from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wiki-to-XML

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> I just wanted to announce that
> * my PHP-based wiki-to-xml converter now supports the whole syntax
> * is now in the "php" directory of the CVS module "wiki2xml"
> * can be tested at http://magnusmanske.de/wiki2xml/w2x.php

My first (two-character) test input:

	{|

yields invalid XML as output. ;-) In general, it does so whenever the
close-table markup (|}) is missing.

Also, you seem to be ignoring all whitespace at the beginning of the
input, which makes it output a <paragraph> when the first line should
have been a <pre> because it starts with a space.

Otherwise: Very impressive!!

Timwi


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Try out the rating scheme

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
>> Yes, of course that is the problem. There are several developers
>> who could enable the feature, but all of them are now in fear that
>> something will go Horribly Wrong(tm), so each individual one of
>> them doesn't want to be held responsible in the end, so they don't
>> do it and hope that someone else will do it and take the blame
>> instead.
>
> No one will blame you.

I'm not a developer. (Read: I don't have the access to turn this feature
on.)


body:
> But you're really making a mountain out of a molehill. The only risk is
> a slight degradation in performance. And that goes away instantly, as
> soon as ANY of the programmers turns the switch off.
>
> Right, Magnus, Timwi, et al.?

I am not in the position to ascertain that the degradation will be
"slight", but I strongly believe that it will be slight or less, and
your third sentence is obviously true (almost tautologous).

Timwi


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikitech-l] diacritics problem

body:
Muhammad, what does the diacritic look like? I notice in some fonts,
it is a line under the character, but is that the symbol used in
Tatabahasa Bugis?

Regarding vowel /e/, this is a problem which I'm working on now.

Cheers
Mark

On 08/11/05, muhammad zaid zainuddin <zaidpjd at umich.edu> wrote:
> dear wikitech,
>
> I'm really really sorry for bothering and giving you guys with a lot of
> trouble. I've been away because of end of ramadan and eid celebration.
>
> About the virama diacritics (attached), actually, it's kind of 'new',
> because it's introduced in 1985 by the 'Balai Penelitian Bahasa Ujung
> Pandang' (Ujung Pandang Committee of Language), thus will never be found in
> old text like i la galigo. Therefore, ominoglot and other lontara sources
> didn't mention this diacritic because they are referring to the oled texts.
> Here's the scan of the page from Buginese Grammar written in Indonesia. You
> will notice this at page five. The title of this book is 'Tatabahasa Bugis'
> published by 'Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan', Indonesia (Department
> of Education and Culture of Indonesia) in 1991. I think, you can find this
> book at main library or university's library. I hope wikitech creates this
> diacrtic and informs me about how to make the input.
>
> Secondly, I notice that the diacritic /e/, when written, got mix up with
> the other consonant. Take a look at this page:
>
> <http://bug.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E1%A8%84%E1%A8%82%E1%A8%89%E1%A8%99%E1%A8%91%E1%A8%99%E1%A8%82>
>
> When I typed in the word 'pangadereng', the vowel /e/ got mix up with the
> other consonants. Thus, make it harder to read.
>
> Thirdly, I got some replies telling me that the consonant is too small to
> read. Can wikitechs make it a little bigger like Malayalam language.
>
> Thank you.
>
> Muhammad Zaid Zainuddin
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>

--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbiter recusal

body:
If arbitrators had to recuse themselves every time someone came before them
who they considered a 'known troublemaker', let's say no disruptive user
would ever get banned.

-Matt


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Totally unscientific investigation...

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>Magnus Manske wrote:
>>*COUGH* validation feature *COUGH*
>
> Jeez Louise, Magnus: WHEN are you going to turn on the validation
> feature?

As far as I understand, Magnus doesn't have the access or the right to
turn the feature on. So don't blame him for not doing it; he's probably
more frustrated about it than anyone else, since he wrote it.

Timwi


list: foundation-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Hosting scans of the 1911 Britannica on Wikimedia

body:
Angela wrote:
> On 11/9/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>
>
>>I suggested EB as an abbreviation, not as a way to avoid
>>trademark issues.
>
>
> The potential trademark issue was brought up on this list last July:
> <http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-July/003645.html>.
> Since then, Wikisource has been mostly using the EB abbreviation, but
> there are still  many mentions of the full name, so perhaps it was
> decided it wasn't an issue.
>

We can remove references to the name if we have to, but don't expect me to
be happy about it. In any case I'd like to hear a qualified opinion.

-- Tim Starling


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Really bad response time from upload.wikimedia.org

body:
Jeremy Dunck wrote:
> I'm seeing a consistent 3 minute response time for a medium-sized file:

The machine is sorely overloaded, and in its current disk configuration
is crap slow at the best of times.

A replacement has arrived but has a defective drive. Maintenance is
scheduled.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>
>But you're really making a mountain out of a molehill. The only risk is
>a slight degradation in performance. And that goes away instantly, as
>soon as ANY of the programmers turns the switch off.
>
>Right, Magnus, Timwi, et al.?
>
>
Right, <paranoid>to the best of my knowledge</paranoid>.

Magnus


from_name: slimvirgin at gmail.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbiter recusal

body:
On 11/9/05, Jack Lynch <jack.i.lynch at gmail.com> wrote:
> There have been recent concerns regarding Kelly Martin, but none so
> serious as her decision not to recuse herself in the case of an editor
> whom she has clear animosity toward.

Sam, arbitrators shouldn't have to recuse themselves because an editor
has tried to draw them into a dispute. If we allowed that, anyone
could use that tactic against any member of the arbcom they wanted to
see removed from a case.

Sarah


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Status of Wikimedia

body:
Alphax wrote:
>
> Mark Williamson wrote:
>
>>Unforunately I'm still learning the glorious language of the beautiful
>>enchanted lands of Zlatibor, so I'd probably not be able to read it.
>>The Zlatiborians who have moved to cities, such as SellackAlex or
>>Djordje, however, will surely read it. ;p
>
> I am most curious as to why the lands of Zlatibor are enchanted. Do they
> have some particularly fine drugs that are not available elsewhere?

No, but they can magically spring a new, as-yet-unheard-of language into
existence (a glorious one, no less), so the lands must be enchanted.

(or they're playing too much Magic: The Gathering)
Timwi


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Hosting scans of the
	1911	Britannica	onWikimedia

body:
We *could* just bot-upload them to the commons...

Just a thought.

Magnus


from_name: Autymn D.C.

subject: [WikiEN-l] disputing block: 69.108.172.162, lysdexia

body:
On 8 Nov 2005, at 11.59, Rowan Collins wrote:
> Wow! A quick glance through some of the disputes involved here reveals
> a whole level of linguistic conservatism I had not previously

It's literalism and discretism, not conservatism.

> encountered. Some of the assertions made ('Temporisation, French Latin
> for "timesening"', "English infinitives [...] end in -an") suggest a
> view of the language as not only set in stone, but defined by rigid,
> complex rules. Thus, "loan words" are simply "foreign" (as also argued
> re. the plural of "virus"), and usages not conforming to grammatical
> rules "incorrect", however common and accepted they may be.

I've been writing up a Rosetta stone between Latin, Greek (It pains me
to write that--it's either Graic or Hellenic in elided Latin, or graEc
or hAllAnEc in elided English.), and English combining forms for people
(everyone) who are ignorant that English can be used as a scientific or
logic language.

> Now, I freely admit that I hold a strongly descriptivist view, so it
> seems to me fairly obvious that language is a dynamic, constantly
> evolving, construct, and that "correctness", "grammar", etc, are all
> constructs created *after the fact* to better describe and understand
> it. And it follows, in my mind, that rules which are *never* (not even
> rarely) applied are simply erroneous, however logical or historically
> accurate.

Since "erroneous" means nothing more than "straysome" or "strayish",
you are trivially riht.  Original languages do not overwrite
themselves: They are /forgotten/.  They are not changed because
speakers are making conscious choices that their words are better, but
because they are too lazy or ignorant to learn or use the older words
which are more diverse, full, and accurate than theirs.  So they
wrongfully claim that "English is easy." or "There's no perfect
translation in English." or "There's no such word, particle, part of
speech, mood, case, conjugation, declension, expression, slang, or
whatever in English."  Then they, foreigners muchly, belittle English
because of /their/ ignorance of its threads.

> I know that mine is, in its way, an extreme position, and there is
> some grounds for arguing that a "correct form" must exist at any time,
> and by definition cannot change arbitrarily; in which case there must
> be a lag between changes occurring and becoming "acceptable" and
> "correct". But even so, it is self-evident that language *does*
> change, and that English *has* changed, so that the "rules" do have to
> be updated *sometimes*.

The rules should if the changes should, not if the changes do.  And
only if there is something /wrong/ with the earlier rules.  Otherwise,
the language should grow like any person or nation would and not, like
a cancer, grow everywhich way so that it eats and poops itself and eats
that.

> In my opinion, the language this user seems to be advocating is a kind
> of grammatically-defined "pure" Anglo-Saxon, which is not what most of
> us would recognise as "contemporary English" (i.e. "early 21st-century
> Modern English") at all. So, given that the edits were on the "English
> Wikipedia", I'd say they were, at best, misplaced.

Anglo-Saxon?  No, it's English.  What people speak today is a mutt of
English, Latin-French-English, and Greek-Latin-English.  And I'd write
"pure" as "sheer".  A lone language has only one word for the same
meaning.  Other words with the same meaning are from other languages,
by space or time.  But none of writing this is making me feel better
for being wrongfully kicked off Wikipedia by a liar for doing what I
hold is riht.

> Nobody said anything about it being about yourself; what was being
> alluded to here is that there is no article ownership on Wikipedia, so
> there is no such thing as "your article", only "an article you have
> contributed to". That doesn't mean you can't be proud of your work,
> but it does mean you have no more claim to or rights over a particular
> article than anyone else.

I didn't say that it /wasn't/ others' article.  I said it was my
article.  Logic goes over most people's head.

