subject:
[Wikitech-l] Idea for faster,	cheaper access to Wikipedia in
	poorer countries

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

>My idea for faster, cheaper access to Wikipedia in poorer countries:
>
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reducing_transit_requirements
>
>It requires patching squid and extending the HTCP protocol. The latter
>should be no big deal, the protocol is only in the "experimental" phase
>after all.
>
>-- Tim Starling
>
>
>
Interesting. I don't know of anyone charging different rates for
day/night IP traffic (let me know if anyone on the list knows better).
However, this _is_ the indirect effect of existing pricing policies.

Most first-world wholesale IP bandwidth is (AFAIK) charged at
95-percentile rates: that is, for the lowest bandwidth below which your
short-timescale traffic bandwidth falls 95% of the time. In general, the
provider gives you a bigger physical pipe than you currently need, for
the same reason that that credit card companies give you ever-increasing
credit limits -- in the hope that your usage will grow progressively to
fill it.

If you add a small increment to your traffic at your daily peak, you
will push up your 95% figure. If you add it at your off-peak time, it
won't. Thus, for anyone on a 95% deal, small increments in off-peak
traffic are effectively "free".

-- Neil


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Ilya N.

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Categories, Portals, Wikiportals,
	Wikiprojects and Notice Boards

body:
I agree that Categories and Portals can share jobs in some cases...

On 10/15/05, adam <underthechair at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It's my view that our systems for co-ordinating both readers and editors
> are currently poorly organised. I'll describe what each of these things
> attempt to achieve (as I see it) and then explain why this causes
> several problems and suggest solutions.
>
> Categories are in theory perfectly simple. [[:Category:English Poets]],
> for example lists all our articles on English poets and does nothing
> else. We also , however, have categories pretending to be portals.
> [[:Category:Mathematics]] is the perfect example of this - there is a
> perfectly good Portal stuck on to the top of a perfectly good Category.
> The Mathematics Portal actually redirects to it.
>
> We also have straight-forward Portals, which are purely (or almost
> purely) designed for readers. The [[Portal:Cricket|Cricket Portal]] is a
> good example of one of these. It contains an introduction to the topic,
> a few pictures and links to some of the more important related articles.
> The only item which is not aimed solely at readers is an invitation to
> participate in the associated WikiProject.
>
> We also have WikiPortals. These contain the same sort of stuff as
> Portals but with extra bits thrown in, aimed at editors. To pick a few
> examples at random, the [[Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Brazil|Brazil
> WikiPortal]] invites people to add information to a list of
> Brazil-related stubs and contains a little information about when it was
> made and who runs it, The [[Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Physics|Physics
> WikiPortal]] has a brief 'things you can do' list and the
> [[Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Music|Music WikiPortal]] links to connected
> WikiProjects.
>
> WikiProjects aim to "help coordinate and organize article writing". Lots
> of these are aimed purely at getting articles on the same subject to
> share a format/layout etc. [[Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mountains|The
> mountains WikiProject]] for example is 90% instructions on how to set
> out articles on mountains, 8% administration and 2% links to resources
> for article writing. The only thing in the
> [[Wikipedia:WikiProject_Archaeology|Archaeology WikiProject]] is a list
> of articles that people might like to contribute to.
>
> Finally, there are also [[Wikipedia:Regional_notice_boards|Regional
> Wikipedians' Notice Boards]]. These contain all sorts of lovely stuff -
> articles to create, expand, pictures to find, relevant peer reviews,
> articles for deletion, featured article candidates and so on.
>
> The problem as I see it is that the functions of these things overlap,
> making the system as a whole overcomplicated. I'll now list the three
> main problematic areas and suggest solutions.
>
> 1. Categories and Portals are essentially coming at the same job from
> different angles. They both provide topic-based navigation, Categories
> with the emphasis on being comprehensive and Portals with the emphasis
> on providing an attractive interface. At the moment our Categories are
> far more developed than our Portals, but given enough time there
> probably would (or could) be a portal covering each Category. There are
> two obvious solutions to this and at the moment we're doing both
> inconsistently. We should either decide to split the two up completely
> as is done in [[Portal:Cricket]] and [[:Category:Cricket]] or put them
> together one one page as at [[:Category:Mathematics]]. My personal
> preference is to keep them separate but with prominent links between
> them, but either solution would be acceptable. The system as it stands,
> however, is illogical and confusing.
>
> 2. Portals and WikiPortals are more or less the same thing. The editor
> related content in WikiPortals is useful but certainly not the sort of
> thing we should be presenting to the public. I think we should take all
> the reader-orientated content from our WikiPortals and transfer it to
> Portals. One link inviting people to edit is probably acceptable, as at
> the Cricket Portal, but certainly no more. What is left can be
> incorporated somewhere else, which leads me to...
>
> 3. Our editor-orientated pages. Here we have Noticeboards and
> WikiProjects doing the more or less the same thing - co-ordinating
> editors' efforts in a certain field. Regional Wikipedians' Noticeboards
> I think are a great idea, except for the first word. I see no reason why
> the Noticeboard concept should be restircted to regions. I think it
> would be equally applicable to any other topic area. I discussed
> mountains earlier and I think the content at the Mountains WikiProject
> could quite easily be incorporated into a Mountains Noticeboard
> (possibly on a well-marked subpage) which would also allow for the
> inclusion of information such as that currently on the Regional
> Noticeboards - requested articles, articles for expansion, up for
> featured articles etc. These could also include any information left
> over from the relevant WikiPortal.
>
> Basically, I think we should attempt to simplify the system and organise
> it along more logical grounds. This would help our readers to navigate
> the site and find the content they want and also help our editors to
> create this content.
>
> Comments and criticism etc welcome
>
> (Also posted at the Village Pump)
>
>
> Adam
>
> (Cherry blossom tree)
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
~Ilya N.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Meanwhile, AfD grinds on

body:
Kelly wrote:
>> No, you can't.  If you recreate an article on the same topic as a
>> previously deleted one, it will be speedied, and VFU won't likely
>> accept that it was "rewritten" as an excuse.

Fred Bauder wrote:
> This doesn't make any sense. We need to change the policy if that is
> how it works.

Yes, Fred is right.

It is difficult to strike a balance here, though.  It's one thing if
Bryan Derkson (*Bryan Derkson*, this isn't some random person, it's
*Bryan Derkson* you see) wants to recreate an article and puts forward
good arguments for it, and another thing if some POV-warring troll or
garage band tries to keep bringing back some nonsense that got properly
deleted already.

We should listen to Bryan, we should not listen to trolls.  The hard bit
is implementing common sense and logic in policy. :-)

--Jimbo


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

>My idea for faster, cheaper access to Wikipedia in poorer countries:
>
>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reducing_transit_requirements
>
>It requires patching squid and extending the HTCP protocol. The latter
>should be no big deal, the protocol is only in the "experimental" phase
>after all.
>
>
>
On reflection, inventing new protocols for taking a real-time feed is
probably uncessary for what will be a batch operation.

How about simply making plain-ASCII logfiles available, where each line
consists of

<timestamp> <url>\n

which is grown in real-time by appending to it?

People wanting to freshen their caches can then download, trim off all
entries previous to the last time they fetched, uniq the file to get
only a single copy of each url, and then run a script to wget all the
uls from inside their cache during off-peak hours, thus freshening it.

Very little software, a twenty-line perl script, no new protocols, and
(I hope) achieves the same effect.

-- Neil


from_name: Александр Сигачёв

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Unicode high characters versus MySQL 5

body:
Unicode collation is very essential and long-awaited for some wikies.

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164

--
Alexander Sigachov
meta:user:ajvol


from_name: Han Dao

subject: [WikiEN-l] Meanwhile, AfD grinds on

body:
Who care if that article ''The Jar'' get deleted from wikipedia. If
wikipedia don't want this webcomic article, than
www.comixpedia.org<http://www.comixpedia.org>can have it. In that
situtation everyone win! Because Wikipedia don't want
this particular article, another wiki licensed under the GNUFDL can have it.
In this case, an encyclopedia dedicated to webcomics who don't care about
notablity/popluarity of a webcomic. In fact, we already tranwiki the article
"The Jar" with credits to Wikipedia. See
http://www.comixpedia.org/index.php/The_Jar
 So absolutely no harm done..

 On 10/12/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:

> I just came across this AfD when a link to the deleted article was
> removed from another I had watchlisted:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/The_Jar
>
> I never read the webcomic The Jar myself, but I know that it existed and
> was popular, and also that when Kittyhawk moved on to other projects the
> webcomic's archive was taken offline. The nominator saw the resulting
> lack of Google results and nominated it solely on account of "none
> notability." As a result of this grand consensus of four voters, three
> of whom explained their vote with "nn" and one with "as per nom",
> Wikipedia will forever more lack an article on this topic. Kind of a
> pity since I've always been curious about what I missed - I've been told
> that it had a better plot than Kittyhawk's current strip, which survived
> a VfD last year.
>
> There were tons of great ideas being kicked around on this mailing list
> a few weeks back for how to change the deletion process, either as a
> short-term experiment or long-term reform, has it all quietly passed
> from everyone's radars now? Or is there some other forum the discussion
> moved to that I missed?
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>


from_name: adam

body:
It's my view that our systems for co-ordinating both readers and editors
are currently poorly organised. I'll describe what each of these things
attempt to achieve (as I see it) and then explain why this causes
several problems and suggest solutions.

Categories are in theory perfectly simple. [[:Category:English Poets]],
for example lists all our articles on English poets and does nothing
else. We also , however, have categories pretending to be portals.
[[:Category:Mathematics]] is the perfect example of this - there is a
perfectly good Portal stuck on to the top of a perfectly good Category.
The Mathematics Portal actually redirects to it.

