from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikiquote now has subdomains

body:
--- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Since I'm sure everyone will agree that Wikipedia is by far the biggest,
> most successful and most popular one of our projects, would there be any
> significant objection to just keeping "w" for Wikipedia?

We are probably stuck with it due to backwards compatibility at the very least.
But the full name should continue to work as well (wikipedia:xx:).

-- mav

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list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Enrico Weigelt

subject: [Wikitech-l] Announce: Going to start phase4

body:
Hi folks,

I'm going to do some quite huge changes in mediawiki and so going
to start a forkoff into phase4.

Some things I've already done:

* rewriting some parts to run over patTemplate
* splitted off the wiki into a (system-wide) library part and
  some very little stub for index.php -> allows multiple instances
  to share the same code and so ease updates.

What I'm going to do:

* database/storage abstraction (i.e. postgresql backend)
* wiki middleware (for article storage, wiki-syntax parsing, ...)
* support multiple parsers and converters (also xml<->wiki)
* frontend completely patTemplate-based
* integration into contentbuilder2/baseTemplate2 framework
  (so the wiki is just a box and can be easily imported into
  some other application

awaiting you comments :)

cu
--
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 Enrico Weigelt    ==   metux IT service

  phone:     +49 36207 519931         www:       http://www.metux.de/
  fax:       +49 36207 519932         email:     contact at metux.de
  cellphone: +49 174 7066481
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from_name: Rob Hooft

subject: Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Multiple categories

body:
Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> On Wednesday 14 July 2004 13:06, Ribamar Santarosa de Sousa wrote:
>
>>>Category:Female/Catholic,Protestant/Saint
>>
>>Why not Category:Female,Catholic,Protestant,Saints ??? This way, we could
>>order Categories by several ways:
>>Category:Saints lists all category of Saints
>>Category:Female lists all category of Females
>>Category:Female/Saints is the same as Category:Saints/Female
>
>
> Yes, that is what already exists. I was proposing a future extension:
>
> Category:Saint/Pope would return all Popes who are also saints
> Category:Pope,Patriarch would return all Popes and Patriarchs
> Category:Saint/Pope,Patriarch would return all saints who were Popes or
> Patriarchs

I don't see how this can be more than marginally useful unless it also
searches all subcategories to infinite depth (with recursion checks?!).

Rob


list: foundation-l

from_name: Jerome Jamnicky

subject: [Foundation-l] How could information flow ?

body:
On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 06:37, Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:
> Just some observations and remarks on this issue.
>
> I think it was not a mistake that every project got the fundraising notice.
>
> I was on an IRC channel when there was a discussion of some project being
> upset, and therefore blanking the message or not translating it. One person
> asked if the messages could be turned off for some projects. A few
> developers expressed that those projects should come up with alternative
> fundraising plans that cover their portion of expected funding need.
> Nothing was turned off. There followed a discussion of putting different
> traffic priorities to different projects. (But I am not sure if they were
> really serious about this.)

The idea about different traffic priorities was mine; the quotes are:

<jeronim`> 1. use delay pools in squid to lower service priority for wikis
which reject money-asking messsages

and later,

<jeronim`> could have a community-decided choice between no ads, opt-in, or
opt-out?
<jeronim`> and quality of service somehow determined based on ad revenue?

This was *just brainstorming*.  The idea was to increase choice by allowing
each wiki to make its own decision about the tradeoff of aesthetics
(advertising/donation requests or the lack of them) against speed (coming
from ad revenue/donations).

Maybe these are stupid ideas or maybe not, but I'd like to be able to
brainstorm on IRC without having to worry about doing damage control on the
mailing list as a result.

--Jerome/jeronim


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Manuel Gomez Rojo

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Convert characters to entities on UTF-8
	Wikipedias??

body:
Angela_ wrote:
> It does seem the wrong way round to me. The edit box should be easy to
> read, and HTML entities are not going to help that. If people have a
> problem typing certain letters, it might be helpful to put a copy of
> those into the [[it:MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning]] page. This is already
> done on the Maori and German Wikipedias. See
> http://mi.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning for example.
> This means the letters are shown at the end of every edit page and can
> be copied and pasted by those who can't type them on their keyboard.
>
> Angela.

The same idea for speecial characters is used in the Spanish Wikipedia,
but we have improved it with some JavaScript functions borrwed from the
edit toolbar. With these functions the character is directly inserted in
the editing box. Take a look at:

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning

and see it in action while editing any page on es.wikipedia.

Please consider using it on any Wikipedia with special character needs.
It has been greatly appreciated on es.

Manuel G. R.


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 05:45:38PM +0200, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> I'm going to do some quite huge changes in mediawiki and so going
> to start a forkoff into phase4.
>
> Some things I've already done:
>
> * rewriting some parts to run over patTemplate
> * splitted off the wiki into a (system-wide) library part and
>   some very little stub for index.php -> allows multiple instances
>   to share the same code and so ease updates.
>
> What I'm going to do:
>
> * database/storage abstraction (i.e. postgresql backend)
> * wiki middleware (for article storage, wiki-syntax parsing, ...)
> * support multiple parsers and converters (also xml<->wiki)
> * frontend completely patTemplate-based
> * integration into contentbuilder2/baseTemplate2 framework
>   (so the wiki is just a box and can be easily imported into
>   some other application
>
>
> awaiting you comments :)

If you're rewriting wiki software, please add gender-dependent
user page names and other messages, so that we don't have to use
male prefix for female users in languages where it matters.
(Wikipedysta: Wikipedystka:)

It's not big thing to do if you're starting over, it would just be pretty
difficult to fix it now in existing code.


from_name: Leonard Vertighel

body:
Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 18:14 schrieb Manuel Gomez Rojo:
> but we have improved it with some JavaScript functions borrwed from the
> edit toolbar. With these functions the character is directly inserted in
> the editing box. Take a look at:
>
> http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning

Looks neat, with FireFox it's really great. (How come with Opera there's
always this extra line between toolbar and edit box?)

Regarding my original question: So there is no technical reason for converting
special characters to HTML entities in UTF-8 Wikipedias? Actually I hoped so,
because that makes editing really awful for some languages.

[[en:User:Leonard Vertighel]]
[[it:Utente:Leonard Vertighel]]


body:
Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 18:16 schrieb Tomasz Wegrzanowski:
> If you're rewriting wiki software, please add gender-dependent
> user page names and other messages, so that we don't have to use
> male prefix for female users in languages where it matters.
> (Wikipedysta: Wikipedystka:)

But make it optional, otherwise that's equivalent to requiring from users to
disclose their sex; not that much private data, but still ... until now no
personal information whatsoever was required.

[[en:User:Leonard Vertighel]]


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Domain names

body:
Please, could people from all languages and all projects update the page
: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_names

Thank you.

ant


subject: [Foundation-l] Domain names


body:
On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 06:28:31PM +0200, Leonard Vertighel wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 18:16 schrieb Tomasz Wegrzanowski:
> > If you're rewriting wiki software, please add gender-dependent
> > user page names and other messages, so that we don't have to use
> > male prefix for female users in languages where it matters.
> > (Wikipedysta: Wikipedystka:)
>
> But make it optional, otherwise that's equivalent to requiring from users to
> disclose their sex; not that much private data, but still ... until now no
> personal information whatsoever was required.

It's not particularly private information if the language requires disclosing it
every time you want to produce grammatically correct sentence.


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Multiple categories

body:
On Sunday 18 July 2004 17:54, Rob Hooft wrote:
> Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> > Category:Saint/Pope would return all Popes who are also saints
> > Category:Pope,Patriarch would return all Popes and Patriarchs
> > Category:Saint/Pope,Patriarch would return all saints who were Popes or
> > Patriarchs
>
> I don't see how this can be more than marginally useful unless it also
> searches all subcategories to infinite depth (with recursion checks?!).

It would not be so useful with current categories, but I assume that when/if
it is implemented, people would make use of it and not create subcategories
manually. IMO, the finely-tuned categories which are present now came to be
because there is no way to display articles which belong to multiple
categories.


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
--- Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Okay, so no spell checker. It was worth a try! :-P
>
> If we are meant to be only be using short stubbish articles for
> everything (I have heard some people saying using only the first
> paragraph of articles), then how will we keep this separate from the
> main articles? Go the same way as monobook.css and have it like
> [[Christianity/stub]]? There are little conceptual problems that need
> to be thought through before we jump in head-first into preparing for
> this.

Section 0 of every article should ideally have a lead section in it that acts
as a concise summary of the entire article. Each of those lead sections should
then be usable as concise encyclopedia articles in a single volume desk
reference (with maybe an overview also thrown in for some subjects). Selection
of articles and validation of those sections would still be needed, of course.
Thus nothing need be compromised on Wikipedia.

-- mav

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body:
Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 18:45 schrieb Tomasz Wegrzanowski:
> It's not particularly private information if the language requires
> disclosing it every time you want to produce grammatically correct
> sentence.

This is not true for German, and it is easy to rephrase most things in Italian
and French so as not to disclose one's sex. Maybe in other languages that's
different though.

[[en:User:Leonard Vertighel]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Announce: Going to start phase4

body:
Leonard Vertighel wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 18:45 schrieb Tomasz Wegrzanowski:
>
>>It's not particularly private information if the language requires
>>disclosing it every time you want to produce grammatically correct
>>sentence.
>
>
> This is not true for German, and it is easy to rephrase most things in Italian
> and French so as not to disclose one's sex. Maybe in other languages that's
> different though.
>
> [[en:User:Leonard Vertighel]]

Pardon me ???
You probably are not female, otherwise you would know you always end up
spilling up your gender one day or another when talking in french. No,
rephrasing is not really easy.

Let me mention that there has been an ongoing discussion at least 1 year
old, asking that utilisatrice is made possible :-) To note : I did not
lead that discussion :-)

See
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia%3APrise_de_d%C3%A9cision%2C_Extension_des_termes_Utilisateur_et_Wikip%C3%A9dien%28ne%29
and


body:
Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 19:13 schrieb Anthere:
> You probably are not female, otherwise you would know you always end up
> spilling up your gender one day or another when talking in french.