> The question is, right (or "riht"; was that deliberate?) according to
> what authority, other than yourself? More generally, can it really be
> true that 100% (or 99.9999%) of English speakers are using English
> "wrong"? Or are they simply mistaken in thinking they speak English -
> in which case the argument becomes one over who gets to choose what
> the word "English" means, the millions of people who communicate in
> what they call "English" every day, or the minority of "experts" who
> call something else "English" instead.

Were we talking about English?  I was using a Greek word.

On 9 Nov 2005, at 11.20, Matt Brown wrote:
On 11/8/05, Autymn D. C. <lysdexia at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>> I consider many possibilities beforehand. They were and are provably
>> wrong.

> Then PROVE them wrong. You don't do so - instead, you merely state
> that you are right and others wrong, and insist that everyone else is
> too stupid to understand the right anyway.

I proved them wrong, with explanations, in the user and article talk
pages.  They can look up the references I told.

> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You insist that your
> grammatical usage is correct and everyone else's wrong - not just the
> Wikipedia editors you are personally dealing with, but the overwhelming
> majority of users of the English language. That is, to my mind, an
> extraordinary claim.

What in specific haven't I proven?

-Aut
1^2 = -1^2
(1^2)^.5 =^.5 (-1^2)^.5
?1 :: ?-1
?1 = ?1; ?-1 = ?-1


from_name: Maru Dubshinki

subject: [Wikipedia-l] fyi: Wikipedia as only as good as its links

body:
On 11/3/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA256
>
> Walter van Kalken wrote:
> >
> >> The consequent of this for Wikipedia culture is that it doesn't link
> >> enough.
> >>
> > It doesn't link enough??? IMHO opinion it links much to MUCH. Some
> > artcles of maybe 1 A4 length contain over a 100 external links in the
> > english wikipedia. Which is something I call madness. I certainly would
> > not want to encourage people to go linking even more. On some subjects
> > we have more links than the DMOZ project. And we are not google or DMOZ
> > are we?
> >
>
> As a sidenote to this, someone (NullC? Eloquence?) is planning to run a
> bot to poll archive.org for all the external links on en: and subsuently
> replace all external links with links to the archive.org copies...
>
> - --
> Alphax                      |   /"\

It's NullC; I've pushed and prodded him while chatting on IRC, and he
mass-submitted the links in his offline mirror.
And I'm afraid you've got it a little mixed up- (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Marudubshinki/Wikipedia_wish_list#Better_citing_and_archives)
the idea is not to replace the current direct links, but to supplement
them.
So far we are still stuck on format; how do you add the archived link
to existing external links in a clear, automatable, compact and
comprehensible way?  I've got a few possibilities in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Marudubshinki/Linktest  but none
really satisfy me, and none of them have gotten too much support from
people in IRC who've taken a look.

~Maru


from_name: Wikiacc

body:
On 11/8/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just find someone with serves access to a non mediawiki wiki and turn
> it on and see what happens. If all else fails the person who runs the
> other wiki project I work on would love to have this feature.

I would invite you to do it on WikiTree (wikitree.org), but we're
still running 1.4 and my developer status (while promised) has not
happened yet.

>
> --
> geni
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wikiacc


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Status of Wikimedia

body:
> I don't know if this is a contributing reason behind Elian's
> posting, but I personally would want a language policy that helped
> us never having to hear a single word on new languages ever again.
> In fact, I'm developing a personal aversion against Mark and
> anybody who mentions language issues.  They are fueling a fire
> that we ought to put out.

I'm afraid that just because you don't like the topic, is very far from
a reason to remove it from this mailing list (whether by radically
disallowing it or by creating a new list). You should ideally use a
software that allows you to ignore threads you don't like (I do that by
simply pressing K - you gotta love Thunderbird).

That said, I agree with you that the "we want a new language Wikipedia"
discussions can get tiresome, but I'm quite enjoying the current
(Zlatiborian) one because it's a nice source of amusement. I never knew
that Mark Williamson had such a sense of humour :)

Timwi


from_name: Amgine

subject:
[Foundation-l] [Fwd: Re: [Wikinews-l] Wikinews is giving out press
	credentials]

body:
To answer Anthony, yes accredited reporters have requested and gained
entry to press events - admittedly of the cattle call variety.

The snip below from message to Mav on Wikinews-l. Note the Credentials
Verification page includes the complete list of en.wikinews accredited
reporters.

-------- Original Message --------

<snip>

Another en.Wikinews contributor who does have press credentials was able
to request entry to the press sections at this fall's Apple events. He
was able to attend a number of small press conferences at the event, as
well as the major floor events, and turned in two articles about it.

News events managers do not let everyone with credentials in. They
accept candidates from news sources they feel will give them the
coverage they want. They also usually want to be able to verify press
credentials. The latter is why en.Wikinews built a policy which is
actually more stringent in some respects than our adminship policies.
The policy includes methods of credential verification including
voicemail contacts.

En.Wikinews has approved a total of 8 reporters for credentials. One
reporter has left the project, and three are currently inactive. Another
is not primarily a Wikinewsy, Sj. Currently we have one candidate for
accreditation, Fuzheado (Andrew Lih).

I encourage Mav to take a look en's policy
(http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Accreditation_policy),
verification
(http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Credential_verification), and
requests (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Accreditation_requests).


from_name: Brian

subject: [Foundation-l] Hosting scans of the 1911 Britannica on Wikimedia

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:

>Brian wrote:
>
>
>>I recently (today) acquired a DVD containing scans of every page
>>of the 1911 Britannica, along with index files for it all,
>>[...]
>>TimStarling specifically asked me to tell you all that he is
>>"confident that the server requirements will be minimal." They
>>would set up a domain name, generate some web pages
>>automatically using the index files, and host the entire set of
>>29,700 files totaling about 4 GB.
>>
>>
>
>What is suddenly wrong with using Wikimedia Commons and
>Wikisource?  Why do you need a new domain and server just for this
>book?  Didn't you see
>http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work
>
>
>
I think they want this to be on a separate domain because not only is
1911EB a famous encyclopedia, Wikipedia has benefitted greatly from it,
and several projects still want its contents. So, they would rather prop
it up and give it a separate space specifically designed for making
1911EB's contents easily accessible.


from_name: Thomas Haws

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rating system simplest form

body:
I assume the rating system will have a form something like the following in
the user interface? Simple is best.

This is an exemplary encyclopedia article: 0000000000000 Reduce Agree
Increase
This article is elementary-school-safe: 000000 Reduce Agree Increase
This version of this article is trusted: 00000000 (Automated rating)

Or in HTML:

This is an exemplary encyclopedia article: 0000000000000 Reduce Agree
Increase
This article is elementary-school-safe: 000000 Reduce Agree Increase
This version of this article is trusted: 00 (Automated rating)


from_name: Jeremy Dunck

body:
I'm seeing a consistent 3 minute response time for a medium-sized file:

$ wget http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Pecan-nuts-on-tree.jpg
--16:16:18--  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Pecan-nuts-on-t
ree.jpg
           => `Pecan-nuts-on-tree.jpg'
Resolving upload.wikimedia.org... 207.142.131.205, 207.142.131.210, 207.142.131.
213, ...
Connecting to upload.wikimedia.org[207.142.131.205]:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 173,759 [image/jpeg]

100%[====================================>] 173,759      275.02K/s

16:19:23 (275.02 KB/s) - `Pecan-nuts-on-tree.jpg' saved [173759/173759]

This seems pretty far out of normal performance.

Any ideas?


from_name: Dariusz Siedlecki

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews is giving out press credentials

body:
2005/11/9, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org>:
>  But maybe I'm wrong. Has anyone accomplished anything by saying "yeah, I'm
> a reporter for some website, you can go to this url and look at a page that
> anyone in the world can edit, and that proves it"?

"Reporters" of pl.wikinews tried it two times. Once during a press
conference, then trying to get into a place for photographers, to make
a good photo for the article. We weren't let in, because we had no
press credentials.

There you go. The point of this email is just to prove that we NEED
press credentials, press badges, and stuff like that. But this also
has to be international. This has to be discussed between the
Wikinewsies of the major Wikinews languages and the Board.

--
Pozdrawiam,
Dariusz "Datrio" Siedlecki


from_name: admin Yellowikis

subject: [Wikitech-l] Reputation Systems

body:
Has anyone tried integrating a reputation system with MediaWiki?

So editors get awarded points/feed back for their work?

Any tips or pointers very welcome.

Paul
--
Yellowikis is to Yellow Pages, as Wikipedia is to The Encyclopedia Britannica


from_name: Delirium

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:

>The interesting question is what happens when one Wikinews
>reporter abuses her credentials?  Say for example that you are let
>into a press conference, and there you start to throw eggs and
>tomatoes on the politician.  Who apologizes to the organizers?
>Who revokes the credentials for the reporter who misbehaved?  Who
>promises that this won't happen again?
>
>
The Wikinewsies revoke their credentials, of course.  We have a process
on Wikipedia (at least on en:) for removing Administrator access when
admins abuse it, so I see no reason why Wikinewsies can't remove
credentials from those who abuse them through a similar process.  If
it's some sort of dire emergency it can be temporarily done by fiat to
speed things up, of course (the way developers can de-admin someone
without waiting if it's a major problem).

-Mark


from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] CheckUser questions

body:
Hello,
Danny's mail brought rrelevant questions rather than comments to me
which I've held since last night after a communication on JA WP Pump.

On 11/9/05, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> Although I have not been following this discussion, I was asked this  evening
> to grant 5 arbitrators on the English Wikipedia CheckUser powers.

Although I don't know not all those five closely, personally I have no
opposition to any of them, however,  frankly I was a bit surprised by
so many people requested (I found it first on meta), because I
understood only two people could be granted it on a local project.

As for the number of checkuser priviledge holders, I understood as the
below: if a project is large but lacks its own arbcom, two users (and
not one, nor more than two) can given the checkuser right. Yesterday
an editor said "more than two: would be given it Perhaps I was wrong.
Or not. If any explanation is given, this guy (or girl) will be very
appreciated.