We also have straight-forward Portals, which are purely (or almost
purely) designed for readers. The [[Portal:Cricket|Cricket Portal]] is a
good example of one of these. It contains an introduction to the topic,
a few pictures and links to some of the more important related articles.
The only item which is not aimed solely at readers is an invitation to
participate in the associated WikiProject.

We also have WikiPortals. These contain the same sort of stuff as
Portals but with extra bits thrown in, aimed at editors. To pick a few
examples at random, the [[Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Brazil|Brazil
WikiPortal]] invites people to add information to a list of
Brazil-related stubs and contains a little information about when it was
made and who runs it, The [[Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Physics|Physics
WikiPortal]] has a brief 'things you can do' list and the
[[Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Music|Music WikiPortal]] links to connected
WikiProjects.

WikiProjects aim to "help coordinate and organize article writing". Lots
of these are aimed purely at getting articles on the same subject to
share a format/layout etc. [[Wikipedia:WikiProject_Mountains|The
mountains WikiProject]] for example is 90% instructions on how to set
out articles on mountains, 8% administration and 2% links to resources
for article writing. The only thing in the
[[Wikipedia:WikiProject_Archaeology|Archaeology WikiProject]] is a list
of articles that people might like to contribute to.

Finally, there are also [[Wikipedia:Regional_notice_boards|Regional
Wikipedians' Notice Boards]]. These contain all sorts of lovely stuff -
articles to create, expand, pictures to find, relevant peer reviews,
articles for deletion, featured article candidates and so on.

The problem as I see it is that the functions of these things overlap,
making the system as a whole overcomplicated. I'll now list the three
main problematic areas and suggest solutions.

1. Categories and Portals are essentially coming at the same job from
different angles. They both provide topic-based navigation, Categories
with the emphasis on being comprehensive and Portals with the emphasis
on providing an attractive interface. At the moment our Categories are
far more developed than our Portals, but given enough time there
probably would (or could) be a portal covering each Category. There are
two obvious solutions to this and at the moment we're doing both
inconsistently. We should either decide to split the two up completely
as is done in [[Portal:Cricket]] and [[:Category:Cricket]] or put them
together one one page as at [[:Category:Mathematics]]. My personal
preference is to keep them separate but with prominent links between
them, but either solution would be acceptable. The system as it stands,
however, is illogical and confusing.

2. Portals and WikiPortals are more or less the same thing. The editor
related content in WikiPortals is useful but certainly not the sort of
thing we should be presenting to the public. I think we should take all
the reader-orientated content from our WikiPortals and transfer it to
Portals. One link inviting people to edit is probably acceptable, as at
the Cricket Portal, but certainly no more. What is left can be
incorporated somewhere else, which leads me to...

3. Our editor-orientated pages. Here we have Noticeboards and
WikiProjects doing the more or less the same thing - co-ordinating
editors' efforts in a certain field. Regional Wikipedians' Noticeboards
I think are a great idea, except for the first word. I see no reason why
the Noticeboard concept should be restircted to regions. I think it
would be equally applicable to any other topic area. I discussed
mountains earlier and I think the content at the Mountains WikiProject
could quite easily be incorporated into a Mountains Noticeboard
(possibly on a well-marked subpage) which would also allow for the
inclusion of information such as that currently on the Regional
Noticeboards - requested articles, articles for expansion, up for
featured articles etc. These could also include any information left
over from the relevant WikiPortal.

Basically, I think we should attempt to simplify the system and organise
it along more logical grounds. This would help our readers to navigate
the site and find the content they want and also help our editors to
create this content.

Comments and criticism etc welcome

(Also posted at the Village Pump)

Adam

(Cherry blossom tree)


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] On Clarity and Generalists

body:
Delirium wrote

> That's certainly an opinion which can be represented.  But that presented
> by the NYT is also a major mainstream opinion on the subject.  It can of
> course be said that European Derrida scholars think the NYT sucks, but
> simply pretending the NYT's view does not exist and is not held by
> millions of other people is strange.

Point 1 would be that we're talking here about arcane philosophy (and a
particularly self-entrenched philosopher), not current affairs.  So even one
of the major newspapers will only be as good as their hired gun who writes
about it.  Reporters picking up phones are not going to cut it.

Point 2 is that the NYT obituary probably did aim, as obits do, to be
judicious about the newsworthy bits of Derrida.  Snowspinner, I take it,
likes the idea that we'd do the same.  But if the NYT blew it ... it became
fairly worthless as an exercise.

Point 3: would be that the article itself probably got into defensive
posture when Derrida died, and there was a sudden rush of people essentially
defacing it.  Yes, it needs to move on, now.  Things written on the talk
page about being true to his memory or not are rather telling, about that.
Wiki is a bit llike one of those materials with memory, though.

Charles


from_name: jmerkey

subject:
[WikiEN-l] www.merkeylaw.com postings on Fvw have been deleted/Fvw
 Wikipedia Blocks are frivilous

body:
I have asked the sysop to remove the page related to Frank V. Waveren
from the merkeylaw website.  He as now done so.  There exist no personal
attacks, legal threats, disruption, or any other items on Wikipedia for
account Gadugi.   As such, the current blocks are frivilous and
unnecessary.   I also consider them to be childish.

Please remove them.

Thanks,

Jeff


from_name: Stephen Bain

subject: [WikiEN-l] On Clarity and Generalists

body:
On 10/15/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
> Is Wikipedia simply a general encyclopedia? I always thought it was more
> than that. I think the goal is really to include general information and
> specific information, and let the user navigate easily between the two.
> Maybe I'm wrong about this, though. It's an interesting question.
>

There's room for both. Since wiki is not paper (as we are so often
told) there is plenty of room for general articles on general
subjects, and specific articles on specific subjects. As a reader, I
would probably expect (and want) to find the most general information
first, and have the option of looking at specific information if I
should so desire. Confronting readers with all available information
at once just gets confusing.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] http://nap.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paggena_prencepale

body:
Rapid growth of the new Philippine WPs should be noted as well.

The more recently-created Illocano WP has 67 mostly very good long articles.

The Waray-Waray WP, created along with the Neapolitan and Ladino WPs,
has 287 mostly very good long articles.

Kapampangan WP (created much earlier) has 135 articles; the Cebuano WP
has 687 articles.

Mark

On 15/10/05, Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it> wrote:
> I just had a look at the main page - in this moment it shows 100 pages
> :-) of course many of them are still stubs, but well, things are going
> ahead :-)
>
> Ho appena dato uno sguardo alla pagina principale - in questo momento mi
> mostra 100 pagine :-) naturalmente molti sono ancora stub, ma stiamo
> andando :-)
>
> (per chi non lo sapesse - in particolare nel gruppo Napulitano: uno stub
> ? un articolo minimo che serve per iniziare qualcosa e per animare altri
> a contribuire - chi volesse la newsletter in napoletano - cio? chi non
> la riceve ancora: per piacere fatemi sapere con un messaggio privato)
>
> (for those of you who do not receive the newsletter in Neapolitan
> language and would like to receive it, please let me know sending a
> private message).
>
> Ciao, Sabine
>
>
> ___________________________________
> Yahoo! Messenger: chiamate gratuite in tutto il mondo
> http://it.messenger.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Static HTML dumps

body:
I've done some HTML dumps of Wikipedia:

http://static.wikipedia.org/

This is something I've been working on for the last 6 months or so. It
was requested by WiderNet, for their eGranary Digital Library project:

http://www.widernet.org/digitalLibrary/index.htm

The project distributes information to universities in developing
countries, by filling large hard drives with free or donated content and
delivering them. The dumps have been produced to their specifications,
but I thought they might be useful to other people as well.

This is a "beta" release, I would recommend that most people wait for
the second release, when a number of known bugs will be fixed.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Meanwhile, AfD grinds on

body:
Alphax wrote:

>As one of the (the?) most active contributors to en.wp, do we have an
>article on Bryan? No? Why not? We have 2 magazine references!
>
>
Aw, shucks. I don't like to make a fuss, I just edit. On the other hand,
Jimbo's post seriously inflated my head, there. Thanks. :)

Relating back to the original purpose of this thread, though, I wouldn't
want to dismiss the issue I had with this deletion by "being Bryan" and
throwing my reputation around to resolve it. It just seemed like a
particularly good example of a problem I felt existed with the current
deletion-related policies, that there's no easy way to revisit a
deletion that's been closed like this and to challenge votes made
without any significant justification provided.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Meanwhile, AfD grinds on

body:
Han Dao wrote:

>Who care if that article ''The Jar'' get deleted from wikipedia. If
>wikipedia don't want this webcomic article, than
>www.comixpedia.org<http://www.comixpedia.org>can have it. In that
>situtation everyone win! Because Wikipedia don't want
>this particular article, another wiki licensed under the GNUFDL can have it.
>
>
But it's not a case that "Wikipedia doesn't want this article", because
Wikipedia isn't a monolithic entity with one opinion. I personally
believe that every web comic with at least a hundred strips or so (as a
very rough benchmark) deserves an article. Webcomics are somewhat of a
specialized subject for an encyclopedia, sure, but Wikipedia is capable
of specializing in _everything_.

