contacted for this
sponsorship. The final choice focused on speakers, on people known by
OSI, on natives from developing or transition countries... and generally
people living far way so unlikely to support their trip themselves. One
important point was to make it possible that Wikimania is truely
international and not only european, which is quite naturally occuring
due to travel costs. The total budget of those people coming was
estimated by Delphine and Sj. Delphine is currently securing the last
plane tickets and making a final summary of how much all that will cost.
  Roughly 20 000 dollars.

We are very glad OSI offered this opportunity to expand the circle of
those coming. I must insist that neither wikimania, nor at a much
smaller scale OSI sponsorship, were (still are) easy to manage. It
requires a lot of work, a lot of implication, generally totally
invisible from editors ... but this is important both to make a good
Wikimania and to start some new opportunities to discuss and start
collaborations.

Aside from this, it will be proof that about a dozen volunteers can make
something huge happen. In front of many sponsors, we appear as non
necessarily credible, because our organisation is pretty much anarchic.
It is very important for all of us that Wikimania is a success and
important as well that we manage to find good people to invite to
Wikimania in a very short timespan. It is proof we can make it. And
proof we can be reliable. And potentially ready for bigger grants.

I can not answer myself for other supports.

Anthere

---------

Mao		Isaac
Tall		JC*
Derakhshan	Hossein
Silva		Rui
Chaparro	Enrique
Bayazidis	Isam
Su?rez		Asc?nder
Soekatno	Revo Arka Giri
Ruiz		Juan David
Aineruhanga	Milton

Due to organisational issues, Mr Tall will probably not come though.


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimania


from_name: Phroziac

body:
User pages don't get vandalised very often, and if you're known well
enough, people will revert it for you, before you even notice the
vandalism.

On 7/25/05, A. Nony Mouse <mousyme at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, you do so - but as I have noticed on multiple occasions reading
> your own userpage, you freely use your admin powers to lock yours down
> whenever someone is defacing your user page.
>
> Ordinary users don't have that right. Their options are to request
> getting it locked and wind up having to beg an admin to lock it, wait
> for them to edit, and then relock it whenever they make changes or
> else constantly revert the vandalism.
>
> It gets worse when an Admin decides to step in and make
> unwanted/unneeded/unjustified changes to someone's user page: they can
> freely lock the user out of their own space.
>
> You, as an admin, have the power to edit your own user page even
> through a page lock. I see no reason why ordinary users shouldn't be
> allowed to edit their own user space even when it's locked to
> outsiders; as far as I know, we have yet to have an instance of users
> vandalizing their own user space, but we have PLENTY of instances
> where user pages or talk pages have been vandalized by POV warriors or
> just plain assholes and the ordinary users have no real defense while
> the Admins sit idly by doing nothing.
>
> A. Nony Mouse
>
> On 7/25/05, Theresa Knott <theresaknott at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > In practice, though, users are generally considered to "own" their user
> > > pages.  If someone edited my user page, I would probably move their
> > > comments to my talk page, and this seems to be standard practice---a
> > > user's user page is only for them to edit, barring extenuating
> > > circumstances such as the user being banned.
> > >
> > > -Mark
> >
> > What you are saying is true, People do generally feel they own thier
> > user page. But it's very unwiki and not something to be encoraged by
> > allowing admins to protect their user pages. I allow people to edit my
> > user page. So does Jimbo, So do several others.
> >
> >
> > Theresa
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
signature


from_name: Angela

body:
> In general, its been principle to keep things open,
> open, and open, though probably nobody would complain
> if you became a sysop and protected your own subpages.

Actually, they would. Protection is meant as a defense against
persistent vandalism, not as a reward for admins.

If you want a non-editable page, please don't use a wiki. I see no
reason user pages need to be protected any more than any other page.
You don't own these pages just because you created them in the user
namespace. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership> and
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Protected_pages_considered_harmful>.

Angela.


from_name: Theresa Knott

body:
> In practice, though, users are generally considered to "own" their user
> pages.  If someone edited my user page, I would probably move their
> comments to my talk page, and this seems to be standard practice---a
> user's user page is only for them to edit, barring extenuating
> circumstances such as the user being banned.
>
> -Mark

What you are saying is true, People do generally feel they own thier
user page. But it's very unwiki and not something to be encoraged by
allowing admins to protect their user pages. I allow people to edit my
user page. So does Jimbo, So do several others.

Theresa


from_name: Salvatore Ingala

subject: [Wikitech-l] New feature proposal: Verify

body:
>How do you set who is allowed to verify?

Sysops are allowed to verify:

In DefaultSettings.php:
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['verify'] = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['unverify'] = true;

Of course this may be changed if needed, but I think this is usually the
better solution.


from_name: Jack Lynch

body:
Exactly, feel free to edit mine (theresa has) but if I don't like
it...(like when you erase all the content and call me bad names), I or
another user might just revert. Protection is only needed short term,
and in response to persistant vandalism.

Jack (Sam Spade)


list: textbook-l

from_name: kelvSYC

subject: [Textbook-l] Proposal for major policy overhaul

body:
I need to solicit major feedback from veteran Wikibookians and the
public in general about this, as I am about to propose a major policy
overhaul.  As you know, Wikibooks policy is rarely strictly enforced,
with [[User:Aya]] pointing out that many of our existing policies are
vaguely defined and self-contradictory, and that [[User:Rob Horning]]
showing that sometimes good material may be left without a home (see
debate on [[Biography of Nikola Tesla]]).

As such, I propose to the world at large a change in how we define
what Wikibooks actually is besides from [[WB:WIN]]:

The two basic parts of Wikibooks as we know it is the form of a book
and the concept of what constitutes instructional material.  These
should be canonized into [[Wikibooks:Books]] and
[[Wikibooks:Instructional material]] (hereby referred to as
[[WB:IM]]).  However, new Wikibookians (or Wikipedia ex-patriates)
may want to create (or may have created) books that are not that
instructional (but remain nonfiction).  If we were to make such a
radical overhaul, we might as well broaden the scope of Wikibooks and
add [[Wikibooks:Reference material]] (hereby referred to as
[[WB:RM]]).  Hopefully the three will be more of a solid guideline as
to what constitutes a book.

As for organizing books, we need [[Wikibooks:Bookshelf]] for the
basic concept of a bookshelf, as well as "the first Wikibooks
WikiProject", [[Wikibooks:WikiProject Librarian]], for users that
wish to organize, categorize, and otherwise "stock bookshelves" as
new books are made.

