from_name: Kiss All

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.3.3 released

body:
Is there any function like online auto-update for MediaWiki? I mean
the same one as windows xp's patching.
It would be nice to provide this function to relieve the
administrators of MediaWiki.
:-)

On Thu, 09 Sep 2004 00:22:38 -0700, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> MediaWiki 1.3.3 is a bug fix release. In particular upgrading is
> recommended to anyone running a non-English wiki where some links
> mysteriously don't work in 1.3.2.
>
> Changes from 1.3.2:
> * Fix for long numeric page titles
> * Fix Go search for "0", numeric almost-self-links
> * Avoid caching of pages with "You have new messages" headers
> * Fix for upgrades as non-root users from 1.2 command-line installs.
> * Fix for $wgDebugDumpSql debug mode.
> * $wgExtraNamespaces setting for configuring additional namespaces
> ~  (see note in DefaultSettings.php)
> * 'recache' on query pages now disabled when miser mode is on; special
> ~  case the global settings in your LocalSettings.php to do automatic
> ~  updates.
> * Don't block UTF-8 titles containing byte 0xA0 (bug added in 1.3.2)
> * Watch/unwatch tabs now shown on edit pages in MonoBook.
> * Fix default skin in Irish localization (ga)
> * Add Traditional Chinese localization (zh-tw)
> * Changed default sortkey of subcategories. Don't include "Category:"
> ~  prefix any longer
> * More helpful info on spam catcher.
> * Allow larger offsets for queries such as Special:Listusers
> * Semicolon (;) added to French non-break space rules
> * Possible fix for some install errors with path names permission
> ~  problems.
> * Removed [[Project:All system messages]], which has been superceded by
> ~  the much faster [[Special:Allmessages]]. This speeds up installation
> ~  considerably.
>
> Anyone still running the 1.3 beta releases is _strongly_ recommended to
> upgrade to the current code due to numerous fixed bugs and a security
> vulnerability in the betas with some PHP configurations.
>
> Note that while MediaWiki through 1.1 required register_globals to be
> on, 1.2 and 1.3 *do not*. If you have register_globals on, you should
> turn it off unless you are absolutely sure you require it for some other
> package. See http://php.net/register_globals for general information.
>
> Release notes:
> http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=266667
>
> Download:
> http://prdownloads.sf.net/wikipedia/mediawiki-1.3.3.tar.gz?download
>
> Wiki admin help mailing list:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
>
> Bug report system:
> http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/
>
> Play "stump the developers" live on IRC:
> #mediawiki on irc.freenode.net
>
> - -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iD8DBQFBQAS+wRnhpk1wk44RAgDoAKCEKB4CM4QGQdVX+4qPDVUEF8daVgCgtww8
> 1URI1OkpcBWItRzku5UZVe8=
> =wF9S
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Be good....


list: foundation-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Delirium

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Launch of the Wikimedia Commons

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Each of these features must be judged on its merits. As you pointed out on
>wikitech-l, the template system provides us with a direct path towards
>metadata. An existing gallery system is not an option as this is not what
>we are trying to create here. Users are encouraged, for example, to edit
>captions as they see fit, or to replace images with higher quality
>versions. We want to use all the cool features a wiki gives us - recent
>changes, diffs, page histories, and so on.
>
>Wikis are something fundamentally new. Old software concepts do not apply.
>
>
I don't think that's really true: A wiki is just something you can edit
from a web browser.  Most of what it does is does in clunkier form
elsewhere (editing the pages with emacs and diff'ing using CVS is a
trivial example), but wikis make it easier for a non-technical user.

This gallery really should have the benefits of both editability and
strong database support.  Whether it's better to start from an existing
gallery system and add editability to it, or start from a wiki and add
metadata/EXIF/etc. to it is largely a matter of preference and ease of
technical implementation.

-Mark


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikien-l

from_name: Matthew Larsen

subject: [WikiEN-l] no more PD satellite photos?

body:
I think that we should stockpile them, that way if they decide to
remove them we can put the back up again to really piss them off!

I'm up for it

On Thu, 09 Sep 2004 01:21:40 +0200, Stephan Walter
<stephan.walter at epfl.ch> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I just saw this on /.:
>
> http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001096.html
>
> U.S. government is proposing to exempt satellite images from the Freedom
> of Information Act (FOIA), meaning that it wouldn't have to release them
> to the public.
>
> If this law gets passed, this could be the end of a great source of PD
> satellite images: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov
>
> What do you think? Something we should do? Stockpiling nasa images? Or
> am I just panicking? :-)
>
> Regards,
> Stephan Walter
>
> --
> Stephan.Walter at epfl.ch  --  http://lart.info/~stw/  --  PGP: B2421799
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Stw
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Matthew Larsen
   > mat.larsen at gmail.com
   > 07739 785 249


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Hidden/protected page in MediaWiki

body:
I cannot agree more. Part of our site should be public and the others
are internal.
Waiting for this .......

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004 22:13:49 +0200, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu> wrote:
> On Wednesday 08 September 2004 21:08, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > Kiss All wrote:
> > > I strongly support to add more security levels into MediaWiki.
> > > Currently there are two levels if I am not mistaken:
> > >   x."user needs login to be able to write"
> > >   x. or "not".
> > > We need at least one more for
> > >    x. "user needs login to read."
> >
> > We already have that.
>
> It would be really nice if it would be possible to set these per article, and
> then per users/groups...
>
> One can dream :)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Be good....


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Sabine Cretella

subject: [Wiktionary-l] mouses and rats

body:
Before going ahead to take this example Italian has a definite word for
rat and topo doesn't mean rat.

topo = mouse
ratto/topo di fogna/in coll. language "topone" = rat

topo d'acqua = this is a kind of rat and not of mouse

topo becomes rat only in combination with other words, but never alone.

To confirm this I just asked a colleague of mine (as even translators
can be wrong)

There is a problem of this kind but normally this happens when for
example there is no translation for a subspecies into the other language.

I don't have an exact example now, but I am sure, we will need it.

This is also a reason for me to work in lists as when asking colleagues
to check the cross translations normally these things come out easily.

Going back to work. - For now I'll read the messages but answer only as
soon as I have finished my job, sorry.

Ciao, Sabine

--
Sabine Cretella
s.cretella at wordsandmore.it
www.wordsandmore.it
Meetingplace for translators
www.wesolveitnet.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] no more PD satellite photos?

body:
Stephan Walter wrote:

> U.S. government is proposing to exempt satellite images from the
> Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), meaning that it wouldn't have to
> release them to the public.
>
> If this law gets passed, this could be the end of a great source of PD
> satellite images: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov
>
> What do you think? Something we should do? Stockpiling nasa images? Or
> am I just panicking? :-)

There is no need to stockpile PD satellite images.  All that is being
proposed is, as you mentioned, exempting satellite images from the
FOIA.  That would mean that the US government is no longer legally
required to release them in response to requests.  It does not affect
images that have already been released, and does not affect images
voluntarily released by government agencies like NASA.  All it would do
is allow the government to refuse FOIA lawsuits asking for the release
of as-of-yet-unreleased images.

Granted, it's a bad idea, and one I oppose, but it has absolutely no
effect on currently-available images.

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] no more PD satellite photos?

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>I think this just means that, if a particular satellite image reveals
>important military information, the government is allowed to keep it
>secret -- instead of being REQUIRED BY LAW to make it public, i.e.,
>reveal it to enemies.
>
>
Not entirely.  The FOIA already includes explicit exemptions for
classified material and material that could impact national security,
which is why documents released under the FOIA often have large sections
blacked out.  What this law would do is allow the government to refuse
to release _unclassified_ satellite images that _do not impact national
security_.  I'm not really sure what the justification for that is.

-Mark


from_name: cookfire

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Opening up the Wiktionary content

body:
Ray Saintonge schreef:

> Andrew Dunbar wrote:
>
>> Imagine using the quick and easy way to move an
>> article "topo" from Italian or "nezumi" from
>> Japanese into a new Wiktionary language. Let's say
>> the to a German Wiktionary.
>>
> ....
>
>> So in the German Wiktionary we have just created an
>> article named "Maus" with a translation section which
>> says "English: mouse, rat".
>>
>> The problem is that English "rat" is not a translation
>> of German "Maus" just because they are both
>> translations of the same Italian word "topo".
>>
> "Topo" is a good example in defense of having the word explained for
> several languages on one page.  For Italian the anumal translates as a
> mouse, but for the  Spanish it is a mole.
>
And I wouldn't be surprised if the French use it to abbreviate topographie.

Polyglot


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

>I personally support the notion of One Chinese Wikipedia.  I think it
>makes the most sense from a language point of view, and additionally,
>I think it makes the most sense from the point of view of having a top
>quality NPOV resource.
>
>
But is it going to be possible from a language point of view?  People
have talked about automatic conversion, but several others have pointed
out multiple academic studies on the subject, some from the Unicode
committees, that have concluded it's nearly impossible to do automated
conversion from one to the other (without fully solving AI anyway), as
it's not a one-to-one mapping.  The only reasonable thing I've heard
proposed is doing a partial automatic conversion, and flagging the
characters that can't be automatically converted for human intervention,
but this doesn't sound like something that's going to be implemented in
the forseeable future.

-Mark


subject: [Wikitech-l] How to safely update from 1.3.2 to 1.3.3?

body:
I am worrying about some configuration will lost and database crash
and something like this.
Any successful experience here?

--
Be good....


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject:
[Foundation-l] Fact-index.com financially supports the Wikimedia
	Foundation

body:
It might be useful to define different tiers of support, and preferred
(or dare I say, approved) language that sites like Fact-index.com can
use in advertising their "support" for Wikipedia.