>In this case, an encyclopedia dedicated to webcomics who don't care about
>notablity/popluarity of a webcomic. In fact, we already tranwiki the article
>"The Jar" with credits to Wikipedia. See
>http://www.comixpedia.org/index.php/The_Jar
> So absolutely no harm done..
>
>
Well, there's been arguments put forward that this sort of thing is a
"fork" that does indeed harm Wikipedia (and perhaps the forked wiki too)
by subjecting both to contributor drain - if the two wikis were merged
they'd each have more people working on their contents. I'm not so sure
about this, but I nevertheless think it's probably a net loss to be
deleting content from Wikipedia that's perfectly acceptable for other
encyclopedias to cover.

But in any event, it's still only tangentally related to the issue that
really bugged me here - that a small handful of voters could cast votes
with paltry or nonexistant justifications given for them, and then that
decision becomes very difficult to argue afterward. The whole "what is
notable, and should notability matter" issue is another ball of wax.


from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] The 3RR is an electric fence, not an entitlement.

body:
G'day Silverback,

> On 10/10/05, Tony Sidaway wrote:
>> Well, do you not see that all you're talking about is a tit-for-tat
>> affair? What does the issue of killing people trying to escape Cuba
>> have to do with the question of whether we call Batista or Castro
>> dictators? Both of them instituted a government by force of arms,
>> so they would both fit the traditional standard. Shah Pahlavi, for
>> that matter, when dismissed by Massadeq, was reinstalled by
>> military force, so I guess we could call him a dictator too. But
>> the editors of the Pahlavi article, for whatever reason, are not
>> squabbling.
>
> You can call it tit-for-tat, but when a clique has control of a page,
> and is claiming a certain standard in rejecting your edits such as
> "dictator" being POV and pejorative even when applied to a world
> class dictator like Fidel Castro, you can at least embarass them some
> with their hypocrisy if they insist on maintaining the term for a
> petty corrupt dictator such as Batista.  His oppression only extended

Ah!  Now I see your problem.  It's not that they alone are POV-pushing.
  Both your side and their side (whoever they are) are POV-pushing.  The
real issue is that they're *better* at POV-pushing than you are, and
therefore getting away with it while you are not.  Well, my heart bleeds.

Now go back and re-read the post where Tony quoted the [[Hitler]]
article as an example of How To Deal With Bastard Dictators Without
Calling Them Bastard Dictators Because Readers Are Smart Enough To Work
That Out.  You may like to ask him (nicely) to make the same point to
your opponents in whatever petty edit wars you've been engaged in
lately.  That way every POV-pusher can receive Enlightenment at the same
time!

Remember, we are writing an encyclopaedia, not a particularly
poorly-written high school argumentative essay.  You present facts, you
do not draw conclusions: that's for the reader to do.  If I read on WP
that Castro shoots people who try to leave Cuba, I'll immediately leap
out of my seat (dislodging the cat), and scream "he's a bastard!"  If I
read on WP that Castro is a bastard, I'll start to wonder why I'm
bothering to read such a bloody awful encyclopaedia.  D'yer understand?

> to the measures necessary to keep him in power and luxury.  There  is
> a difference between being anti-democratic for selfish reasons, and
> essentially enslaving (because they can't leave) a pool of cheap
> labor to implement your grand plans for the economy.

Now you're getting into ideology, and ... well, off-topic.  That's not good.

Cheers,

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.12.0/134 - Release Date: 14/10/2005


list: commons-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Commons-l] How to use and reuse our content

body:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/How_to_use_or_reuse_our_content

If any of you have a bit of time for this, please help
building that page with all the information currently
available accross all our projects, so that a common
page exist which would could make it available on the
Foundation website.

The idea is to make something quite clear, to which we
could point out for any major reuser of our content.

Thanks in advance

Ant

__________________________________
Yahoo! Music Unlimited
Access over 1 million songs. Try it free.
http://music.yahoo.com/unlimited/


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] How to use and reuse our content


subject: [WikiEN-l] How to use and reuse our content


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] AfD needs to die, for historical reasons

body:
Alphax wrote:

>Just found this page....
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Votes_for_deletion/title
>
>"There is currently no vote taking place. Suggestions are being taken.
>Options are being considered. Alternatives are being pondered. Please do
>not attempt to start a vote without prior discussion and rough consensus
>on the length of such a vote, how it will be counted, what all the
>candidates are, and so forth. Especially don't start a vote if we don't
>even agree that we need it."
>
>WHY DIDN'T ANYONE LISTEN??????????????
>
Listening seriously interferes with one's ability to put across a more
important POV, ;-)

Ec


from_name: Sabine Cretella

body:
I just had a look at the main page - in this moment it shows 100 pages
:-) of course many of them are still stubs, but well, things are going
ahead :-)

Ho appena dato uno sguardo alla pagina principale - in questo momento mi
mostra 100 pagine :-) naturalmente molti sono ancora stub, ma stiamo
andando :-)

(per chi non lo sapesse - in particolare nel gruppo Napulitano: uno stub
? un articolo minimo che serve per iniziare qualcosa e per animare altri
a contribuire - chi volesse la newsletter in napoletano - cio? chi non
la riceve ancora: per piacere fatemi sapere con un messaggio privato)

(for those of you who do not receive the newsletter in Neapolitan
language and would like to receive it, please let me know sending a
private message).

Ciao, Sabine

___________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger: chiamate gratuite in tutto il mondo
http://it.messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: Grease Monkee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Why AFD works Great

body:
AFD functions well, and I'm surprised to see the never ending stream of
emails to this list complaining about the process. My only suggestion to
improve AFD is for it to have its own mailing list.

Some of AFD's features I find particularly appealing ...

* efficiently disposes of sewage - has a very low error rate
* satisfies the appetites of certain editors who crave visibility, drama and
social interaction
* is a wonderful soap box for bombasts to opine, prognosticate and listen to
themselves
* distracts the Fucking Idiots from more important parts of the encyclopedia
* provides a place for these animals to gnash their teeth and hump each
other

...while the rest of us write an encyclopedia.

Most of the complaining has been about the AFD process, when the real
problem is the behavior of the editors who are drawn there. If AFD was
reworked to eliminate the possibility of bitching, whining and sniveling,
this behavior might just move elsewhere in our project.

The current process, amazingly, motivates volunteer editors to passionately
evaluate tens of thousands articles per year. And while it's not perfect and
can probably be improved, it's pretty damn good.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Static HTML dumps

body:
--- Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> I've done some HTML dumps of Wikipedia:
>
> http://static.wikipedia.org/

Neat! Although things like stub and clean-up messages don't make any sense in a
static version. Would it be possible to somehow meta tag those templates so
they don't show up in a static dump?

stub example: http://static.wikipedia.org/en/m/a/n/MANPADS_5a96.html

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Meanwhile, AfD grinds on

body:
> I felt existed with the current
> deletion-related policies, that there's no easy way to revisit a
> deletion that's been closed like this and to challenge votes made
> without any significant justification provided.

That's the whole point, if there's a Wayback Machine link that shows
it was popular there's enough justification for undeletion, but if
justification with extra info wasn't required all deletions would be
contested by people who are trying to get something into Wikipedia for
their own purposes rather than creating an encyclopedia. A safeguard
is needed.

--Mgm


subject: [WikiEN-l] Meanwhile, AfD grinds on

body:
> Well, there's been arguments put forward that this sort of thing is a
> "fork" that does indeed harm Wikipedia (and perhaps the forked wiki too)
> by subjecting both to contributor drain - if the two wikis were merged
> they'd each have more people working on their contents. I'm not so sure
> about this, but I nevertheless think it's probably a net loss to be
> deleting content from Wikipedia that's perfectly acceptable for other
> encyclopedias to cover.

The problem with this is, that Comixpedia is a collection of all
webcomics they can think of there's no editorial control and literally
anything can get in. Merging that with Wikipedia would introduce
scores of what are basically vanity articles for the creators. Just
try arguing for undeletion with a solid claim backed up by references.

--Mgm


subject: [WikiEN-l] Meanwhile, AfD grinds on

body:
Actually...we don't let everything get in. Only webcomics article get in.
Those vanity article tends to get edited into a encyclopedic article. We
even have a vague editorial policy like all article must be in NPOV. I have
a problem with those creators who create vanity article. Thier article
completely sucks, and self promoting, and I have to clean up their freaking
mess almost everyday. We don't let commerical adversiting in there, spaming
our encyclopedia with 100+ characters pages that have no purpose (In one
incident, I deleted more than 100 articles relating to every single comic
strips of Gaming Guardian.) Litterally any webcomics stuff can get in if
they are real unless they just plain grabage not worth editing, irrevleant,
orginal research, a review, hoax, etc.
 On 10/16/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Well, there's been arguments put forward that this sort of thing is a
> > "fork" that does indeed harm Wikipedia (and perhaps the forked wiki too)
> > by subjecting both to contributor drain - if the two wikis were merged
> > they'd each have more people working on their contents. I'm not so sure
> > about this, but I nevertheless think it's probably a net loss to be
> > deleting content from Wikipedia that's perfectly acceptable for other
> > encyclopedias to cover.
>
> The problem with this is, that Comixpedia is a collection of all
> webcomics they can think of there's no editorial control and literally
> anything can get in. Merging that with Wikipedia would introduce
> scores of what are basically vanity articles for the creators. Just
> try arguing for undeletion with a solid claim backed up by references.
>
> --Mgm
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Idea for faster,	cheaper access to Wikipedia
	in   poorer countries

references:
<dipuv8$tk3$1@sea.gmane.org> <4351394C.7030208@tonal.clara.co.uk>
	<disbk4$ag2$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