Could you give me an example of a sentence where you would disclose your
gender as a female, but not as a male? I really can't think of one.

Personally I don't even really care, for me it's not a problem to disclose
even more private information (if www search engines didn't exist, I would
probably even give my real name, but I *hate* to be googleable). I just
noticed that it might be somewhat against current policy.


from_name: Kai F. Lahmann

subject: [Wikitech-l] Convert characters to entities on UTF-8 Wikipedias??

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Am S?nndag 18 Juli 2004 13:56 schrieb Leonard Vertighel:

> on the Italian Wikipedia it has recently been discussed to make a bot that
> is used for some maintenance work additionally convert characters like
> letters with accents to HTML-entities (è etc.). Does this make any
> sense? And if so, why was it.wikipedia converted to UTF-8 at all?

an interwiki bot with a frensh AOL IP? The same was on plattd??tsch and
frensh... Allways only one edit with one IP - no chance to catch him :(

- --
Kai F. Lahmann

1zu160-Bahner
http://www.1zu160.net
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body:
Leonard Vertighel wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 18:14 schrieb Manuel Gomez Rojo:
>
>>but we have improved it with some JavaScript functions borrwed from the
>>edit toolbar. With these functions the character is directly inserted in
>>the editing box. Take a look at:
>>
>>http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning
>
>
> Looks neat, with FireFox it's really great. (How come with Opera there's
> always this extra line between toolbar and edit box?)
>
> Regarding my original question: So there is no technical reason for converting
> special characters to HTML entities in UTF-8 Wikipedias? Actually I hoped so,
> because that makes editing really awful for some languages.
>
> [[en:User:Leonard Vertighel]]
> [[it:Utente:Leonard Vertighel]]

I think the only relevant reason to switch to UTF-8 is not showing
#xxxx; codes for international scripts, so you are totally right.


from_name: Timwi

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: phase3/languages Language.php, 1.261,
 1.262 LanguageFr.php,
 1.67, 1.68 LanguageDe.php, 1.70,   1.71 LanguageZh.php, 1.16, 1.17

references:
<E1BlrOL-00045G-81@sc8-pr-cvs1.sourceforge.net>	<cdbkac$pdl$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<20040718111531.GR13095@jeluf.mine.nu>

body:
Jens Frank wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 17, 2004 at 05:31:47PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
>
>>This change is going to have a noticeable and annoying effect on all
>>Wikipedias except for en, fr, de and zh where you adapted the language
>>files.
>
> That's wrong. The patches only affect the specified languages.
> Other languages work fine until the migration is completed.

Your patch changed the way month and weekday names are looked up, so it
would have affected all Wikipedias where the code change would have gone
live.

>>Are you still planning to "fix" all the other language files too?
>
> Expect more to come, dates isn't the end of this story. But it's boring,
> stupid work so it takes some time.

Yes, that's what I thought :) Thanks a lot for doing it!

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: LanguageIs.php

body:
?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:

> The one uploaded yesterday was based on an old version, this is a new
> version i've fine-tuned a little more, please go over it hover as i
> may have made some subtle mistakes i havent noticed.

Well... as mentioned previously on this list, there has been a change in
the way month names and weekday names are handled. Your file is still
using the old way. Perhaps if you could download the newest Language.php
and adapt your version of LanguageIs.php accordingly? Here's the newest
Language.php:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/wikipedia/phase3/languages/LanguageIs.php?rev=1.2

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: LanguageIs.php

body:
Timwi wrote:

> http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/wikipedia/phase3/languages/LanguageIs.php?rev=1.2

Gah -- of course I meant

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/wikipedia/phase3/languages/Language.php?rev=1.265

:)

Timwi


body:
Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 19:46 schrieb Fennec Foxen:
> Well, in addition to that, it also lets you use the UTF-8 character in
> the article title, and probably enables full-text search as well.

This hint just led me to the discovery that a fulltext search for "?" does not
find "è". One more reason _not_ to use entities, IMHO. (Who would
enter "è" as a search term? Obviously, the problem of typing in the
special characters remains, but entities won't solve it.)

[[en:User:Leonard Vertighel]]
[[it:Utente:Leonard Vertighel]]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote now has subdomains)

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> This may be a good time to rethink our approach to Meta. Currently there
> is just one big, messy Meta-Wiki, with neither particularly clear policies
> (although my CPOV draft attempts to remedy this to some extent) nor
> interlanguage links. Help texts are spread across the "MediaWiki User's
> Guide" and the Help: namespace, with non-English texts in the English
> language Help: space. On the other hand, as Mav keeps pointing out, we
> have no real community editable Wikimedia presence.
>
> How about a setup like this:
> de.wikimedia.org
> en.wikimedia.org
> fr.wikimedia.org

Absolutely not! We need ONE place where we can all come together. That place is
currently meta. I'm therefore very strongly opposed to balkanizing the only
common place we all can edit. The interface issues need to be fixed and Meta
should be made into a truly multilingual wiki.

-- mav

__________________________________
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subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF-8 characters and ""è"" for "è" And the case for converting ALL wiktionaries to UTF-8

body:
On wikitech there is a discussion of the relative merits of having UTF-8 and monstrosities (for editors) like "è" or ᏲᏁᎦ/ᎩᎢᏏ

It seems that you can search wikipedia for ?h or something. This will not find you èh. As wiktionary has many monstrosities, it would be best to convert them to something legible again.

I have been carefull not to add these things to en:wiktionary after I became aware of this problem, but I do know that many of these exist. In order to prevent them getting new ones, I think the best way of preventing this is by converting all wiktionaries to UTF-8.

I am still hoping that nl:wiktionary may soon be converted to UTF-8; there are many words that we cannot add to our dictionary because of this backwardness.

Thanks,
  GerardMare many words that we cannot add to our dictionary


list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] UTF-8 characters and ""è"" for "è" And the case for converting ALL wiktionaries to UTF-8


subject: Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Multiple categories

body:
Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> On Sunday 18 July 2004 17:54, Rob Hooft wrote:
>
>>Nikola Smolenski wrote:
>>
>>>Category:Saint/Pope would return all Popes who are also saints
>>>Category:Pope,Patriarch would return all Popes and Patriarchs
>>>Category:Saint/Pope,Patriarch would return all saints who were Popes or
>>>Patriarchs
>>
>>I don't see how this can be more than marginally useful unless it also
>>searches all subcategories to infinite depth (with recursion checks?!).
>
> It would not be so useful with current categories, but I assume that when/if
> it is implemented, people would make use of it and not create subcategories
> manually. IMO, the finely-tuned categories which are present now came to be
> because there is no way to display articles which belong to multiple
> categories.

I see what you mean, but with the category system you envision, none of
the categories would be very useful to browse by eye, and that happens
to be a very fruitful way of browsing wikipedia. And all articles would
need to be added to very, very many categories, bringing lots of hard
manual work with it. In any system with subcategories, a search function
MUST also search the tree.

Rob


body:
On Sunday 18 July 2004 19:23, Leonard Vertighel wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 19:13 schrieb Anthere:
> > You probably are not female, otherwise you would know you always end up
> > spilling up your gender one day or another when talking in french.
>
> Could you give me an example of a sentence where you would disclose your
> gender as a female, but not as a male? I really can't think of one.

In Serbian, for example, "I was here".


body:
On Sunday 18 July 2004 20:30, Leonard Vertighel wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 19:46 schrieb Fennec Foxen:
> > Well, in addition to that, it also lets you use the UTF-8 character in
> > the article title, and probably enables full-text search as well.
>
> This hint just led me to the discovery that a fulltext search for "?" does
> not find "è". One more reason _not_ to use entities, IMHO. (Who
> would enter "è" as a search term? Obviously, the problem of typing
> in the special characters remains, but entities won't solve it.)

About the only reason for using entities where there isUTF-8 is for characters
which are otherwise not visible ( ).


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Wikibooks is internally multi-lingual so there is no need for sub-domains. The
> foundation owns and controls wikisource.org and I no longer have access to it
> to change settings. That project is *also* internally multi-lingual and thus
> there is no need for subdomains (they would also be very repetitive since the
> same source docs will need to be used in many different languages).
>
> What we need is the ability to switch user interface language in the same wiki.
>

Could we carry out this discussion on the wiki instead? See:

http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Staff_lounge#Multiple_subdomains.3F

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Mark Ryan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 13:01:50 +0200, Yann Forget <yann at forget-me.net> wrote:
> Le Sunday 18 July 2004 10:17, Mark Ryan a ?crit :
>
>
> > We would need the spell checker to be reactivated and modified so that
> > articles can be checked on their own (rather than giving a huge list
> > of all pages with particular errors in them). I don't fancy copying
> > entire articles into MS Word to check for errors (and people checking
> > articles for correct spelling would be likely to miss many errors). I
> > know the spell checker was a huge resource drain on Wikipedia, but if
> > it is restricted to those permitted to validate articles, it shouldn't
> > be so bad.
>
> No, real paper publications are always ultimately checked by human eyes even
> for spelling. Automatic spelling is just a tool, but it can't detect every
> spelling mistakes.
>
> > ~Mark Ryan
>
> Yann
>
> --
> http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
> http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
> http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

I know automatic spell checking is just a tool. But we still have
spelling errors being found now, years after they were first inserted
into articles. Humans are prone to errors. I know I can proofread an
essay of my own over ten times and not notice the most obvious
spelling errors. An automatic spell checker would just draw our
attention to possibly overlooked errors. How many spelling errors
would you find on Britannica?


body:
On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 06:56:39PM +0200, Leonard Vertighel wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 18:45 schrieb Tomasz Wegrzanowski:
> > It's not particularly private information if the language requires
> > disclosing it every time you want to produce grammatically correct
> > sentence.
>
> This is not true for German, and it is easy to rephrase most things in Italian
> and French so as not to disclose one's sex. Maybe in other languages that's
> different though.

