from_name: Mathias Schindler

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [PR] Kurzweil Educational Systems Announces Kurzweil
 1000 Version
 9 With Expanded Online Search, Portability and Information Sharing

body:
I've nerver heard a company name such as "kurzweil" and I have no clue
waht this Kurzweil 1000 - Version 9 is about. But at least they mention
wikipedia-  so it must be good.

Yours,
Mathias Schindler [[de:Benutzer:Mathias Schindler]]

http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20040628005436&newsLang=en

Here's FYI:

    June 28, 2004 09:30 AM US Eastern Timezone

Kurzweil Educational Systems Announces Kurzweil 1000 Version 9 With
Expanded Online Search, Portability and Information Sharing

BEDFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 28, 2004--

  	Company Kicks-off Annual Pricing Promotion and Introduces New "Refer
a Friend" Program

Kurzweil Educational Systems, Inc., innovator of reading technology for
individuals with visual or learning disabilities, today announced
Kurzweil 1000(TM) Version 9, the premier scanning and reading software
for people who are blind or visually impaired. The latest version of the
software makes printed pages and electronic archives more accessible and
usable than ever before with a new online encyclopedia search and
retrieval capability, broadened support for Web repositories, more
accurate scanning, enhanced DAISY and portable device support, and
better navigation through document linking.

"Computer users everywhere are demanding more and better online access
for communication, and for business, personal or academic research, and
Kurzweil 1000 users are no different," said Stephen Baum, Chief
Technology Officer at Kurzweil Educational Systems. "As online resources
expand, so will Kurzweil 1000's access to those resources. We will
continue to develop best-of-breed tools to access information--in
whatever form it may take."

"Kurzweil 1000 was a tremendous help to me as a college student and
continues to be very helpful to me now as a working adult," said Vince
Tomassetti, Assistive Technology Coordinator for Assistive Technology -
British Columbia (Canada). "Kurzweil 1000 not only reads books and
documents aloud, but with the extensive online search and retrieval
capabilities, I can also research information for whatever my purpose.
And the best part of all is, I can transfer text and MP3 files to
portable devices, like Book Port, and take my reading with me wherever I
go."

Kurzweil 1000 Version 9 new features give users:

-- Expanded Online Search and Retrieval - Support for online
encyclopedias, such as Columbia Encyclopedia and Wikipedia from
Wikimedia Foundation as well as access to additional Web repositories,
including American Foundation for the Blind's (AFB) AccessWorld and
Talking Newspaper Association of the United Kingdom, complement the
online book and magazine search capabilities and the already notable
list of accessible Web repositories.

-- More Accurate Scanning - A new Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
engine, ScanSoft(R) OCR(C), and an update of the ABBYY FineReader(TM)
OCR engine provide the most accurate recognition available.

-- Additional Study Tools - Notes and Document Link options expand an
already powerful set of study tools. The Notes feature provides an
additional way to annotate documents. The new Document Link feature
allows users to explore existing links to dynamically navigate within
the same document, another document or Web site to access needed
information.

-- Increased Portability - Support for Book Port(TM) extends the list of
portable devices to which Kurzweil 1000 can transfer text and MP3 files.

-- Talking Business Calculator - A new full-function talking business
calculator performs, for example, financial functions for loans,
mortgages, leases, savings, annuities and more.

Version 9's new features expand upon the extensive list of existing
features in Kurzweil 1000, including state-of-the-art synthetic speech
options, color scanning, flexible writing and editing tools, the ability
to send files to e-mail, Braille embosser compatibility, and
photocopier, fax and calculator applications.

Availability, Pricing and Summer Promotions

Kurzweil 1000 Version 9 is scheduled to ship to customers later this
summer and can be previewed at the 2004 National Federation of the Blind
(NFB) Convention, June 29-July 5 in Atlanta, Georgia; the 2004 American
Council of the Blind (ACB) National Convention, July 3-10 in Birmingham,
Alabama; and the 2004 Association for Education and Rehabilitation of
the Blind and Visually Impaired (AER) International Conference, July
13-18 in Orlando, Florida.

A single license of Kurzweil 1000 retails for $995. Volume pricing is
also available. Through October 29, 2004, Kurzweil Educational Systems
is also offering customers:

-- A discount of $100 off the retail price of any new, full-product
purchase of a Kurzweil 1000 license.

-- The opportunity to participate in the new Refer a Friend Program in
which registered Kurzweil 1000 users who refer a new customer who buys a
Kurzweil 1000 license receive a $50 American Express gift certificate.

Kurzweil 1000 can be purchased directly from Kurzweil Educational
Systems at 800-894-5374 (within the U.S. or Canada) or 781-276-0600
(outside the U.S. or Canada), or from Kurzweil Educational Systems'
worldwide network of resellers listed at
(http://www.kurzweiledu.com/resellers.asp).

About Kurzweil Educational Systems, Inc.

Kurzweil Educational Systems, founded in 1996, is the industry leader
and innovator of reading, writing and learning solutions for people with
learning disabilities, and people who are blind or visually impaired.
Ray Kurzweil, a co-founder of the original company, invented
computer-based reading machine technology 25 years ago to provide access
to printed text for the blind. With a pioneering history in developing
assistive technology, the company has received worldwide recognition for
enabling people with disabilities to lead more independent lives through
improved reading and writing abilities. Kurzweil Educational Systems
products have recently won a "Media and Methods Awards Portfolio" 2004
Award from Media and Methods magazine, a 2004 Bessie Award from ComputED
Gazette magazine, and a 2004 Codie Award from the Software & Information
Industry Association (SIIA). For more company or product information, or
to order online, visit www.kurzweiledu.com.

Kurzweil 1000 and Kurzweil Educational Systems, Inc., are trademarks of
the Kurzweil Educational Systems, Inc. Other company names and products
are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Contacts

Collaborative Insight, Inc.
Ellenann Haughey, 617-357-7715
haughey at collaborative.com

At A Glance

Kurzweil Educational Systems, Inc.
Headquarters: 	Bedford, MA
Website: 	http://www.kurzweiledu.com
CEO: 	Michael Sokol
Employees: 	NA
Organization: 	Private

Source: via Business Wire
Updated  05/10/2004 by company


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Segfault in mysqld on suda

body:
A segfault on suda's mysqld took us down for a couple minutes. It
restarted just fine, so this may have been a weird temporary condition.
Should watch memory usage etc to check that...

I've added the symbols to the stack trace below per the secret recipe.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

mysqld got signal 11;
This could be because you hit a bug. It is also possible that this
binary or one of the libraries it was linked against is corrupt,
improperly built, or misconfigured. This error can also be caused by
malfunctioning hardware. We will try our best to scrape up some info
that will hopefully help diagnose the problem, but since we have already
crashed, something is definitely wrong and this may fail.

key_buffer_size=134217728
read_buffer_size=4190208
max_used_connections=1145
max_connections=1200
threads_connected=17
It is possible that mysqld could use up to
key_buffer_size + (read_buffer_size + sort_buffer_size)*max_connections
= 1568054 K bytes of memory
Hope that's ok; if not, decrease some variables in the equation.

thd=0xbb0fbff0
Attempting backtrace. You can use the following information to find out
where mysqld died. If you see no messages after this, something went
terribly wrong...
Cannot determine thread, fp=0xbf67f138, backtrace may not be correct.
Stack range sanity check OK, backtrace follows:

0x8070610 handle_segfault + 420
0x8289628 pthread_sighandler + 184
0x8230bfd mem_area_free + 1717
0x822f5e5 mem_heap_block_free + 421
0x819bd60 trx_free + 3724
0x819c2ef trx_free_for_mysql + 739
0x80c96fc innobase_close_connection__FP3THD + 40
0x80c32fb ha_close_connection__FP3THD + 27
0x8069b9a _._3THD + 130
0x807023c end_thread__FP3THDb + 64
0x8079452 handle_one_connection + 938
0x8286ddc pthread_start_thread + 220
0x82bc5ba thread_start + 4

New value of fp=(nil) failed sanity check, terminating stack trace!
Please read http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Using_stack_trace.html and
follow instructions on how to resolve the stack trace. Resolved
stack trace is much more helpful in diagnosing the problem, so please do
resolve it
Trying to get some variables.
Some pointers may be invalid and cause the dump to abort...
thd->query at (nil)  is invalid pointer
thd->thread_id=29312209
The manual page at http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Crashing.html contains
information that should help you find out what is causing the crash.

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list: wikien-l

from_name: Dan Drake

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Rules vs. Anarchy

body:
On Sat, 26 Jun 2004 03:47:23 UTC, Ray Saintonge
<saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

>
> Americans are essentially a law-abiding peoples, and would sacrifice
> common sense to ensure that the law is enforced.

I do wish we could reduce the amount of nationalist sniping and worse than
useless generalities.

Another thing Americans like to do: Laugh scornfully at other countries'
rigid bureaucacies mindlessly enforcing the letter of massive, intrusive,
and stupid laws and regulations.  (Since some people can't imagine an
American saying anything that is not shallow and dogmatic, I need to
explain that those opinions of other countries' administrations are not
necessarily *true*; just that that's a perception, not necessarily less
valid than the one cited above.)

--
Dan Drake
dd at dandrake.com
http://www.dandrake.com

Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.
 --George Orwell


list: foundation-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Angela

body:
Angela told me today she lost a member of her family. She will be
offline for longer than she expected, and may have to cancel coming to
Paris.