Let me continue a talk on assumption; if more than two may granted on
a project, it isn't worthy for a surprise that five people request for
checkuser priviledge. Otherwise, a question arises; a big project with
arbcom can have more than two checkuser granted editors. a rather
small but still big project without arbcom (like Ja or De) can be with
two such users. It seems to me somehow strange.

For your information, few months ago JA WP had a discussion about
checkuser request. Then we argued how many checkuser group editors
would be needed; a certain opinion said three would be the best mainly
due to availability and frequency of such investigation.
So "two' or "more than two" is not a petty thing to that community.

> While the request was made, I think it is sage for us to let it sit there
> for some time to see if there are any valid protests to giving it to these
> individuals. Usually, steward requests can remain for several days until someone
> acts upon them, and I don't see why this should be any different.

One interesting point to me, the request submitted Raul mentioned to
Jimbo's participation to the discussion about request. I have no
argument about it; it is simply nice for such participation and
approval. On the other hand, such participation couldn't be expected
on most projects couldn't. It means in most cases the Board and
Foundation has to rely on  their credibilitygiven by a community -
another question arises here to me, wheter "70%-80% approval with more
than 20-30 supports" is truly acceptable (Not personally, just a
question).

A relevant thing: a sysop election on a big project can gather
sometimes over 50 or close to 100 support vote (like vote on elian
last year) - I am not sure if the current criteria is enough for some
meta-project with 10,000+ registered users. If everyone is happy, no
problem.

> I also wonder whether they should be given the power on a permanent or a
> need-to-know basis. That is, should they always have this ability, or should
> they only be given it when a case requires invesigation, and then have it
> removed? Personally, I favor the latter option. I do not think anybody needs to  be
> able to do this in all instances.

Sounds wise. One concern is time expirinng and steward availability.
In some circumstances investigation should be done within a day or
hours (like emergent request for desysoping). If stewards don't care
to be bothered with frequent on-time basis requests, it would be
prudent. On the other hand, if they are so trusted, it would be
unlikly problematic to give them permenent right.

--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


subject: [Foundation-l] CheckUser questions


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
> The code has already been tested in such a fashion - the
> question is whether it can stand a production load.
>
> Perhaps the true problem is that we do not have any method of
> simulating a production load adequately.
>
> -Matt

You can copy all "hits" and "edits" from the production server into a
log. Then feed the log into the test server at whatever rate you choose.

I can help design this.

Ed Poor
Former holder of various offices


from_name: Tels

subject: [Wikitech-l] [OT] IOCCC

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Moin,

On Wednesday 09 November 2005 10:16, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Peter Danenberg wrote:
> >Is it our Timwi, by the way, who just won the IOCCC?
> >
> >     http://www.ioccc.org/whowon2005.html
>
> Looks like it. Congratulations, Timwi!
>
> Let me be the first to welcome our new obfuscating overlord, and
> express my deep hope that he never may use this special power on
> MediaWiki source ;-)

Congrats and let me express similiar hopes,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Wed Nov  9 17:18:42 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "If Duke Nukem Forever is not out in 2001, something's very wrong." -
 George Broussard, 2001 (http://tinyurl.com/6m8nh)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Reputation Systems

body:
admin Yellowikis wrote:

>Has anyone tried integrating a reputation system with MediaWiki?
>
>
It's been talked about on and off, but:

1) They have an impact on the community, and so there needs to be some
consensus as to what form they should take.
2) They are notoriously easy to game.  It may be possible to design a
reasonably robust one, but it's non-trivial, especially if it is also to
match whatever constraints (1) proposes.
3) Nobody has actually implemented one in MediaWiki.

-Mark


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [HelpDesk-l] permission

body:
Good point. I also have had several ... not-quite-fights ... with users who
either attempt to replace free-licensed pictures with supposedly 'better'
"fair use" pictures, or who object to my removing a fair-use picture in
favor of a free one. They complain that the free ones look 'amateurish'
because they're not studio shots.

-Matt


from_name: Gordon Joly

subject: [Wikitech-l] mwdumper

body:
At 11:43 -0500 9/11/05, Ryan Hudy wrote:
>Does anyone know if the mwdumper program has image import
>capabilities?  I'm able to import wikipedia data into my wiki, but I
>also need to import certain images, but can't find a way to perform
>that function effectively.
>
>Ryan
>

And....

Is it possible to dump all the sql from WIkipedia without shell access?

Gordo

--
"Think Feynman"/////////
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
gordon.joly at pobox.com///


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
On 08/11/05, Autymn D. C. <lysdexia at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> On 8 Nov 2005, at 09.16, Sean Barrett wrote:
> >> I really need to update my article....
> > No, you don't.  Not only do you not /have/ an article,
> > but you also don't /need/ to update any article.
>
> I didn't say it was about myself, only that it was mine.

Nobody said anything about it being about yourself; what was being
alluded to here is that there is no article ownership on Wikipedia, so
there is no such thing as "your article", only "an article you have
contributed to". That doesn't mean you can't be proud of your work,
but it does mean you have no more claim to or rights over a particular
article than anyone else.

> [...]  My spelling of cinetic is riht, and it
> looks like you've changed it.

The question is, right (or "riht"; was that deliberate?) according to
what authority, other than yourself? More generally, can it really be
true that 100% (or 99.9999%) of English speakers are using English
"wrong"? Or are they simply mistaken in thinking they speak English -
in which case the argument becomes one over who gets to choose what
the word "English" means, the millions of people who communicate in
what they call "English" every day, or the minority of "experts" who
call something else "English" instead.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Try out the rating scheme

body:
On 11/9/05, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think the suggestion of using a non-Wikimedia site to trial this
> first would be a good idea. If that's done with no problems, someone
> might be more willing to risk it on Wikimedia servers. I'd offer
> Wikicities, but we're still on 1.4.
>
> Angela.

Hmm non wikimedia sites with high trafic that use mediawiki 1.5. Could
be tricky.

--
geni


from_name: Erwin Jurschitza

subject: AW: [Wikitech-l] Wiki-to-XML

body:
Gregory Maxwell:

> My thought is that if we consider the parse tree
> of wikitext it should
> be that templates should only be able to affect a
> subtree under the
> node where they are included, not make changes to
> the syntax at their
> level or above.

Fully agreed. I found some pages on dewiki a while ago and
corrected them.

> I.e. you should be able to
> completely parse the
> wikitext, then go in and insert subtrees at the
> templates and not
> change anything else.

There are at least two more problems complicating the
building of a sane parse tree:

- templates may be nested inside tags, e.g.
  <table {{Prettytable}}>
  {| {{Prettytable}}
- variables may be used inside tags, see [1]
  [[Image:Chs2_{{{2}}}d40.png|{{{65}}}px]]

Erwin Jurschitza (de:Benutzer:Vlado)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Chess_pos2


from_name: Noluogo

subject:
[WikiEN-l] commercial link spam in
	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venice

body:
Commercial link spam in this url:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venice

Link insert for top position in google!

this web site
www.venezia.net
and
www.veniceguide.net

is 100% commercial web site (hotels, banners adv, etc..)
ex:
http://www.venezia.net/venezia/hotel-5-stelle.htm
http://www.venezia.net/venice/5-star-hotels.htm
and
http://www.veniceguide.net/disponibilita/index.php (whit alberghi venezia banner)
http://www.veniceguide.net/ (whit alberghi venezia banner)
http://www.veniceguide.net/link.htm (whit banners, links)


from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation website

body:
How is it beneficial to have personal essays that do not necessarily
reflect the views of the Foundation on the official Foundation website
rather than on Meta?

<http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/It_is_forbidden_to_take_pictures%21>

If this is what the site is turning into, I'd rather go with earlier
suggestion (I think by Elian) of merging the foundation wiki with
Meta. Since the Quarto experiment has, as far as I can tell, been
abandoned, and press releases are scattered over the projects and meta
rather than being in any one "official" place, I'm less and less
seeing any point to this site. It doesn't reflect anything official,
and locks down editing for no benefit.

I no longer think an uneditable wiki is the best way to present the
Foundation to the world.

Angela.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Try out the rating scheme

body:
On 11/9/05, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:

> Until now, developers simply judged consensus - usually from the mailing
> list. If they hesitate to do so now, with 100 times as many contributors
> as we had 2 years ago, then let's put it to a vote.
>
> Angela, what's the proper way to vote on this?

I'd advise not voting it
(<http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?VotingIsEvil>). There's nothing to
guarantee developers will carry something out simply because it was
voted on. There is a voting mechanism inside bugzilla
(<http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/page.cgi?id=voting.html>) but I'm not
aware of anyone taking the results of that seriously.

I think the suggestion of using a non-Wikimedia site to trial this
first would be a good idea. If that's done with no problems, someone
might be more willing to risk it on Wikimedia servers. I'd offer
Wikicities, but we're still on 1.4.

Angela.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wiki-to-XML

body:
Timwi wrote:
> My first (two-character) test input:
>
>     {|
>
> yields invalid XML as output. ;-) In general, it does so whenever the
> close-table markup (|}) is missing.
I hacked in a fix for nested tables minutes before announcing here, so
it's probably a side effect of that. I'll have a look, thanks for noticing.
>
> Also, you seem to be ignoring all whitespace at the beginning of the
> input, which makes it output a <paragraph> when the first line should
> have been a <pre> because it starts with a space.
Yep. Already fixed by changing "trim" to "rtrim" :-)
>
> Otherwise: Very impressive!!
Thanks! I hope with added OpenDocument export, this will become useful
one day.

Magnus


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Hosting scans of the 1911
	Britannica	onWikimedia

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>On 11/9/05, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote
>
> I'll give it a try. Can you get all the images, or just the books still in
>progress, or just the pages from the books still in progress that haven't
>yet been processed?
> Actually, I'll probably just wait until this stuff gets put somewhere on
>Wikimedia.
>
>
Technically once a book has been sent formally to Project Gutenberg the
images are scheduled for deletion, but I've been able to even get images
to older book projects as well.  As far as scans of books that you are
working on, you have to find the book project page itself.  You can also
dig around for other books, but you have to do some real searching.