That would prevent someone in the future from giving a paltry sum and
claiming they financially support Wikipedia.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Wed, 8 Sep 2004 16:08:20 +0100, Angela_ <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Sep 2004 14:11:51 +0000 (UTC), Walter Vermeir
> <walter at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> > *Fact-index.com financially supports the Wikimedia Foundation*. Is this true?
>
> Fact-index have made a substantial donation to the Foundation. Plans
> are being made to detail this, and other significant donations, on the
> http://wikimediafoundation.org website in future.
>
> Angela.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Andrew Lih
andrew.lih at gmail.com


from_name: Stan Wiechers

subject: [Wikitech-l] enabling categories in 1.2.6

body:
Hi!

I'm running mediawiki 1.2.6 on debian. Everything works fine except that I
don't seem to be able to use categories. I have some docs with tags like:

[[Category:People]]
[[Category:Design]]

What I want to is to have pages like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Social_psychology

I created a page in my wiki:

http://host/wikidev/index.php/Category:People

And the only tag I have in there is:

[[Category:People]]

But there is not output. How do I enable that?

Also I'm missing "/wikidev/index.php/Special:Categories"

Can somebody help me setting this up? If that is not the right group to post
that message could you refer me to a different one?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Wiki Rocks!

Stan


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Robert Brookes

body:
At some point you will need to talk with "the prick" and try to get him to
come around.

Fred

> From: Mike Halterman <haltermannews at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 11:29:12 -0700 (PDT)
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Robert Brookes
>
> Oh, yeah, me too. I don't blame her one bit. I'm totally behind Theresa on
> this observation.
>
> -Mike H
>
> Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> I understand the frustration behind the outburst, however!
>
> -Morven
>
>
> On Thu, 09 Sep 2004 10:47:06 -0600, Fred Bauder wrote:
>> I think referring to him as "this prick" is not cool despite his referring
>> to you as part of the "lunatic fringe".
>>
>> Fred
>>
>>> From: "KNOTT, T"
>>> Reply-To: English Wikipedia
>>> Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 17:04:21 +0100
>>> To: "English Wikipedia"
>>> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Robert Brookes
>>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Would people check out this pricks edits please and state on his rfc if
>>> he is a simple vandal that can be blocked by any admin or a more usual
>>> POV pusher that needs to go to the AC.
>>>
>>> It's a bit of an in-between case IMO. I think he's a vandal who is here
>>> to get his kicks from insulting people, but maybe I am biased because
>>> he's called me part of a "lunatic fringe".
>>>
>>> What do other people think?
>>>
>>> Theresa
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>>> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out!
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Domas Mituzas

body:
By InitialiseMessages, mediawiki messages are imported with NULL cur_user/cur_user_text

Domas

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Brion Vibber
Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 12:40 PM
To: wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [MediaWiki-CVS] phase3/maintenance/postgresql pg_tables.sql, 1.7, 1.8

Domas Mituzas wrote:
> Modified Files:
> 	pg_tables.sql
> Log Message:
> specify defaults for cur_user and cur_user_text

Honestly these should never ever be left as NULL by an insertion; if
they ever do that in itself is a bug. What's the circumstance where this
happens?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Daniel Ploss

subject: [WikiEN-l] mistake in rayleigh scattering coefficient formular

body:
Dear Sir or Madam,

On that link to the rayleigh scattering coefficient ks is a mistake in
the power of pi. Pi should be to the power of five and not to the power
of six.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering

Please check this again. Thank you.

Best regards,
Daniel Ploss

______________________________
Daniel Ploss
CSEM
Jaquet-Droz 1
CH-2007 Neuch?tel
Switzerland

Tel: +41 32 720 5542
Fax: +41 32 720 5740
daniel.ploss at csem.ch


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] BUG: pagenames having apostroph (watchlist.php,
	skin.php and more?) are not correctly treated

body:
Thomas Gries wrote:
> Dear Brion,
> in my opinion, there is problem in the character conversion of
> pagetitles which appears when a pagename contains an apostrophe ( ' ).
>
> I have set up a testpage having an apostroph such as
> User:Nyxos/testpage_and_users'_guide . When you put it into your
> watchlist or visit recent changes view, the apostroph is (still) coded
> as %27 instead of being re-rendered as apostrophe.

Here's your problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=MediaWiki:Noarticletext&diff=5596366&oldid=5596350

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

subject: [WikiEN-l] More abuse from JFW. Please desist.

body:
I am surprised by the recent attacks from JFW. I don't even
understand how they started. Up until two days ago he and I
got along fine; we had a most friendly relationship. His
letter attacking me came out of nowhere.

JFW writes:
> In one day, I've been called dishonest, a fundamentalist
> and a censor by Robert, and dishonest and a censor by an
> antisemitic vandal who decided to change my userpage.
> For some reason I've stuck my arm in the crate with
> velociraptors, haven't I?

Calling me a "velociraptor" and lumping me together with
anti-Semites is a hateful thing to do, especially
considering that he and I have worked together in a
friendly fashion. Worse, he knows that he and I are on the
same side against anti-Semites. To see JFW write this is
painful and disappointing.

> I have stated my real concern with Robert's
> "critical historical" quotes in my original post
> to this list. However, Robert is in fact turning
> my views inside out. I do *not* want to eliminate
> or suppress historical interpretations, but I'm
> annoyed that Robert doens't research the traditional
> (or Haredi, if you want) take on things.

That is patently false. The only person refusing to do this
is JFW himself. I am very happy to include any such views,
when I come across them.

The real problem is that while JFW is a member of the
ultra-Orthodox Jewish community (i.e. Haredi Judaism), he
absolutely refuses to contribute anything on this point
from the Haredi perspective.  Oddly, he demands that other
people write about his own community's point of view, even
when other people tell him that we are not familiar enough
with their views to do so.  Does this make sense to anyone?

The current subject of contention is [[Maimonides]] and his
ideas on "true beliefs" versus "necessary beliefs", an
important topic both in the philosophy of religion, and in
the philosophy of political systems.  JFW keeps claiming
that there must be Haredi points-of-view on this issue, and
that I am deliberately not including them. That's nonsense.
 JFW can't even tell us where to find Haredi points-of-view
on this specific issue, yet he demands that someone outside
of his community should include them.

Folks, here is the general rule for Wikipedia: If you want
to include a point-of-view, then write it.  But never
attack others for not writing what you wish you had written
yourself.

Not every person is an expert on every issue. Stop
attributing a lack of knowledge to deceit and malice.  For
instance, I fully admit that I have no knowledge of what
ultra-Orthodox Jews may think of Maimonides' writings on
"true beliefs" versus "necessary beliefs". That is why I
can't contribute anything on this specific point.

If JFW has some info on this issue, he is free to include
them. But he is not free to repeatedly harass me about
including info that I just do not have!  (And I do not have
the time to get this info either, especially since he has
given no specific references!  If he gave me a specific
book and page number, from an English source, I might be
able to find it, but JFW has never done so.)

> I cannot stand by idly to see him overwhelm
> Judaism-related articles with critical-historical
> material without making serious mention of the
> traditional interpretations (which are not all too
> hard to find in English-language literature).

First off, I have contributed a tremendous amount of such
material. Apparently, you think that it wasn't enough?
Fine!  Then add more! If you want to include a
point-of-view within an article, then include it.  No one
is stopping you.  You and I fully agree.

But never attack others for not writing your POV for you!
I am merely a volunteer contributor to Wikipedia, and I am
not anyone's galley slave. Since you are unwilling to do
the work yourself, you certainly have no right to attack
others.

> On [[Talk:Maimonides]] I asked Robert to reproduce a
> particular quotation from the scholar Ibn Tibbon,
> something that Robert refused to do despite having
> photocopies of the article from which the quote could
> be taken.

This goes too far. JFW is not honest. Anyone here can go to
the article and see the quotes I added for
themselves...unless someone dishonestly deleted the quote I
added.

Summary: JFW absolutely refuses to add information, berates
me for not doing his own work for him, and then makes false
claims about quotes that I really gave him. That is nothing
less than harassment.

Robert (RK)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


body:
Hi!

I'm running mediawiki 1.2.6 on debian. Everything works fine except that I
don't seem to be able to use categories. I have some docs with tags like:

[[Category:People]]
[[Category:Design]]

What I want to is to have pages like:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Social_psychology
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Social_psychology>

I created a page in my wiki:

http://host/wikidev/index.php/Category:People
<http://host/wikidev/index.php/Category:People>

And the only tag I have in there is:

[[Category:People]]

But there is not output. How do I enable that?

Also I'm missing "/wikidev/index.php/Special:Categories"

Can somebody help me setting this up? If that is not the right group to post
that message could you refer me to a different one?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Wiki Rocks!

Stan


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Robert Brookes

body:
His account is a month old with <500 edits. I have warned him that if
he continues to make personal attacks, he will be blocked.

That said, offensive as he may be, referring to him as a prick is, as
you know, not good.

-Snowspinner


subject: [WikiEN-l] ABOUT LATITUDE.

body:
Interestingly, Britain and Ireland are considered part of Europe, even
Iceland is, while Cuba is not considered part of North America.

Fred

> From: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com>, English Wikipedia
> <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 21:51:00 +0100
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] ABOUT LATITUDE.
>
> Two things: first, I am also European - English, to be precise -


from_name: big-ben at haefft.de

subject: [Foundation-l] de.wikisource.org

body:
Hello!

We want to set up a German Version of Wikisource. I've already posted the request for a new subdomain here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects

But the side states the following: "Meta-wiki is not really much frequented, therefore it is recommended that you also send a posting to the Foundation-l mailing-list to announce your proposal."