Anthere


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Angela


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Fennec Foxen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] I was banned, why?

body:
moink pondered:
> I do have to wonder how a user can "admit to" anything on another's behalf.

They're commonly regarded as "in cahoots" (hmm, is that how you spell
cahoots? cahutz? whatever, forget it) with each other.


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] I was banned, why?

body:
Well, let's see, Editing Saddam Hussein was from a Qwest IP from the
same city your edits originate from. The username was associated with
Red Faction, as you are. It was used in a window of time in which you
were using Wikipedia, as you nominated User:Plato at about the same
time. And, furthermore, Comrade Nick has said that you were Editing
Saddam Hussein.

I'm pretty well convinced by that chain of evidence. I suppose if you
wanted to prove otherwise you could ask a developer to check the IP
addresses to see if they match up exactly - I only know they're the
same ISP and region.

But I'm not going to ask a developer to do that, because, honestly, I'm
already convinced.

-Snowspinner

On Jun 28, 2004, at 1:37 PM, moink wrote:

>> *Surely, Plato's say-so is not sufficent grounds to ban me; I'm
> rather confused as to how
> he can "admit" to my alleged crimes. Regardless, having reviewed the
> history of User:Editing Saddam Hussein -- I am at a loss as to how
> that account envokes the negative connotations indicated in the latter
> half of "A sock puppet is an additional username used by a Wikipedian
> who posts under more than one name. While they may serve legitimate
> purposes, sock puppets may
> be sometimes also used to deceive, for example by voting more than
> once in a poll or otherwise creating an illusion of broader support
> for an idea." *Apparently you feel that the account was used to
> sockpuppet against your admin request -- do you have any proof of my
> voting more than once in RfA? I doubt you will find any evidence to
> support your allegation; since, I am not User:Editing Saddam Hussein
> nor is that my sockpuppet.
>
> I do have to wonder how a user can "admit to" anything on another's
> behalf.
>
> moink
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Since "standard" isn't "standard",
	perhaps it shouldn't be "standard"

body:
> I had intended to rename it "Classic" back in April, but apparently
> forgot to update the English localization. (I did change at least
> Esperanto, haven't checked the others.)

Bah, I still think it would be nicer to give it a 'proper' name -
suggestions of "Gold", "Straw", "Ochre" all sound more interesting to
me. And having "Nostalgia" and "Classic" does seem a bit silly...

> Change is now made for en; other languages with custom skin names should
> update as necessary.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Multiple categories

body:
----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: [Wikitech-l] Multiple categories
Date: Sun, 30 May 2004 12:07:09 +0200
From: Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at EUnet.yu>
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>

I have made a patch which enables display of all articles that belong to
multiple categories. Thus, for example, Category:Female/Orthodox/Saint would
return all female orthodox saints (that is, all articles which are
categorised with at least [[Category:Female]], [[Category:Orthodox]] and
[[Category:Saint]]).

I am not sure would this make for much greater database load, but that
 remains to be seen in practice. Line if(strchr($t,"/")) { and corresponding
 else block are actually not needed but I have left them because I figure
 that display of a single category is slightly faster this way, and that at
 that point it would be easier to turn off this feature if needed. It should
 also be easy to limit to number of categories if that turns out to be
 neccesary.

Index: Parser.php
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/wikipedia/phase3/includes/Parser.php,v
retrieving revision 1.135
diff -u -3 -p -r1.135 Parser.php
--- Parser.php  15 May 2004 00:29:07 -0000      1.135
+++ Parser.php  30 May 2004 09:11:00 -0000
@@ -318,7 +318,21 @@ class Parser

                # FIXME: add limits
                $t = wfStrencode( $this->mTitle->getDBKey() );
-               $sql = "SELECT DISTINCT cur_title,cur_namespace FROM
cur,categorylinks WHERE cl_to='$t' AND cl_from=cur_id ORDER BY cl_sortkey" ;
+               $t = preg_replace("'/+'","/",$t);
+               if(strchr($t,"/")) {
+                       $ta = explode("/",$t);
+                       $tt="cur"; $tw="";
+
+                       $i=0;
+                       foreach($ta as $v) {
+                               $tt.=",categorylinks as cl$i";
+                               $tw.="cl$i.cl_to='$v' AND
cl$i.cl_from=cl".++$i.".cl_from AND ";
+                       }
+                       $tw=preg_replace("' AND
cl[0-9]+[.]cl_from=cl[0-9]+[.]cl_from AND $'U","",$tw);
+                       $sql="SELECT DISTINCT cur_title,cur_namespace FROM
 $tt WHERE $tw AND cl0.cl_from=cur_id ORDER BY cl0.cl_sortkey";
+               } else {
+                       $sql = "SELECT DISTINCT cur_title,cur_namespace FROM
cur,categorylinks WHERE cl_to='$t' AND cl_from=cur_id ORDER BY cl_sortkey" ;
+               }
                $res = wfQuery ( $sql, DB_READ ) ;
                while ( $x = wfFetchObject ( $res ) ) $data[] = $x ;

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

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Query two or more categories

body:
On Monday 28 June 2004 08:53, Jens Frank wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 26, 2004 at 06:38:11AM +0200, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> > On Friday 25 June 2004 00:37, Forest Gregg wrote:
> > > Is there a way to query two or more categories. Something like
> > > /Category:Philosophers:Dwarves that would return all dwarvish
> > > philosophers. I think I saw a notice that a feature like this was
> > > implemented.
> >
> > I made a patch which does it but it didn't made it to the CVS. I guess
> > because I submitted it when everyone was busy with installing new version
> > mediawiki to the Wikipedia.
>
> can you repost it? I checked all your mails to this list back to June 1 and
> can't find the patch.

Bad luck, I sent it on May 30 ;)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Lir, Brion, Ed and Jeronim :-)

body:
Lir is currently asking for clarification for her ban from the english wikipedia, on the wikipedia-l. I do not think this is a topic for wikipedia-l.
However, after I mentionned that to her, she answered she was banned from english wikipedia, from wikien-l and from irc, so wikipedia-l was the last place she could discuss her ban.

I am sorry to ask this, but I would prefer that Lir presents her defense on the english wikipedia mailing list, since it is an english wikipedia issue. I do not think all languages have to be involved in local issues discussion. I do not think Lir ban is a wikipedia wide topic of discussion :-)

Now, it has been going on for such a long time that I do not know what is the current status of Lir, with regards to her being allowed to edit.
Did the AC pronounced her banned ? For which duration ?
Is she really banned from the english mailing list ? Why was she ? Is it permanent ? Who decide who is banned from a list ?
Is she really banned from irc as well ? Why ? Is it permanent ?

I would have liked to go and see whether she was blocked or not on the english mailing list.
However, I do not have any admin access to the mailing lists any more since Fire reorganised everything. Not even to the lists I administrated myself for a while :-)

As far as I know, only 3 people have admin access now, brion, ed poor and jeronim.
So, brion, ed and jeronim, could one of you please check if Lir has access or not ?

If Lir does not have access, who is willing to discuss with Lir offline ?

Also, since this mailing list has now very few people able to access, I think a fair process has to be set up to decide who is banned and who is not banned from the mailing lists. It would also be nice that we are updated on this.

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I was banned, why?

body:
Hello Lir

Would you mind having these discussions on the english mailing list please ?

C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
>
> *I was banned, apparently because I am suspected of "sockpuppetry".  I
> have not been provided with any evidence of this, the issue has not
> been reviewed by the mediation committee, I am not guilty. Please
> remedy this matter. -- User:Lir
> **Without having to think about it too much, I can point to the
> well-proven sockpuppet "Editing Saddam Hussein," which you attempted to
> use to vote in RfA, and which User:Plato has admitted was you.
>
> *Surely, Plato's say-so is not sufficent grounds to ban me; I'm rather
> confused as to how he can "admit" to my alleged crimes. Regardless,
> having reviewed the history of User:Editing Saddam Hussein -- I am at a
> loss as to how that account envokes the negative connotations indicated
> in the latter half of "A sock puppet is an additional username used by a
> Wikipedian who posts under more than one name. While they may serve
> legitimate purposes, sock puppets may be sometimes also used to deceive,
> for example by voting more than once in a poll or otherwise creating an
> illusion of broader support for an idea."
> *Apparently you feel that the account was used to sockpuppet against
> your admin request -- do you have any proof of my voting more than once
> in RfA? I doubt you will find any evidence to support your allegation;
> since, I am not User:Editing Saddam Hussein nor is that my sockpuppet.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


body:
Anthere wrote:
> Now, it has been going on for such a long time that I do not know what
> is the current status of Lir, with regards to her being allowed to edit.
> Did the AC pronounced her banned ? For which duration ?

Can't help you there. You'll have to ask the secret cabal where they put
their sealed proclamations.

> Is she really banned from the english mailing list ? Why was she ? Is it
> permanent ? Who decide who is banned from a list ?

So far as I know, the only person who's ever been banned from this
mailing list is Plautus Satire (plautus at shaw.ca).

There are three other addresses blocked from subscribing in the mailing
list config, which look like spam addresses. (The list's moderation
queue allows you to add a rejected mail's sender to ban, moderation,
reject, or discard lists; there are a *lot* on the discard list, and
none of them is a[name omitted for privacy reasons].)