In most European languages the adjectives for each gender are different.
In Polish it's even harder not to disclose your gender, as the past tense
is formed from past form of the word to be + an adjectival form of the verb.


from_name: Sj

subject: [Wikitech-l] Article validation

body:
Hi, Mangus!  This is good news.  Would it be possible not to name
this table "validate", if this is all it will contain, and instead something
like "article_votes"? Otherwise, could there also be a text field
associated with each vote?

 I hold out hope that a validation table will be associated with some
form of 'validation' which associates a text field with each
"validation"/"review"
(perhaps a numerical vote like this; perhaps distinct from such votes).

--Sj--

On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 22:54:42 +0200, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske at web.de> wrote:
> I have put some preliminary code for article validation into CVS HEAD.
>
> You'll need to add the table "validate" (tables.sql) to the DB. Then,
> (for "Main Page", as example) go to
>    index.php?title=Special:Validate&article=Main_Page
>
> Every logged-in user can "vote"
> * for every article
> * in multiple versions
> * in multiple categories
> * in a variable range (so far, 1-5 points per category)
> This offers maximum flexibility, but can be "dumbed down" to a single
> yes/no decision. No database entry equals the "no opinion" choice.
>
> I hard-coded the available choices into SpecialValidate.php, but that
> can be moved to the language files,
>
> So far, *no* way of extracting that information exists. Some statistic
> output is likely to be my next attempt.
>
> The special page is also *not* linked from the articles yet. I'd prefer
> a "tab" like edit, history and the like instead of the special page, but
> I didn't look into the coding just yet.
>
> That's it for today :-)
> Magnus
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 20:54 schrieb Nikola Smolenski:
> On Sunday 18 July 2004 19:23, Leonard Vertighel wrote:
> > Could you give me an example of a sentence where you would disclose your
> > gender as a female, but not as a male? I really can't think of one.

To answer my own question: This is impossible due to elementary logic.

> In Serbian, for example, "I was here".

...will disclose the gender in both cases, obviously. I'll admit that you'd
need a rather clumsy expression to avoid that (I guess that something along
the lines of "I spent [the last weekend] here" should do), but as I said, a)
it's not true for German and b) I don't really care, I just wanted to point
out that with this we're more or less forcing registered users to disclose
their sex (though you could still click the other radio button).

(Having just read Eugenides' novel "Middlesex": Do we have any users that
don't consider themselves neither male nor female? But maybe I'm getting too
far off, I'd better stop commenting this any further.)

[[en:User:Leonard Vertighel]]


from_name: Thomas Luft

body:
Enrico Weigelt <weigelt <at> metux.de> writes:

>
> Hi folks,
>
> I'm going to do some quite huge changes in mediawiki and so going
> to start a forkoff into phase4.
>
[...]

Hi Enrico,

could you implement the deletion of single reversions so that copyright
violations can be purged easily? This is a long time request especially for the
German WP.
Regards

Thomas (aka Urbanus)


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote now has
	subdomains)

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Having multiple languages in one wiki doesn't help people to come
> together. In fact, in my experience, it does the exact opposite.
> Parcipation on Meta by people from languages like Chinese or Japanese is
> minimal. I'm afraid Meta is perceived as an extension of the English
> language Wikipedia.

There is no reason why MediaWiki can't become multilingual. Since this has not
happened on its own (probably due to the use of subdomains) we could use some
of our award money to put a bounty on that. Somebody already tried to submit a
patch for this but here is my idea:

*Have /xx subpages for each MediaWiki page where xx is a language code and the
localized message is on the subpage.
*create a language tagging system for articles; pages tagged for language xx
will switch the user interface to language xx.
*create @lang=xx as a url hack for forcing such a change via links - overriding
any page tag.
*add an option in user preferences to override per page interface language tags
and url hacks.

We could also use the current category system to classify pages based on the
language they are written in. Then using related changes from a category page
would give a language-specific RC (yes, RC from category doesn't work yet, but
I consider that a major bug).

> You can't eliminate the language barrier by throwing all languages into
> one big pot. That only means that the most popular common one - English -
> will dominate and small pockets of non-English discussions will form. This
> is what has happened on the multilingual mailing lists and it is what will
> continue to happen on Meta if we stay on the current path.

Balkanization is not an answer either. Making Meta truly multi-lingual is the
key.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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from_name: Camille Constans

subject: [Wikitech-l] es.wikipedia converted to utf-8

body:
es.wikipedia is now converted in utf-8. If somebody could clear the mediawiki: cache, that would be perfect :)

If everything goes well, it would have take less than an hour, without downtime, only readonly. The complete db dumped is 1GB

Shaihulud


body:
Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 22:12 schrieb Ray Saintonge:
> Angela_ wrote:
> >On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 13:56:18 +0200, Leonard Vertighel
> ><leonard.vertighel at web.de> wrote:
> >>on the Italian Wikipedia it has recently been discussed ...
> >
> >It does seem the wrong way round to me. ...
>
> I agree that Leonard's approach is the wrong way round. ...

Hey, this wasn't MY approach ;-) I agreed with Angela's opinion from the
beginning. I just wanted to make sure there wasn't some important technical
issue I was missing. But fortunately the replies I got so far are all in
favour of converting entities to characters, if anything. I hope to convince
my fellow Italian Wikipedians that this is indeed the better solution.

[[en:User:Leonard Vertighel]]
[[it:Utente:Leonard Vertighel]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] RFC: Labels [WAS: Announce: Going to start phase4]

body:
* Krzysztof Kowalczyk <kkowalczyk at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>
> In context of e-mail "Labels" can be used as equivalent of "virtual
> folders" e.g. I tag all e-mails from this list with "wikipedia" label.
>
> In context of WikiPedia, Labels are equivalent of Categories.
>
> They can also be used to implement other things that are done manually
> e.g. lists of any kinds (e.g. list of articles nominated for great
> writing, list of "most wanted to be written articles). We could use
> label "stub" instead of {{stub}} tag etc.
>
> So I think it would be good to have a good implementation of labels
> and implement other functionality (e.g. categories) in terms of
> labels.
hmm.
nice idea. we could it for automatically creating directories.
these labels could be something similar to HTML meta tags.

we could also use them to implement some permission handling,
so there could be groups with different permissions (which makes
wiki more interesting for enterprise usage)

BTW: lets make some wiki page for new feature requests.

cu
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
 Enrico Weigelt    ==   metux IT service

  phone:     +49 36207 519931         www:       http://www.metux.de/
  fax:       +49 36207 519932         email:     contact at metux.de
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from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikitech-l] LanguageIs.php

body:
On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 00:08:28 +0200, Jens Frank <jeluf at gmx.de> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 04:49:51AM +0000, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
> > The one uploaded yesterday was based on an old version, this is a new
> > version i've fine-tuned a little more, please go over it hover as i
> > may have made some subtle mistakes i havent noticed.
>
> I don't speak any Icelandic, but
>   NS_TALK             => 'Spall', # Talk
> looks like a 'j' is missing, since all other talk pages, e.g.
>   NS_IMAGE_TALK       => 'Myndaspjall'
> have this 'j'.
Yeah, thats a spelling error.
>
>   NS_WIKIPEDIA_TALK   => $wgMetaNamespace . '_talk',
> looks inconsequent, all other talk pages are ending in 'spjall'.
should be 'spjall'
>
> Is the above intended?
>
No, i was quite tired when i wrote the thing so some mistakes slipped through;(
>         Regards,
>
>
>
>                 JeLuF
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Evan Prodromou

body:
> awaiting you comments :)

Sure. Who are you? Do you have CVS access? Why are you doing a
unilateral re-write? Why aren't the rest of the developers invited? Why
should your unilateral re-write become THE mediawiki? Where's the design
docs, and where's the code? Why are you using the obsolete "phase N"
naming convention rather than the current MediaWiki 1.x (or 2.x)
versioning scheme?

~ESP


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Forming an action plan for 1.0

body:
Please remember that we '''do not need developer effort''' to move towards
Wikipedia 1.0.

I think that improving the quality of major articles (a big part of moving
towards 1.0) is the most important task for our editing community.
Yet I also agree with the majority of those poll responders
that vandalism screening and features for organised patrol are the
most-needed development items (and these /do/ have some
relevance to validation and quality control).

>>sj<<

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 12:25:34 +1000, Tim Starling
<ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> I just wanted to point out that when users were asked what they think is
> the most important thing programmers should be working on, only 4 out of
> 36, or 11% said formal review and distribution. The results in detail were:
>
> Quality: 17
> Screening for vandalism, with better watchlists, more configurable
> contributions pages and RC, etc. Features for organised patrol, marking
> edits as checked.
>
> Performance: 12


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Article validation

body:
I have put some preliminary code for article validation into CVS HEAD.

You'll need to add the table "validate" (tables.sql) to the DB. Then,
(for "Main Page", as example) go to
    index.php?title=Special:Validate&article=Main_Page

Every logged-in user can "vote"
* for every article
* in multiple versions
* in multiple categories
* in a variable range (so far, 1-5 points per category)
This offers maximum flexibility, but can be "dumbed down" to a single
yes/no decision. No database entry equals the "no opinion" choice.

I hard-coded the available choices into SpecialValidate.php, but that
can be moved to the language files,

So far, *no* way of extracting that information exists. Some statistic
output is likely to be my next attempt.

The special page is also *not* linked from the articles yet. I'd prefer
a "tab" like edit, history and the like instead of the special page, but
I didn't look into the coding just yet.

That's it for today :-)
Magnus


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 20:54:03 +0200 Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu>
wrote:
>On Sunday 18 July 2004 19:23, Leonard Vertighel wrote:
>> Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 19:13 schrieb Anthere:
>> > You probably are not female, otherwise you would know you always end up
>> > spilling up your gender one day or another when talking in french.
>>
>> Could you give me an example of a sentence where you would disclose your
>> gender as a female, but not as a male? I really can't think of one.
>
>In Serbian, for example, "I was here".