>The pre-fetch component is a batch operation, but the cache clear isn't.
>When a user edits a page, we expect everyone in the world to be able to
>retrieve it within a second or two. That's why we already have apaches
>in two countries pumping out UDP packets which are routed by various
>means to all our squid servers. When someone makes an edit, the
>worldwide cache of that page is instantly purged, and the main point of
>my proposal is an automated method for ISP proxies to be part of that.
>
>We could convert the CLR stream to ASCII text, but the software to do
>that could equally run on every individual squid, since they all have
>access to that stream. Either way, we need to put a flag in the CLR
>packets indicating whether the item should be pre-fetched or not.
>
>Polling the recentchanges table to construct these ASCII files isn't
>really an option, we tried that with the RC->IRC bots and it turned out
>to be too resource-intensive, which is why they also use a UDP stream
>these days. We could add a third UDP stream for this purpose, or create
>a daemon and have TCP notification, but it seems easier to me to just
>modify one of the existing ones slightly, by adding a flag. The REASON
>field has a 4-bit width, and only two codes are defined, so there's
>plenty of room for us to suggest our own codes. Otherwise we can just
>stake a claim in the RESERVED section.
>
>-- Tim Starling
>
>
>
I'm not suggesting the log files should be polled in real-time: that
would be silly. Rather, the URL invalidation file needs to be pulled
down only once per batch pre-fetch session, a total of perhaps 6 Mbytes
per day for each client site, assuming 60 chars per log entry and
100,000 edits a day. This assumes no compression: this file should gzip
extremely efficiently due to the strong repetition in both URLs and
timestamp strings, so the file might be only 2 or 3 Mbytes long if
dowloaded with gzip on-the-fly compression.

For a remote site, Wikipedia traffic will only form a small proportion
of overall traffic. A cache issuing an HTTP HEAD request to check
freshness will return a tiny fraction of the number of bytes that an
HTTP GET will: if the data is stale, a full GET will be required,
regardless of whether the cache invalidation is done on-demand at page
fetch time or by real-time streaming.

The advantage of the streaming approach is (as I understand it)
* to eliminate the need for HEAD requests
* to push some of the GET requests into the off-peak time, which is a
win providing the page is not touched between the off-peak fetch and a
user's on-peak access to the same page (but a loss if the page is edited
between then and the user access, as it simply wastes off-peak bandwidth
to no useful effect).

For the Wikipedia cluster, which spends 100% of its time serving
Wikipedia content, the multicast HTCP solution is clearly the best
solution to the problem.

For another site, the question will be whether the expected cost and
bandwidth gain from the advantages of the streaming system will outweigh
the cost, complexity and bandwidth loss of installing special software
and subscribing to the HTCP stream at all times during the day.

It would make sense to do some modelling of the cache hit/miss patterns
of off-peak prefetching before going ahead and implementing anything.
For a simple model, I think it would be reasonable to expect a Zipf
distribution pattern of access rates for individual pages on both the
read and edit sides of the system, and to consider the gains/losses for
pages updated in a Poisson fashion at various data rates, and what
proportion of the traffic is accounted for by each class of pages.

-- Neil


subject: [WikiEN-l] Meanwhile, AfD grinds on

body:
Alphax wrote:

>Bryan Derksen wrote:
>
>
>>It just seemed like a particularly good example of a problem I felt
>>existed with the current deletion-related policies, that there's no
>>easy way to revisit a deletion that's been closed like this and to
>>challenge votes made without any significant justification provided.
>>
>>
>We should make "voting keep or delete on AfD without explaining the
>vote" a blockable offence?
>
He He He!  A bit of their own medicine.  There could be a whole new
level of argumentation.

I would be happy with the simpler solution that any AfD without
explanation could itself be speedied on sight.

Ec


from_name: Cormac Lawler

subject: [WikiEN-l] Help needed for helpdesk-l

body:
Hi,

Since the helpdesk-l address was made more instantly visible, there
has been a surge of questions to the list - of a wide range of
queries/problems/issues. Your help would be appreciated. You can
subscribe at http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/helpdesk-l

Thanks,
Cormac / Cormaggio


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Help needed for helpdesk-l


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Idea for faster,
	cheaper access to Wikipedia in   poorer countries

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> On reflection, inventing new protocols for taking a real-time feed is
> probably uncessary for what will be a batch operation.
>
> How about simply making plain-ASCII logfiles available, where each line
> consists of
>
> <timestamp> <url>\n
>
> which is grown in real-time by appending to it?
>
> People wanting to freshen their caches can then download, trim off all
> entries previous to the last time they fetched, uniq the file to get
> only a single copy of each url, and then run a script to wget all the
> uls from inside their cache during off-peak hours, thus freshening it.
>
> Very little software, a twenty-line perl script, no new protocols, and
> (I hope) achieves the same effect.

The pre-fetch component is a batch operation, but the cache clear isn't.
When a user edits a page, we expect everyone in the world to be able to
retrieve it within a second or two. That's why we already have apaches
in two countries pumping out UDP packets which are routed by various
means to all our squid servers. When someone makes an edit, the
worldwide cache of that page is instantly purged, and the main point of
my proposal is an automated method for ISP proxies to be part of that.

We could convert the CLR stream to ASCII text, but the software to do
that could equally run on every individual squid, since they all have
access to that stream. Either way, we need to put a flag in the CLR
packets indicating whether the item should be pre-fetched or not.

Polling the recentchanges table to construct these ASCII files isn't
really an option, we tried that with the RC->IRC bots and it turned out
to be too resource-intensive, which is why they also use a UDP stream
these days. We could add a third UDP stream for this purpose, or create
a daemon and have TCP notification, but it seems easier to me to just
modify one of the existing ones slightly, by adding a flag. The REASON
field has a 4-bit width, and only two codes are defined, so there's
plenty of room for us to suggest our own codes. Otherwise we can just
stake a claim in the RESERVED section.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [WikiEN-l] Meanwhile, AfD grinds on

body:
G'day Anthony,

> On 10/12/05, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>>On 10/12/05, Keith Old <keithold at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>In other words, an article rewritten to establish notability under the
>>>criteria for Web Comics shouldn't be speedy deleted.
>>
>>Sure, it shouldn't. Wanna bet it won't be?
>
> As an arbitrator you'll make sure that such a blatant disregard of Wikipedia
> policy doesn't stick, right? If not, thank God you're only there until the
> end of the year.

Arbitrators are not Inquisitors.  It's not their job to track down and
punish violations; they sit back and wait for the arguments to come to them.

Cheers,

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.12.1/136 - Release Date: 15/10/2005


from_name: Travis Mason-Bushman

subject: [WikiEN-l] Meanwhile, AfD grinds on

body:
On 10/16/05 1:10 PM, "Bryan Derksen" <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:

> I'm more concerned with the votes
> themselves; a string of "delete, nn" or "keep, notable" can swing the
> outcome of a vote but provides no actual basis for it ("me too" votes
> provide a basis by proxy, but don't themselves add anything new to the
> discussion).

Why should there be a requirement that someone has to waste time by
repeating the explanations given by other people for deleting an article?

If an article is non-notable, it's non-notable. There is no requirement that
anyone who votes has to write explanations for anything. When you have 150
AFD noms per day, it is absurd to suggest that there is some sort of
obligation to explain votes, especially when so many nominations are
uncontested junk.

-FCYTravis @ en.wikipedia


from_name: Jakob Voss

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Deleted revs

body:
Jeremy Dunck wrote:
> On 10/15/05, Brion Vibber <brion-e+AXbWqSrlAAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
>>Deleted revisions are removed from the revision table and copied to the
>>archive table. The only record of deletion time is in the logging table,
>>and that won't tell you which revision was deleted when.
>
>
> So, deleted revs aren't included in dumps at all?
>
> Deletes are relatively rare (sysop) occurrences, right?

Some numbers of the German Wikipedia during two weeks measured with
Special:log and Special:Newpages:

delete: 7.561
newpages: 7.438
newusers: 5.460
upload: 3.6302
move: 2.049
revert: ~1.500[1]
block: 721
protect: 365
rights: 6
recentchanges: > 150.000[2]

[1] estimate by number of edits containing "revert" in it's comment.
[2] estimate based on the last WikiStat numbers

You may wonder why there are more deletes but new pages but the
"newpages" log only contains pages that have not been deleted. In my
private opinion English Wikipedia does not delete enough
non-encyclopaedic articles (like the "List of films ordered by uses of
the word fuck" that is TOP 23[3] of the most viewed articles by the way)
but the number of deltes should be somewhat higher than in the German
Wikipedia. So I guess that there are almost 1.000 deletes a day because
so many people confound Wikipedia with a place where they can put any
nonsense. Have a look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=delete
to get to know what I mean.

Greetings,
Jakob

[3]
http://www2.knams.wikimedia.org/logwood/logwood.php?site=en.wikipedia.org
at August, 11th 2005


from_name: Brian Haws

subject: [WikiEN-l] VFU is utterly beyond hope

body:
Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
Rightly so - this was a slam-dunk keep, and I'm appalled that it got
no keep votes.

