subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply because
>real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than letters in a
>window on a computer screen. That was obvious at the WOS in Berlin, as I
>know that some people are still reeling from the whole experience. ;-)
>Getting Angela to mingle with the French Wikimedia community will benefit
>the whole project.
>
>
I disagree with this---meeting with a tiny fraction of the Wikimedia
community and making decisions at such meetings is detrimental to the
project.  Real work and decision-making should be done online, in
public, where everyone can participate.  If people want to socialize in
person, that's fine, but we shouldn't be making decisions at meetings
either behind closed doors or at which only a small fraction of
Wikimedians are present.

And, I don't think calling such meetings "perks" is an overstatement.
I've observed quite a few non-profit meetings, as well as meetings and
conferences in academia, and they rarely have much real work being
done.  They're social and networking events, and the most "real work"
that gets done is at best finding out about something that you make a
note of to look up and read later.  The actual real work gets done via
email or telephone (or both) either before or after the conferences.  H.
Cheney's recent email indicated he's had similar experiences on the
non-profit boards he's sat on, so this seems to not simply be my
personal experience.

-Mark


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Delirium

subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses


list: foundation-l

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Funding for the newly elected Board Members

body:
--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> I don't see it as very different.  Many Wikipedians have spent their
> personal money in contributing to quality articles, including buying
> out-of-copyright books from eBay in order to scan in images, to name
> just one example.  We don't have plans to reimburse people for this expense.

The comparison is still not valid since creating articles has its own rewards
(different for each person) and the creation of *any* article is *never*
mandatory. Meetings are a drag and require board members to do things they may
not really want to do just because the work *must* be done.

Meetings are are a necessary part of the functioning of the organization. The
organization is nothing without people. People are social creatures and are
energized by social contact and/or from a feeling that important people know
and care about them (why do you think political candidates spend so much time
on the road?). Thus to create and maintain the organization a certain amount of
social interaction is needed. So the trustees should be able to seek
reimbursement for meeting expenses.

Also, as Erik rightly states, the highest bandwidth way to accomplish that is
through face-to-face meetings. Once per year would be an absolute minimum. Once
a quarter would be ideal if those meetings could be hosted by different
Wikimedia chapters around the world (creating stronger ties between the
foundation and the chapter system).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


list: wikien-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corporate sponsorship of Wikipedia

body:
Delirium wrote:
> Mark Pellegrini wrote:
>
>> Note, Angela asked me emphatically to make sure you fight it out there
>> and not on the mailing list.
>>
> Ugh... it's nearly impossible to carry on a lengthy conversation on the
> wiki.  Mailing lists are a lot better: I can organize subthreads, keep
> posts I find particularly interesting for later reference and delete
> others, and so on.  Can't do any of that on a wiki unless you make a
> private copy of the discussion page and edit it yourself, and then keep
> your copy in sync with the original, which is a gigantic mess.
>
> -Mark

well, this is very unfortunate for you, because Angela and I will
strongly favor use of multilingual meta over mailing lists.


from_name: Angela

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Terms of use

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Someone please proof-read it before making it official. :/

It needs more than proof reading before it can be made official.
Suggesting, as the page did before I edited it, that this was an
agreement between users and the Foundation, is not legally meaningful
when the board has not even approved these terms. I have emailed
Anthere and Jimbo about this with a view to determining whether or not
we do want these terms to be official. I also think that if we have
terms of use, they need to be translated and put into effect
site-wide. It doesn't make sense to have these conditions for one
language version of Wikipedia, and nothing at all for the other wikis.

Angela.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Setting up for the Greek language

body:
Delirium wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
>
>> Delirium wrote:
>>
>>> There may be cases I'm not covering, but for the one I can
>>> immediately see in the interface, the issue is that "day month" type
>>> dates use the possessive form of the month name, while month names
>>> used by themselves use a simple noun form.
>>
>> [... etc. ...  'Maios' vs. '5h Maiou']
>>
>> Ah-ha. I kind of thought so. So why don't you just do this:
>>
>> - Set the month name to "Maio"
>> - In a sentence like "{{MONTHNAME}} is nice", write "{{MONTHNAME}}s
>> estis bioutiphulos"
>> - Set the date format to "{{DAY}} {{MONTHNAME}}u {{YEAR}}"
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
> Well, unfortunately one part I had left out were the accents, which
> shift when the word becomes possessive.  To take the example from
> Andreas's email, the simple noun form of June is "Io?nios", whereas the
> possessive form is "Ioun?ou".  So it would really need a separate
> {{MONTHNAMEPOSSESSIVE}} or something of that sort.

OK. Next idea:

(1) Set the month names to be the possessive forms, e.g. "Ioun?ou",
     so they can be used normally in dates throughout the site.
(2) Create thingies in the Template namespace that contain the
     nominative forms, e.g. [[Template:Nominative-Ioun?ou]] would
     contain "Io?nios".
(3) Whenever you need the nominative, instead of {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}
     write {{Nominative-{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}}}.

How's that?
Timwi


subject:
[Wikitech-l] More efficient handling of "touched" and caching (was:
	update record)

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> In the cur table, there is a field called "cur_touched".  This field is
> used for cache invalidation. If links on the page change from broken to
> unbroken or vice versa, cur_touched is set to the present. This field is
> queried to determine whether the client cache or the parser cache is valid.

I see. If we are okay with sacrificing a few 304 Not Modifieds, I have
an idea of an alternative scheme that can work without having to modify
cur_touched of hundreds of pages when a template is changed.

I think we should have an equivalent of what is cur_touched in memcached
(I'll call it a touched-key), and if it is not in memcached, the page is
served.

This means that sometimes such a touched-key will expire from the cache
and *one* page will be served instead of 304ed, but more importantly,
editing a template (or, in fact, creating a heavily-linked-to page)
would require only purging (parser cache (memcached) and squids), and no
database queries on hundreds of rows.

> You can't store anything in memcached unless you're prepared to have it
> go missing.

Oh, come on, I know that. :) I don't think the few times that a
touched-key "goes missing" are that much of a problem. Compared to fully
parsed pages, the touched-keys are extremely small, and hence many of
them can stay in memcached. If one does go missing, then we'll just have
to serve the page; if we're lucky, it's still in the parser cache. If
not, then we re-render it, but we also update both the parser cache and
the touched-key.

> Memcached is appropriate for caching read operations, but
> not for replacing write operations.

cur_touched is not the kind of information that is essential to keep
(meaning: it is not a problem if this information "goes missing").

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Concatenation of Image and old English table files

body:
Claudio V wrote:

> Another particular problem is that while logged in
> Knoppix I cannot do "cat xaa xab xac xad xae >
> somefile.bz2" because it will return an error.

Why don't you tell us what this error is?


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Theora bitstream frozen...

body:
Delirium wrote:

> Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
>
>> I think we are now in a position to go ahead and start adding Theora
>> videos to Wikipedia, if anybody has suitable video to add!
>
> I'm not sure adding videos to Wikipedia in a format that almost nobody
> can play is really the absolute best thing to do, even if it is all
> fuzzy and open source...

The quantification "almost nobody" applies now, but for how much longer?
Ogg Vorbis has taken off quite remarkably. I think Wikipedia should help
boost the popularity of these open-source formats, *especially* when
they are the only free alternative to proprietary competitors.

Timwi


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

body:
Hi,

I know that I'm still technically on wikivacation, but I'm beginning to
feel full of energy again and want to briefly share my thoughts on the
matter of bounties and expenses, which has been hotly debated in the last
few days.

First of all, I think that Angela should absolutely go to Paris on the
foundation budget. This is not an entertainment trip. This is the first
opportunity for Jimbo, Anthere and Angela to sit down together and discuss
what will happen in the next few months.

Angela went to Berlin from her own money to observe the creation of the
German chapter (with me trying to give her a real-time translation of what
was going on), and in Paris she would have a similar opportunity to talk
to French Wikimedians about the French chapter, both sharing her own
experiences and getting new input. This is exactly what board members
should do.

Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply because
real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than letters in a
window on a computer screen. That was obvious at the WOS in Berlin, as I
know that some people are still reeling from the whole experience. ;-)
Getting Angela to mingle with the French Wikimedia community will benefit
the whole project.

Of course I understand the general objections, but calling foundation-
related travel expenses "perks" is ridiculous and offensive. Anthere and
Angela are giving a large part of their personal lives to this project at
the expense of their career and family. Asking them to either fund their
own travel expenses or stay at home undermines the whole purpose of the
board, which is to keep an eye on the development of *all* of Wikimedia,
and for that it is absolutely necessary to actually meet with real human
beings.

It would be a shame if we returned to our usual anglocentric way of doing
things while Jimmy is still on his missionary trip through Europe.
Wikimedia is an international organization, and real world board meetings
should take place in different locations to give Wikimedians from the
whole world an opportunity to directly talk to the trustees they voted
for. Now just because these experiences might actually be enjoyable to the
trustees doesn't mean that they aren't valuable to Wikimedia as a whole as
well.

I do believe that funds which were not explicitly designated for the
purpose of funding foundation organizational activity should not be
permanently used for said purpose. So what we should do is clarify on the
donations page how much of the money is going to be used for which
purpose.

But we will soon get a check over 10,000 euros from the Prix Ars
Electronica award, and that money can be designated by the trustees for
various purposes, and a certain amount of it (say 2000 euros) should
certainly be designated for organization expenses. Temporarily withdrawing
the necessary funds from a non-designated pool until we get the check is
not a serious issue.

The key here is that everything is transparent and open. The fact that we
are seriously debating whether we should give one of our trustees 400
bucks or so to meet with the elected board and discuss the creation of a
new chapter shows quite well that we are already much, much more open than
virtually every other organization of the same type.