We shall also need to overhaul [[WB:MOS]] and [[WB:NC]] to anchor a
uniform appearance across all books.  [[WB:HNS]] is to be adopted and
only colon or slash (slash recommended) separators are permitted.
[[WB:MOS]] is to be expanded to cover the following:

* MOS for cover pages ([[Cookbook]], [[Programming]], [[Pok?mon]], etc)
* stating that each book has its own MOS that must conform to the
main MOS and [[WB:NC]]
* MOS for general wiki formatting

Feedback among the community is generally appreciated.


body:
On 7/25/05, Tomer Chachamu <the.r3m0t at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 25/07/05, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu> wrote:
> > The way I see it, this decision is a political and not a technical one. Each
> > word could have several spellings, each of which is related to a spelling
> > authority. If you want common misspellings in the dictionary, simply have
> > "Common misspelling" as a spelling authority. Similarly, nothing prevents you
> > from having several different spellings of a same word attributed to a single
> > spelling authority, which solves all the problems you mentioned above.
>
> Surely it would be better for the search function to try some other
> possibilities, such as removing glottal stops from the input and
> searching again.
>
> Besides, didn't we forget the Unicode possibility of the same
> character entered in two ways?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_equivalence

The current version of MediaWiki does Unicode canonical
normalisation. I would hope that UW would too. Compatiblity
normalisation is a different kettle of fish though.

> Actually, ideally every word would have a "search name" which is
> worked out based on the language. It would only contain the compulsory
> characters, with a certain decision on e.g. German ? ? ? (to transform
> them in one direction or the other).

Well since there are German words which can be spelled with ae, oe,
ue; but not with ?, ?, ?, the diacritic versions have to be the canonical
ones. The same goes for French ? which can always be spelled as
oe but not every oe can be spelled as ?. However, for ?, it always the
wrong spelling in Switzerland but not every ss can be spelled ?
either in German and Austria.

> It could also decompose all
> precomposed characters into sets of characters. This is a little bit
> like how some databases store the soundex index.

Unicode canonical normalisation does this.

> I think this would handle most cases. I certainly agree that redirects
> are a necessary technical feature for the rarer cases.

Or maybe thinking outside the MediWiki box altogether if US is
to be designed from the ground up.

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

--
http://linguaphile.sf.net


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pipermail Privacy Concern

body:
On 25/07/05, andyl2004 at sympatico.ca <andyl2004 at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm a bit concerned because two wikien-l emails contained in the online archives at pipermail have my full name and I believe these pages have been "googled" in the past by individuals angry at the content of articles. I've been harassed as a result by two individuals in the past few months.

One problem here is that there are multiple places where these lists
are archived: as well as directly in the listserv's pipermail
directory, they are pushed through GMane, which archives them as well
as turning them into newsgroups:
http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.english.

Who knows where else public copies might exist, and of course search
engine databases might already have spidered it and not be in any
hurry to remove it again....

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

body:
kelvSYC wrote:

> I need to solicit major feedback from veteran Wikibookians and the
> public in general about this, as I am about to propose a major policy
> overhaul.  As you know, Wikibooks policy is rarely strictly enforced,
> with [[User:Aya]] pointing out that many of our existing policies are
> vaguely defined and self-contradictory, and that [[User:Rob Horning]]
> showing that sometimes good material may be left without a home (see
> debate on [[Biography of Nikola Tesla]]).
>
> As such, I propose to the world at large a change in how we define
> what Wikibooks actually is besides from [[WB:WIN]]:
>
> The two basic parts of Wikibooks as we know it is the form of a book
> and the concept of what constitutes instructional material.  These
> should be canonized into [[Wikibooks:Books]] and
> [[Wikibooks:Instructional material]] (hereby referred to as
> [[WB:IM]]).  However, new Wikibookians (or Wikipedia ex-patriates)
> may want to create (or may have created) books that are not that
> instructional (but remain nonfiction).  If we were to make such a
> radical overhaul, we might as well broaden the scope of Wikibooks and
> add [[Wikibooks:Reference material]] (hereby referred to as
> [[WB:RM]]).  Hopefully the three will be more of a solid guideline as
> to what constitutes a book.
>
> As for organizing books, we need [[Wikibooks:Bookshelf]] for the
> basic concept of a bookshelf, as well as "the first Wikibooks
> WikiProject", [[Wikibooks:WikiProject Librarian]], for users that
> wish to organize, categorize, and otherwise "stock bookshelves" as
> new books are made.
>
There are a few absolutely hard "facts" about Wikibooks that IMHO needs
to be enforced, or the nature of Wikibooks is going to substantially
change from what it currently is:

1) All material on Wikibooks should be non-fiction in nature.

2) Original research is not appropriate to be placed on Wikibooks.  A
very clear definition of original research needs to be made, but it
should include things like laboratory notes, engineering tests, and
interesting but new concepts like Neo (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Neo
which is currently up on a VfD discussion)

3) Material that is encyclopedic in nature ought to be placed on
Wikipedia.  If it is organization of Wikipedia material (Unicyclopedia
pushes this line very hard) it should instead be a Wikipedia
Wikiproject, again not something that should be here.  Small articles
about a particular subject are encouraged to be developed on Wikipedia
first.

4) Material that clearly belongs on a Wikimedia sister projects, such as
original text source, image collections, dictionary/glossary
collections, or original news reporting should be started or moved to
those respective projects (Wikisource, Wikicommons, Wiktionary,
Wikinews, and any other future projects that the Wikimedia Foundations
comes up with).

5) (This is a new change) Forking of Wikipedia content can and should
happen on Wikibooks, but the article on Wikipedia should be rather
mature in nature and generally should be rather long as well (with a
rule of thumb being that it is hitting the 32K article limit on
Wikipedia, and no realistic way to break into multiple articles for
Wikipedia.)  Keep in mind that the content should be an independent
book, and that major rewriting of the material might be in order.  The
Wikipedia fork is only an initial stub that substantially large
quantities of new information can be added to. (More exactly policies
should be added to this point.)

6) Wikibooks should be organized into "book-like" formats.  It should
include chapters, appendicies, bibliographies, and other features
commonly found in books.  Random articles that, while related to the
subject of the Wikibook, should be added to Wikipedia instead unless it
can be worked into the content of the Wikibook.  Each Wikibook is not a
subject-based "mini Wikipedia", although there is a tendancy for this to
happen on Wikibooks.

7) Wikibooks should be placed on a bookshelf for organizational
purposes.  It may be moved to a more "appropriate place", but shelving a
book is a good way to start a Wikibook stub.  Wikibooks material that is
not on a bookshelf (or without links anywhere in Wikibooks) may be
subject to deletion.  Good-faith efforts of new users should be guided,
and perhaps a diligant Wikibookian who wants to help out can "place" a
"loose" wikibook on a bookshelf it is not on one in the first place.
 Generally this matieral is either going to be new user experiments or a
violation of Wikibooks policies for other reasons, including link
spamming and blatant vandalism or even offensive material with strong
POV issues.