So here I am to announce my proposal. To get more information look at the link above.

Here I've got a copy of the proposal on meta-wiki:

Wikisource in German
Link to request on mailing list:
Domain name: de.wikisource.org
Name of user requesting this language: Kaiser Bob
Details:
People interested joining: Kaiser Bob, Pythagoras1, Dovi, Xarax
Relevant links:
- Talk on the German Main Page of wikisource
- http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium/Language_domain_proposal

I hope, that a developer can set this up soon.
Goodbye.
Kaiser Bob
--
cent thru freemehl on www.haefft.de


subject: [Foundation-l] de.wikisource.org


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 13:16:45 +0200, Daniel Ploss <daniel.ploss at csem.ch> wrote:
> Dear Sir or Madam,
>
> On that link to the rayleigh scattering coefficient ks is a mistake in
> the power of pi. Pi should be to the power of five and not to the power
> of six.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering
>
> Please check this again. Thank you.
>
> Best regards,
> Daniel Ploss

Daniel: hard though it is to believe, wikipedia is founded on not just
the idea, but the practice, that anybody can edit any article. So to
correct this mistake, you need only to click the link labelled "edit
this page" near the top of the screen, and find the appropriate part
of the text to change. Then, when you click "Save page", the article
will be changed. No review is needed, your new version will become the
'official' version of that page instantly.

I haven't made the change myself, because I have no experience or
reference for the subject in hand - and also because I want you to see
just how easy and satisfying it is to improve the content of
Wikipedia. [Note that the formula is written in "TeX" so that it
displays nicely, but it's fairly easy to find where each part is
described.]

For more information on how the project works, how we would very much
welcome your help, and why it doesn't all break down into complete
anarchy (as well as what we hope it *will* become) please take a look
at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Welcome%2C_newcomers and
have a look around.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Christian List

subject: [Wikitech-l] Converting danish Wikipedia to UTF-8

body:
We have agreed on the danish Wikipedia to switch to UTF-8, nobody disagreed.
See the discussion here:
http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Landsbybr%F8nden#Skifte_fra_ISO-8859-1_til_UTF-8

If it could be done on a weekday afternoon (danish time) that would be good
for us.
We would like to suggest monday september 13. around 3 PM danish time.

Is there anything we need to do before?
Is there anything we need to do after?

Please notify us on http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Landsbybr%F8nden
at least a few minutes before starting the conversion.

Regards
Christian List


from_name: ZH Wikipedia

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Stop zh-tw WP !

body:
On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 16:16:08 +0800, ZH Wikipedia <zh.wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Plese Stop zh-tw WP (http://zh-tw.wikipedia.org/). We zh WP users
> just study the automatic conversion work between traditional form and
> the simplified Chinese word, see also
> http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E7%B9%81%E7%AE%80%E4%BD%93%E9%97%AE%E9%A2%98
> and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babel/Archive1#Traditional_and_Simpified_Chinese_UI
>
> [[zh:user:shizhao]]
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Fwd: Stop zh-tw WP !

body:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: ZH Wikipedia <zh.wikipedia at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 16:16:48 +0800
Subject: Fwd: Stop zh-tw WP !
To: mediawiki-l at wikimedia.org

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: ZH Wikipedia <zh.wikipedia at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 16:16:08 +0800
Subject: Stop zh-tw WP !
To: wikitech-l-request at wikimedia.org

Plese Stop zh-tw WP (http://zh-tw.wikipedia.org/). We zh WP users
just study the automatic conversion work between traditional form and
the simplified Chinese word, see also
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E7%B9%81%E7%AE%80%E4%BD%93%E9%97%AE%E9%A2%98
and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babel/Archive1#Traditional_and_Simpified_Chinese_UI

[[zh:user:shizhao]]


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: no more PD satellite photos?

references:
<E506B3FF6BC1254C9AC1B948C380BC2801FBB835@sm-nyny-xm05.nena.wdpr.disney.com>
	<vhIsdqY67dTD-pn2-Qr7rSsQiP7lK@localhost>
	<41409AE3.2060501@apple.com>
	<9f02ca4c04090915375bcd44f4@mail.gmail.com>

body:
Rowan Collins wrote:

>On Thu, 09 Sep 2004 11:03:15 -0700, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
>
>>One thing I noticed is that the article mentions images created by
>>private companies and then bought for use by the government. It
>>occurs to me that people might have been using FOIA as an endrun to
>>avoid paying the companies for their images - find out that the
>>government happens to be one of their customers, demand copies
>>from the government under FOIA, and then use the images for free
>>"because it's from the government".
>>
>
>Ah, but wouldn't this still breach the original company's copyright?
>
Seems so to me, but FOIA itself probably muddies the waters - makes
it a matter of the "public interest" or whatever. If it's ABC doing
the stealing, probably hard for a small imaging company to stop them.
This could all just be bought-and-paid-for legislation too,
rationality is just one of the many options in DC. :-)

In any case, it doesn't matter to WP, because we don't want anything
to do with improperly-licensed images anyway.

Stan


body:
Muke Tever schreef:

> On Thu, 09 Sep 2004 11:20:19 +0200, cookfire <cookfire at softhome.net>
> wrote:
>
>> If topo in Italian means both mouse and rat. Then it should be a word
>> with two definitions. One will translate into mouse, the other will
>> translate into rat.
>
>
> Just because a word refers to multiple objects doesn't mean it has
> multiple definitions.
>
> To give an exaggerated example, it is like saying that the English
> word "bird" has over 9000 definitions because there are over 9000
> kinds of birds and "bird" refers to them all.
>
> Less extremely, the word "dolphin" in everyday English[1] refers
> indiscriminately to dolphins that live in the ocean, dolphins that
> live in rivers, and (for some people) porpoises; however, there are
> languages that distinguish them:  in Latin for example they are
> "delphinus", "platanista", and "thursio" respectively[2], and I
> wouldn't be surprised if other languages did similarly.
>
> English has lots of words like these, that get defined nonspecifically
> as "a member of taxonomic group X or Y".
>
>     *Muke!
> [1] Excepting in technical language, or language trying to be
> specific.  In such cases even languages that don't ordinarily
> differentiate rat/mouse can find ways to be specific.
> [2] It's a really obscure example, I know, but it's the only one I'm
> familiar with offhand, from writing about dolphins in Latin.  Pliny,
> who describes the animals, does not give them as kinds of dolphins,
> though he does say the _thursio_ "delphinorum similitudinem habent"
> (has the dolphins' likeness), and the _platanista_ is "rostro delphini
> et cauda" ([possessed] of a dolphin's muzzle and tail).

I follow you on the dolphin example. I don't follow you on the bird
example. Bird is a word with a certain meaning, indeed it is a more
general term, for which a lot of more specific words exist. This doesn't
give a problem when translating.

As for the dolphins, you are right. That is a problem. One has to choose
between adding comments with the translations, or whether one wants to
distinguish between them on the "Meanings"/definitions level. I suppose
it would depend on how many languages do make this distinction. If a lot
of languages do, it may make sense to add more definitions.

Anyway, you are right, it is very important to be able to add comments
to translations and it is not because word X in language A is a
translation of word Y in language B, that this will also be the case for
language Z.

The current situation is different though. If somebody defines the
translation of a term between two languages in one Wiktionary, the other
Wiktionaries are not updated. It is not because they are Wiktionaries in
another language that the translation of these terms would be different.
Even worse, it is very well possible for one Wiktionary to declare that
the translation of A = B, while another language Wiktionary says that A
= C. There is no consistency and no reasonable way to keep the
Wiktionaries synchronized. This is the waste of resources that Gerard
and Sabine are worried about.

You know how I have always been active to avoid duplication in the
English Wiktionary and I always felt it was very unfortunate that
duplication was going to happen on such a large scale because of the
many Wiktionaries that were created. If it can't be helped, so be it.
But what if we can come up with a way to not have this duplication?
Where everybody can work with the Wiktionary in his/her own language,
but where the results are pooled together.

When somebody claims that a translation between two languages is such,
then everybody can check this out.
When somebody writes down a nice definition or etymology, others can
translate it. It is even possible to keep track of these translations
and mark them 'fuzzy' when the original changes (but that doesn't have
priority)

If people fill out a profile with languages they understand, they can
get those definitions/etymologies in those languages they indicated.
If anonymous users come by, they can see in which languages translations
are already provided, making use of symbols, in case it is not available
in their own language.
They can then decide to translate it, if they want to make a contribution.

If we want to implement this, we are looking at a major software rewrite
though and it is true that there are not a lot of developers to
implement it. (Which is why I haven't spoken too much about this
before). Before we start looking for developers, we should find out
whether there is a willingness to host this on the WikiMedia servers. If
the willingness is there it all has to be refined and analyzed. Then it
can be implemented. This is not something that will be ready in a few
months. After the system is set up, a migration can take place.
Conflicts will have to be resolved where they occur. In the end we will
have a better dictionary though, given that it is designed properly in
the early stages. It will be possible to export it or selected parts of
it, according to the needs of who is doing the extracting. And what
comes out of it will be extremely structured and usable for other projects.

Polyglot


subject: [WikiEN-l] ABOUT LATITUDE.

body:
On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 06:14:48 -0700, Poor, Edmund W <edmund.w.poor at abc.com> wrote:
> There are seven traditional continents in geography. In no particular
> order, they are:
>
...
> * Australia (the "island continent")
...
> This leaves two issues:
> 1. Where do the various islands go?