-Snowspinner

On Oct 16, 2005, at 2:52 PM, Tony Sidaway wrote:

> AfD sometimes makes mistakes, and VFU is supposed to correct them.
> For some reason it signally fails to--often point blank refuses
> to--carry out this task.
>
> The article on Professor Albert Wolters was delete a few days ago.
> The usual false pretexts are being posed as excuses for not
> immediately undoing this travesty.
>
> I am therefore taking the unusual step of undeleting this article.
> _______________________________________________

I agree, this insistance on process and instruction over common sense in VFU is very disheartening to me. And the proposed Deletion Review doesn't seem to be concerned about this, the goal seems to be making it as easy as possible to keep things deleted.


from_name: Alphax

subject: [WikiEN-l] Meanwhile, AfD grinds on

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Kelly wrote:
>
>>>No, you can't.  If you recreate an article on the same topic as a
>>>previously deleted one, it will be speedied, and VFU won't likely
>>>accept that it was "rewritten" as an excuse.
>
>
> Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>>This doesn't make any sense. We need to change the policy if that is
>>how it works.
>
>
> Yes, Fred is right.
>
> It is difficult to strike a balance here, though.  It's one thing if
> Bryan Derkson (*Bryan Derkson*, this isn't some random person, it's
> *Bryan Derkson* you see) wants to recreate an article and puts forward
> good arguments for it, and another thing if some POV-warring troll or
> garage band tries to keep bringing back some nonsense that got properly
> deleted already.
>

As one of the (the?) most active contributors to en.wp, do we have an
article on Bryan? No? Why not? We have 2 magazine references!

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Meanwhile, AfD grinds on

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> I would be happy with the simpler solution that any AfD without
> explanation could itself be speedied on sight.

I suspect an unexplained AfD nomination isn't a big deal by itself,
since practically every nomination gets a few votes and those votes will
probably be what decides it. I'm more concerned with the votes
themselves; a string of "delete, nn" or "keep, notable" can swing the
outcome of a vote but provides no actual basis for it ("me too" votes
provide a basis by proxy, but don't themselves add anything new to the
discussion). Deleting individual votes is likely to be pretty
contentious but maybe if there was an obvious policy against considering
them when closing the AfD there might be fewer such votes cast in the
first place.

I notice that
[[Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Commenting_on_a_listing_for_deletion]]
already sort of implies this, but perhaps it needs to be made more explicit.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Requests per second

body:
Hi!

Just a small question from somebody not that familiar with the server
structure. How many requests per second do we currently and by average have?

http://wikimedia.org/stats/live/
looks like around 1.300 total requests per second but

http://noc.wikimedia.org/reqstats/reqstats-weekly.png
looks more like around 3.000 requests by seconds.

What's the real number? (ignoring local caching by ISPs that we cannot
detect)

Thanks and greetings,
Jakob


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] On Clarity and Generalists

body:
On 10/14/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> As flawed as the NYT obituary was, it does need to be grappled with
> as the mainstream understanding of Derrida, and if that voice is
> silenced, that's bad NPOV writing. Better to let the popular
> understanding weigh in, and then include information on where its
> limitations are.

Well, and frankly, if the New York Times does a better job of covering
this aspect than our encyclopedia, then that's a problem. There's no
reason our coverage of it couldn't include a line along the lines of,
"Most Derrida scholars do not find this to be relevant to the use of
his philosophy," or something like that.

What all of these articles need is more attention from people who are
less concerned with being specialists in the fields they represent,
and understand very clearly what the level of detail and specificity
in an encyclopedia should be (versus an academic paper or even an
academic lecture). Where these hypothetical legions live, or how to
utilize them effectively, I have no idea.

FF


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Requests per second

body:
Jakob Voss wrote:
> Just a small question from somebody not that familiar with the server
> structure. How many requests per second do we currently and by average
> have?
>
> http://wikimedia.org/stats/live/
> looks like around 1.300 total requests per second but

This page is obsolete; it doesn't get data from all the systems.

> http://noc.wikimedia.org/reqstats/reqstats-weekly.png
> looks more like around 3.000 requests by seconds.
>
> What's the real number? (ignoring local caching by ISPs that we cannot
> detect)

That'll be the real number, as far as we know. :) Note that this figure
will include style sheets, images, etc as well as page views.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Meanwhile, AfD grinds on

body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:

>>I felt existed with the current
>>deletion-related policies, that there's no easy way to revisit a
>>deletion that's been closed like this and to challenge votes made
>>without any significant justification provided.
>>
>>
>That's the whole point, if there's a Wayback Machine link that shows
>it was popular there's enough justification for undeletion, but if
>justification with extra info wasn't required all deletions would be
>contested by people who are trying to get something into Wikipedia for
>their own purposes rather than creating an encyclopedia. A safeguard
>is needed.
>
I don't have any interest in web comics or the Wayback Machine.  This
pretty well qualifies me for not having a specific opinion on the
matter.  I understand that it was Bryan's interest in that subject that
led to his comments.  To the extent that you quote him it is about a far
more important and far more general issue.  That issue does not depend
on the justifications that you used for deleting a particular type of
article.

Bryan has been around since Wikipedia's first year, and has a proven
track record of acting in the best interests of the encyclopedia.  I
don't see him as pushing a POV for his own purposes.  The fact that he
has endured some of the bullshit that passes for opinion for so long
adds considerable weight to his opinion.  Imputing the motive that
others are trying to keep an article for purposes of their own is an
assumption of bad faith.

He is talking about the need for safeguards, safeguards against having
deletions that get so caught up in bureaucratic process that no wrong
can be undone.

When VfU gets hung up on the matter of process vs. content it has
perhaps reached the point where it should be scrapped entirely.  Let it
be replaced by a policy that *any* decided AfD is reopenable by anyone.
This does not imply automatic undeletion, but it will certainly make it
easier for those of us who do not spend all our time on AfD like a
mother bird waiting for her eggs to hatch, or do not learn that an
article has even existed until it is deleted.

Ec


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia and autism

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> If Bush chose to become one of our editors it would be his right, and he
> too would have the right to remain anonymous.  I'm afraid though that if
> he tried to sign on as [[User:George W. Bush]] he would have a difficult
> time proving that he was not a troll using that name for mischief.

He could put a little note at the bottom of his official website. ;-)

--Jimbo


subject: Ant: [Wikipedia-l] Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia - a policy question?

body:
elephantus wrote:
> But I really think that you should
> respect the will of a great majority of the three peoples
> and not try to force a common identity or language upon us.

I do think we should try to respect the will of a great majority of the
three peoples, but my sense of it is that the great majority of people
do not think that it is wise that we have three separate wikipedia
editions.  The language is written in different ways, but by any
rational standard, it is the same language, it is mutually
understandable with some words pronounced differently.

I strongly support Milos in his efforts to provide a technical solution
to the question of different ways of writing.

> Proclaiming the many contributors to the three Wikipedias
> and other ordinary folks "nationalists" because they decided
> to go their separate ways shows a certain lack of respect or
> detailed and nuanced knowledge about things.

It is indeed unfair to call anyone "nationalists" for such a flimsy
reason.  But it is also worth nothing that no one "decided to go their
separate ways".  The reason we have Serbian and Croatian and Bosnia(n/k)
Wikipedias is simple historical accident and unfortunate blind following
of the ISO language codes, which we had hoped would give us good guidance.

--Jimbo


body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> Still, the situation is now that there are separate wikis AND a merged
> one. Apparently I am not the only one who thinks that that is a
> strange and unwanted situation. Either Serbocroatian has to go, or the
> other three have to go (after moving the articles of course), in my
> opinion. The democratical thing seems to be to not merge - there seem
> to be more people interested in the Serbian and Croatian Wikipedias
> than in the Serbocroatian one.

I absolutely agree with Andre that the current situation is undesirable
in the extreme.  Having three separate wikis *and* a merged one is
really not very helpful in the long run.

I visited this region some months ago, and one thing I am happy to
report is that all the wikipedians I met there, both Serbian and
Croatian, were exactly the same in every essential respect as
Wikipedians I have met everywhere.

They are reasonable, they are thoughtful, and they are thinking really
hard about this situation.  At the present time, it seemed to me that
the majority viewed seemed to be best summed up as "It is bad to have
all 3, but it is probably necessary for now."

Milos has been working on software tools to allow for full support in
*one* Wikipedia of all 4 major ways of writing this language.

> I don't know how much different the languages/dialects are. I do know
> that from both sides people are moving towards separate languages. If
> we consider languages to be variations with at least a given amount of
> difference, they are indeed dialects of the same language. But if we
> consider languages to be dialects with a special formal status,
> they're different languages.

Opinions about this matter seem to vary a significant extent.
Nationalists (and I do not use the term pejoratively here, only as a
label of convenience) tend to desire/believe more in separate languages.

But at some point, there is this simple matter of objective fact: when I
went with a group of Croations to Serbia, and we had a big friendly
happy meetup at Milos' house, everyone just laughed and joked and talked
to each other, and they didn't have to use English to do it. :-)

--Jimbo


body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
> Serbian _usually_ uses the Ekavian standard, and Croatian and Bosnian
> _always_ use the Ijekavian standard. However, lossless conversion
> between the two is easily possible.

For those who find Mark irritating, and who may tend not to listen to
him on those grounds, I would like to say: listen to him on this point.
 He's right on the factual matter here, as far as I have been able to
determine.

Milos has been patiently working to have software put together which
will handle this conversion.  This provides us a nice easy way forward
so that *everyone* can read the *same* information in the way that is
most comfortable to them.

This situation is parallel to the situation with Traditional and
Simplified Chinese characters.  Yes, there are two ways of writing the
language.  But yes, they are machine translateable, losslessly.

--Jimbo


from_name: Snowspinner

subject: [WikiEN-l] VFU is utterly beyond hope

body:
Rightly so - this was a slam-dunk keep, and I'm appalled that it got
no keep votes.