8) A wikibook stub can be started, and it doesn't necessarily have to be
completed by the person who started it.  A good point of debate,
however, should be when a Wikibook stub is left alone for a long time
(several months or years) and no new material is added, should it be
deleted simply because it is a stub?  Certainly it could be removed from
bookshelves and "archived" in a collection of stubs to be used/ignored
by future Wikibookians.  A formal "what constitutes a Wikibook stub"
policy should also be created.

9) New Wikimedia project concepts are also inappropriate to be placed in
Wikibooks.  (Wikijunior is a major exception here, but that is a
seperate issue.)  If you need some server space to try out the concept,
it can be done on a *very* limited basis on Meta, or if you think you
have a larger community for the concept try it out on Wikicities first.
 The Wikimedia Foundation is particularly hostile to new major projects
ideas, but Wikibooks is not the appropriate place to fight against that
hostility.

Up to this point I havn't even covered the instructional "textbook"
material vs. "non-textbook".  It is on this more fine point of what
constitutes instructional material that is for me a major sticking point
on Wikibooks, and needs to be reexamined.  It is also an issue with the
other Wikimedia projects, and when material shows up on the sister
projects that is book length in nature, the natural tendancy is to
transwiki the material over to Wikibooks, regardless if it fits
Wikibooks policies.  Perhaps the "textbook" nature needs to be adapted
or changed?  Does a whole new Wikimedia project need to be developed
that makes clear distinctions between these two categories of
non-fiction books?

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Salvatore Ingala:
> Hi, I'm a newcomer to the developers group. I uploaded in the branch
> SHOW_VERIFIED a modified version of MediaWiki where I added a new feature.
> This wants to be an alternative to the page protection. I added a
> verify/unverify button: 'verify' sets the current revision (or the one
> indexed by oldid) as the verified one for that page. This means that any
> user can edit the page, but the new revisions are not shown (though they can
> be accessed through the hystory, where the currently 'verified' revision is
> shown in bold characters) until a sysop 'verifies' it again. 'unverify', of
> course, removes this protection.

This is a step in the right direction. Something similar has been
discussed for a while, with an additional element: The live version of
the page is replaced *automatically* with the temporary version after a
set period of time without edits. In combination with 3RR, this could
lead to an open, consensus-based approach to updating contentious pages.
This idea is described in
http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?StableCopy and linked pages and has been
tossed around a few times as a way to get rid of protected pages. See
also this thread from January 2003:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-January/026211.html

Your current implementation has the drawback that it might become very
popular soon, even on pages where we otherwise try to avoid protection,
and give sysops too much editorial responsibility. Of course, it can
hardly get worse than it is now, where some articles, such as
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexueller_Missbrauch_von_Kindern
have been protected for months (that one since April!).

Best,

Erik


from_name: Skyring

body:
On 7/26/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> Without such a mechanism, we could end up with more footnotes than there
> are sentences in many articles.  Just looking at [[en:Paris]] for the
> moment, this is the first paragraph:
>
> "Paris is the capital city of France, as well as the capital of the
> Ile-de-France region, whose territory encompasses Paris and its
> suburbs.  The city of Paris proper is also a departement, called Paris
> departement (French: departement de Paris)."
>
> These are facts that might be worth getting citations for:
> [1] Paris is the capital city of France.
> [2] Paris is the capital of the Ile-de-France region.
> [3] The Ile-de-France region's territory encompasses Paris and its suburbs.
> [4] The city of Paris proper is also a departement, called Paris
> departement.
>
> Presumably citations for these can be found in French law, and would be
> useful to have somewhere---someone might conceivably actually want to
> know exactly where it is specified officially that Paris is the capital
> city of France.  But I'm not sure we'd want to present readers with a
> barrage of footnotes for all these facts that they might take as fairly
> obvious---by the time you got the end of the article we might be on
> footnote #200.

The difference is that some people actively argue that the earth is
not a sphere, whereas those who argue that Paris is not the capital of
France so far have kept their activities secret.

If a fact is contentious, then it should be backed up with a cite.

--
Peter in Canberra


subject: [WikiEN-l] Irate

body:
For the record since he is an english wikipedian, I blocked Irate for
one week on meta. Those unhappy with that decision may of course cancel
it and unblock him. Reason given for the block : uncooperative behavior
with his fellow wikipedians.

ant


subject: [WikiEN-l] Pipermail Privacy Concern

body:
--- andyl2004 at sympatico.ca wrote:
> Does this mean the pages will be modified or are you
> suggesting I practice some trancendental
> meditation?

No, Im suggesting you let the "trancendental
meditation committee" take care of it. Meditate on
this:

  tube(toothpaste)
  ----------------  =  1(tube)  -  n(toothpaste)

        1(n)

:)
SV

> > From: steve v <vertigosteve at yahoo.com>
> > Date: 2005/07/25 Mon PM 09:14:01 EST
> > To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> > Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Pipermail Privacy Concern
> >
> > Don't worry about it.
> >
> > SV
> >
> > --- andyl2004 at sympatico.ca wrote:
> >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I'm a bit concerned because two wikien-l emails
> > > contained in the online archives at pipermail
> have
> > > my full name and I believe these pages have been
> > > "googled" in the past by individuals angry at
> the
> > > content of articles. I've been harassed as a
> result
> > > by two individuals in the past few months.
> > >
> > > I really would like to avoid this problem in the
> > > future and either have these pipermail entries
> > > edited so as to remove my full name or have them
> > > hidden from search engines by having a "NOINDEX"
> > > command placed in the html codes for those
> pages.
> > >
> > > The pages in question are
> > >
> >
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-April/012194.html
> > >
> >
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-April/012194.html
> > > (previous entry title)
> > >
> > > If this can be attended to I would be very
> grateful.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > >
> > > AL
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > >
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > __________________________________
> > Do you Yahoo!?
> > Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we.
> > http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> >
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
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body:
Yes, I agree, but in areas other than science, almost
any contention can become the greater issue rather
than the insignificant one--a very small group of
violent extremists, for example, can disrupt things
far beyond their representation. The point is that
"original research" isnt really the issue, as much as
rational versus irrational writing--of which writing
skill is a substantial factor. Contrary to what some
may say, its *not* POV to say that a view is
considered "irrational" by most people, and putting
things in that context helps to rectify the problems
of marginal views promoting themselves out of their
element (irrationality) even if they are

Using the Flat Earth example again, the FES's notions
are generally unclear in terms of whether they are
actually sincere (still), or that they might be
speaking metaphorically, or IMHO from the POV of human
experience. Thus it can rather ridiculous to talk in
terms of science, without explaining what their actual
point is, which might be something like:
 'Thinking about the Earth as round is only a
conceptual construct which also requires thinking
along notions of complex relativity-- in real life, we
intrinsically think of the world as Euclidian, and
therefore, "flat." The FES might just be claiming that
the religious view that all souls be on the same
plane, or else that in personal terms, thinking in
global terms is just a waste of precious time.