Now, designating money for org. expenses does not preclude us from doing
the same for development expenses. As some of you know, the creation of a
development bounty system was a core part of my election platform. From
communicating with Jimbo and Angela I got the impression that they share
the belief that selectively funding specific tasks would be a good idea. I
don't know where Anthere stands on the issue.

Again, we could use a certain amount of money from the Prix Ars
Electronica funds for a first test drive (I'd suggest $2000). If it turns
out that such a bounty system does more harm than good, we can always stop
doing it. It is unlikely that a single experiment will have devastating
effects, but it is quite possible that it will lead the way toward a
complementary development process.

The key question is how to define priority tasks. Because the developers
are the benefactors of such a system it is somewhat dangerous to let them
alone make the decision, even if that is done through voting. On the other
hand, non-developers often do not have the understanding necessary to make
these decisions.

I do not yet have a final answer to this question. For the experiment
phase, I think appointing one developer and one technically-minded non-
developer who have to reach consensus would be a simple solution. I would
like to nominate Tim Starling and Daniel Mayer for these two roles. If Tim
doesn't want to do it, I would suggest Jens Frank, who has already said
that he wants to leave bounty tasks to others, so he would have a certain
level of objectivity.

(I'm not nominating myself because I would consider participating in the
bounty system, and because I think I'm a little too biased in favor of
certain tasks to be an objective judge.)

Essentially, these two people would be in charge of evaluating "grant
proposals", which could be made by anyone (developers or users). In the
long term, I believe it would make sense to replace them with an appointed
or elected committee, which would have to include at least one leading
developer representative with the power to veto certain proposals (for
being infeasible, impractical, incompatible etc.).

But again, we should experiment with different approaches.

The amount of money for each task should of course be related to its
complexity, and be decided by the bounty managers. The bounty would be
paid if the developers and the bounty managers agree that the task has
been completed.

Regarding Erik Zachte's remark that $100 is not a lot of money, that is of
course correct. However, the purpose of this system is not so much to give
participating developers a salary, but to provide a little extra incentive
for completing tasks which we all agree need to be done, but which have
been largely ignored for months. We can always raise the bounties if it
turns out that they are ineffective. $15/hour seems like a reasonable
starting value. I know Java programmers who work for less than that.

To preempt the inevitable comment that we don't do the same thing for
articles or wikibooks, that's true, but that doesn't mean that we never
will. If this bounty system works, it is quite possible that we will try a
similar approach to fill important gaps in the various Wikimedia projects.
As always, it is of key importance that any such process is open and
transparent, and that all funds which are used for this purpose have been
designated for it from the start.

With all this talk about expenses, we have to keep in mind that Wikimedia
will quite possibly be an organization with a multi-million-dollar budget
in just a couple of years. I am very confident that we will be able to
raise $100K or more through grassroots donations this year. Like the
energy of our content contributors flows into many different areas, the
money which is given to Wikimedia should flow wherever it can be usefully
and productively spent.

A lot of our money will be going into hardware purchases for quite some
time, but it would be irresponsible not to carefully consider and explore
other ways in which money can help along our mission of educating
humanity.

All best,

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

body:
In a message dated 6/22/2004 2:33:09 AM Eastern Standard Time,
delirium at hackish.org writes:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply because
>real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than letters in a
>window on a computer screen.
I completely agree with this. In fact, I will suggest that a breakdown of how
the money we have will be used is probably very important at this stage. I
suggest something along the following lines:

60% --- servers and hardware
20% --- bounties for software development (let's face it, there are certain
things we need, and we can't just wait for people to develop them)
10% --- incrementals, to include this board meeting and other outstanding
expenses, for instance, as people begin to fill positions, they should be issued
with business cards so that they can meet with others professionally. This is
especially important for fundraising purposes. You have to invest money if you
want to make money. This will also cover postage, letterhead, and, of course,
board meetings. Of course, this should also be limited to a set portion of
the budget and not exceed that. It can also be used for salaries for lawyers,
accountant, etc. if the need be.
10% --- Emergency use. This should be locked in a high-interest account at
three-month intervals. It can serve as a back-up reserve just in case. The sum
should be augmented regularly, but the interest would be split between the
various projects.

This is only a preliminary sketch of how money might be allocated. While it
prioritizes hardware, it recognizes that there are other expenses that should
be covered if we are to grow.

Assuming we have about $25,000, it should cover start-up costs.

I also want to pledge to donate a certain amount each month, provided an
arrangement can be made to take it directly from my bank account at regular i
ntervals. I hope others will be willing to do the same. This sum can be part of the
steady income that we will also require. Fund-raising drives are great, but
we also need to know that every month a certain amount is coming in dependably.

Danny
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subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

body:
In a message dated 6/22/2004 2:33:09 AM Eastern Standard Time,
delirium at hackish.org writes:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply because
>real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than letters in a
>window on a computer screen.
I completely agree with this. In fact, I will suggest that a breakdown of how
the money we have will be used is probably very important at this stage. I
suggest something along the following lines:

60% --- servers and hardware
20% --- bounties for software development (let's face it, there are certain
things we need, and we can't just wait for people to develop them)
10% --- incrementals, to include this board meeting and other outstanding
expenses, for instance, as people begin to fill positions, they should be issued
with business cards so that they can meet with others professionally. This is
especially important for fundraising purposes. You have to invest money if you
want to make money. This will also cover postage, letterhead, and, of course,
board meetings. Of course, this should also be limited to a set portion of
the budget and not exceed that. It can also be used for salaries for lawyers,
accountant, etc. if the need be.
10% --- Emergency use. This should be locked in a high-interest account at
three-month intervals. It can serve as a back-up reserve just in case. The sum
should be augmented regularly, but the interest would be split between the
various projects.

This is only a preliminary sketch of how money might be allocated. While it
prioritizes hardware, it recognizes that there are other expenses that should
be covered if we are to grow.

Assuming we have about $25,000, it should cover start-up costs.

I also want to pledge to donate a certain amount each month, provided an
arrangement can be made to take it directly from my bank account at regular i
ntervals. I hope others will be willing to do the same. This sum can be part of the
steady income that we will also require. Fund-raising drives are great, but
we also need to know that every month a certain amount is coming in dependably.

Danny
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subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

body:
In a message dated 6/22/2004 2:33:09 AM Eastern Standard Time,
delirium at hackish.org writes:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply because
>real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than letters in a
>window on a computer screen.
I completely agree with this. In fact, I will suggest that a breakdown of how
the money we have will be used is probably very important at this stage. I
suggest something along the following lines:

60% --- servers and hardware
20% --- bounties for software development (let's face it, there are certain
things we need, and we can't just wait for people to develop them)
10% --- incrementals, to include this board meeting and other outstanding
expenses, for instance, as people begin to fill positions, they should be issued
with business cards so that they can meet with others professionally. This is
especially important for fundraising purposes. You have to invest money if you
want to make money. This will also cover postage, letterhead, and, of course,
board meetings. Of course, this should also be limited to a set portion of
the budget and not exceed that. It can also be used for salaries for lawyers,
accountant, etc. if the need be.
10% --- Emergency use. This should be locked in a high-interest account at
three-month intervals. It can serve as a back-up reserve just in case. The sum
should be augmented regularly, but the interest would be split between the
various projects.

This is only a preliminary sketch of how money might be allocated. While it
prioritizes hardware, it recognizes that there are other expenses that should
be covered if we are to grow.

Assuming we have about $25,000, it should cover start-up costs.

I also want to pledge to donate a certain amount each month, provided an
arrangement can be made to take it directly from my bank account at regular i
ntervals. I hope others will be willing to do the same. This sum can be part of the
steady income that we will also require. Fund-raising drives are great, but
we also need to know that every month a certain amount is coming in dependably.

Danny
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subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

body:
In a message dated 6/22/2004 2:33:09 AM Eastern Standard Time,
delirium at hackish.org writes:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply because
>real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than letters in a
>window on a computer screen.
I completely agree with this. In fact, I will suggest that a breakdown of how
the money we have will be used is probably very important at this stage. I
suggest something along the following lines:

60% --- servers and hardware
20% --- bounties for software development (let's face it, there are certain
things we need, and we can't just wait for people to develop them)
10% --- incrementals, to include this board meeting and other outstanding
expenses, for instance, as people begin to fill positions, they should be issued
with business cards so that they can meet with others professionally. This is
especially important for fundraising purposes. You have to invest money if you
want to make money. This will also cover postage, letterhead, and, of course,
board meetings. Of course, this should also be limited to a set portion of
the budget and not exceed that. It can also be used for salaries for lawyers,
accountant, etc. if the need be.
10% --- Emergency use. This should be locked in a high-interest account at
three-month intervals. It can serve as a back-up reserve just in case. The sum
should be augmented regularly, but the interest would be split between the
various projects.

This is only a preliminary sketch of how money might be allocated. While it
prioritizes hardware, it recognizes that there are other expenses that should
be covered if we are to grow.

Assuming we have about $25,000, it should cover start-up costs.

I also want to pledge to donate a certain amount each month, provided an
arrangement can be made to take it directly from my bank account at regular i
ntervals. I hope others will be willing to do the same. This sum can be part of the
steady income that we will also require. Fund-raising drives are great, but
we also need to know that every month a certain amount is coming in dependably.

Danny
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from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories in 1.3beta

references:
<opr9x2gpabv3cvyb@hause.local> <40D741BF.6010507@pobox.com>
	<cb7kdj$hfa$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<20040621214913.GA23811@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>
	<40D7723F.2070507@telus.net>

body:
Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> writes:

> Some people may very well consider "Einstein, Albert" to be ugly, but
> it's not grammatically incorrect.  There are languages (like Hungarian)
> where it's considered normal.

No, in Hungarian it is "Einstein Albert".