As far as I can see, the question was about French.

Andre Engels


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: LanguageIs.php

body:
On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 08:17:10PM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
>
> >The one uploaded yesterday was based on an old version, this is a new
> >version i've fine-tuned a little more, please go over it hover as i
> >may have made some subtle mistakes i havent noticed.
>
> Well... as mentioned previously on this list, there has been a change in
> the way month names and weekday names are handled. Your file is still
> using the old way. Perhaps if you could download the newest Language.php
> and adapt your version of LanguageIs.php accordingly? Here's the newest

Since his patch is for REL1_3 branch, it should be in the old form. I'll
convert it to the new format for HEAD.

Language.php is a very bad example, it implements all the functions that
the other languages just inherit. Translations should not be based on a
cut'n'paste of Language.php. Doing so makes any further changes to the
Language*.php files unneccessarily hard.

JeLuF


subject: [Wikitech-l] LanguageIs.php

body:
On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 04:49:51AM +0000, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
> The one uploaded yesterday was based on an old version, this is a new
> version i've fine-tuned a little more, please go over it hover as i
> may have made some subtle mistakes i havent noticed.

I don't speak any Icelandic, but
  NS_TALK             => 'Spall', # Talk
looks like a 'j' is missing, since all other talk pages, e.g.
  NS_IMAGE_TALK       => 'Myndaspjall'
have this 'j'.

  NS_WIKIPEDIA_TALK   => $wgMetaNamespace . '_talk',
looks inconsequent, all other talk pages are ending in 'spjall'.

Is the above intended?

	Regards,

		JeLuF


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Anthere wrote:

> Leonard Vertighel wrote:
>
>> Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 19:13 schrieb Anthere:
>>
>>> You probably are not female, otherwise you would know you always end up
>>> spilling up your gender one day or another when talking in french.
>>
>> Could you give me an example of a sentence where you would disclose
>> your gender as a female, but not as a male? I really can't think of one.
>
> Je suis ing?nieur
>
> Je suis ing?nieure

Domage que "Je suis ing?nieuse" n'est pas acceptable. :-)

Ec


body:
Leonard Vertighel wrote:

> on the Italian Wikipedia it has recently been discussed to make a bot that is
> used for some maintenance work additionally convert characters like letters
> with accents to HTML-entities (è etc.). Does this make any sense? And
> if so, why was it.wikipedia converted to UTF-8 at all? And finally, if this
> really makes sense, shouldn't this be handled by the software instead of
> cluttering the edit window with &foobar;s that most people don't even
> understand?

I'm not sure I can follow your train of thought, but:

1) whether or not you use such a bot is an issue relevant to your local
    Wikipedia, so there should be a vote on it there, and;
2) whether or not you use such a bot is independent of whether or not
    the Italian Wikipedia uses UTF-8.

The Italian Wikipedia, just like all other smaller Wikipedias, was
converted to UTF-8 to allow you to enter more characters than just the
dreadfully limited Latin-1. With UTF-8, users can enter Cyrillic,
Arabic, Chinese/Japanese, Hebrew, etc.etc.etc. Switching from Latin-1 to
UTF-8 *only* introduces extra possibilities, and imposes no limitation,
so it's not even a trade-off.

> It has been argued that those characters can't be entered directly e.g. with
> an American keyboard layout, but in my opinion this is at best a reason for
> converting the entities to the corresponding characters, not the other way
> round.

Firstly, you are right. Secondly, the argument isn't even valid. Just
because some people can't enter an ? because they use such a limited
keyboard layout (which is their own fault), doesn't mean all instances
of ? need to be changed into è ... nor does it mean anything else
of the kind, really.

(Personally, I wouldn't even mind a wiki syntax for entering special
characters, but one that is replaced with the real character upon save,
and if we do that, we might as well replace è etc. with ? etc.)

(Incidentally, I've just thought of a way for people to enter the ?
properly if they know that its HTML code is è. Just use the
preview and then copy & paste it back into the edit box. :) )

> If this has already been discussed, could someone please point me to the
> relevant pages/threads.

I'm not aware of any past instance of this crackpot theory. ;-)

Timwi


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> --- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>>My own preferences have always been "wp" for Wikipedia; "wd" for
>>Wiktionary (though I suppose "wt" would do), "wq" for Wikiquote, "ws"
>>for Wikisource, "wb" for Wikibooks, and "wm" for the 9/11 project.
>>These are all two letter "w" codes which should be easy to remember.  I
>>haven't heard any clamour for additional projects.  The "w" codes would
>>not conflict with any ISO-639-1 language codes where only "wa" and "wo"
>>are used.
>
> "wt" should be reserved for Wikitravel. who may eventually join the Wikimedia
> family. Also, current plans are to rename the Sep11 wiki to Wikipeople and
> expand its focus. So that may complicate using wp.

Since I'm sure everyone will agree that Wikipedia is by far the biggest,
most successful and most popular one of our projects, would there be any
significant objection to just keeping "w" for Wikipedia?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Attention all sysops on non-English Wikipedias

body:
Jens Frank wrote:

> If you would have read the entire patch, you would have noticed that I'm
> moving translations from hardcoded to user-configurable, not only for
> English, but for all languages.

At the time I had written this, it was only for English, German, French
and Chinese. I was also under the false impression that the code would
go live relatively quickly, and I wasn't sure if you (or anyone) would
do the remaining languages. Given this, please accept my claim that I
was acting in good faith when warning users.

> There have been complaints that certain
> parts of the user interface are not maintainable (month names, user
> preferences, etc) using the MediaWiki:-namespace.

You seem to think that I was somehow opposed to the change you made to
the code? What makes you think that?

> I'm putting a high effort into not breaking things in this process, e.g.
> moving all existing translations etc. Currently having 52 languages, this
> will take some time.

Thanks for doing it. I appreciate it.

> Be assured that the goal of the MediaWiki developers is not to break things.

Be similarly assured that the goal of my message was not to "frighten
users". :-p

Greetings,
Timwi


from_name: Daniel Herding

subject: [Wikitech-l] Fwd: Bot messed up databases on UTF-8 wikis

body:
Hi,

This is a message I sent to the Python Wikipedia Bot mailing list today, which
should be of concern for MediaWiki development as there might be other
clients that send invalid UTF-8 (or even the MediaWiki software itself, as
seen in [[es:Wikipedia:Registro_de_borrados]]).

----------  Forwarded Mail  ----------

Subject: [pyWikipediaBot-users] Bot messed up databases on UTF-8 wikis
Date: Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 16:12
From: Daniel Herding <DHerding at gmx.de>
To: pywikipediabot-users at lists.sourceforge.net

Hi,

wikipedia.putpage() always sent its edit summary messages as Latin-1 or
something, even if it was editing a UTF-8 wiki which expected UTF-8 summary
messages. (This concerns all bot functions which can have non-ASCII
characters in their summary messages.)

This, of course, troubled the SQL databases, and if you look at

http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=10_mars&action=history

with Mozilla, it will show flashy question marks instead of special
characters. The same happened on nds:, where Andre ran the interwiki bot, and
probably on many other Wikipedias. I just can't believe that nobody noticed
this, and I'm quite angry that nobody reported this bug.

I fixed this bug yesterday, as you can see here:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Utilisateur:Head&action=history

but the databases are already fucked up. The XML export special page (which
 is used by interwiki.py) gives out crappy XML, which leads to a SAX parse
 bug. And my newly created sqldump.py is unusable for these wikis.

So I guess we should ask the MediaWiki developers to help us out. Maybe they
can shut down the wiki for a while, then run over the 'old' database,
replacing every non-UTF-8-byte with a question mark.

Daniel

----------- End of forwarded Mail ---------------

It would be nice if someone could repair the databases on fr:, nds:, es:, and
other affected Wikipedias. You should also consider implementing a filter
that stops users from posting illegal characters. Mail me if you need
additional information.

Daniel


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> ... which was woefully incomplete. I am completely in favor of properly
> internationalizing MediaWiki and putting a bounty on the implementation.
> However, such an implementation should be generic, i.e. it should allow us
> to migrate Wikipedia itself into that system. This requires some way to
> deal with namespace conflicts - e.g. wikimedia.org/en/Merchandising vs.
> wikimedia.org/de/Merchandising (the current Merchandising page on Meta is
> actually German), and we would have to set up automatic redirects for
> subdomain access. Given that, setting subdomains up now while we don't
> have this advanced code will put us well on the road to a nice general
> solution for all Wikimedia projects once we have it.

If there is a problem with naming conflicts, then that is a very good reason to
have separate wikis. That problem does not really exist for meta, wikisource,
and wikibooks. In short, I think we should only divide things up if there is a
compelling reason. Meta in *particular* is there for multiproject and
multilingual coordination. How is that coordination going to happen on separate
wikis?

Sorry, I will not support balkanization of Meta. We should work on improving
the interface situation instead.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
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body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> I write regularly in
> French and insteat of the &egrave I simply use Alt + 0232 for ?.

Are you sure you write it regularly enough that you find that a usable
solution? Wouldn't using a suitable keyboard layout be way easier?


body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Let's take the "Stewards" discussion and vote as an example. The whole
> discussion was mostly English as was the voting page. If we used
> subdomains, we could have made it a requirement that the page be
> translated into the main languages before we vote. We could have
> aggregated the votes from the different language Wikimedias so that each
> community could express their preferences in their language. We could have
> translated important arguments from the discussion in realtime (in the
> form of localized "pro" and "cons" lists, for example).

This could much more easily be coordinated on one wiki so long as everybody
sees the interface in their own language. This is especially useful and
convenient for multi-lingual people, who are the glue that bind us together.
Meta is a convenient, but currently flawed, substrate. A few improvements will
do wonders.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote now has
	subdomains)

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
Ant wrote:
> I think they should be separated.

This can be done with the current setup. Stewards just need the ability to
create new pages for the Wikimedia Foundation website.

