subject: [WikiEN-l] Reversion warriors (was: User:Caius2ga)

body:
Mirko Thiessen <mt at mirko-thiessen.de> schrieb am Tue, 18 Nov 2003 09:42:13
+0100:

> RickK wrote:
>
>> [[User:Caius2ga]] is repeatedly involved in edit wars
>> over the useage of the names of Polish cities, insisting
>> on calling every city that ever was or ever might have
>> been in Poland, by its current name, regardless of what
>> it might have ever been called.  He has now begun to
>> refer to those who disagree with him as Nazis.
>

I am adding to my last comment to this list: There are no-go areas on
Wikipedia, where normal editors can't edit. There are articles in a
constant state of edit war, which cannot be NPOVed because of the
superiority of partisans and reversion warriors. There are entire fields
of knowledge, where serious editors run away from other editors insulting
and accusing everyone having another opinion.

Viajero made a good point when he said, that we need new procedures to
deal with this sort of users. These users are discouraging serious
contributors and chasing them away (as already happened).

If your reaction to this is "Just tell him, he should not do it again",
then - okay, then I will accept, that there are sections in Wikipedia,
which will never become encyclopedic.

Deeply frustrated,

Mirko.


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Peter Gervai

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Switching everything to UTF-8

body:
On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 04:28:32AM -0500, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Peter Gervai wrote:
> >Could you point us to the page and revision of the problem?
>
> couple examples:
>
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org&diff=4613&oldid=4612
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Main_Page&diff=20132&oldid=20130
>
> This happens on meta's Main Page often. Ask Anthere and Erik for other
> examples.

I see. First is not a good example, Opera 5 is _ancient_, you can't expect
that anyone would support it, as upgrading is clearly painless.

Second example is indeed valid, but it isn't a problem for you: if the page
does not contain non-8859-1 characters, nothing gets garbled. If it does
contain others then, well, you *need* utf-8 on that page anyway. (Embed
codes are a little bit slow to type, don't you agree? If not, write your
reply manually by using embeds. :))

> >I'm curious what kind of problem it might have been, as many
> >of the Wikipedias are in UTF-8 from the start, and we had no
> >problem whatsoever.
>
> Probably because their browsers work nicely in UTF-8 because they have to. If
> they didn't they would be useless for any language where UTF-8 is required.
> In places where UTF-8 isn't required, browsers that can't support it tend to
> slip by without being fixed or upgraded. If it ain't broke...

I understand your problem, it is valid, and that's probably the reason it's
topic on wikitech. Still I believe we can expect editors to use non-ancient
browsers (remember, reading is not a problem). As far as I know most
browsers handle this very well (including, for example, unix character mode
browsers).

> >However we *do* have problems with english wikipedia when
> >pages contain unrepresentable literal characters, which makes
> >the page break after editing. See "Budapest" article on wikitravel,
> >where every special dash and curly quote marks became question
> >marks. Truly ugly.
>
> I don't understand. Is Wikitravel in UTF-8?

Not at all! It clearly shows what happens when a page _IS_ 8859-1 encoded
but editors want to use fancy characters. Same hppens when they do it with
an old browser on UTF-8 pages. So, you get trash either way, other editors
revert the same way, so you may well use utf-8, don't you? :-)

Peter


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] UTF-8 - idea (maybe stupid,
	from a non-tech dreamer :-)

body:
On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 04:25:02AM -0800, Anthere wrote:

> I am glad I do not break pages any more, either
> because of utf (Opera), or because of the cut at 30 ko
> (Opera),

I'm using Opera on .hu which is utf-8. I think I have been using Opera for
the last year at least. I can imagine that Opera from 1999 doesn't handle
utf or large editboxes very well. :)

peter


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Vincent Ramos

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Switching everything to UTF-8

body:
Le Tue, 18 Nov 2003 05:03:33 -0500, Daniel Mayer
<maveric149 at yahoo.com> a ?crit:

> We shouldn't be telling those people that they have to upgrade to use
> Wikipedia if they can use Wikipedia just fine without UTF-8. The benefits
> simply do not seem to be at all compelling enough to justify the
> negatives
> (at least for en.wikipedia). But if you can figure out a way to have
> UTF-8
> without the associated problems, then great.

	What about transcoding data from utf-8 to latin-1 whern a non utf-8
compliant
browser is detected? This way, people with this kind of browser may not
even notice
they are editing text in latin-1 which will be transcoded to utf-8 when
the page is
saved.

	Vincent


from_name: Nicolas Weeger

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Students!

body:
> something like:
> * we welcome it! :)
> * make sure your students understand NPOV
> * and so on

(en:)
I have one main concern about that, even if the idea is great :)
Since grades will be given partly for the language, the contents & such,
what happens if someone outside the students fixes typos, links, adds
things? This, arguably, is the teacher's trouble to sort out. But what
if the teacher asks 'ok, could non-students please do not change this
page during the ''examen'' ?' ? What should we reply? It obviously is
against Wikipedia's very nature to 'lock' (morally, at least :)) a page.

(fr:)
J'ai une seule crainte, ? ce propos, m?me si l'id?e est super :)
Les notes ?tant attribu?es (sans doute) en fonction du langage, du
contenu, etc, que se passera-t-il si quelqu'un qui n'est pas un de ces
?tudiants change la page, en corrigeant des fautes, des liens, etc ?
C'est ?videmment le probl?me du professeur. Mais que r?pondre s'il nous
demande 'bon, que les non-?tudiants ne touchent pas ? ces pages le temps
de l'examen' ? C'est totalement contre la nature de Wikip?dia de
'bloquer' une page (m?me moralement :))

Nicolas 'Ryo'


body:
>We shouldn't be telling those people that they have to upgrade to use
>Wikipedia if they can use Wikipedia just fine without UTF-8. The benefits
>simply do not seem to be at all compelling enough to justify the negatives
>(at least for en.wikipedia). But if you can figure out a way to have UTF-8
>without the associated problems, then great.
>
>
I wholeheartdly agree. This is totally against Wikipedia's spirit to
discriminate for using some browser and not some other (.

>--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>
>
Nicolas 'Ryo'
(as myself, not fr:embassador)


body:
>We shouldn't be telling those people that they have to upgrade to use
>Wikipedia if they can use Wikipedia just fine without UTF-8. The benefits
>simply do not seem to be at all compelling enough to justify the negatives
>(at least for en.wikipedia). But if you can figure out a way to have UTF-8
>without the associated problems, then great.

I wholeheartdly agree. This is totally against Wikipedia's spirit to
discriminate for using some browser and not some other.

>--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

Nicolas 'Ryo'
(as myself, not fr:embassador)


list: wikien-l

from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Caius2ga

body:
How do you suggest we perform 1.?  I wrote on his Talk page that calling other users Nazis was not in the spirit of Wikiquette (though I did also throw in that it could lead to his being banned), and he said that in retaliation he was going to change every occurrence on Wikipedia of a Polish city to its current name.  I've tried to explain that it's like calling the capital of New Netherlands "New York" instead of "New Amsterdam", that we need to consider the historic context, but he isn't listening.

Rick

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

1. Please ask Caius not to refer to other contributors as "Nazis".

2. As for the "current name" issue, that comes under the category of usage.

Let's deal with the first issue, first. After the conversational tone gets calmed down, we can start to deal with the more complex issue.

Ed Poor

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20031118/905d9524/attachment.htm


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] On browsers, UTF-8 and attitude.

body:
Ralesk wrote:
>Please!  Let's all return to the 6-bit ASCII set,
>everything else is  bloat, and unsupported by
>older systems.

Nobody is advocating that - certainly not me. But where there are perfectly
acceptable alternatives that are nearly universal (read: ASCII quotes and
hyphens), then we should use those instead of slightly fancier alternatives.

>Please, also, keep your Netscape 4 and watch it break
>every standard and  recommendation that W3C proposed.

I use Konqueror 3.1.3, which IIRC is more standards compliant the IE. However
many people still use their pre-installed versions of Netscape 4 or whatnot
because that is what came with their computer. Most of these people simply
want their computer to do things for them; they don't care about things like
browser versions and compatibility. Therefore, in their view, if a website
they visit doesn't work on their browser their first thought is that the
website is broken, not their browser.

So if their browser works fine on a Latin-1 wiki as is, then why should we
change things to 'break our website' for them? They may also not have the
time, interest, confidence, hardware, bandwidth, OS version or permissions
needed to upgrade.

You shouldn't assume others are like you and don't mind upgrading things. Most
people I know have /never/ upgraded /anything/! Everything comes
pre-installed when they get a new computer.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
Anthere wrote:
>....
>I know very well that if we switch to utf-8 on all
>wikipedias without a technical tweak to automatically
>insure "translation", the user of this browser,
>perhaps just a mother at home with a 4 years old imac,
>perhaps a student in Algeria, perhaps a kid in Brasil,
>will just be kicked out.
>...

Exactly! We should be as inclusive as practically possible. If that means that
we have to be just 'good enough' in our technical capabilities and forgo
being 'great', then so be it. This is why wikitext works great for our goals
(creating content) while HTML does not, even though much more can technically
be done with HTML. But if we can be both inclusive /and/ be technically
'great', then all the better!

Hm - that reminds of wikitables and wikitemplates. Whatever happened to those
ideas?

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Ralesk Ne'vennoyx

body:
Mav said the following quoted text:
 >Well a person should /not/ be using fancy things
 >like curly quotes and long hyphens because many
 >browsers (especially on non-MS systems) display them
 >as question makes.

I expect a couple typographists to get serious heart problems from that.

 >These should be fixed, not allowed
 >to propagate.

Please!  Let's all return to the 6-bit ASCII set, everything else is
bloat, and unsupported by older systems.

 >The fact that some browsers break these
 >codes should be a good hint that they should not be
 >used to begin with (esp. since ASCII quotes and
 >regular hyphens can be used instead).

Just as I said above.

Also, from another post:
 >When I see "You need to
 >upgrade your browser" I leave and never come back.