-Snowspinner

On Oct 16, 2005, at 2:52 PM, Tony Sidaway wrote:

> AfD sometimes makes mistakes, and VFU is supposed to correct them.
> For some reason it signally fails to--often point blank refuses
> to--carry out this task.
>
> The article on Professor Albert Wolters was delete a few days ago.
> The usual false pretexts are being posed as excuses for not
> immediately undoing this travesty.
>
> I am therefore taking the unusual step of undeleting this article.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Jtkiefer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Strange and unfair RfC/user process

body:
actionforum at comcast.net wrote:

>He is modifing statements that have been certified by
>4 people, and he is basing his new accusations on my
>responses to items which no longer exist in the certified
>statement, this is completely bad faith vandalism.  Two
>of the others have given him permission on the talk page.
>
>There is no way a procedure such as this can be fair.
>I am entitled to revert vandalism, that damages wikipedia's
>integrity, as this certified statement changing process does.
>He can provide is changes in different response sections
>if he wants.  But I shouldn't have to respond to a moving
>target, only to have my responses orphaned by subsequent
>changes.
>
>If anything good can come out of this, hopefully it is reform
>of the system.
>                 -- Silverback
>
>
As has been said before I do not belive that it is vandalism.  If it's
their own comments then they have every right to edit them.  That being
said it is defiinately questionable to modify your comments after the
fact to change their meanings in response to another user's comments.

-Jtkiefer


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] VFU is utterly beyond hope

body:
>From: geni <geniice at gmail.com>
>
>On 10/16/05, Brian Haws <brian at bhaws.com> wrote:
> > I agree, this insistance on process and instruction over common sense in
>VFU is very disheartening to me. And the proposed Deletion Review doesn't
>seem to be concerned about this, the goal seems to be making it as easy as
>possible to keep things deleted.
>
>well yes the alturnative is that any AFD that decides to delete will
>be listed on VFU by it's supporters.
>
>--
>geni

In my experience, one common use of VfU is for authors of deleted articles
to immediately try to get their article undeleted, even though the article
has been subjected to vigorous discussion and debate, and a clear consensus
of Wikipedia editors is that the article should be deleted *on policy
grounds* (e.g. consists solely of original research, is a neologism, etc.).

Jay.


subject: [WikiEN-l] VFU is utterly beyond hope

body:
On Oct 16, 2005, at 4:47 PM, geni wrote:

> On 10/16/05, Brian Haws <brian at bhaws.com> wrote:
>
>> I agree, this insistance on process and instruction over common
>> sense in VFU is very disheartening to me. And the proposed
>> Deletion Review doesn't seem to be concerned about this, the goal
>> seems to be making it as easy as possible to keep things deleted.
>>
>
> well yes the alturnative is that any AFD that decides to delete will
> be listed on VFU by it's supporters.
>
> -
>

VfU has never once seen "any" AfD that decides to delete, nor even
"most" VfUs that decide to delete get brought up there. This is a
complete straw man argument.

-Snowspinner


subject: [WikiEN-l] Meanwhile, AfD grinds on

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Bryan Derksen wrote:
> Alphax wrote:
>
>> As one of the (the?) most active contributors to en.wp, do we have
>> an article on Bryan? No? Why not? We have 2 magazine references!
>>
>>
> Aw, shucks. I don't like to make a fuss, I just edit. On the other
> hand, Jimbo's post seriously inflated my head, there. Thanks. :)
>
> Relating back to the original purpose of this thread, though, I
> wouldn't want to dismiss the issue I had with this deletion by "being
> Bryan" and throwing my reputation around to resolve it.

It could be worse - you could be Brion or Tim and have the power to
keep/delete on the database level ;)

> It just seemed like a particularly good example of a problem I felt
> existed with the current deletion-related policies, that there's no
> easy way to revisit a deletion that's been closed like this and to
> challenge votes made without any significant justification provided.

We should make "voting keep or delete on AfD without explaining the
vote" a blockable offence?

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Data dump optimization

body:
Since Domas keeps complaining about the database load from the dumps
(and then killing the dump processes), I've made some changes which
should reduce the load involved.

Dumps are now being generated on a two-pass system. The first pass reads
through page and revision quickly and makes a stub dump, with
rev_text_id references in place of the full page text.

The second pass reads this stub dump, and the previous full dump of the
same database. Existing revision text can be copied directly from the
previous dump (page contents on a given revision ID are immutable). New
revisions not in the old dump are read individually out of the database,
using the rev_text_id to avoid having to hit the page or revision tables.

At the moment I'm doing the full/current/articles split on the first
pass, and the compression to bzip2 and 7zip is done on the second pass
with the final data.

Hopefully this should go a little smoother.

Also, last week the mwdumper dump import tool got a number of optimizations:

* Inserts are batched more efficiently for bulk insert
* Folke Behrens sent a patch to rearrange and properly buffer things to
significantly speed up the XML input and SQL generation
* You can have it connect directly to the MySQL server if you have the
MySQL Connector/J driver in classpath.
* There are some hints in the README on server configuration tweaks for
faster import

A precompiled .jar of the current code is available at:
http://download.wikipedia.org/tools/

Source is in CVS, module mwdumper.

It's known to work with Sun's 1.5 JDK and GNU GCJ 4.0.1. Sun Java 1.4
may have problems with some dumps (known to fail on the last Japanese
Wikipedia dump.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Data dump optimization

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> The second pass reads this stub dump, and the previous full dump of the
> same database. Existing revision text can be copied directly from the
> previous dump (page contents on a given revision ID are immutable).

The thing I completely forgot to mention about this is that I'm using
the new XMLReader extension in PHP 5.1 for this; so srv35 and srv36 have
experimental PHP 5.1.0RC1 installations in /usr/local/php5 that get used
for this step.

XMLReader has a 'pull' interface, so you can read off the XML stream at
your own pace. Quite handy when you're already trapped in one SAX event
loop reading the first stream. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Unicode sorting - language specific?

body:
Peter Jacobi wrote:
> Will the upgrade to MySQL 5 give us (within the limits of Wikipedia per
> language) culture correct sorting or just the default Unicode collation?

MySQL has several language-specific Unicode collations in addition to
the generic one:

Czech
Danish
Estonian
Icelandic
Latvian
Lithuanian
Persian
Polish
Roman
Romanian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish

Note that "Language-specific collations for the utf8 character set are
implemented only if the ordering with utf8_unicode_ci does not work well
for a language. For example, utf8_unicode_ci works fine for German and
French, so there is no need to create special utf8 collations for these
two languages."

For the full list and notes see:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-unicode-sets.html

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] VFU is utterly beyond hope

body:
On Oct 16, 2005, at 5:21 PM, geni wrote:

> On 10/16/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> VfU has never once seen "any" AfD that decides to delete, nor even
>> "most" VfUs that decide to delete get brought up there. This is a
>> complete straw man argument.
>>
>> -Snowspinner
>>
>
> Unless you consider the reason for this may a combination of low
> profile and the knowlage amoungst those that do know about it that
> they would be wasteing there time. Any article that is so important
> that it must be included in wikipedia this year is unlikely to get
> wiped out through AFD.
>

In which case your real argument is that we don't need VFU because
AfD is flawless - an argument that is not so much a straw man as self-
evidently absurd.

-Snowspinner


from_name: actionforum at comcast.net

body:
I received a notice of an RfC/user against me.  So I went, read it, and started to respond, noting some false charges.  Some of the editors claimed to right to talk out those false charges, after I had responded to them.  Changing the statement of dispute right from under my response and under each others signatures.   It seems to me that is vandalism as it is a violation of wikipedia integrity and changing signed comments.  Their changes in meaning have implications for my writing.
They appear intent on continuing, and nothing has happened on my report of severe vandalism due to the changing of meaning.
If the process really works this way, it seems unfair, as if I am just refining their charges.  They can try out ones that they would like to make, and then, if I do the research and refute it, they can just withdraw it and try another one.
Is there a place where more specific rules have been defined which address this issue?
            -- Silverback


body:
-------------- Original message --------------
> As I understand it, it is a blockable offence to change another's
> comments. Do you have a link to the appropriate page?
>
> Chris

They are changing their mutually certified statement of dispute
at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/Silverback

So in a sense it is changing their own comments,  but it is after I have responded, so it is changing the meaning of my responses, etc.  I still think to protect the integrity of my response, etc.  The should make changes in a separate section where they respond to my responses, etc.  I am a little surprised that they would give
each other carte blanche to make changes above each others signature. I don't think they have all agreed to that yet either.
               -- Silverback


body:
Whoops, that is the talk page link, it is actually
the project page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Silverback

   -- Silverback

------------- Original message --------------

>
> -------------- Original message --------------
> > As I understand it, it is a blockable offence to change another's
> > comments. Do you have a link to the appropriate page?
> >
> > Chris
>
> They are changing their mutually certified statement of dispute
> at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/Silverback
>
> So in a sense it is changing their own comments, but it is after I have
> responded, so it is changing the meaning of my responses, etc. I still think to
> protect the integrity of my response, etc. The should make changes in a
> separate section where they respond to my responses, etc. I am a little
> surprised that they would give
> each other carte blanche to make changes above each others signature. I don't
> think they have all agreed to that yet either.
> -- Silverback
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Mattwolf Binder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Silverback, indefinite block in order?

body:
I am not involved, and 172 supporting my RfB has nothing to do with it. In
fact if you check the arbcom pages you'll see I opposed 172. But after
seeing all this crap he puts up with I think that I'll end up supporting.
Silverback has been attacking 172, trolling, being a level 19 revert
warrior, and is all around raising the stress for everyone involved. In fact
he'll probably end up in front of the arbcom, and I'm tempted to
indefinitely block just to save them work. He's turning into another Tern, a
user who I block for a short period of time, whines on the mailing list,
doesn't seem to let up anything, and will probably end up blocked
indefinitely. I'm also really tired of the political hatred and right wing
POV pushing by Silverback. Would anyone object to indefinitely blocking him?