I agree with everything else you said about this (except the CPOV thing, since
I have no idea what that is).

--mav

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from_name: rose.parks at att.net

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0 - Comments on Copy Editing

body:
Hi Members,

     You rarely hear from me on this list, but... I was the Chief Copy Editor for Nupedia. Since part of validation process is copy editing, and I have seen few comments on this subject, I added my first thoughts on this subject to Mediawiki's page on article validation...please see the Copy Edit section (6.6) of the Article Validation page at:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Article_validation#Copyediting

I think this is important, because I see copy editing as different from other types of article validation. I would appreciate feedback, either to this list or to the article validation page.

                          Thank you,

                             As Ever,

                               Ruth Ifcher


body:
Am Montag, 19. Juli 2004 01:01 schrieb Brion Vibber:
> Add a quick output filter to Special:Export; there's a particular
> character one's supposed to use for invalid chars (check the Unicode
> specs).

That would solve a part of the problem (the minor one), but the database would
still contain illegal characters, which means that also the SQL dumps are
broken. This is a pity because the python wikipeida bot can get information
from these dumps (and thereby decrease server traffic), but not if the dump
contains illegal characters.
I could imagine that other people who want to reuse the dumps in other ways
have similar problems.

So the real fix would be:
* run through the 'old' database, and replace every occurence of illegal
characters with the U+FFFD replacement character you mentioned.
* implement a filter that does these replacements when new data comes in (i.e.
when a user saves a page), so that no new broken characters come in. Our bot
is fixed now, but there might be users with outdated browsers etc. which send
bad data (or even the MediaWiki software itself, as just happened on es:).

A similar filter would have helped the ISO 8859-1 wikis to prevent illegal
windows-1252 characters, but now it wouldn't be worth implementing it because
they will be converted to UTF-8 sooner or later anyway.

> Patches are welcome, please send them to wikitech-l.

I'm sorry, but I don't have any experience with MySQL and PHP.

Daniel


from_name: Anthere

body:
Leonard Vertighel <leonard.vertighel at web.de> wrote:
Am Montag, 19. Juli 2004 07:39 schrieb Anthere:
> Leonard Vertighel wrote:
> > Could you give me an example of a sentence where you would disclose your
> > gender as a female, but not as a male? I really can't think of one.
>
> Je suis ing?nieur
>
> Je suis ing?nieure

Nonsense ;-)

if (! female) { male }

There can't possibly be an example simply due to "tertium non datur".

----------------------

Hum. Non sense ?
No, I was really serious here.
And I know not what "tertium non datur" is :-)

When I send a resum?, if I write
Anth?re : ing?nieur agronome

Then I can be anyone, man or woman.
In short ing?nieur is usually the term used for male and female gender.

If I write
Anth?re : Ing?nieure agronome

Then, I indicate I am a woman, and very likely, a feminist, since french people do not often use gendered version.
Ing?nieure is only used for female. Using it is deliberately a political act.

if (! female) { male } is just not true :-)

I personally do not care being an "utilisateur", as it is a general term, which I consider somehow neutral, just as "ing?nieur".
I fear a bit that adding such delicacies as utilisateur/utilisatrice will probably only result in longer loading times, and I would prefer that developers work on this wikimedia project wide communication system :-)

But if some people feel uncomfortable with the male-gender orientation of wiki software, and very much want to change that, welllll... this is important then :-)

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from_name: Mikhail Capone

subject: [Wikitech-l] Sorting interwiki links

body:
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On Monday July 19 2004 03:55, Emmanuel Engelhart wrote:
> Hi
>
> Is somebody against the idea of sorting interwiki links in the
> alphanumerical order (by language: en always before fr) ? It will be easier
> to find a corresponding article in a specific language thus.
>
> Cordialy
>
> Emmanuel Engelhart

I think this is a good idea and would make the "interface" more consistent,
which is good. So I guess that's my vote.
- --
Mike / http://mikecapone.blogspot.com
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subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Rethinking Meta (was- Wikiquote
	now has subdomains)

body:
(copied to foundation-l - please reply there)

On 19 Jul 2004 04:46:00 +0200, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Tim-
> > Wikiquote now has specific-language subdomains. Instead of creating
> > wikis for all 150 languages, I made a system where wikis are only
> > created when they're wanted. To save time during maintenance operations,
> > it should now be possible to delete unused Wiktionaries and even
> > Wikipedias until they are required.
>
> This may be a good time to rethink our approach to Meta. Currently there
> is just one big, messy Meta-Wiki, with neither particularly clear policies
> (although my CPOV draft attempts to remedy this to some extent) nor
> interlanguage links. Help texts are spread across the "MediaWiki User's
> Guide" and the Help: namespace, with non-English texts in the English
> language Help: space. On the other hand, as Mav keeps pointing out, we
> have no real community editable Wikimedia presence.

What sort of "Wikimedia presence" did you want there? Do the pages in
the Wikimedia Foundation category not meet this?
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation)

> How about a setup like this:
> de.wikimedia.org
> en.wikimedia.org
> fr.wikimedia.org
> ...

One point I raised yesterday on wikitech-l (yes, I was on the wrong
list as well) is whether certain Foundation pages (such as the budget
or the bylaws) will need to be marked as official in some way, and
whether or not translations of those ought to be clearly marked as
non-official.

If we split into sub-domains, it makes this easier to do, but if the
translations are to be official, having 50+ recent changes for the
board to check and approve makes this impractical.

> This is more logical (Meta is not just about Wikipedia but about all
> Wikimedia projects), it allows us to use interlanguage links, to see RC
> only for the languages you are interested in, and to maintain the
> documentation separately for each language in the respective localized
> Help: namespace. It would encourage internationalization for things like
> project-wide votes.

Allowing the use of interlanguage isn't necessarily better than the
current system on meta. By using templates, the links only need be
updated in one place when a new language is added. Normal
interlanguage links would need to be updated on every sub-domain.

> The major downside: In the present system, you would have to create an
> account for each edition of Meta. So it might make sense to postpone this
> until Single Sign-On is implemented.
>
> In any case, I think there should be no separate Meta-Wiki and Wikimedia
> Foundation wiki - they should be the same thing.
>
> Thoughts?

If the Foundation wiki and Meta are not separated, we have less
control over it, as any sysop will be able to edit it, rather than
only those people who can be trusted with pages that allow HTML, such
as the fundraising page. Moving it to a separate wiki would allow for
different permissions to be set up, and for the use of full HTML;
something which mav is particularly keen to have.

Angela.

> Regards,
>
> Erik


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Tim-
> Wikiquote now has specific-language subdomains. Instead of creating
> wikis for all 150 languages, I made a system where wikis are only
> created when they're wanted. To save time during maintenance operations,
> it should now be possible to delete unused Wiktionaries and even
> Wikipedias until they are required.

This may be a good time to rethink our approach to Meta. Currently there
is just one big, messy Meta-Wiki, with neither particularly clear policies
(although my CPOV draft attempts to remedy this to some extent) nor
interlanguage links. Help texts are spread across the "MediaWiki User's
Guide" and the Help: namespace, with non-English texts in the English
language Help: space. On the other hand, as Mav keeps pointing out, we
have no real community editable Wikimedia presence.

How about a setup like this:
de.wikimedia.org
en.wikimedia.org
fr.wikimedia.org
...

This is more logical (Meta is not just about Wikipedia but about all
Wikimedia projects), it allows us to use interlanguage links, to see RC
only for the languages you are interested in, and to maintain the
documentation separately for each language in the respective localized
Help: namespace. It would encourage internationalization for things like
project-wide votes.

The major downside: In the present system, you would have to create an
account for each edition of Meta. So it might make sense to postpone this
until Single Sign-On is implemented.

In any case, I think there should be no separate Meta-Wiki and Wikimedia
Foundation wiki - they should be the same thing.

Thoughts?

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Marco Krohn

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
On Friday 16 July 2004 20:24, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Meanwhile, the tone of the press concerning wikipedia seems to
> be slowly drifting from "interesting, lots of potential" to "source of
> unreliable information".
[...]

> It seems to me that most of you would agree to a method similar to this:
> * A (logged-in) user can approve a single version of an article.
> * At least two approvals are needed for the "wikipedia seal of approval"
> :-)

Before discussing an approval method we should agree on what the approval is
about. Is it about spelling/grammer correctness, factually accurateness,
license problems, neutrality, ... or all of the above?

What we need for Wikipedia is a complete review in terms of quality similar to
the traditional peer review system. I write similar since we already know
that a traditional peer review system will not work for Wikipedia--too little
incentive, too much work for a single person, basically it comes down to the
same reasons why Nupedia has failed.

A complete review of an article needs all the things described in the
beginning:

1. style - this includes grammer, well-written, image captions, ...
2. legal - in particular check status of images
3. completeness - does the article contain everything "important" about the
subject
4. fact checking - validate every information in the article

For competing against Britannica 1, 3 and 4 are important. No.2 is important
for avoiding legal mess a la SCO.

A simple yes/no approval mechanism is IMHO not the right way in order to
achieve our goals. I don't think that anyone will fact-check an article of
>30.000 characters, this would literally take days of work if done properly.
I even seriously doubt that everyone would read the whole article before
approving. Erik M?ller once wrote:

"My experience on FAC [featured articles candidates] indicates that many
people have not even read the articles they support (no surprise, many of
them are 40,000 characters and longer)."

Not to mention other problems:
* everyone can create an arbitrary number of accounts
* we do not know anything about the readers expertise on the field
* approving an article again and again after every (small) edit will become a
pain

The last point IMHO is important. Every review method should be chosen in such
a way that the additional work after several smaller changes have occurred is
small. In particular one (trusted) user should be able to retransfer the
results from a "stable" version to a more recent version.

I am confident that we can solve no.1 and no.2 and perhaps no.3 within the
exiting wiki framework.

[[Wikipedia:Featured article candidates]] is already a good base for no.1 and
it seems to work reasonable well. And btw I never have heard any complaints
in press that grammer and/or writing style of the articles is bad.