I think, generally, they go with the nearest continent, with special
treatment given to Australia and its surroundings: since there isn't
really a 'continent' nearby (in pedantic terms), but Australia is the
largest land mass, the term "Australasia"
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australasia] is sometimes used to group
these as a "continent". In other contexts, "Oceania" is used, although
according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceania these two terms are
sometimes more or less the complement of each other, one including
only Australia and New Zealand, while the other includes the lesser
islands between there and Asia.

In other words, Australia isn't generally treated as a continent, but
part of an imaginary continent that mops up the islands that aren't
near enough a real continent to belong. I think everything else is
just about near enough to 'belong', although how 'American' some of
the more distant mid-oceanic islands would consider themselves, I'm
not sure!

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

body:
I strongly recommend not discussing this any more on the mailing list.
It is pointless.

RK, you need to take it through the mediation process and if that
fails, through the arbitration process.  Ranting on the mailing list
is not helpful.

We used to talk about such things a lot on the mailing list, in the
old days, because I had the role of making decisions about such
things, and this is where I hang out.  But.  Those days are long since
past, and the ArbCom does their work on the wiki.

So don't bother bringing interpersonal problems to the list in most
cases, it's the wrong forum for it.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Robert Brookes

body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
> That said, offensive as he may be, referring to him as a prick is, as
> you know, not good.

Yeah, let's try to relax a bit.  I'm sure she's right about the
situation, but we don't have to get all heated up about it.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
Delirium wrote:
> But is it going to be possible from a language point of view?  People
> have talked about automatic conversion, but several others have pointed
> out multiple academic studies on the subject, some from the Unicode
> committees, that have concluded it's nearly impossible to do automated
> conversion from one to the other (without fully solving AI anyway), as
> it's not a one-to-one mapping.  The only reasonable thing I've heard
> proposed is doing a partial automatic conversion, and flagging the
> characters that can't be automatically converted for human intervention,
> but this doesn't sound like something that's going to be implemented in
> the forseeable future.

I think this is a question for the speakers of the language to talk to
us about; it's really a question of mutual intelligibility, isn't it?

So far as I know, there is no major movement afoot to split the two.
A few people support it, and one of the main ones, the only one who
was actually working on the accidentally-created website, is a 15 year
old American living in Arizona.  I mention this not to say that a 15
year old American living in Arizona can't possibly be right about
this, but rather to indicate what I understand *at the moment* to be
the situation on the ground.

--Jimbo


from_name: KNOTT, T

subject: [WikiEN-l] Robert Brookes

body:
Would people check out this pricks edits please and state on his rfc if
he is a simple vandal that can be blocked by any admin or a more usual
POV pusher that needs to go to the AC.

It's a bit of an in-between case IMO. I think he's a vandal who is here
to get his kicks from insulting people, but maybe I am biased because
he's called me part of a "lunatic fringe".

What do other people think?

Theresa


subject: [Wikitech-l] zh-tw wp

body:
This to Chinese version of all user to say that very not
 respect

shizhao


subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Stop zh-tw WP !

body:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: ZH Wikipedia <zh.wikipedia at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 16:16:08 +0800
Subject: Stop zh-tw WP !
To: wikitech-l-request at wikimedia.org

Plese Stop zh-tw WP (http://zh-tw.wikipedia.org/). We zh WP users
just study the automatic conversion work between traditional form and
the simplified Chinese word, see also
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E7%B9%81%E7%AE%80%E4%BD%93%E9%97%AE%E9%A2%98
and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babel/Archive1#Traditional_and_Simpified_Chinese_UI

[[zh:user:shizhao]]


subject: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Stop zh-tw WP !


from_name: Matthew Larsen

subject: [WikiEN-l] ABOUT LATITUDE.

body:
well that cleared that up then

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 16:35:17 +0100, Rowan Collins
<rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 06:14:48 -0700, Poor, Edmund W <edmund.w.poor at abc.com> wrote:
> > There are seven traditional continents in geography. In no particular
> > order, they are:
> >
> ...
> > * Australia (the "island continent")
> ...
> > This leaves two issues:
> > 1. Where do the various islands go?
>
> I think, generally, they go with the nearest continent, with special
> treatment given to Australia and its surroundings: since there isn't
> really a 'continent' nearby (in pedantic terms), but Australia is the
> largest land mass, the term "Australasia"
> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australasia] is sometimes used to group
> these as a "continent". In other contexts, "Oceania" is used, although
> according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceania these two terms are
> sometimes more or less the complement of each other, one including
> only Australia and New Zealand, while the other includes the lesser
> islands between there and Asia.
>
> In other words, Australia isn't generally treated as a continent, but
> part of an imaginary continent that mops up the islands that aren't
> near enough a real continent to belong. I think everything else is
> just about near enough to 'belong', although how 'American' some of
> the more distant mid-oceanic islands would consider themselves, I'm
> not sure!
>
> --
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Matthew Larsen
   > mat.larsen at gmail.com
   > 07739 785 249


subject: [WikiEN-l] Robert Brookes

body:
Is there something in the T&C about not publishing your POV? If there
isnt there should be! Comments and views are ok on the discussion
page, but when they are posted on the main article page it 'sours the
article' so to speak.

This would probably solve 99% of most of the arguments.

But this is probaby off topic and wrong anyway, so what the heck!

Regards,

On Thu, 09 Sep 2004 11:14:28 -0500, Jim Redmond <jim at scrubnugget.com> wrote:
> My vote is for "POV pusher".  His inflexibility and his inability to
> work with others towards a neutral article are the main reasons I asked
> for protection on [[circumcision]].
>
> --
> Jim Redmond
> jim at scrubnugget.com
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Matthew Larsen
   > mat.larsen at gmail.com
   > 07739 785 249


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject:
[Foundation-l] Google Grants: Google for non-profit organizations
	provides 3 months of free AdWords

body:
--- ZH Wikipedia <zh.wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:

> See http://www.google.com/grants/

Is it not the case that we gen enough traffic as it is? What we need
is donation money.

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

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Shop for Back-to-School deals on Yahoo! Shopping.
http://shopping.yahoo.com/backtoschool


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] ABOUT LATITUDE.

body:
Jens Ropers wrote:

> On 10 Sep 2004, at 01:23, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:
>
>> Message: 4
>> Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 15:02:25 -0600
>> From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net>
>>
>> Interestingly, Britain and Ireland are considered part of Europe, even
>> Iceland is, while Cuba is not considered part of North America.
>>
>> Fred
>
> Is that so?
>
> Well... four words: United States foreign politics ;-)

I believe that this position predates the Castro era.

Ec


from_name: Dan Drake

body:
On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 13:00:12 UTC, "Poor, Edmund W"
<Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:

> I think this just means that, if a particular satellite image reveals
> important military information, the government is allowed to keep it
> secret -- instead of being REQUIRED BY LAW to make it public, i.e.,
> reveal it to enemies.
>
> I really doubt that the typical "map showing my house" or "aerial view
> of my community" is in any jeopardy.

Ah, well, that's because you conservatives have complete trust in the
Government to behave decently and reasonably on its own, without oversight
by the citizens.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Seriously, none of this (including the advocacy site cited) tells us much
about the sort of unclassified stuff that needs to be suppressed, or how
determinations will be made, or what motivations a government agency might
have for doing things not entirely jusitifiable by the common weal, or
what appeal there might be from policies unfavorable to the good of the
citiznes, if such motivations should exist in reality.  The only
information we have at the moment is that _one_ form of redress against
possible ill-considered government policy is to be repealed, presumably
for good national-security reasons.  Obviously, the pursuit of such
questions belongs somewhere other than here.


from_name: Lorenzarius

subject: [Wikipedia-l] One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
Hi all,

Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) was started in October 2002. At
that time, almost all texts were in simplified Chinese, because the
first Chinese wikipedians are mainly from mainland China. (Being a
traditional Chinese user since birth, I was "scared away" when I first
went to zh: and saw that the whole site is in simp. Chinese.) But at
that time, most of the zh wikipedians agree that there should only be
one Chinese Wikipedia, but not two, because simp. and traditional
Chinese is one language actually, the difference being that some
characters are written in a different way and that wikipedians from
different part of the world have different names/terms for the same
object. (Just like a British would write "The centre of a sulphur atom
on a railway ." while an American would write "The center of a sulfur
atom on a railroad.") Most of the zh wikipedians can read both form of
characters, though we write in our respective native form. That's why
we want to have ONE zh: only.

We have been discussing on how to deal with this trad/simp problem
since the beginning. The consensus is that pages would be converted
between simp. and trad. according to the need of the reader/editor by
some automatic script or software. Though the development of such a
software has not started until recently (due to a lack of technical
assistance).

I am writing this mail because I see that zh-tw.wikipedia.org has been
set up. Being a long-time contributor to zh:, I feel quite frustrated
because it seems that all the discussion we have on how to solve this
problem are in vain.

Therefore I request that zh-tw.wikipedia.org and zh-cn.wikipedia.org
be redirected to zh.wikipedia.org.

Regards
Lorenzarius


from_name: Jens Ropers

subject: [WikiEN-l] ABOUT LATITUDE.

body:
In Europe, we were taught in school that Australia ''was'' a continent.
Thus:

North America
South America
Europe
Africa
Asia
Australia
Antarctica

So that's 7 continents -- which, incidentally, is the number of Olympic
rings (they represent the 7 continents). Commonly, New Zealand and
sometimes all of the Pacific Ocean islands were seen as being part of
Australia. Then again, as far as the "Pacific islands problem" is
concerned, maybe they don't ''have'' to be grouped with any continent
at all: The word "continent", after all, derives from Latin ''(terra)
continens'', meaning a combined land mass (as opposed to islands). Thus
(some) island can happily be regarded as not being part of any
continent.