It may be much easier if we wait and put it on Commons or something
similar when all is said and done.  The point I'm making is that the
scans are technically public but obfuscated to keep from dragging their
network connection down on Distributed Proofreaders.  There may be some
scans that might be of use to people on Wikisource, including some books
that have been scanned in that are in languages other than English.  The
real question would be more if the Wikimedia Foundation wants those book
scans and is willing to deal with the huge server and bandwidth issues
of having those scans available.  The conversion from TIFF to PNG or
other related issues are trivial in comparison.  Based on the type of
people on Distributed Proofreading that I've met, getting legal
permission to post the scans is trivial, particularly once the book has
completed its proofreading rounds and DP doesn't need the scanned images
anymore.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Delphine Ménard

body:
On 11/9/05, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> How is it beneficial to have personal essays that do not necessarily
> reflect the views of the Foundation on the official Foundation website
> rather than on Meta?
>
> <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/It_is_forbidden_to_take_pictures%21>

How is having that directly on the Wikimedia FOundation website
different from having it on the Quarto ?

> If this is what the site is turning into, I'd rather go with earlier
> suggestion (I think by Elian) of merging the foundation wiki with
> Meta. Since the Quarto experiment has, as far as I can tell, been
> abandoned, and press releases are scattered over the projects and meta
> rather than being in any one "official" place, I'm less and less
> seeing any point to this site. It doesn't reflect anything official,
> and locks down editing for no benefit.

Merging Foundation Wiki with meta is absolute nonsense. And I think
Florence found a very good compromise.

> I no longer think an uneditable wiki is the best way to present the
> Foundation to the world.

I totally don't agree. As a matter of fact, there should be a person
completely dedicated to this website and it should be static. And yes,
it should reflect editorials from members of the community, the things
they find that are good and those they find difficult. That's the only
thing that will give it a little bit of life.

Not to say that Florence has announced this re-factoring about a month
ago. She did it step by step, we all had plenty of time to say what we
want to see there and we don't want to see there.

Cheers,

Delphine
--
~notafish


from_name: Yann Forget

subject:
[Foundation-l] WSIS Parallel Event on Open Educational Resources -
	14 November 2005

body:
Hi,

FYI

Yann

Subject: [WSIS Edu] WSIS Parallel Event on Open Educational Resources - 14
November 2005
Date: Wednesday 9 November 2005 02:37
From: Brendan Barrett <barrett @ hq . unu . edu>
To: Edu Mailinglist <edu @ wsis - cs . org>

World Summit on the Information Society

Tunis, Tunisia, 16-18 November 2005

Parallel Event on Widening Access to Knowledge through Open Sharing:

The Growing OpenCourseWare Movement

14 November 2005

Monday, 14 November 2005, 15.00-19.00

Saint Augustin Conference Room, Kram Expo Centre

Background
The term Open Educational Resources (OER) was first coined and
adopted at UNESCO?s 2002 Forum on the Impact of OpenCourseWare for
Higher Education in Developing Countries. OER champions the sharing
of knowledge worldwide to increase human intellectual capacity and
can best be understood as the open sharing of educational content,
enabled by tools (such as the World Wide Web) and defined by
standards (such as Creative Commons), for use and adaptation by the
global community of educators and learners.

OpenCourseWare (OCW), a critical component of the OER movement, is
defined as a free, publicly accessible, and openly licensed digital
resource that offers high quality learning materials structured
around courses and presented in a reasonably consistent format. An
OCW is a publication of course materials created by faculty to
support teaching and learning. For any given course, the published
materials should fully convey the parameters of the course?s subject
matter and ideally represent a substantially complete set of all the
materials used in the course.

For many educators and learners in the developing world, up-to-date
material in science and technology is in particularly short supply.
The value in openly sharing quality OCW resources is that they foster
the process of educational change, as societies seek to bring their
educational institutions into the Knowledge Age. The use of external
resources for educational improvement is not a new idea ? colleges
and universities all over the world are accustomed to using
publications from many sources, facilitating exchanges involving
students and faculty, and seeking information via the Internet. The
OCW Movement, however, takes the principle of sharing and cross-
institutional exchange to the next level, enabling open access to a
vast library of high-quality educational materials in key curricular
areas from a wide array of institutions all over the world.

Outcomes

The intended outcomes for the event are that participating
institutions and organizations:

?      Develop a common understanding of OCW and the broader OER
movement;

?      Enhance their awareness of the growing international body of
OCW resources; and

?      Find effective ways to adapt and use OCW materials for
teaching and learning, and ultimately raise the general standard of
global higher education.

In addition, an intended outcome for the event is to emphasize the
importance of open sharing of educational materials as a critical
component of the Plan of Action.

World Summit on the Information Society

Tunis, Tunisia, 16-18 November 2005

Parallel Event on Widening Access to Knowledge through Open Sharing:

The Growing OpenCourseWare Movement

14 November 2005

Monday, 14 November 2005, 15.00-19.00

Saint Augustin Conference Room, Kram Expo Centre

Draft Agenda

15.00- 15.30            Keynote address

Speaker:            Dr. G. M. (Mike) Reed, Director of the United
Nations University

International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST)

15.30- 16.40            Setting the Context: The World of Open
Educational Resources

Moderator:            Marshall Smith, Education Program Director,
William and Flora

Hewlett Foundation

Panelists

o      Derek Keats, Executive Director of Information and
Communication Services, University of the Western Cape

o      Paula Le Dieu, Director of Creative Commons International

o      Karen Lynch, Communications Director, Development Gateway
Foundation

16.40- 17.50             The Growing International OpenCourseWare
Movement

Moderator:       Shigeru Miyagawa, Professor and Faculty Advisor, MIT
OCW

Panelists

o      Yoshimi Fukuhara, Professer, Keio University

o      Divina Frau Meigs, Professer, Universit? Paris 3-Sorbonne

o      Mary Lee, Associate Provost, Tufts University, and Dean for
Educational Affairs, Tufts University School of Medicine

17.50- 18.45            Benefits and Challenges to Using and Adapting
OpenCourseWare Materials

Moderator:       Brendan Barrett, Academic Programme Officer, UNU

Panelists

o      Kuzvinetsa Peter Dzvimbo, Rector, African Virtual University

o      Elizabeth Longworth, Director of the Information Society
Division, UNESCO

o      Chunyan Wang, Professor at Renmin University of China School
of Law, and the China and Project Representative for Creative Commons

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


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation website

body:
Angela wrote:

> How is it beneficial to have personal essays that do not necessarily
> reflect the views of the Foundation on the official Foundation website
> rather than on Meta?
>
> <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/It_is_forbidden_to_take_pictures%21>

Hmmmm, a tendency I observe in most global issues is that
* a person indicates her desire to change something
(http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-October/004418.html)
or to create a new policy

And no one comment (or so few ...)

* then, a second step happens when outlines of changes are done, the one
promoting the changes invite other editors to comment on the proposal
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-October/004456.html
or announce a last week comment on a new policy (do I really need to say
which policy I am talking about ?)

And no one comment (or so few ...)

* then, the last step is to proudly announce the stuff going live, a new
site, or a new policy, whatever.

And suddenly, the comments (understand the criticisms) are pouring like
rain in France in november.

If I were inspired by certain psychologists, I'd say that overall, all
wikipedia projects are castrating.

I feel castrated.

This is not only for this issue, it is a more general feeling.

> If this is what the site is turning into, I'd rather go with earlier
> suggestion (I think by Elian) of merging the foundation wiki with
> Meta. Since the Quarto experiment has, as far as I can tell, been
> abandoned, and press releases are scattered over the projects and meta
> rather than being in any one "official" place, I'm less and less
> seeing any point to this site. It doesn't reflect anything official,
> and locks down editing for no benefit.
>
> I no longer think an uneditable wiki is the best way to present the
> Foundation to the world.
>
> Angela.

I'll let other people make that decision.


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbiter recusal

body:
Sean Barrett wrote:
> And after that, review [[barratry]].

Kelly's sunk the adminship!

Chris


subject: AW: [Wikitech-l] Wiki-to-XML

body:
Erwin Jurschitza wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell:
>
>
>> My thought is that if we consider the parse tree
>> of wikitext it should
>> be that templates should only be able to affect a
>> subtree under the
>> node where they are included, not make changes to
>> the syntax at their
>> level or above.
>>
>
> Fully agreed. I found some pages on dewiki a while ago and
> corrected them.
>
That will break quite a few things on en, for example succession boxes,
where they do something like this:
{{table start}}
{{succession|some position}}
{{succession|some other position}}
{{succession|yet some other position}}
{{table end}}
>
>> I.e. you should be able to
>> completely parse the
>> wikitext, then go in and insert subtrees at the
>> templates and not
>> change anything else.
>>
>
> There are at least two more problems complicating the
> building of a sane parse tree:
>
> - templates may be nested inside tags, e.g.
>   <table {{Prettytable}}>
>   {| {{Prettytable}}
> - variables may be used inside tags, see [1]
>   [[Image:Chs2_{{{2}}}d40.png|{{{65}}}px]]
>
I do support #2, but not #1. Should be not overly complicated.

Basically, I agree with you though; Templates everywhere gets awfully messy.

Magnus


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...

body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> On 11/9/05, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>
>> On 8 Nov 2005, at 18:39, kosebamse at gmx.net wrote:
>>
>> I dont know. Despite what other people seem to think there are huge
>>  areas that are missing. A lot of people find it easier to write
>> with something to start from. I have written a few of articles from
>> missing encyclopaedic articles (ones I knew something about) and
>> other people have found them and improved them. So even having more
>> stubs is useful.
>
>
>> From my own experience, articles are more often created than
>> improved
> as is demonstrated by the large amounts of school stubs for example.
> Also, the complete dismal state on the articles on "Acidity" for
> example makes me think improvement is not on the top of the list of
> enough people. Merging for example episode articles into lists or the
>  different languages once spoken in Egypt would provide more detailed
>  articles and help Wikipedia in the end.
>

Indeed. When something is fairly useless on its own it's best to merge
the information somewhere useful.