Certainly there is no technical impediment to Lir subscribing and
posting on this list. I would dispute the authority of a claimed ban by
the AC if there is one; the mailing lists have traditionally been the
open channel for complaints, moderated only for spam.

> Is she really banned from irc as well ? Why ? Is it permanent ?

As far as I can see there are no bans currently set in #wikipedia,
though I could be pushing the wrong button.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: you are very rude

body:
Sooooo.

Lir, you may have read Brion and Tim Starling answers about you being banned from mailing lists and irc. You are not.
Ed also wrote to me, and mentionned that he could see no evidence of you being banned from the mailing lists. He also added that till now, only Jimbo was deciding blocks on the english mailing list (though, I must admit I distinctly remember I blocked someone one day...but oh well...).

Your posts probably do not go through because you may not have any account. This is a public mailing list, *requiring* registration. It is no hassle. Administration of mailing list is a pain, because of the huge amount of spam. It is difficult to "distinguish" the "relevant" mails being blocked by "mistake", from the spam. Be nice to administrators and register please.

In short, you are not banned from the mailing lists, nor are you from irc.
As Ed put it "Please sign on and talk with us".

And as I put it "Please, discuss english banning on the english mailing list"

PS : Tim, that makes one ;-)

C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons] <a[name omitted for privacy reasons]@msn.com> wrote:
I am also blocked from IRC.
----- Original Message -----
From: Anthere
To: C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons]
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 1:52 AM
Subject: Re: you are very rude

do you mean then that you are blocked from the english
mailing list ?

--- C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons] <a[name omitted for privacy reasons]@msn.com> wrote:
> No, I am not rude; I am banned without reason. I am
> a victim, and you should respect my arguments that
> wikijustice has gone haywire. I do post to the
> English mailing list; as I have stated before, they
> do not accept my posts there.
>   ----- Original Message -----
>   From: Anthere<mailto:anthere9 at yahoo.com>
>   To: C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons]<mailto:a[name omitted for privacy reasons]@msn.com>
>   Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 12:47 AM
>   Subject: Re: you are very rude
>
>
>   No. *You* are rude.
>   The wikipedia mailing list is for all wikipedians;
>   poorly-english speaking as well. We do not want
> them
>   to have to spent time and energy trying to
> decipher
>   what really is of little if no interest to them.
>   You do not have trouble on any other wikipedias
> than
>   en. Then, please stick to en per respect for the
> non
>   english wikipedians.
>
>   --- C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons]
> <a[name omitted for privacy reasons]@msn.com<mailto:a[name omitted for privacy reasons]@msn.com>> wrote:
>   > It is very rude of you to respond to my
> unjustified
>   > banning, by simply asking that the discussion be
>   > held elsewhere. You should be ashamed of
> yourself.
>
>
>
>
>
>   __________________________________
>   Do you Yahoo!?
>   New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
>
>
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail<http://promotions.yahoocom/new_mail>
>
>

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: you are very rude

body:
Sooooo.

Lir, you may have read Brion and Tim Starling answers about you being banned from mailing lists and irc. You are not.
Ed also wrote to me, and mentionned that he could see no evidence of you being banned from the mailing lists. He also added that till now, only Jimbo was deciding blocks on the english mailing list (though, I must admit I distinctly remember I blocked someone one day...but oh well...).

Your posts probably do not go through because you may not have any account. This is a public mailing list, *requiring* registration. It is no hassle. Administration of mailing list is a pain, because of the huge amount of spam. It is difficult to "distinguish" the "relevant" mails being blocked by "mistake", from the spam. Be nice to administrators and register please.

In short, you are not banned from the mailing lists, nor are you from irc.
As Ed put it "Please sign on and talk with us".

And as I put it "Please, discuss english banning on the english mailing list"

PS : Tim, that makes one ;-)

C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons] <a[name omitted for privacy reasons]@msn.com> wrote:
I am also blocked from IRC.
----- Original Message -----
From: Anthere
To: C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons]
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 1:52 AM
Subject: Re: you are very rude

do you mean then that you are blocked from the english
mailing list ?

--- C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons] <a[name omitted for privacy reasons]@msn.com> wrote:
> No, I am not rude; I am banned without reason. I am
> a victim, and you should respect my arguments that
> wikijustice has gone haywire. I do post to the
> English mailing list; as I have stated before, they
> do not accept my posts there.
>   ----- Original Message -----
>   From: Anthere<mailto:anthere9 at yahoo.com>
>   To: C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons]<mailto:a[name omitted for privacy reasons]@msn.com>
>   Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 12:47 AM
>   Subject: Re: you are very rude
>
>
>   No. *You* are rude.
>   The wikipedia mailing list is for all wikipedians;
>   poorly-english speaking as well. We do not want
> them
>   to have to spent time and energy trying to
> decipher
>   what really is of little if no interest to them.
>   You do not have trouble on any other wikipedias
> than
>   en. Then, please stick to en per respect for the
> non
>   english wikipedians.
>
>   --- C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons]
> <a[name omitted for privacy reasons]@msn.com<mailto:a[name omitted for privacy reasons]@msn.com>> wrote:
>   > It is very rude of you to respond to my
> unjustified
>   > banning, by simply asking that the discussion be
>   > held elsewhere. You should be ashamed of
> yourself.
>
>
>
>
>
>   __________________________________
>   Do you Yahoo!?
>   New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
>
>
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail<http://promotions.yahoocom/new_mail>
>
>

__________________________________
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---------------------------------
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subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF-8, excuse my ignorance

body:
I remember somewhere that at conversion time the old stuff in articles are converted to UTF-8. At present I do my addition of all kinds of names for languages in the nl-wiktionary, words like ??? translate to [[ᎳᏛᏈ]]. This turns up perfectly well on the en:wikitonary. I just realised that this may not be as simple as that.

My question, should these charactercodes be converted again on en:wiktionary ??

Thanks, GerardM


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
> > Now, it has been going on for such a long time that I do not know what
> > is the current status of Lir, with regards to her being allowed to edit.
> > Did the AC pronounced her banned ? For which duration ?
>
> Can't help you there. You'll have to ask the secret cabal where they put
> their sealed proclamations.

What secrete cabal? What sealed proclamations? The AC makes all its rulings
public:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration#Completed_requests

And there is no mention of Lir.

-- mav

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


from_name: C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons]

from_email: a

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: you are very rude

body:
*Lir, you may have read Brion and Tim Starling answers about you being banned from mailing lists and irc. You are not.
**Would that be why, when I log into irc, it says I am banned? Have you considered that they are lying to you?
**Would that be why my posts to the English list are not accepted? Obviously, something is wrong at the English Wiki.

*Your posts probably do not go through because you may not have any account. This is a public mailing list, *requiring* registration.
**The list does NOT require registration.

*Administration of mailing list is a pain, because of the huge amount of spam. It is difficult to "distinguish" the "relevant" mails being blocked by "mistake", from the spam.
**That's not true; that's the same complaint you mediation people made about your task there -- if you can't do the job, resign and let someone do it who is willing to do it. Don't tell me that its too much work to be a supersysop; lots of people would happily do it.

*Be nice to administrators and register please.
**05:08, 28 Jun 2004 Guanaco<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guanaco> blocked "Lir" with an expiry time of 24 hours (use of multiple sockpuppets to edit war)
***I am being nice to you, have I blocked you? Aren't you on the board of Wikimedia; why aren't you at all concerned about sysops blocking other users, over edits wars that the sysop is in, when there is no evidence provided that the blocked user did anything wrong? Once again, if you can't do your job, which involves being concerned about these issues; please resign and let someone else do the it.
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from_name: Slow Poke

subject: [Wikitech-l] Special:Myuserpage, Special:Myusertalk

body:
Would a {{USERNAME}} var work here? If so that could be useful for
other things.

slowpoke

On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 13:53:24 -0400, Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org> wrote:
>
> So, I'm thinking it would be kind of useful to have two special pages:
> Special:Myuserpage and Special:Myusertalk.
>
> These would just redirect to the current user's User: page and User
> talk: page, respectively. If the user isn't logged in, they'd go to the
> IP address User: and User talk: pages, respectively; optionally, they
> could go to an error page.
>
> Why would this be valuable? Well, it would help if one were trying to
> serve the same HTML to all users so that caching is more effective.
> Right now, each page served to each logged-in user has different
> navigational stuff based on their user name. With a Special:Myuserpage
> link, we could change:
>
>         My page
>
> to...
>
>         My page
>
> Anyways, barring objections, I'm going to implement this Special: page
> and see how it works.
>
> ~ESP
>
> --
> Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
> Wikitravel (http://wikitravel.org/)
>
>
>
> signature.asc - 1K
> noname - 1K Download
>


from_name: Evan Prodromou

body:
So, I'm thinking it would be kind of useful to have two special pages:
Special:Myuserpage and Special:Myusertalk.

These would just redirect to the current user's User: page and User
talk: page, respectively. If the user isn't logged in, they'd go to the
IP address User: and User talk: pages, respectively; optionally, they
could go to an error page.

Why would this be valuable? Well, it would help if one were trying to
serve the same HTML to all users so that caching is more effective.
Right now, each page served to each logged-in user has different
navigational stuff based on their user name. With a Special:Myuserpage
link, we could change:

        My page

to...