Sorting by family or last name by default and switching the sequence of
the parts of the name is a western stupidity.  Stay away from it and
lot a lot artificial problems disappear.

At http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/HTML/ we are sorting
translator names as supplied by the translator and nobody complained
ever.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


body:
Delirium wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>> Delirium wrote:
>>
>>> Mark Pellegrini wrote:
>>>
>>>> Note, Angela asked me emphatically to make sure you fight it out
>>>> there and not on the mailing list.
>>>
>>>
>>> Ugh... it's nearly impossible to carry on a lengthy conversation on
>>> the wiki.  Mailing lists are a lot better: I can organize subthreads,
>>> keep posts I find particularly interesting for later reference and
>>> delete others, and so on.  Can't do any of that on a wiki unless you
>>> make a private copy of the discussion page and edit it yourself, and
>>> then keep your copy in sync with the original, which is a gigantic mess.
>>
>>
>>
>> well, this is very unfortunate for you, because Angela and I will
>> strongly favor use of multilingual meta over mailing lists.
>
>
> And I, and quite a few others, will continue to favor the opposite.
> Posting stuff on the wiki is great; having actual discussion on it is
> tedious and nearly impossible to keep track of past a low volume of posts.

I keep basically NO track of what is written on the english wikipedia.
It is tedious and basically impossible for me to track.

But this is also true for several mailing lists as well. For example, I
do not keep track of the tech list, and do not read it for a few
messages whose topic attract me. I also do not read entirely the en ml
either.

I recommand that people attract my attention by telling me things
directly, or on meta, if they want me to hear it. I just cant follow
dozen of mailing list all the time. I am not wonderwoman.

It is far easier for me to follow discussion according to a topic mode,
such as on meta.

> I do think we've had a vote on this on en:, which also contained about
> five pages of arguments back and forth on both sides, as it came up on
> the Village Pump about 5 or 6 separate times, but I can't seem to find
> where it got moved to.  Links, anyone?

I do not represent english users only, but users of any language.
Corporate donation is not english restricted topic at all; it concerns
all languages. Hence it does not have to be on the english wikipedia.

> I really don't see why anyone would want to use such a terrible
> discussion medium though.  Discussion media in the 1980s on bulletin
> boards at least supported threading and filtering; can't we at least use
> something as technologically advanced as 1980?  If it must be a
> web-based system (despite the fact that email is better-suited to
> textual discussion), there are several software packages that support
> fully-threaded discussions, included Slashcode (used on slashdot.org)
> and Scoop (used on kuro5hin.org).  The latter even keeps track of unread
> messages, a feature that is absolutely necessary to follow large-scale
> discussions.
>
> -Mark

Well, we prefer. It is much easier for both of us to work with. Meta
content is gfdl, and we can refactor propositions so that we can see
more easily where the consensus is. And we can find information back.


body:
Delirium wrote:
> Delirium wrote:
>
>> Anthere wrote:
>>
>>> well, this is very unfortunate for you, because Angela and I will
>>> strongly favor use of multilingual meta over mailing lists.
>>
>>
>>
>> I do think we've had a vote on this on en:, which also contained about
>> five pages of arguments back and forth on both sides, as it came up on
>> the Village Pump about 5 or 6 separate times, but I can't seem to find
>> where it got moved to.  Links, anyone?
>
>
> I found it: several separate discussions are archived on [[en:Wikipedia
> talk:Mailing lists]].
>
> The votes were mostly inconclusive...
>
> Question: Should we have meta-discussions on:
> * mailing lists?  9 yes, 12 no, 3 neutral
> * web forums (boards.wikimedia.org)? 2 yes, 11 no, 5 neutral
> * the Wikimedia wiki (meta.wikimedia.org)? 12 yes, 9 no, 2 neutral
> * on Wikipedia itself (en.wikipedia.org for en: discussions)? 4 yes, 6
> no, 7 neutral
>
> Of course, these are more like straw polls than a real vote, so can't be
> said to be conclusive, even if they had shown a strong preference one
> way or another, which they don't.  But clearly people are fairly
> strongly divided on the issue.  Allowing simultaneous wiki and email
> discussion is probably next to impossible as a compromise, but if the
> pro-wiki-discussion people would be willing to compromise on some
> web-based discussion interface other than a wiki, probably a gateway of
> some sort could be set up to allow posting and reading by either email
> or web, depending on personal preference.  gmane does some of this now,
> but perhaps some better web-email gateway interface is possible.
>
> -Mark

Discussion of meta issues should either be on foundation-l or on meta.


from_name: jheiskan at welho.com

subject: [Foundation-l] A Challenge: Sending Angela to gay Paree!

body:
I think the ultimate decision whether Angela goes to Paris or not, should be
left up to her. Things might be different if the meeting were non-voluntary.

However; to help her make up her mind, I hereby pledge to send an International
Money-Order to the Foundation in the sum of the prize of two six-packs. (which
In my local store totals up to 13.80 Euros) I will ONLY send this if she attends
the Paris meet, and pledges to physically hug me, if and when we ever meet in
person.

Is there any other person to step up to the plate and similarly pledge the prize
of two local six-packs in this good cause?

--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (Cimon)


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Peter Gervai wrote:

>If they're lazy or uneducated to install a player they probably won't miss
>much since Wikipedia content is not multimedia oriented, and this may be a
>drive to them to educate themselves and install the players.
>
>
That's a damned arrogant attitude.  In some parts of the world people
would count themselves lucky just to have text available on a slow
connection.  I support the vision of making information available in
these places, so a lot of this fancy stuff needs to be severable.

Ec


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Automatick category links (was: Categories considered
	harmful" considered harmful)

body:
Jakob raises a good point, but let's not through out the baby with the
bath water. I'm sure our legions of genius software developers can
surmount this problem.

Adding a Category Tag to an article should be the equivalent of adding a
link to that category.

For example, I add a "Category Pet" tag to the [[Siamese Cat]] article.
I would then expect to see the [[Category Pet]] page with a link to
[[Siamese Cat]]. In the "page history" I would expect to see the link
added with the usual user and timestamp indications.

Jakob, if we had this software feature would it address your concerns?

Ed Poor
English Wikipedia Bureaucrat
And "Developer Emeritus"


from_name: tic at tictric.net

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories in 1.3beta

references:
<opr9x2gpabv3cvyb@hause.local> <40D741BF.6010507@pobox.com>
	<cb7kdj$hfa$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<20040621214913.GA23811@wroclaw.taw.pl.eu.org>

body:
>> >tic at tictric.net wrote:
>> >
>> >>A page Albert_Einstein gets categorised as
>> >>[[Category:Albert_Einstein|Einstein, Albert]] and shows up as E
>> >>Albert_Einstein where it shoud be E Einstein, Albert.
>> >>That's weird.
>> >
>> >It always shows the actual title.
>>
>> I think the point in his posting was to say that it *should not* always
>> show the actual title, and I agree with him. We shouldn't have "Albert
>> Einstein" under E, we should have "Einstein, Albert".
>>
>> I always thought this was going to be done, and I actually thought that
>> the fact that it used the string only as a sort key but not for display,
>> was a bug. Personally, I think it should be "fixed". :-)
>
> "Einstein, Albert" is ugly - it looks like a paper encyclopedia.
> There's nothing wrong with displaying grammatically correct "Albert
> Einstein",
> even when its ordered by family name.

I don't think it matters whether it appears ugly or not ugly to the one or
the other.
People are different :)

What does matter is, that especially in a Wiki one should also have the
freedom to choose for himself what way he would like to have it. Still
others have the freedom to change it again.

Maybe like [[category:People|:Einstein, Albert]] would sort it as E
Einstein, Albert and [[category:People|::Einstein, Albert]] would sort it
as A Albert_Einstein AND E Einstein, Albert. (I don't know if that makes
sense. It just came to my mind.)
On BIG Category pages I can imagine that there might occur the need to
list on thing twice.
I can't think of an english example but in german we got to common
notations for joiner. "Tischler" and "Schreiner".
Both of them describe the very same thing. A Joiner. If he comes from
south germany he'll look for Schreiner, if he comes from up north he'll
look for Tischler. The official notation is "Tischler".

So we need on the page "Tischler" [[category:professions|::Schreiner]]

Cheers
Manfred


from_name: kelvSYC

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Templates

body:
I like templates, for sure about that.  And a lot of us do.  But I
still have two complaints about them (both of which I've placed a
request in sourceforge).  I'd like to hear a few peer opinions about my
two complaints:

1. The way that pipes work in templates, but that's an oft-requested
feature/bugfix.

2. The lack of default template parameters.  A lot of those "incumbent
series" navigation links could be done with templates if there were
only default template parameters to cover the first and last articles
in the series.  For example, a simplified incumbent template might have

{{{prev}}} | Team captains of the Calgary Flames | {{{next}}}

and another would be

{{{prev}}} | National Pok?dex | {{{next}}}

Of course, if you specified something in [[Template:Prev]] or
[[Template:Next]], you could get default template parameters, but what
would you put in either page?  Surely you can't put something in either
page without making it irrelevant for one purpose ("First Captain",
"First Pok?dex Entry") or diluting its meaning ("First").  (There is
also the issue of the third pair of brackets, but we'll leave it aside)

What I'd like to see is subpages fulfilling that purpose.  Given
[[Template:foo]] with contents {{{bar}}}, What I'd like to see is for
MediaWiki to, when instantiated without specifying what {{{bar}}}
should be:

- first check if [[Template:foo/bar]] exists (yes, this would mean that
forward slashes can't be part of a template name...) and replace
{{{bar}}} with the contents if it does
- if it doesn't, replace {{{bar}}} with the contents of
[[Template:Bar]] with a set of brackets around it (like it is done now)

Is this idea a good one...?