IOW: While its easy to call such people stupid, its
hard to say exactly objectively what such group
actually represents. Skpeptical "science" (ie. science
POV) doesnt offer insight into this basic aspect. The
articles talk about FES "models" of the Earth,
assuming that models are the actual *point* of the
group--the physical descriptions may be quite
irrelevant.

SV

--- Haukur ?orgeirsson <haukurth at hi.is> wrote:

> How many religious fundamentalists does it take to
> make a fact contentious? How actively do they have
> to argue? Where are you going to draw the line? And
> why should we privilege the points of view that
> happen to be held by people alive today?
>
> Wikipedia would be a parody of an encyclopedia if it
> held that the approximately spherical shape of the
> Earth is contentious. People expect an encyclopedia
> to be written from a scientific point of view - and,
> for the most part, that's how Wikipedia is written.
>
> Regards,
> Haukur
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pipermail Privacy Concern

body:
andyl2004 at sympatico.ca (andyl2004 at sympatico.ca) [050726 06:18]:

> I really would like to avoid this problem in the future and either have these pipermail entries edited so as to remove my full name or have them hidden from search engines by having a "NOINDEX" command placed in the html codes for those pages.
> The pages in question are
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-April/012194.html
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-April/012194.html (previous entry title)

While not wishing to denigrate your concerns, I must note that as a public
mailing list for a public project (one in which all edits made by any
editor can be seen by anyone on the web at any time), such is exceedingly
unlikely to be our practice if at all avoidable.

I have updated the list info to say:

  <b>All emails to wikien-l are available on the public web archive.</b> If
  you do not want your message on the World Wide Web, do not send it to a
  Wikimedia mailing list.

Although there's a link to the archives already on the listinfo page (the
one you go to to join the list), so it's really not like subscribers aren't
warned.

(I don't have the power to remove messages from the archive, by the way.)

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Template:Libertarianism

body:
Frank Pinter (francis.pinter at gmail.com) [050726 07:43]:
> On 7/24/05, steve v <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:

> > Is it just me, or is this thing just plain overused?
> > Make a nice "pruning project" maybe?

> Generally, series boxes are limited to articles within that series (as
> defined by inclusion in the box). That may be a good direction here.

[[WP:CLS]] notes that a good way for a template to be sent to [[WP:TFD]] is
to be seen to be attempting to push a POV on articles.

- d.


from_name: johny why

subject: [Wikitech-l] Feature Requests

body:
Hello

1.	"Feature Request" feature: I have had a very difficult time finding
a "Feature Request" feature on Wikipedia. It should be easy to find. The
"Feature Request" part of the "Bug Report" page doesn't seem to exist.
2.	"Page Change Alert" feature: I would like to receive an email alert
when any pages I have marked for tracking are editing.

Thanks
-------------- next part --------------
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.338 / Virus Database: 267.9.5/58 - Release Date: 7/25/2005


body:
Phroziac (phroziac at gmail.com) [050726 10:13]:

> And furthermore, if for some reason you don't want people editing your
> user page(s), you can put a note on them saying not to, and most
> people will listen, other then vandals. I have a note on mine saying
> TO edit it, and not many people do, other then vandals and
> anti-vandals :(

Mmm. Most people don't out of politeness rather than rules. (But then I
once corrected a broken link on User:RickK, noted I had done so on the talk
page and got a thank-you :-)

Also, 3RR doesn't seem to apply in one's own userspace. Which is not what
the 3RR says, but it fits with userspace as a *personal* thing (for project
purposes, whatever those may be).

I had mine protected for a while because I could, then read the arguments
that it was unwiki. And it wasn't like the vandalisations lasted long
anyway. So people can edit mine, but I'll probably revert changes 'cos I
like it how it is ;-)

- d.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:

>>The difference is that some people actively argue that the earth is
>>not a sphere, whereas those who argue that Paris is not the capital of
>>France so far have kept their activities secret.
>>
>>If a fact is contentious, then it should be backed up with a cite.
>>
>>
>How many religious fundamentalists does it take to
>make a fact contentious? How actively do they have
>to argue? Where are you going to draw the line? And
>why should we privilege the points of view that
>happen to be held by people alive today?
>
>Wikipedia would be a parody of an encyclopedia if it
>held that the approximately spherical shape of the
>Earth is contentious. People expect an encyclopedia
>to be written from a scientific point of view - and,
>for the most part, that's how Wikipedia is written.
>
>
It's not a matter of the number of religious fundamentalists, or how
persistently anyone argues, or lines being drawn.  I certainly don't
believe that today's points of view should hold sway over historical ones.

When we put forth these intuitive truths as examples of the need for
citations we put up a straw man that is there to be knocked down.  There
is a presumption that any statement is true unless and until it is
challenged.  Of course the more ridiculous and outrageous statements
will be challenged very quickly.  Statements about the near-spherical
shape of the earth may not be challenged at all.

The "scientific point of view" would be fine if it meant rigorous
adherence to the principles of scientific method; it is not fine if it
means support for the prevailing prejudices of mainstream scientists.

Some people may very well expect an encyclopedia to be written from that
mythical "scientific point of view"; others may expect it to be from a
"religious point of view" of some sort.  We still need to stick to a
neutral point of view.  Implicit to the neutral point of view is the
dynamic of questioning everything.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Pipermail Privacy Concern

body:
steve v wrote:

>--- andyl2004 at sympatico.ca wrote:
>
>
>>Does this mean the pages will be modified or are you
>>suggesting I practice some trancendental
>>meditation?
>>
>>
>No, Im suggesting you let the "trancendental
>meditation committee" take care of it. Meditate on
>this:
>
>  tube(toothpaste)
>  ----------------  =  1(tube)  -  n(toothpaste)
>
>        1(n)
>
>:)
>SV
>
When toothpast tubes were made of a zinc alloy one could squeeze the
truth from them by rolling it up from the bottom.  With modern plastic
tubes it just springs back as though it wanted to go back into the tube.

Ec


from_name: David

body:
steve v wrote:

>Fine. But what about the theoretical idea of allowing
>for private discussion/scoop spaces on wikinews, for
>example? Part of what makes news organizations work is
>their ability to privately collaborate in gathering
>news before its published.
>
>SV
>Off topic? Certainly.
>
>
There's always Email.  Not everything to do with the wiki has to happen
on the wiki, does it? -humblefool


from_name: andyl2004 at sympatico.ca

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pipermail Privacy Concern

body:
Does this mean the pages will be modified or are you suggesting I practice some trancendental
meditation?