        My page

Anyways, barring objections, I'm going to implement this Special: page
and see how it works.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel (http://wikitravel.org/)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] action=new

body:
So, right now, when we have a broken link in a page, it gets rendered
like this:

        New page

The problem here is that we're not differentiating between creating a
new page and editing an existing page. It's uncommon but not impossible
that someone creates [[New page]] while I'm looking at this link, and
when I click it to start a new page, there's text in the textarea.

IWBNI we had a *different* action for creating new pages than for
editing existing pages.

        New page

On getting action new, we could do things like:

      * Show the page, if it's been created since the person fetched the
        referring page.
      * Show some set of instructions on how (or why) to start a new
        page, and give some other possibilities (I think the [[meta:new
        page page]] discusses this).
      * Do some cool functionality, like _new_page_templates_ (create
        new pages with some existing format already filled in).

But we can't do anything interesting with new pages unless we know
they're new pages. So, I'd like to change action=edit to action=new for
broken links.

Sound OK?

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel (http://wikitravel.org/)
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from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Some Restrictions May Apply

body:
--- Denni <dwindrim at shaw.ca> wrote:
> I do not want anyone to be denied the opportunity to participate in
> Wikipedia to its fullest extent, except for three groups of people:
> the
> presently banned, anons, and newbies (he said, seeing keyboards
> around
> the planet ignite spontaneously).

Anon, in general, do not bother me. I am an anon at times. It helps
me gauge the response of active sysops.
Newbies do not bother me either. They are like teens trying to figure
sex out.

> I have no great sympathy for most of those banned; while mistakes
> happen, MNH and friends are "away" for good reason. However, anons
> and
> newbies have, as a group, no less ability to create havoc.

People are banned for various reasons. Just because a user is banned
does not mean they are worthless. They may have heated up too much in
 the wrong situation.

> I come at this as remembering my own first days here - trying to
> find my
> way around, trying to navigate what appeared to be darkness,
> editing a
> bit here and a bit there until I had the nerve to do my own
> userpage or
> submit a small article (can't remember which came first). Yes, I
> screwed
> up, not through bad intent, but through ignorance, and posted a
> couple
> of articles that got me leapt upon by irate sysops.

That fumbling around in the dark is hopefully now better addressed.
Perhaps there should be a sysop "Guided tour" feature.

> There are also
> those
> "anons" who are only anonymous to us. They know who they're dealing
> with, and sock puppetry is the least of their bad manners
> sometimes.

> I put forward as a suggestion that newbie and anon postings be
> screened...

And who monitors the screeners? And define newbie. And define anon.
Someone who comes for ten minutes per month will be a newbie for a
very long time. Jimbo may be a anon.

> While this does not negate Wikipedia's promise of being
> able
> to "edit this page right now", it does add the caveat that the edit
> may
> not be immediately visible.

That would not be good. The very idea of transparency and immediacy
is highly critical to the W's success.

> VfD has a big group of vigilant eyes, myself among them. But if I
> could
> be of help in screening anon vandals, and helping newbies find the
> right
> way, I'd sure rather spend my time on such a page. I propose this
> to the
> powers that be for consideration.

I propose the opposite: that the powers that be not spend any time on
this. Rather, newbies need better help.

Heck, publiching a hardcopy Wikipedia Guide would go far to alleviate
newbieism.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
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New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
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from_name: Denni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Some Restrictions May Apply

body:
I do not want anyone to be denied the opportunity to participate in
Wikipedia to its fullest extent, except for three groups of people: the
presently banned, anons, and newbies (he said, seeing keyboards around
the planet ignite spontaneously).

I have no great sympathy for most of those banned; while mistakes
happen, MNH and friends are "away" for good reason. However, anons and
newbies have, as a group, no less ability to create havoc.

I come at this as remembering my own first days here - trying to find my
way around, trying to navigate what appeared to be darkness, editing a
bit here and a bit there until I had the nerve to do my own userpage or
submit a small article (can't remember which came first). Yes, I screwed
up, not through bad intent, but through ignorance, and posted a couple
of articles that got me leapt upon by irate sysops. There are also those
"anons" who are only anonymous to us. They know who they're dealing
with, and sock puppetry is the least of their bad manners sometimes.

I put forward as a suggestion that newbie and anon postings be screened,
similarly to VfDs, for the first few weeks or first few dozens worth of
posts. The software is in place to track x number of posts and shunt
those not meeting certain criteria through to a fastedit page; while
newbies/anons can edit in what seems to be a transparent manner to them,
Wikipedia can also monitor for malicious edits, edits made out of
ignorance (an article submitted intended as a userpage, for instance,
that ends up in article namespace), or edits made similarly (as was my
error - editing the article instead of its related talk page). The
process is, of course, a tad more complicated than this - there need to
be, for instance, some fundamental criteria for holding a page back;
unlike VfD, these pages need to proceed to (mostly) articlespace without
hindrance. While this does not negate Wikipedia's promise of being able
to "edit this page right now", it does add the caveat that the edit may
not be immediately visible.

VfD has a big group of vigilant eyes, myself among them. But if I could
be of help in screening anon vandals, and helping newbies find the right
way, I'd sure rather spend my time on such a page. I propose this to the
powers that be for consideration.

Denni

--
? "Computers are stupid They only know the answers." -- Pablo Picasso
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Pocket Internet Explorer and other handheld devices

body:
We've had a few complaints about really bad page layout with the
MonoBook skin in Pocket Internet Explorer.

It would be a *great* help if someone with access to a PocketPC device
could look into this and try to tweak the CSS rules to where Pocket IE
will produce a non-crappy rendering. Does it support @media handheld
selectors? Is it triggering bad IE workarounds that don't work right on
it? Is it just inherently really bad? :)

As far as I can tell there is not a freely downloadable Pocket IE that
runs on 'real' PCs for web developers to test with, so we're totally
dependent on those with access to an actual device to do this.

Other handheld device browsers should be checked as well; those that
don't do CSS should look ok with the minimal structure of the xhtml_slim
base template, while those that sort-of support CSS might be messing up
like Pocket IE.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Some Restrictions May Apply

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Instead of putting the newbie/anon posts in an approval queue, let
> them go through to the wiki live and direct as they do now - but create
> a special: page specifically to display those contributions.

Like this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/newbies

This was added as a quick hack a week or so back and doesn't show the
usernames, hopefully it'll be fleshed out when someone has time.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Some Restrictions May Apply

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Instead of putting the newbie/anon posts in an approval queue, let
> them go through to the wiki live and direct as they do now - but create
> a special: page specifically to display those contributions.

Like this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/newbies

This was added as a quick hack a week or so back and doesn't show the
usernames, hopefully it'll be fleshed out when someone has time.

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

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Lir, Brion, Ed and Jeronim :-)

body:
Anthere wrote:
> Lir is currently asking for clarification for her ban from the english
> wikipedia, on the wikipedia-l. I do not think this is a topic for
> wikipedia-l.
> However, after I mentionned that to her, she answered she was banned
> from english wikipedia, from wikien-l and from irc, so wikipedia-l was
> the last place she could discuss her ban.
>
> I am sorry to ask this, but I would prefer that Lir presents her defense
> on the english wikipedia mailing list, since it is an english wikipedia
> issue. I do not think all languages have to be involved in local issues
> discussion. I do not think Lir ban is a wikipedia wide topic of
> discussion :-)
>
> Now, it has been going on for such a long time that I do not know what
> is the current status of Lir, with regards to her being allowed to edit.
> Did the AC pronounced her banned ? For which duration ?
> Is she really banned from the english mailing list ? Why was she ? Is it
> permanent ? Who decide who is banned from a list ?
> Is she really banned from irc as well ? Why ? Is it permanent ?

The following email addresses are banned from wikien-l:

lilianmatos at concite.sadistics.com
dreday1207 at mail15.com
jewel_tay771 at netzero.com
plautus at shaw.ca

Lir's a[name omitted for privacy reasons] at msn address doesn't seem to be subscribed to either
wikien-l or wikipedia-l, nor is it banned, so I can only assume the
posts were queued for moderation. If he's having trouble subscribing, he
can email me and I'll subscribe him using the administrative interface.

The current ban list for #wikipedia is:

creak!*@*
Editing*!*@*

A username ban on IRC is not a serious barrier to entry, just a hint
that the person in question is not wanted. I imagine Lir is referring to
the Editing* ban, which is odd since he denies being that person.

> I would have liked to go and see whether she was blocked or not on the
> english mailing list.
> However, I do not have any admin access to the mailing lists any more
> since Fire reorganised everything. Not even to the lists I administrated
> myself for a while :-)

Have you asked Fire for access?

> As far as I know, only 3 people have admin access now, brion, ed poor
> and jeronim.
> So, brion, ed and jeronim, could one of you please check if Lir has
> access or not ?

Now, you know how much I dislike seeing my name not mentioned, so I just
had to reply to this :) I'm pretty sure Fire sent the new administrator
password to all the people with shell access. Anyone with root access
could administer the lists by just changing the password temporarily.

> If Lir does not have access, who is willing to discuss with Lir offline ?

Lir is a liar. The technical evidence strongly suggests he's the same
person as "Editing Saddam Hussein".

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: you are very rude

body:
On Jun 29, 2004, at 11:13 AM, C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:

> *Lir, you may have read Brion and Tim Starling answers about you being
> banned from mailing lists and irc. You are not.
> **Would that be why, when I log into irc, it says I am banned? Have
> you considered that they are lying to you?