Please, also, keep your Netscape 4 and watch it break every standard and
recommendation that W3C proposed.  You may also try things with
NetPositive and the likes, which are though newer, but support
/nothing/.  Hell, lynx and (e)links do better at 'splaying a page.  And
indeed, if your browser, or whoever's browser SUCKS, then sorry, compile
a links.  It's shouldn't be /that/ hard, especially for hardcore users
of heavily outdated servermonsters (which are, granted, otherwise quite
good).

Unicode is the Present.  Live With It?.

--
"Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good
excuse for some of the brain-damages of minix." (Torvalds to Tanenbaum)
--
Ralesk Ne'vennoyx
[ICQ:37046326]


body:
Mirko wrote:
>Viajero made a good point when he said, that we need
>new procedures to deal with this sort of users. These
>users are discouraging serious contributors and chasing
>them away (as already happened).

I agree. And if I may be so bold as to add that edit wars should be viewed a
similar way as schoolyard fights are; they are simply not acceptable behavior
and who is right and who is wrong is a secondary issue. If Johnny punches you
in the nose, duck the next blow and get away instead of hitting him back. To
paraphrase Jimbo; leave a clean paper trail and let the wrongdoer clearly
hang themself with their own actions.

So, purposefully prolonging an edit war (not to be confused with repeated
simple vandalism and reverting those edits) itself should be considered bad
regardless of who is right and who is wrong. That can be determined later
when the merits of particular versions are weighed and text/ideas integrated
where appropriate. But things like finding consensus is not really possible
in the middle of an edit war.

In short: It takes two to Tango and fighting is bad in itself.

Daniel Mayer (aka mav, aka part-time edit warrior)


from_name: Yann Forget

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Read only mirror in Paris & French law non profit
	organisation

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

Hi,

> Following my demand, the Ouvaton cooperative has offered to host a read only
> mirror of the French Wikipedia with a budget of 1000 euros for a year in
> hardware and bandwidth. For that it is necessary that a non profit
> organisation to be set up in France. I drafted a project of status for this
> according to French law. It is available at
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> Wikip?dia:Statuts_pour_une_association_en_France

I think I may not have been very clear.
Ouvaton is a cooperative of independant webmasters. As an example, it is
supportive of our ideas (free software, etc.). It offers to host a mirror of
Wikipedia for FREE. They would give Wikipedia up to 1000 euros a year in
material and bandwidth. A few people in the French Wikipedia have already
offered to take care of the technical details of this mirror. Now I have been
told than a mirror in France would not help much. How the offer of Ouvaton
can be used?

Secondly Ouvaton asked than an organisation (not an individual) need to be
legally responsible for this mirror. Upon further asking, it said that
Wikimedia Foundation or a European organisation can be this organisation.

The idea of a French or European non profit organisation was also to collect
donations. Potential avantages : easing money transfer and issuing tax
deductible receipts. Yes a French non profit can collect donations and issue
tax deductible receipts. [1] There is also the possibility in Belgian law to
set up a European organisation with similar capabilities.
cf. http://www.notaire.be/info/societes/031_loi_sur_les_asbl.htm (in French)

We have more and more requests for public talks about Wikipedia in France :
three in 2003 and two more are already planned in 2004. A local organisation
would help to organise this (to print leaflets, posters...). Someone also
suggests to set up an French non profit called "The friends of Wikipedia" for
this. What do you think?

Regards,
Yann

[1] "La loi n?87-571 du 23 juillet 1987 sur le d?veloppement du m?c?nat
pr?cise que d?sormais, le don manuel (celui qui n'est pas pratiqu? sous acte
notari?) est l?galement autoris? pour toutes les associations d?clar?es."

- --
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
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE/uppJm4KYjQo0y9oRAtWiAKCnRNF2LX0dWmf4v1wZa2l+KmRNNgCgkkRp
Axk+Kwdirz96YY+nSs97RU8=
=YQC/
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On Nov 18, 2003, at 20:31, Lars Aronsson wrote:

> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> Anyway, adding a notice and/or doing some extra conversion for those
>> 2%
>> shouldn't be a huge server burden.
>
> Would that be only for posting, or will the 2% also be blocked from
> reading the site?  2% of Wikipedia's readers is a lot.

Nobody's going to be blocked.

"NOTICE" and "CONVERSION" don't sound like blocking to me, and I hope
they don't to anyone else.

You'll notice we *don't* block browsers that are known to damage long
articles during editing; we warn about the problem and when things do
go awry anyway people can fix it up.

Can we all drop the paranoia? We're not making a switch of the existing
Latin-1 phase3 wikis to UTF-8 until compatibility code is in place.
That's what we decided over a year ago when the issue was first raised,
no?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20031119/0e29c6e8/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Transwiki

body:
Peter Gervai wrote:

>On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 09:57:10AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>  1. dictionary type entries; (They belong in Wiktionary)
>>
>Do we have wiktionary in foreign languages? What should foreigners (to
>english) do with dictionary entries now?
>
Although some of us would like to encourage other-language Wiktionaries,
so far only the English version exists.  If you have somebody who likes
writing up dictionary articles in Hungarian, maybe you can convince him
to start a Hungarian Wiktionary. :-)   That being said, if someone wants
to write up English definitions for Hungarian words that would go on the
English Wiktionary.  Wiktionary is in utf-8 so it can handle fully
accented Hungarian.

>>  3. entire quoted books; (They belong in Wikibooks)
>>
>
>A user started to enter his own fictions and writings in the .hu.wikipedia.
>Right now I can only send him to... anywhere else, and delete the
>"articles". Do they belong to Wikibooks? Essays, novels, any kind of
>"fictional facts" and other nonsense?
>
My opinion is that works of original fiction don't belong in any of
these, but if the Hungarian Wikipedians decide a different policy that's
their choice, You're not going to get a lot of objections from those of
us who don't understand a word of Hungarian

>>Since this idea can be applied to transfers between any two projects, I
>>
>
>Do you mean all the article history should be transferred, or just the text
>put on hold in the namespace?
>
Copying the talk pages would be a good idea, and the history may be
helpful for understanding what the author was thinking about.  There is
a potential history problem if we don't have uniform registration across
all projects.  Also the Transwiki pages would all be temporary pages ,
so their history would disappear when the work is done.

Ec

>


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Anyway, adding a notice and/or doing some extra conversion for those 2%
> shouldn't be a huge server burden.

Would that be only for posting, or will the 2% also be blocked from
reading the site?  2% of Wikipedia's readers is a lot.

On the other hand, staying with Latin-1 might exclude some active
contributors (Tomasz W.) who want to push the envelope.  And wiki
experience says it pays off to cater to your best contributors.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy on Reversions?

body:
Essentially Daniel proposes a policy change here (or maintains that such a
policy exists). Which put simply is that repeated reversions by anyone is of
administrative concern. And, implicitly, WILL BE DEALT WITH. This would put
all participants in an edit war though some administrative process, "when
the merits of particular versions are weighed and text/ideas integrated
where appropriate."

Is this in fact, policy, or desired policy?

Fred

> From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: maveric149 at yahoo.com, English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 22:42:31 -0500
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Reversion warriors (was: User:Caius2ga)
>
> Mirko wrote:
>> Viajero made a good point when he said, that we need
>> new procedures to deal with this sort of users. These
>> users are discouraging serious contributors and chasing
>> them away (as already happened).
>
> I agree. And if I may be so bold as to add that edit wars should be viewed a
> similar way as schoolyard fights are; they are simply not acceptable behavior
> and who is right and who is wrong is a secondary issue. If Johnny punches you
> in the nose, duck the next blow and get away instead of hitting him back. To
> paraphrase Jimbo; leave a clean paper trail and let the wrongdoer clearly
> hang themself with their own actions.
>
> So, purposefully prolonging an edit war (not to be confused with repeated
> simple vandalism and reverting those edits) itself should be considered bad
> regardless of who is right and who is wrong. That can be determined later
> when the merits of particular versions are weighed and text/ideas integrated
> where appropriate. But things like finding consensus is not really possible
> in the middle of an edit war.
>
> In short: It takes two to Tango and fighting is bad in itself.
>
> Daniel Mayer (aka mav, aka part-time edit warrior)
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy on Reversions?

body:
I guess my "win" condition excludes double-talk... I find your answer
without substantive content, essentially a Rodney King statement, "Why can't
we all get along?" Wholesome and true, but not relevant to the questions
Daniel raises.

Fred

> From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 09:08:45 -0500
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Policy on Reversions?
>
> I think Daniel (maveric) is not really proposing
> a change in policy, so much as he is making a call
> for a more congenial and cooperative attitude.
>
> Repeatedly reverting others' edits is a pointless
> waste of time and will never resolve controversies
> about facts or points of view (POV). We ought to make
> a distinction, as I think mav has done, between (1)
> taking a firm stand against simple vandalism like
> "you are a poopoo head" and (2) stubbornly insisting
> on "rightness" in a POV dispute.
>
> Resolution of a dispute requires a mutually agreeable
> outcome, a "win-win" condition. Otherwise, it's
> not stable. We ought to work toward stability by
> clarifying each person's win conditions.
>
> Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Evan Prodromou

body:
>>>>> "NW" == Nicolas Weeger <nweeger at noos.fr> writes:

    NW> I wholeheartdly agree. This is totally against Wikipedia's
    NW> spirit to discriminate for using some browser and not some
    NW> other.

Wikipedia discriminates against people who don't have a browser at
all. Or people who don't have an Internet connection. Or people who
don't have a computer.

There's a baseline of standards and technologies that somebody has to
have in order to read and edit Wikipedia. This change is just adding
one more technology -- UTF-8, which is really useful -- to that list.

~ESP

P.S. Yeah, it has nothing to do with Wikitravel, just thought I'd jump
in.

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy on Reversions?

body:
For example, Erik Moeller's recent post addresses the issues, straight talk.
Ed, do you have a position on the issue under discussion? Namely how to deal
with edit war by reversion, last one standing wins?