> The difference lies in what one calls a stub. I call something a stub
>  when it has a basic definition and just a tad bit more to get an
> article on it's way. while "Bill Clinton was the President of the
> United States" conveys a basic meaning, I would call it a substub and
>  request deletion on the basis of speedy deletion criterion A1.

To say the least, that would be a push of CSD A1 - which applies to:

> Very short articles providing little or no context (e.g., "He is a
> funny man that has created Factory and the Hacienda. And, by the way,
> his wife is great."). Limited content is not in itself a reason to
> delete if there is enough context to allow expansion.

In this case, "Bill Clinton was the President of the United States"
*does* give context, and it claims notability, so it's not CSD A7.

> If it went on to mention his date of birth, political party and a few
> biographical details it would be a stub. Too many people want to
> create an article NOW, rather than wait for themselves to have
> collected sufficient information.
>

But it's a wiki! You can always fix it later!

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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from_name: Dorożyński Janusz

subject: [Wikitech-l] mwdumper

body:
| -----Original Message-----
| From: ... Ryan Hudy
| Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2005 5:44 PM
/
| Does anyone know if the mwdumper program has image import
| capabilities?  I'm able to import wikipedia data into my
| wiki, but I also need to import certain images, but can't
| find a way to perform that function effectively.

I think that images are stored in subdirectories of /images directory as jpg
files rather than in db as blobs. So they are "dumping" (packing) to tar
file, and you can unpack the proper tar. I hope that your certain images
aren't stored on commons, because commons tar have 35 giga :-)

	Regards, Janusz 'Ency' Dorozynski


from_name: Brian

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Hosting scans of the 1911 Britannica
	on	Wikimedia

body:
I think most of your concerns should be directed to wikitech-l, rather
than being injected into other discussions.

As for the availability of the DVD, it has been available _for a price_,
and not easily accessible. This effectively prohibits and group projects
from moving for which require the use of the images.

Also, several people are excited by this and want to know when it will
be online, believing that it will finally allow projects such as
Wikisource's 1911EB to take off, so it's not accurate to say that there
is no hurry. It seems that most people, myself included, didn't even
know that these were available anywhere. In any case, they were _never_
easily available, or freely available.

Lars Aronsson wrote:

>Tim Starling wrote:
>
>
>
>>When Brian came on to IRC and asked us "What is the best way to
>>upload 30,000 images requiring 6 GB to commons?" the reaction
>>from Brion and I was a groan. The hardware requirements for
>>commons are rapidly increasing, and uploading and storing such
>>content in MediaWiki is inefficient and non-portable.
>>
>>
>
>While I can understand your reaction, I think we should fix our
>systems so they can handle these volumes without having to create
>new exceptions.  The existence of Wikisource could be questioned,
>since there are already other projects (such as Project Gutenberg
>and Distributed Proofreaders) that do this kind of work.  But if
>Wikisource is to exist, it should be capable of handling large
>volumes (terabytes) of digitized text (and scanned images).  It
>cannot be that every new book requires a new project, because
>Wikisource is unable to handle its size.  Encyclopaedia Britannica
>might be bigger than anything that is currently in Wikisource, but
>just wait til someone suggests we digitize the Spanish
>"Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada" (70 fat volumes, 1908-1930),
>which makes EB look tiny.
>
>Andreas Grosz' scans of EB1911 have been available on DVD for more
>than two years, so I see no immediate hurry for us to host it.
>As far as I know, PGDP is doing a good work proofreading it, and
>we could benefit from waiting for them to finish more of the work.
>
>
>
>>If we had them in a separate directory on a separate domain,
>>
>>
>
>Or if MediaWiki could handle separate directories on the same
>domain...
>
>The recent donation (and import) of 10,000 art images from
>Directmedia GmbH to Wikimedia Commons put the system to its
>limits.  What if the next donation consists of a million images?
>Or a million audio recordings?  Dump them in a directory, supply
>an index description in XML, and let MediaWiki use the data where
>it is, instead of trying to stuff it into the MySQL database
>through the wiki upload form.
>
>
>
>>Wikisource has suffered so far due to a lack of specialised
>>software.  This kind of initiative could see it become more
>>usable generally.
>>
>>
>
>Or the specialization could be added to MediaWiki, so anybody
>could benefit from it, not just Wikisource.
>
>
>
>


from_name: Ryan Delaney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbiter recusal

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

Matt Brown wrote:

> If arbitrators had to recuse themselves every time someone came
> before them who they considered a 'known troublemaker', let's say
> no disruptive user would ever get banned.
>
> -Matt

No kidding.To suggest that arbitrators should be neutral in
how they think of users is to suggest they shouldn't do their job at all.

Ryan
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subject: AW: [Wikitech-l] Wiki-to-XML

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> I do support #2, but not #1. Should be not overly complicated.
>
Done.


body:
Timwi wrote:
> Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>> Magnus Manske wrote:
>>> *COUGH* validation feature *COUGH*
>>
>> Jeez Louise, Magnus: WHEN are you going to turn on the validation
>> feature?
>
> As far as I understand, Magnus doesn't have the access or the right to
> turn the feature on. So don't blame him for not doing it; he's
> probably more frustrated about it than anyone else, since he wrote it.
Yup. [bites into carpet]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Try out the rating scheme

body:
Andrew Venier wrote:
> Wikimedia has no test servers?  All of them are production systems?
We do have a test server, somewhere, which even ran an ancient version
of the validation feature last time I looked.

The point seems to be to test the feature on a high-traffic site, which
the test server is not.

Magnus


from_name: Jack Lynch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbiter recusal

body:
There have been recent concerns regarding Kelly Martin, but none so
serious as her decision not to recuse herself in the case of an editor
whom she has clear animosity toward. Please review:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_arbitration/Silverback#Recusal

Jack (Sam Spade)


body:
kosebamse at gmx.net wrote:
> ...regarding the quality of our work:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kosebamse/Twenty-random-pages_test
>
> Plus ?a change, plus c?est la m?me chose. Kosebamse
>
>

Just did it myself; opened 20 "random article" tabs and checked them for
cohesiveness and such.

The "good" articles were:
 1. [[Massachusetts State Police]]
 2. [[Owl Creek Mountains]]
 3. [[Palmer Lake, Colorado]] (rambot)
 4. [[Hopewell Junction, New York]] (rambot)
 5. [[Dewey Square]]
 6. [[Robber baron (industrialist)]]

The "bad" articles were:
 1. [[Raycom National Tower]]
 2. [[Jean Par?]]
 3. [[Serge]]
 4. [[Hartogs' lemma]]
 5. [[Armus]]

The "marginal" articles were:
 1. [[D M Vasudevan]]
 2. [[Munsu Cup Stadium]]
 3. [[Donald Oliver]]
 4. [[Treaty of Passarowitz]]
 5. [[Ernest Vessiot]]

Apart from that I got two lists and two articles that I really wasn't
sure about.

So: 30% good, 25% bad, 25% marginal bordering on bad, and 20% neutral.
I'd guess that the actual proportion of "good" aritcles is somewhere
between 20 and 30 percent.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbiter recusal

body:
And after that, review [[barratry]].

- --
 Sean Barrett

On what possible basis would I be inclined to harass this user? Your
comment is offensive and unhelpful.

Jack (Sam Spade)


body:
On 11/9/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> > I no longer think an uneditable wiki is the best way to present the
> > Foundation to the world.

> I'll let other people make that decision.

I'd like to know if anyone still thinks it is a good idea, and if so
why? It clearly doesn't present an official view, so where is the
benefit in it being uneditable?

Angela.


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Soviet spies

body:
I have no idea what this is all about, but I noticed with some
surprise that someone briefly put Edward R. Murrow in the category of
"Soviet spies!" I can only suppose that someone is trying to fill out
that category to make it contain exactly 205 names.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Brian wrote:
> I recently (today) acquired a DVD containing scans of every page
> of the 1911 Britannica, along with index files for it all,
> [...]
> TimStarling specifically asked me to tell you all that he is
> "confident that the server requirements will be minimal." They
> would set up a domain name, generate some web pages
> automatically using the index files, and host the entire set of
> 29,700 files totaling about 4 GB.

What is suddenly wrong with using Wikimedia Commons and
Wikisource?  Why do you need a new domain and server just for this
book?  Didn't you see
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work

> One more thing, these are black and white TIFs, and there is
> discussion about whether they should be mass converted to PNGs
> to be easily viewable.

MediaWiki's image upload already does rescaling. All you need to
do is to hack the TIFF-to-PNG conversion into MediaWiki and upload
the original TIFFs to Wikimedia Commons.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/


body:
Dariusz Siedlecki wrote:
> There you go. The point of this email is just to prove that we NEED
> press credentials, press badges, and stuff like that. But this also
> has to be international. This has to be discussed between the
> Wikinewsies of the major Wikinews languages and the Board.

The interesting question is what happens when one Wikinews
reporter abuses her credentials?  Say for example that you are let
into a press conference, and there you start to throw eggs and
tomatoes on the politician.  Who apologizes to the organizers?
Who revokes the credentials for the reporter who misbehaved?  Who
promises that this won't happen again?

I guess it would have to be the press officer (Elian) or chairman
(Jimbo) of the Wikimedia Foundation.  But I'm just guessing.

If getting press credentials is too easy, they can easily be
abused, and their value/usefulness might fall very quickly.

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


body:
> The interesting question is what happens when one Wikinews
> reporter abuses her credentials?  Say for example that you are let
> into a press conference, and there you start to throw eggs and
> tomatoes on the politician.  Who apologizes to the organizers?
> Who revokes the credentials for the reporter who misbehaved?  Who
> promises that this won't happen again?

Is it any different to someone going to a conference to talk about
Wikipedia? It will be generally be assumed they're representing the
Foundation, even though there was no community or Board approval for
them to go there and do that. Why couldn't the people making the
apology be the same people giving out the credentials - that is the
community itself.

Angela.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbiter recusal

body:
I certainly agree, it is statements made by the arbiter, not by the
defendant, which concern me.