--Redwolf24


from_name: Ben E.

subject:
[WikiEN-l] I've been blocked by an involved admin (was Strange
	and unfair RfC/user process

body:
First off, we need get the facts straight here. The block log shows not a
3RR violation, but something else. Let's take a look:

18:22, October 16, 2005
Redwolf24<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Redwolf24>blocked "
User:Silverback <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Silverback>" with an
expiry time of 24 hours (reverts incessantly, removing information from his
RfC <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Silverback>,
has been attacking 172 a lot lately, hasn't been too civil, hopefully this
block will turn him around.)

This doesn't seem to be much of a 3RR block, but more of a block for
disruption, violating [[WP:NPA]], and removing comments from the RfC without
reason.

--[[:en:User:Bratsche|Ben]]

On 10/16/05, actionforum at comcast.net <actionforum at comcast.net> wrote:

> Redwolf24 just blocked me, allegedly for 3RR on the RfC
> page against me where he had taken a voting position
> against me. We really need to develop a fair process.
>

--
Bratsche-It means "viola!"


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

body:
actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
> I received a notice of an RfC/user against me.  So I went, read it, and started to respond, noting some false charges.  Some of the editors claimed to right to talk out those false charges, after I had responded to them.  Changing the statement of dispute right from under my response and under each others signatures.   It seems to me that is vandalism as it is a violation of wikipedia integrity and changing signed comments.  Their changes in meaning have implications for my writing.
> They appear intent on continuing, and nothing has happened on my report of severe vandalism due to the changing of meaning.
> If the process really works this way, it seems unfair, as if I am just refining their charges.  They can try out ones that they would like to make, and then, if I do the research and refute it, they can just withdraw it and try another one.
> Is there a place where more specific rules have been defined which address this issue?
>             -- Silverback

As I understand it, it is a blockable offence to change another's
comments. Do you have a link to the appropriate page?

Chris


body:
-------------- Original message --------------

> actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
> > -------------- Original message --------------
> >
> >>As I understand it, it is a blockable offence to change another's
> >>comments. Do you have a link to the appropriate page?
> >>
> >>Chris
> >
> >
> > They are changing their mutually certified statement of dispute
> > at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/Silverback
> >
> > So in a sense it is changing their own comments, but it is after I have
> responded, so it is changing the meaning of my responses, etc. I still think to
> protect the integrity of my response, etc. The should make changes in a
> separate section where they respond to my responses, etc. I am a little
> surprised that they would give
> > each other carte blanche to make changes above each others signature. I don't
> think they have all agreed to that yet either.
> > -- Silverback
>
> Perhaps in your response to the points raised by the other people you
> could quote what they are saying, to ensure that it is clear what you
> are responding to?
>
> Chris

The signed the statement of Dispute and then notified me.  They shouldn't be changing it underneath my responses.  Yes, I could quote them, because they might delete from underneath me, but what is an RfC/user doing lacking even the basic integrity of a talk page.  You were right the first time.  It is a blockable offense.   But I wanted you to know that some of the community seems to think nothing of this behavior.
                 -- Silverback


body:
I don't think you have a right to remove comments on your own RfC. A request
for comment is just that: a chance for those both involved and uninvolved to
comment on an article or user's situation. [[User:Fawcett5]]'s comments was
also at the end of a list, not above signatures. If there is confusion, look
at the timestamp on the sigs. That's why we have them.

-Ben

On 10/16/05, actionforum at comcast.net <actionforum at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Look again bratsche, you just reverted the page, putting the edits of an
> uninvolved user, over the signatures of 4 people.
>
> It doesn't matter what excuse redwolf24 used, he is an
> involved admin, he'd already reached the conclusions below
> yesterday per his "outside" view on the page. Note that he
> gave no edits or specifics in support of his "view" either.
>
> You might want to note also, that 172 went to his talk page
> about this issue, right after voting for him for bureaucrat.
> -- Silverback
>
> -------------- Original message --------------
>
> > First off, we need get the facts straight here. The block log shows not
> a
> > 3RR violation, but something else. Let's take a look:
> >
> > 18:22, October 16, 2005
> > Redwolf24blocked "
> > User:Silverback " with an
> > expiry time of 24 hours (reverts incessantly, removing information from
> his
> > RfC ,
> > has been attacking 172 a lot lately, hasn't been too civil, hopefully
> this
> > block will turn him around.)
> >
> > This doesn't seem to be much of a 3RR block, but more of a block for
> > disruption, violating [[WP:NPA]], and removing comments from the RfC
> without
> > reason.
> >
> > --[[:en:User:Bratsche|Ben]]
> >
> > On 10/16/05, actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
> >
> > > Redwolf24 just blocked me, allegedly for 3RR on the RfC
> > > page against me where he had taken a voting position
> > > against me. We really need to develop a fair process.
> > >
> >
> > --
> > Bratsche-It means "viola!"
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Bratsche-It means "viola!"


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] VFU is utterly beyond hope

body:
AfD sometimes makes mistakes, and VFU is supposed to correct them.
For some reason it signally fails to--often point blank refuses
to--carry out this task.

The article on Professor Albert Wolters was delete a few days ago.
The usual false pretexts are being posed as excuses for not
immediately undoing this travesty.

I am therefore taking the unusual step of undeleting this article.


subject: [WikiEN-l] VFU is utterly beyond hope

body:
>From: Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com>
>
>On 10/16/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 10/16/05, Brian Haws <brian at bhaws.com> wrote:
> > > I agree, this insistance on process and instruction over common sense
>in VFU is very disheartening to me. And the proposed Deletion Review
>doesn't seem to be concerned about this, the goal seems to be making it as
>easy as possible to keep things deleted.
> >
> > well yes the alturnative is that any AFD that decides to delete will
> > be listed on VFU by it's supporters.
> >
>
>Why is this a problem?

If you think AfD needs to go, it's hard to understand how turning into a
double AfD will help.

Jay.


body:
actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
> -------------- Original message --------------
>
>>As I understand it, it is a blockable offence to change another's
>>comments. Do you have a link to the appropriate page?
>>
>>Chris
>
>
> They are changing their mutually certified statement of dispute
> at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_comment/Silverback
>
> So in a sense it is changing their own comments,  but it is after I have responded, so it is changing the meaning of my responses, etc.  I still think to protect the integrity of my response, etc.  The should make changes in a separate section where they respond to my responses, etc.  I am a little surprised that they would give
> each other carte blanche to make changes above each others signature. I don't think they have all agreed to that yet either.
>                -- Silverback

Perhaps in your response to the points raised by the other people you
could quote what they are saying, to ensure that it is clear what you
are responding to?

Chris


subject: [WikiEN-l] VFU is utterly beyond hope

body:
>From: Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com>
>
>On 10/17/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 10/17/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > No we didn't.
> >
> > The consensus appears to be against you on that one.
>
>Absolutely not.  When we decide that the forum dedicated to undeleting
>articles should not undelete articles?

VfU does undelete articles, regularly.  What you are arguing about are what
VfU should consider as valid rationales for undeletion.  Until now its
mandate has been to undelete (or not) based on process - in other words, an
appeals court; you would like to expand that to include undeletions based on
content.

Jay.


body:
-------------- Original message --------------

> actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
> > The signed the statement of Dispute and then notified me. They shouldn't be
> changing it underneath my responses. Yes, I could quote them, because they
> might delete from underneath me, but what is an RfC/user doing lacking even the
> basic integrity of a talk page. You were right the first time. It is a
> blockable offense. But I wanted you to know that some of the community seems
> to think nothing of this behavior.
> > -- Silverback
>
> (could you turn on word wrap in your email client please).
>
> It is a blockable offence to modify other users' statements, not your
> own. It is definitely dubious if people modify their original statements
> to make replies by another person sound out-of-place, but not blockable.
>
> I think you should quote the original version of the text you are
> replying to, adding it into your statement. I suggest you ask the people
> who are changing the text to stop, but I would caution against accusing
> them of trying to make your replies out-of-context (question the action,
> not the motive). This also assumes good faith, if you request politely.

He is modifing statements that have been certified by
4 people, and he is basing his new accusations on my
responses to items which no longer exist in the certified
statement, this is completely bad faith vandalism.  Two
of the others have given him permission on the talk page.

There is no way a procedure such as this can be fair.
I am entitled to revert vandalism, that damages wikipedia's
integrity, as this certified statement changing process does.
He can provide is changes in different response sections
if he wants.  But I shouldn't have to respond to a moving
target, only to have my responses orphaned by subsequent
changes.

If anything good can come out of this, hopefully it is reform
of the system.
                 -- Silverback


body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Just found this page....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Votes_for_deletion/title

"There is currently no vote taking place. Suggestions are being taken.
Options are being considered. Alternatives are being pondered. Please do
not attempt to start a vote without prior discussion and rough consensus
on the length of such a vote, how it will be counted, what all the
candidates are, and so forth. Especially don't start a vote if we don't
even agree that we need it."

WHY DIDN'T ANYONE LISTEN??????????????

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
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subject: [WikiEN-l] VFU is utterly beyond hope

body:
Undeleted.

-Snowspinner

On Oct 16, 2005, at 8:30 PM, Tony Sidaway wrote:

> Yet again, somebody who puts process before content has deleted this
> perfectly valid article, contrary to the fundamental axiom of our
> deletion policy: *if in doubt, don't delete*.  Somebody please
> undelete it.
>
> Why do we have to go through this clownish pantomime every time some
> ignoramuses delete a good article?
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] VFU is utterly beyond hope

body:
On 10/16/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Rightly so - this was a slam-dunk keep, and I'm appalled that it got
> no keep votes.