Fred

> From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 09:33:19 -0500
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Policy on Reversions?
>
> I share your win condition of excluding double-talk. Would you please
> tell me a little more about what you mean? --Ed
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Alex R.

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikilegal-l] [mhollist@cox.net: RE: Use of content
	from Wikipedia]

body:
 From: "Arvind Narayanan" <arvindn at meenakshi.cs.iitm.ernet.in>

>
> I got a reply to the letter I sent to Chess and Beyond:
>

Good job, the OCILLA cease & decist issue will have to wait in the wings
for more resistive users who do not see the wisdom of just being nice.

Alex756


subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposal for Harmony (was: Policy on Reversions?)

body:
I'd love this to work.  I don't think I'm altruistic enough to be a participant, but if it worked, it would be great.

RickK

"Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
Erik made an eloquent and keen observation:

:-) Until there is a firm policy that is strictly enforced (e.g.
:-) you can revert only once, if that doesn't work, you will have
:-) to take it to the talk page), edit wars will be a reality on
:-) Wikipedia, and the side that is willing to invest the most
:-) time in their "POV" will get it through by sheer force.

This is precisely the problem which vexes me. This is what
makes me want to leave Wikipedia permanently, as I have been
'threatening' to do all this week. This is what has driven
away countless superb contributors. Some have complained about
this problem loudly and repeatedly before making a public
departure, but many have just quietly vanished like Lewis
Carroll's snark.

Thus I would like to propose the formation of a sort of club
or SIG within Wikipedia - sort of on the lines of the old semi-
humorous Wikipedia 'militia' - a group of contributors who will
join to intervene in edit wars and work together to create a
stable and neutral article, one which all parties to the edit
war would agree is correct and good and satisfying.

These club members would show by example how to contribute in
a harmonious, useful fashion. These members would bind THEMSELVES
to the rule of "you can only revert once". They would propose
options on the talk page BEFORE making edits to the article.
They might even wait an hour or a day for assent from others
before making a change.

These club members would politely remind others not to make
abusive remarks on talk pages. They would refactor talk when
it got too long or tangled.

I don't have to be the club president, we might not even need
a president or a formal roster.

What does everyone think about this plan?

Ed Poor
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20031119/2fcbe4d8/attachment.htm


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] [mhollist@cox.net: RE: Use of content from Wikipedia]

body:
Arvind,

Thank you for taking the time to write such a courteous letter to the
Chess & Beyond website. As predicted, the response was courteous and
promised cooperation within quite a reasonable amount of time.

This sort of courteous exchange is an excellent example of promoting the
"free text" concept -- and it's much better than an abrupt takedown
demand. We're not WWF wrestlers, we're public-spirited artists.

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Transwiki

body:
On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 09:57:10AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:

>   1. dictionary type entries; (They belong in Wiktionary)

Do we have wiktionary in foreign languages? What should foreigners (to
english) do with dictionary entries now?

>   3. entire quoted books; (They belong in Wikibooks)

A user started to enter his own fictions and writings in the .hu.wikipedia.
Right now I can only send him to... anywhere else, and delete the
"articles". Do they belong to Wikibooks? Essays, novels, any kind of
"fictional facts" and other nonsense?

> Since this idea can be applied to transfers between any two projects, I

Do you mean all the article history should be transferred, or just the text
put on hold in the namespace?

grin


subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy on Reversions?

body:
I think Daniel (maveric) is not really proposing
a change in policy, so much as he is making a call
for a more congenial and cooperative attitude.

Repeatedly reverting others' edits is a pointless
waste of time and will never resolve controversies
about facts or points of view (POV). We ought to make
a distinction, as I think mav has done, between (1)
taking a firm stand against simple vandalism like
"you are a poopoo head" and (2) stubbornly insisting
on "rightness" in a POV dispute.

Resolution of a dispute requires a mutually agreeable
outcome, a "win-win" condition. Otherwise, it's
not stable. We ought to work toward stability by
clarifying each person's win conditions.

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Arvind,
>
>Thank you for taking the time to write such a courteous letter to the
>Chess & Beyond website. As predicted, the response was courteous and
>promised cooperation within quite a reasonable amount of time.
>
Yes, I suspect most people will be accomodating when the situation is
politely explained to them, and they're given enough time to respond.

>This sort of courteous exchange is an excellent example of promoting the
>"free text" concept -- and it's much better than an abrupt takedown
>demand. We're not WWF wrestlers, we're public-spirited artists.
>
As an indicator of how problematic some of the copyright issues can be,
 the wrestlers are not allowed to call themselves WWF anymore. :-)

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy on Reversions?

body:
I share your win condition of excluding double-talk. Would you please
tell me a little more about what you mean? --Ed


body:
On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 12:01:57PM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> >From Wikitech-l:

> Sorry, but as a long-time Linux desktop user I get a
> bit pissed whenever somebody brings up the "only x%"
> arguments. It is often used as an excuse to prevent me
> from using certain websites. When I see "You need to
> upgrade your browser" I leave and never come back. We
> needn't repeat the "only x%" type of attitude here.

I just checked: lynx handles utf-8 very well, and keeps even chinese
characters intact after editing. You do not need to change your browser,
only _update_ it. Don't expect that your 1998 lynx will go on well with
today's webpages, but nothing should obstruct you from upgrading it to the
latest version.

Name any widely used browser (including character mode browsers or not
full-fledged ones; but please be reasonable, and do not name anything which
could not be found even with internet search engines :)) which have problem
with utf8 in its latest version, and then we will have a better picture of
the problem. I can check you all browsers on linux, and I am pretty sure
they all conform utf-8. They're used on other unixen like *bsd, and windoze
is covered well with up to date, free browsers. My only dark spot is Mac,
but I believe Mac have working browsers as well (but Mac fans can correct me
here).

I think we should not support _every_ _possible_ browsers on earth, it's not
reasonable. If a user uses a _very_ minority _non-unicode-conform_ browser,
then, well, we revert his/her changes right away, and communicate that
either s/he should _upgrade_ the browser, or use a different one for editing
Wikipedia.

But to tell you: I _have_to_change_my_browser_ when I want to edit english
wikipedia, wikitravel, if I do not want to screw up some pages, which
contain non-8859-1 characters. Mozilla handles it (illegally, as I have
already mentioned), other browsers do it right and change illegal characters
to question marks or whatever. So you right now _force_ me to change
("upgrade") my browser, and it is no way better than forcing that definite
minority with old, nonconform browsers to use something else for editing the
'pedias.

Oh, and another thing. I do not know about your languages, but Hungarian
language have rules. Rules tell you that you _have_to_ use curly quotation
marks (lower at the beginning), en dashes and like. If you don't: it's
grammatically (well, typographically) incorrect.

grin


body:
> From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 09:50:27 -0500
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposal for Harmony (was: Policy on Reversions?)
>
> Erik made an eloquent and keen observation:
>
> :-)  Until there is a firm policy that is strictly enforced (e.g.
> :-)  you can revert only once, if that doesn't work, you will have
> :-)  to take it to the talk page), edit wars will be a reality on
> :-)  Wikipedia, and the side that is willing to invest the most
> :-)  time in their "POV" will get it through by sheer force.
>
> This is precisely the problem which vexes me. This is what
> makes me want to leave Wikipedia permanently, as I have been
> 'threatening' to do all this week. This is what has driven
> away countless superb contributors. Some have complained about
> this problem loudly and repeatedly before making a public
> departure, but many have just quietly vanished like Lewis
> Carroll's snark.
>
> Thus I would like to propose the formation of a sort of club
> or SIG within Wikipedia - sort of on the lines of the old semi-
> humorous Wikipedia 'militia' - a group of contributors who will
> join to intervene in edit wars and work together to create a
> stable and neutral article, one which all parties to the edit
> war would agree is correct and good and satisfying.

How would club members find out about edit wars? (Actually there might be a
software solution for this question). How would the club decide which "wars"
to intervene in? How would the club communicate with one another?
>
> These club members would show by example how to contribute in
> a harmonious, useful fashion. These members would bind THEMSELVES
> to the rule of "you can only revert once". They would propose
> options on the talk page BEFORE making edits to the article.
> They might even wait an hour or a day for assent from others
> before making a change.
>
> These club members would politely remind others not to make
> abusive remarks on talk pages. They would refactor talk when
> it got too long or tangled.
>
> I don't have to be the club president, we might not even need
> a president or a formal roster.
>
> What does everyone think about this plan?
>
> Ed Poor

Sounds like a spiderweb, well designed for catching flies (folks who with a
little nudging come around), but ineffective on hawks (folks who are here to
advance a POV). It also sounds very elitist and time-consuming. I'm still
interested in how to catch hawks.

Fred


body:
On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 02:49:12PM -0800, Delirium wrote:
> Peter Gervai wrote:
> >On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 04:28:32AM -0500, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> >>Peter Gervai wrote:

> I don't really see the problem with typing embed codes manually on, for
> example, the English Wikipedia.

Try to type greek, chinese phrases this way. Go on, try. See any chinese
related articles, see the name there (don't cheat, don't edit the article),
and type its embed codes in your favourite editor. I'd like to know how many
percentage do you guess chinese characters right by just looking at them.
:-)

May I put bets on you? ;->

> Actually, I think with the current setup, on en: at least, you can type
> them literally and when you hit submit or preview it'll automatically
> convert them to the numeric codes.  I seem to recall this happening with
> some Greek text I pasted in (though I could be mistaken).

Yes, you are pretty wrong here. Some browsers actually change those codes to
embeds (like Mozilla), which is *illegal*. There is not guarantee at the
time of the POST that the server wants _HTML_ (or anyway else) encoded text,
so the browser do a _wild_guess_, and pick the most used encoding.

Other browsers' authors say that they conform standards and are not willing
to make wild, baseless guesses, and they do not submit illegal characters to
a POST where the encoding type does not support it.

Anyone may debate that but I see no basis to force anyone not to follow the
standards.