It was actually quite a surprise to me to see that there appear to be
different definitions in the U.S. I thought the above was universal and
I had never heard of "Austalasia". Then again, in the end of the day
it's a matter of arbitrary definition isn't it?

Luckily, [[Continent]] already appears to have the gist of this info. :)

As long as we can all contain ourselves there should be continental
consensus.

-- Jens

On 9 Sep 2004, at 18:05, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:

> Message: 8
> Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 16:35:17 +0100
> From: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com>
>
> On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 06:14:48 -0700, Poor, Edmund W
> <edmund.w.poor at abc.com> wrote:
>> There are seven traditional continents in geography. In no particular
>> order, they are:
>>
> ...
>> * Australia (the "island continent")
> ...
>> This leaves two issues:
>> 1. Where do the various islands go?
>
> I think, generally, they go with the nearest continent, with special
> treatment given to Australia and its surroundings: since there isn't
> really a 'continent' nearby (in pedantic terms), but Australia is the
> largest land mass, the term "Australasia"
> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australasia] is sometimes used to group
> these as a "continent". In other contexts, "Oceania" is used, although
> according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceania these two terms are
> sometimes more or less the complement of each other, one including
> only Australia and New Zealand, while the other includes the lesser
> islands between there and Asia.
>
> In other words, Australia isn't generally treated as a continent, but
> part of an imaginary continent that mops up the islands that aren't
> near enough a real continent to belong. I think everything else is
> just about near enough to 'belong', although how 'American' some of
> the more distant mid-oceanic islands would consider themselves, I'm
> not sure!
>
> --
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]


from_name: Patrick Aiden Hunt

subject: [WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?

body:
-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Mayer [mailto:maveric149 at yahoo.com]

>--- "KNOTT, T" <tknott at qcl.org.uk> wrote:

>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Delirium [mailto:delirium at hackish.org]
>>
>> >I don't think academic credentials are very good ones.
>> > Perhaps some measure of involvement in Wikipedia would
>> >be a reasonable start, as most of our longtime
>> >contributors are reasonably reliable.
>> >
>> >-Mark
>>
>>
>> Perhaps articles should be reviewed by at least a couple of people.
One
>> 'expert' plus one long term wikipedian, in whom we trust.

>Sounds good to me.

>--mav

I know this may seem to some to be a silly question, but why do you need
someone with academic credentials reviewing articles? Any normal
encyclopedia simply uses a basic bibliography and the information in the
article is from books that are written by experts who have academic
credentials already recognized. If we had people simply cite sources for
information, then it seems like we would have to worry much less about
the reviewers' credentials.

I mostly contribute to articles regarding U.S. Supreme Court cases and
legislation, so all I have to do is cite the actual opinion or portion
of the U.S. Code. But I imagine if I were contributing to an article on
another academic field I am interested in (such as Economics), I would
simply cite Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" or Keynes' "The General
Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" or whatever economic treatise
the particular theory or concept came from. I would think it would make
little sense to have an academic scholar waste time signing off on the
article if all the reader would have to do is check the text that the
information comes from to ensure it's accuracy.

What am I missing?

-Skyler


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?

body:
Patrick Aiden Hunt wrote:

>I know this may seem to some to be a silly question, but why do you need
>someone with academic credentials reviewing articles? Any normal
>encyclopedia simply uses a basic bibliography and the information in the
>article is from books that are written by experts who have academic
>credentials already recognized. If we had people simply cite sources for
>information, then it seems like we would have to worry much less about
>the reviewers' credentials.
>
>I mostly contribute to articles regarding U.S. Supreme Court cases and
>legislation, so all I have to do is cite the actual opinion or portion
>of the U.S. Code. But I imagine if I were contributing to an article on
>another academic field I am interested in (such as Economics), I would
>simply cite Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" or Keynes' "The General
>Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" or whatever economic treatise
>the particular theory or concept came from. I would think it would make
>little sense to have an academic scholar waste time signing off on the
>article if all the reader would have to do is check the text that the
>information comes from to ensure it's accuracy.
>
>
Well, a big problem is how to present information accurately and not in
a misleading way, and simply citing sources gives no guarantee of that.
I could cite all sorts of Supreme Court decisions and give a very
misleading view by not citing particular ones I should've cited, or only
citing obscure portions of well-known decisions, and so on.  This can be
done either maliciously or because the author wasn't familiar with the
wider context so knowledgeable about what to cite.

I agree academic credentials aren't a magic bullet, but I do think
review of the _article_ itself, rather than merely requiring sources, is
necessary.  Given maybe a dozen books on the subject of global warming,
for example, I could write an article taking almost any point of view
and have plenty of citations to back it up (even if I let you choose the
books!), but not all of these articles would be equally reliable.

-Mark


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Why is DL/DD (rather than CSS) used for indented
	text?

body:
Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> writes:

> Can you provide a list of HTML readers known to render the current
> markup in an incorrect fashion, with a description of the actual
> incorrect rendering and a description of the actual rendering of
> proposed corrected markup?

No, but I can imagine that an audio device may "read" the tags and when
the device says:

    definition list
      definition definition
        [now the running text...]
      close dd
    close dl

it might confuse the recipient if the content is not list stuff at all.
Imagine a poem read this way!  Maybe, audio devices offer different
voices for quotations; and it would be nice to make use of this feature
and we should go for (Goethe's Faust, the Lord is speaking):

Hast thou naught else to say? Is blame

In coming here, as ever, thy sole aim?

Does nothing on the earth to thee seem right?

Whether we can achieve the blockquote markup from the wiki syntax is
another issue.  Im simply interested in good HTML (or XML) output.

> If the proposal is to improve correctness, it would be nice to know
> what the actual result would be.

I prefer going the the other way around.  Provide files with sematically
correct markup.

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


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
>As a temporary measure, we are shutting it down right now. Switching
it to read-only, moving it to closed-zh-tw subdomain so people can
salvage their work if it's important.

Because until just now, I was not subscribed to wikipedia-l because I
had no good reason to be, I was not aware of this and nobody bothered
to notify me, which irritates me since quite a few people knew I was
pursuing this project.

>Looking at it, I see exactly 1 user in the past 7 days.  So we are
not stomping on a group of people trying to do something.

Yes, but how many articles? How many of them are unique, or
significantly different from the versions in zh:? And there are 2
registered users; in addition I was planning to get up to 1000
articles and then ask people for support as I had already told many
people.

>If it continues to exist, it would attract an audience even if it is
not a good idea.

...

>We can leave the issue open for the zh community to decide. I
personally advice for unity.  Similar to "One China, Two Systems", I
propose "One zh, two character sets."

The thing here is this: "One China, Two Systems" applies to HONG KONG,
and not TAIWAN. The "tw" in zh-tw: stands for Taiwan. If it *were* to
apply to Hong Kong, it couldn't be said to be a single language
because the language spoken in Hong Kong is Cantonese.

Wikipedia would be the first major website to pursue a unified zh:,
with IBM, Microsoft, Linux, and just about everybody on the face of
the earth having separate versions for simplified and traditional
Chinese. To have a unified version is not workable.

It is not merely a difference in characters as perhaps some would like
you to believe, but much more than that. It is very easy to convert
traditional characters to simplified, but it is much trickier to do so
vice-versa. zh: is almost completely in simplified chinese.

zh: has in the past had a few different systems for interlinking
articles between the two, and there are hundreds if not thousands of
articles that still use the old systems instead of the current system.

In addition, the entire user interface is in simplified. This makes it
extremely uncomfortable for a person who uses *exclusively*
traditional to use zh:, and it will scare many users away (as
Laurentius admits, sie was at first scared away because of the
dominance of simplified; for every user that comes back after being
initially scared away by this there are perhaps 300 that never come
back). zh-tw:, on the other hand, the last I checked, had a UI
completely in Traditional.

Also, another issue is that currently the article count of zh: is
inflated by the fact that many pages have two versions.

Laurentius is wanting to mischaracterise (no pun intended) the
difference between simplified and traditional chinese as minimal,
which they most certainly are NOT.

If we are to have one dominant version, it should be traditional since
traditional characters are much easier for a simplified user to read
than vice-versa since they already have to learn them to read
classical literature and such.

For example, any random 50 characters you choose in Simplified might
map to any of 100 or so characters in Traditional chinese, as you can
imagine this leads to a great deal of ambiguity.

Also, Laurentius and others are trying to portray events on zh: as
complete 100% consensus that a united version should be kept although
this is far from the truth.

--Jin Jun-shu (Mark Williamson)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
Delirium wrote:

>But is it going to be possible from a language point of view?  People
have talked about automatic conversion, but several others have
pointed out multiple academic studies on the subject, some from the
Unicode committees, that have concluded it's nearly impossible to do
automated conversion from one to the other (without fully solving AI
anyway), as it's not a one-to-one mapping.  The only reasonable thing
I've heard proposed is doing a partial automatic conversion, and
flagging the characters that can't be automatically converted for
human intervention, but this doesn't sound like something that's going
to be implemented in
the forseeable future.
>
>-Mark

Exactly. Conversion between the two scripts is technically very
difficult. We can use the Chinese version of ms word to convert, but I
believe this may not be 100% legal and even if it is, it is not a good
solution because it is not a server-side solution.

-Mark/Jin Junshu


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Why $wgCheckFileExtensions=false does not work?

body:
Kiss All wrote:
> I just want let users upload all files other than the blacklist so I
> set it to false. But it still keeps warning me like:

You need to change $wgStrictFileExtensions, not $wgCheckFileExtensions:

  # If this is turned off, users may override the warning for files not
  # covered by $wgFileExtensions.
  $wgStrictFileExtensions = true;

Also, you should never change DefaultSettings.php; override the settings
in your LocalSettings.php.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
>I think this is a question for the speakers of the language to talk
to us about; it's really a question of mutual intelligibility, isn't
it?