In order to avoid legal problems in the long run, in particular after having
printed 1.0, we should at least have someone who is familiar with law and
GFDL who looks through the article. In most cases it probably would be
sufficient to have a closer look at the images. Here it would be helpful to
have a list of trusted "experts" that could help, similar to
[[Wikipedia:Association_of_Members'_Advocates]].

No.3 can become more difficult if the topic is very special. E.g. for the
article [[quantum field theory]] only a small number of our users have the
knowledge to judge if everything important is included.

No.4 IMHO is the most difficult one and concerning the "reliability" aspect
the most important one.

Checking every single statment can't be done by one user (it is too much
work). Thus a simple yes/no for the whole article cannot be the solution. The
hard point IMHO is the following:

* we either check the article in a very short time frame. Then we need an
"expert committee" which can validates the material. This has also has been
discussed many times, the last time
[[meta:Article_validation#Proposition_of_validation_by_a_committee]]. Reading
the proposition reminds me of Nupedia that's why I don't think this will
work.

* the other way is that many person independently validate information in a
longer time frame. The unsolved problem about this ansatz is how the system
remembers which parts already have been validated and which haven't.

(The discussion page won't be sufficient: if we know that A checked section
1,2 of version 125, B checked section 2,3 of version 134 and C of 1,4 of
version 145, it is hard to find out if really everything was validated
because of the edits in between. And this is only an example with three
reviewers where everyone has checked whole paragraphs.)

The edits between reviews make this hard. I have some ideas I'm playing around
with in order to overcome the problem. This is done by allowing users to
validate single sentences and by that allowing the underlying system to tell
for every single sentence how often it was validated. (unfortunately it is
not that easy, but this is another story)

O.k. just my 2 cents, why I think that a simple yes/no unfortunately is not
sufficient for an equivalent of peer review. It's late, therefore I apologize
for any extra grammer / spelling mistakes ;-)

best regards,
   Marco


body:
Daniel-
>> How about a setup like this:
>> de.wikimedia.org
>> en.wikimedia.org
>> fr.wikimedia.org

> Absolutely not! We need ONE place where we can all come together. That place
> is currently meta. I'm therefore very strongly opposed to balkanizing the
> only common place we all can edit. The interface issues need to be fixed and
> Meta should be made into a truly multilingual wiki.

Having multiple languages in one wiki doesn't help people to come
together. In fact, in my experience, it does the exact opposite.
Parcipation on Meta by people from languages like Chinese or Japanese is
minimal. I'm afraid Meta is perceived as an extension of the English
language Wikipedia.

You can't eliminate the language barrier by throwing all languages into
one big pot. That only means that the most popular common one - English -
will dominate and small pockets of non-English discussions will form. This
is what has happened on the multilingual mailing lists and it is what will
continue to happen on Meta if we stay on the current path.

The reality is that because of the language barrier, there *are* different
communities. Because of national barriers, there *are* different Wikimedia
interests. And there's no reason why an interesting global policy
discussion shouldn't be started by people who speak no English whatsoever,
and then be translated into the main languages if there is a vote.

While I would prefer it if all languages of a project were handled with a
single database and codebase, this requires quite substantial changes to
the current code, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon. And if it
happens, we can port all the existing wikis over to that new system. But I
think we should strive for a consistent approach.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikien-l

from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV and religion

body:
I agree wholeheartedly with RK:

* Wikipedia's [[NPOV]] policy often means multiple points
of view. This means providing not only the points of view
of different groups today, but different groups in the
past.

*Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. One important task for
articles is to explain things. In the case of human beliefs
and practices, explanation encompasses not only what
motivates individuals who hold these beliefs and practices,
but an account of how such beliefs and practices came to be
and took shape.

*Wikipedia articles on history and religion draw from a
religion's sacred texts. But Wikipedia articles on history
and religion also draw from modern archaeological,
historical and scientific sources

The above three points should go directly into the [[Wikipedia:NPOV]]
article, if they're not there already. Good work, Robert!

As for dealing with they way adherents view their own religions, we can
also apply the W's neutrality policy. Even if believers "would prefer
that the articles describe their faith as they see it," I suggest we
regard THE WAY THEY SEE IT as merely their own point of view.

This has worked well with the Unification Church, with its prime
Wikipedian adherent (yours truly!) satisfied to have the article
describe Rev. Moon as "regarded by his followers to be the Messiah" --
which is the POV of Unificationists. The article also satisfies other
readers by reporting that non-adherents often vigorously dispute Moon's
claim of Messiahship.

Moreover, _all_ the articles on religion take a step back and avoid
endorsing or condemning the view that "there is one God", don't they?
(If not, they should, right?) Christians, Jews and atheists are all
satisfied with a statement like "Judaism teaches that God creating
everything."

This statement is really a paradigm of NPOV: it _attributes_ a claim to
a source.

SOURCE: Judaism, the Bible and/or Jews
CLAIM:  That God exists as a supreme being who created everything

Note that there are many variations, minor and major, on what that claim
is; and who precisely makes that claim. Which is really the meat and
potatoes of any article on religion: readers want to know just exactly
WHAT is believed and WHO believes it. And it's a good thing W is not
paper, because it takes a lot of words to describe these beliefs and
believers.

Finally, the belief that "the way things are is the
way things have always been; any differences are from
heretical sects that don't represent the real religion" is sometimes a
component or major current of thought in religions or sects. This belief
or point of view should be _mentioned_ in the article, but neither
endorsed or condemned.

If some religion like -- oh, I dunno, Jehovah's Witnesses or Seventh Day
Adventists? -- asserts that their teachings have NEVER evolved since
first being articulated by their founder; well, then, simply state that
_they_ assert _that_.

SOURCE: certain JWs
CLAIM:  that the core teachings have never varied

If some critics insist on calling this an "ahistorical perspective", we
should name these critics and mention (or better summarize) their
claims.

Jimbo and Larry's NPOV policy stands the test of time. It handles all
cases. It's the basis for resolving even the most difficult of disputes
over articles.

All we ever have to do is say that THIS SIDE claims THIS, and that
ANOTHER SIDE claims ANOTHER THING.

Uncle Ed


body:
Angela-
> What sort of "Wikimedia presence" did you want there? Do the pages in
> the Wikimedia Foundation category not meet this?
> (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation)

For ourselves, yes. For the outside world, we need something that the
average journalist can navigate. Every Wikimedia chapter will want to have
a nice URL to give to people for signing up, donating ...

de.wikimedia.org, en.wikimedia.org etc. would be consistent with the
wikipedia.org setup. The current community directory style content could
be put on a separate page like it is done for the Wikipedia Main Page. The
actual Wikimedia entry page would mostly contain
- links to all projects
- donation form
- membership application form (for chapters)
- contact information

Keep it simple and stupid. HTML is definitely needed for this as well as
some backend processing scripts.

> If we split into sub-domains, it makes this easier to do, but if the
> translations are to be official, having 50+ recent changes for the
> board to check and approve makes this impractical.

True, but the current mixed RC isn't scalable without filtering. So
whether you want filtering for the combined Meta, or synthesis-on-demand
for the split up Meta, we need to add this type of functionality in any
case. In lieu of a nice solution, a page "Pages waiting for board
approval" on en and maybe fr would be sufficient.

> Allowing the use of interlanguage isn't necessarily better than the
> current system on meta. By using templates, the links only need be
> updated in one place when a new language is added. Normal
> interlanguage links would need to be updated on every sub-domain.

This is essentially a hack. It's better to fix the interlanguage link
system (by using a shared link table) than to use a custom solution which
people have to learn for a single wiki and which doesn't work anywhere
else. Consistency is good - currently Meta is a special case and that
creates a lot of problems (like the Help: namespace not being localizable,
interlanguage links not in the same place as everywhere else, etc.).

> If the Foundation wiki and Meta are not separated, we have less
> control over it, as any sysop will be able to edit it

MediaWiki already supports limited rights management (write access to
certain pages can be limited to one user group, e.g. "Wikimedia Editors").
We could relatively easily extend this to allow for selectively enabling
HTML support. Limiting edit rights should be kept to an absolute minimum
for obvious reasons.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Daniel-
>
>>>How about a setup like this:
>>>de.wikimedia.org
>>>en.wikimedia.org
>>>fr.wikimedia.org

I am *very* strongly opposed to doing that.

Meta is the only place where we can really meet, and find information
that someone else left. Yes, there is work to do to make it easier to
navigate between languages, but separating us is not the solution. That
is the "easy" solution, but will be very bad in the long term.
Currently, meta is slowly becomming more multilingual, in particular
thanks to german speaking people. We must keep that this way, and rather
try to go toward a solution to navigate (with a sort of internal
language linking) and language interface to be changed in preferences.

> Having multiple languages in one wiki doesn't help people to come
> together.

Yes, it does. Much more than any "supposingly" multilingual mailing list.

> In fact, in my experience, it does the exact opposite.

In my experience, it does bring people together, provided that you
welcome the interaction.

> Parcipation on Meta by people from languages like Chinese or Japanese is
> minimal.

It was also minimal a few months ago by Germans. It is becoming less.
Plus, there are japanese and chinese people currently over there. We
have Tomos, Suisui, Britty etc...

> I'm afraid Meta is perceived as an extension of the English
> language Wikipedia.

Perhaps if you were editing over there in German, it would lessen that
feeling ?

> You can't eliminate the language barrier by throwing all languages into
> one big pot. That only means that the most popular common one - English -
> will dominate and small pockets of non-English discussions will form. This
> is what has happened on the multilingual mailing lists and it is what will
> continue to happen on Meta if we stay on the current path.

This is what is happening on the multinlingual mailing lists, because
each time someone DARE putting a word in a language different than
english, he is severely told that "of course, he could write in english,
because really, no one can understand him".

I regularly write in french on purpose on wikipedia-l, and it never
failed. Each time, I am told it is bad and if I want to be understood, I
should really avoid writing in french.