A

> From: steve v <vertigosteve at yahoo.com>
> Date: 2005/07/25 Mon PM 09:14:01 EST
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Pipermail Privacy Concern
>
> Don't worry about it.
>
> SV
>
> --- andyl2004 at sympatico.ca wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm a bit concerned because two wikien-l emails
> > contained in the online archives at pipermail have
> > my full name and I believe these pages have been
> > "googled" in the past by individuals angry at the
> > content of articles. I've been harassed as a result
> > by two individuals in the past few months.
> >
> > I really would like to avoid this problem in the
> > future and either have these pipermail entries
> > edited so as to remove my full name or have them
> > hidden from search engines by having a "NOINDEX"
> > command placed in the html codes for those pages.
> >
> > The pages in question are
> >
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-April/012194.html
> >
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-April/012194.html
> > (previous entry title)
> >
> > If this can be attended to I would be very grateful.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > AL
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we.
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
steve v wrote:

>Using the Flat Earth example again, the FES's notions
>are generally unclear in terms of whether they are
>actually sincere (still), or that they might be
>speaking metaphorically, or IMHO from the POV of human
>experience. Thus it can rather ridiculous to talk in
>terms of science, without explaining what their actual
>point is, which might be something like:
> 'Thinking about the Earth as round is only a
>conceptual construct which also requires thinking
>along notions of complex relativity-- in real life, we
>intrinsically think of the world as Euclidian, and
>therefore, "flat." The FES might just be claiming that
>the religious view that all souls be on the same
>plane, or else that in personal terms, thinking in
>global terms is just a waste of precious time.
>
>IOW: While its easy to call such people stupid, its
>hard to say exactly objectively what such group
>actually represents. Skpeptical "science" (ie. science
>POV) doesnt offer insight into this basic aspect. The
>articles talk about FES "models" of the Earth,
>assuming that models are the actual *point* of the
>group--the physical descriptions may be quite
>irrelevant.
>
The difficulty here with the FES POV is that we're not hearing it from
FES supporters.  We have no evidence of what they still believe.  It's
very easy to overcome such a group's arguments when the only ones they
have are the ones we have imputed to them.

Ec


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Radio interview with Clara Long yesterday

body:
David Gerard wrote:
<snip>
> it's not that Wikipedia is less trustworthy, it's that *all* sources,
> print or not, are untrustworthy and require thought.

That should be added on wikiquote, it can even become a slogan :)

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080


from_name: Kelly Martin

body:
On 7/25/05, A. Nony Mouse <mousyme at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, you do so - but as I have noticed on multiple occasions reading
> your own userpage, you freely use your admin powers to lock yours down
> whenever someone is defacing your user page.
>
> Ordinary users don't have that right. Their options are to request
> getting it locked and wind up having to beg an admin to lock it, wait
> for them to edit, and then relock it whenever they make changes or
> else constantly revert the vandalism.

I've never locked my user page despite frequent vandalism.

There are so many editors monitoring recent changes that user page
vandalism rarely lasts more than a few minutes.  We have special tools
that make user page vandalism very obvious, easy to spot, and easy to
revert.  So this really is a non-issue.

Kelly


from_name: elwp at gmx.de

subject: [Wikitech-l] dumps

body:
The dumps of most Wikipedia projects seem to be complete,
but

http://download.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/pages_full.xml.gz

is apparently incomplete (only 1.1GB). Would someone be
so kind as to make a new dump?

--
GMX DSL = Maximale Leistung zum minimalen Preis!
2000 MB nur 2,99, Flatrate ab 4,99 Euro/Monat: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl


body:
On 7/26/05, steve v <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> For all concerned: I used the Flat Earth Society as an
> extreme example -- not as a kind of important
> precedent. The real issue is, as others have said,
> that  NOR is a for the most part a guideline and not
> an absolute rule, to apply to anything which hasn't
> been checked over by a physicist or physician.

Whether the earth is flat or spherical is a reasonably easy argument,
and cites may be found to back up the common knowledge.

But other "common knowledge" views may be quite erroneous:
* Queen Elizabeth II is Queen of England.
* In the biblical story Delilah cut Samson's hair, making him weak.
* Trams do not run down Flinders Lane in Melbourne.

All of these are incorrect, but there would be any number of Wikipedia
editors who would get upset if asked to provide sources for such
"common-sense" views. Some editors get quite narky if their views are
challenged. Some editors are unwilling to admit of any error.

--
Peter in Canberra


from_name: steve v

body:
Yes, but we deal with the collaborative crafting of
documents, by several uses, which email does not do
well--though email has both public and private modes.

Does "wiki" intrinsically both mean "open" and
"collaborative" or just "open," even when such
openness inhibits collaboration?

SV

PS Eclecticology: Very funny. Resp. later. ;)

--- David <humble.fool at gmail.com> wrote:

> steve v wrote:
>
> >Fine. But what about the theoretical idea of
> allowing
> >for private discussion/scoop spaces on wikinews,
> for
> >example? Part of what makes news organizations work
> is
> >their ability to privately collaborate in gathering
> >news before its published.
> >
> >SV
> >Off topic? Certainly.
> >
> >
> There's always Email.  Not everything to do with the
> wiki has to happen
> on the wiki, does it? -humblefool
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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


from_name: Joseph Reagle

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Consensus

body:
On Monday 18 July 2005 06:33, Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
> >> "Consensus" can only mean everyone agrees - and when the hell that
> >> does that happen? Next to never.

A metric other than unanimity is to reach for better than BATNA:
[[ Lawrence E. Susskind, A short guide to consensus building
We want to differentiate the idea of maximizing joint gain from the
simple-minded language of "win-win" negotiating. We are interested in
helping parties do better than what no agreement probably holds in store
for them. Doing better than one's BATNA (Best Alternative To A Negotiated
Agreement) is the way to measure success in consensus building. There are
few, if any situations, where everyone can get everything they want (which
is what "winning" sounds like to us). (Susskind 1999)
]]

(In the same volume, a great practitioner chapter is Mckearnam and Fairman
(1999) on Producing consensus:
  http://reagle.org/joseph/2005/06/search.cgi?query=Mckearnam%20and%20Fairman%201999
)

> > Consensus may be a slightly fuzzy term, but it doesn't mean that.

It's a very rich, and complex notion, as evidenced by some musings on
consensus in the W3C/IETF context:

[[ http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/reagle/regulation-19990326.html#_Consensus
If one is still looking for a more concrete definition, one is unlikely to
find it. The notable characteristic of consensus mechanisms as a means of
preference aggregation is that they are flexible and informal, and that
they work best in small communities such that differences can be easily
documented, considered, and resolved. The method of reaching consensus
alone does not scale well to large communities; however, when combined with
the characteristics below, it often scales better than a ballot among a
million people! This is because of competitive scaling: a small group of
people get to produce their best work under consensus, and then compete,
coordinate, cooperate, and learn with other groups.
]]

Also, as an aside, the recent debate on pseudo-science and labels is
reminiscent of other encyclopedic debates:

[[Richard R Yeo, Encyclopedic Visions


from_name: ilooy

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Crosspolinating regarding lad.wikis

body:
Hi,
Could Brion or another developer
respond to my message concerning
the lad.wikipedia.org and lad.wiktionary.org
subdomains?