"That is not an RfC, it's a rant by a known troublemaker. I see no
reason to participate in such a clearly broken process."
(regarding an RfC initiated by Silverback)
\
Let's check the outrage at the door and discuss this reasonably, ok?
Hyperbolic screaming does not benefit your cause. Kelly Martin (talk)
12:54, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

etc...

Jack (Sam Spade)

On 11/9/05, slimvirgin at gmail.com <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/9/05, Jack Lynch <jack.i.lynch at gmail.com> wrote:
> > There have been recent concerns regarding Kelly Martin, but none so
> > serious as her decision not to recuse herself in the case of an editor
> > whom she has clear animosity toward.
>
> Sam, arbitrators shouldn't have to recuse themselves because an editor
> has tried to draw them into a dispute. If we allowed that, anyone
> could use that tactic against any member of the arbcom they wanted to
> see removed from a case.
>
> Sarah
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: candy

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia+database concepts and schema

body:
Hi all,

First of all I have my own wiki installed running on mediawiki 1.5. I
have the latest current pages database dump in xml format which I
imported to the mediawiki using the php import script.

Now before I installed the mediawiki 1.5 I had mediawiki 1.4. I find
that the database schema has changed. My observations can be summarized
by the following table :

MediaWiki 1.5 (under command "show tables;" in mysql )
N.B I used the prefix "wiki" during installation for the tables.

wikiarchive
wikicategorylinks
wikihitcounter
wikiimage
wikiimagelinks
wikiinterwiki
wikiipblocks
wikilogging
wikimath
wikiobjectcache
wikioldimage
wikipage
wikipagelinks
wikiquerycache
wikirecentchanges
wikirevision
wikisearchindex
wikisite_stats
wikitext
wikitrackbacks
wikiuser
wikiuser_groups
wikiuser_newtalk
wikivalidate
wikiwatchlist

Apart from the above said tables Mediawiki 1.4 also had the tables as
listed below.

wikiblobs
wikibrokenlinks
wikicur
wikilinks
wikilinkscc
wikilogging
wikitranscache
wikiuser_rights
wikivalidate

Having specified the background I have the following questions :

1. Does this mean that the database schema of wikipedia has changed ?

2. The schema looks really simple ! Is that all in the backend of the
mighty wikipedia ?

3. I have observed that under the history tab in wikipedia, we get all
the versions of the current page. And we can select any 2 versions and
click on compare to find the changes. Apparently it seems that wikipedia
stores all the snapshots of every change in the page(Article). I presume
its stored in the recentchanges  table. Am I correct in my presumption.

4. When does a page or Article enters the wikiarchive table ? I
experimented with my own wiki (running on mediawiki 1.5) and discovered
that if I add a new article to the wikipedia, its entry is there in the
wikirecentchanges, wikipage and wikirevision tables. But not in
wikiarchives table. So when does it enter the latter and under what
circumstances?

Please clarify these querries. In case you know the answer to some
please feel to reply to them.

Thanking you
C


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
candy wrote:
> 1. Does this mean that the database schema of wikipedia has changed ?

Yes.

> 2. The schema looks really simple ! Is that all in the backend of the
> mighty wikipedia ?

:D

> 3. I have observed that under the history tab in wikipedia, we get all
> the versions of the current page. And we can select any 2 versions and
> click on compare to find the changes. Apparently it seems that wikipedia
> stores all the snapshots of every change in the page(Article). I presume
> its stored in the recentchanges  table. Am I correct in my presumption.

See maintenance/tables.sql for the table definitions, which are
liberally commented.

> 4. When does a page or Article enters the wikiarchive table ? I
> experimented with my own wiki (running on mediawiki 1.5) and discovered
> that if I add a new article to the wikipedia, its entry is there in the
> wikirecentchanges, wikipage and wikirevision tables. But not in
> wikiarchives table. So when does it enter the latter and under what
> circumstances?

On deletion, revision data is moved to archive.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Hosting scans of the 1911 Britannica on
	Wikimedia

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> When Brian came on to IRC and asked us "What is the best way to
> upload 30,000 images requiring 6 GB to commons?" the reaction
> from Brion and I was a groan. The hardware requirements for
> commons are rapidly increasing, and uploading and storing such
> content in MediaWiki is inefficient and non-portable.

While I can understand your reaction, I think we should fix our
systems so they can handle these volumes without having to create
new exceptions.  The existence of Wikisource could be questioned,
since there are already other projects (such as Project Gutenberg
and Distributed Proofreaders) that do this kind of work.  But if
Wikisource is to exist, it should be capable of handling large
volumes (terabytes) of digitized text (and scanned images).  It
cannot be that every new book requires a new project, because
Wikisource is unable to handle its size.  Encyclopaedia Britannica
might be bigger than anything that is currently in Wikisource, but
just wait til someone suggests we digitize the Spanish
"Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada" (70 fat volumes, 1908-1930),
which makes EB look tiny.

Andreas Grosz' scans of EB1911 have been available on DVD for more
than two years, so I see no immediate hurry for us to host it.
As far as I know, PGDP is doing a good work proofreading it, and
we could benefit from waiting for them to finish more of the work.

> If we had them in a separate directory on a separate domain,

Or if MediaWiki could handle separate directories on the same
domain...

The recent donation (and import) of 10,000 art images from
Directmedia GmbH to Wikimedia Commons put the system to its
limits.  What if the next donation consists of a million images?
Or a million audio recordings?  Dump them in a directory, supply
an index description in XML, and let MediaWiki use the data where
it is, instead of trying to stuff it into the MySQL database
through the wiki upload form.

> Wikisource has suffered so far due to a lack of specialised
> software.  This kind of initiative could see it become more
> usable generally.

Or the specialization could be added to MediaWiki, so anybody
could benefit from it, not just Wikisource.

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


body:
Angela wrote:
> Is it any different to someone going to a conference to talk about
> Wikipedia? It will be generally be assumed they're representing the
> Foundation, even though there was no community or Board approval for
> them to go there and do that.

If *I* speak about Wikipedia, I state very clearly that I'm *not*
representing the foundation.  (If I weren't, some people would be
fast to throw eggs and tomatoes at me.)

> Why couldn't the people making the apology be the same people
> giving out the credentials - that is the community itself.

That would be fine, if it works.  The only point I wanted to make
is that "press credentials" can be abused, and it is in the
interest of all reporters that this situation can be handled.

Serious reporters would never throw tomatoes, of course, but a
serious tomato thrower would do anything to get press credentials!

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


from_name: Justin Cormack

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [HelpDesk-l] permission

body:
On 9 Nov 2005, at 19:34, Matt Brown wrote:

> On 11/9/05, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>>
>> I think creating free content is much more subversive.
>>
>
> Does the one preclude the other?

Yes to a large extent. eg see Jimbo's comments on his talk page about
his
friend who is taking free pictures of baseball players:

"But my very good friend Terry spends a lot of his spare time going
to baseball games to take photos of baseball players for us, and he
finds it disheartening that many of the photos he is taking aren't
adding to wikipedia except in the narrow sense of improving things
from a "fair use" to "GFDL" standpoint. He's prefer to be known as
the hero who went to baseball games year in and year out to get
hundreds of photos for Wikipedia for article which would have
otherwise been bare."

Justinc


from_name: Delirium

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Again ? monikers up to now, such as administrator, only give people authority
>to act within our community. Saying somebody is a credentialed journalist is
>*very* different since that relates to that person?s interactions with the
>outside world. Everything they do in our name is therefore a reflection on all
>of us and the foundation.
>
>
I agree oversight is necessary, but disagree that the Foundation is the
proper entity to provide it---the Wikinews community is the only entity
that should or can legitimately do so. The Foundation can, of course,
step in in an emergency if necessary (which has always been the case on
all projects), but pre-approval should not be necessary, nor should that
authority be used in any case except a true emergency.

I don't see the importance of the outside vs. inside distinction in this
case. It is entirely proper for a Wikinewsie to be given the authority
to represent themselves to the outside world as "vouched for by
Wikinews" if, in fact, they are vouched for the Wikinews community. So
long as they are not presenting themselves as representatives of the
Wikimedia Foundation, I don't see the need for Foundation approval.

-Mark


from_name: Noluogo

body:
Request for to insert in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venice
this code in all links:

rel="nofollow"

is possible? thanks!


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> The interesting question is what happens when one Wikinews
> reporter abuses her credentials?  Say for example that you are let
> into a press conference, and there you start to throw eggs and
> tomatoes on the politician.  Who apologizes to the organizers?
> Who revokes the credentials for the reporter who misbehaved?  Who
> promises that this won't happen again?
>
> I guess it would have to be the press officer (Elian) or chairman
> (Jimbo) of the Wikimedia Foundation.  But I'm just guessing.
>
> If getting press credentials is too easy, they can easily be
> abused, and their value/usefulness might fall very quickly.

The good name of Wikinews and the foundation would also be harmed. This is
exactly why the foundation needs to give this process high level oversight
(again - all accreditation and reaccrediation will be handled by the community
and almost all deaccreditation will be done by the community as well). I know
that the potential of Jimbo being able to step in and nullify the ArbCom was
often on my mind when I worked on that body. I think that that potentiality
helped the ArbCom from going too far in the direction of grabbing power. People
also need permission to use our marks in a way that implies an official
connection. It is one thing to say you are a Wikinews reporter, it is something
else entirely to say you are a credentialed Wikinews reporter and for you to
show a badge with your photo, name, the Wikinews mark and the Wikinews logo on
it. The first case does not require permission, the second case does.