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Thomas Jost wrote:
> There is another free alternative: the XviD codec. It's free software
> (GPL). It's stable. Lots of people use it. It's included in popular
> codec packs (like Nimo Codecs Pack or K-Lite Codecs Pack). And I'm quite
> sure the DivX decoder can read XviD-encoded videos.

Is XviD legal in the US? My understanding is that it's an MPEG-4 codec,
and that there are patents covering fundamental parts of that standard.
[IANAL] Surprisingly, this isn't mentioned in the FAQ though talk about
it appears in their devel list archives.

I think we'd want some clarification on this before declaring our
support for it.

This little note raises all kinds of alarms:
"Distributing XviD is allowed and it is encouraged by the fact it is
published under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2. But,
here at xvid.org, we don't distribute binaries for legal reasons."

http://www.xvid.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=44&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

> I've nothing against Theora. But why should we use it if there is
> another, much more known and probably better alternative ?

The patent issue which makes it difficult to support with free software;
this is the same reason we recommend Vorbis instead of MP3.

I suspect it's premature to distribute anything with Theora at this
time, but it's worth looking at. We're in this for the long term, and
videos can always be recoded from the original source material. [Of
course that's the thorny issue with video: the original source material
is *huge*.]

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Bounties and expenses

body:
Viajero wrote:

>In the past, I've been involved in a number of EU-funded projects among at times quite disparate participants, and it was always a given that such projects -- after being approved for funding -- got off to a start with a meeting with everyone involved. Sometimes this was the only time the participants met; they then went back to their respective countries and spent the duration of the project working in their offices and communicating by email and telephone. But that initial face-to-face was critical; it isn't something that can be measured in cold person/hour metrics but rather reflects some as yet not entirely well-understood psychological truth: long-distance, distributed projects work better when the participants have first met.
>
>
It is possible meetings can sometimes be helpful.  However, they can be
helpful in a number of cases:

* Wikipedians collaborating on writing an article meet to draw out an
outline, or hammer out differences, or otherwise work on the article in
person
* Wikipedians researching an article visit national archives, national
libraries, organizations' offices, embassies, or various other sources
of information
* Developers installing a new set of servers visit the colocation
facility to do so in person
* Developers working on software meet to draw up a design over a
weekend, rather than back and forth over email
* The board of trustees meets, as discussed

Of these five possibilities, which are only five of many, I don't see
the last one as the most important, yet no one so far has proposed
funding any of the previous four.  Given that our primary project is
currently an encyclopedia, I think if we are to fund any travel, it
ought to first be that travel that contributes most directly to
producing a high-quality encyclopedia.  Therefore, if we are to have a
travel fund, it ought to pay researchers and article writers.  (The
details, of course, are subject to debate.)

-Mark


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

body:
On 06/22/04 07:32, Delirium wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:

>> Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply
>> because  real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than
>> letters in a  window on a computer screen. That was obvious at the WOS
>> in Berlin, as I  know that some people are still reeling from the
>> whole experience. ;-)  Getting Angela to mingle with the French
>> Wikimedia community will benefit  the whole project.

> I disagree with this---meeting with a tiny fraction of the Wikimedia
> community and making decisions at such meetings is detrimental to the
> project.  Real work and decision-making should be done online, in
> public, where everyone can participate.  If people want to socialize in
> person, that's fine, but we shouldn't be making decisions at meetings
> either behind closed doors or at which only a small fraction of
> Wikimedians are present.

It's getting ideas flying back and forth at high bandwidth. Based on the
London wikimeet, just all being in one place supplied piles of good
ideas and the energy to do something about them. I really do think you're
completely wrong here.

> And, I don't think calling such meetings "perks" is an overstatement.
> I've observed quite a few non-profit meetings, as well as meetings and
> conferences in academia, and they rarely have much real work being
> done.  They're social and networking events, and the most "real work"
> that gets done is at best finding out about something that you make a
> note of to look up and read later.  The actual real work gets done via
> email or telephone (or both) either before or after the conferences.  H.
> Cheney's recent email indicated he's had similar experiences on the
> non-profit boards he's sat on, so this seems to not simply be my
> personal experience.

My personal experience of a wikimeet says otherwise. (My anecdote can beat up
your anecdote.)

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses


subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

body:
Andrew Lih wrote:

>It's clear your objections run deep -- you seem have a standing
>problem with the entire idea of a board of trustees that is, well,
>trusted with the interests of the Wikimedia Foundation. This can be
>seen also in your strong bias and mistrust concerning the governance
>of nonprofits.  If this is so, your issues are not with the
>particulars of how we are going about things, but of an entire concept
>of the board.
>
>
Oh, having a board is fine, so long as it only handles unimportant
things.  We decided to have a board initially not because anyone thought
it was a good idea, but because the State of Florida requires
non-profits to have boards of trustees consisting of five or more
people.  For one reason or another, Jimbo decided it would be a good
show of community participation and democratic fuzziness and whatnot if
we elected two of these five members, and so we did.

As a legal matter, the board has authority over the project; as a moral
matter, it does not.  Jimbo was previously the benevolent dictator, and
to a large extent remains so, but he rarely took decisions unilaterally,
instead guiding a consensus process and respecting the outcomes of that
process even if he occasionally personally would have done things
otherwise.  I'd expect the board to at the very least do no more than he
previously did, and ideally to work to continue the process he starting
of devolving decision-making to the community at large.

In short, boards are unwiki, but we are required by law to have one, so
we do.

>However, this community has decided to go ahead with the board, so
>that designated individuals can spend more time on issues that need
>it.  This includes fundraising and building links among the different
>wikis, which have both been our weak spot.  Your characterization of
>these meetings as "perks" that happen "behind closed doors" is
>misleading and disingenuous.  No one has suggested anything of the
>sort, and Wikipedians should have every confidence that things will be
>open and inclusive.
>
>
I don't see how they will be open and inclusive unless the Foundation is
prepared to pay for hundreds of Wikipedians to attend them.  If they
involve only a minutely small percentage of the users, then they are
worse than no meeting at all, and bias decision-making towards those
with the resources to attend.

>You've cited H.Cheney's comment, while conveniently leaving out
>others' (including my own) positive experiences in working with
>nonprofits and the benefits of face to face meetings for this type of
>collaboration. The use of "social and networking events" as a
>pejorative is odd considering Wikipedia is one of the largest social
>software systems and collaborative projects in the world.
>
>
Wikipedia is indeed a social and collaborative system, but it takes
place online, on a large scale.  If the Foundation can come up with
funding so that any significant subset of its users can meet somewhere,
or even any significant subset of one of its language encyclopedias can
meet, I would not object to that.  However, so far there have been no
proposals for that, only proposals for small cliques of users to meet,
which I feel is detrimental to the project on a whole.  All important
work should take place online, in public, with as full participation as
possible, not take place behind closed doors and then reported after the
fact.

As for other comments on travel reimbursements as a good thing, one of
them even cited EU-funded projects, which are pretty notorious for being
full of wasteful perks (http://www.iht.com/articles/521419.html among
thousands of related articles).

-Mark


subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Corporate sponsorship of Wikipedia

body:
[crossposted from a discussion that originated on wikiEN-l]

Delirium wrote:

> Anthere wrote:
>
>> well, this is very unfortunate for you, because Angela and I will
>> strongly favor use of multilingual meta over mailing lists.
>
>
> I do think we've had a vote on this on en:, which also contained about
> five pages of arguments back and forth on both sides, as it came up on
> the Village Pump about 5 or 6 separate times, but I can't seem to find
> where it got moved to.  Links, anyone?

I found it: several separate discussions are archived on [[en:Wikipedia
talk:Mailing lists]].

The votes were mostly inconclusive...

Question: Should we have meta-discussions on:
* mailing lists?  9 yes, 12 no, 3 neutral
* web forums (boards.wikimedia.org)? 2 yes, 11 no, 5 neutral
* the Wikimedia wiki (meta.wikimedia.org)? 12 yes, 9 no, 2 neutral
* on Wikipedia itself (en.wikipedia.org for en: discussions)? 4 yes, 6
no, 7 neutral

Of course, these are more like straw polls than a real vote, so can't be
said to be conclusive, even if they had shown a strong preference one
way or another, which they don't.  But clearly people are fairly
strongly divided on the issue.  Allowing simultaneous wiki and email
discussion is probably next to impossible as a compromise, but if the
pro-wiki-discussion people would be willing to compromise on some
web-based discussion interface other than a wiki, probably a gateway of
some sort could be set up to allow posting and reading by either email
or web, depending on personal preference.  gmane does some of this now,
but perhaps some better web-email gateway interface is possible.

-Mark


from_name: נפתלי פלס

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: Setting up for the Greek language

body:
??"Delirium" wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
>
> > Delirium wrote:
> >
> >> Timwi wrote:
> >>
> >>> You should probably give us more information on how Greek month
> >>> names work. You have only told us what does *not* work. I might be
> >>> able to come up with a technical solution if you explain to me what
> >>> morphological properties of Greek need to be satisfied in the month
> >>> names.
> >>
> >>
> >> There may be cases I'm not covering, but for the one I can
> >> immediately see in the interface, the issue is that "day month" type
> >> dates use the possessive form of the month name, while month names
> >> used by themselves use a simple noun form.
> >
> > [... etc. ...  'Maios' vs. '5h Maiou']
> >
> > Ah-ha. I kind of thought so. So why don't you just do this:
> >
> > - Set the month name to "Maio"
> > - In a sentence like "{{MONTHNAME}} is nice", write "{{MONTHNAME}}s
> > estis bioutiphulos"
> > - Set the date format to "{{DAY}} {{MONTHNAME}}u {{YEAR}}"
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
> Well, unfortunately one part I had left out were the accents, which
> shift when the word becomes possessive.  To take the example from
> Andreas's email, the simple noun form of June is "Io?nios", whereas the
> possessive form is "Ioun?ou".  So it would really need a separate
> {{MONTHNAMEPOSSESSIVE}} or something of that sort.
>
> -Mark

I think that in most of the languages the "{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}u" solution
will solve the problem. (In Hebrew, for example, we say "Yanuar" for Jan,
but "15 beYanuar" for Jan 15 - of course, in Hebrew chcracters - and when a
date is needed, we use to write "{{CURRENTDAY}} be{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}" and
it's all fine.)