Those who support the formation of
this new subdomain have been
following all the criteria and
requirements mentioned on the
Request_for_new_languages page
in Meta and are eagerly awaiting
word of when the subdomain would
be ready for article submissions.

Please respond to this message
with information of what else is
needed or if a date for announcement
can be set up. I would very much
appreciate your help.

With sincere regards,
Jay B.
en:User:ILVI
ia:Usator:ILVI

2005/7/22, ilooy <ilooy.gaon at gmail.com>:
> Hi,
> I'm once again requesting help
> in setting up the Ladino language
> wikis at http://lad.wikipedia.org
> and http://lad.wiktionary.org
>
> I haven't received a response
> from any of the tech developers
> despite repeated requests. I know
> our developers are busy and they
> do a worthwhile job and definitely
> deserve our praise for all ther
> hard work.
>
> However, I am asking this time
> for a confirmation that someone
> will be looking into putting the
> subdomains online, and also
> by when this can be expected.
>
> Thanks,
> Jay B.
>
> 2005/7/21, ilooy <ilooy.gaon at gmail.com>:
> > Hi,
> > There is enough support at
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages#Ladino
> > to make the following request:
> >
> > I'd like to request the set up
> > of the Ladino wikis for subdomains
> > http://lad.wikipedia.org
> > and
> > http://lad.wiktionary.org
> >
> > For this we will need the
> > help of the developers.
> >
> > Could someone help set this
> > up? Last time I requested this
> > on the tech list there was no
> > response. Is there another
> > forum where this should be
> > handled? Or could we get
> > an idea of a due date where
> > we could have it ready and
> > available for contributions.
> >
> > With sincere regards,
> > Jay B.
> > en:User:ILVI
> > ia:Usator:ILVI
> >
>
>
> --
> --
> ilooy.gaon at gmail.com
>

--
--
ilooy.gaon at gmail.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Crosspolinating regarding lad.wikis

body:
Hi, fellow Wikipedians,

Could Brion, please,  or another developer
respond to my message concerning
the http://lad.wikipedia.org and
http://lad.wiktionary.org
subdomains?

Those who support the formation of
these new subdomains have been
following all the criteria and
requirements mentioned on the
Request_for_new_languages page
in Meta and are eagerly awaiting
word of when the subdomain would
be ready for article submissions.

Please respond to this message
with information of what else is
needed or if a date for announcement
can be set up. I would very much
appreciate your help.

With sincere regards,
Jay B.
en:User:ILVI
ia:Usator:ILVI

2005/7/22, ilooy <ilooy.gaon at gmail.com>:
> Hi,
> I'm once again requesting help
> in setting up the Ladino language
> wikis at http://lad.wikipedia.org
> and http://lad.wiktionary.org
>
> I haven't received a response
> from any of the tech developers
> despite repeated requests. I know
> our developers are busy and they
> do a worthwhile job and definitely
> deserve our praise for all ther
> hard work.
>
> However, I am asking this time
> for a confirmation that someone
> will be looking into putting the
> subdomains online, and also
> by when this can be expected.
>
> Thanks,
> Jay B.
>
> 2005/7/21, ilooy <ilooy.gaon at gmail.com>:
> > Hi,
> > There is enough support at
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages#Ladino
> > to make the following request:
> >
> > I'd like to request the set up
> > of the Ladino wikis for subdomains
> > http://lad.wikipedia.org
> > and
> > http://lad.wiktionary.org
> >
> > For this we will need the
> > help of the developers.
> >
> > Could someone help set this
> > up? Last time I requested this
> > on the tech list there was no
> > response. Is there another
> > forum where this should be
> > handled? Or could we get
> > an idea of a due date where
> > we could have it ready and
> > available for contributions.
> >
> > With sincere regards,
> > Jay B.
> > en:User:ILVI
> > ia:Usator:ILVI
> >
>
>
> --
> --
> ilooy.gaon at gmail.com
>

--
--
ilooy.gaon at gmail.com


from_name: Ryan Delaney

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Haukur ?orgeirsson wrote:
>
>>> The difference is that some people actively argue that the earth is
>>> not a sphere, whereas those who argue that Paris is not the capital of
>>> France so far have kept their activities secret.
>>>
>>> If a fact is contentious, then it should be backed up with a cite.
>>>
>>
>> How many religious fundamentalists does it take to
>> make a fact contentious? How actively do they have
>> to argue? Where are you going to draw the line? And
>> why should we privilege the points of view that
>> happen to be held by people alive today?
>>
>> Wikipedia would be a parody of an encyclopedia if it
>> held that the approximately spherical shape of the
>> Earth is contentious. People expect an encyclopedia
>> to be written from a scientific point of view - and,
>> for the most part, that's how Wikipedia is written.
>>
>>
> It's not a matter of the number of religious fundamentalists, or how
> persistently anyone argues, or lines being drawn.  I certainly don't
> believe that today's points of view should hold sway over historical
> ones.
>
> When we put forth these intuitive truths as examples of the need for
> citations we put up a straw man that is there to be knocked down.
> There is a presumption that any statement is true unless and until it
> is challenged.  Of course the more ridiculous and outrageous
> statements will be challenged very quickly.  Statements about the
> near-spherical shape of the earth may not be challenged at all.
>
> The "scientific point of view" would be fine if it meant rigorous
> adherence to the principles of scientific method; it is not fine if it
> means support for the prevailing prejudices of mainstream scientists.
>
> Some people may very well expect an encyclopedia to be written from
> that mythical "scientific point of view"; others may expect it to be
> from a "religious point of view" of some sort.  We still need to stick
> to a neutral point of view.  Implicit to the neutral point of view is
> the dynamic of questioning everything.
>
> Ec
>
My big problem with this is that very frequently, especially in fields
like science and philosophy, commonly held beliefs might be very
different from the "correct" beliefs, or the consensus among learned
experts. But because of the format of Wikipedia, some extremely wrong
beliefs are inserted into articles because they are commonly held, even
if they wildly contradict the research that professionals in the field
are doing -- and I mean this is just as bad as saying the Earth is flat.
The only difference is that the roundness of the Earth is common
knowledge, but there are some things in science that are just as obvious
to professionals but completely unknown to the general public.

The [[Race and intelligence]] article is a perfect example of this
phenomenon. People who know nothing about the research done in this
field have many times gone into that article and edited it mercilessly
in the name of NPOV because the established scientific opinion presented
(and extensively referenced) in the article is very contradictory to the
"politically correct" opinion. In my view, Wikipedians need to have more
respect for references and experts to prevent this kind of thing from
happening. The usual Wiki philosophy usually works in other cases, but
in such an emotional subject as [[Race and intelligence]], people tend
to go way overboard, and the NPOV and "everyone's equal" policies only
make them more convictional about their right to push their POV over
that of the academic consensus.