Perhaps the ban of Editing included an IP block as well, and the fact
that he was your sockpuppet has resulted in your being banned too?

-Snowspinner
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from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fwd: Multiple categories

body:
Nikola Smolenski wrote:

> I have made a patch which enables display of all articles that belong to
> multiple categories.

I think the following patch is slightly more efficient.

The database query itself is very inefficient though. If this was Perl,
I could make it way more efficient. In short, the "DISTINCT" and "ORDER
BY" are performance killers. They should be done in PHP instead.

Timwi
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: UTF-8, excuse my ignorance

body:
Gerard.Meijssen wrote:

> I remember somewhere that at conversion time the old stuff in articles
> are converted to UTF-8. At present I do my addition of all kinds of
> names for languages in the nl-wiktionary, words like ??? translate to
> [[ᎳᏛᏈ]]. This turns up perfectly well on the
> en:wikitonary. I just realised that this may not be as simple as that.
>
> My question, should these charactercodes be converted again on en:wiktionary ??

I'm not sure I understand your question. An inter-wiki link like
[[chr:ᎳᏛᏈ]] certainly works, regardless of whether the
wiki you put it on is in UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1. As for article titles, you
should not try to create articles on the English Wikipedia (or any other
ISO-8859-1 Wikipedia) that uses non-ISO-8859-1 characters. Since
chr.wikipedia.org is already on UTF-8, it is no problem there.

To save some disk space, it might be worth converting all the HTML
entities to UTF-8 characters when we convert the English Wikipedia, but
this is not strictly necessary.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Special:Myuserpage, Special:Myusertalk

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:

> So, I'm thinking it would be kind of useful to have two special pages:
> Special:Myuserpage and Special:Myusertalk.

I'm against this; redirects more than double the server response time.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: action=new

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:

> It's uncommon but not impossible
> that someone creates [[New page]] while I'm looking at this link, and
> when I click it to start a new page, there's text in the textarea.

Is that really so much of a problem? I would think it happens rarely
enough that no newbie will probably ever see this more than once, and
experienced users will already know what was going on.

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Rules vs. Anarchy

body:
Jim Cecropia wrote:

> I don't know. My experience seems to suggest that Americans are fairy
> ignorant of other nation's restrictive laws, giving rise to the belief
> that other nations are uniformly at least as liberal or more liberal
> than the U.S.

Oh, really? ... My impression was rather that Americans tend to think of
their own country as being the most liberal and most "humane" on the
planet. It would seem plausible, as most of the time they hear about
situations in other nations, it's in the news when some oppressive
regime (perhaps tinted with a condemning remark on communism) is
mentioned as having done something that would be unthinkable in the US.


from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject: [Wikitech-l] __TOC__

body:
I've just committed a new magic word __TOC__ that inserts the toc at the
place it is found. This implies __FORCETOC__.
--
Gabriel Wicke


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Some Restrictions May Apply

body:
On 06/29/04 23:26, Denni wrote:

> I put forward as a suggestion that newbie and anon postings be screened,
> similarly to VfDs, for the first few weeks or first few dozens worth of
> posts. The software is in place to track x number of posts and shunt
> those not meeting certain criteria through to a fastedit page; while
> newbies/anons can edit in what seems to be a transparent manner to them,
> Wikipedia can also monitor for malicious edits, edits made out of
> ignorance (an article submitted intended as a userpage, for instance,
> that ends up in article namespace), or edits made similarly (as was my
> error - editing the article instead of its related talk page).

This is a technical solution to what is, after all, a social problem.
Worse, it's a harsh and exclusionary one.

Let me suggest an alternative:

The above requires someone to care to check the newbie/anon queue.
As such, let's assume we have sufficient people on hand who care about
this enough to do it.

Instead of putting the newbie/anon posts in an approval queue, let
them go through to the wiki live and direct as they do now - but create
a special: page specifically to display those contributions.

Then the sufficient people to monitor this stuff will have technical
help in doing so, and we would have avoided putting a restriction on
the wiki we could do without.

What do you think?

(I have no idea if this would be easy or hard or what to code. I can
see it being very useful. Though I doubt I'd be monitoring it a whole
lot myself.)

This should probably be discussed on wikipedia-l, not wiki-en - I've
crossposted it there and set reply-to there.

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Pocket Internet Explorer and other handheld devices

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> Does it support @media handheld selectors?

It does. (Unbelievable.)

> Is it just inherently really bad? :)

It is pretty bad in many respects. For example, it seems to ignore the
"display" attribute, so "display: block" and especially "display: none"
don't have an effect; as a consequence, every external link has their
URL next to it, which is pretty bad *especially* on a small-screen
device. :-(

Hoping for Pocket Firefox,
Timwi


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mentoring system (was: Some Restrictions May Apply)

body:
In response to Denni and Christopher,

I have been in my company's mentoring program for over two years,
providing guidance to high school students at LaGuardia High School,
which prepares public high school students for professional careers in
dance, music or drama (the movie and TV series Fame both dramatized
student life there).

Now in it's 14th year, it is the longest running and most successful of
my company's volunteer programs.

The key is sponsorship and organization.

First of all, New York City _has_ a mentoring program for its schools.
There are mentoring coordinators both at my company, and at the local
high school. We organizers all meet each other at least three times a
year.

At Wikipedia, I used to follow newbies around and offer them help, but
then I got swept up in Jimbo's proposal to have a Mediation Committee
and an Arbitration Committee. I agreed to serve as a mediator, both on
the official (appointed) committee and later in Alex's grassroots
(elected) Member Advocate project.

These things didn't bear much fruit, because they are "courts of last
resort". Advocacy, mediation, arbitration -- these are all legal
mechanisms by which we turn the gears of justice.

Wouldn't it be better to plant seeds? And water them? And give them
sunlight and fresh air? (That is, guidance and praise and
encouragement?)

My response to the Six Month Experiment of having committees is that it
takes a lot of the work load off of Jimbo's shoulders and that it
performs a necessary task rather well. But it is not sufficient, in and
of itself, to provide the nurturing and nourishment needed for Wikipedia
to grow to full flower.

We need something more, like a Mentoring System.

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


from_name: Pablo Saratxaga

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: a question about ISO639 language codes

body:
Kaixo!
Li Wed, 30 Jun 2004 13:36:22 +0800,
 YiDa Chiang <ccpz at sparc20.hchs.hc.edu.tw> scrijheut:

 YC> hello,I'm now translating wiki into Traditional Chinese
 YC> but chinese language code "zh" is used for Simplified Chinese
 YC> so can I use "zhtw" for Traditional Chinese translation? or else?

ISO 639 codes are only about languages, not about writting conventions.
Traditional and simplified chinese aren't distinguished; it is the same
for languages like Uzbek or Serbian that can be written in cyrillic
or latin.
"zh" is not "simplified Chinese", it is simply "Chinese", without any
more information.

An usual way to disambiguate traditional chinese and simplified chinese
is to use the language code with the country code of the biggest one
where each sort of writting is used, eg: "CN" and "TW";
that gives "zh-CN" for simplified and "zh-TW" for traditional.
That is used a lot in multilingual web sites that have traditional
and simplified chinese pages.

--
? bient?t,
Pablo Saratxaga           PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: you are very rude

body:
On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 20:36:16 -0500, Phil Sandifer
<sandifer at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Perhaps the ban of Editing included an IP block as well, and the fact
> that he was your sockpuppet has resulted in your being banned too?

Well, if there's an IP block, it wasn't put on by #wikipedia
operators- it would have been put on by Freenode operators. The only
on-channel bans are those listed before- anyone named Creak or anyone
with a name beginning with Editing. Channel bans of this sort do NOT
translate into IP bans by any method besides a human operator.

Lir, did you get yourself [[K-line]]d?


body:
--- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:

> Wouldn't it be better to plant seeds? And water them? And give them
> sunlight and fresh air? (That is, guidance and praise and
> encouragement?)

yes, of course.

> My response to the Six Month Experiment of having committees is
> that it
> takes a lot of the work load off of Jimbo's shoulders and that it
> performs a necessary task rather well. But it is not sufficient, in
> and
> of itself, to provide the nurturing and nourishment needed for
> Wikipedia
> to grow to full flower.

Agreed.

> We need something more, like a Mentoring System.

Also agreed, but it needs to be informal.
People don't need to be admins to be mentors. Also, it needs to be
completely voluntary. Offer help on talk pages, offer help on
personal pages, etc.

I wonder to what extent it sould be possible to allow for system
messages, to be seen by the person the next time they refresh... This
would be more like a slow im, with no history being kept, but rather
an informal communication. This way, next to the anon's IP, there
could be a "send text message" which would appear the next time the
user requested a W page.

Just kicking up dirt as usual.

You know, the occasional "nice work" and "wow, thanks for fixing my
typo" go a long way to encourage people.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Blocking hiatus

body:
On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 13:37:26 +0100, J.F. de Wolff
<jfdwolff at doctors.org.uk> wrote:
> I'm an admin on en, and have blocked myself for a week for a wikiholiday. I
> happened to check my watchlist at work (while being logged in), and
> discovered rapidly that the admin "rollback" feature is not inhibited by
> blocking (see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=Jfdwolff).
> Okay, the blocking of admins is a rare occurrence, but I believe this
> security issue might need addressing...