In a manner of speaking, perhaps; but technically it is not because
Chinese writing, in either of the two forms, is only partially
phonetic, I believe the proper terminology has something to do more
with "mutual literacy" or something like that.

>So far as I know, there is no major movement afoot to split the two.
A few people support it, and one of the main ones, the only one who
was actually working on the accidentally-created website, is a 15 year
old American living in Arizona.  I mention this not to say that a 15
year old American living in Arizona can't possibly be right about
this, but rather to indicate what I understand *at the moment* to be
the situation on the ground.

Just curious, Jimbo, but how is my *age* any more relevant to /this
particular issue/ than the number of pets I have or my favourite
colours?

-Jin Junshu/Mark


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
Sorry everybody, I'd like to apologise for being so... well, so... agressive.

I hope you can understand why I might find it hard now to keep my
cool: over 600 articles I am almost singlehandedly responsible for are
to be deleted, I have been told to copy-and-paste them but come on,
this is 600 ARTICLES we're talking about. Also, I did not even know
this was going on until I tried to go to wantedpages on zh-tw: and
found that I was redirected to wantedpages at zh:, and then asked in
#wikipedia and was told to check the ML to which I am not subscribed
(even if I were, I don't check my inbox on even a  daily basis
usually)

apologies...

--Mark/Jin Junshu


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Wikipedia-l] One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
I'm not sure why zh-tw was created recently. I can count at least
three times before where we've requested it not be established so that
ZH would work towards a traditional-simplified solution.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 03:17:09 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> I personally support the notion of One Chinese Wikipedia.  I think it
> makes the most sense from a language point of view, and additionally,
> I think it makes the most sense from the point of view of having a top
> quality NPOV resource.
>
> --Jimbo
>
>
>
> Lorenzarius wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) was started in October 2002. At
> > that time, almost all texts were in simplified Chinese, because the
> > first Chinese wikipedians are mainly from mainland China. (Being a
> > traditional Chinese user since birth, I was "scared away" when I first
> > went to zh: and saw that the whole site is in simp. Chinese.) But at
> > that time, most of the zh wikipedians agree that there should only be
> > one Chinese Wikipedia, but not two, because simp. and traditional
> > Chinese is one language actually, the difference being that some
> > characters are written in a different way and that wikipedians from
> > different part of the world have different names/terms for the same
> > object. (Just like a British would write "The centre of a sulphur atom
> > on a railway ." while an American would write "The center of a sulfur
> > atom on a railroad.") Most of the zh wikipedians can read both form of
> > characters, though we write in our respective native form. That's why
> > we want to have ONE zh: only.
> >
> > We have been discussing on how to deal with this trad/simp problem
> > since the beginning. The consensus is that pages would be converted
> > between simp. and trad. according to the need of the reader/editor by
> > some automatic script or software. Though the development of such a
> > software has not started until recently (due to a lack of technical
> > assistance).
> >
> > I am writing this mail because I see that zh-tw.wikipedia.org has been
> > set up. Being a long-time contributor to zh:, I feel quite frustrated
> > because it seems that all the discussion we have on how to solve this
> > problem are in vain.
> >
> > Therefore I request that zh-tw.wikipedia.org and zh-cn.wikipedia.org
> > be redirected to zh.wikipedia.org.
> >
> > Regards
> > Lorenzarius
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
> --
> "La n??fle est un fruit." - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Andrew Lih
andrew.lih at gmail.com


from_name: Kate Turner

body:
On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 12:26:39 -0400, Stan Wiechers <stan at rga.com> wrote:
> I'm running mediawiki 1.2.6 on debian. Everything works fine except that I
> don't seem to be able to use categories.

1.2 doesn't support categories.  You'll have to upgrade to 1.3 if you want them.

Kate.


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [WikiEN-l] ABOUT LATITUDE.

body:
On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 18:53:29 +0200, Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:
> In Europe, we were taught in school that Australia ''was'' a continent.
> Thus:
>
> North America
> South America
> Europe
> Africa
> Asia
> Australia
> Antarctica
>
> So that's 7 continents -- which, incidentally, is the number of Olympic
> rings (they represent the 7 continents).
<snip>
>
> It was actually quite a surprise to me to see that there appear to be
> different definitions in the U.S. I thought the above was universal and
> I had never heard of "Austalasia". Then again, in the end of the day
> it's a matter of arbitrary definition isn't it?

Two things: first, I am also European - English, to be precise - and
whether or not I was taught it in school, I have always thought of
"Australasia" or "Oceania" being the pseudo-continent that contains
Australia, that being an island and not big enough to "count" on its
own.

Secondly, there are only 5 olympic rings:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Rings suggests that the Americas
are considered one (personally, I'd 'merge' Eurasia more readily than
the Americas, but I guess there's politics as well as geography at
stake); and, presumably, nobody can come to the olympics from
Antarctica, but that's alright because they can always represent the
nations whose citizenship they hold (there being no sovereign states
in Antarctica, AFAIK).

> Luckily, [[Continent]] already appears to have the gist of this info. :)

Yep, there's a pretty good break-down of different ways of dividing
things there. :D

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Thomas Gries

subject:
[Wikitech-l] BUG: pagenames having apostroph (watchlist.php,
 skin.php and more?) are not correctly treated

body:
Dear Brion,
in my opinion, there is problem in the character conversion of
pagetitles which appears when a pagename contains an apostrophe ( ' ).

I have set up a testpage having an apostroph such as
User:Nyxos/testpage_and_users'_guide . When you put it into your
watchlist or visit recent changes view, the apostroph is (still) coded
as %27 instead of being re-rendered as apostrophe.

W.r.t. recent changes listing and/or watchlist using the same modules:
Live example page:

linktext =
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nyxos/testpage_and_users%27_guide
link underneath the linktext is coded as =
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nyxos/testpage_and_users%2527_guide

When you follow the link, you get the message, that the page does
not exist - which is not true !
--->
when you now follow the "edit this page", you see the correct link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nyxos/testpage_and_users27_guide
and the page text is present again.

I guess, it has to do with a mix-up of accessing the MySQL databases
sometimes with namespace:pagetitle, sometimes with page_id() and also
the MySQL statements.

Tom aka Nyxos


from_name: FoeNyx

subject: [Wikitech-l] XML feed for the watchlist

body:
Basic support for feeds xml for the watchlist.
I tried to do as in recent changes.
(The user need to be logged in but if the aggregator
is integrated into the browser it migh be usefull anyway)
My first contrib to mediawiki, be nice if I did something wrong please :(
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from_name: Camille Constans

body:
On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 15:59:24 -0400
"Christian List" <list1974 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> We have agreed on the danish Wikipedia to switch to UTF-8, nobody disagreed.
> See the discussion here:
> http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Landsbybr%F8nden#Skifte_fra_ISO-8859-1_til_UTF-8
>
> If it could be done on a weekday afternoon (danish time) that would be good
> for us.
> We would like to suggest monday september 13. around 3 PM danish time.
>
> Is there anything we need to do before?

No, it should be fine

> Is there anything we need to do after?

If everything works well, maybe little changes in user table.

> Please notify us on http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Landsbybr%F8nden
> at least a few minutes before starting the conversion.

I must convert sv.wiktionary, nl.wikipedia and da.wikipedia now :)

I really dont know when I'll have free time.... Well, in your case if you accept only I tell you a few minutes before starting, I could do it soon (I hope.....)

Shaihulud


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

body:
I made the suggestion on Landsbybr?nden that the conversion be done at
approximately 00:00 - 01:00 on saturday morning due to the load being
the lowest at that time.

See:
http://wikimedia.org/stats/da.wikipedia.org//hourly_usage_200408.png
and
http://wikimedia.org/stats/da.wikipedia.org//daily_usage_200409.png

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 15:59:24 -0400, Christian List <list1974 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> We have agreed on the danish Wikipedia to switch to UTF-8, nobody disagreed.
> See the discussion here:
> http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Landsbybr%F8nden#Skifte_fra_ISO-8859-1_til_UTF-8
>
> If it could be done on a weekday afternoon (danish time) that would be good
> for us.
> We would like to suggest monday september 13. around 3 PM danish time.
>
> Is there anything we need to do before?
> Is there anything we need to do after?
>
> Please notify us on http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Landsbybr%F8nden
> at least a few minutes before starting the conversion.
>
> Regards
> Christian List
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Kiss All

body:
Hi all,
I just want let users upload all files other than the blacklist so I
set it to false. But it still keeps warning me like:
Upload file
>From HPCWiki
Upload warning
".pdf" is not a recommended image file format.
Is it a bug or something else?

# grep -r 'wgCheckFileExtensions' *
includes/SpecialUpload.php:             global $wgCheckFileExtensions,
$wgStrictFileExtensions;
includes/SpecialUpload.php:                             if (
$wgCheckFileExtensions ) {
includes/DefaultSettings.php:$wgCheckFileExtensions = false;

--
Be good....


from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Why is DL/DD (rather than CSS) used for
	indented text?

body:
On Wed, 2004-09-08 at 23:08 -0700, Wil Mahan wrote:

> I think the space indented by dd/dl can sometimes vary between
> browsers, so using CSS would have the very slight advantage of
> providing more control over layout.

Nope, both indentation and spacing are defined in css, at least in the
monobook skin.
--
Gabriel Wicke


from_name: Andrew Dunbar

body:
 --- cookfire <cookfire at softhome.net> wrote:
> If topo in Italian means both mouse and rat. Then it
> should be a word
> with two definitions. One will translate into mouse,
> the other will
> translate into rat.