(And not every browsers do it this way. Some does it the other way,
submitting anything they like, and php and mysql and other underlying crap
changes it to god knows what, and the article changes the next time someone
edits it, and nobody going to be able to tell why did it happen. It's fun.
:))

grin


body:
Erik made an eloquent and keen observation:

:-)  Until there is a firm policy that is strictly enforced (e.g.
:-)  you can revert only once, if that doesn't work, you will have
:-)  to take it to the talk page), edit wars will be a reality on
:-)  Wikipedia, and the side that is willing to invest the most
:-)  time in their "POV" will get it through by sheer force.

This is precisely the problem which vexes me. This is what
makes me want to leave Wikipedia permanently, as I have been
'threatening' to do all this week. This is what has driven
away countless superb contributors. Some have complained about
this problem loudly and repeatedly before making a public
departure, but many have just quietly vanished like Lewis
Carroll's snark.

Thus I would like to propose the formation of a sort of club
or SIG within Wikipedia - sort of on the lines of the old semi-
humorous Wikipedia 'militia' - a group of contributors who will
join to intervene in edit wars and work together to create a
stable and neutral article, one which all parties to the edit
war would agree is correct and good and satisfying.

These club members would show by example how to contribute in
a harmonious, useful fashion. These members would bind THEMSELVES
to the rule of "you can only revert once". They would propose
options on the talk page BEFORE making edits to the article.
They might even wait an hour or a day for assent from others
before making a change.

These club members would politely remind others not to make
abusive remarks on talk pages. They would refactor talk when
it got too long or tangled.

I don't have to be the club president, we might not even need
a president or a formal roster.

What does everyone think about this plan?

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Transwiki

body:
Peter Gervai wrote:

>On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 01:52:54AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>Peter Gervai wrote:
>>
>>Although some of us would like to encourage other-language Wiktionaries,
>>so far only the English version exists.  If you have somebody who likes
>>writing up dictionary articles in Hungarian, maybe you can convince him
>>to start a Hungarian Wiktionary. :-)
>>
>Well, not that anyone would allocate time for that, but newbies usually
>create dictionary entries (in Hungarian), and would be useful to keep them
>instead of deleting. If a hu.wiktionary doesn't require much space or
>resources it would be nice, even if there would be only 46 articles a
>year...
>
All the wikis start small. :-)   Once the opportunity is presented, some
people will just naturally feel more comfortable working on a dictionary
that on encyclopedia.  46 articles is a good start,  but it should take
a *lot* less than a year to get there.  The transwiki concept would work
just as well for moving an article from hu.wikipedia to hu.wiktionary as
it does in English.  The message to people changes.  It is no longer,
"Wikipedia is not a dictionary, so we're deleting your work."  It
becomes, "Wikipedia is not a dictionary, but we respect your effort and
have a better place for your good work in Wiktionary."

>>That being said, if someone wants
>>to write up English definitions for Hungarian words that would go on the
>>English Wiktionary.
>>
>
>Sure. (To be honest, I don't really grasp the idea, since it's pretty time
>consuming to update a definition. For example there's a word for "Dog", and
>there are 23 pages describing dog in 23 other languages. Then I come, and
>want to share Hungarian Dog, so I have to edit *24* pages to insert Dog
>everywhere. I know, it's a wiki not a database, but still, prevents me from
>wanting to do anything serious there.)
>
The en:wiktionary currently show a translation for "dog" into 72 other
languages.  This is far more than for most words. It also gives an
English meaning for the Dutch word "dog".  There is a brief entry for
"kutya" showing it as the Hungarian word for "dog".  That entry also
shows the translation of "kutya" into Dutch.  I personally don't believe
that the Dutch rendering should be on the "kutya" article, but it's not
the sort of thing that I would spend a lot of time arguing about.  Other
Wiktionarians have been keen to develop an extensive system of
cross-indexing, but have been less than diligent and focused on
maintaining it.

I see three functions for the English Wiktionary:
    1. Provide detailed definitions  of English words in English for
English speakers.
    2. Provide translations of English words into an indefinite number
of languages.
    3. Provide entries for words in any foreign language for English
speakers.
Substitute the name of another language in that statement in all the
places where "English" appears, and you have how, in a big picture, I
would envision developments in other language Wiktionaries.

Wikimedia's volunteer environment is such that we will not cut your
salary in half if you work on only 12 of 24 dog articles, and we won't
triple it if you choose to work on 72 either.  Effectively, you are
limited in the number of meaningful contributions that you can make by
the bumber of languages that you understand.  Some people have a passion
for providing dictionary definitions of a word in as many languages as
they can, but they can't convince me that there is any depth to their
understanding of any of those languages.  Briefly, you are limited in
what you can do by the time you have available, and there is never any
obligation to do more than that.  Providing the perfectionist's depth
across a large breadth of languages is often simply impossible.

Ec

>


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

>Arvind,

>Thank you for taking the time to write such a courteous letter to the
>Chess & Beyond website. As predicted, the response was courteous and
>promised cooperation within quite a reasonable amount of time.

>This sort of courteous exchange is an excellent example of promoting the
>"free text" concept -- and it's much better than an abrupt takedown
>demand. We're not WWF wrestlers, we're public-spirited artists.

If public spirited artists do not protect their rights, they loose them
like anyone else. I still think there needs to be a policy that deals with
such misuse of the content of Wikipedia, otherwise let's just take down
that GFDL license and let it just be a PD free-for-all, then it will really
be
like  the WWF; rational people make rational demands, the OCILLA
notice is a rational demand as authorized by law, it is not some wild
act by a bunch of guys on steroids.  Sure being nice is good, but if
someone ignores it, it should not be tolerated this is what it means to
live in a free and democratic society, people follow the laws. If they
want to change them, then they can try to do that, but don't compare
the law to a bunch of thugs, that is not nice (and not in the spirit of
public-spirited artists).

Once again this is a legal issue and all posts should at least be cross
posted
to Wikilegal-L which is open to anyone to join who is interested in such
legal issues.

Alex756


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Students!

body:
Actually, there is a page for students/university projects:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects

As for grading, I've promised to put up what I've done for students and
hope to get to it soon.  The quick summary (for my journalism students)
-- edits from the Wikipedia community are welcome, encouraged and part
of the experience.  Experiencing 'participatory journalism' is part of
the reason for doing things on Wikipedia.

As for grading, the entire article is graded, and all folks assigned
that aritcle are given the same grade.  They sink or swim together.
Severe slackers will get individual deductions, but otherwise, its in
each student's interests to keep working at the article and help each
other.  Doing individual grades would indeed change the Wiki dynamic.

-Fuzheado

> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
> [mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Fred Bauder
> Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 3:16 AM
> To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Students!
>
>
>
>
> > From: Nicolas Weeger <weeger at noos.fr>
> > Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 19:11:47 +0100
> > To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Students!
> >
> >
> >> something like:
> >> * we welcome it! :)
> >> * make sure your students understand NPOV
> >> * and so on
> >
> > (en:)
> > I have one main concern about that, even if the idea is
> great :) Since
> > grades will be given partly for the language, the contents & such,
> > what happens if someone outside the students fixes typos,
> links, adds
> > things? This, arguably, is the teacher's trouble to sort
> out. But what
> > if the teacher asks 'ok, could non-students please do not
> change this
> > page during the ''examen'' ?' ? What should we reply? It
> obviously is
> > against Wikipedia's very nature to 'lock' (morally, at least :)) a
> > page.
>
> User contributions combined with page history for each
> student will return the work they did. No need for anyone
> else to change what they ordinarily do.
>
> Fred
>
> >
> > (fr:)
> > J'ai une seule crainte, ? ce propos, m?me si l'id?e est
> super :) Les
> > notes ?tant attribu?es (sans doute) en fonction du langage, du
> > contenu, etc, que se passera-t-il si quelqu'un qui n'est
> pas un de ces
> > ?tudiants change la page, en corrigeant des fautes, des
> liens, etc ?
> > C'est ?videmment le probl?me du professeur. Mais que r?pondre s'il
> > nous demande 'bon, que les non-?tudiants ne touchent pas ?
> ces pages
> > le temps de l'examen' ? C'est totalement contre la nature
> de Wikip?dia
> > de 'bloquer' une page (m?me moralement :))
> >
> > Nicolas 'Ryo'
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wik> ipedia-l
>


body:
Okay, Alex. You're the lawyer, you formulate the policy.

I hope it includes a section on "how to communicate politely but firmly
with apparently accidental GFDL infringement".

Ed Poor, non-lawyer


from_name: Till Westermayer

body:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .

Hi,

>> Actually, I think with the current setup, on en: at least, you
>> can type them literally and when you hit submit or preview it'll
>> automatically convert them to the numeric codes.  I seem to
>> recall this happening with some Greek text I pasted in (though I
>> could be mistaken).

>Yes, you are pretty wrong here. Some browsers actually change
>those codes to embeds (like Mozilla), which is *illegal*. There is
>not guarantee at the time of the POST that the server wants _HTML_
>(or anyway else) encoded text, so the browser do a _wild_guess_,
>and pick the most used encoding.

I strongly disagree to cutting backward compatibility. But couldn't we
find a technical solution, i.e.:

- storing everything in the database in UTF-8

- converting it automagically into embedded code (maybe even using HTML-
entities like ü or ß) before an edit

- converting everything after the edit in UTF-8, including correct UTF8-
characters inserted by the edit and embedded code

Best regards,
 __ .
 / / / /                            ... Till Westermayer - till we *)
. .
  . mailto:till at tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072
  . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179
  . . . . .


from_name: Walter Stanish

subject: [Wikitech-l] Pinyin feature suggestion

body:
Hi there,

  Wikipedia has a lot of Chinese history articles that would benefit
from a fast way to mark up 'pinyin'.  Pinyin is basically a romanization
system for standard Chinese, in which syllables are represented as
words built through the combination of a sound in letters, such as
'zhao' and a number for tone, such as 1.   Thus, zhao1 would be
first-tone.

The 'mark up' that I referred to was converting from this, uglier
system of pinyin to the more attractive unicode system, whereby
vowels are marked with various shaped lines in order to visually
communicate the tonal direction.

(Better explanation at http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin )

There's a PHP function already written to do this, which I
suppose could be modified and included as a new function in
wiki markup.  You can find it here:

  http://www.foolsworkshop.com/downloads/pinyintounicode.txt

And an online demo (try some input like ni3 hao3 - 'hello' in
Chinese), here:

  http://www.foolsworkshop.com/ptou/

Regards,
Walter Stanish

PS: I'm going straight off the list (I'm online via GPRS and can't
afford to download heaps of messages - or the wikipedia codebase
to make the change myself), so please CC me diretly on any
response.


from_name: Alex T.

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

>Okay, Alex. You're the lawyer, you formulate the policy.

It is very frustrating for a jurist to be told that others do not want to
discuss things, even though IAAL, this is NALO (not a legal opinion).
We should still work on these things together and not create an "legal"
ghetto of lawyer/volunteers in Wikimedia land. Law does not have to
be that stuff that those guys write up that take over our lives, this is
exactly why some many corporations/millionaires have captured the
legistlative process, "public-spirited artists" just seem to let it happen
and they wake up after it is all done. I'd rather be a media artist/lawyer
activist (actually that is sort of what I am at times).

>I hope it includes a section on "how to communicate politely but firmly
>with apparently accidental GFDL infringement".

It definitely will and I nominate Ed to write it.

Alex, the poor lawyer


from_name: Jurriaan Schulman

subject: [Wikitech-l] Popular articles

body:
Is there any way to find out which articles are visited most or how often a
certain article was visited/read?

Jurriaan


body:
Sorry if I gave the impression I don't want to discuss this. What I
should have said is:

1. I agree with you about the policy.

2. I think you are the best one to articulate the policy.

3. I would like you to write up a good, workable summary of the policy
for internal use and/or public posting.

4. I think you can do this without any further help from me, O
loquacious one!

5. But I'm happy to help if you so request.

And now the party of the second part requests an recess for lunch!

Ed Poor


body:
> From: viajero at quilombo.nl
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 19:33:56 +0100
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Proposal for Harmony (was: Policy on Reversions?)
>
> Hi all,
>
> I find the one revert limit a little too virtuous; moreover, there has
> been a discussion and proposal on [[Wikipedia_talk:How to revert a page to
> an earlier version]] regarding a "three-revert" guideline.
>
> This seems sensible to me (and others it appears). Moreover, I think this
> guideline can also be used as a definition of what an edit war is, namely
> reverting an edit more than three times.

Sounds good
>
> This is useful because defining what exactly an edit war is is the first
> step to deciding what to do about them.

True
>
> One possibility I discussed briefly yesterday with another sysop would be
> to ban users who have gotten involved in an edit war from the relevant
> article for a given period (a week or two). Although it would be nice,
> this would probably be impossible to do by software.

This would not be that difficult if it was good policy.

Fred

> So, who would decide
> this? What about a panel of sysops, say three or five, rotated on a
> monthly basis?

Needs to be sysops who find this activity worthwhile

>
> I appreciate Ed's proposal but fail to see how it would solve the problem
> of intransigent reverters like Wik.
>
>
> V.


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Proposal for Harmony

body:
> From: Mirko Thiessen
>
> Ed Poor wrote:
>
> > Thus I would like to propose the formation of a sort of club
> > or SIG within Wikipedia - sort of on the lines of the old semi-
> > humorous Wikipedia 'militia' - a group of contributors who will
> > join to intervene in edit wars and work together to create a
> > stable and neutral article, one which all parties to the edit
> > war would agree is correct and good and satisfying.
>
>
> Sounds good, but you assume, that people are willing to accept the
> intervention of this "militia".

"SIG" is a much, much better word to use than "militia".


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Popular articles

body:
The per-article database was disabled some months ago due to performance
reasons, and it is unlikely that it will come back. Perhaps some
administrator can parse the http log files, but it would be a special task
unless automated writing some programs or plugging in existing ones.

Ciao
Alfio

On Wed, 19 Nov 2003, Jurriaan Schulman wrote:

>Is there any way to find out which articles are visited most or how often a
>certain article was visited/read?
>
>Jurriaan
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Arvind Narayanan

body:
I got a reply to the letter I sent to Chess and Beyond:

----- Forwarded message from Matthew Personal Account <mhollist at cox.net> -----

Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 15:54:19 -0700
From: "Matthew Personal Account" <mhollist at cox.net>
To: "'Arvind Narayanan'" <arvindn at meenakshi.cs.iitm.ernet.in>
Cc: <arvindn1 at yahoo.com>, <karuke23 at netscape.net>
Subject: RE: Use of content from Wikipedia

Arvind- I want to thank you for taking the time to notify us of your
responsibility in conjunction with the use to Wicipedia information.  We
in no way intended to go against the copy right and apologize for the
misuse.  We will gladly make the changes mentioned and thank you for
your assistance.  Our design teem will bee working on it and you should
start to see the changes in the next week to ten days.  Thank you again.

Matthew Hollist
Sales and Marketing Director
Chess And Beyond

www.chessandbeyond.com
sales at chessandbeyond.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Arvind Narayanan [mailto:arvindn at meenakshi.cs.iitm.ernet.in]
Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2003 1:29 AM
To: questions at chessandbeyond.com
Subject: Use of content from Wikipedia

Dear Chess and Beyond,

We're delighted to see that several pages on your website,
http://www.chessandbeyond.com/ use content from Wikipedia
(http://www.wikipedia.org/), the free encyclopedia. This
is just the sort of application that we at Wikipedia wish
to promote.

However, we'd like to point out that to use content from
Wikipedia you should include a link back to the source
Wikipedia articles (
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame,
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess%20strategy%20and%20tactics,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules%20of%20chess,
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic%20chess%20notation,
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_(chess)
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_(chess)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rook_(chess)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_(chess)
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_(chess)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawn_(chess)),
as we've suggested on our copyrights page
(http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights). Additionally,
you should also include a GFDL notice. One way of doing this would be to
add the text "This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation
License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the
entire work (including additions) remains under this license", and
provide a link to http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.

Thanks for your assistance,
Arvind Narayanan
Wikipedia contributor

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

--
Its all GNU to me


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Can I be a developer? (was: French and German versions
	of the fundraising page)

body:
Well, its been nearly a month since I first asked

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-October/006546.html

so since nobody else wants to do it, I will.

Can I be given the server access needed in order to
add pages to the foundation's website
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/) and the Wikimedia
portal (http://wikimedia.org/)? I should be able to
figure out how to do Brion's 'export from meta page'
trick, me thinks.

I maintain a ~500 page website (I'll email a link
confirming this to any current developer who wants it,
but I don't want to make public where I work), using
Dreamweaver (mostly HTML stuff, though). It doesn't
explode that often, honest! :) And when it does it is
almost always not my fault (pages are served using an
ancient version of Resin and the database
functionality was hacked together by somebody else
years ago - I don't have control over that).

Eventually I would like to also start helping Brion
clear some of the more mundane items on his ToDo list.

Hm. Come to think of it, a page on meta would be a
better place to ask for developer access....

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy on Reversions?

body:
Ed-
> Repeatedly reverting others' edits is a pointless
> waste of time

Pointless for whom? The reality is that it works: One side usually gives
up and the other side "wins", with at worst a slight loss of face (but
when the "loser" brings up the edit war on the list, they will be reminded
that it "takes two to tango"). Regulars who engage in blanket reverts are
not faced with any serious actions or reprimands, and reverting is so much
easier than discussing things and resolving problems.

Until there is a firm policy that is strictly enforced (e.g. you can
revert only once, if that doesn't work, you will have to take it to the
talk page), edit wars will be a reality on Wikipedia, and the side that is
willing to invest the most time in their "POV" will get it through by
sheer force. To say that the other side should simply let it rest for a
few days and come back later is idiotic if you're dealing with a regular
who will be just as willing to do blanket reverts three days later as he
is today. Edit wars are not purely a symptom of heightened emotions, they
are a symptom of fundamental differences in beliefs and an unwillingness
to bridge them through NPOV.

A code of honor works well for small projects with like-minded people.
Wikipedia is neither small nor like-minded. That's why it needs policies
which are actually followed through, and not just a call for WikiLove
every now and then. We don't need a WikiGestapo, but we need a certain
amount of policy enforcement and clear rules, and that's just not
happening. As a result, NPOV is mostly theoretical for many of the
controversial articles on Wikipedia.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Forbidden

body:
On Nov 19, 2003, at 14:16, Jay Bowks wrote:
> You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Does your firewall remove your browser's "user-agent" header?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20031119/68ce1450/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Allan Crossman

subject: [WikiEN-l] DW aliases and IPs

body:
Would it be too much trouble for a developer to give IP addresses for
*all* suspected DW aliases listed on [[User:DW]] - most or all of
which are in fact blocked already. I'm somewhat irritated with having
to deal with accusations of an Orwellian plot to ban anyone on the
slightest provocation with the excuse that they're DW. So it would be
useful if we could show that, yes, all those people were actually
coming in from the very same tiny IP range...

Evercat
--
Allan Crossman - http://dogma.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
PGP keys - 0x06C4BCCA (new) || 0xCEC9FAE1 (compatible)


from_name: Christopher Mahan

body:
--- Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> I'm still
> interested in how to catch hawks.

You have a hunter on the ground with a shotgun. That's Jimbo. He may
lend his shotgun to trusted people when he's got to potty-break, but
it's still his responsibility.

The other option is to have a few eagles around who don't actually
kill (hard-ban) the hawk, but rather drop it to the ground and pin it
down until such time as the hunter (Jimbo) with the shotgun decides
to pump it full of lead (hard -ban) or let it go with just a bruised
ego.

Of course, eagles should stay above all edit wars, and if they get
involved even for a second, other eagles should pounce on then and
drop them to the ground for the hunter to review.

How to drop a hawk: temporary ban until review by Jimbo or his
appointee.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree


from_name: Peter Gervai

body:
On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 03:48:59PM -0800, Anthere wrote:
> > Peter Gervai wrote:
> >I see. First is not a good example, Opera 5 is
> >_ancient_, you can't expect that anyone would support
> >it, as upgrading is clearly painless.
>
> This is NOT true. I tried upgrading to Opera 6, and it
> was unworkable, because it needed to much memory for
> my computer to handle it. Sure enough, I did not break
> anything any more, but the browser had great
> slowliness, and crashed on average every 30 mn. This
> is not precisely what I call *painless*

What was the memory footprint of opera 4,5 or whatever
you use? What browser do you use regularly, under what
operating system? How much memory do you have?

I just checked: opera 7.21 uses 35MB virtual (20MB
resident) memory, I believe this is not outrageous
for a graphical browser. (Latest opera is 6.03 for
Mac as far as I see, but I won't downgrade mine.)

> The upgrade is perfectly ok if you have a recent
> computer. But you cannot expect every user to have so.
> There was a big campaign about 4 years ago in France,
> and many many people bought some imacs.

That's a problem. I can't tell you about Mac browsers,
apart from the fact that I see "Mac OS/X" (whatever it
might be) in Mozilla download pages. Don't Mac have
any more recent browsers than Opera 6.03 or Netscape
4.xx? (I see netscape 6.2.xx for MacPPC.)

> since then. Except for wikipedia, I did not meet any
> problem with it, fine for power, fine for dvd, fine
> for internet.

I'm sure you going to have troubles with that "fine
for internet" soon. dmoz.org is going to be changed
to utf-8 "real soon now" (see http://dmoz.org/Test/World/
utf8 categories, like Catalan or Arabian), and most
international project are either already utf-8
or going to be soon.

Natually you should be aware that french accents
are in latin1, so you feel yourself comfortable.
The rest of the world which ISN'T in latin1 going
to change to utf-8 sooner or later (probably sooner),
because we have to, otherwise we cannot handle our
natural language and latin1 at once.

> Just problem on wikipedia. And I bought
> a boosted one.

Can your browser edit utf-8 articles which does NOT
contain non-latin1 characters?

> I know it is not possible for these users to use Opera
> 6, and not possible to switch to system X.

I believe you, but then, they are in a dead end, and
they can expect more and more problems as unicode
gets used more widely. usemod wikis just being changed
to utf-8, we'll see what happens.

Come: http://narya.grin.hu/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UniCodeTest

Edit, enter your browser and opsys, and see what happens.

> I do not understand that comment.

If the iso8859-1 encoded page contains illegal characters,
it breaks if you edit it with a standards compliant browser.

> French people suggested they could just by hand
> correct broken caracters.
> This is not an option I fear
>
> I just made an example : this is what appear after my
> edit : http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorraine
>
> Can you figure manually correcting each time after a
> user ?

Well, I'd revert it and tell the user to use a different
browser. :-/

Okay, without much thinking:

If I were WikiGod I'd create a button "Send me latin1, I
am lame", which would run page through

iconv -f utf-8 -t iso8859-1

then let the user edit, then have the "lame submit" button
which would send the text through

iconv -t utf-8 -f iso8859-1

and save (change 8859-1 to any iso encoding you prefer).
This would keep iso8859 representable characters.

The button would refuse if the page would contain a char
not representable, and advise you to either look for other
page or to really update that darned browser.

Not that I believed this is good or right. As I mentioned:
you going to have lots of problems anyway.

> I have the plain answer : I saw a couple of reaction
> on meta to my destructive edits; I was just reverted;
> I know very well that if we switch to utf-8 on all
> wikipedias without a technical tweak to automatically
> insure "translation", the user of this browser,
> perhaps just a mother at home with a 4 years old imac,
> perhaps a student in Algeria, perhaps a kid in Brasil,
> will just be kicked out.

Just get reverted. Probably it is even possible to reject
your edits since they contain illegal utf-8 characters,
which is probably possible to notice in even php.

> Perhaps is it just 2%,

Only those who:
1) have their charset included in latin1 (the privileged)
2) keep their browser at least 2 years old.

> and perhaps those editing
> wikipedia right now are people technically better
> equipped that the average human being connected to
> internet,

Definitely, if you count in the Albanian orphans and the
chinese peasants.

Otherwise no. I can run opera well on a pentium 233 with
32 MB of memory (and on 16MB either, but it's much slower).
How much is a P233 nowadays? $10? (convert to FFR at will :))

> and perhaps we just do not want to keep it
> that way, and perhaps we want liberty and openess.

This would include supporting non iso-8859-1 people.

> Depends on what is important.

Yes. But it is not that simple when you are in a
privileged group.

Still, maybe en.wikipedia should stay 8859-1, since it's
english after all.

> >As far as I know most
> >browsers handle this very well (including, for
> >example, unix character
> >mode browsers).
>
> And perhaps most users know nothing about unix

Most end-users are using windoze, and it is well equipped
with utf-8 conform browsers.

But maybe you're right, maybe english doesn't need
utf-8. But to me it seems to be a big loss.

I stay silent, and let the old timers decide. If I can
be any technical help, I'll start talking again.

Hoping the best,
Peter


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Transwiki

body:
On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 01:52:54AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Peter Gervai wrote:

> Although some of us would like to encourage other-language Wiktionaries,
> so far only the English version exists.  If you have somebody who likes
> writing up dictionary articles in Hungarian, maybe you can convince him
> to start a Hungarian Wiktionary. :-)

Well, not that anyone would allocate time for that, but newbies usually
create dictionary entries (in Hungarian), and would be useful to keep them
instead of deleting. If a hu.wiktionary doesn't require much space or
resources it would be nice, even if there would be only 46 articles a
year...

>   That being said, if someone wants
> to write up English definitions for Hungarian words that would go on the
> English Wiktionary.

Sure. (To be honest, I don't really grasp the idea, since it's pretty time
consuming to update a definition. For example there's a word for "Dog", and
there are 23 pages describing dog in 23 other languages. Then I come, and
want to share Hungarian Dog, so I have to edit *24* pages to insert Dog
everywhere. I know, it's a wiki not a database, but still, prevents me from
wanting to do anything serious there.)

> >> 3. entire quoted books; (They belong in Wikibooks)
> >
> >A user started to enter his own fictions and writings in the .hu.wikipedia.
> >Right now I can only send him to... anywhere else, and delete the
> >"articles". Do they belong to Wikibooks? Essays, novels, any kind of
> >"fictional facts" and other nonsense?
> >
> My opinion is that works of original fiction don't belong in any of
> these, but if the Hungarian Wikipedians decide a different policy that's
> their choice, You're not going to get a lot of objections from those of
> us who don't understand a word of Hungarian

My opinion is that Wikipedia is not a short story publisher, and he can go
to any free web provider or freeform-wiki to publish these.
Thanks for the opinion. :)

grin


body:
On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 12:02:00PM +0100, Till Westermayer wrote:

> I strongly disagree to cutting backward compatibility. But couldn't we
> find a technical solution, i.e.:
>
> - storing everything in the database in UTF-8
>
> - converting it automagically into embedded code (maybe even using HTML-
> entities like ü or ß) before an edit

Preferably (de)activated by a user preference item. (It's pretty hard to
edit with embeds, and it's useless for a modern browser.)

> - converting everything after the edit in UTF-8, including correct UTF8-
> characters inserted by the edit and embedded code

Apart from my comment: Good idea!

grin


from_name: Jay Bowks

subject: [Wikitech-l] Forbidden

body:
Hi, maybe one of you can help...
When going to http://en.wikipedia.org
Why do I get the message:

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Apache/1.3.28 Server at en.wikipedia.org Port 80

Is is a problem with my firewall or
is there something amiss with the
server?

Thanks,
Jay B.


from_name: Mirko Thiessen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Proposal for Harmony

body:
Ed Poor wrote:

> Thus I would like to propose the formation of a sort of club
> or SIG within Wikipedia - sort of on the lines of the old semi-
> humorous Wikipedia 'militia' - a group of contributors who will
> join to intervene in edit wars and work together to create a
> stable and neutral article, one which all parties to the edit
> war would agree is correct and good and satisfying.

Sounds good, but you assume, that people are willing to accept the
intervention of this "militia". I don't oppose this proposal, but we
have to think ahead: What will we do with those who refuse to abandon
their behaviour?

My thoughts:

1. The rejection of edit wars should become Wikipedia policy (and not
just a voluntary guideline).
2. If an edit war is emerging, the parties involved are forced either
to discuss the issue on the talk page or to leave the article forever.
3. If a participant refuses to discuss, but continues reverting in
spite of active discussion on the talk page, (s)he should face
consequences: first warning, second warning, ban (something like
that).

Currently we have especially one edit warrior on Wikipedia, who
actually announced, that he would revert the articles in question
after their unprotection, regardless of the outcome of the discussions
ongoing on the corresponding talk pages.
And he did more than once. We won't change his behaviour with Ed's
proposed intervention group.

Mirko.

P.S.: I am really happy, that this is actually discussed now.


from_name: viajero at quilombo.nl

body:
Hi all,

I find the one revert limit a little too virtuous; moreover, there has
been a discussion and proposal on [[Wikipedia_talk:How to revert a page to
an earlier version]] regarding a "three-revert" guideline.

This seems sensible to me (and others it appears). Moreover, I think this
guideline can also be used as a definition of what an edit war is, namely
reverting an edit more than three times.

This is useful because defining what exactly an edit war is is the first
step to deciding what to do about them.

One possibility I discussed briefly yesterday with another sysop would be
to ban users who have gotten involved in an edit war from the relevant
article for a given period (a week or two). Although it would be nice,
this would probably be impossible to do by software. So, who would decide
this? What about a panel of sysops, say three or five, rotated on a
monthly basis?

I appreciate Ed's proposal but fail to see how it would solve the problem
of intransigent reverters like Wik.

V.


from_name: James Duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] Reddi's POV edits of Current Events

body:
Reddi had added many links to [[Current events]]. Most are OK but s/he has a
habit of adding highly questionable stuff -

i. adding in lines in the page that are generally seen as totally irrelevant
and completely Americocentrist, eg announcing the launch of US TV show
premieres and re-runs as if they were of internationally newsworthy, or
could remotely fall within the ambit of current affairs, eg.,

*  [[Entertainment]] : "The Partridge Family" to take the psychedelic bus
for another spin, returning to television in an updated remake, according to
The Hollywood Reporter. [22]

*  [[Entertainment]]: The "Star Wars: Clone Wars" episodes premieres. A new
episode of the Lucas-approved series airs each weeknight, repeating at
midnight. Another 10 will air next spring. [4] [5]

* [[Movies]]: Russell Crowe attended the London premiere of his movie Master
and Commander. [2]

** [[Nudity]]: Porn publisher Larry Flynt states he bought reported nude
photos of Iraq war heroine Jessica Lynch - to keep them from ever being
published. Jessica Lynch is frolicking topless with male soldiers in the
photos before she went off to war. [10] [11] [12]

ii. using highly POV language, eg.,

*  [[Mass media]]: An example of European media coverage distorting the
Mideast conflict is publicized. [47]

* [[United Nations]]: The UN votes again and overwhelmingly for an end to
sanctions against Cuba; only the USA, Israel, and the Marshall Islands vote
against. [12] The US's United Nations ambassador John Negroponte avoided the
UN propaganda forum.

iii. uses as /single/ sources references that are not highly regarded as
NPOV, for example editorials and commentary columns and controversial
sources such as FOX News.

iv. Adding in names of countries, definitions and links at the start of
sentences that are at this stage OTT and in most cases wrongly defined
([[Scotland]], [[Nudity]], [[Entertainment]], etc, as if the page was a
tabloid TV news channel. Mav among others have constantly had to revert
these, for example:

# (cur) (last) . . M 20:39, 16 Nov 2003 . . Maveric149 (removed bastard
contextualizations; place is not context! Nor is subject! )
# (cur) (last) . . 01:27, 14 Nov 2003 . . Snoyes (removing POV on news
article (no place for debating on this page - it is meant to be short and to
the point - see talk))
# (cur) (last) . . 23:26, 13 Nov 2003 . . Snoyes (add link to judge-story;
rm official statement from other news story (official statements are
frequently useless, as they mostly don't add anything))
# (cur) (last) . . M 03:22, 12 Nov 2003 . . Jiang (rm pointless
contextualizations)

Snoyes wrote - Regarding my removal of, as you (user:Reddi) put it, the
"pentagon view": The Current Events page should not be some kind of forum
for posting points of view on News articles. It is about the News itself. I
don't think that it is a good idea to post responses by involved parties if
they don't contain significant relevant information that has not already
been said. . .  If this continues we'll be writing entire news stories
pretty soon. Which I don't think Current Events is designed to do. --snoyes
01:28, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Jiang, Snoyes, Mav, Viajero and others have complained repeatedly about some
of these additions. I raised the point of the nonsensical listing of a
cartoon series. Reddi's response was to write a weird largely unreadable
reply which he signed "Not an irish drunk", an offensive characture link
mocking my Irishness which, if it was made against someone because of their
gender, race or jewish identity would rightly be criticised.

It is not the only place on wikipedia that Reddi has acted in a POV manner,
but while thankfully s/he doesn't engage in edit wars, they keep adding in
links, adding in categories at the start of lines, creating ever growing
right wing Americocentrist lines and using controversial sources as single
sources, rather than, as requested, offer other sources alongside with their
beloved FOX News and the Washington Times. And so far appeals from everyone
else to stop fall on deaf ears. Have people any suggestions, before what is
right now just a constant irritant on the Current events page requiring
frequent culling of irrelevant stuff, as so happens grows into something
worse and provokes major rows on the page?

JT

_________________________________________________________________
>From the hottest toys to tips on keeping fit this winter, you?ll find a
range of helpful holiday info here.
http://special.msn.com/network/happyholidays.armx


from_name: Jake Nelson

body:
I've eyed those same entries that were quoted... considered doing something
a couple times, but didn't feel fully justified in removing them. I agree
that something should be done there. Also, if it isn't already, it should be
a fairly hard & fast rule on CE that one source isn't enough, with only rare
exceptions. (I've actually broken this once... a "A US official reports..."
item, that I only saw on CNN, added the cnn.com link to it when it
appeared... I later decided I'd added it while it was perhaps a bit too
fresh.) And if it's only one source, and no one else is carrying it, perhaps
what you're really reporting is that fact? IE: "CNN reports that <some
random person> does <some random thing>. [link]" Or something...
On another note, I think the entertainment events article is a good thought,
but I think it'll take strong watching and guiding or it'll descend into
nonsensical gossip.

-- Jake


subject: [Wikitech-l] Can I be a developer?

body:
Daniel-

we definitely need more people to blame when things go really wrong. So I
wholeheartedly support your request!

Regards,

Erik


body:
James-

> Reddi had added many links to [[Current events]]. Most are OK but s/he has a
> habit of adding highly questionable stuff -

Your analysis is correct and I have had conflicts with Reddi over this in
the past. He replied with an incomprehensible block of text (and also has
the annoying habit of removing a comment when replying to it). On the
other hand, he is/was one of the most active editors on CE, so I think we
should make reasonable efforts to work with him.

Reddi has good intentions, but when it's so obvious where he stands
politically from his edits, something needs to be done.

I would support an official warning to the effect that:
- POV language needs to be avoided -- will everyone agree with the
summary?
- Sources should be reasonably objective, e.g. Voice of America is a US
government funded operation, and AP/Reuters are therefore preferable
- "Current events" should concentrate on factual information, not mere
statements of opinion
- When available, summaries should contain facts/"opinions" from all
relevant sides

As for the entertainment news, I believe these *could* be salvaged, but
not in the current format which has no clear distinction between different
news categories. They could either be on a separate page or in a separate
section. This includes sports, movies, music etc. I do support growing the
"Current events" section beyond its present format, we can always spin it
off if it gets too dominant.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy on Reversions?

body:
Erik wrote:
>...
>A code of honor works well for small projects with
>like-minded people. Wikipedia is neither small nor
>like-minded. That's why it needs policies which are
>actually followed through, and not just a call for
>WikiLove every now and then. We don't need a
>WikiGestapo, but we need a certain amount of policy
>enforcement and clear rules, and that's just not
>happening. As a result, NPOV is mostly theoretical for
>many of the controversial articles on Wikipedia.

Sadly, I think you are right. Bureaucracy expansion.... Hm.

One possible idea:
Somebody mentioned a "3 revert" rule where anything more than 3 reverts in an
article content dispute by any party (not to be confused with reverting
simple vandalism), is grounds for a warning. If within a certain amount of
time, say a month, they go pass 3 reverts on the same article again, then
they get a final warning. Strike three in the same month and they are banned
from editing for a week. After that they can come back on probation (3 months
long maybe?). At that point: 1 probation violation gets an automatic 1 week
editing ban, second one gets 2 weeks and the third gets them a HardBan for at
least the duration of their probation period.

Hopefully this will encourage people to work together instead of automatically
reverting. But we also need a way to resolve disputes.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
Erik wrote:
>I would support an official warning to the effect that:
>- POV language needs to be avoided -- will everyone
>agree with the summary?
>- Sources should be reasonably objective, e.g. Voice of
>America is a US government funded operation, and AP/
>Reuters are therefore preferable
>- "Current events" should concentrate on factual information,
>not mere statements of opinion
>- When available, summaries should contain facts/"opinions"
>from all relevant sides

I was about to write a reply to James' post saying pretty much the same thing.
Ditto for what you wrote about the entertainment news problem. The release of
a major new film is news, however. It's already reported on the day and year
pages. More entries can be added to the month pages, so naturally less
significant events can be mentioned a bit more often than they would
otherwise be on a year or day page.

No need to be "hard news" zealots (although not nearly as much space should be
given to soft/entertainment news as hard news on [[current events]]).

I imagine that we will eventually need to have a [[current entertainment
news]] daughter article of the [[current events]] page. Their "archives"
would be [[{month} {year} in entertainment]]. The detail can go there, but
really significant entertainment news would also get a mention on the regular
[[current events]]/[[{month} {year}]] article. But I don't forsee us needing
such a page for a while (such a page could also degenerate into celebrity
gossip "news" a la the Enquirer in the US or The Sun in the UK - that would
be bad IMO).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy on Reversions?

body:
> From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: maveric149 at yahoo.com, English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 02:50:13 -0500
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy on Reversions?
>
> Erik wrote:
>> ...
>> A code of honor works well for small projects with
>> like-minded people. Wikipedia is neither small nor
>> like-minded. That's why it needs policies which are
>> actually followed through, and not just a call for
>> WikiLove every now and then. We don't need a
>> WikiGestapo, but we need a certain amount of policy
>> enforcement and clear rules, and that's just not
>> happening. As a result, NPOV is mostly theoretical for
>> many of the controversial articles on Wikipedia.
>
> Sadly, I think you are right. Bureaucracy expansion.... Hm.
>
> One possible idea:
> Somebody mentioned a "3 revert" rule where anything more than 3 reverts in an
> article content dispute by any party (not to be confused with reverting
> simple vandalism), is grounds for a warning. If within a certain amount of
> time, say a month, they go pass 3 reverts on the same article again, then
> they get a final warning. Strike three in the same month and they are banned
> from editing for a week. After that they can come back on probation (3 months
> long maybe?). At that point: 1 probation violation gets an automatic 1 week
> editing ban, second one gets 2 weeks and the third gets them a HardBan for at
> least the duration of their probation period.
>
> Hopefully this will encourage people to work together instead of automatically
> reverting. But we also need a way to resolve disputes.
>
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

For there to be 3 reverts there must generally be someone else reverting to
their version.

Also this does not cover the sort of obliteration of the existing article by
someone who posts a new version with the declartion that the old one was,
"all crap".

