subject: [WikiEN-l] [Barry.Meatyard@warwick.ac.uk: Entry in Wikipedia]

body:
Whoa whoa dont blow this e-mail out of proportian. UK Government
bodies are not corrupt pieces of crap (unlike many government
organisations around the globe) so do not immediatly draw that this is
a publicity thing. The e-mail seems to me to praise the work of the
wikipedia, ask an honest question about its operation and air a
concern about a group of young idiots who are writing crap about the
organisation.

Despite sending them numerous links on how to edit content they will
not be inclined to do so. The main reason being people could see it as
an attempt at self-publicising, a bit like Microsoft writing an
article in a computing magazine.

Take this with good faith! :-) We are happy people!

On Tue, 21 Sep 2004 19:54:58 -0600, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> I have written a response to Barry, offlist, and posted it at
> [[Talk:National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth]]. Perhaps you could
> forward this suggestion about an external link to the Academy's information
> page to him.
>
> Fred
>
> > From: Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca>
> > Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> > Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 19:25:23 -0700
> > To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> > Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] [Barry.Meatyard at warwick.ac.uk: Entry in  Wikipedia]
>
>
> >
> > At 01:39 AM 9/22/2004 +0200, Jens Ropers wrote:
> >
> >> Maybe we should just send these guys this link [
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?
> >> title=National_Academy_for_Gifted_and_Talented_Youth&action=edit ] and
> >> tell them to work away.
> >>
> >> Wouldn't that be a near-perfect solution?
> >> What do people think?
> >
> > It wouldn't be a perfect solution in this case, because in addition to
> > simply inquiring about how editing is done Barry is also asking for the
> > removal of certain versions from the article history and for the version
> > that their representative writes to be "protected" in some way. We need to
> > explain both that we can't comply with those requests, and also that those
> > things won't actually be necessary in order to get a nicely neutral article
> > written and maintained against POV.
> >
> > Personally, I'd recommend to them that they add an external link to their
> > own "about us" page (to reassure them that they'll always have a way to
> > present themselves according to their own terms) and to make copious use of
> > the talk: page to explain and attribute any corrections they make to the
> > article itself so that future editors will have a better idea of which
> > information comes from which sources (while also pointing out that talk:
> > pages have different community standards than article text, so that what
> > they write there is pretty much immune from "tampering"). That's still no
> > guarantee that the article will remain in the form that they prefer, but
> > the information they add will hopefully be authoritative enough that it'll
> > be hard to replace with inaccuracies in the future. Other editors will much
> > more easily notice biases creeping back in if there's notes in talk: to
> > work from.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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
>

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


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] HEADS UP: major database schema change in 1.4

body:
On Sun, Sep 26, 2004 at 08:13:00PM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Kate-
> > I'm about to commit a major change to the 'old' table in HEAD.
>
> Shouldn't we wait with major schema changes until REL1_4 is branched? IMHO
> major schema changes justify a major version number change, i.e. 1.4->2.0.

We shouldn't wait. Waiting will just increase the costs of changes.
The change is needed, as the previous code was very expensive for
page moves. They have been used several times to kill the wiki.

Regards,

JeLuF


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Jens Ropers

subject: [Wikipedia-l] China flamewar officially cancelled

body:
Ok.
I offer the following:

1. I invite people who are interested in a meaningful and non-acerbic
political discussion as regards these issues to drop me a line on my
talk page:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ropers

2. If people prefer they may email me at < ropers 4t ropersonline d0+
com >.

I really invite all whose point was to honestly argue their case to
join me.
Those who only wanted to vent in public, yet seek to evade any possible
challenge to their views -- well, they probably won't join.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com

On 26 Sep 2004, at 21:29, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> Please, no more.
>
> I'm finding it harder and harder to find _wikipedia_ signal on this
> list, because of all of the _political_ noise.  Let's please just all
> absolutely refuse to discuss matters of a general political nature,
> and stick specifically to wikipedia.
>
> --Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Sound files

body:
On 26 Sep 2004, at 15:43, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:

> It appers you havent even tried doing so yourself:
> http://www.google.com/search?q=http+filetype%3Aogg

Ah.
I didn't know/think of the http filetype search syntax.
Thanks for the hint!
:)

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Sound files

body:
On 26 Sep 2004, at 17:44, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:

>> * Not everyone discusses on wikien and en:wikipedia.
> Yes, however it was announced:
> * On the main mailing list
> * On the Village Pump
> * On the community portal
>> * If such a consensus does not result in some good explanations on how
>> to use .ogg files it is empty talk.
> I have already pointed you to Wikipeda:Sound, read especially
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound#Ogg_playback for
> instructions on how to playback Ogg Vorbis files and
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound#Ogg_encoding for how to
> encode them, does this explanation not suffice you?

Gerard's complaints and your response really reminded me of this:
>> http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

Yes, true, you and me can easily take the info on Wikipedia:Sound and
get ready to roll, but A LOT of users will be stumped with this task.

'''Think like a user.'''

And think like Joe Random User (NOT Joe Random Developer) who's
skillset encompasses browsing the Wikipedia, clicking an edit button
and typing.

I acknowledge that I ''should'' ideally try to improve that page
myself, but I'm put off by two things:
1. As things are currently set up it's far from clear that Joe will
even find that page. I reckon template and/or markup changes are
required to make this more digestable to Joe.
2. I don't have the best oversight of all things .ogg as I'm still
mostly ignoring it. (I correctly configured my box to play ogg just
yesterday, in response to this thread.) So there are better people than
me to clear this one up.

HOWEVER:
The fact that we're even having this conversation proves Gerard's and
my point that things are still just not good enough.
Pointing out that fact IS in itself a constructive step forward.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Sound files

body:
On Sat, 25 Sep 2004 23:45:18 +0200 Gerard Meijssen <gerardm at myrealbox.com>
wrote:

>Questions:
>* How can I make the .ogg file execute immediately (without a detail
>screen) ?

Use [[Media:nl-Nederlands.ogg|text]] rather than
 [[Afbeelding:nl-Nederlands.ogg]].

>*When can I upload sound files to COMMONS so that every wiktionary can
>share this and similar resources ?
><http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/Afbeelding:nl-Nederlands.ogg>

It should be possible already; isn't it?

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] Sound files

body:
On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 15:43:27 +0200 ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason
<avarab at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Then again, as we're not actually in the business of writing audio
>> encoding software, we might just as well put up with reality and allow
>> mp3 uploads.
>This has already been discussed at great length both on wikien and on
>wikipedia talk:sound, and the overwhelming consensus was not to use
>none-free formats which would possibly lock us into proprietery
>software.

So instead we prefer to have every Windows user go through the same process
of seeing that he can't listen to .ogg files and with great difficulty
upload a special program to listen to it, where almost all of them are
already having the possibility to listen to mp3s?

And if we have this policy, why are jpegs still ok? (just google for
jpeg+patent+forgent to see what I mean)

I would like to change this policy, and instead of looking at patent rights,
allow those and only those formats that have widely used freely available
players on all of Windows, Linux and Mac.

Andre Engels


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On Sep 26, 2004, at 10:57 PM, Ivan Krstic wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> A possible alternative which has been brought up before is to avoid
>> changing the structure of the old table, rather pullings its
>> non-textual data out to a separate table and continuing to use the
>> old table (unaltered) as a store for old_text. This avoids copying
>> around the most data and should in theory be faster.
>
> I had volunteered to do this, and have had a nearly-done patch on hand
> for a while now, but my ability to find time to code disappeared when
> classes started. Is there still interest in me finishing this?

Please do.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Brion-
> A possible alternative which has been brought up before is to avoid
> changing the structure of the old table, rather pullings its
> non-textual data out to a separate table and continuing to use the old
> table (unaltered) as a store for old_text. This avoids copying around
> the most data and should in theory be faster.

How about doing a quick hack now instead, such as adding a "sysop_move"
flag to cur_restrictions which would then make certain pages only be
movable by sysops? This until we do a proper database redesign, where we
would then convert the existing DB into the new schema in one well-
coordinated step, with associated downtime.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: wikipedia  in China

body:
Anthere wrote:

> I do not think this desire for overall balanced information should be
> confused with censorship. My goal for most projects is that they are
> complete for all topics, not only focusing on controversial topics.
> But if such a desire to wish for overall neutrality is only seen as
> academic discussion and nothing more, it is not really worth
> discussing imho.

I certainly agree with this, but there's two ways of going about
balance: the first is writing more about things that are missing, and
the second is removing things that are seem as "unbalanced".  The first
I have no problem with (and I don't think anyone has a real problem with
them, so long as they're neutral and accurate), but the second is what
I'm worried about.  If someone wants to write an article about something
"negative" in the zh: Wikipedia, I don't see how we can reasonably tell
them not to do so, as long as their article is factual and written from
a NPOV.  It would be an odd situation if a Chinese-American could only
write about some things in the en: Wikipedia and wasn't able to write
the exact same things in the zh: Wikipedia.

-Mark


subject:
[Wikitech-l] initialise interface language in 1.4 -- add an
	"uninstalled"

body:
On Sep 26, 2004, at 11:50 PM, Thomas Gries wrote:
> Testing the 1.4 CVS version (new installations and update
> installations) I found that the Interface Language in User Preferences
> was set (defaulted) to Africaans.
>
> In my humble opinion, even when I understand this language a little
> bit, fresh MediaWiki installations should come with a "(uninstalled
> yet - please choose)" default interface language, proposed: English .

That would be surprising; wouldn't it make more sense to default to the
wiki's content language same as it always has?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On Sun, Sep 26, 2004 at 01:35:25PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> A possible alternative which has been brought up before is to avoid
> changing the structure of the old table, rather pullings its
> non-textual data out to a separate table and continuing to use the old
> table (unaltered) as a store for old_text. This avoids copying around
> the most data and should in theory be faster.