This is a comment I never get on meta. The argument what does happen on
mailing list will necessarily happen on meta is moot.

> The reality is that because of the language barrier, there *are* different
> communities. Because of national barriers, there *are* different Wikimedia
> interests. And there's no reason why an interesting global policy
> discussion shouldn't be started by people who speak no English whatsoever,
> and then be translated into the main languages if there is a vote.

There is no reason... but this is just too heavy, so it won't happen.

> While I would prefer it if all languages of a project were handled with a
> single database and codebase, this requires quite substantial changes to
> the current code, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon. And if it
> happens, we can port all the existing wikis over to that new system.

No, thank you.

But I
> think we should strive for a consistent approach.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki fork

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> Enrico is free to "start a forkoff" without the approval of the existing
> development team and without CVS access, after all MediaWiki is licensed
> under GPL. I'll do my best to make the main line of MediaWiki
> development outcompete it in terms of features, stability and
> performance. Choosing which branch to use for Wikipedia could then be
> left up to the users and the Board of Trustees.

Tim's right about everything, of course, but it sure would be
unfortunate for things to go in that way.  I assume Enrico is talented
and motivated and we've seen wonderful things from people taking up
the effort for a total rewrite.

So while of course it's true that Enrico doesn't _need_ anyone's
approval, wouldn't it be better if he approached the main developers
(in IRC, for example, or on this list) to gather support and ideas, so
that we could all pitch in on this together?  (That's the editorial
"we", of course, I'm personally useless.)

--Jimbo


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> In any case, I think there should be no separate Meta-Wiki and Wikimedia
> Foundation wiki - they should be the same thing.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

I think they should be separated.

The reason of wikimediafoundation site is to present a unified front to
outside. It should be clean, with no dispute, and it should be
consistent with the Foundation frame of mind. It should also contain a
whole bunch of data, which should not be modified too easily by anyone
(like financial issues).

On the other hand, meta is about brainstorming. It not only can, but
should contain many povs. It should be a boiling soup, with many
languages; something rather anarchic. A place where we can make
mistakes, where we organise ourselves. Where everyone can edit freely.

This makes them necessarily separated. They do not have the same editors
(foundation should be a subset of meta), they do not have the same goal
at all.

If we put them together in the same pot
* this will be confusing for outsiders, as they will launch on possibly
highly disorganised pages
* there will be no certainty that what is written is what the foundation
supports

Now, I remember very well your CPOV proposition, which aimed at strongly
limiting access to meta, by requesting that people identify themselves
by real names to have the right for their edits to be claimed
trustworthy, when the edits of non real people were labelled "untrusted
or non representative of a so-called community point of view" by default.

There is no such thing as a community point of view, especially at the
international level. There are a certain number of points on which we
all agree. Aside from that, there are a collection of pov, some totally
incompatible, and many compatible.

This CPOV proposition will have to happen over my dead body :-) I trust
people for what they are and what they do, not for their real name. And
a place where ideas are thrown in the pot is good. We sometimes need the
stupid ideas to find the best ones. Labelling ideas not CPOV when they
do not suit your own opinion is bad. Voting all the time to decide which
are CPOV and which are not is equally bad. This may clarify some points,
but also mark them in stone. I am sorry Erik, but this is really not an
issue on which I think we will ever meet agreement.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Should MP3 files be allowed on wikipedia - Current
	ongoing discussion.

body:
Mark Richards wrote:
> I agree, there is no compelling reason not to use ogg
> or something else that is free. Is there a
> 'mainstream' player (wmp, real or something) that
> plays ogg these days?

I am under the impression that it's trivial for people to play
ogg in all the major players.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg_Vorbis#Software

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia for Cell Phones - see kwickee.com as well

body:
Andrew Lih wrote:
> It would be nice to make it easy for folks to submit photos via
> mobile means for articles. This might be part of a larger effort to
> make the whole photo submission process more friendly.

Yes.  A certain fairly well-known wikipedian just went on a big tour
of Europe and made a special point of taking "encyclopedic" photos of
many prominent landmarks on his journey, but he still hasn't uploaded
any of them, because it's a huge pain in the ass.

I don't know the solution, but it sure would be sweet to have some
means of bulk uploading, for example ftp or something like that.

--Jimbo


body:
Anthere-
> Meta is the only place where we can really meet, and find information
> that someone else left.

Can you give me a single example where splitting Meta by subdomain would
do any harm in bringing people together? I would like to move this
discussion from the general, emotional "Don't split us up!" to the
specific, rational "This is where it would cause problems" level. What
recent policy discussion or vote would have been harmed by this approach?

Let's take the "Stewards" discussion and vote as an example. The whole
discussion was mostly English as was the voting page. If we used
subdomains, we could have made it a requirement that the page be
translated into the main languages before we vote. We could have
aggregated the votes from the different language Wikimedias so that each
community could express their preferences in their language. We could have
translated important arguments from the discussion in realtime (in the
form of localized "pro" and "cons" lists, for example).

This is a lot better than having a single page with the occasional piece
of untranslated French or Japanese between a couple of participants. In
that case, the main part of the page is English - excluding those who
don't speak it - and some parts of the discussion are not - excluding
those who don't speak that language. It's a lose-lose situation.

> In my experience, it does bring people together, provided that you
> welcome the interaction.

I can't interact with someone whose language I do not speak, unless
someone translates it for me. A Wikipedia-style setup facilitates that.

> Plus, there are japanese and chinese people currently over there. We
> have Tomos, Suisui, Britty etc...

Exactly - the people on Meta are mostly the ones who speak some amount of
English. Someone who doesn't speak any English won't even understand the
user interface.

> This is what is happening on the multinlingual mailing lists, because
> each time someone DARE putting a word in a language different than
> english, he is severely told that "of course, he could write in english,
> because really, no one can understand him".

First, I must remind you that my main objection in the last debate on this
matter was using a different language in order to exclude others from a
certain comment. This is a completely separate issue, and I would have the
same objection on Meta.

Second, if you want to reach the *largest number* of people, you should
either use English or make sure that what you say gets translated into
English. That should be very obvious, no? It would be helpful if you could
acknowledge this simple point.

Translations become far easier with a consistent approach, and people feel
more welcome if the main site they navigate is in their mother tongue.
This seems to work very well for Wikipedia, I don't see why it shouldn't
work on Meta.

This is about giving non-English projects a larger voice instead of
relying on multilingual people like you to act as mouthpieces for those
who don't speak English. Just like there is a Wikipedia community for
every language, there should be a Wikimedia community for each. Once you
have something like ja.wikimedia.org, the creation of a Japanese Wikimedia
chapter becomes more likely as well because people will find it far easier
to interact when there is no constant interference by what is *effectively
indistinguishable from random noise* to them. The problem of creating
project-wide policies is addressed through board review and voting
standards.

It may be a good idea to put this issue to a Wikimedia-wide vote if we
fail to reach consensus.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Announce: Going to start phase4

body:
Leonard Vertighel wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 19:13 schrieb Anthere:
>
>>You probably are not female, otherwise you would know you always end up
>>spilling up your gender one day or another when talking in french.
>
>
> Could you give me an example of a sentence where you would disclose your
> gender as a female, but not as a male? I really can't think of one.

Je suis ing?nieur

Je suis ing?nieure


subject: [Wikipedia-l] subdeviding meta in domains

body:
The lingua franca of meta is Englisch, when you devide it up, people who read meta will not necessaraly read relevant posts. This will undermine the usefulness of meta. At present there is little translated to other languages.

The only thing practical would be to have people indicate that an article is in XX language, and have a userpreference to indicate these articles for people intrested in that language.

Thanks,
  GerardM


body:
Anthere-

> The reason of wikimediafoundation site is to present a unified front to
> outside. It should be clean, with no dispute, and it should be
> consistent with the Foundation frame of mind. It should also contain a
> whole bunch of data, which should not be modified too easily by anyone
> (like financial issues).

This can be done using rights management and page approval. Having a
combined wiki helps in collaborating as a community on matters such as
press releases and general news.

> Now, I remember very well your CPOV proposition, which aimed at strongly
> limiting access to meta, by requesting that people identify themselves
> by real names to have the right for their edits to be claimed
> trustworthy, when the edits of non real people were labelled "untrusted
> or non representative of a so-called community point of view" by default.

Wow. This is a gross misrepresentation of what I said. I am frankly
flabbergasted. See:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_point_of_view

In the *discussion* I suggested that *personal essays which deviate from
the CPOV* (such as our favorite troll pages) should be signed, and that
unsigned pages could be refactored or removed. This was a compromise
proposal towards you to not have to completely exclude such pages. Next
time you "remember something very well", you may want to look it up first.

> This CPOV proposition will have to happen over my dead body :-)

Fortunately, Wikimedia is democratically governed.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

body:
On Sunday 18 July 2004 23:26, Andre Engels wrote:
> On Sun, 18 Jul 2004 20:54:03 +0200 Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu>
> wrote:
> >On Sunday 18 July 2004 19:23, Leonard Vertighel wrote:
> >> Am Sonntag, 18. Juli 2004 19:13 schrieb Anthere:
> >> > You probably are not female, otherwise you would know you always end
> >> > up spilling up your gender one day or another when talking in french.
> >>
> >> Could you give me an example of a sentence where you would disclose your
> >> gender as a female, but not as a male? I really can't think of one.
> >
> >In Serbian, for example, "I was here".
>
> As far as I can see, the question was about French.

Well, no. The question was about use of gender-specific language in MediaWiki
messages, with French as an example.


from_name: Robert

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV policy on Israel Shahak and Richard Wagner articles

body:
For over a year now Zero has been taunting me with personal
attacks, slander, and taunting with attacks on any Jews who
differ with him. Zero constantly deletes chunks of
articles, in order to censor facts that he disagrees with.
Shockingly, the deleted material isn't even contested; Zero
flat out admits that the groups mentioned have the views
presented.