Fred


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

body:
On Tuesday 18 November 2003 19:36, Nicolas Weeger wrote:
> >We shouldn't be telling those people that they have to upgrade to use
> >Wikipedia if they can use Wikipedia just fine without UTF-8. The benefits
> >simply do not seem to be at all compelling enough to justify the negatives
> >(at least for en.wikipedia). But if you can figure out a way to have UTF-8
> >without the associated problems, then great.
>
> I wholeheartdly agree. This is totally against Wikipedia's spirit to
> discriminate for using some browser and not some other.

What about browsers that don't work well when UTF-8 is not present?


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

body:
At 11:33 AM 11/19/03 -0500, Alex T. wrote:
>From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
>
> >Okay, Alex. You're the lawyer, you formulate the policy.
>
>It is very frustrating for a jurist to be told that others do not want to
>discuss things, even though IAAL, this is NALO (not a legal opinion).

Thank you. My reaction, when I saw Ed's post, was that yes, you're
a lawyer, which means that _once we decide what we want to do, you're
likely best qualified to sort out how we should phrase it_. Not that you
should make the decisions of what--it didn't take a lawyer to decide that
we want to create an excellent free encyclopedia, for example.

>We should still work on these things together and not create an "legal"
>ghetto of lawyer/volunteers in Wikimedia land. Law does not have to
>be that stuff that those guys write up that take over our lives, this is
>exactly why some many corporations/millionaires have captured the
>legistlative process, "public-spirited artists" just seem to let it happen
>and they wake up after it is all done. I'd rather be a media artist/lawyer
>activist (actually that is sort of what I am at times).
>
> >I hope it includes a section on "how to communicate politely but firmly
> >with apparently accidental GFDL infringement".
>
>It definitely will and I nominate Ed to write it.

And I volunteer to look it over once he, or someone, has, and fiddle
with commas, noun/verb agreement, and the like.


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Single-sourcing (was: Reddi's POV edits of Current
	Events)

body:
There's nothing wrong with single-sourcing. SecretLondon reads the
Guardian, I read the Washington Times. Go ahead and quote from the
Washington Post or New York Times if you want. Everybody posts info from
the sources they know.

Many people think the Post and the NY Times are editorially biased, but
does anyone think their *news* is untrustworthy? Okay, there was the
Jason Blair thing, and the guy whose Pulitzer from 60 years ago might be
revoked for whitewashing Stalin's Ukrainian genocide - but I mean aside
from minor things like that, does anyone really consider them
untrustworthy sources?

Same for the Washington Times: okay, their editorials and most of their
columnists are conservative; but does anyone think their *news" is
untrustworthy?

Uncle Ed


subject: [WikiEN-l] Temp Ban Policy Suggestions

body:
Maveric and Chris Mahan have both suggested formulas for blocking
signed-in users from editing, if abandon cooperative editing and engage
in excessive reversion.

I agree in principle, and I trust someone like mav or Eloquence or
Angelas or (oddly enough, even myself) to:
1. Determine that someone has violated the rules
2. Recommend a ban to Jimbo

I just don't think Jimbo is *ever* going to delegate hard-ban authority,
even for a week -- not any time soon, anyway. He's found a way of
maintaining community stability and he's not likely to give in to our
periodic demands for "more authority".

Sometimes I think he's just being stubborn, and sometimes I think he's
much wiser than I am about this - but /he/ is the one running a
successful company and sponsoring the world's largest Wiki community
(not little ol' me).

Uncle Ed


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Article of the week

body:
(original French version at the buttom of this mail)

Hello all,

This week we began a new Community project on Francophone Wikipedia: the
article of the week. It is a matter of proposing to all the wikipadians to
jointly work during one week on an article they chose. The goal is double:
develop Community work and harmony between the editors, and to create an
article of quality which can be used as model for promotion. Our first test
is more than conclusive that almost all French wikipedians took part has
this first article of the week (the [Lorraine]? region) and that after four
days we already obtained a rather complete article on the subject (although
it remains much has to write).

There aren?t any strict criteria to be able to propose an article as article
of the week, in fact the wikipedians judge relevance of the proposals by
their votes. However, a good article of the week can be defined as an
article:

- empty or stub,

- not controversial,

- not too technical,

- whose subject is enough vast to make it possible to each one to add
contents,

- coming from the pages [Ask an article], [Popular articles] or coming from
[Main page].

I not sure this concept is easily adaptable to Anglophone Wikipedia because
of its size and the great number of editors, but I think that it can be
interesting for other Wikipedia.

FAQ:

- Why only one article per week and not several?

> The goal is to propose to wikipedians to work jointly on one article. If
there were several articles, there is great chance that each one takes part
only on article which have favourite subject.

- Why a week whereas in one day we had already obtained a good article?

> The goal is not to create a great number of good articles, but make take
part a maximum number of people on one article and to succeed has as
realised as possible article. For example, certain people of Francophone
Wikipedia took part in the article only several days after the beginning.

Article of the week:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%E9dia:Article_de_la_semaine (French)

Rules, votes and discussions:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_Wikip%E9dia:Article_de_la_semaine
(French)

Aoineko

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

Bonjour ? tous,

Cette semaine nous avons commenc? un nouveau projet communautaire sur le
Wikip?dia francophone : l'article de la semaine.

Il s'agit de proposer ? tout les wikip?diens de travailler main dans la main
pendant une semaine sur un article qu'ils ont choisi. Le but est double :
d?velopper le travail communautaire et l'entente entre les ?diteurs, et
aboutir a la cr?ation d'article de qualit? qui peuvent servir de model pour
la promotion.

Notre premier essai est plus que concluant puisse que la quasi-totalit? des
wikip?diens ont particip? a ce premier article de la semaine (la r?gion
[Lorraine]) et qu'apr?s quatre jours nous avons d?j? obtenu un article assez
complet sur le sujet (bien qu'il reste encore beaucoup a ?crire).

Il n'existe aucuns crit?res stricts pour pouvoir proposer un article comme
article de la semaine, ce sont les wikip?diens qui jugent de la pertinence
des propositions par leurs votes. Cependant, un bon article de la semaine
peut ?tre d?fini comme un article :

- vide ou ? l'?tat d'?bauche,

- non controvers?,

- pas trop technique,

- dont le sujet est assez vaste pour offrir ? chacun la possibilit?
d'ajouter du contenu,

- provenant des pages [demander un article], [articles les plus demand?e] ou
encore provenant de la [page d'accueil].

Je ne suis pas sur que ce concept soit facilement adaptable au Wikip?dia
anglophone de part sa taille et le grand nombre d'?diteurs, mais je pense
qu'il peut ?tre int?ressant pour les autres Wikip?dia.

FAQ :

- Pourquoi un seul article par semaine et non pas plusieurs ?

> Le but et de proposer aux wikip?diens de travailler main dans la main sur
un article. Si il y avait plusieurs articles, il y a de grande chance que
chacun ne participe qu'a l'article dont le sujet lui tiens le plus a c?ur.

- Pourquoi une semaine alors qu'en un jour nous avions d?j? obtenu un bon
article ?

> Le but n'est pas de cr?er un grand nombre de bons articles, mais bien de
faire participer un maximum de gens sur cet article et d'aboutir a un
article le plus abouti possible. Par exemple, certaines personnes du
Wikip?dia francophone n'ont particip? ? l'article que plusieurs jours apr?s
le d?but.

Article de la semaine :
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%E9dia:Article_de_la_semaine

R?gles, votes et discussions :
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_Wikip%E9dia:Article_de_la_semaine

Aoineko


subject: [WikiEN-l] Who's a good mediator?

body:
I agree with every word of Erik's post, except for the sarcastic part
about kicking out pathological lying Chechen Republicans chased by foxes
with warped cores in their breeches. And he says /I/ have a strange
sense of humor...

This is basically the same idea as my Harmonious Editing Club, only
expressed with more eloquence ;-) -- all we have to do now is nominate
some more people; then figure out what they should do and how to request
their help.

Criteria for nomination should include anyone who has ever:

* Worded an article so eloqently/fairly/neutrally that an edit war
suddenly evaporated into thin air

* Successfully defused a tangle between contributors

** Like the hero who got Nico and Szopen to "kiss and make up" (was that
Viajero?)

To call in a mediator, just leave a note at their user talk page, or
more generally post in the ==Request for mediaton== section of
[[Wikipedia:Mediators]].

Uncle Ed


from_name: Dan Carlson

subject:
[Wikitech-l] How do I install MediaWiki using only FTP and HTTP
	access?

body:
I am looking to create my own wikiwiki website using the MediaWiki
software, but I'm uncertain as to how I should proceed, because I do
not have access to the command line.  I first attempted to have my
host's support people run the install.php script for me, but they ran
into errors and told me that they ran into errors when they ran the
script from the backend, and to look for errors in the code.  (You'll
have to forgive my ignorance here -- I'm pretty good with websites, but
server management isn't something I know anything about yet!)

So, I'm looking for a way to install MediaWiki and set up my site using
nothing but FTP upload, phpMyAdmin access (full admin/dba permissions),
and a normal Web browser.  Can anyone provide some assistance with
this?

Thank you,
Dan Carlson


subject: [WikiEN-l] Mediators

body:
--- Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons] <[name omitted for privacy reasons]@msn.com> wrote:
> Why do we even need mediators? Is there some problem which we have
> been unable to resolve? Yes, we have edit wars...and we resolve
> them. Mediators might "solve" edit wars easily, if I were the only
> editor Id solve them pretty quick too. What's the rush? Just relax
> and accept the fact that arguments are inevitable -- some
> "mediator" isn't going to solve the issue. >

Mediator can say: You stay in your corner and you in yours, otherwise
I'll go get Dwarf-Lord Jimbo and after reviewing your heinous
dogfight he will most assuredly smite thee and send thee flaining
into the Depths Below.

This will save some grief. So instead of a long drawn out nail
scratchin' he-did-it-no-he-started-first-no-he-did-no-he-did
argument, everybody sits quiet and lets "recent changes" alone.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now
http://companion.yahoo.com/