We have to do something about people advancing false pretexts to
delete or to keep deleted.  Time and again people in VFU absolutely
refuse to actually look at the article, falsely claiming that they're
notpermitted to actually take the valus of the thing to Wikipedia into
account.  This repeated peddling of falsehoods, which has taken such a
strong hold in VFU that it is almost impossible to remedy a bad
deletion debate, must be nipped in the bud before more good content is
lost.


body:
I apologize: I have the information slightly wrong. Fawcett5 was adding some
informatino to the page, then corrected her mistake. Still, there is no
reason to remove her statements. Doing it yourself on your own RfC makes it
seem slightly suspicious.

-Ben

On 10/16/05, actionforum at comcast.net <actionforum at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> ------------- Original message --------------
>
> > I don't think you have a right to remove comments on your own RfC. A
> request
> > for comment is just that: a chance for those both involved and
> uninvolved to
> > comment on an article or user's situation. [[User:Fawcett5]]'s comments
> was
> > also at the end of a list, not above signatures. If there is confusion,
> look
> > at the timestamp on the sigs. That's why we have them.
>
> The signatures are four or five sections BELOW her insertion. And what you
> reverted was not the insertion of her "correction",
> but was the insertion of both the error and the correct, and was
> a total null effect that did not belong in the RfC at all, and
> definitely not in the section signed by others.
> -- Silverback
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Bratsche-It means "viola!"


from_name: sorib.mail at gmail.com

subject: [Foundation-l] Request: Wikinews Russian version.&In-Reply-To=

body: so?


body: so?


body:
Here are the relevant texts from the Wikipedia:Vandalism page.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism].
''"Vandalism is any addition, deletion, or change to content
made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity
of the encyclopedia "'' and ''"Changing people's comments
Editing signed comments by another user to substantially
change their meaning (e.g. turning someone's vote around),
 except when removing a personal attack (which is
somewhat controversial in and of itself)"''

I think the first one, the integrity one is key.  But the
statement of dispute is signed by more than one certifier,
so in a sense you are modifying someone elses comment.
Integrity requires that the certification mean something.

                   -- Silverback

-------------- Original message --------------

> actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
>
> >He is modifing statements that have been certified by
> >4 people, and he is basing his new accusations on my
> >responses to items which no longer exist in the certified
> >statement, this is completely bad faith vandalism. Two
> >of the others have given him permission on the talk page.
> >
> >There is no way a procedure such as this can be fair.
> >I am entitled to revert vandalism, that damages wikipedia's
> >integrity, as this certified statement changing process does.
> >He can provide is changes in different response sections
> >if he wants. But I shouldn't have to respond to a moving
> >target, only to have my responses orphaned by subsequent
> >changes.
> >
> >If anything good can come out of this, hopefully it is reform
> >of the system.
> > -- Silverback
> >
> >
> As has been said before I do not belive that it is vandalism. If it's
> their own comments then they have every right to edit them. That being
> said it is defiinately questionable to modify your comments after the
> fact to change their meanings in response to another user's comments.
>
> -Jtkiefer
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
> The signed the statement of Dispute and then notified me.  They shouldn't be changing it underneath my responses.  Yes, I could quote them, because they might delete from underneath me, but what is an RfC/user doing lacking even the basic integrity of a talk page.  You were right the first time.  It is a blockable offense.   But I wanted you to know that some of the community seems to think nothing of this behavior.
>                  -- Silverback

(could you turn on word wrap in your email client please).

It is a blockable offence to modify other users' statements, not your
own. It is definitely dubious if people modify their original statements
to make replies by another person sound out-of-place, but not blockable.

I think you should quote the original version of the text you are
replying to, adding it into your statement. I suggest you ask the people
who are changing the text to stop, but I would caution against accusing
them of trying to make your replies out-of-context (question the action,
not the motive). This also assumes good faith, if you request politely.

Chris


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Why is this a problem

body:
> From: Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] VFU is utterly beyond hope
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID:
>     <605709b90510161417w70cb1b4ar952c22ee9564458 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 10/16/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 10/16/05, Brian Haws <brian at bhaws.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I agree, this insistance on process and instruction over common
>>> sense in VFU is very disheartening to me. And the proposed
>>> Deletion Review doesn't seem to be concerned about this, the goal
>>> seems to be making it as easy as possible to keep things deleted.
>>
>> well yes the alturnative is that any AFD that decides to delete will
>> be listed on VFU by it's supporters.
>
> Why is this a problem?

It's not a problem if you believe that articles are being deleted too
quickly and easily and generally favor slowing the process or making
it more difficult.

HYPOTHETICALLY, because nothing like this is happening in practice: IF

--there were general agreement that arguments on the merits of the
article were completely appropriate for VfU

--every article closed for deletion in AfD were systematically taken
to VfU

then the result would be that an article could not be deleted unless
it had basically been voted for deletion TWICE: once in AfD by 2/3
majority, then a second time in VfU by simple majority. In most
cases, of course, _all things being equal,_ an article getting a 2/3
majority in AfD would be expected to get a simple majority when re-
argued.

Unless the rules for VfU and AfD are asymmetrical, than VfU becomes a
pointless waste of time.

Discussion of the merit and content of the article should not be
mechanically excluded from VfU. But it should be limited to cases
where it can convincingly be shown _something has changed_ between
AfD and VfU that would lead one to believe that the people taking
part in AfD would probably have voted otherwise had they had known.

Articles that are _genuinely_ and _substantially_ rewritten just
before close of AfD (e.g "delete, delete, delete, delete, delete,
delete, delete, delete, comment: rewritten, keep, keep") would be one
example.

Or "Har Gobind Korhana is so kewl! I love his lecutres" followed by a
string of delete, non-notable prof", closed for deletion, someone
points out that it's a misspelling of Har Gobind Khorana who won a
Nobel prize.

Whatever the rules and practices are, VfU should be _different_ from
AfD and involve _different_ considerations. It should not just be
mechanical re-run of AfD to see whether the percentage of people who
think Jenny MacNabb is notable will turn out to be different.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


subject: [WikiEN-l] The Trollslayer's Guide to the Wiki

body:
You are reading a letter sent out by the happiest wikipedian you've ever
seen.

For those familiar with me, or with Wiki brah, you'll know recently enough
an RfC was filed against me. 55 to 70 people have supported me, but Wiki
brah and Shelburne Kismaayo were against me.

Essjay first noticed that Shelburne was being extremely similar to
Rainbowwarrior1977. Diffs of Shelly lately include:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Redwolf24&diff=prev&oldid=25705687

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Gmaxwell&diff=prev&oldid=25709237
(Suspicious because like a week ago Gmaxwell asked to email
Rainbowwarrior1977 at his talk page)

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Essjay&diff=prev&oldid=25706104

Anyways, So I pulled out Brion from the IRC room, and we convinced him to do
a sockpuppet check.

Bottom line: Wiki brah, Rainbowwarrior1977, and Shelburne Kismaayo are the
same person.

I have never been so happy. People posted that we were abusing Wiki brah who
was likely autistic. Nope, just a troll. Furthermore, he's NOT EVEN
BRAZILIAN! He's from... Florida.

Also, Essjay and I got an arbitrator or three to support the block.

Ah, vindication.

Nothing like trollslaying with your best friend.

Cheers Wikipedia.

-Red


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Why is this a problem

body:
>From: Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com>
>
>On 10/17/05, Daniel P. B. Smith <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
> >
> > then the result would be that an article could not be deleted unless
> > it had basically been voted for deletion TWICE: once in AfD by 2/3
> > majority, then a second time in VfU by simple majority.
>
>No, that would be silly.  VFU should not try to gainsay deletion
>policy.  We should undelete unless there is a consensus to delete.

VFU should also not try to gainsay consensus.  The fact that is was deleted
in the first place means (in 99.9% of cases) that there was consensus to
delete.

Jay.


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] VFU is utterly beyond hope

body:
On 10/16/05, Brian Haws <brian at bhaws.com> wrote:
> I agree, this insistance on process and instruction over common sense in VFU is very disheartening to me. And the proposed Deletion Review doesn't seem to be concerned about this, the goal seems to be making it as easy as possible to keep things deleted.

well yes the alturnative is that any AFD that decides to delete will
be listed on VFU by it's supporters.

--
geni


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] VFU is utterly beyond hope

body:
On 10/16/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >From: Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com>
> >
> >On 10/17/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 10/17/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > No we didn't.
> > >
> > > The consensus appears to be against you on that one.
> >
> >Absolutely not. When we decide that the forum dedicated to undeleting
> >articles should not undelete articles?
>
> VfU does undelete articles, regularly. What you are arguing about are what
> VfU should consider as valid rationales for undeletion. Until now its
> mandate has been to undelete (or not) based on process - in other words,
> an
> appeals court; you would like to expand that to include undeletions based
> on
> content.

Until now? Didn't I send those links to what the VFU pages said just a few
months ago?

VFU was initially a page where you could list an article that you wanted to
undelete, and the community would discuss whether or not to undelete the
article. It wasn't about process, it was about whether or not the article
should be undeleted or not. There were articles which were deleted out of
process, which received a majority of support to keep deleted, and there
were articles which were deleted within process (at least, assuming you
agree with the twisted definition of consensus as 67%), which received a
majority of support to undelete.

Someone went in to the "rules" at the top of the VFU page and changed them
to say it was about process, claiming that there was a consensus for this
viewpoint. Based on the discussion here, there obviously wasn't such a
consensus.

Jay.

Anthony