In these cases, I don't think that any amount of voiciferous objecting
and arguing should be considered relevant. I think that even if the
consensus of Wikipedians editing the article disagrees with it, that
consensus should lose, unless they can find some evidence that the
article is wrong. This obsession with consensus has a real possibility
of going terribly wrong. I think the emphasis should be on having
Wikipedia advance _correct_ beliefs, not popular ones.

Ryan


from_name: Jtkiefer

body:
>I've never locked my user page despite frequent vandalism.
>
>There are so many editors monitoring recent changes that user page
>vandalism rarely lasts more than a few minutes.  We have special tools
>that make user page vandalism very obvious, easy to spot, and easy to
>revert.  So this really is a non-issue.
>
>Kelly
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>
I can see why locking your userpage and userpage subpages is counter
wiki, but I think that an exception to this would be things like
monobook.css and monobook.js since they are a real pain to fix if a
vandal wants to continually vandalize them and even then the page
shouldn't be permanately protected.

-Jtkiefer


from_name: Haukur Þorgeirsson

body:
>>Once I've cited the source, I can replace the sentence in the article
>>that says "the world is round" with the sentence "The U. S. Naval
>>Oceanographic Office states that for many navigational purposes the
>>earth is assumed to be a sphere, without intolerable error." Problem
>>solved.
>
> Of course, now you have replaced a four-word sentence that a child
> could understand by a 22-word monster that makes tears come to my
> eyes. Double negative included. And someone who's not from the USA
> might wonder why the US Navy gets to decide what the shape of the Earth
> is.

Normally we would just state "for many navigational purposes the earth is
assumed to be a sphere, without intolerable error" and cite the source in
the references.

Regards,
Haukur


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> > You don't want to duplicate entire Russian corpus (with
> > inflections, it could easily rise to ten million words), so
> > that you could have each one of them with and without
> > diacritics. It makes sense to have only canonical spellings in
> > the dictionary, and a bit of code to offer nearest match when
> > someone tries to retrieve a word spelled in a different way.
> >
> As a matter a fact I do want all inflections even if they are
> ten million words. Now I do not expect to have all these
> inflections to start off with but as far as I am concerned I
> want them all. I already have 222.930 Dutch words and they do
> include many inflections.

There are two approaches to dictionaries: (1) The encyclopedic
approach, trying to find (define, spellcheck, explain, ...) "all"
words (and their deflections), or (2) the statistics based
approach, trying to find the most commonly used words.  I think
the OED is of the first kind, while many dictionaries in recent
decades (built with the help of computers, extracting word
frequency statistics from large text corpora) have been of the
latter kind.  Some would call (1) a 19th century approach.

The real difference is their handling of the least common words.
The encyclopedic approach sees every missing word as a failure,
while the statistics based approach recognizes that there is an
infinite number of words anyway (new ones are created every day)
and some might be too uncommon to deserve a mention.

As a consequence, spellchecking in the statistics based approach
can never say that a spelling is "wrong" when it is missing from
the dictionary, only that it probably is "uncommon" and thus
suspect.  The remedy for this is a statics based dictionary of
common misspellings.  Wikipedia article history can be used as a
source for this.  Just find all edits that changed one word, e.g.
speling -> spelling, and you will have a fine dictionary of common
spelling mistakes.

> From a database point of view a Word has one Spelling.

This would be an example of the encyclopedic approach.

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


from_name: janisc at adelphia.net

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia-l Digest, Vol 24, Issue 62

body:
Much appreciated.  I think I know someone who took a photo of a celebrity that has a wikipedia entry.  I'll suggest they put their photo up.

Interesting to note--I'd hate to see it pulled, but I'm curious if falls under fair use.

Under Chrissy Hynde's entry someone used a scan from the Pretender's Greatest Hits cover.  Acceptable?  I'd hate to see it be deleted...but I'm also trying to figure out if photos like that are acceptable.

& I know one of my favorite actors has a page with a non fair use photo.  Because it came from  newspapers and magazines.  They didn't take it.  I don't want to rat them out.  :)

I just mentioned Hynde's entry because I want to know if a CD cover scan is acceptable?  And I had to mention the picture so you guys could see it. :)


from_name: Delirium

body:
steve v wrote:

>And your stated agenda to promote
>links is in violation of policies that "wikipedia is
>not a soapbox" [[WP:SOAP]] and "wikipedia is not a
>links repository."
>
>
We do have those policies, but we also have a policy to try to include
links from a broad range of opinions.  In this case it would seem that a
directory of ex-Muslim or anti-Muslim sites would be appropriate, so
long as it were labeled as such.  We have quite a lot of
anti-Scientology links at the bottom of [[Scientology]], after all...

-Mark


body:
> The difference is that some people actively argue that the earth is
> not a sphere, whereas those who argue that Paris is not the capital of
> France so far have kept their activities secret.
>
> If a fact is contentious, then it should be backed up with a cite.

How many religious fundamentalists does it take to
make a fact contentious? How actively do they have
to argue? Where are you going to draw the line? And
why should we privilege the points of view that
happen to be held by people alive today?

Wikipedia would be a parody of an encyclopedia if it
held that the approximately spherical shape of the
Earth is contentious. People expect an encyclopedia
to be written from a scientific point of view - and,
for the most part, that's how Wikipedia is written.

Regards,
Haukur


body:
>They are automatically protected by the MediaWiki software. Non-admins
>cannot edit other people's stylesheets or javascript files, for obvious
>reasons.
>
>Chris
>
>
Hmm, didn't know that.

-Jtkiefer


from_name: Cathy Ma

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Wikimania! Announcements and broadcasting : help
	requested

body:
Hey SJ,

I'm Cathy from Hong Kong, Fuzheado's student. Will you need a
Mandarin-Cantonese-English onsite traslator?

Best,
Cathy

On 7/25/05, SJ <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Wikipedians,
>
> Wikimania will begin in less than two weeks. (If you're helping
> organize this, the calendar is already engraved inside your forehead
> :-) There will be a crazy collection of speakers and wiki developers
> (http://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Programme), media and documentary
> coverage, and lots of storytelling and good fun.
>
> For those of you who can't be there in person, there will be audio
> streams from the two main halls, and two cameras' worth of vlogging
> thanks to Soufron et al. There are also some important things you can
> do to make it an even better event :
>
> == Wiki discussions, gathering sources ==
> Wikimania will see some very focused discussions about how to improve
> and coordinate the development of MediaWiki, Wikipedia, and the other
> Wikimedia projects. Preparation and organization of ideas over the
> next ten days will see great returns on investment.
> (To add a discussion you want to see happen, or link to existing
> discussions :
> please update http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania:Discussions )
>
> The most exciting part of Wikimania, to me, is getting many different
> circles of savvy people talking about Wikimedia development at the
> same time; and most of that will take place outside of Frankfurt.
>
> == Announcements; Letting others know how to take part ==
> I hope that when the audio podcasts and vlogs of the conference
> sessions start to come out, that everyone who might care to will know
> how to find them... and I want the many Wikimedians who can't be
> there to know how to find the discussions on-wiki surrounding key
> sessions and discussions.
>
> == Requests for help ==
> So please respond to the following requests, if you can, either on- or
> off-list (if off-list, make sure you write to elian :
>
> 1) We need people to help spread the word about Wikimania; to
> websites that want to follow or link to the conference, to people who
> want to join in the disucssions online. Many conferences have IRC
> channels that occasionally produce one or two questions. We should
> strive to have as much feedback coming from IRC and wiki discussions
> as from the audience.
> 2) We need people to help update the Wikimania website with
> information as the conference approaches; and especially DURING the
> conference, as new materials become available. Transcripts, podcasts,
> etc will turn up on meta and on individual blogs; and we should have a
> good portal to that content.
> 3) As I mentioned previously, we also need transcribers for the
> broadcast sessions. We will only have audio and video for the larger
> 2 of 5 rooms; we could use 4-5 transcribers listening in and typing
> out text transcripts for those rooms as well. (I'm sure someone will
> be bored enough to tune in :
> http://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/Programme )
> 3b) If you're COMING to Wikimania and want to transcribe sessions in
> the other three rooms, you will have my undying affection. Contact me
> directly about that...
>
>
> Maniacally,
> SJ
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
MA, P.S. Cathy
MPhil student,
Department of Sociology
The University of Hong Kong
http://cathyma.net


from_name: thomas Armstrong

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Searching a collection of hacks and extensions for
	MediaWiki

body:
Hi.

Is there any list collecting hacks and extensions for MediaWiki?

Regards.


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
thomas Armstrong wrote:
> Is there any list collecting hacks and extensions for MediaWiki?

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Hacks_and_Extensions

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Jack Lynch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pipermail Privacy Concern

body:
http://www.behind-the-tm-facade.org/Transcendental_Meditation-myths.htm

I think some mattress hopping might do you some good, yes.

Jack (Sam Spade)

On 7/26/05, andyl2004 at sympatico.ca <andyl2004 at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> are you suggesting I practice some trancendental
> meditation?


from_name: SJ

subject:
[Foundation-l] Fwd: [archivists] Announcement: Online Conference
	about eBooks and Digital Audiobooks (fwd)

body:
Potentially interesting.   *Not* run by archive.org; the organizer was
just spamming the archivists list.  Perhaps someone free can attend
and report back?

SJ

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Samuel Klein <sjklein at hcs.harvard.edu>
Date: Jul 26, 2005 12:51 PM
Subject: [archivists] Announcement:  Online Conference about eBooks
and Digital Audiobooks (fwd)
To: 2.718281828 at gmail.com

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 09:43:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: Tom Peters <tapinformation at yahoo.com>
To: archivists at yahoogroups.com, archivists-talk at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [archivists] Announcement:  Online Conference about eBooks and
    Digital Audiobooks

This announcement is being sent to several lists, with apologies
extended to those who receive multiple copies.

You are invited to attend an online conference about books, ebooks,
and digital audiobooks to be held on Thursday, July 28, 2005 (early
Friday morning in Australasia).  There is no cost to register, and
there is no registration deadline.  Already over 185 librarians,
information technologists, ebook and digital audiobook users,
publishers, and others from across the U.S. and around the world have
registered to attend this innovative online conference.

To participate all you need is an Internet-connected computer running
a Microsoft Windows operating system (Windows 98 or later), Mac OS X,
or Linux.  If in addition to text-chatting you wish to communicate via
voice-over-IP, you need to have a microphone connected to--or embedded
in--your computer.

The homepage for the conference website is:

http://www.planetlibrary.info/lgleindex.htm

The direct link to the conference registration page is:

http://www.planetlibrary.info/tinc?key=opjmI0gx&formname=LGLEregister200507

If you want to test your connection prior to the day of the online
conference, here is the link to one of the online conference rooms:

http://67.19.231.218/v4/login.asp?r=7c4d784b&p=0

Access to this room is available 24/7 from now until the conclusion of
the conference.  Please note:  The first time you enter one of these
online meeting rooms, the operating system you are using may ask for
your permission to download and automatically install a small, safe
software plug-in.

In addition to vendor exhibits and opportunities for informal
networking, this conference will feature the following outstanding
speakers:

   Mark Beatty from WILS: Wilsconsin Library Services

   Lori Bell (Director of the Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center):
An Introduction to Digital Audiobooks

   Charlotte Johnson (Director of User Services at Lovejoy Library,
Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville), and William Harroff
(Reference and Information Technologies Librarian, Holman Library,
McKendree College):
(r)Evolutionary (e)Books

   Asra Nomani (Author of the new book Standing Alone in Mecca, one
woman's pilgrimage to reclaim the rightful role of women in Islam):
Interview and Online Book Signing

   Jon Noring from the OpenReader Consortium, a cooperative project to
create a universal, open standards digital publication distribution
format.

   David Rothman from TeleRead, an organization dedicated to bringing
ebooks home and advocating for well-stocked national digital
libraries.

   Blake Squires from Findaway, Inc., which will begin selling the
Playaway self-contained digital audiobook device in October.

   Juliet Sutherland from Distributed Proofreaders, supporting the
digitization of public domain books.

   Lori Watrous-deVersterre from LibraryCity, dedicated to bringing
ebooks to online communities in the Carnegie tradition.

   Claudia Weissman from OverDrive, a leading digital book and digital
audiobook vendor for libraries and retailers.

This online conference is part of Let's Go Library Expo, a planned
series of online conferences on timely topics related to librarianship
and information technology.  Please watch for announcements of future
conferences in this series.

It is being organized by:

   Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center

   North Suburban Library System near Chicago

   Alliance Library System in Central Illinois

   TAP Information Services near Kansas City

The conference is sponsored by:

OverDrive (www.overdrive.com), a leading digital book and digital
audiobook vendor for libraries and retailers.

For more information please visit the conference website
(http://www.planetlibrary.info/lgleindex.htm) or contact Tom Peters
from TAP Information Services (tpeters at tapinformation.com).  Thank
you!

Tom Peters

TAP Information Services
1000 SW 23rd Street
Blue Springs, MO 64015
phone:  816-228-6406
email:  tapinformation at yahoo.com
web:  www.tapinformation.com

TAP Information Services provides a wide variety of high quality
planning, consulting, research, and assessment services
supporting libraries, library consortia, government agencies,
professional associations, and other information-intensive
organizations.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/archivists/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    archivists-unsubscribe at yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

--
++SJ


subject:
[Textbook-l] Fwd: [archivists] Announcement: Online Conference
	about eBooks and Digital Audiobooks (fwd)