Admins can unblock themselves while blocked, as well. If this is
really an issue, the admin in question can be desysopped.


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mediawiki automatic documentation

body:
Bonjour,

I used Doxygen to generate a documentation of Mediawiki software.

You can see it at http://aoineko.free.fr/doxygen/ in HTML, Latex or RTF
format.

I don't know if someone had done it before, but it's very useful for
developers.

If you want, I can generate this documentation for each Mediawiki release
and put it on my server or somewhere on Wikimedia servers.

If you want to do it your self, here are the links:

- Doxygen download (GNU-GPL):
http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/download.html#latestsrc

- "Dot" tool to generate graphs:
http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/download.html

- Doxygen configuration file for Mediawiki:
http://aoineko.free.fr/doxygen/mediawiki.dox

Aoineko


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: you are very rude

body:
C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
> *Lir, you may have read Brion and Tim Starling answers about you being
> banned from mailing lists and irc. You are not.
> **Would that be why, when I log into irc, it says I am banned? Have you
> considered that they are lying to you?

Anyone can check the ban list by logging in to irc.freenode.net and
typing "/mode #wikipedia b", or some client-specific equivalent.

> *Your posts probably do not go through because you may not have any
> account. This is a public mailing list, *requiring* registration.
> **The list does NOT require registration.

Yes it does. I just subscribed you, and set your membership to "nomail".
Now you'll be able post there without your posts being queued for
moderation. Now quit your whinging.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] lies lies lies

body:
You people just lie all the time. This website is an amazing experiment in groupthink, juvenile insults, and a refusal to acknowledge even the most basic processes of judicial review. Not only was I banned; but, you people are so wrapped up in your deceit, you can't even acknowledge the ban! Lol -- its fascinating how messed up this site is becoming. When is the cabal going to grow up; all that power-tripping is gonna take its toll on you.
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from_name: rkscience100 at yahoo.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Thanks!

body:
Your document is attached.
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from_name: Karlheinz Toni

subject: AW: [Wikitech-l] Re: action=new

body:
Hi there,

is there any tutorial on how to adapt the layout of the whole page? What
files do I have to adapt? Where can I add another layout, so that one can
choose it in the private preferences menu?

Any ideas or references?

Sincerely
Charly

> -----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-
> bounces at Wikipedia.org] Im Auftrag von Timwi
> Gesendet: Mittwoch, 30. Juni 2004 00:47
> An: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> Betreff: [Wikitech-l] Re: action=new
>
> Evan Prodromou wrote:
>
> > It's uncommon but not impossible
> > that someone creates [[New page]] while I'm looking at this link, and
> > when I click it to start a new page, there's text in the textarea.
>
> Is that really so much of a problem? I would think it happens rarely
> enough that no newbie will probably ever see this more than once, and
> experienced users will already know what was going on.
>
> Timwi
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: AW: [Wikitech-l] Re: action=new

body:
On Wed, 2004-06-30 at 12:29 +0200, Karlheinz Toni wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> is there any tutorial on how to adapt the layout of the whole page? What
> files do I have to adapt? Where can I add another layout, so that one can
> choose it in the private preferences menu?
>
> Any ideas or references?

See http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_styles and
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_of_user_styles. You can get a
blank slate for your own skin by choosing 'MySkin' in the prefs. All css
is pulled from User:you/myskin.css in that case.

Please start a new thread if the mail isn't really a reply to the
action=new one.

--
Gabriel Wicke


from_name: YiDa Chiang

subject: [Wikitech-l] a question about ISO639 language codes

body:
hello,I'm now translating wiki into Traditional Chinese
but chinese language code "zh" is used for Simplified Chinese
so can I use "zhtw" for Traditional Chinese translation? or else?


from_name: J.F. de Wolff

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Blocking hiatus

body:
I'm an admin on en, and have blocked myself for a week for a wikiholiday. I
happened to check my watchlist at work (while being logged in), and
discovered rapidly that the admin "rollback" feature is not inhibited by
blocking (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=Jfdwolff).
Okay, the blocking of admins is a rare occurrence, but I believe this
security issue might need addressing...

Jacob


from_name: Arno M

subject: [WikiEN-l] Avoid attachments

body:
There seems to be a tendency amongst some users to e-mail using attachments.

Could I remind them that this will produce irritating "An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
" error messages? Just send them in plain text.
--
_______________________________________________
Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages
http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp?SRC=lycos10


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [WikiEN-l] Some Restrictions May Apply

body:
That would be great if it had usernames, but what happens if someone
is using the username 'newbies' ?:=)

On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 19:06:46 -0700, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
> > Instead of putting the newbie/anon posts in an approval queue, let
> > them go through to the wiki live and direct as they do now - but create
> > a special: page specifically to display those contributions.
>
> Like this?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/newbies
>
> This was added as a quick hack a week or so back and doesn't show the
> usernames, hopefully it'll be fleshed out when someone has time.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
>


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikitech-l] Antispam and antivirus ?

body:
Hi,

I think we should have some filtrer for the mailing lists against spams and
virus.

At least to reject non valid domains and virus with a few regex. This doesn't
take much CPU power, like a full antispam and virus does.

I can help setting one if needed.

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


from_name: Peter Jaros

subject: [WikiEN-l] Avoid attachments

body:
On Jun 30, 2004, at 3:48 AM, Arno M wrote:

> There seems to be a tendency amongst some users to e-mail using
> attachments.
>
> Could I remind them that this will produce irritating "An HTML
> attachment was scrubbed...
> " error messages? Just send them in plain text.

On Jun 30, 2004, at 6:00 AM, rkscience100 at yahoo.com wrote:

> Your document is attached.
[<document.pif> not quoted]
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Er, that's not good.  If we're blocking attachments, why do worms
like this get through?

Peter

                            -- ---<>--- --
                  A house without walls cannot fall.
     Help build the world's largest encyclopedia at Wikipedia.org
                            -- ---<>--- --


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] lies lies lies

body:
--- C A S [name omitted for privacy reasons] <a[name omitted for privacy reasons]@msn.com> wrote:
> You people just lie all the time. This website is an amazing
> experiment in groupthink, juvenile insults, and a refusal to
> acknowledge even the most basic processes of judicial review. Not
> only was I banned; but, you people are so wrapped up in your
> deceit, you can't even acknowledge the ban! Lol -- its fascinating
> how messed up this site is becoming. When is the cabal going to
> grow up; all that power-tripping is gonna take its toll on you.

Dear Adam,

  I was wondering about all this myself, and was troubled. I am very
thankful for your frank evaluation of the matter.

  As a long-term contributor to this project, I have an interest in
seeing it go forward in the best possible manner.

  Of course, I understand your frustration, and while I hoped you
might have chosen a different approach, I nevertheless respect your
opinion and your desire to communicate it to us.

  I am looking forward to work with you to better Wikipedia. I
believe you have a lot to contribute as you seem dedicated and
indefatiguable.

  On a more personal note, I sincerely hope you have overcome some of
the issues that had plagued you in times past.

  Again, I look forward to your contributions to the project.

  Sincerely,

  Chris Mahan

  PS: While some people might see this as sarcastic, it is not at all
of this sort, as I hope you understand.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: Dan Drake

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Rules vs. Anarchy

body:
On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 22:51:54 UTC, Timwi
<timwi at gmx.net> wrote:

> Jim Cecropia wrote:
>
> > I don't know. My experience seems to suggest that Americans are fairy
> > ignorant of other nation's restrictive laws, giving rise to the belief
> > that other nations are uniformly at least as liberal or more liberal
> > than the U.S.
>
> Oh, really? ... My impression was rather that Americans tend to think of
> their own country as being the most liberal and most "humane" on the
> planet. It would seem plausible, as most of the time they hear about
> situations in other nations, it's in the news when some oppressive
> regime (perhaps tinted with a condemning remark on communism) is
> mentioned as having done something that would be unthinkable in the US.

Well, I wasn't trying to start a discussion of what Americans are really
like; quite the reverse.  But I think both of these positions are largely
right, as was the one I expressed before.  Here's the amazing, unheard-of
secret: not all Americans think alike all the time.  That was the point of
my post.

Still, consider this: a person may believe that his country does something
better than most of the world does (to be concrete, let's take the matter
of having an independent judiciary that is largely in the hands of people
who understand the concept of due process of law and even approve of it),
and he may even be right; but when he comes face to face with the places
that really are worse, the reality may be shocking.  Thus I reconcile the
two positions.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Pocket Internet Explorer and other handheld
	devices

body:
Rowan Collins wrote:
> Actually, I think hiding things using CSS is probably a rather bad
> idea anyway - I know it's kind of cool that it's possible, and it's
> certainly an elegant solution where available, but invisibility is one
> attribute that really doesn't 'degrade elegantly' if unavailable.

Actually, that's exactly an instance of elegant degradation. In
plaintext you get the full information: brief link text plus the URL.
With CSS on the web page, we can hide the URL since you'll see it when
hovering over the link anyway.

> I was thinking of pointing this out somewhere before, if it hasn't
> been already, since text-based browsers (for instance) have the same
> problem. It looks especially ugly for footnote-style links ("[1]" et
> al)

We ought to be producing actual footnotes for footnote-style links, but
iirc we don't yet.