Quick benchmark on Diderot, using dewiki (one third the size of enwiki):

  INSERT INTO new_old (old_id, old_namespace, old_title, old_comment,
     old_user, old_user_text, old_timestamp, old_minor_edit, old_flags)
  SELECT old_id, old_namespace, old_title, old_comment,
     old_user, old_user_text, old_timestamp, old_minor_edit, old_flags
  FROM old;

  Query OK, 2498816 rows affected (24 min 52.30 sec)

Table was created by

  create table new_old (
     old_id int(8) unsigned not null primary key,
     old_namespace tinyint(2) unsigned,
     old_title varchar(255) binary,
     old_comment tinyblob,
     old_user int(5) unsigned,
     old_user_text varchar(255) binary,
     old_timestamp varchar(14) binary ,
     old_minor_edit tinyint(1),
     old_flags tinyblob );

Probably the query can be done while the wiki is online and the transition
requires only a short downtime to get the latest changes and to migrate to
the new software release.

Regards,

JeLuF

PS: Lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. Test setup was not representative.
    Ariel is performing better than diderot, but has additional workload
    at the same time.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Sound files

body:
Yes, MP3 being license-encumbered is worrying.
BUT:
We neither decode nor encode audio files.
We only host them for people to retrieve.
We don't have to worry about MP3's license status.

Yes, we would like to advocate free alternatives and no, we should not
disallow .ogg if allowing MP3.
BUT NOTE:

***Most operating systems are not free either and***
***we don't bar Win or Mac folks from using the Wikipedia.***

We even expressly _cater_ for MSIE quirks to a considerable (and
painfully high) extent.
Surely if we do that then we can allow existing users of the non-free
MP3 format to use their known and ***ubiquitous*** format?

Second thought, I'd even go so far as to advocate WP going .ogg only
and becoming a driving force in .ogg adoption, but ONLY, ONLY once a
totally hassle-free solution with simple, short and FULLY sufficient
end user friendly instructions exists.

Despite the concomitant loss of quality (which can be partially avoided
by "oversampling"/using higher sampling rates) we can always convert
MP3 files and switch to .ogg ONCE WE AND .OGG ARE FULLY THERE in terms
of user-friendliness. As long as that's not the case insisting on .ogg
would only serve to prevent most people from using audio with
MediaWiki/Wikipedia.

On 26 Sep 2004, at 23:04, Andre Engels wrote:

> On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 15:43:27 +0200 ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason
> <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> Then again, as we're not actually in the business of writing audio
>>> encoding software, we might just as well put up with reality and
>>> allow
>>> mp3 uploads.
>> This has already been discussed at great length both on wikien and on
>> wikipedia talk:sound, and the overwhelming consensus was not to use
>> none-free formats which would possibly lock us into proprietery
>> software.
>
> So instead we prefer to have every Windows user go through the same
> process of seeing that he can't listen to .ogg files and with great
> difficulty upload a special program to listen to it, where almost all
> of them are already having the possibility to listen to mp3s?
>
> And if we have this policy, why are jpegs still ok? (just google for
> jpeg+patent+forgent to see what I mean)
>
> I would like to change this policy, and instead of looking at patent
> rights, allow those and only those formats that have widely used
> freely available players on all of Windows, Linux and Mac.
>
> Andre Engels
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiCommons wishes

body:
On Sat, Sep 25, 2004 at 03:07:15PM +0200, Andre Engels wrote:
> From WikiCommons the following seem currently to be the most wanted
> additions to Wikimedia Software:
>
> 1. The possibility to use images on commons directly on Wikipedia
> 2. Getting a thumbnail of an image in a category (and for non-images some
> descriptive text) instead of just the page title on a category page.
>
> Unfortunately, it does not seem like there are any active developers on
> WikiCommons currently, so I am throwing this into the larger group in the
> hope someone will be interested in programming them.

1) Any proposed syntax for it?

2) There already is a Special:Newimages in 1.4-pre that is intended for
commons, it shows the latest uploads as thumbnail galery. It was written
with cateogry pages in mind, so adding this will not take too long.

Regards,

JeLuF


subject: [Wikitech-l] SVG images

body:
On Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 06:18:33PM +0200, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
>
> BTW: is there a chance that the extension for rendering SVG to PNG on
> demand will be available anytime soon?

Is there any good and freely available command line tool for rendering
SVG to PNG?

Regards,

JeLuF


body:
On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 12:24:44AM +0200, Jens Frank wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 26, 2004 at 01:35:25PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> >
> > A possible alternative which has been brought up before is to avoid
> > changing the structure of the old table, rather pullings its
> > non-textual data out to a separate table and continuing to use the old
> > table (unaltered) as a store for old_text. This avoids copying around
> > the most data and should in theory be faster.
>
> Quick benchmark on Diderot, using dewiki (one third the size of enwiki):
>
>   INSERT INTO new_old (old_id, old_namespace, old_title, old_comment,
>      old_user, old_user_text, old_timestamp, old_minor_edit, old_flags)
>   SELECT old_id, old_namespace, old_title, old_comment,
>      old_user, old_user_text, old_timestamp, old_minor_edit, old_flags
>   FROM old;
>
>   Query OK, 2498816 rows affected (24 min 52.30 sec)

Jamesday played around with some MySQL settings and improved performance
of this query by a factor of 3.

I think this is the way to go: Keep old as it is, add a new table for
the revision metadata, ignore metadata in old.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Hyperlink convention

body:
On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 09:35 +0530, shantanu oak wrote:
> Hi,
> What are the implied rules of creating hyperlinks?
>
> Let's assume I am reading the page....
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MandrakeSoft
>
> I have understood 2 things about links...
> 1) Red links don't contain any text.
> 2) External links are marked (a convention, I wish all websites should follow)
>
> But I completely fail to understand why certain words are hyperlinked.
> For e.g. in the following para why does the date January 27 is linked?
> I clicked on that date and could not find anything related to the
> current page i.e. MandrakeSoft.
>
> MandrakeSoft operated under bankruptcy protection from [[January 27]],
> [[2003]] to [[March 30]], [[2004]]. Despite its efforts to cut losses
> and improve profits, MandrakeSoft was forced to file for protection
> due to a series of quarterly losses.
>
> Too much (and mostly unnecessary) hyperlinks makes me shy away from using wiki.

Hmm. We're kind of in a double bind, here. If we don't fix up everything
in the encyclopedia to be completely perfect, you're not going to
participate. But if we fix everything to be completely perfect, we don't
really need your participation after that. B-)

On a more serious note: you should probably look over the manual of
style for English Wikipedia. If I'm not mistaken, linking dates and
years just because is not recommended. You can help Wikipedia by taking
out the links in the page you found.

You will probably find about 100,000,000 thing in Wikipedia as you go
along that will disgust and horrify you. Some you will grow to love;
others you should try to change. There's no Big Boss who's going to do
it for you; if you've got ideas as to how to make the encyclopedia
better, start implementing them (but stop if someone complains!).

~ESP

P.S. I redirected this to wikipedia-l as it's not really a technical
question.


list: wikien-l

from_name: phil hunt

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Diderot 0.1 - First alpha release available on
	sourceforge.net

body:
On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 21:41:07 +0100, Matthew Larsen <mat.larsen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Any chance of a Linux version?
>
>That always seems to be a popular reply to any program release :-)

The program is written in Python, which is a cross-plastform
language with a number of cross-platform GUI APIs, so it shouldn'tr
been too difficult for the application to be cross-platform.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: wikipedia  in China

body:
Christopher Mahan a ?crit:

> All I know is that if Wikipedia is fair and balanced, showing in
> thousands of articles the true face of china today, then the Chinese
> government will find no reason to block us, and in fact may
> participate.

This is exactly what I meant.

I agree with Jimbo when he says that "Chinese editors who are
working on sensitive topics should take *great care* to be sure that
their writing is impeccable", nor libel, nor false, but only true and
honest reports.

My only point is this one : the chinese goverment does things that most
of us find chocking, but some people also consider the goverment does
good things which will help the country enters fully the XXI century as
a modern state. Just as any goverment, there is bad and there is good.
Similarly, some chinese people did things most of us would consider
terribly bad, but there are also many great chinese people.

My opinion is that npov has two levels. The level of the article and the
level of the project itself. NPOV at the level of the articles is not
negociable. But there is nothing in the requirements about the
neutrality a project has to achieve overall. Globally.

Now, I think that an encyclopedia is "supposed" to contain the entirety
of human knowledge. Practically, it will be only a subset of human
knowledge, and may only at best tend to perfection.

If a project contains 100 articles on history, that all these articles
are individually neutral, but ALL 100 are about, say, french atrocities
in Algeria in the 50's, and NOTHING else, then, the articles
individually will be NPOV, but globally, it would be hard to claim the
project is neutral. It will inherently follow a political stance if the
only historical topic treated is this one. If only... a european biais
that seems to imply that only european history is worth reporting :-)

Similarly, if the chinese (this is an hypothesis) wikipedia is greatly
focusing in writing articles mostly dealing about chinese gov
atrocities, even though the articles are NPOV, overall, the project will
not really be neutral in its description of what human knowledge is.

I just mentionned that the project might greatly benefit from having its
overall content balanced, and all facets of a country described, rather
than only one facet described. Imho, this goes toward our general goal
(well, at least mine) and if that CAN HELP avoiding the site blocked,
then that doubly helps.

I do not think this desire for overall balanced information should be
confused with censorship. My goal for most projects is that they are
complete for all topics, not only focusing on controversial topics. But
if such a desire to wish for overall neutrality is only seen as academic
discussion and nothing more, it is not really worth discussing imho.


from_name: Ivan Krstic

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> A possible alternative which has been brought up before is to avoid
> changing the structure of the old table, rather pullings its non-textual
> data out to a separate table and continuing to use the old table
> (unaltered) as a store for old_text. This avoids copying around the most
> data and should in theory be faster.

I had volunteered to do this, and have had a nearly-done patch on hand
for a while now, but my ability to find time to code disappeared when
classes started. Is there still interest in me finishing this?

Ivan


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Quick thoughts on fundraising

body:
Erik Moeller a ?crit:

Many suggestions, that I hope you would put on meta as well.

> 6) E-mail - the Dean campaign also used a huge list of email addresses for
> fundraising alerts. This of course has to be strictly opt-in, but could
> have an additional outreach effect.

Warning, sollicitations could have an adverse effect.

> Caveat:
>
> We are in the position where the people who *should* support us often
> don't know who we are. They may only have a vague idea what Wikipedia is
> based on reading Wikipedia articles from various mirrors and occasionally
> from our site - they may consider us equivalentto fact-index.com,
> thefreedictionary.com etc. They may be just as willing to donate to these
> sites as to us.

Partially, the newsletter was also meant to adress a bit this issue.
It cant do it all of course, but it could help with the regular donnors.

> The people who are most targeted by any fundraising campaign are
> unfortunately our regular contributors, because they generate many
> pageviews. How to solve this dilemma? Ideas:
>
> * Give signed in users a convenient [hide] link for obnoxious fundraising
> headers

Some french did this in another way. They changed their css not to see
the sitenotice any more ...

> One big problem this year is of course that it's a hotly contested US
> election, so many Americans have given hundreds of dollars already and
> don't have much money to spare for things like Wikimedia. We should
> consider this a good thing, because we need to put our donation model to
> the test properly, and this is a good opportunity to do so.

Hmmmmm. We tried to adress this issue by translating many of the
donation pages. I am not sure it is a good idea to consider this a *big*
issue, because I am not sure it is a good idea to make it clear that
most donations are US ones.

Perhaps Mav could clarify this ?

> Oh, and we of course need to still go for the big money in the form of
> institutional grants and corporate donations. The collaborative volunteer
> model may not be good enough here - it's fairly meticulous work where it's
> often a good idea to have one person on the job. Paying someone a couple
> grand to do this properly may provide huge returns that make our $50K
> campaign pale in comparison.
>
> Apologies if I've missed previous discussions on these matters - as ever
> so often, I'm just throwing ideas out there in the hope of contributing to
> finding better solutions.
>
> A final suggestion that Anthere should like: I believe that after the
> fundraising campaign, we should do an international poll among Wikimedians
> to figure out
> - why they donated, if they did
> - why they didn't donate, if they didn't
> - whether they told anyone else about the campaign
> etc.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

Hmmmmm.
I mentionned on fr that Aurevilly has been the first donator of this
campaign. Comments I got mentionned that having such an information
public was forcing a hierarchy among editors, by insisting on those
giving money compared to those not giving.

With such a reaction, I believe such a poll should only be "anonymous" :-)


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] SVG images

body:
On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 12:43:38AM +0200, Jens Frank wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 06:18:33PM +0200, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
> >
> > BTW: is there a chance that the extension for rendering SVG to PNG on
> > demand will be available anytime soon?
>
> Is there any good and freely available command line tool for rendering
> SVG to PNG?

You can use Batik's converter:
$ java -jar extensions/batik-rasterizer-ext.jar foo.svg

It's Java, rather slow compared to others, but last time I checked it
had more complete and bugfree SVG support than any other Open Source SVG lib.

Other option is rsvg (in Debian it's in librsvg2-bin package):
$ rsvg file.svg file.png

ImageMagick's convert could use librsvg too, so
$ convert file.svg file.png
should do the same as the former.


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Diderot 0.1 - First alpha release available on
	sourceforge.net

body:
Hiho,

Matthew Larsen wrote:
>>Any chance of a Linux version?
>
> That always seems to be a popular reply to any program release :-)

For the present, you'll find a wikipedia plugin for the Java text-editor
Jedit on http://djini.de/software/wikipedia/

It works under linux, macos and windows and supports a wide range of
wikimedia projects.

For any question, problems, bug reports -> elian on irc.freenode.net

greetings,
elian


subject: [Wikipedia-l] AP on Wikis

body:
This should work:
http://tinyurl.com/3vqlr
(AP.org's "distributed" search is a pain, IMHO. I'm just saying.)

On 27 Sep 2004, at 01:48, Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Sep 26, 2004, at 2:14 PM, Stirling Newberry wrote:
>> http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Sharing-Knowledge-
>> Online.html
>
> Registration required. Can you provide a link from a non-evil source
> please?
>
> Can you imagine if we required Wikipedia *readers* to provide their
> gender, age, zip code, household income range, industry, job title,
> and job function?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] UI language switching

body:
On Sun, 2004-09-26 at 20:47 -0400, zhengzhu wrote:

> Right now the UI language option is only accessible for registered
> users through the preference page. I think we should also place a
> selection box somewhere in the mainpage for anonymous users so they
> can choose the UI language as well.

Of course, it _should_ default to a content-negotiated language based on
the browser preferences and the available languages on the server...
right? I mean, that's just the Right Thing to do.

We have some content negotiation code in Mediawiki already. Right now I
think it does MIME types, but it could be quickly adapted to doing
languages, too. We should take some time to do qs ratings for the
available language files.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
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from_name: Jiong Sheng

subject: [Wikipedia-l] China conclusions

body:
On 26 Sep 2004 07:31:00 +0200, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:

> 1) The content on the Chinese Wikipedia will not be censored or edited in
> violation of NPOV. All sides to any issue are to be presented fairly and
> neutrally, with or without the threat of government censorship.
> Wikipedia's policies are not subject to change as a result of
> intimidation.

I believe that all Chinese Wikipedians will agree that we should
*never* give up NPOV. In fact we have never discussed the possibility
of violating this policy of Wikipedia in order to have the ban lifted.

> Now, if 2) fails, I hope we can talk about what other options we have.
> Actively aiding Chinese users to circumvent such censorship is, at least
> to me, not out of the question. But for the time being, I would suggest to
> Chinese Wikipedians to form an action group specifically for the purpose
> of dealing with the issue of government censorship cautiously.

Shizhao and Mountain are working actively on the issue. Both of them
live in Beijing and thus is easier to contact the authorities.

> The important thing to remember is that we are all on the same side, that
> we believe in creating a neutral encyclopedia, and that we oppose
> censorship of our work. Let's take strength from our shared values instead
> of wasting time and energy on our personal and political differences.

I totally agree with you. But I *do not* like to be racially
prejudiced. When someone said that Chinese *soldiers* (note that it is
soldier, not the government) are robbers who were "tempted by
wristwatches and ballpoint pens", and also "a Blackberry", it is a
clear and obvious racial discrimination. I am not arguing about
politics, but respect for my ethnic group. I have no intention of
arguing with anybody about politics of my country, but this kind of
attack-- insinuating my compariots are robbers--is not tolerable.

formulax


from_name: Thomas Gries

body:
Testing the 1.4 CVS version (new installations and update installations)
I found that the Interface Language in User Preferences was set
(defaulted) to Africaans.

In my humble opinion, even when I understand this language a little bit,
fresh MediaWiki installations should come with a "(uninstalled yet -
please choose)" default interface language, proposed: English .

Tom


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiCommons wishes

body:
Jens Frank wrote:

>On Sat, Sep 25, 2004 at 03:07:15PM +0200, Andre Engels wrote:
>
>
>>From WikiCommons the following seem currently to be the most wanted
>>additions to Wikimedia Software:
>>
>>1. The possibility to use images on commons directly on Wikipedia
>>2. Getting a thumbnail of an image in a category (and for non-images some
>>descriptive text) instead of just the page title on a category page.
>>
>>Unfortunately, it does not seem like there are any active developers on
>>WikiCommons currently, so I am throwing this into the larger group in the
>>hope someone will be interested in programming them.
>>
>>
>
>1) Any proposed syntax for it?
>
>2) There already is a Special:Newimages in 1.4-pre that is intended for
>commons, it shows the latest uploads as thumbnail galery. It was written
>with cateogry pages in mind, so adding this will not take too long.
>
>Regards,
>
>JeLuF
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
The syntax is simple: it is the same syntax as the local syntax, when
the image/sound is not found locally, it should be looked for in
Commons. When a picture is uploaded it it should be possible to upload
to Commons, depending on the license. Fair use for instance is not
allowed in some wikipedia and therefore is not allowed in Commons.

When this mechanism is implemented, we can start migrating pictures to
Commons, paricularly the pictures that are used in more than one
wikipedia. Many pictures have interwiki links to indicate them as a
shared resource.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: zhengzhu

subject: [Wikitech-l] UI language switching

body:
> Isn't this going to be a bit awkward when anyone changes a MediaWiki
> message, and finds that they can't switch non-local speaking users
> away from the default? I mean, sometimes things like "Current events"
> get turned into something significantly different, like Meta's "Goings
> on".

> But then, perhaps a site like Meta: or a "data-based project" could
> just have *all* languages as "supported variants" (is this going to be
> a setting somewhere?), and attempt to propogate any major changes
> across each of the /langcode sub-pages.

yes, that's doable on the technical level.

The purpose of only allowing content language to be modified through
the mediawiki namespace is to ensure a somewhat consistent user
interface across the different languge sites. Otherwise, if every
language can be changed by anyone, then someone visiting say en.wp
using fr as UI, may have rather different experience when visiting
de.wp using fr as UI, because people at the two sites decided to
modify fr differently.

>
> ----
>
> Ah! Bug alert: some MediaWiki messages/translations determine the
> target of links. Different languages default these links to different
> locations, so putting the TestWikipedia in German gives me a link to
> http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite rather than
> http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. Perhaps destinations like
> this need to be stored seperately in some global
> (language-independent) part of the MediaWiki: namespace, and
> referenced in the default translations for each language -
> : in LanguageDe.php "[[ {{MediaWiki:mainpage}} | Hauptseite ]]"
> : of course, for UI language == content language, "[[
> {{MediaWiki:mainpage}} | {{MediaWiki:mainpage}} ]]" gives the
> equivalent of the current system
> In short, the *text* of such links can be translated, but their
> *target* needs to reflect the actual location on this wiki, wherever
> it appears.
>
> I would have guessed this would affect namespace names as well (e.g.
> User:, User_talk:), but I can't find any instances of this being the
> case so far.
>
> --
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]
>

These are being fixed. I think I got the namespace names part right so
far:) The problem with 'mainpage' is due to a new patch to
SkinPHPTal.php, and has been fixed in cvs.

Please report similar issues to this thread or to bugzilla!

Also, if you write new code that need to use $wgLang, or need to call
wfMsg*, please take into consideration the difference between the UI
elements and the content elements. For example, if you want to make a
link to the mainpage, it should look something like this, roughly
speaking:

      here is the <a href= wfMsgForContent('mainpage') > wfMsg('mainpage') </a>

--
zhengzhu


subject: [Wikitech-l] UI language switching

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:

>On Sun, 2004-09-26 at 20:47 -0400, zhengzhu wrote:
>
>
>
>>Right now the UI language option is only accessible for registered
>>users through the preference page. I think we should also place a
>>selection box somewhere in the mainpage for anonymous users so they
>>can choose the UI language as well.
>>
>>
>
>Of course, it _should_ default to a content-negotiated language based on
>the browser preferences and the available languages on the server...
>right? I mean, that's just the Right Thing to do.
>
>We have some content negotiation code in Mediawiki already. Right now I
>think it does MIME types, but it could be quickly adapted to doing
>languages, too. We should take some time to do qs ratings for the
>available language files.
>
>~ESP
>
It would be really great if the user interface is something that can be
set in user preferences in other projects than just zh: ; it would make
a lot of difference in data driven projects like WikiData, WikiSpecies
and with a database backend Wiktionary.

I would prefer to have this only for registered users because it will
prevent people changing stuff to their local language (not a good idea
in the datadriven projects). When registering, the user would be more
aware of what the project does and this would prevent a lot of these errors.

Thanks,
    GerardM


subject: [Wikitech-l] UI language switching

body:
> It would be really great if the user interface is something that can be
> set in user preferences in other projects than just zh: ; it would make
> a lot of difference in data driven projects like WikiData, WikiSpecies
> and with a database backend Wiktionary.

It is not specific to zh. But the zh site supports multiple variants
in the content, which is uniq atm.

> I would prefer to have this only for registered users because it will
> prevent people changing stuff to their local language (not a good idea
> in the datadriven projects). When registering, the user would be more
> aware of what the project does and this would prevent a lot of these errors.

I think there is internal measurements to make sure only sysop can
modify the mediawiki namespace. The UI switching itself is per user,
so you and I can use different UI languages at the same site, for
example.

--
zhengzhu


from_name: shantanu oak

subject: [Wikitech-l] Hyperlink convention

body:
Hi,
What are the implied rules of creating hyperlinks?

Let's assume I am reading the page....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MandrakeSoft

I have understood 2 things about links...
1) Red links don't contain any text.
2) External links are marked (a convention, I wish all websites should follow)

But I completely fail to understand why certain words are hyperlinked.
For e.g. in the following para why does the date January 27 is linked?
I clicked on that date and could not find anything related to the
current page i.e. MandrakeSoft.

MandrakeSoft operated under bankruptcy protection from [[January 27]],
[[2003]] to [[March 30]], [[2004]]. Despite its efforts to cut losses
and improve profits, MandrakeSoft was forced to file for protection
due to a series of quarterly losses.

Too much (and mostly unnecessary) hyperlinks makes me shy away from using wiki.

Thanks
Shantanu Oak


from_name: Carson, David

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Diderot 0.1 - First alpha release available
	onsourceforge.net

body:
phil hunt wrote:
>On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 21:41:07 +0100, Matthew Larsen
<mat.larsen at gmail.com>
>wrote:
>>> Any chance of a Linux version?
>>
>>That always seems to be a popular reply to any program release :-)
>
>The program is written in Python, which is a cross-plastform
>language with a number of cross-platform GUI APIs, so it shouldn'tr
>been too difficult for the application to be cross-platform.

If I'm not much mistaken, Diderot is using wxWindows for it's GUI, which
is indeed a cross-platform API which supports Linux, so it shouldn't be
too difficult at all!

Cheers,
David...

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
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this email in error, please immediately delete it from your system and notify the sender by return email.


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [lstruwe@hotmail.com: Wikipedia serious copyright
	infringement: Gentianaceae pages]

body:
----- Forwarded message from Lena Struwe <lstruwe at hotmail.com> -----

From: "Lena Struwe" <lstruwe at hotmail.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2004 04:17:13 -0400
To: <jwales at bomis.com>
Subject: Wikipedia serious copyright infringement: Gentianaceae pages

Dear Mr. Wales,

I am the founder of the Gentian Research Network and its website, and today I suddenly found some of the text from the plant descriptions on my website used illegally on Wikipedia.  Someone has copied large portions of text without giving the source.  I request that all copied text be removed and be replaced with links to the pages it was copied from.  This concerns several pages, for example Adenolisianthus and Aripuana, and would probably be additional pages in the future since the Wikipedia author has started first in the alphabet of the genus list.  I think Wikipedia is a great idea, however, not when this happens. I am a contributor to Wikipedia too, and if this is not taken care of I will start to edit these pages and replace them with links to the sources.  Please notify the author of the affected Wikipedia pages that this is unacceptable and improper use of copyrighted material.

For example:
Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenolisianthus

my page: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~struwe/gentnet/genera/genAden.htm

Each page has a copyright at the bottom of each page - and the home page has an extensive copyright paragraph - see http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~struwe/gentnet/index.htm at the bottom.

Currently no source is given for the text in Wikipedia, but the link to the home page of Gentian Research Network is given.  This is not sufficient - and the text should not have been directly copied into Wikipedia.

I am a professor in Botany at Rutgers University and have published extensively in this subject area.  Please see my home page below and the Gentian Research Network site for corroboration of above claims.  We freely share data and images from the website, however, we DO NOT allow direct copying without prior permission and without giving the source.

Thanks,

Dr. Lena Struwe
________________________________
Dr. Lena Struwe
Dept. of Ecology, Evolution, & Nat. Resources
Rutgers University - Cook College
237 Foran Hall, 59 Dudley Road
New Brunswick, NJ 08904
phone: (732) 932-9711 ext. 235, fax: (732) 932-9441
e-mail: struwe at aesop.rutgers.edu or lstruwe at hotmail.com
home page: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~struwe
GENTIAN RESEARCH NETWORK http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~struwe/gentnet

----- End forwarded message -----

--
"La n??fle est un fruit." - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org


from_name: JAY JG

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Zero0000 has blocked
	Lance6Wins....apparentlycontray to Block

body:
>From: Matthew Larsen <mat.larsen at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: Matthew Larsen <mat.larsen at gmail.com>,English Wikipedia
><wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Zero0000 has blocked
>Lance6Wins....apparentlycontray to Blocking policy
>Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 21:44:50 +0100
>
>Anyone can make a harmless mistake, and Zero has clearly blown this
>issue out of all proportians. Is it really worth making all this fuss
>over something as silly as 'where did this quote come from'

I think there is a more important issue here, and that it is not just Zero
who has "blown the issue out of all proportions."  The tolerance for editors
who willfully damage Wikipedia is astounding; known repeat offenders are
agonized over, sometimes for weeks at a time, before action is taken, and
even then actions are watered down in the hopes that one day, perhaps, with
the right tutoring, the editor might make some valuable edit or
contribution.  Even people who have been permanently banned for outrageous
behaviour are allowed back in on special "parole" conditions in the hopes
that enough Wikilove and supervision will turn them into productive
citizens.  The RfC, mediation, and Abitration processes work so slowly and
intermittently that many admins describe them as broken and essentially
useless (see, for example, [[User:Ambi/Thoughts_on_Dispute_Resolution]] .
And yet, when an admin who has made extremely valuable contributions to the
project appears to step over the line in a fairly mild way, the immediate
response *from the top* is that this person should be de-sysopped.

Now it's true no action has yet been taken, and given the glacial pace of
the various abuse "remedies" on Wikipedia, it's likely none ever will be
taken.  And I understand and support the need for holding an admin to a
significantly higher standard than a regular editor.  However, I still see a
big imbalance here between the way valuable contributors are treated and how
known trolls are coddled.  A number of extremely knowledgeable editors have
privately (and even publicly) stated that they would no longer edit articles
*in their areas of expertise* because the abuse and harassment they receive
from POV warriors and ad hominem abusers is so great that it is simply not
worth it for them to bother, particularly as there is no remedy for this
problem - or rather, there are remedies, but Wikpedia cannot or will not use
them.

I admit that some of the frustration I'm expressing here is based on two
solid weeks of daily personal attacks on me by 3 Wikipedia editors, and in
particular my feeling that there is little, if any, point in attempting to
use the various Wikipedia remedies to try to fix this situation.  And
perhaps it is character building for me to simply ignore the "slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune" rather than "take arms against a sea of
troubles, and by opposing end them," particularly when I think the arms in
question are ineffective.  Nevertheless, the underlying question is general
and remains; how many of Wikipedia's most valuable resources will be forced
to take lengthy or permanent self-imposed Wikibreaks as a result of this,
before the issue is not only taken seriously, but actually addressed?

Jay.

_________________________________________________________________
Take charge with a pop-up guard built on patented Microsoft? SmartScreen
Technology.
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first two months FREE*.


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 00:58:18 -0400, Evan Prodromou <evan at bad.dynu.ca> wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 09:35 +0530, shantanu oak wrote:
> > Hi,
...
> > But I completely fail to understand why certain words are hyperlinked.
> > For e.g. in the following para why does the date January 27 is linked?
> > I clicked on that date and could not find anything related to the
> > current page i.e. MandrakeSoft.
...
> On a more serious note: you should probably look over the manual of
> style for English Wikipedia. If I'm not mistaken, linking dates and
> years just because is not recommended. You can help Wikipedia by taking
> out the links in the page you found.

Actually, I thought linking dates *was* encouraged - for the
(admittedly rather opaque) reason that this triggered special code to
reformat them:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing says "Use links for dates,
so everyone can set their own display order. Use Special:Preferences
to change your own date display setting."

Basically, putting links round "[[January 27]],
[[2003]]" makes it appear as though it was "[[27 January]] [[2003]]"
or even "[[2003]] [[01-27]]" depending how the viewer's preferences
are set. Nifty, but perhaps a bit too magic...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiCommons wishes

body:
On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 00:41:54 +0200 Jens Frank <JeLuF at gmx.de> wrote:

>> 1. The possibility to use images on commons directly on Wikipedia
>> 2. Getting a thumbnail of an image in a category (and for non-images some
>> descriptive text) instead of just the page title on a category page.
>>
>> Unfortunately, it does not seem like there are any active developers on
>> WikiCommons currently, so I am throwing this into the larger group in the
>> hope someone will be interested in programming them.
>
>1) Any proposed syntax for it?

The _preferred_ syntax would be no syntax at all. For a Media or Image-link,
first the local wiki is checked whether it exists. If not, it is looked at
in WikiCommons. This is preferred, because it is how thing will go in the
Erik's envisioned 'fully operating' WikiCommons.

However, if it is easier to program, the alternative would be: Have keywords
'Commons' and 'Commonsmedia', which have the same or similar syntax as Image
and Media.

>2) There already is a Special:Newimages in 1.4-pre that is intended for
>commons, it shows the latest uploads as thumbnail galery. It was written
>with cateogry pages in mind, so adding this will not take too long.

Cool and thanks!

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] UI language switching

body:
On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 20:47:37 -0400, zhengzhu <zhengzhu at gmail.com> wrote:
> The basic functionality of switching the UI language is in CVS HEAD. I
> see test.wp is already running it, so please take a look.
[...]
> Only messages of the content language (and supported variants, such as
> zh-cn and zh-tw for zh) are stored in the MediaWiki: namespace. All
> message keys are suffixed by the language code in the namespace. For
> example, 'mainpage' will be 'mainpage/en' in the en site, and
> 'mainpage/fr' in the fr site, etc. This is mainly for the purpose of
> supporting multiple variants (e.g. zh-tw and zh-cn) in the namespace.

Isn't this going to be a bit awkward when anyone changes a MediaWiki
message, and finds that they can't switch non-local speaking users
away from the default? I mean, sometimes things like "Current events"
get turned into something significantly different, like Meta's "Goings
on".

But then, perhaps a site like Meta: or a "data-based project" could
just have *all* languages as "supported variants" (is this going to be
a setting somewhere?), and attempt to propogate any major changes
across each of the /langcode sub-pages.

----

Ah! Bug alert: some MediaWiki messages/translations determine the
target of links. Different languages default these links to different
locations, so putting the TestWikipedia in German gives me a link to
http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite rather than
http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. Perhaps destinations like
this need to be stored seperately in some global
(language-independent) part of the MediaWiki: namespace, and
referenced in the default translations for each language -
: in LanguageDe.php "[[ {{MediaWiki:mainpage}} | Hauptseite ]]"
: of course, for UI language == content language, "[[
{{MediaWiki:mainpage}} | {{MediaWiki:mainpage}} ]]" gives the
equivalent of the current system
In short, the *text* of such links can be translated, but their
*target* needs to reflect the actual location on this wiki, wherever
it appears.

I would have guessed this would affect namespace names as well (e.g.
User:, User_talk:), but I can't find any instances of this being the
case so far.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiCommons wishes

body:
Le Monday 27 September 2004 13:31, Andre Engels a ?crit :
> On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 00:41:54 +0200 Jens Frank <JeLuF at gmx.de> wrote:
> >> 1. The possibility to use images on commons directly on Wikipedia
> >> 2. Getting a thumbnail of an image in a category (and for non-images
> >> some descriptive text) instead of just the page title on a category
> >> page.
> >>
> >> Unfortunately, it does not seem like there are any active developers on
> >> WikiCommons currently, so I am throwing this into the larger group in
> >> the hope someone will be interested in programming them.
> >
> >1) Any proposed syntax for it?
>
> The _preferred_ syntax would be no syntax at all. For a Media or
> Image-link, first the local wiki is checked whether it exists. If not, it
> is looked at in WikiCommons. This is preferred, because it is how thing
> will go in the Erik's envisioned 'fully operating' WikiCommons.

No. It is necessary that the image from Commons can be forced over an image
with the same name in the local wiki.

> Cool and thanks!
>
> Andre Engels

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


from_name: Austin Hair

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia in China

body:
> Look back on history, though China had the most powerful navy and army
> since the 10th century, we did not want to conquer the whole world.
> Only the whites would go all around the world robbing and killing.

I'm not Chinese.  Not remotely so.  I do, however, know for a fact that
China was practicing an active policy of imperialism until fairly
recently in modern history.  The emperor (take note of the term) fancied
himself sovereign of a global dominion which included Europe, as
dynastic literature tells us, and with the exception of a brief period
of isolation during the 16th and 17th centuries China was as imperialist
as they come.

> Prosperity of China is indeed great. At least we would not turn into
> another superpower that invades another country thousands of miles
> away.

Perhaps because you're too busy oppressing your own people.

--
Austin D. Hair <austin at austinhair.org>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Callidus
http://www.austinhair.org/
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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiCommons wishes

body:
On Sep 27, 2004, at 5:09 AM, Yann Forget wrote:
>> The _preferred_ syntax would be no syntax at all. For a Media or
>> Image-link, first the local wiki is checked whether it exists. If
>> not, it
>> is looked at in WikiCommons. This is preferred, because it is how
>> thing
>> will go in the Erik's envisioned 'fully operating' WikiCommons.
>
> No. It is necessary that the image from Commons can be forced over an
> image
> with the same name in the local wiki.

Any reason that this must be necessary?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Sound files

body:
On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 18:42:36 -0700, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> Those links are only meaningful to an experienced Wikipedian.  They are
> of absolutely no use to a casual visitor who may just want to hear how a
> word on Wiktionary is pronounced.  A link would need to be placed on
> each and every page that has a .ogg file on it, much as is done at sites
> that have .pdf files.
>
> Communicating these issues can be a big problem.  I know about it
> because I subscribe to this mailing list.  I rarely visit the other two
> sites.

OK, a proposal:
* A [[Help:Sounds]] page should be created
* This page should be linked to automatically from the "Image:"
(description) page for every file matching *.ogg [since we have no
better way of determining file type]
* It should be strongly encouraged for people to add a link to this if
they use a [[Media:]] link to an Ogg Vorbis file.
* The page should be biased heavily towards casual visitors who have
no prior knowledge of Ogg; possibly even no real conception of
different filetypes
* Software for playback should be listed in a step-by-step/how-to
style, with the name most likely to be recognised mentioned at the
beginning of each item

e.g.:
"Sounds on {{sitename}} are stored in a format called [[Ogg Vorbis]],
which is a form of compression which makes them faster to download. It
is similar to the popular format known as [[MP3]], but there are a
legal issues associated with that format that make it undesirable for
our use.

==How to play sounds==
Unfortunately, the Ogg Vorbis format is not yet as common as others,
so you may find you do not have software that can play these files.
Below is a list of what programs can be used:

===Windows===
* '''Winamp''': support included in full installs of versions 2.80 and
later; [http://.. available here]
** if you used a "compact" installer, you may need [http://.. this plugin]
* '''Windows Media Player''': support can be added through [http://..
this plugin]
* '''QuickTime''': plugin available [http://.. here]

===MacOS===
(similar)

===Linux and UNIX systems===
(etc)

Would this cover what people want?

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] V2.0?

body:
Yesterday, Erik Moeller mentioned that it might be best to hold off with
the wikidata development, and instead do that in a "quantum leap"
MediaWiki 2.0 version.

Which got me thinking: Should we start this (at least, plan it)?

There are quite some concepts and ideas that were proposed, but seem to
be hard to do with the current line of development. Examples:
* WikiData
* cur/old integration
* stable revision number for both cur/old
* single login
* XML parser
* use of wikicommons
* centralized interwiki link management
* stable/editable version management
* SVG support (editable SVG source?)

These are just the ones I come up with in a minute. There are, no doubt,
more.
Sure, some of them *can* be integrated into 1.3/1.4, but considering the
sum of the above, it might call for some radical break.

Which leads to the question: Fork or rewrite?

Seriously: If the database structure in 2.0 would greatly differ from
1.4 (which is to be expected), a rewrite of the core parts is in order.
* The parser will be rewritten anyway as XML-interpreting.
* We can probably keep the skin system
* Special pages will need a (partial) rewrite, depending on the new DB
structure
* Cache/squid/... can probably stay as they are

DATABASE REWRITE PROPOSAL

I vaguely remember there's one on meta, but I came up with this last
night (don't ask;-), so here goes nothing:

* Object list table. An object is a page (article, talk, etc.), an
image/media/binary file, or data; extensible with future types.
* A table for each object type, which holds the actual data: Article
text and user comment, revision number etc.

The object table only contains an ID and name (+namespace) for the
object, and an ID number for the actual object in its table.
So:
* OBJ_ID, OBJ_TITLE, OBJ_NAMESPACE identifies the object
* OBJ_TYPE (0 for page, 1 for image, 2 for data...)
* OBJ_DATA_REVISION identifies the current object data *in its table*

An article has
* ARTICLE_ID (matches OBJ_ID)
* ARTICLE_REVISION (both cur and old; OBJ_DATA_REVISION has the latest
ARTICLE_REVISION)
* the text of  that revision, the user id, text and comment, and all the
other goodies

An image table would have
* IMAGE_ID, IMAGE_REVISION
* filename of the stored image, or reference to an external image
(commons), with a local description

Similar for data etc. (maybe even users?)

A table for changes would thus store an OBJ_ID. Recent Changes can then
look up what that object is, and then look up the changes in the
appropriate table.
As a result, we'd get
* an "universal" interface for everything we store in the wiki
* a (relatively) small table with all objects, equaling faster access
times, that only references the actual data (in the appropriate table)

Now you see why I think "rewrite" for this one. I also strongly believe
we should put *every* database access into the database class, capsuling
it from the rest of the software. Had we done this in 1.4, basically
only a rewrite of the database class(es) would be in order for the above
proposal.

Enough shocking you for now,
Magnus


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] UI language switching

body:
On Monday 27 September 2004 02:47, zhengzhu wrote:
> Right now the UI language option is only accessible for registered
> users through the preference page. I think we should also place a
> selection box somewhere in the mainpage for anonymous users so they
> can choose the UI language as well.

For anon users, browser language might also be recognised.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Recurring error messages

body:
Rick wrote:
> I keep getting this error message while trying to use Wikipedia.  It's been occurring for the last two days or so, off and on:
>
> Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-new/includes/LoadBalancer.php on line 111
>
> RickK

Rick,

You've written the above in response to a message about '"Editorial
purposes only" images', presumably by hitting reply and then changing
the subject line. On many newsreaders this causes your message to appear
as a reply to that thread which is confusing. Would you mind hitting
"New" rather than "Reply" when starting a new topic?

Ed Poor - I seem to have the opposite problem with you :) Often a new
thread with a new subject line continues a discussion already ongoing,
which can be confusing!

Thanks for listening,

Pete/Pcb21


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikitech-l] Sound files

body:
On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 00:38:03 +0200, Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:
> Yes, MP3 being license-encumbered is worrying.
> BUT:
> We neither decode nor encode audio files.
> We only host them for people to retrieve.
> We don't have to worry about MP3's license status.

Of course we technically don't, but this is not just about doing what
we *have* to do but rather doing what is right. Using a free audio
format guarantees that it can be decoded and encoded in the future
with free software, which means for example that if wikipedia were to
be distributed on a CD along with software necessary to display it the
distributor would not have to pay licence fees to fraunhoffer or worse
not be allowed to distribute the files at all.

Imagine a similar situation where we would use Microsoft Word
documents to store content rather than wikitext, that too would
putting all those who wish to read the content at the mercy of a
corporate entity.

>
> Yes, we would like to advocate free alternatives and no, we should not
> disallow .ogg if allowing MP3.
> BUT NOTE:
>
> ***Most operating systems are not free either and***
> ***we don't bar Win or Mac folks from using the Wikipedia.***

Your analogy is flawed, what matters is that one should not need
proprietary software to access wikimedia content, you can of course do
so but having the choice is what this is about, with a proprietary
format you might not have that choice any longer.

Remember also that the reason you can access wikimedia content on
multiple platforms today is because it uses open standards, html,
http, png and such, i for one would like to keep it that way.

>
> We even expressly _cater_ for MSIE quirks to a considerable (and
> painfully high) extent.
> Surely if we do that then we can allow existing users of the non-free
> MP3 format to use their known and ***ubiquitous*** format?
>
> Second thought, I'd even go so far as to advocate WP going .ogg only
> and becoming a driving force in .ogg adoption, but ONLY, ONLY once a
> totally hassle-free solution with simple, short and FULLY sufficient
> end user friendly instructions exists.
>
> Despite the concomitant loss of quality (which can be partially avoided
> by "oversampling"/using higher sampling rates) we can always convert
> MP3 files and switch to .ogg ONCE WE AND .OGG ARE FULLY THERE in terms
> of user-friendliness. As long as that's not the case insisting on .ogg
> would only serve to prevent most people from using audio with
> MediaWiki/Wikipedia.

Honestly i think that you and others are taking this totally out of
proportion, it's a plug in which can be downloaded in 2-5mins, for
free!, remember that through some amazing miracle of ( insert deity
here ) people were very well capable of doing just that when Windows
did not ship with mp3 support not so long ago.

>
>
>
> On 26 Sep 2004, at 23:04, Andre Engels wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 15:43:27 +0200 ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason
> > <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >>> Then again, as we're not actually in the business of writing audio
> >>> encoding software, we might just as well put up with reality and
> >>> allow
> >>> mp3 uploads.
> >> This has already been discussed at great length both on wikien and on
> >> wikipedia talk:sound, and the overwhelming consensus was not to use
> >> none-free formats which would possibly lock us into proprietery
> >> software.
> >
> > So instead we prefer to have every Windows user go through the same
> > process of seeing that he can't listen to .ogg files and with great
> > difficulty upload a special program to listen to it, where almost all
> > of them are already having the possibility to listen to mp3s?
> >
> > And if we have this policy, why are jpegs still ok? (just google for
> > jpeg+patent+forgent to see what I mean)
> >
> > I would like to change this policy, and instead of looking at patent
> > rights, allow those and only those formats that have widely used
> > freely available players on all of Windows, Linux and Mac.
> >
> > Andre Engels
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Stirling Newberry

body:
On Sep 27, 2004, at 5:59 PM, Jens Ropers wrote:

> Austin,
>
> What part of "CHINA FLAMEWAR OFFICIALLY CANCELLED" do you not
> understand?!?
>
> -- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
>     www.ropersonline.com
>

The same part Chris didn't understand.

Can we get back to work now?


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] na: problems - WikiSquatting (was: Starting a new
	wiki)

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
> Mark Williamson wrote:
> > Oh, also there is the additional option of setting up shop at a
> > Wikipedia that has had little or no action. This is *not* something I
> >  would encourage! Please exhaust all other options first. Depending
> > on which language you choose though, it could take a very short time
> >  or a very long time for anybody to realise what you're doing. And if
> >  you can round up a good sized group of contributors, and you get up
> > a sizable number of articles, when you *are* eventually found out
> > there is a good chance the content will be kept, but moved to a
> > different subdomain (most likely ang:).
> >
>
> I don't mind if people squat on empty wikis, since their secrecy means
> that they won't be able to request help writing language files, or to
> ask for help in making interlanguage links. In fact, I'll happily create
> any wiki if the potential contributors agree in advance to use a
> language file which is already mature, and that you refrain from
> requesting interface customisations which require developer attention.
>
> If that seems like a bizarre rule, then maybe you should re-read my
> posts, where I have repeatedly attempted to explain my objection.
>

Actually, it appears that is *exactly* what is being done at
http://na.wikipedia.org/

I have investigated and na.wikipedia as well as na.wiktionary appear
to be totally fraudulent. I'm not sure what language they *are* in,
but it sure as hell isn't Nauruan - the dead giveaway is "el welcomi
gua wikipedia gua nauruoese" - a number of hints in that one sentence:
1 "welcomi" is *not* a Nauruan word, teh Nauruan word for "welcome" is
"talofa" 2 The Nauruan language for itself is not "nauruoese" but
rather "nauri".

In addition the names of articles can be used as an example. "Langue"
is not Nauruan for language, the Nauruan word would be "ekakairu" or
"edorer". "Nasion" is not Nauruan for nation, the Nauruan word would
be "ename" or "eponname". "Xiao" is not Nauruan for city, the Nauruan
word would be "tekawa". Of course since "Suaong" has no interwiki link
I cannot tell what it's supposed to mean, but suffice to say the word
does not appear in any Nauruan dictionary.

Also notable is this language's usage of an -s suffix to indicate
plurals, as in English and many Romance languages. A Polynesian
language such as Nauruan would not indicate plurals with a suffix like
that, and even if it *did*, it would be an extreme coincidence if it
was the same as in English.

It also appears that this language has noun cases - "xiao" (city)
because "xiae" (not sure what case either of these are, but I think
the former might be nominative and the latter accusative). This is a
feature that most definitely DOES NOT appear in Polynesian languages
(I would say it doesn't occur in Austronesian languages at all, but I
don't know that for sure).

Also suspect is the fact that a huge portion of the words they use are
cognate to English words - this would not be the case for a real text
in Nauruan.

--node


from_name: Angela

body:
> On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 09:35 +0530, shantanu oak wrote:

> > But I completely fail to understand why certain words are hyperlinked.
> > For e.g. in the following para why does the date January 27 is linked?
> > I clicked on that date and could not find anything related to the
> > current page i.e. MandrakeSoft.

Two reasons that dates are linked are:
1) so you can use "what links here" from the date pages to find
everything that happened on that date
2) so that the date is shown in your preferred format. This can be set
in your preferences and allows you see [[3 August]] as [[August 3]]
which prevents people edit warring over date formats. This preference
isn't available on all Wikipedias, so the rule might be something
specific to en.

Angela.


from_name: Michael Snow

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: [lstruwe@hotmail.com: Wikipedia serious copyright
 infringement: Gentianaceae pages]

body:
The two articles in question have been listed on [[Wikipedia:Copyright
problems]]. The "author" of these pages has not made any contributions
since, but I left a note on the talk page just the same. I couldn't find
any other problems in the contribution history, or in the other articles
on this family of plants. I also emailed Dr. Struwe to let her know what
steps we were taking.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Vina Wang

subject:
[Wikitech-l] How to get a list of all pages without interlanguage
	links

body:
A question came up during a discussion on the Chinese wiki.  There are lots of pages on Chinese wiki that does not have interwiki links, that has counterparts. However, finding these pages are very difficult.  What's the easist way to get a list of all pages that does not have any inter-language links?

The proposal were either to run a SQL query of some sort against the database, or run the interlanguage bot against the wiki and parse the result log.

Which is a better way?  Also, if it is the SQL query, who will be able to help me with it?

Thanks in advance.

-Vina


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [lstruwe@hotmail.com: Wikipedia serious copyright
	infringement...

body:
I looked at the original site. While some of the material was clearly copied,
and it seems obvious that the site mentioned was used as a source, other
material there was reworked and we added various wikipedia characteristics,
including a taxbox, which did not appear in the original article. I therefore
restored the article, and removed the material that was copied directly.

In general, we are getting an increasing number of complaints about copyright
violation. While we should always be on guard against this, we should not let
this tear down material that was created. Information per se cannot be
copyrighted. Our taxoboxes and other, similar features are uniquely Wikipedian. In
this case, some of the material was salvagable. It would be a pity to remove
that.

Danny


from_name: Manuel G R

subject: [Wikitech-l] Translation update from MediaWiki namespace

body:
Spanish Wikiquote is lacking a complete translation into Spanish. The
more modern messages, which have been translated through the MediaWiki:
namespace in Wikipedia and Wiktionary, are untraslated.

Would it be possible to automatically update the LanguageEs.php file
with the contents of Special:Allmessages from Wikipedia or Wiktionary?
Thus there won't be the necessity to repeat the translation process. If
this isn't possible I might provide a manual translation of the last
version of this file.

Regards.


from_name: Arwel Parry

body:
In message <1096261098.9992.59.camel at bad>, Evan Prodromou
<evan-zOntnoXveK8sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> writes
>On Mon, 2004-09-27 at 09:35 +0530, shantanu oak wrote:
>> Hi,
>> What are the implied rules of creating hyperlinks?
>>
>> Let's assume I am reading the page....
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MandrakeSoft
>>
>> I have understood 2 things about links...
>> 1) Red links don't contain any text.
>> 2) External links are marked (a convention, I wish all websites
>>should follow)
>>
>> But I completely fail to understand why certain words are hyperlinked.
>> For e.g. in the following para why does the date January 27 is linked?
>> I clicked on that date and could not find anything related to the
>> current page i.e. MandrakeSoft.
>>
>> MandrakeSoft operated under bankruptcy protection from [[January 27]],
>> [[2003]] to [[March 30]], [[2004]]. Despite its efforts to cut losses
>> and improve profits, MandrakeSoft was forced to file for protection
>> due to a series of quarterly losses.
>>
>> Too much (and mostly unnecessary) hyperlinks makes me shy away from
>>using wiki.
>
>Hmm. We're kind of in a double bind, here. If we don't fix up everything
>in the encyclopedia to be completely perfect, you're not going to
>participate. But if we fix everything to be completely perfect, we don't
>really need your participation after that. B-)
>
>On a more serious note: you should probably look over the manual of
>style for English Wikipedia. If I'm not mistaken, linking dates and
>years just because is not recommended. You can help Wikipedia by taking
>out the links in the page you found.

On the contrary -- linking dates is strongly encouraged, so that they
are displayed according to the readers' preferences. [[27 September]]
[[2004]] will display variously as 27 September 2004, September 27,
2004, or 2004-09-27. It saves a great many edit wars that way. Anything
which will pour oil on the troubled waters of Transatlantic writing
styles is a good thing.

--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


from_name: Jens Ropers

body:
Austin,

What part of "CHINA FLAMEWAR OFFICIALLY CANCELLED" do you not
understand?!?

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com

On 27 Sep 2004, at 23:25, Austin Hair wrote:

>> Look back on history, though China had the most powerful navy and army
>> since the 10th century, we did not want to conquer the whole world.
>> Only the whites would go all around the world robbing and killing.
>
> I'm not Chinese.  Not remotely so.  I do, however, know for a fact that
> China was practicing an active policy of imperialism until fairly
> recently in modern history.  The emperor (take note of the term)
> fancied
> himself sovereign of a global dominion which included Europe, as
> dynastic literature tells us, and with the exception of a brief period
> of isolation during the 16th and 17th centuries China was as
> imperialist
> as they come.
>
>> Prosperity of China is indeed great. At least we would not turn into
>> another superpower that invades another country thousands of miles
>> away.
>
> Perhaps because you're too busy oppressing your own people.
>
> --
> Austin D. Hair <austin at austinhair.org>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Callidus
> http://www.austinhair.org/


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] V2.0?

body:
Magnus-
> * WikiData
> * cur/old integration
> * stable revision number for both cur/old
> * single login
> * XML parser
> * use of wikicommons
> * centralized interwiki link management
> * stable/editable version management
    and peer review mechanisms.

I've been thinking about the general problem of workflow, fact-markup etc.
I'll have some more details soon.

> * SVG support (editable SVG source?)
  * proper multi-language support within a single DB
  * completely new way of looking at discussion pages

The fact that we are using a mailing list to discuss this is a sign that
our dogfood is not quite good enough to eat yet in the department of
discussions. In fact, one Wikipedia WikiProject even created a separate
phpBB-type online forum as a replacement for individual aricle talk pages.

Talk pages are confusing and do not offer most of the functionality that
we have come to take for granted from other online forums, usenet, mailing
lists etc.:
- different view modes for a thread
- sorting
- reply button
- quoting
- comments are signed for me
- watching individual threads for replies
- isolated viewing/linking of individual comments/threads
- automatic archiving
- search by author, subject etc.
- group or aggregate related discussions easily
- ...

On the other hand, of course talk pages have the full power of wikis -
they integrate into RC, they allow wiki syntax, refactoring, diffs etc. So
I've been thinking in the last few weeks about a good way to combine the
advantages of talk pages and discussion forums into a truly revolutionary
new system.

This system, which I have dubbed "LiquidThreads" for now, requires each
comment to be stored separately in the database. It will not just *allow*
refactoring, it will in fact *require* it - the archiving process depends
on old discussions being summarized. It will be possible to attach open
wiki pages to a thread which can then be used to create a summary for one
or several threads; only if such a summary exists, the thread will be
automatically archived after a given time. For easy refactoring into
summaries, it will be possible to generate a "flat" wikitext view of a
thread.

The system will make it easy to create new "channels" of discussions and
to "attach" channels to individual article pages - multiple channels per
article, or multiple articles per channel. Discussions can be moved easily
so that we can get a decent workflow on general discussion channels like
Wikipedia:Village pump.

It will make it possible to immediately see recent comments on a Wikipedia
article or a Wikidata entry without going to a separate "talk page", if
you want to. You can get a "You have new messages" type notification for
*any* reply, no matter where it appears. Discussions of interest to you
can be followed on a single page. Yet the system will provide the whole
flexibility of the traditional wiki talk system. It will allow setting
individual comment permissions so that others can edit your comments. Each
comment will have a history, diffs etc. And perhaps functionality for
polls can be added, too.

OK, I know, someone has to code it, too ;-). I've created some mock-ups
(yeah, I really like mock-ups) and will very soon start writing the
specifications for this system, which I believe definitely needs to be
taken into account when desigining the new database scheme. I'm fully
aware that this will probably only get implemented if I code it myself.

So I hope we don't hurry too much, and at least spend a month or two
laying out the requirements for the 2.0 database. Design flaws are always
difficult to fix later. I want this design to be *good*, better than
anything else out there. I want us to take wiki to the next level.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

>I looked at the original site. While some of the material was clearly copied,
>and it seems obvious that the site mentioned was used as a source, other
>material there was reworked and we added various wikipedia characteristics,
>including a taxbox, which did not appear in the original article. I therefore
>restored the article, and removed the material that was copied directly.
>
>In general, we are getting an increasing number of complaints about copyright
>violation. While we should always be on guard against this, we should not let
>this tear down material that was created. Information per se cannot be
>copyrighted. Our taxoboxes and other, similar features are uniquely Wikipedian. In
>this case, some of the material was salvagable. It would be a pity to remove
>that.
>
I agree that it's important to avoid overreacting  when there is a
copyright complaint.  I can see where our author should not be faulted
too much.  The wording of the copyright notice alone would not prevent
us from copying without asking permission. We are not using it for
commercial purposes.  The problem is that we cannot guarantee that a
downstream user will be aware of this.

> All information on this web site is copyrighted and cannot be used for
> any commercial purposes without prior permission.  Educational,
> research, and not-for-profit use is allowed, if you cite the source
> (as Gentian Research Network, or when applicable, individual copyright
> holders). Look at the bottom of each page for copyright information.

Adenolisianthus was first described in1895.  The official description is
in the public domain, but I don't know how much the description varies
from the official one.  Even with a more modern taxom I would wonder
about the copyrightability of such a description.

Ec


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] UI language switching

body:
On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 15:38:49 +0200, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu> wrote:
> On Monday 27 September 2004 02:47, zhengzhu wrote:
> > Right now the UI language option is only accessible for registered
> > users through the preference page. I think we should also place a
> > selection box somewhere in the mainpage for anonymous users so they
> > can choose the UI language as well.
>
> For anon users, browser language might also be recognised.

This is what the earlier references to "content negotiation" meant.
Basically, a browser can be set to have a prioritised list of
preferred languages, which are sent with every request to a web
server; the server can then interpret this data, and return a
different version of the requested document in order to match those
preferences as best as possible. In MediaWiki's case, we could simply
select the UI that matched the highest priority language given by the
browser.

I see one disadvantage to this: caching. We're going to need some
pretty clever partial caching if too many non-English-speaking anons
visit en...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Hyperlink convention

body:
This is also for people that want different date formats, for me it reads:

"MandrakeSoft operated under bankruptcy protection from 2003-01-27 to
2004-03-30."

On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 09:35:09 +0530, shantanu oak <shantanu.oak at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> What are the implied rules of creating hyperlinks?
>
> Let's assume I am reading the page....
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MandrakeSoft
>
> I have understood 2 things about links...
> 1) Red links don't contain any text.
> 2) External links are marked (a convention, I wish all websites should follow)
>
> But I completely fail to understand why certain words are hyperlinked.
> For e.g. in the following para why does the date January 27 is linked?
> I clicked on that date and could not find anything related to the
> current page i.e. MandrakeSoft.
>
> MandrakeSoft operated under bankruptcy protection from [[January 27]],
> [[2003]] to [[March 30]], [[2004]]. Despite its efforts to cut losses
> and improve profits, MandrakeSoft was forced to file for protection
> due to a series of quarterly losses.
>
> Too much (and mostly unnecessary) hyperlinks makes me shy away from using wiki.
>
> Thanks
> Shantanu Oak
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject:
[Wikitech-l] The difficulty of collaborative design in a volunteer
	enviornment

body:
Tim Starling schrieb:

> What developers do when faced with this problem is they attempt to
> ignore all plans which have gone before. They invent their own, and fool
> themselves into thinking that their idea is truly creative and new. This
> allows them to regain the motivation that was lost.

BTW, I've seen this mechanism work in Wikipedia many times. :-)

Kurt


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Sound files

body:
Jens Ropers wrote:
> The fact that we're even having this conversation proves Gerard's and
> my point that things are still just not good enough.
> Pointing out that fact IS in itself a constructive step forward.

Yes.  There is no question in my mind that we should have an obvious
link in every obvious place where a person might be baffled, we should
help them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Tatum

has this link in it:
[[media:Elegie (Art Tatum).ogg|"Elegie"]]

Perhaps the rendered html for that wik markup should include a link to
a very user-friendly page "How to play ogg".

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Sound files

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> And if we have this policy, why are jpegs still ok? (just google for
> jpeg+patent+forgent to see what I mean)

It seems fairly clear to me that the alleged jpeg patents are going to
be held to be invalid soon enough.  We need not take into account
every crackpot legal claim out there.

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] Quick thoughts on fundraising

body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> I just wanted to add that I like all of Erik's ideas.

Indeed.

One thing he didn't focus on is our writing style.  I find that we are
frequently way too wordy and NPOV in our own marketing efforts.  I'm
not suggesting that we go overboard with garishness, etc., but we
should recognize that many or most donations will be "impulse
purchases" and to inspire that, an emotional connection is best.

If we go back and read my "open letter" for our first ever fundraiser,
it was a fairly emotional appeal.  (I can't actually find it online
right now, did it get lost?)

--Jimbo


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia in China

body:
On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 14:25:07 -0700, Austin Hair <callidus at austinhair.org> wrote:
> I'm not Chinese.  Not remotely so.  I do, however, know for a fact that
> China was practicing an active policy of imperialism until fairly
> recently in modern history.  The emperor (take note of the term) fancied
> himself sovereign of a global dominion which included Europe, as
> dynastic literature tells us, and with the exception of a brief period
> of isolation during the 16th and 17th centuries China was as imperialist
> as they come.

This is so ludicrous. I'm thankful Jimbo declared this thread over.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)


subject:
[Wikitech-l] The difficulty of collaborative design in a
	volunteer enviornment

body:
Tim-
> Forgive me for being jaded from past experience with MediaWiki
> development, but I care very little for plans. We have unbelievable
> numbers of plans piled up on meta and on the mailing list. The people
> who propose them generally overestimate the available developer
> workload, and fail to consider an important part of developer motivation.

There is a lot of truth to this, and this is always something I worry
about when I write a proposal - but it's a catch-22 situation, and I
consider the potential benefits of publishing larger than the potential
downsides of not doing it.

I also believe there's a better solution to the problem of volunteer
motiviation than the one you suggest, and that is the building of group
identity from the start. This is what WikiProjects on Wikipedia do, for
example.

What we need to create, I believe, is workgroups for different project
areas:
- extension work group
- template work group
- 2.0 work group
etc.

These groups would try to develop truly collaborative strategies and
utilize all available knowledge, with all members working together on
equal footing, regardless of the nature of their contributions.
Positive group energy can generate a lot of motivation in itself. When
people feel they are part of one group from the start, every member of
that group can get a sense of accomplishment for what the group is doing.

The one problem that remains is the problem of respect, not just within a
work group but within the larger MediaWiki community. If people don't
respect each other, they can't work together well, and they won't *enjoy*
working with each other. There are many strategies which try to address
that problem, such as building reputation-based currencies where any
highly respected member in the community can use that respect to "buy"
other people's time. However, based on my experiences on Wikipedia, I tend
to come to the conclusion that the solutions are entirely social rather
than technical.

We need to build a culture of shared values, where these values tie us
together and allow us to work towards a common goal. Think about it -
*any* community needs shared values to be successful.

Our shared core value on Wikipedia is NPOV, for example. I can work
together with people of completely different political persuasions because
they all believe in building a neutral encyclopedia. Only the ones who do
not believe in that, we try to convert, or eventually ostracize.

What is our shared value in MediaWiki development? As long as we do not
have anything that unites us, the things that divide us will always come
into focus and take up our energy and resources. Clashes between egos will
prevent people from working together who could otherwise achieve true
greatness. This to me seems to be a larger cause of lack of cooperation
than anything else.

We share many of the same goals, but we have never bothered to put this
into explicit terms. The technology we are building has enormous potential
for positive change in society. If we all want this positive change to
happen, if we all want to make a difference through what we are doing,
then we have *no other choice* but to work together as best as we can.

We don't have to start a religion. But building a group identity based on
mutual respect and shared values would be useful, I think. How about you?

</soapbox>

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Harry Smith

body:
--- JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:

<snip>
> And yet, when an admin who has made extremely
> valuable contributions to the
> project appears to step over the line in a fairly
> mild way, the immediate
> response *from the top* is that this person should
> be de-sysopped.
<snip>
> from POV warriors and ad hominem abusers is so great
> Jay.

Jay,

Admin privileges are a trust.  they require a high
level of maturity in order to refrain from using those
privileges to enforce one's own view upon a
section/article in Wikipedia.  Abusing that trust,
even once, indicates a lapse in that maturity, a
failure to place the policies of Wikipedia above ones
own desires.

Zero0000 is the worst ad hominem abusers that I have
come into contact with at Wikipedia.  Virtually
everyon e else is willing to discuss an edit to one
extent or another.  Zero0000 quickly went to "go
away", "ban him", "i will ban you" as his only
communication with Lance6Wins.  He maintained that
position over an extended period of time. That is
unacceptable behavior in any admin.

Lance6Wins

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia in China

body:
That is enough !

I will block from this mailing list the next person writing such a thing.

I am terribly serious here.

There is *no* place here for such rants.

Anthere

Austin Hair a ?crit:
>>Look back on history, though China had the most powerful navy and army
>>since the 10th century, we did not want to conquer the whole world.
>>Only the whites would go all around the world robbing and killing.
>
>
> I'm not Chinese.  Not remotely so.  I do, however, know for a fact that
> China was practicing an active policy of imperialism until fairly
> recently in modern history.  The emperor (take note of the term) fancied
> himself sovereign of a global dominion which included Europe, as
> dynastic literature tells us, and with the exception of a brief period
> of isolation during the 16th and 17th centuries China was as imperialist
> as they come.
>
>
>>Prosperity of China is indeed great. At least we would not turn into
>>another superpower that invades another country thousands of miles
>>away.
>
>
> Perhaps because you're too busy oppressing your own people.


body:
Angela wrote:

> 1) so you can use "what links here" from the date pages to find
> everything that happened on that date

But the day of year and year are linked separately, making this
effectively useless. I'd much prefer to link each day individually, but
this task may be too monumental to do (not so much in terms of writing
and using the appropriate script - but in terms of getting widespread
agreement)

Pete


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Muke Tever

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] Checking capitalisation and the resurrection of
	"wikt"

body:
On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:43:54 +0200, Gerard Meijssen <gerardm at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> It is relatively easy to find all words of one language: the references for
> Sjabloon:-xx- where xx is the ISO 639 code for a language will give you
> all the words in a language.

Up to five hundred words.  Not nearly "all".

	*Muke!
--
website:     http://frath.net/
LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/
deviantArt:  http://kohath.deviantart.com/

FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki:
http://wiki.frath.net/


body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> Muke Tever wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:43:54 +0200, Gerard Meijssen
>> <gerardm at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>>
>>> It is relatively easy to find all words of one language: the
>>> references for
>>> Sjabloon:-xx- where xx is the ISO 639 code for a language will give you
>>> all the words in a language.
>>
>> Up to five hundred words.  Not nearly "all".
>>
>>     *Muke!
>
> Muke, at this point in time with *4925* words in nl:wiktionary 500
> words is sufficient. When I have finished with the conversion, I will
> look into using the output from queries to create content pages for
> the languages. This will overcome the still theoretic limit of 500 words.
>
> One question, do you have something positive to say as well, or can
> you only repeat yourself? I have heard you say this more than once.
>
> PS Did you happen to notice this problem ? Have you tried it ? Did you
> find any problems on the nl:wiktionary ? Do you have a better
> alternative ? Please be positive, I put a lot of work in it and I
> prefer something positive in stead of something negative.

en:wiktionary has over 46,000 entries.  I don't know if Muke
participates on nl, but I assume not.  Your scheme may work very well
there, and that's fine.  But please don't extrapolate that into an
excuse for it being a good thing on en, where the support for it is far
from unanimous.

Ec