Anyway, I have a different solution: There is another already-present month
template - {{CURRENTMONTHNAMEGEN}} - that I don't know for which purpose it
is used, but it seems to be really redundant. So, you can use
{{CURRENTMONTHNAMEGEN}} for the simple form and {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} for
possessive, etc.

Naftali


subject: [Wikipedia-l] zh.wikipedia.org - having a single unified portal

body:
Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

>I don't want to get into the debate, but just FYI, such a convertor is
>considered impossible by many experts. By impossible, I mean
>impossible in the level of a perfect German to English to German
>machine translation software. Refer to Unicode mailing list and its
>archives for more details.
>
>
Just to provide some more concrete points of reference:

Jack Halpern and Jouni Kerman. "The Pitfalls and Complexities of Chinese
to Chinese Conversion". Proceedings of the 14th International Unicode
Conference, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, March 1999.
[http://www.basistech.com/papers/chinese/c2c.html]

The biggest issue seems to be that certain simplified characters map to
one of multiple traditional characters, depending on context.  Thus a
translator has to know the context, which requires solution of some
fairly daunting natural-language processing problems.  Conversion from
traditional to simplified seems to be much easier, as it typically
collapses the total number of characters used.

-Mark


from_name: reflection at gmail.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] MBTI and Wikipedia

body:
>From e.p.zachte at chello.nl  Tue Jun  1 08:36:49 2004
>From: e.p.zachte at chello.nl (Erik Zachte)
>Date: Tue Jun  1 08:36:57 2004
>Subject: [Wikipedia-l] MBTI
>Message-ID: <NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNIEJECIAA.e.p.zachte at chello.nl>

>Anthere wrote:

>>http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_by_MBTI_type
>>
>>How do you explain the current majority of NTs ?
>>

>Could it be that NTs are more willing than others to fill in a questionary
>in order to categorize themselves, without a job selector looking over their
>shoulders?

>I did complete the questionaire and put my name on the list, but still I'm
>rather skeptical, or should I be according to my type? :)

>For fun try to convince yourself that you scored any other type than you did
>and read the description, part of it will still seem to describe you, at
>least that was my experience. Just like with astrology charts, people tend
>to agree with all niceties written about them.
>
>Erik Zachte

It is my WAG that Wikipedians are predominantly NT, and specifically
INTJ, because they love facts and they love citations.  INTJs are your
classic intellectuals and enjoy a statistical majority in college /
graduate school despite being a statistical minority (Did I mention
Rhodes scholars?).  Looking at the numbers, you would also find it
quite strange that INTP's, another of the rarest types, would be so
bountiful on Wikipedia.  They, however, are your classic computer
nerds :)

I also want to point out that the Wikipedia article on the MBTI is not
neutral and it is inherently skewed.  I keep meaning to go in there
and redo it.  There are not different ways of interpreting the
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator - there is only one way and that is
prescribed by Consulting Psychologists Press, the Myers & Briggs
Foundation, and the Center for Applications of Psychological Type.
Note that you will never see Keirsey's name associated with any of
these. If someone were to use "Jung-like methods" they would sit
someone down in their office and start asking them questions lol.
Jung didn't have a test, and further, it's not even a test - its an
indicator of preferences!  Keirsey also has his own indicator, built
off of Jung's writings, called the Keirsey Temperament.  It is
completely separate from the MBTI.

I will try to redo that article soon. If anyone wants to help me that
would be cool - I haven't created a Wikipedia account yet.

One last thing, I noticed that on this page
(http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_by_MBTI_type) there is a
link to an "Online Myers-Briggs test".    I would like to include a
cite directly from the 2004 CAPT catalog (on my desk):

"Qualified users of the MBTI instrument must meet two basic
requirements: Have a four-year college degree from an accredited
college or university /and either/ Have passed a college course in
psychological educational tests and measurements and have acquired a
basic understanding of the theory and uses of the MBTI instrument /or/
have successfully completed a recognized qualifying program, such as
the one offered by CAPT.

Hence, you cannot take the MBTI on the Internet!  If someone put a
test on the Internet and called it the SAT, and it looked like the SAT
and smelled like the SAT, but wasn't endorsed y The College Board,
would it still be the SAT?  Nope!

postscriptum:  I am an ISTP =)

Brian

>From ts4294967296 at hotmail.com  Tue Jun  1 05:40:19 2004
>From: ts4294967296 at hotmail.com (Tim Starling)
>Date: Tue Jun  1 05:40:35 2004
>Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: MBTI
>References: <20040531125858.23258.qmail at web41803.mail.yahoo.com>
>Message-ID: <40BC16C3.5090406 at hotmail.com>

>Anthere wrote:
>> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedians_by_MBTI_type
>>
>> How do you explain the current majority of NTs ?
>>

>MBTI is pseudoscience. I don't know why people bother with it.

>http://skepdic.com/myersb.html

>-- Tim Starling

Tim I am a big fan of that Skeptic's Dictionary article because it
does a good job of bringing awareness to both sides of type, however,
nowhere in that article does it state that the MBTI is pseudoscience
(though admittantly there are inferences). The system of preferences
as it was when Jung invented it was indeed pseudoscience because he
was akin to guessing peoples types and was
not a fan of statistics.  The MBTI didn't come around until afterwards, though.

The MBTI as it is today is backed by statistics, something not
mentioned in that article.  Of course he didn't know this because you
have to be qualified to administer the test before you have access to
purchasing the statistics, a prerequisite thereof being having a BA.
See capt.org for more information on that.

Brian


list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Re: De-capitalisation-isation

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Guys! Please keep this on the mailing list, and don't reply to me
> personally. Thanks!
>
> (Maybe the mailing list administrator should set a Reply-To header?)

I think it's fixed now...

> Brion wrote:
>> Note that there may be an effect on usernames
>
> I'll leave the usernames capitalised, I guess.

You'll also have to ensure that new usernames remain capitalized.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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references:
<cb7je6$5jm$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<cb9p02$947$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D873C4.7090903@pobox.com>
	<cb9shc$jb4$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>>> I'll leave the usernames capitalised, I guess.
>>
>> You'll also have to ensure that new usernames remain capitalized.
>
>
> This is not already done? So it is possible to have "Brion" and "brion"
> be different accounts on, say, Toki Pona (where capitalisation is turned
> off)?

http://tokipona.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User:brion&action=history

Usernames are treated as special cases of titles (with "_" replaced back
to " "). While tokipona and tlh aren't exactly big deals, Wiktionary is
much larger and attracts more people, so it's rather more important to
make sure that usernames there are consistent if we intend to unify
logins later.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: update record

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
>
>> Timwi wrote:
>>
>>> Jens Frank wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Tue, Jun 15, 2004 at 09:19:20AM +0200, Gerard.Meijssen wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> LS, I have been trying for two days to change one record in
>>>>> nl:wiktionary. the article is [[Sjabloon:-noun-]]
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> When saving a template, all pages using the template are "touched"
>>>> so that they
>>>> will be updated the next time they are rendered. Having zillions of
>>>> pages using
>>>> that template, this takes a long time. Probably too long.
>>>
>>>
>>> Did whoever came up with that think about the performance
>>> implications? o.O
>>
>>
>> Of course I did. In MediaWiki 1.2 I deliberately avoided this kind of
>> cache purging, for performance reasons.
>
>
> Jens Frank was talking about "touching". This sounded like a database
> query to me. Now you are terming it "cache purging", which I'm not sure
> what it is, but if it were referring to memcached, it would not require
> a database query.

"Touch" is the name of a unix utility which changes the modification
time on a file, usually setting it to the present time. Hence "touching"
a file is equivalent to making some infinitesimal change to it.

In the cur table, there is a field called "cur_touched". This field is
used for cache invalidation. If links on the page change from broken to
unbroken or vice versa, cur_touched is set to the present. This field is
queried to determine whether the client cache or the parser cache is valid.

The squid cache does not check back with the database on each query,
instead it keeps its own records of which pages are valid and which are
invalid. So whenever a page changes, we need to not only update
cur_touched, but also to send a message to each squid server informing
it that the page has become invalid. This is called "purging".

> I suppose I definitely need to know more about this. Where is the
> "parser cache" -- is that in memcached or elsewhere?

The parser cache is a cache of the content HTML of a page, stored in
memcached. That is, it omits the sidebar, header and footer. It is
stored under an index which indicates what user preferences were used to
render it. You can tell when a page is served from the parser cache by
looking for an HTML comment at the end of the content area, e.g.

<!-- Saved in parser cache with key
enwiki:pcache:idhash:13173-1!1!1!monobook!1!1!0!1!0!1!0 and timestamp
20040622004805 -->

13173 is the main page.

> What does
> "touching" a page mean -- does it involve a database query? Can cache
> purging be done without a database query? If not, can the cache
> mechanism be changed (perhaps to use memcached) so database queries can
> be avoided when all you want to do is invalidate a cache entry?

You can't store anything in memcached unless you're prepared to have it
go missing. Memcached is appropriate for caching read operations, but
not for replacing write operations.

One alternative is to use a system where two cur_touched fields must be
checked to validate a page, instead of one. One for the page, one for
the template. This would only be efficient for widely included
templates. Templates included in only a few pages would have to be
handled the old way.