> and links typed in the form "[http://example.com
> http://example.com]" - although the latter are broken at the moment
> anyway. :-/

That should never even happen -- you'd write just http://example.com.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Some Restrictions May Apply

body:
On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 02:06:46 UTC, Brion Vibber
<brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> David Gerard wrote:
> > Instead of putting the newbie/anon posts in an approval queue, let
> > them go through to the wiki live and direct as they do now - but create
> > a special: page specifically to display those contributions.
>
> Like this?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/newbies
>
> This was added as a quick hack a week or so back and doesn't show the
> usernames, hopefully it'll be fleshed out when someone has time.

Nice feature.

I'd like to toss a couple of ideas out, without attachment to the results,
having been on the receiving end of enough "why don't you just program
this" items to last a lifetime.

These lines could be sorted by the submitter ot the change, turning the
faceless entities into something resembling people.  At present, of
course, if an edit looks like vandalism, one can check User Contributions
to see if that's the user's pattern of behavior; but having the user's
edits grouped together in this way would encourage looking at them
together, which would automatically bring out any patterns.

Further: a list of recent edits by randomly selected anons & newbies could
be a sort of alternate watchlist.  When I've made my daily check that the
articles I know about haven't been crapped on, I click on the alternate
list, and see what a few random new editors are doing.  Somebody else
clicks and gets a different list.  If a bunch of people did this, we'd
have a much improved spotting of new vandals, misguided flaming newbies,
and astoundingly good new contributors.  It could feed into some kind of
mentoring, as advocated by Ed Poor.

If the practice of watching Recent Chagnes is getting overwhelmed by the
mass of new data, something like this might be a useful replacement.


body:
--- Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:

> We already have it: Edit the User_talk page of a user, even one
> only
> known by an IP address; the message "You have new messages" will
> appear on their screen until they follow the link. It is indeed
> very
> encouraging as a new user (I must start doing it more myself...)
> :)

Well, i was thinking of putting the message itself. Few newbies will
click on "You have a new message" because that sounds like spam.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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


from_name: Geoff Burling

body:
On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, Rowan Collins wrote:

> > I wonder to what extent it sould be possible to allow for system
> > messages, to be seen by the person the next time they refresh... This
> > would be more like a slow im, with no history being kept, but rather
> > an informal communication. This way, next to the anon's IP, there
> > could be a "send text message" which would appear the next time the
> > user requested a W page.
>
> We already have it: Edit the User_talk page of a user, even one only
> known by an IP address; the message "You have new messages" will
> appear on their screen until they follow the link. It is indeed very
> encouraging as a new user (I must start doing it more myself...)
> :)
>
Just as something for all to think about, for the last couple of months,
I've been making edits to WP from work without logging in. I'm not adding
anything controversial thru my "sock puppet" -- unless fixing typos & bad
grammar is considered insidiously pushing a POV -- & I would rather not
draw my employer's attention to my online activities between 8:00 &
5:00 (after all, I should be working ;-).

However, I just noticed today that I've managed to make something like
70 edits from a single IP address, & no one's seemed to notice. Not that
I care, but one has to wonder how many more anonymous contributors are
quietly working away on a regular basis, adding positively to Wikipedia
without anyone noticing.

I guess it's true what they say about squeaky wheels.

Geoff


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] foundation list

body:
I have now on three separate occasions in the last month tried to
subscribe to the foundation mailing list with absolutely no result.
What's happening there?

Ec


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] __TOC__

body:
> I've just committed a new magic word __TOC__ that inserts the toc at the
> place it is found. This implies __FORCETOC__.

Thank you! Now I can stop trying to come up with headings for
paragraphs that don't need them, just to make the ToC come after the
lead-in; it's led to some awfully odd and forced headings... :D

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] foundation list

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> I have now on three separate occasions in the last month tried to
> subscribe to the foundation mailing list with absolutely no result.
> What's happening there?

No idea, but I've just subscribed you to it manually.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
> It is pretty bad in many respects. For example, it seems to ignore the
> "display" attribute, so "display: block" and especially "display: none"
> don't have an effect; as a consequence, every external link has their
> URL next to it, which is pretty bad *especially* on a small-screen
> device. :-(

Actually, I think hiding things using CSS is probably a rather bad
idea anyway - I know it's kind of cool that it's possible, and it's
certainly an elegant solution where available, but invisibility is one
attribute that really doesn't 'degrade elegantly' if unavailable.

I was thinking of pointing this out somewhere before, if it hasn't
been already, since text-based browsers (for instance) have the same
problem. It looks especially ugly for footnote-style links ("[1]" et
al) and links typed in the form "[http://example.com
http://example.com]" - although the latter are broken at the moment
anyway. :-/

I'm not sure what a better solution would be, but maybe some
JavaScript voodoo to add them or uncomment them. In general, I dislike
relying on JavaScript even more than I dislike relying on CSS, but I
accept that this option is never going to be viable server-side, and
presumably people wanted it.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
> I wonder to what extent it sould be possible to allow for system
> messages, to be seen by the person the next time they refresh... This
> would be more like a slow im, with no history being kept, but rather
> an informal communication. This way, next to the anon's IP, there
> could be a "send text message" which would appear the next time the
> user requested a W page.

We already have it: Edit the User_talk page of a user, even one only
known by an IP address; the message "You have new messages" will
appear on their screen until they follow the link. It is indeed very
encouraging as a new user (I must start doing it more myself...)
:)

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: __TOC__

body:
Rowan Collins wrote:

>>I've just committed a new magic word __TOC__ that inserts the toc at the
>>place it is found. This implies __FORCETOC__.
>
> Thank you! Now I can stop trying to come up with headings for
> paragraphs that don't need them, just to make the ToC come after the
> lead-in; it's led to some awfully odd and forced headings... :D

Are you saying you're going to have unheaded text after the TOC? I
strongly disagree to that; that is very bad/unprofessional page layout.


body:
Rowan Collins wrote:

> Actually, I think hiding things using CSS is probably a rather bad
> idea anyway

Although your reasons seem sound, your stance raises the question: Does
that mean you reject the idea of using the same HTML for different
layouts? Thing is, that is the whole purpose of CSS.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Antispam and antivirus ?

body:
Yann Forget wrote:

> I think we should have some filtrer for the mailing lists against spams and
> virus.

How come I never see spam or viruses here?

Is it because friendly gmane folk manually delete them from the server?
If that is so, I can only recommend strongly everyone use gmane's NNTP
interface too! :) If, however, gmane have automated spam filtering
mechanisms installed, it means legitimate messages may sometimes not
show up. Worrying...

Timwi


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Printable links (was Re: Pocket Internet Explorer and
 other handheld devices)

body:
Gabriel Wicke wrote:
> There is a simple css-only solution in commonPrint.css, currently
> commented out. Drawback: doesn't work with older browsers like IE, but
> is fine in Opera, Moz/Firefox and derivates, Safari etc.

The reason we commented it out was that it went overboard, putting link
text in all kinds of places it shouldn't: interwiki links, links where
the link text was the URL itself, etc.

This should probably be fixed by marking print-worthy links with an
appropriate class name (class="external printable" ?), but it still
won't be compatible with stoopid IE unless a JavaScript hack is used.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>> and links typed in the form "[http://example.com
>> http://example.com]" - although the latter are broken at the moment
>> anyway. :-/
>
> That should never even happen -- you'd write just http://example.com.

People use the [http://example.com http://example.com] syntax because
our parser is not intelligent enough to ignore punctuation marks after
the URL; most commonly the problem occurs with parentheses.

Personally, though, I would very much prefer if every link had a
sensible link text. While I admit the URL is better than "click here", I
still think it's pretty lame, and you can *always* find something better.

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Mentoring system (was: Some Restrictions May Apply)

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:

> --- Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>We already have it: Edit the User_talk page of a user, even one
>>only
>>known by an IP address; the message "You have new messages" will
>>appear on their screen until they follow the link. It is indeed
>>very
>>encouraging as a new user (I must start doing it more myself...)
>>:)
>
> Well, i was thinking of putting the message itself. Few newbies will
> click on "You have a new message" because that sounds like spam.

Maybe not spam, but many adverts on the Internet say something like "You
have new messages" to get na?ve people to click on them.

I generally quite like the idea, and I think it would have a lot of very
useful and productive uses. However, I would very much like to see a
"message log" - maybe something like [[User:Timwi/Received messages]]
and [[User:Timwi/Sent messages]]. Of course, those should be
wiki-editable, so the user can manually delete them or move them to an
archive page if they think it's getting too long.

Timwi


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] American concepts of justice (was: Rules vs. Anarchy)

body:
Dan Drake wrote,

> Well, I wasn't trying to start a discussion of what Americans
> are really
> like; quite the reverse.  But I think both of these positions
> are largely
> right, as was the one I expressed before.  Here's the
> amazing, unheard-of
> secret: not all Americans think alike all the time.  That was
> the point of my post.
>
> Still, consider this: a person may believe that his country
> does something better than most of the world does (to be
> concrete, let's take the matter
> of having an independent judiciary that is largely in the
> hands of people
> who understand the concept of due process of law and even
> approve of it),
> and he may even be right; but when he comes face to face with
> the places
> that really are worse, the reality may be shocking.  Thus I
> reconcile the
> two positions.