Rubbish! Spanish "ser" and "estar" both **translate
to** English "be". That doesn't mean that English
"be" has two definitions. Italian "topo" doesn't
**mean** "mouse" or "rat" - those are foreign words.
Italian "topo" means a group of rodents of a
particular
type of appearance, just as Italian "sorcio" does.
Just as Japanese "nezumi" does.

I seriously cannot believe that you believe these
languages must have 1:1 mappings. I especially can't
believe that you want to force languages into trying
to fit this expectation. You speak more than one
language - think about this!

> If this distinction was not made initially, the
> split will have to be performed afterwards.

Please read about translation!

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

> Polyglot
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>

=====
http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl    http://www.abisource.com

___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun!  http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] ABOUT LATITUDE.

body:
On Thu, 09 Sep 2004 15:02:25 -0600, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> Interestingly, Britain and Ireland are considered part of Europe, even
> Iceland is, while Cuba is not considered part of North America.
>
> Fred

Are you sure about that? The Cubans certainly consider themselves
'American', in the geographic sense - the state newspaper has a
section entitled "Our America" or somesuch, IIRC, covering 'local
international' issues, as it were (Central/Latin America, I guess).

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?

body:
Delirium wrote:
> But how to decide this seems a little bit of a case-by-case thing.
> Perhaps eventually we'll need a Wikipedia meta-editorial board of
> sorts?  Some of these things are really pseudo-editorial decisions, and
> someone has to make at least some of them.  Is someone with a PhD who
> takes outlandish opinions an expert (Linus Pauling on Vitamin C comes to
> mind)?  We'd have to override their qualifications on a case-by-case
> basis, hopefully somewhat conservatively.  And which non-credentialled
> people have enough experience to make them experts?  Same decision.  Of
> course we don't want a board deciding editorial issues directly ("this
> article shall say this"), but eventually making some sort of
> pseudo-editorial decisions ("this guy is not really an expert in the
> field") seems unavoidable.  But how to do that without getting biased
> ("disqualify all people who disagree with global warming", or something
> of that sort) I don't have a good answer for.

I guess at least some of this is about the would-be reviewers
understanding and accepting the concept of NPOV - there'd be no
problem with an expert with an 'outlandish' opinion who accepted it as
being outlandish and expected it to be treated that way. Come to that,
perhaps we could make it an aim to have an expert from each side of a
contentious issue both review the same version of an article...

Of course, that doesn't solve the "what makes an expert anyway?"
problem, so I guess *someone* has to decide that.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
On Thu, 09 Sep 2004 11:03:15 -0700, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> One thing I noticed is that the article mentions images created by
> private companies and then bought for use by the government. It
> occurs to me that people might have been using FOIA as an endrun to
> avoid paying the companies for their images - find out that the
> government happens to be one of their customers, demand copies
> from the government under FOIA, and then use the images for free
> "because it's from the government".

Ah, but wouldn't this still breach the original company's copyright?
Oh, hang on, I think I misread
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_of_the_United_States_Government -
but it doesn't really say that that *does* include works acquired from
other organisations...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?

body:
--- Matt R <matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> I disagree with you. Personally, I would distinguish between the process for
> writing articles, and the process of evaluating the quality of articles. For
> the former, when *writing* articles, academic qualifications should confer
> no additional authority or weight -- an unqualified person should have an
> equal right to edit the content of an article as should a PhD.
>
> However, when certifying the quality of articles, I think expert review (in
> addition to general review) is necessary -- I can give reasons for this, if
> you want. Academic qualifications are one form of evidence of expertise.
> ...
> P.S. I like the idea of "stable" vs "development" versions of an article.

<aol>I very much agree with this.</aol>

The stable version could be at http://en.wikipedia.org/stable/Article_Name and
the development version would still be at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Name with appropriate backlinks and a
different-enough UI to make the distinction obvious.

But we have to start something ala Larry's sifter idea since we are getting
slammed in the media due to our perceived non-trusted status (I personally
think these objections are laughable since they are comparing us to
encyclopedias that are hundreds of years old and that have very similar
disclaimers).

-- mav

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


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Here's your problem:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=MediaWiki:Noarticletext&diff=5596366&oldid=5596350

Since no one's responded, I've cleaned it up myself. The bad links
should no longer be being made; please confirm.

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

body:
Andrew Dunbar wrote:

> --- cookfire <cookfire at softhome.net> wrote:
>
>
>>If topo in Italian means both mouse and rat. Then it
>>should be a word
>>with two definitions. One will translate into mouse,
>>the other will
>>translate into rat.
>>
>>
>
>Rubbish! Spanish "ser" and "estar" both **translate
>to** English "be". That doesn't mean that English
>"be" has two definitions. Italian "topo" doesn't
>**mean** "mouse" or "rat" - those are foreign words.
>Italian "topo" means a group of rodents of a
>particular
>type of appearance, just as Italian "sorcio" does.
>Just as Japanese "nezumi" does.
>
>I seriously cannot believe that you believe these
>languages must have 1:1 mappings. I especially can't
>believe that you want to force languages into trying
>to fit this expectation. You speak more than one
>language - think about this!
>
>
>
>>If this distinction was not made initially, the
>>split will have to be performed afterwards.
>>
>>
>
>Please read about translation!
>
>Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
>
>
>
>>Polyglot
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wiktionary-l mailing list
>>Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
>>
>>
>>
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>
>
>>
>>
>>
>
>=====
>http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl    http://www.abisource.com
>
>
>
>
>
>___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun!  http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
>_______________________________________________
>Wiktionary-l mailing list
>Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>
>
>
>
Athough it is nice to talk about mice and rats, muizenissen is a Dutch
word that comes to mind, it has nothing to do with the subject: "Opening
up the Wiktionary content".

The issue is are we going to open up our wiktionary content. Is it
important to have our content open so that it can be shared in our other
wiktionaries and in other resources outside wikimedia. This means that
we will be able to describe our content in something like XML. The issue
is strategic, structure not content  like "topo". Whatever will be the
outcome of the "topo"question, the method of describing what comes out
of it is at issue not the messagecontent itself.

Thanks,
    Gerard


subject: [WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?

body:
--- Patrick Aiden Hunt <skyler1534 at comcast.net> wrote:
> I know this may seem to some to be a silly question, but why do you need
> someone with academic credentials reviewing articles? Any normal
> encyclopedia simply uses a basic bibliography and the information in the
> article is from books that are written by experts who have academic
> credentials already recognized. If we had people simply cite sources for
> information, then it seems like we would have to worry much less about
> the reviewers' credentials.

Pragmatic; many people will not trust and in fact warn people against using our
content otherwise. Think of it as building a bridge to the old way of
publishing and to the drones who think that is the only way content can be
trusted.

It is also another level of article verification - at least one set of eyes
from somebody who has formal training in the subject has looked at the article
and says its OK. That is more like how academic/scientific peer review works
(although panels in the related field are most often used instead).

I for one value that type of feedback for my articles since I hardly ever write
in the area I majored in.

The important thing is that this is in addition to our current best practices
and not a replacement for them. Just another layer.

-- mav

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from_name: Jens Ropers

subject: [WikiEN-l] ABOUT LATITUDE.

body:
On 10 Sep 2004, at 01:23, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:

> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 21:51:00 +0100
> From: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com>
>
> <snip>
>
> Secondly, there are only 5 olympic rings

Ops.
(My bad.)

- J


subject: [WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?

body:
> Message: 6
> Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 23:30:32 +0100
> From: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?

Folks,

I would PLEAD with everyone to '''not''' go the road of requiring
academic certifications for approval (or even to value them
excessively).

Granted, I agree there is some need for an approval/review mechanism,
but once again GNU/Linux/BSD lead the way:
We should IMHO simply adopt the current common Open Source software
development practice of having '''stable''' and '''current/unstable'''
branches -- ''of each article'', in our case. Periodically, articles
would be subjected to similar processes like Peer review and/or
Featured article candidates. They would then (if successful) have a
certain version declared stable (ie. promoted to the stable branch).
(The criteria for "stable" should however not be "brilliant prose" but
"factual correctness and NPOV".) This would greatly extend review
activity as contributors would be motivated to have their contributions
approved for stable and would thus increasingly participate in review
processes. Once a sufficient number of articles have stable versions,
the respective Wikipedia's default user setting could be switched to
"display stable branch".

But we should not, definitely not, ''require'' academic accreditation
in any way -- or even attach substantial value to it. Let
contributions, not certificates be our decisive factors. Accepting
something because A says it and A is academically accredited as xyz is
the reverse of an [[ad hominem]] attack -- and it's equally flawed
logic, IMHO. There are a lot of reasons why under the "academic model"
of a knowledge economy a lot of potentially good ideas are lost and
wasted. One example of this might be that an otherwise brilliant head
may just not be capable of concentrating for hours and months on end
and thus might never have a chance of becoming academically recognized.
I thought our core strength was just the very fact that we are able to
merge each and every bit of input from each and all comers.
As I recently wrote to one of our detractors:

>> Many of us believe that it is beneficial to make it as EASY as
>> possible to contribute to our encyclopedia.
>>
>> The traditional approach to writing encyclopedias, to aggregating
>> human knowledge, has been to make it as DIFFICULT as possible to
>> contribute. You have to obtain formal certifications and undergo
>> formal training to be even allowed to contribute. This is done in the
>> hope of  reaching and maintaining high standards.
>>
>> Many of us believe that this however stifles progress as it excludes
>> all knowledge and knowledge-based skills obtained in any other way
>> (than formal accreditation).
>>
>> We put a process in place that will accept all comers in the first
>> instance -- and combine and distill these collective contributions to
>> reach high standards.
>> Our daily growth and quality improvement shows that the traditional
>> approach -- only allowing very few select individuals to contribute
>> -- wastes enormous talent, potential and opportunity for progress in
>> all fields of human knowledge. Thus, one of our core operating
>> principles is to lower any bars to entry as much as possible, if not
>> to outright abolish them. Anyone can contribute. You don't need to
>> provide certifications. You don't need to show ID or a credit card.
>> You don't need to give an email address. You don't even need to log
>> in or create an account. You can edit. Because you have UNIQUE
>> knowledge skills. Dr. Pyotr Anokhin calculated that the number of
>> possible combinations in the human brain was 10 to the power of 799
>> (seven hundred ninety nine). In short, NO ONE on this planet will
>> ever have the same thoughts as you. It thus makes sense for us to be
>> as inclusive as possible. We would be honored to welcome your
>> contribution to our modest but growing record of human knowledge.

I would be very disappointed to say the least if this community now
turned around to go the "traditional academic" way and proved my view
of things wrong.

-- Jens [[User:Ropers|Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] ABOUT LATITUDE.

body:
On 10 Sep 2004, at 01:23, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:

> Message: 4
> Date: Thu, 09 Sep 2004 15:02:25 -0600
> From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net>
>
> Interestingly, Britain and Ireland are considered part of Europe, even
> Iceland is, while Cuba is not considered part of North America.
>
> Fred

Is that so?

Well... four words: United States foreign politics ;-)

- Jens


from_name: Henry H. Tan-Tenn

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:

> Wikipedia would be the first major website to pursue a unified zh:,
> with IBM, Microsoft, Linux, and just about everybody on the face of
> the earth having separate versions for simplified and traditional
> Chinese. To have a unified version is not workable.

Well, there's something to be said about innovation :)  Seriously,
should this work on a technical basis, it'd be a contribution to Han
character interoperability *at a community level*.

> It is not merely a difference in characters as perhaps some would like
> you to believe, but much more than that. It is very easy to convert
> traditional characters to simplified, but it is much trickier to do so
> vice-versa. zh: is almost completely in simplified chinese.

My limited observation does yield the impression that simplified Chinese
is dominant (the interface not withstanding).  Whether that is due to
the head start by Simplified editors (who jump-started zh) and/or less
success in attracting or retaining Traditional editors, is beyond me.  I
have heard *unconfirmed* stories of Traditional editors leaving the
project in recent months, but the reasons aren't clear to me).

/* snip* /

> In addition, the entire user interface is in simplified. This makes it
> extremely uncomfortable for a person who uses *exclusively*
> traditional to use zh:, and it will scare many users away (as
> Laurentius admits, sie was at first scared away because of the
> dominance of simplified; for every user that comes back after being
> initially scared away by this there are perhaps 300 that never come
> back). zh-tw:, on the other hand, the last I checked, had a UI
> completely in Traditional.

I am sympathetic with this point of view.  It seems to be that zh (as is
probably true of Wikipedia in general) has a core of well-educated
editors.  This is likely to be a group to have had exposure to both
scripts, in a way that is perhaps atypical of most casual Internet
users.  The same group is likely to underestimate the difficulty
Traditional users (and maybe vice versa) have in utilizing the
simplified script.  Thus a unified (but Simplified-dominated) ZH will
likely remain more of a niche project than the wildly popular EN for
quite some time.

/* snip */

> If we are to have one dominant version, it should be traditional since
> traditional characters are much easier for a simplified user to read
> than vice-versa since they already have to learn them to read
> classical literature and such.

I still hope (as the ignorant often do?) that a technical solution could
be found such that (1) the interface is dual-script, thus addressing the
"scare factor" that will keep ZH a niche project, and (2) the
Trad/Simp/Bi editors may work on the same article for each topic in a
familiar or chosen script.

No technical solution will, of course, address the differences in
vocabulary among Taiwan, PRC-Hong Kong, PRC-Mainland (and God forbid,
Singapore and PRC-Macau).  The differences are sometimes considerable in
certain technical and pop cultural fields, though they should not be
exaggerated.

> For example, any random 50 characters you choose in Simplified might
> map to any of 100 or so characters in Traditional chinese, as you can
> imagine this leads to a great deal of ambiguity.
>
> Also, Laurentius and others are trying to portray events on zh: as
> complete 100% consensus that a united version should be kept although
> this is far from the truth.
>
> --Jin Jun-shu (Mark Williamson)


from_name: Matt R

subject: [WikiEN-l] A future for Nupedia?

body:
 --- Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:
> I would PLEAD with everyone to '''not''' go the road of requiring
> academic certifications for approval (or even to value them
> excessively).

<snip>

> But we should not, definitely not, ''require'' academic accreditation
> in any way -- or even attach substantial value to it. Let
> contributions, not certificates be our decisive factors. Accepting
> something because A says it and A is academically accredited as xyz is
> the reverse of an [[ad hominem]] attack -- and it's equally flawed
> logic, IMHO.

<snip>

I disagree with you. Personally, I would distinguish between the process for
writing articles, and the process of evaluating the quality of articles. For
the former, when *writing* articles, academic qualifications should confer no
additional authority or weight -- an unqualified person should have an equal
right to edit the content of an article as should a PhD.

However, when certifying the quality of articles, I think expert review (in
addition to general review) is necessary -- I can give reasons for this, if you
want. Academic qualifications are one form of evidence of expertise.

As an example, if physics Prof. Alice and a "layman" -- Bob -- are editing an
article on [[quantum physics]], and they disagree on a point, they should
discuss it, and cite sources etc; obviously, Alice is not given precedence over
Bob because of her position and qualifications. On the other hand, I would
suggest that Wikipedia should give somewhat more weight to a Professor Carol,
with a 15-year publication record in the field, compared to layman Dave when
Carol says that revision 82 of [[quantum physics]] is a thorough and accurate
treatment of the subject.

I would emphasise that I *don't* believe that academics are infallible arbiters
of truth. My main point is that review of articles requires, amongst other
things, expertise. My secondary point is that some evidence of expertise can be
found, amongst many other places, in academia.

-- Matt

P.S. I like the idea of "stable" vs "development" versions of an article.

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from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
> Yes, but how many articles? How many of them are unique, or
> significantly different from the versions in zh:? And there are 2
> registered users; in addition I was planning to get up to 1000
> articles and then ask people for support as I had already told many
> people.

The more unique or significantly different articles, the worse the
problem to be sure.

> The thing here is this: "One China, Two Systems" applies to HONG KONG,
> and not TAIWAN.

I know, and I should not have used that terminology.  I was only
drawing an analogy but that particular analogy is fraught with peril.

> Wikipedia would be the first major website to pursue a unified zh:,
> with IBM, Microsoft, Linux, and just about everybody on the face of
> the earth having separate versions for simplified and traditional
> Chinese. To have a unified version is not workable.

Opinions appear to differ on this.  Most people appear to think that a
unified solution is workable, although it is also acknowledged that
there are significant challenges.

IBM, Microsoft, and others face a different situation and so this
analogy doesn't strike me as compelling.  If you're simply producing
content for outside consumers, you want to make it as comfortable for
them as possible.  But in this case, we are also trying to deal with
the needs of *producers* of content, and also trying to generate
certain conditions "on the ground" that support a strong community
creating good NPOV content.

> It is not merely a difference in characters as perhaps some would like
> you to believe, but much more than that. It is very easy to convert
> traditional characters to simplified, but it is much trickier to do so
> vice-versa. zh: is almost completely in simplified chinese.

Absolutely, I do understand that it is not merely a difference in
characters.

> In addition, the entire user interface is in simplified. This makes it
> extremely uncomfortable for a person who uses *exclusively*
> traditional to use zh:, and it will scare many users away (as
> Laurentius admits, sie was at first scared away because of the
> dominance of simplified; for every user that comes back after being
> initially scared away by this there are perhaps 300 that never come
> back). zh-tw:, on the other hand, the last I checked, had a UI
> completely in Traditional.

I would support the creation of two urls pointing to the same content
with different UIs.  The UI issue can be resolved without splitting
the community.

Alternatively, I wonder if the UI could be further customized to make
it more "international".

> Also, Laurentius and others are trying to portray events on zh: as
> complete 100% consensus that a united version should be kept although
> this is far from the truth.

Well, it is up to the community to decide, and of course the community
as well ought to respect and work with minority viewpoints to try to
reach solutions that resolve problems.

The simple answer of "split into two wikis" doesn't strike me as the
right one.  But this is not something for me personally to decide; I
am unqualified.

The reason I asked Tim Starling to shut down the zh-tw was:
(1) it was only created by accident
(2) only one person was actively using it
(3) that person does not seem to be representative of a broader community
(4) there are huge and permanent implications of splitting up the two, and
such a decision must not be taken lightly

I will not stand in the way of a split, but it needs to be considered very
carefully, and "softer" solutions used wherever possible.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
Henry H. Tan-Tenn wrote:
> No technical solution will, of course, address the differences in
> vocabulary among Taiwan, PRC-Hong Kong, PRC-Mainland (and God forbid,
> Singapore and PRC-Macau).  The differences are sometimes considerable in
> certain technical and pop cultural fields, though they should not be
> exaggerated.

Within a fairly wide range, though, such differences can be avoided in
an encyclopedia.  It depends on how extreme the differences might be,
of course, but mutual intelligibility is the standard that I would
use.

I can testify that when I'm in London talking to people, I have a lot
harder time understanding what's being said than I do when reading
Wikipedia, because (in my uneducated opinion) UK and US casual
speaking is further apart than UK and US formal writing.  This may be
similar to when you are talking about when you mention pop culture.

--Jimbo