Another alternative would be to reduce service. When changing a
template, before attempting to invalidate all caches, it would check how
many pages are using the template. If it is greater than some critical
number, the invalidation could simply be skipped. After a few days, the
squid cache and the parser cache will expire, and users will see the
updated template.

Please don't reply by saying "yeah, do that!"

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Thomas Jost

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

There is another free alternative: the XviD codec. It's free software
(GPL). It's stable. Lots of people use it. It's included in popular
codec packs (like Nimo Codecs Pack or K-Lite Codecs Pack). And I'm quite
sure the DivX decoder can read XviD-encoded videos.

Doom9.org (the best site about video tools) rated XviD "best free video
codec" a few months ago. (http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/codecs-203-1.htm)

I've nothing against Theora. But why should we use it if there is
another, much more known and probably better alternative ?

MagicTom
[[fr:Utilisateur:MagicTom]]

Timwi a ?crit :
| The quantification "almost nobody" applies now, but for how much longer?
| Ogg Vorbis has taken off quite remarkably. I think Wikipedia should help
| boost the popularity of these open-source formats, *especially* when
| they are the only free alternative to proprietary competitors.
|
| Timwi
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iD8DBQFA1/vN8qG/0bshvCcRAqQNAJ47PCInj8GlepeLE8Co0Mq8QcXyWACggJSF
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from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Adminship as a reward

body:
I REALLY dislike this idea.  And it has nothing to do with my acknowledgement that I would never get one.  This sounds like nothing but a popularity contest that could lead to hurt feelings and facionalism.

RickK

moink <theresa.robinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I propose that the community start issuing awards of
> merit to users that will be voted upon by the
> community over a period of a week. Some of the ideas I
> kicked around were...
>
> the Wikipedia Peace Prize - for users who have
> worked to resolve conflict in the community.
>
> the Gutenberg Award - for users that have
> extensively improved the main-namespace content of
> Wikipedia

I really like this idea. Independent of the adminship issues, the
more ways we have of rewarding users and spreading wikilove, the
better.

moink

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
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from_name: Andy Rabagliati

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Chinese government lift the ban partly

body:
On Thu, 17 Jun 2004, Anthere wrote:

> These are very good news :-)
>
> yuanml wrote:
> > After we had sent the application to our government, today my ISP told me that
> > the IP address 207.142.131.235, 207.142.131.236, 207.142.131.245, 207.142.131.246,
> > 207.142.131.247, 207.142.131.248 can be access from Mainland China now.
> >
> > I try it later, and I found that: all Wikipedia project except Chinese Wikipedia
> > can be access on my computer now

While progress has been made, we are still not out of the woods.

Please can our chinese colleagues keep us posted on access to the Chinese
Wikipedia, even if the notice states that nothing has changed.

Cheers,    Andy!


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

body:
Erik Moeller schrieb:

> Again, we could use a certain amount of money from the Prix Ars
> Electronica funds for a first test drive (I'd suggest $2000). If it turns
> out that such a bounty system does more harm than good, we can always stop
> doing it. It is unlikely that a single experiment will have devastating
> effects, but it is quite possible that it will lead the way toward a
> complementary development process.

Before starting a test drive we need a way to measure the harm done. The problem
is that the psychological effects might take time. Maybe it'll take half a year
before we realize that most programmers are waiting for new bounties before
starting the dirty programming work, and only very few are still working for
free, but only because they need this or that feature for their own wiki
installation.

I'm not against a bounty system, just a bit skeptic. I fear that after the first
test drive the people in favor of it will point to the tasks done and the
skeptics will just have their premonition but no way to prove it.

Kurt

--
  http://leihnetzwerk.de -- Teile B?cher, Videos und CDs mit anderen!
  http://wikipedia.de    -- Arbeite mit bei der freien Enzyklop?die!
  Kurt Jansson, Wiener Str. 7, 10999 Berlin, http://jansson.de


subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories in 1.3beta

body:
On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 16:41:51 -0700
  Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
>>There's nothing wrong with displaying grammatically correct "Albert
>>Einstein",
>>even when its ordered by family name.
>>
>> "Einstein, Albert" is ugly - it looks like a paper encyclopedia.
>
>Some people may very well consider "Einstein, Albert" to be ugly, but it's
>not grammatically incorrect.  There are languages (like Hungarian) where
>it's considered normal.

It would be "Einstein Albert" not "Einstein, Albert". And if in a language
it is felt that this is correct, the logical way would be to call the page
such, not to call the page something else but have it that title in a
category.

Andre Engels


from_name: Viajero

body:
On 06/22/04  at 02:32 AM, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> said:

> And, I don't think calling such meetings "perks" is an overstatement.
> I've observed quite a few non-profit meetings, as well as meetings and
> conferences in academia, and they rarely have much real work being
> done.  They're social and networking events, and the most "real work"
> that gets done is at best finding out about something that you make a
> note of to look up and read later.  The actual real work gets done via
> email or telephone (or both) either before or after the conferences.  H.
>  Cheney's recent email indicated he's had similar experiences on the
> non-profit boards he's sat on, so this seems to not simply be my
> personal experience.

I think these comments reflect a grave misunderstanding of the importance of meetings.

In the past, I've been involved in a number of EU-funded projects among at times quite disparate participants, and it was always a given that such projects -- after being approved for funding -- got off to a start with a meeting with everyone involved. Sometimes this was the only time the participants met; they then went back to their respective countries and spent the duration of the project working in their offices and communicating by email and telephone. But that initial face-to-face was critical; it isn't something that can be measured in cold person/hour metrics but rather reflects some as yet not entirely well-understood psychological truth: long-distance, distributed projects work better when the participants have first met.

If Jimbo, Anthere, and Angela will be working closely together in the coming months and years, as appears to be the case, than it is entirely appropriate, no, *imperative* that they meet each other. I would therefore be in favor of Angela being reimbursed for her travel expenses to attend the Paris meeting.

V.


from_name: Muke Tever

body:
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 18:07:02 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>> I don't remember it being a consensus at all. I seem
>> to recall some being quite opposed to it.
>
> Really? Can you provide links? I only remember people emphasising that
> they don't mind because they think the current work-around work
> perfectly for them. I seriously don't see how anyone can seriously be
> opposed to having a dictionary with correct spellings. :/

I disagreed,
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wiktionary-l/2004-May/000018.html
Polyglot said it could be done but he would vote against it also:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wiktionary-l/2004-May/000020.html

By the way, how does search handle the existence of pages differing by
capitalization?  If someone searches for <greek> (v. [1]), which doesn't
exist, are they sent to <Greek>, which does? ... Are users who are used to
case-insensitive search, or don't know the proper capitalization of the
word, sent to <greek> when it is made, when they might have wanted <Greek>
better?  Will every word where capitalization is semantic have to be made
into a disambiguation page?

I would *much* prefer that pages, instead of being case-sensitive, be
case-insensitive (even more than they are now, perhaps), with the page
title in title case, and the regular capitalization indicated inline, as
is now normally done.

	*Muke!
[1] "to fill a template with nonsense text, so that form and not content
can be focused on"
--
http://frath.net/  (my website)
http://kohath.livejournal.com/
http://kohath.deviantart.com/

http://wiki.frath.net/ (conlangs and concultures)


from_name: Peter Bartlett

body:
-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Viajero

>On 06/22/04  at 02:32 AM, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> said:

>> And, I don't think calling such meetings "perks" is an overstatement.
>> I've observed quite a few non-profit meetings, as well as meetings and
>> conferences in academia, and they rarely have much real work being
>> done.  They're social and networking events, and the most "real work"
>> that gets done is at best finding out about something that you make a
>> note of to look up and read later.  The actual real work gets done via
>> email or telephone (or both) either before or after the conferences.  H.
>>  Cheney's recent email indicated he's had similar experiences on the
>> non-profit boards he's sat on, so this seems to not simply be my
>> personal experience.

>I think these comments reflect a grave misunderstanding of the importance
>of meetings.

>In the past, I've been involved in a number of EU-funded projects among at
>times quite disparate participants, and it was always a given that such
>projects -- after being approved for funding -- got off to a start with a
>meeting with everyone involved. Sometimes this was the only time the
>participants met; they then went back to their respective countries and
>spent the duration of the project working in their offices and
>communicating by email and telephone. But that initial face-to-face was
>critical; it isn't something that can be measured in cold person/hour
>metrics but rather reflects some as yet not entirely well-understood
>psychological truth: long-distance, distributed projects work better when
>the participants have first met.

>If Jimbo, Anthere, and Angela will be working closely together in the
>coming months and years, as appears to be the case, than it is entirely
>appropriate, no, *imperative* that they meet each other. I would therefore
>be in favor of Angela being reimbursed for her travel expenses to attend
>the Paris meeting.

There may very well be in truth in this. However whatever the arguments in
favour of the trustees meeting, wouldn't these same arguments be equally
applicable to the developers meeting, say? The developers at least have a
long and proven track record. So far the board has not had the chance to
prove its worth above the old, board-less, way at all - thus we are being
asked to take on trust that such a use of funds would be a best use. Perhaps
it's a shame that a certain amount of that required trust has already been
used by the refusal to publish the election results, despite explicit
(albeit informal) assurances to the contrary before and during the
elections.

Further Jimbo and Angela and Jimbo and Ant have already met. Thus it is only
Ant and Angela who don't have a face to put words too. As these two trustees
are much closer geographically, there is more scope for taking time and
waiting for the most cost-effective opportunity for them to meet.