Dan, would you please weave this insight into a Wikipedia article about
America or Americans? Or start a new article called [[American concepts
of justice]]? Or maybe put this into [[independent judiciary]], as part
of a series on [[American government]]?

I think it's important for the Wikipedia articles to reflect that fact
that many Americans take just the attitude you described above:

  that America "does something better than most of the world does" by
  "having an independent judiciary that is largely in the hands of
people
  who understand the concept of due process of law and even approve of
it"

Ed Poor


body:
--- Andre Engels <andrewiki at freemail.nl> wrote:

> Then allow people to get a list of badly-trusted changes. This way
> we can
> make it easier to have check-ups cover all messages instead of this
> one not
> being checked and that one five times.

I like the concept.
However, I would like to see little checkmarks next to the edits.
with the name of the checker on mouseover. Visually, then, the number
of checkmarks would help show who has looked at it.
Actually, since it would not confer a seal of approval, I would
rather see a pair of eyes, pair of glasses of some sort, to simply
indicate that a particular edit has been looked at, rather than give
the perhaps false sense of having been "validated and accepted".

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
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from_name: Anthere

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Christopher Mahan wrote:
>
>> --- Rowan Collins
>> <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> We already have it: Edit the User_talk page of a user, even one
>>> only
>>> known by an IP address; the message "You have new messages" will
>>> appear on their screen until they follow the link. It is indeed
>>> very
>>> encouraging as a new user (I must start doing it more myself...)
>>> :)
>>
>>
>> Well, i was thinking of putting the message itself. Few newbies will
>> click on "You have a new message" because that sounds like spam.
>
>
> Maybe not spam, but many adverts on the Internet say something like "You
> have new messages" to get na?ve people to click on them.
>
> I generally quite like the idea, and I think it would have a lot of very
> useful and productive uses. However, I would very much like to see a
> "message log" - maybe something like [[User:Timwi/Received messages]]
> and [[User:Timwi/Sent messages]]. Of course, those should be
> wiki-editable, so the user can manually delete them or move them to an
> archive page if they think it's getting too long.
>
> Timwi

And what about "User:Timwi wrote you a message" instead of "You have new
messages"

It removes anonymity, sounds less like spam and is more informative
(requires probably a little tech tweak I suppose though :-))

ant


body:
--- Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:

> Just as something for all to think about, for the last couple of
> months,
> I've been making edits to WP from work without logging in. I'm not
> adding
> anything controversial thru my "sock puppet" -- unless fixing typos
> & bad
> grammar is considered insidiously pushing a POV -- & I would rather
> not
> draw my employer's attention to my online activities between 8:00 &
> 5:00 (after all, I should be working ;-).

<humor>
You insidious POV pusher!!! Ohhh, the Irony! SockPuppetry at its
finest!!! Plus, getting paid while doing it...
</humor>

> However, I just noticed today that I've managed to make something
> like
> 70 edits from a single IP address, & no one's seemed to notice. Not
> that
> I care, but one has to wonder how many more anonymous contributors
> are
> quietly working away on a regular basis, adding positively to
> Wikipedia
> without anyone noticing.

Your point is well taken.
I imagine people have many reasons not to log in at times, from fear
of the Dreaded Year-End Employee Evaluation, to fear of governmental
retribution.

Effectively, anons cannot be assumed to be newbies.

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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from_name: Slow Poke

subject: [Wikitech-l] postgreSQL port

body:
On Thu, 1 Jul 2004 15:22:28 +0200, Enrico Weigelt <weigelt at metux.de> wrote:
>
>
> Hi folks,
>
> is there anyone working on porting mediawiki to postgreSQL ?

Yes, someone was doing that:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2004-June/000535.html

Check the http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-cvs/ archives
for specifics

slowpoke

>
> cu
> --
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Enrico Weigelt    ==   metux IT service
>
>   phone:     +49 36207 519931         www:       http://www.metux.de/
>   fax:       +49 36207 519932         email:     contact at metux.de
>   cellphone: +49 174 7066481
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>  -- DSL ab 0 Euro. -- statische IP -- UUCP -- Hosting -- Webshops --
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Thumbnails

body:
After discussion with some people (especially Tannin) on the
en.wikipedia, I propose a few changes (more like additions) to the
thumbnail function.

Here's the "main proposal":

    [[image:bla.jpg|thumb|some text]] generates a normal thumbnail
    [[image:bla.jpg|thumb=bla_small.jpg|some text]] uses "bla_small.jpg"
as the thumbnail

This associates the manually created thumbnail with the larger image in
a machine-readable fashion. It should only be used if the manual
thumbnail is of significant better quality than the automatic one, or if
the manual thumbnail shows an alternate view (e.g., only a part) of the
larger image.

Additionally, the automatic thumbnail generation should be improved:
* Add a little sharpening, at least to photos (.jpg/.jpeg).
* Apparently, automatically generated thumbnails look nicer when they
are recaled by an exact even number. For example, for a 640x480 image, a
thumbnail of 200px is requested, generate one with a width of 213px
instead, as this is a factor of 33.3%, or 1/3. I propose to use a
variation of up to 10% from the requested width.

If there is no special reason *not* to do this, implementation can start
soon. At least the "main proposal" should be easy enough to code.

Magnus


subject: [Wikitech-l] Thumbnails


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: __TOC__

body:
> > Thank you! Now I can stop trying to come up with headings for
> > paragraphs that don't need them, just to make the ToC come after the
> > lead-in; it's led to some awfully odd and forced headings... :D
>
> Are you saying you're going to have unheaded text after the TOC? I
> strongly disagree to that; that is very bad/unprofessional page layout.

Well, I'm not going to go round actively taking headers out, but some
of the articles I've edited have had sections at the beginning which
really defied description - one of them ended up called "Generality",
which really isn't very nice; but, if the ToC sitting in the middle of
unheadered text looks even worse, I shan't use it.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
> People use the [http://example.com http://example.com] syntax because
> our parser is not intelligent enough to ignore punctuation marks after
> the URL; most commonly the problem occurs with parentheses.

Yes, and I'm 99% sure there used to be a style-guide suggesting people
use this rather than assuming the software would always autolink
plaintext URLs. It seems to have gone now (or I can't find it), and
perhaps it dated to when the software was in the process of being
rewritten or something.

> Personally, though, I would very much prefer if every link had a
> sensible link text. While I admit the URL is better than "click here", I
> still think it's pretty lame, and you can *always* find something better.

Yes, there are a few instances where it's valid - like, in order to
construct a sentence which tells the user what the address is for
future reference, and turns that address into a link at the same time
in case they want to go there right now; but mostly, it's just links
waiting for a decent description.

It's bug #974082, BTW.

> Actually, that's exactly an instance of elegant degradation. In
> plaintext you get the full information: brief link text plus the URL.
> With CSS on the web page, we can hide the URL since you'll see it when
> hovering over the link anyway.

I see your point, but this is information that neither Wikipedia, nor
any other website I can think of, traditionally shows *at all* [even
Slashdot only puts the domain]. People are usually quite happy to let
their browsers tell them where links head if they want to, and writing
out the whole URL can take up quite a bit of space and rather breaks
up the flow of text and layout that the article's author(s) thought
they were creating.

> Although your reasons seem sound, your stance raises the question: Does
> that mean you reject the idea of using the same HTML for different
> layouts? Thing is, that is the whole purpose of CSS.

Well, I guess it does rather raise that question, but my answer would
be that I love the concept of CSS, and the idea of using one page for
multiple formattings is great. But in reality, like all things
web-based, it has to be done in a way that makes no assumptions about
the client's environment - and since it's entirely a client-side
technology, that means a lot of compromises. So, for instance, the
non-CSS'd version of a page is best written in an order that will make
sense for a linear display (e.g. the venerable lynx). I think the
non-CSS'd version having the same *information* as the CSS'd one - no
more, no less - is similar, but that's just an opinion.

I had another thought, though, about a possibly nicer way of having
this option if people really want it - enable it in MySkin but not
Monobook, so that people can reconstruct "monobook but with visible
link text" if they want, but it's not there by default. That may be
more coding than it's worth though, if MySkin is just literally
MonoBook minus the CSS; I don't really understand how the skinning
works.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
> Yann Forget wrote:
>
> > I think we should have some filtrer for the mailing lists against spams and
> > virus.
And Timwi answered:
> How come I never see spam or viruses here?

Because this list is moderated for non-subscribers, and so spam will
just find its way into the moderation queue and be rejected when
someone logs into the admin interface. How much of a chore said
administration is becoming, with so many lists, and a no doubt rising
level of spam, only they would know.

As for a virus checker, it is of course a good idea to have those at
as many levels as possible, and moderation wouldn't help that, because
they tend to arrive from "real" people...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Thumbnails

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> Here's the "main proposal":
>
>    [[image:bla.jpg|thumb|some text]] generates a normal thumbnail
>    [[image:bla.jpg|thumb=bla_small.jpg|some text]] uses "bla_small.jpg"
> as the thumbnail
>
> This associates the manually created thumbnail with the larger image in
> a machine-readable fashion. It should only be used if the manual
> thumbnail is of significant better quality than the automatic one, or if
> the manual thumbnail shows an alternate view (e.g., only a part) of the
> larger image.

I'm neither voicing opposition nor support here, but I would like to
point out that this is kind of asking for trouble: More and more people
are inevitably going to claim that their manual thumbnails have
"significantly better quality"...

Timwi