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click.
http://farechase.yahoo.com


from_name: Jason Y. Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Article transclusion

body:
Can someone tell me why article transclusion is allowed?  Or why it is necessary?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2005 has the same problems as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_English_cricket_season_%2814-25_September%29

The issue here is that many editors are running into articles that look like unnecessary stubs which in fact are transclusions and are completely unaware of it.  Why don't we just disable such transclusions?  I do not believe main space (article) transclusions are necessary and they skew our article count.  The number of cricket articles that I found were a total of 508 articles that happen to be transcluded.  I did not know that, nor did the five other people who nominates similar articles for deletion.
--
Jason Y. Lee
AKA AllyUnion


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] A community the size of...

body:
Based on results of the recent elections in the US, I thought I would
try some comparisons with our own elections, to get a better idea of the
effective size of the Wikimedia electorate. What I did was to take the
elections results for cities in my general area, since I can find those
very quickly. I chose those cities where the number of ballots cast in a
contested local race (usually for city council) was closest to the
number of ballots cast in two of our elections (the Board of Trustees
election earlier this year, and the Arbitration Committee election last
December on the English Wikipedia). I figured that the population of
these cities would be a reasonable estimate of the effective size of our
community. Naturally, this is an impressionistic rather than a rigorous
statistical analysis.

At the time of the Arbitration Committee election, the number of ballots
cast on the English Wikipedia was about the same as several cities with
populations ranging roughly from 3,000-6,000 people. The upper end of
this range is quite close to the number of people who edited five times
or more last December, according to Erik Zachte's statistical reports.
So it seems this may be the number that is closest to a real-world
population for our community. Since those statistics have just been
updated (thanks, Erik) we can see that the English Wikipedia is now
nearly equivalent to a town of 15,000 people.

The turnout for the Board of Trustees election was comparable to a
real-world population of about 7,000-11,000 people.
It's a little harder to find an equivalent number in our ongoing
statistics, in part because project-wide participation is difficult to
capture (<cough>single login</cough>). Even the number of users with
five or more edits that month on just the Wikipedias collectively was
significantly larger than this.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Hosting scans of the 1911 Britannica on Wikimedia

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Brian wrote:
>
>>I recently (today) acquired a DVD containing scans of every page
>>of the 1911 Britannica, along with index files for it all,
>>[...]
>>TimStarling specifically asked me to tell you all that he is
>>"confident that the server requirements will be minimal." They
>>would set up a domain name, generate some web pages
>>automatically using the index files, and host the entire set of
>>29,700 files totaling about 4 GB.
>
>
> What is suddenly wrong with using Wikimedia Commons and
> Wikisource?  Why do you need a new domain and server just for this
> book?  Didn't you see
> http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work

When Brian came on to IRC and asked us "What is the best way to upload
30,000 images requiring 6 GB to commons?" the reaction from Brion and I was
a groan. The hardware requirements for commons are rapidly increasing, and
uploading and storing such content in MediaWiki is inefficient and
non-portable. If we had them in a separate directory on a separate domain,
we could copy them from server to server, make tarballs, run batch
conversion jobs -- all with a minimal amount of programming and system
administration work. And it wouldn't require writing a bot to create 30,000
index pages, we could just write a hundred lines of PHP to index the whole
lot. The collection will be easier to use and more reliable, and it will be
easy to maintain and update the index pages.

All of the navigation text, the headers and footers, could be editable in
wiki fashion. You could let anyone change the header that will be displayed
on 30,000 pages, with no server strain whatsoever. This is in stark contrast
to the system requirements of templates which are used on large numbers of
wiki pages.

Wikisource has suffered so far due to a lack of specialised software. This
kind of initiative could see it become more usable generally.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: CheckUser questions

body:
Thanks for your replies with suggestive facts.

On 11/9/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> There is no maximal limit.

OK.

> The "two" is a minimal number and is there to ensure that there are at
> least 2 editors who can watch each other activity. This was proposed to
> reduce the impact of lack of public log.

OK at least two - in the other words, it shouln't be monopolized: if
there is only one users who is admitted worthy to hold this right, it
suggests the community is not enough big have a checkuser level user.
If so, It makes a sense in my opinion.

> As a reference, which might be interesting, David makes checks every
> day. Yesterday (a bad day I guess), he made over a hundred checks. At
> this rate, clearly, more than 1 and actually more than 2 must have the
> tool in the hand.

> The numbers were proposed to limit the access for small projects with
> only 2-5 editors. Two reasons for this
> * first, the needs are less important, and can be handled by steward
> ponctually.
> * second, on small wikis, sysophood is just given with no vote right
> now.

So it is stated on the purpose to discourage small wikis to submit
their requests and it is minimum (grin).

> As a second interesting reference, the second biggest project (dewiki)
> has it seems never made a request (even to a steward). The third
> community (frwiki) had two "valid" requests in a month or so. The fourth
> (jawiki) never asked either. Seeing Oscar and Waerth log activity, the
> nlwiki is ready to use the tool as well.

Just for information: precisely "jawiki never asked it publicly.":
Datrio once used it for jawiki per request but request wasn't
submitted on meta. On the other side, there were some requests for "IP
check"  with community supports but not seem not to have reached to
developers, or with not sufficient number of supports. Perhaps you are
aware two of wiki ambassadors on jawiki delisted themselves since this
February, one has been inactive and two are still active on other
projects but have no edit on ja for a year or more: shortly it is far
apart from the global Wikimedia community. So you wouldn't be
surprised only few editors on there knew checkuser right since very
recent. On the other hand, most editors seems not to be interested in
such investigations or argument around blocking. People don't want to
be involved into back kitchin issues.

> Might be interesting from a cultural perspective though...

Indeed.

And we have several times observed that the new sysop aquire a sort
> of special status, with special rights over the others. On some
> projects, the sysops are the only ones authorized to vote over
> decisions... on some projects, sysops are free to block a page on which
> they are in edit war with someone... on some projects, the bureaucrats
> decide who shall be sysops :-)

Well it is a big deal to have people know that sysopship isn't a big
deal ;) But "appointment by bureaucrats" isn't a bad idea for wikis
where most of people avoid to be involved. Like jawiki which have only
around 30 active sysops per hundreds of active editors (and perhaps
anons in the same numbers - almost half of edits are submitted
anonimously).

> Well... on enwiki, the checks are done everyday. It would be unworkable
> to have to restore status everyday...

Agreed. But if requests are so few like frwiki or others, it is still
worthy to consider.

> Now, I suppose that if some requests are done on a temp basis by editors
> we generally trust very much, we could just give them a temp status ?

It depends on what you mean here with "we" perhaps... generally if the
Board decides something, or the member, most editors support the
decision except very few editors with a loud voice (trying to smile
angelicly)

David Gerard 	<dgerard at gmail.com> writes;
Message-ID: <fbad4e140511090238w5ccf2d7euac55b3ffdd2a3e8 at mail.gmail.com>

> We could also do with a closed mailing list for CheckUser users -
>  IP matching is an art, not a science, and needs experienced knowledge
> and peer consultation of what's a match and what's a coincidence.
>  (It'll also help me/us work on [[m:Help:CheckUser]] ;-)

Both grobal mailing lists and local (by language) ones would be helpful.

Also,  [[m:Help:CheckUser]]  seems to be worthy to a subject of
"Wikimedia Collaboration of the Week: Translation". If a project wants
to have checkuser level editors, they are strongly encouraged to have
[[m:Help:CheckUser]]  and [[m:CheckUser policy]] in their language, or
they couldn't understand what will be going on.

--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: CheckUser questions


from_name: Gordon Joly

subject: [Wikitech-l] "Meta Refresh" called on restricted wiki.

body:
I have set up wiki which can only be read by logged in users, by setting:

$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['createaccount']   = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['read']            = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['edit']            = false;

$wgGroupPermissions['user' ]['move']            = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['user' ]['read']            = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['user' ]['edit']            = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['user' ]['upload']          = true;

However, a non logged in user visiting any page raises an error, and
this appears to call:-

         function returnToMain( $auto = true, $returnto = NULL )

which contains a 10 second refresh (on the the main page) with the notice

***
Login Required

You must login to view other pages.

Return to Main Page.
***

   $wgOut->addMeta( 'http:Refresh', '10;url=' . $titleObj->escapeFullURL() );
                 }

I have set the refresh to 600 seconds to reduce server load. This
Wiki is on the  Internet (that is not an intranet).

Any other thoughts or suggestions?

Regards,

Gordo

--
"Think Feynman"/////////
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
gordon.joly at pobox.com///


body:
I wrote:
> When Brian came on to IRC and asked us "What is the best way to upload
> 30,000 images requiring 6 GB to commons?" the reaction from Brion and I was
> a groan. The hardware requirements for commons are rapidly increasing, and
> uploading and storing such content in MediaWiki is inefficient and
> non-portable. If we had them in a separate directory on a separate domain,
> we could copy them from server to server, make tarballs, run batch
> conversion jobs -- all with a minimal amount of programming and system
> administration work. And it wouldn't require writing a bot to create 30,000
> index pages, we could just write a hundred lines of PHP to index the whole
> lot. The collection will be easier to use and more reliable, and it will be
> easy to maintain and update the index pages.
>
> All of the navigation text, the headers and footers, could be editable in
> wiki fashion. You could let anyone change the header that will be displayed
> on 30,000 pages, with no server strain whatsoever. This is in stark contrast
> to the system requirements of templates which are used on large numbers of
> wiki pages.
>
> Wikisource has suffered so far due to a lack of specialised software. This
> kind of initiative could see it become more usable generally.

Come to think of it, I could probably do it as a MediaWiki extension, and
embed this content in en.wikisource.org. You'd get all of the same features,
but it would also appear to be integrated with the wiki. You wouldn't be
able to edit the page images, but I don't think that's a desirable property
anyway. It would be easy for someone to download the whole collection, run a
processing script (say, automated correction of the scanning quality), and
then upload the whole new collection and incorporate it into the wiki. Easy
as in no bots, no screen scrapers, no server strain, just a tarball download
and a tarball upload.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy on including templates in automatic categories

body:
On 11/10/05, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've been altering templates, as and when I come across them, so that the
> template itself is **not** included in the category to which it
> automagically adds articles.

I agree. Strongly so. I do believe that if this is done, the template which
adds to the category should be linked to from the category description,
however.

Perhaps it's my software-development background, but I see categories as an
'is-a' relationship, and find it jarring when people do not follow that
relationship with category members. Some seem to use a 'is related to'
relationship instead.

I would argue that the 'is-a' relationship helps categories mean something
that is much more useful.

Especially in this case, excluding the template itself from the category
makes the categorisation more powerful - because the category then contains
ONLY pages with the template in them. This is useful for, e.g., automated
tools to work with. It also exposes less of the 'guts' of Wikipedia's
workings to the reader.

In parallel with this, I'm wondering whether there is a case for having more
> than one "category-like" namespace, so that we can have a separate set of
> "categories" for project-related stuff. For example, the automagic
> [[category:articles which survived deletion]] (or something like that
> anyway) was removed from the {{oldvfd/oldafd/oldvfdfull/oldafdfull}}
> templates, on the grounds that it was self-referential. The thing was that
> it is actually useful information to keep track of, and having one central
> place for it, rather than scanning laboriously "what links here" lists for
> several templates. It would have been nice if we could have had something
> like [[wikipedia-category:articles which survived deletion]] to keep this
> stuff in.
>

I agree strongly with this, too. There are two uses of categories: 'for the
reader' and 'for the editor'. The two should probably be distinct somehow.

The work-around with the current situation is to categorise the article's
talk page in the 'for the editor' case. Not neat, but it works, and it
doesn't break the metaphor that the article is 'for the reader' and the talk
page is 'for the editor'.

-Matt


from_name: Peter Mackay

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbiter recusal

body:
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of
> slimvirgin at gmail.com
> Sent: Thursday, 10 November 2005 08:51
> To: English Wikipedia
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Arbiter recusal
>
> On 11/9/05, Jack Lynch <jack.i.lynch at gmail.com> wrote:
> > There have been recent concerns regarding Kelly Martin, but none so
> > serious as her decision not to recuse herself in the case
> of an editor
> > whom she has clear animosity toward.
>
> Sam, arbitrators shouldn't have to recuse themselves because
> an editor has tried to draw them into a dispute. If we
> allowed that, anyone could use that tactic against any member
> of the arbcom they wanted to see removed from a case.

An obvious test should be whether the dispute predates the Arbcom hearing.

Peter (Skyring)


body:
At 09:21 +0000 10/11/05, Gordon Joly wrote:
>I have set up wiki which can only be read by logged in users, by setting:
>
>$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['createaccount']   = false;
>$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['read']            = false;
>$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['edit']            = false;
>
>$wgGroupPermissions['user' ]['move']            = true;
>$wgGroupPermissions['user' ]['read']            = true;
>$wgGroupPermissions['user' ]['edit']            = true;
>$wgGroupPermissions['user' ]['upload']          = true;
>
>However, a non logged in user visiting any page raises an error, and
>this appears to call:-
>
>         function returnToMain( $auto = true, $returnto = NULL )
>
>which contains a 10 second refresh (on the the main page) with the notice
>
>***
>Login Required
>
>You must login to view other pages.
>
>Return to Main Page.
>***
>
>   $wgOut->addMeta( 'http:Refresh', '10;url=' . $titleObj->escapeFullURL() );
>                 }
>
>I have set the refresh to 600 seconds to reduce server load. This
>Wiki is on the  Internet (that is not an intranet).
>
>Any other thoughts or suggestions?
>
>Regards,
>
>Gordo
>
>-

My next question is "how do I login to wiki that will only allow
logged in users to read pages"?

Looks like there is need to refresh back to the login page, and not
the page that says

>
>***
>Login Required
>
>You must login to view other pages.
>
>Return to Main Page.
>***

Gordo

--
"Think Feynman"/////////
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
gordon.joly at pobox.com///


from_name: Mike

subject: [WikiEN-l] caught in a floating ip ban, no way to contact an admin

body:
Hello,
I am a student at the University of Miami, and it seems that the entire university has been IP banned from wikipedia.

I noticed this yesterday when I was looking at your entry for Led Zeppelin on wiki. I noticed that for no reason at all, the picture of the band had one of the members listed as "Leigh Limbrick" when it should have been John Paul Jones. "Gadzooks!" I exclaimed to myself. In an outrage, I clicked the edit button, only to be greeted with a page stating that I was a warned vandal and that bluemoose had given me the boot.

I haven't really ever vandalized everything, but I can take this to mean that someone at the university here has spoiled it for all of us and gotten the entire college blocked. I can see how this might happen, having adminned several sites, forums, the like, myself.

The catch 22 here is that the only way to resolve the issue is to contact Bluemoose, which I can't do, because I don't have a username. I also can't create a new account, edit Bluemoose's talk page, or edit my ip's talk page, because of this IP ban. You may want to modify your blocking policy, as this catch-22 makes it very difficult to report when such occurances arise.

I would appreciate it if the IP ban could be lifted, or if perhaps I could make an account which would be an exception to the IP ban. I have on occasion contributed anonymously to wiki (under different IP's), and have always enjoyed contributing to such an effort.

The IP in question is 192.88.124.202.

Thank you,
Mike Battaglia


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject:
[Wikitech-l]
	Re: [MediaWiki-CVS] phase3/includes EditPage.php, 1.231, 1.232

body:
On 11/4/05, Magnus Manske <magnus_manske at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> Update of /cvsroot/wikipedia/phase3/includes
> In directory sc8-pr-cvs1.sourceforge.net:/tmp/cvs-serv21820/includes
>
> Modified Files:
>         EditPage.php
> Log Message:
> Additional hook
>
> Index: EditPage.php
> ===================================================================
> RCS file: /cvsroot/wikipedia/phase3/includes/EditPage.php,v
> retrieving revision 1.231
> retrieving revision 1.232
> diff -C2 -d -r1.231 -r1.232
> *** EditPage.php        3 Nov 2005 22:40:02 -0000       1.231
> --- EditPage.php        4 Nov 2005 15:32:26 -0000       1.232
> ***************
> *** 155,158 ****
> --- 155,161 ----
>         function edit() {
>                 global $wgOut, $wgUser, $wgRequest, $wgTitle;
> +               $l = strlen ( $wgOut->mBodytext ) ;
> +               wfRunHooks( 'AlternateEdit', array( &$this  ) ) ;
> +               if ( $l != strlen ( $wgOut->mBodytext ) ) return ; # Something's changed the text, my work here is done
>
>                 $fname = 'EditPage::edit';
>

This is the wrong way to do something like this, it should look like:

if ( ! wfRunHooks( 'AlternateEdit', array( &$this  ) ) )
        return;

That way you avoid two calls to strlen() and allow the extension using
the hook to override the function even if it doesn't change
$wgOut->mBodyText (and you should really use the ->getHTML() accessor
if you wanted it)


body:
>
>
>My next question is "how do I login to wiki that will only allow
>logged in users to read pages"?
>
>Looks like there is need to refresh back to the login page, and not
>the page that says

$wgWhitelistRead = array ( "Main Page", "Special:Userlogin", "Wikipedia:Help");

Seems to work!

Gordo

--
"Think Feynman"/////////
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
gordon.joly at pobox.com///


subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbiter recusal

body:
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Matt Brown
> Sent: Thursday, 10 November 2005 10:41
> To: English Wikipedia
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Arbiter recusal
>
> If arbitrators had to recuse themselves every time someone
> came before them who they considered a 'known troublemaker',
> let's say no disruptive user would ever get banned.

But that's not the case. Recusal should only occur when there is a history
of personal conflict directly related to the matter at hand.

Peter (Skyring)


from_name: steve v

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia:Editor_tags

body:
WP:ET is a "proposal" for curtailing the use of
excessive editor templates on articles, allowing their
essential debates to be noted in a minimal form.

User:Radiant! (sic) listed it as "rejected by the
community," and clinging to the loose belief that
User:Radiant! (sic) and the two others who commented
on the idea dont themselves represent the community.
Nor does any ridiculously deletionist (FLOABT) voting
on TFD represent "consensus" on an idea. Radiant has
always had a preference for the long and verbose
template forms, and has sort of been a crusader
against changing them. I think personally they are a
nuisance, and that they essentially deface wikipedia
articles and makes commercial sucker-sites easier to
read. Anyway, Ive changed it back to {{proposed}}.

Stevertigo

__________________________________
Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click.
http://farechase.yahoo.com


from_name: Phil Boswell

body:
I've been altering templates, as and when I come across them, so that the
template itself is **not** included in the category to which it
automagically adds articles.

I've been doing this with a cunning combination of the <includeonly> and
<noinclude> tags, which enable me to add in rubric to the template warning
people that it adds articles to a category, and which category.

However I've just been reverted (here: http://tinyurl.com/7b7gw ) with the
explanation "rv, it's important for these templates to be a member of their
category".

First off, I disagree: I think it clutters up the categories pointlessly
with **self references** which are evil(TM).

Second, in this particular case, the template doesn't even appear unless you
know which letter to click in the {{CategoryTOC}}.

Third, the template is already documented in the category description (here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Book_covers ) perfectly adequately.

Whatever, I'm wondering whether there is a policy on this, since these tags
are so new, and if so where is it?

Rather than enter into a revert war, I'd rather thrash it out properly
first.

In parallel with this, I'm wondering whether there is a case for having more
than one "category-like" namespace, so that we can have a separate set of
"categories" for project-related stuff. For example, the automagic
[[category:articles which survived deletion]] (or something like that
anyway) was removed from the {{oldvfd/oldafd/oldvfdfull/oldafdfull}}
templates, on the grounds that it was self-referential. The thing was that
it is actually useful information to keep track of, and having one central
place for it, rather than scanning laboriously "what links here" lists for
several templates. It would have been nice if we could have had something
like [[wikipedia-category:articles which survived deletion]] to keep this
stuff in.

HTH HAND
--
Phil
[[en:User:Phil Boswell]]


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [Foundation-l] Florida public figure ruling

body:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,69511,00.html?tw=rss.POL
 In an Oct. 21 ruling, Florida circuit court Judge Karen Cole threw out a
defamation case against two TV stations because she deemed the plaintiff --
a Jacksonville woman -- to be a public figure who had been subject to
"substantial" internet debate.