Pete/Pcb21


from_name: Rowan Collins [IMSoP]

subject: [Wikitech-l] "Changelog" mode

body:
This is perhaps only tangentially related, but I've been wondering for a while whether downtime for
various upgrades / database conversions could be minimised by using some kind of "changelog mode".
The idea being that a copy could be made of the database and sent somewhere else for processing [I'm
not sure where, since processing two copies of en: on one server doesn't seem very likely, but
that's a detail for later]; meanwhile, the original copy is still fully editable, but creates a log
of all edits (or rather, actions that change the DB) made since the copy was taken. Then, once the
bulk of the conversion is done, the main db goes into read-only mode while the new version is
"patched" with the changes from the log (obviously, the code which was altering the DB would then
have to alter the logs to match, but in many cases this shouldn't be too hard, since the changes
themselves aren't usually complex, just time-consuming).

I'm not sure how feasible this is, or even how much would be gained in practice, but when en: was
converted to 1.3 it seemingly had to be locked for essentially a whole day while its links table was
rebuilt - my hunch is that it would take far less than a day to "replay" a day's worth of edits, if
some feature could be made for them to be logged and replayed.

What does anyone with more experience think? Just a pipe dream, or something worth considering as an
investment for the future?

--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]


from_name: Arvind Narayanan

in_reply_to:
<cb85qk$i1g$1@sea.gmane.org>;
	from timwi@gmx.net on Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 03:33:44AM +0100

body:
On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 03:33:44AM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> Delirium wrote:
>
> > Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> >
> >> I think we are now in a position to go ahead and start adding Theora
> >> videos to Wikipedia, if anybody has suitable video to add!
> >
> > I'm not sure adding videos to Wikipedia in a format that almost nobody
> > can play is really the absolute best thing to do, even if it is all
> > fuzzy and open source...
>
> The quantification "almost nobody" applies now, but for how much longer?
> Ogg Vorbis has taken off quite remarkably.
No it hasn't. It is almost unheard of outside the linux world. Still,
I support an open format for music/videos. The effort required to get
an ogg plugin for your favorite player is small enough that even if
someone hasn't heard of ogg before it shouldn't be a big deal.

Arvind
--
Its all GNU to me


from_name: Makoto & Guillaume

subject: [Wikitech-l] Breton Wikipedia

body:
Hi all,

It seems Breton Wikipedia was lost during the big crash (few weeks ago).

If I didn't misunderstand, a version may be on a hard disk backup (80Go) but
it's would be long and hard to try to retrieve it.

My questions are:

1) Does someone have a local backup of Breton Wikipedia?

2) Does someone know how many pages there were on this Wikipedia?

If there were only few paged it's perhaps faster to set a new Wikipedia
rather than try to retrieve old one.

Thanks for help.

Aoineko


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Link table corruption due to templates (was Re:
 Setting up for the Greek language)

references:
<40CD966B.70105@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<40CFECA5.4000702@cs.ucy.ac.cy>	<cb6vr0$vff$2@sea.gmane.org>	<40D70F19.3080409@hackish.org>	<cb7jtj$gnn$1@sea.gmane.org>	<40D7551C.5000701@hackish.org>
	<cb83dc$drf$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
>
> OK. Next idea:
>
> (1) Set the month names to be the possessive forms, e.g. "Ioun?ou",
>     so they can be used normally in dates throughout the site.
> (2) Create thingies in the Template namespace that contain the
>     nominative forms, e.g. [[Template:Nominative-Ioun?ou]] would
>     contain "Io?nios".
> (3) Whenever you need the nominative, instead of {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}
>     write {{Nominative-{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}}}.

Putting variables in links or template names causes link table
corruption. We should have left it disabled.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Terms of use

body:
Delirium wrote:
> I think we should continue the consensus-based system of "officialness"
> that we've been using for years now: if the Wikipedia community says
> it's official, then it's official.  That's what the discussion on the
> talk page is for: to hammer out a consensus wording.
>
> Perhaps for legal niceties the board ought to rubber-stamp it, but I
> certainly would expect the board wouldn't fail to agree to something
> that has been drawn up by consensus.

Community consensus can't be a party to a contract. For this and other
reasons, I removed the terms of use link from the footer. As a
replacement for its main point, I added a copyright notice to old
revisions. JamesDay chose the wording. If there are no objections, I
intend to add a notice to the terms of use page stating that it is not
official policy.

I see no reason to use a contract to inform users of their obligations
under US law. Just inform them, don't try to trick them into implicit
agreements formed by "using this site in any way".

I also had concerns with the "submission standards", and changed that
page accordingly. Please see the two talk pages for more details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Terms_of_use
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Submission_Standards

-- Tim Starling


from_name: moink

subject: [WikiEN-l] Adminship as a reward

body:
> I propose that the community start issuing awards of
> merit to users that will be voted upon by the
> community over a period of a week. Some of the ideas I
> kicked around were...
>
> the Wikipedia Peace Prize - for users who have
> worked to resolve conflict in the community.
>
> the Gutenberg Award - for users that have
> extensively improved the main-namespace content of
> Wikipedia

I really like this idea.  Independent of the adminship issues, the
more ways we have of rewarding users and spreading wikilove, the
better.

moink


from_name: Joerg-Olaf Schaefers

body:
Hello Delirium,

Tuesday, June 22, 2004, 5:16:21 AM, you wrote:

...
> I've personally never actually seen a Vorbis-encoded file anywhere
> except Wikipedia, and non-techies I know typically don't know what to do
> with them when I send them, especially since apparently they don't play
> in the installations of Winamp many people have

They do:

--snip-- http://www.winamp.com/support/help/50/Configuring_Winamp_as_the_Default_Player.htm

Winamp allows you to play many popular media formats:

    * Audio formats include: CDA, MP3, MP2, MP1, AAC, NSA, OGG, WMA,
      MID, MIDI, RMI, KAR, MIZ, MOD, MDZ, NST, STM, STZ, S3M, S3Z, IT,
      ITZ, XM, XMZ, MTM, ULT, 669, FAR, AMF, OKT, PTM, WAV, VOC, AU,
      SND, AIF, AIFF
...
--snip--

Winamp supports Ogg Vorbis since version 2.8, which was released >2
years ago:

--snip-- http://www.neilturner.me.uk/2003/Nov/23/ogg_vorbis_101.html
...
# Winamp - native support since version 2.8, otherwise installable by
           an official plugin
...
--snip--

See also: http://www.vorbis.com/software.psp

MfG
 Olaf


from_name: Ian Mackinnon

body:
OK, as I was editing around in zh.wikipedia.org and having talked to some
people, I've come to realize that it's in the best interest of the China,
Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc communities to share one portal as it's important to
share knowledge and views with each other to better understand each other.
Just as China itself is wide and varied in culture and customs, the
simplified script unifies the nation.

Also, from what I've been told, some people are currently working on some
kind of conversion tool that will enable the automatic interchangeable
conversion between Simplified vs Traditional script. Because of this I have
decided to stop or try to engage as little as possible in updating articles
as until the implementation of the conversion tool is in effect on
zh.wikipedia.org

I was also told not to create seperate articles in Traditional chinese as
two versions of the same article is not in the interest of the community,
but rather having one version of an article that can be accessed and edited
by anyone in either Simplified or Traditional script. The conversion tool
will then do the work to display the script on the end user's screen
according to their preference of either script.

In response to:
----------
Message: 8
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 19:07:48 +0800
From: Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] zh-tw.wikipedia.org
To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Message-ID: <2ed171fb04061804075dfddfa2 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

Please, no.  We've discussed this in several places recently, but:

1) The ZH community has kept it consolidated to keep critical mass together
2) Doing so will make a future technical solution easier to implement
3) It's not a good time anyway, since the ZH accessibility is in flux
from the PRC

-Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 10:48:29 +0000, Ian Mackinnon
<ianm2000uk at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>I don't know how to reply to the list thread but I really like Mark's idea
>about splitting zh.wikipedia.org into zh-cn.wikipedia.org and
>zh-tw.wikipedia.org. This would really solve the problem of navigation
>conflicts. I wasn't suggesting this for political reasons but for practical
>reasons since the writing scripts conflict with each other.
>
>Whoever is able to split the portal into 2 categories, please do so.
>
>Thanks!
>- Ian
>
>-----
>Mark's comment:
>Interlanguage links are already done with [[zh-tw:]] and [[zh-cn:]], so
>perhaps we could simply split zh.wikipedia.org into zh-cn.wikipedia.org
>and zh-tw.wikipedia.org, with zh.wikipedia.org being a disambiguating
>portal?  Of course, this is more up to Chinese-speakers than it is to
>myself; just a suggestion that would be consistent with our current
>usage.  Having separate interlanguage links going to one encyclopedia
>that is effectively written in a mixture of two writing systems that are
>often not mutually intelligible is more than a little bit odd.
>
>-Mark

_________________________________________________________________
It's fast, it's easy and it's free. Get MSN Messenger today!
http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger


subject: [WikiEN-l] Adminship as a reward

body:
>I REALLY dislike this idea.  And it has nothing to do with my
acknowledgement that I would >never get one.  This sounds like nothing
but a popularity contest that could lead to hurt feelings >and
facionalism.

Hmmm good point.  My first thought was that this would spread
happiness and sunshine around but if it's competitive, well, it may
bring out the darker parts of people.  So sad that we have to evaluate
it that way.

moink


from_name: Peter Gervai

body:
On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 01:42:51PM +0530, Arvind Narayanan wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 03:33:44AM +0100, Timwi wrote:
> > Delirium wrote:
> > > Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> > >
> > >> I think we are now in a position to go ahead and start adding Theora
> > >> videos to Wikipedia, if anybody has suitable video to add!
> > >
> > > I'm not sure adding videos to Wikipedia in a format that almost nobody
> > > can play is really the absolute best thing to do, even if it is all
> > > fuzzy and open source...
> >
> > The quantification "almost nobody" applies now, but for how much longer?
> > Ogg Vorbis has taken off quite remarkably.
> No it hasn't. It is almost unheard of outside the linux world.