In recent days Zero has unilaterally (again) removed large
amounts of verified facts from the article we have on
Israel Shahak; the text he removed was on the one subject
for which Shahak is most well known. Shahak today is known
for his writings against religious Jews, which have been
rejected by mainstream historians. Today, not a single
maninstream historian relies on Shahak; his work only
exists on Nazi, Christian Identitity and White Supremacist
Websites. (Please do not take my word for this; check out
Google and see for yourself.)

Long time members will recall that certain people
attempted to sabotage our articles on Richard Wagner and on
Holocaust denial. They repeatedly denied that any
anti-Semitism existed in Wagner or in Holoaust denier. They
claimed that it was a "strawman" that the ideas about Jews
of Richard Wagner and of Holocaust Deniers were rejected by
all historians, and were only accepted today by Nazi,
Christian Identitity and White Supremacist Websites.

Fortunately, at the time, sane voices here prevailed. A
number of us noted that one's personal feelings have no
place in Wikipedia articles. Our NPOV policy demands that
we phrase all facts in NPOV terminology.

Thus, for the Richard Wagner article we extensively
discussed Wagner's views on Jews, giving direct quotes so
that readers could judge for themselves. The article then
noted that these views were not accepted as factual, yet
were adopted as truthful by Nazis and other similar groups.
While the anti-Semitic Wagner supporters screamed bloody
murder, the rest of us Wikipedians kept this NPOV
discussion. The facts were there in NPOV format, and the
readers could judge for themselves.

Now the same thing is occuring here in the Israel Shahak
article. Thus the article discussed Shahak's views on Jews,
giving direct quotes so that readers could judge for
themselves. The article then noted that these views were
not accepted as factual, and have been rebutted by
virtually the entire Jewish community, from secular to
Reform to Orthodox to the ADL.

The articles states (when not censored by Zero) that
Shahak's claims are only accepted by anti-Semitic groups.
This is a fact. However, Zero is screaming bloody murder,
and on the talk page has engaged in bashing against me, and
then against the Jewish community. He now is trying to get
me banned, and he keeps reverting the page.

Wikipedia needs to insist that NPOV policy be followed,
even on articles for Richard Wagner and Israel Shahak. We
cannot let Zero mass revert everything that he wants to
keep hidden, and we cannot let him slander the Jewish
community (or the blacks, or the gays, etc.) We cannot ban
people just because they want articles to contain verified
factual information in NPOV format.

Obviously I and others are flexible on the specific wording
of said facts (as I have stated on the articles' talk pag)
The problem is that Zero has repeatedly stated that he
won't let the issue even be discussed, which is a serious
violation of Wikipedia ethics.

Robert (RK)

__________________________________
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body:
Daniel-
> There is no reason why MediaWiki can't become multilingual. Since this has
> not happened on its own (probably due to the use of subdomains) we could use
> some of our award money to put a bounty on that. Somebody already tried to
> submit a patch for this

... which was woefully incomplete. I am completely in favor of properly
internationalizing MediaWiki and putting a bounty on the implementation.
However, such an implementation should be generic, i.e. it should allow us
to migrate Wikipedia itself into that system. This requires some way to
deal with namespace conflicts - e.g. wikimedia.org/en/Merchandising vs.
wikimedia.org/de/Merchandising (the current Merchandising page on Meta is
actually German), and we would have to set up automatic redirects for
subdomain access. Given that, setting subdomains up now while we don't
have this advanced code will put us well on the road to a nice general
solution for all Wikimedia projects once we have it.

Regards,

Erik


subject: Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Multiple categories

body:
On Sunday 18 July 2004 20:49, Rob Hooft wrote:
> Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> > On Sunday 18 July 2004 17:54, Rob Hooft wrote:
> >>Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> >>>Category:Saint/Pope would return all Popes who are also saints
> >>>Category:Pope,Patriarch would return all Popes and Patriarchs
> >>>Category:Saint/Pope,Patriarch would return all saints who were Popes or
> >>>Patriarchs
> >>
> >>I don't see how this can be more than marginally useful unless it also
> >>searches all subcategories to infinite depth (with recursion checks?!).
> >
> > It would not be so useful with current categories, but I assume that
> > when/if it is implemented, people would make use of it and not create
> > subcategories manually. IMO, the finely-tuned categories which are
> > present now came to be because there is no way to display articles which
> > belong to multiple categories.
>
> I see what you mean, but with the category system you envision, none of
> the categories would be very useful to browse by eye, and that happens
> to be a very fruitful way of browsing wikipedia. And all articles would

You are right that most categories would have a lot of articles; but I don't
think that that's not fruitful. If someone needs a list of all cities
featured on WIkipedia, there it is; if someone needs a list of all cities in
Germany, it could be made. With current system, one is fine with a list of
all cities in Germany but there is no way at all of getting a list of all
cities.

> need to be added to very, very many categories, bringing lots of hard

I don't think so. For example, a city in Germany might need to be added to
Category:City and Category:Germany and that's about all. Possibly there are
articles where a lot more could be needed (Leonardo Da Vinci?) but I guess
that they would have a lot of categories anyway.

> manual work with it. In any system with subcategories, a search function
> MUST also search the tree.

But you are right, that should be added in the future.


from_name: Mark Ryan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Waiting for 1.0

body:
Okay, so no spell checker. It was worth a try! :-P

If we are meant to be only be using short stubbish articles for
everything (I have heard some people saying using only the first
paragraph of articles), then how will we keep this separate from the
main articles? Go the same way as monobook.css and have it like
[[Christianity/stub]]? There are little conceptual problems that need
to be thought through before we jump in head-first into preparing for
this.

~Mark Ryan


from_name: Leonard Vertighel

body:
Am Montag, 19. Juli 2004 07:39 schrieb Anthere:
> Leonard Vertighel wrote:
> > Could you give me an example of a sentence where you would disclose your
> > gender as a female, but not as a male? I really can't think of one.
>
> Je suis ing?nieur
>
> Je suis ing?nieure

Nonsense ;-)

  if (! female) { male }

There can't possibly be an example simply due to "tertium non datur".

(I'll stop spamming the list now before I get banned)


from_name: Dan Keshet

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: NPOV policy on Israel Shahak and Richard Wagner
	articles

body:
RK,

Please don't personalize the issue as if Zero were the only one who
disagrees with your text.  It is wrong on many accounts, accounts which I
have described on the talk page.  I have repeatedly indicated my
willingness to use mediation to try to improve the discussion, in an
attempt to lead to a better article.  Zero was hesitant, but said he would
try it.  Will you join us?

--Dan Keshet

Robert wrote:

> For over a year now Zero has been taunting me with personal
> attacks, slander, and taunting with attacks on any Jews who
> differ with him. Zero constantly deletes chunks of
> articles, in order to censor facts that he disagrees with.
> Shockingly, the deleted material isn't even contested; Zero
> flat out admits that the groups mentioned have the views
> presented.
>
> In recent days Zero has unilaterally (again) removed large
> amounts of verified facts from the article we have on
> Israel Shahak; the text he removed was on the one subject
> for which Shahak is most well known. Shahak today is known
> for his writings against religious Jews, which have been
> rejected by mainstream historians. Today, not a single
> maninstream historian relies on Shahak; his work only
> exists on Nazi, Christian Identitity and White Supremacist
> Websites. (Please do not take my word for this; check out
> Google and see for yourself.)
>
> Long time members will recall that certain people
> attempted to sabotage our articles on Richard Wagner and on
> Holocaust denial. They repeatedly denied that any
> anti-Semitism existed in Wagner or in Holoaust denier. They
> claimed that it was a "strawman" that the ideas about Jews
> of Richard Wagner and of Holocaust Deniers were rejected by
> all historians, and were only accepted today by Nazi,
> Christian Identitity and White Supremacist Websites.
>
> Fortunately, at the time, sane voices here prevailed. A
> number of us noted that one's personal feelings have no
> place in Wikipedia articles. Our NPOV policy demands that
> we phrase all facts in NPOV terminology.
>
> Thus, for the Richard Wagner article we extensively
> discussed Wagner's views on Jews, giving direct quotes so
> that readers could judge for themselves. The article then
> noted that these views were not accepted as factual, yet
> were adopted as truthful by Nazis and other similar groups.
> While the anti-Semitic Wagner supporters screamed bloody
> murder, the rest of us Wikipedians kept this NPOV
> discussion. The facts were there in NPOV format, and the
> readers could judge for themselves.
>
> Now the same thing is occuring here in the Israel Shahak
> article. Thus the article discussed Shahak's views on Jews,
> giving direct quotes so that readers could judge for
> themselves. The article then noted that these views were
> not accepted as factual, and have been rebutted by
> virtually the entire Jewish community, from secular to
> Reform to Orthodox to the ADL.
>
> The articles states (when not censored by Zero) that
> Shahak's claims are only accepted by anti-Semitic groups.
> This is a fact. However, Zero is screaming bloody murder,
> and on the talk page has engaged in bashing against me, and
> then against the Jewish community. He now is trying to get
> me banned, and he keeps reverting the page.
>
> Wikipedia needs to insist that NPOV policy be followed,
> even on articles for Richard Wagner and Israel Shahak. We
> cannot let Zero mass revert everything that he wants to
> keep hidden, and we cannot let him slander the Jewish
> community (or the blacks, or the gays, etc.) We cannot ban
> people just because they want articles to contain verified
> factual information in NPOV format.
>
> Obviously I and others are flexible on the specific wording
> of said facts (as I have stated on the articles' talk pag)
> The problem is that Zero has repeatedly stated that he
> won't let the issue even be discussed, which is a serious
> violation of Wikipedia ethics.
>
>
> Robert (RK)


from_name: Emmanuel Engelhart

subject: [Wikitech-l] Sorting interwiki links

body:
Hi

Is somebody against the idea of sorting interwiki links in the alphanumerical
order (by language: en always before fr) ? It will be easier to find a
corresponding article in a specific language thus.

Cordialy

Emmanuel Engelhart