Some comments (to the other replies as well):
* "Almost nobody" does not even apply, since Linux and Windoze players are
available. (Sure, if you don't have the player, you can't play anything. Not
quicktime or even mpeg. A format is useless if there is no player available,
if there is some, the format is useful.)
* ogg streams are far from "unheard", as there are commercial desktop dvd
players as well as mobile players/walkmans playing ogg, apart from the
windows players available since Noah. :)

> Still,
> I support an open format for music/videos. The effort required to get
> an ogg plugin for your favorite player is small enough that even if
> someone hasn't heard of ogg before it shouldn't be a big deal.

Yes. And a free project ought to popularise free formats, I believe. As
ogg/vorbis players popped up in the market people started to create
ogg/vorbis sound files (you probably can check on p2p nets around). If there
are players [and encoders] and reason to install those players people going
to install them and the format will be used and known.

If they're lazy or uneducated to install a player they probably won't miss
much since Wikipedia content is not multimedia oriented, and this may be a
drive to them to educate themselves and install the players.

Peter


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Ah, seventh-grade English class finally pays off

body:
> >>I think for this to have very much credability, you
> >>would have to remove the 'You Can Edit This Page'
> >>notice.
> >>Mark
> >
> > I don't see why - people are authorized to edit, but they are not
> > authorized to vandalise.

Q: "CAN I edit this page?"
A: "Indeed, you can."
Q: "MAY I edit this page?"
A: "That depends on what you intend to do. See Wikipedia:Policies and
guidelines."


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Full text Search

body:
Camille Constans wrote:

> As Ariel is now in production, I enabled full text search on all
> wikis. I tryed to load balance search to Ariel, Tim could you check
> it when you have some spare time.
>
> Another pb, the script to rebuild the index doesnt seem to work, so
> search is often empty. Of course each time you're making an edit, the
> search is updated :) So you only have to edit all articles (joke)

Search without the index is pretty useless, so I've disabled it again
until the script is fixed up and run. I might get to it tonight if no
one else does, but i might not.

Also, somebody broke searching inserting load balancer stuff (missing
global). I think I fixed the local copy, but it's not committed or
anything...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Andreas Kasenides

subject: [Wikitech-l]  Re: Setting up for the Greek language

body:
>
>
>Delirium wrote:
>>/ Timwi wrote:
>/>/
>/>>/ Delirium wrote:
>/>>/
>/>>>/ There may be cases I'm not covering, but for the one I can
>/>>>/ immediately see in the interface, the issue is that "day month" type
>/>>>/ dates use the possessive form of the month name, while month names
>/>>>/ used by themselves use a simple noun form.
>/>>/
>/>>/ [... etc. ...  'Maios' vs. '5h Maiou']
>/>>/
>/>>/ Ah-ha. I kind of thought so. So why don't you just do this:
>/>>/
>/>>/ - Set the month name to "Maio"
>/>>/ - In a sentence like "{{MONTHNAME}} is nice", write "{{MONTHNAME}}s
>/>>/ estis bioutiphulos"
>/>>/ - Set the date format to "{{DAY}} {{MONTHNAME}}u {{YEAR}}"
>/>>/ http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>/>/
>/>/ Well, unfortunately one part I had left out were the accents, which
>/>/ shift when the word becomes possessive.  To take the example from
>/>/ Andreas's email, the simple noun form of June is "Iou'nios", whereas the
>/>/ possessive form is "Iouni'ou".  So it would really need a separate
>/>/ {{MONTHNAMEPOSSESSIVE}} or something of that sort.
>/
>OK. Next idea:
>
>(1) Set the month names to be the possessive forms, e.g. "Iouni'ou",
>     so they can be used normally in dates throughout the site.
>(2) Create thingies in the Template namespace that contain the
>     nominative forms, e.g. [[Template:Nominative-Iouni'ou]] would
>     contain "Iou'nios".
>(3) Whenever you need the nominative, instead of {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}
>     write {{Nominative-{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}}}.
>
>How's that?
>Timwi
>
Sorry for not responding earlier on this (since I started it). It seems that
something went wrong with my delivery of list messages and I had to look
into
the Web archives. Anyway:

Concerning the Greek names for months and the way they work you can look in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection for nice explanation and reference.
I believe the above suggestion by Timwi seems to solve the problem. Of
course
somebody needs to remember what we are doing here so that in the future it
stays that way.

So the possessive case of Greek months along with their abbreviation,
after the comma,
are (please keep the dots in abbreviations, it looks much better in Greek):

??????????, ???.
???????????, ????.
???????, ????.
????????, ???.
?????, ?????
???????, ????.
???????, ????.
?????????, ???.
???????????, ????.
?????????, ???.
?????????, ?????.
??????????, ???.

I also attach a UTF-8 txt file with the above.
Now somebody needs to load all these.
Thanx
Andreas
=========================

e-mail: Andreas.Kasenides_at_cs.ucy.ac.cy
<mailto:Andreas.Kasenides%20at%20cs.ucy.ac.cy>

(replace the _at_ above with @)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] New page creation on meta

body:
Somebody disabled new page creation for relatively new users on meta.
This make it impossible to, for instance, create a user page or custom
style sheet page, as well as breaking general wiki functionality for
newly registered users.

Since it's friggin' easy to delete newly created spam/vandalism pages, I
don't see the point. I've taken this out.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Denni

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: A Challenge: Sending Angela to gay Paree!

body:
Angela represents for me what it is to be a real Wikipedian. Not to say
that the rest of us aren't, and there is a fair crowd of people I admire
here, but if I could do half as much as Angela in twice the time, I'd be
pretty pleased with myself. As I am presently between jobs, I cannot
afford to contribute a great deal, but I will offer a Euromoneyorder for
$10 CDN to cover some miniscule portion (some 8 air kilometres or so) of
her trip, and would be grateful for a mailing address.

Denni

--
?"The difference between extra-marital sex and extra marital sex is not
to be sneezed at." --George Will, on hyphen use
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Visit my Wikipedia user page at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3ADwindrim
Do you ICQ? I do - 276534369 Magpie


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

body:
Mark,

It's clear your objections run deep -- you seem have a standing
problem with the entire idea of a board of trustees that is, well,
trusted with the interests of the Wikimedia Foundation. This can be
seen also in your strong bias and mistrust concerning the governance
of nonprofits.  If this is so, your issues are not with the
particulars of how we are going about things, but of an entire concept
of the board.

However, this community has decided to go ahead with the board, so
that designated individuals can spend more time on issues that need
it.  This includes fundraising and building links among the different
wikis, which have both been our weak spot.  Your characterization of
these meetings as "perks" that happen "behind closed doors" is
misleading and disingenuous.  No one has suggested anything of the
sort, and Wikipedians should have every confidence that things will be
open and inclusive.

You've cited H.Cheney's comment, while conveniently leaving out
others' (including my own) positive experiences in working with
nonprofits and the benefits of face to face meetings for this type of
collaboration. The use of "social and networking events" as a
pejorative is odd considering Wikipedia is one of the largest social
software systems and collaborative projects in the world.

-Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)

On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 02:32:29 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> >Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply because
> >real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than letters in a
> >window on a computer screen. That was obvious at the WOS in Berlin, as I
> >know that some people are still reeling from the whole experience. ;-)
> >Getting Angela to mingle with the French Wikimedia community will benefit
> >the whole project.
> >
> >
> I disagree with this---meeting with a tiny fraction of the Wikimedia
> community and making decisions at such meetings is detrimental to the
> project.  Real work and decision-making should be done online, in
> public, where everyone can participate.  If people want to socialize in
> person, that's fine, but we shouldn't be making decisions at meetings
> either behind closed doors or at which only a small fraction of
> Wikimedians are present.
>
> And, I don't think calling such meetings "perks" is an overstatement.
> I've observed quite a few non-profit meetings, as well as meetings and
> conferences in academia, and they rarely have much real work being
> done.  They're social and networking events, and the most "real work"
> that gets done is at best finding out about something that you make a
> note of to look up and read later.  The actual real work gets done via
> email or telephone (or both) either before or after the conferences.  H.
> Cheney's recent email indicated he's had similar experiences on the
> non-profit boards he's sat on, so this seems to not simply be my
> personal experience.
>
> -Mark
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses


from_name: Corey Burger

body:
I think the point being missed here is that the board is NOT going to run
Wikipedia or any other project. They are there to make it easier to run
the project, primarily by getting funding for us, coorinating people and
hardware, etc. The actual job of writing the encyclopedia/dictionary/etc.
will still be where it needs to be, in the hands of the users.

And if we don't decide to give Angela money, I pledge $10CAD to help here.

Corey Burger aka Burgundavia


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

references:
<9BN5N2ShpVB@erik_moeller> <40D7E08D.4020809@hackish.org>
	<40D87C0C.9000209@yahoo.com>

body:
Anthere wrote:

> Delirium wrote:
>
>> I disagree with this---meeting with a tiny fraction of the Wikimedia
>> community and making decisions at such meetings is detrimental to the
>> project.  Real work and decision-making should be done online, in
>> public, where everyone can participate.  If people want to socialize
>> in person, that's fine, but we shouldn't be making decisions at
>> meetings either behind closed doors or at which only a small fraction
>> of Wikimedians are present.
>
>
> I think you may have not understood what a board exactly is.

I know what a board is, but I disagree that we should have one running
significant parts of Wikimedia projects.  Hierarchical top-down control
is the exact opposite of the wiki way of doing things.

We do of course need a board for legal reasons, and the board may need
to make some decisions.  But it should not be running the project, and
when it does make decisions, it should do so as openly and publicly as
possible, in consultation with the normal consensus-based method of
decision-making we use.

-Mark


subject: [Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses