body:
On 04/09/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 12.7% of people in
> the 2001 Census speak a language other than English at home. Full
> stats:

http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/D3310116.NSF/85255e31005a1918852556c2005508d8/c47ad86d67c1466bca256ce0007e8d6b/$FILE/ATTH23CO/Exstatic%202%202005,%20Australia.xls

(corrected URL-from-Hell)

- d.


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: David Gerard

subject:
[Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] Edits by project and country of
	origin


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Edits by project and country of origin


body:
On 04/09/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> Or is this a "jest"?

I'd say so :-)

- d.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Rob Church

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Translation of "A Wikimedia project" and "Powered
	by MediaWiki" images

body:
On 04/09/06, Guillaume Paumier <guillom.pom at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Some French-language Wikipedians would like to translate the text of the two
> images at the bottom of each page: "A Wikimedia project" and "Powered by
> MediaWiki". To answer them I would like to know:
> * if it is technically possible;

It is not technically possible to translate the "powered by MediaWiki"
logo at present.

> * what people from the Foundation think about it.

I'm not from the Foundation, but I think that translating the "powered
by MediaWiki" logo will lead to inconsistencies with other uses of the
software; that button brands all MediaWiki wikis, and should be kept
as such.

Rob Church


body:
On 04/09/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:

> Custom made in-house, terrible recode of Mambo or outsourced most
> likely. A friend of mine made a CMS for his school and stored all the
> data in mysql, assigning each file a unique identifier that appeared
> in the url. The value of this unique identifier? md5 of the filename
> and md5 of the file put together.

**SPORK** That makes the Database Jesus cry.

- d.


body:
On 04/09/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> There are some 231 living languages spoken in Australia. I think English is
> the only one that has it's Wikipedia.

If you mean the native languages, the problem is that a lot of them
weren't written until recently, not many are used for any academic
purpose (though some notably are) and orthographies vary widely. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_of_Australian_Aboriginal_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_sign_languages

So what we need for a Wikipedia is a few people who speak the
languages and want to do a Wikipedia of a language.

- d.


list: foundation-l

body:
On 04/09/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:

> What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,
> which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99
> percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It
> would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in
> the sample.

It'll be amusing when US contributors are a minority on en:, they'll
find out how UK contributors sometimes feel ;-p

- d.


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [Foundation-l] Edits by project and country of
	origin


body:
On 04/09/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:

> Native aboriginal languages? I meant languages like english, german,
> greek, spanish, french etc. Is there a greek wikipedia?

Um ... yes. Go to http://www.wikipedia.org/ and see the links.

- d.


body:
On 04/09/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:

> Is there any particular trend of us contributors becoming the minority
> on en:wp? That would be very interesting.

Not as yet that I know of; I'm hypothesising as to a large educated
English-speaking population in India getting into writing on
Wikipedia.

- d.


list: wikien-l

from_name: John Lyden

subject: [WikiEN-l] Leaving the project

body:
On 9/4/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> As long as you leave your talk page history in tact as a historical record
> so links and discussions aren't broken, I don't have a problem with
> blanking.
>
> If you're burned out, I suggest an extensive wikibreak. Once you've sniffed
> in the outside air and spend some time de-stressing, you might look
> different at returning.

Yeah, I wasn't planning on deleting it at all.

I've been on wikibreak for a few months now (as opposed to the 'weeks'
that I put on my talk and user pages) and that was the sniffing the
outside air.

Head cleared, and all that. I'm definitely done with the project for a
long time.

Thanks for the suggestion, though.

-John
--
John Lyden - rasputinaxp at gmail.com
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time..." -Kerouac


body:
On 04/09/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:

> The real problem is the possibility  of English-as-a-second-language speakers
> (or third or fourth language)  becoming a majority of users on en.wiki and
> the impact that this would have  on the basic quality of writing. It has already
> becoming an issue in  some areas of content related to India, where the prose
> requires inordinate  cleanup just to make it legible.
> To be clear, I am *not* saying that these contributions should be
> discouraged--only that they come at some cost.

Sounds like something for a specialised cleanup crew. The thing that
makes cleanup really horrible is when the articles are badly
structured as well - are these at least usable articles with only
grammar cleanup?

- d.


subject:
[Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] Edits by project and country
	of	origin

body:
On 04/09/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:

> The real problem is the possibility  of English-as-a-second-language speakers
> (or third or fourth language)  becoming a majority of users on en.wiki and
> the impact that this would have  on the basic quality of writing. It has already
> becoming an issue in  some areas of content related to India, where the prose
> requires inordinate  cleanup just to make it legible.
> To be clear, I am *not* saying that these contributions should be
> discouraged--only that they come at some cost.

Sounds like something for a specialised cleanup crew. The thing that
makes cleanup really horrible is when the articles are badly
structured as well - are these at least usable articles with only
grammar cleanup?

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


from_name: Ole Andersen

body:
On 04/09/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Some interesting demographic data for main space edits to our largest
> Wikipedia projects may be found at
> http://meta.wkimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin.

Typo: wkimedia.org seems to belong to a domainsquatter - try:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin

--
http://palnatoke.org * Ole Andersen, Copenhagen, DK
* CV: http://palnatoke.org/CV.doc *
h:+45 61 91 48 88


subject:
[Wikitech-l] MediaWiki:Sidebar - PROs and CONs - Why not using
	Wikisyntax

body:
On 04/09/06, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, not properly internationalized,
> and missing the ability to specify keyboard shortcuts.

I removed the snippet from the main documentation page on the grounds
that hacks like this need to be collected elsewhere and marked as
such.

Rob Church


from_name: GerardM

body:
HoI,
Thanks for the positive apreciation of the Dutch and Belgian effort. There
is no positive meaning to the word slut.. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slut

Thanks,
    GerardM

Or is this a "jest"?

On 9/4/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Some interesting demographic data for main space edits to our largest
> Wikipedia projects may be found at
> http://meta.wkimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin.
>
> My thanks to Greg Maxwell for his invaluable assistance generating this
> data.
>
> Some observations
> * NL and BE are language sluts.
> * ptwiki gets quite a bit more edits from BR than from PT, although
> almost 75% of edits from PT are to ptwiki.
> * MX has a depressingly low participation in eswiki.
>
> Not reported in the data on the page, but possibly of interest: US
> accounts for 27.61% of edits to the projects sampled, followed by DE
> at 10.01% and GB at 8.15%.
>
> Kelly
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
Hoi,
There are some 231 living languages spoken in Australia. I think English is
the only one that has it's Wikipedia.
Thanks,
    GerardM

http://wiktionaryz.org/Portal:AU

On 9/4/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 90% of australians edit on the enwiki only :( I'm sure there are many
> more than 10% of AUS wiki users who are fluent in a second language of
> which there is a wiki (frankly you'd be hard pressed to find a
> language spoken by Australians that didn't have a wiki). How regularly
> are the stats updated?
>
> On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 04/09/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > http://meta.wkimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin.
> >
> >
> > or perhaps
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin
> > ;-)
> >
> >
> > - d.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: maru dubshinki

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Britannica on Wikipedia

body:
On 9/3/06, Ruud Koot <r.koot at students.uu.nl> wrote:
> Britannica has an article on Wikipedia
> <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9433599> (maybe they've had it for
> a while, I can't remember finding anything when I looked a few months ago).
>
> -Ruud

We discussed this a while back. Re-examining it, I'm glad to see that
some of the issues I identified have been fixed.

~maru


body:
Hoi,
Maybe, but isn't it sad that the Australian languages are doing so poorly ?
Thanks,
    GerardM

On 9/4/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> That would be native languages... add another several dozen for the
> immigrants and second language learners, which is who I think Akash
> was referring to.
>
> Brianna
>
> On 04/09/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hoi,
> > There are some 231 living languages spoken in Australia. I think English
> is
> > the only one that has it's Wikipedia.
> > Thanks,
> >     GerardM
> >
> > http://wiktionaryz.org/Portal:AU
> >
> > On 9/4/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > 90% of australians edit on the enwiki only :( I'm sure there are many
> > > more than 10% of AUS wiki users who are fluent in a second language of
> > > which there is a wiki (frankly you'd be hard pressed to find a
> > > language spoken by Australians that didn't have a wiki). How regularly
> > > are the stats updated?
> > >
> > > On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > On 04/09/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > >
> http://meta.wkimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > or perhaps
> > > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin
> > > > ;-)
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > - d.
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Michael Billington

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Very minor technical suggestions

body:
>
> Where do I post about bugs in the MediaWiki software?

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ :D


body:
Hoi,
English is considered to be a living language of Australia according to
Ethnologue. And it is in this long list of languages. Yes, there is a Greek
Wikipedia; http://el.wikipedia.org
Thanks,
   GerardM

On 9/4/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Native aboriginal languages? I meant languages like english, german,
> greek, spanish, french etc. Is there a greek wikipedia?
>
> On 9/4/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hoi,
> > There are some 231 living languages spoken in Australia. I think English
> is
> > the only one that has it's Wikipedia.
> > Thanks,
> >     GerardM
> >
> > http://wiktionaryz.org/Portal:AU
> >
> > On 9/4/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > 90% of australians edit on the enwiki only :( I'm sure there are many
> > > more than 10% of AUS wiki users who are fluent in a second language of
> > > which there is a wiki (frankly you'd be hard pressed to find a
> > > language spoken by Australians that didn't have a wiki). How regularly
> > > are the stats updated?
> > >
> > > On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > On 04/09/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > >
> http://meta.wkimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > or perhaps
> > > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Edits_by_project_and_country_of_origin
> > > > ;-)
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > - d.
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Anons banned from creating articles

body:
(Just a sort of followup here)
Our very own AaronSw has been writing some articles on his blog when
he's not busy running for the Board. I found the second of them quite
interesting since it seems to have some direct ramifications for our
discussion of blocking article creation by anons.

"Who Writes Wikipedia?" ( http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia )

"But, he [Jimmy] insisted, the truth was rather different: Wikipedia
was actually written by "a community ... a dedicated group of a few
hundred volunteers" where "I know all of them and they all know each
other". Really, "it's much like any traditional organization.""
....
"Wales presents these claims as comforting. Don't worry, he tells the
world, Wikipedia isn't as shocking as you think. In fact, it's just
like any other project: a small group of colleagues working together
toward a common goal. But if you think about it, Wales's view of
things is actually much more shocking: around a thousand people wrote
the world's largest encyclopedia in four years for free? Could this
really be true?""
.....
"Wales seems to think that the vast majority of users are just doing
the first two (vandalizing or contributing small fixes) while the core
group of Wikipedians writes the actual bulk of the article. But that's
not at all what I found. Almost every time I saw a substantive edit, I
found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the
site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around
10), usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an
account."
.....
"I don't have the resources to run this calculation across all of
Wikipedia (there are over 60 billion edits!), but I ran it on several
more randomly-selected articles and the results were much the same.
For example, the largest portion of the Anaconda article was written
by a user who only made 2 edits to it (and only 100 on the entire
site). By contrast, the largest number of edits were made by a user
who appears to have contributed no text to the final article (the
edits were all deleting things and moving things around).
When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider
makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make
several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack
up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a
category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders
deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority
of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the
content."
....
Aaron essentially concludes with:
"Wales is right about one thing, though. This fact does have enormous
policy implications. If Wikipedia is written by occasional
contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more
rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze
more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to
broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit.

Unfortunately, precisely because such people are only occasional
contributors, their opinions aren't heard by the current Wikipedia
process. They don't get involved in policy debates, they don't go to
meetups, and they don't hang out with Jimbo Wales. And so things that
might help them get pushed on the backburner, assuming they're even
proposed."

Submitted for your consideration....,
~maru


from_name: Jan-Åke Larsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Using dvipng in texvc

body:
Jan-?ke Larsson wrote:
> Jan-?ke Larsson wrote:
>> Domas Mituzas wrote:
>>> How much faster is the dvipng approach?
>>
>> My tests indicate a factor 3.
>
> What, no cheers?  :-)   Are there comments, opinions?

Apparently there is no interest in this. Pity.

I'll stay subscribed one week from now (longer if there is any response
at all).

/J?

--
TeX, n.: A part of a typesetting system that preserves the medieval
          traditions of sorcery and black art.


from_name: HeinzJ

body:
I added this to monobook.php for creating additional sidebar-blocks:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Navigation_bar#Customizing_monobook.php

  +

  +
<?php $this->msg('navigation') ?>

  +

  +       <?php $this->msgWiki( 'AnotherMenu' ) ?>
  +

  +

Are there any CONs against this?
Imho the solution above is able to use more complicated
sidebar-construction than MediaWiki:Sidebar doas

HeinzJ


subject: [Wikitech-l] Using dvipng in texvc

body:
Domas Mituzas wrote:
>> Apparently there is no interest in this. Pity.
>
> Sorry - your stuff is great, it is just that... volunteer priorities
> are pretty mixed, and they tend to forget. :-)
> We definitely want this code to replace our current math rendering -
> it just needs attention and dev time (I personally would have to
> install all ocaml environments to test ;-)

Ah, good. I'll stay subscribed, then. (I'd do it myself, but I don't
have an environment ready, and precious little time too.)

/J?

--
Death before dishonor. Nothing before coffee!


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] new dumps ?

body:
FlaBot wrote:
> i am waiting for new Dumps ? What happend to the dump-batch ? When will it
> be started ?

Waiting for Mark to confirm that the machines will not be shut down to be moved
from one rack to another during the dump run.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
On 9/4/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> It depends on what you mean by a simple language.  English is second
> only to Chinese in its simplicity.
>
> Ec

Oh, c'mon. That old prejudice?  Is English really more complex than
Japanese, or Sumerian and Akkadian and Sanskrit? I greatly doubt it.

~maru


subject:
[Wikitech-l] MediaWiki:Sidebar - PROs and CONs - Why not using
 Wikisyntax

body:
HeinzJ wrote:
> I added this to monobook.php for creating additional sidebar-blocks:
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Navigation_bar#Customizing_monobook.php
>
>
>   +

>   +
<?php $this->msg('navigation') ?>

>   +

>   +       <?php $this->msgWiki( 'AnotherMenu' ) ?>
>   +

>   +

>
> Are there any CONs against this?

Slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, not properly internationalized,
and missing the ability to specify keyboard shortcuts.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
On 04/09/06, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/4/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:

> > I'm not from the Foundation, but I think that translating the "powered
> > by MediaWiki" logo will lead to inconsistencies with other uses of the
> > software; that button brands all MediaWiki wikis, and should be kept
> > as such.

> One option would be to allow a localised caption or alt text for the
> image, while still keeping the same image everywhere.

The puzzle-piece globe gets different text as needed. What on earth?

- d.


subject:
[Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Translation of "A Wikimedia
	project" and "Powered by MediaWiki" images

body:
Forwarding to Foundation list - this is being put as a trademark
question, not a technical question.

The question: is it allowable to translate the "Powered by MediaWiki"
and "A Wikimedia project" logos? Given the puzzle globe is routinely
translated ...

- d.

On 04/09/06, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> Rob Church wrote:
> > It is not technically possible to translate the "powered by MediaWiki"
> > logo at present.
>
> So many things that need to be parameterizable, so little time... :-)
>
> > I'm not from the Foundation, but I think that translating the "powered
> > by MediaWiki" logo will lead to inconsistencies with other uses of the
> > software; that button brands all MediaWiki wikis, and should be kept
> > as such.
>
> I'm not from the Foundation, either (and know less about it than
> Rob does), but it seems to me that retaining the image part of
> each image, and the names "Wikimedia" and "MediaWiki", and the
> background shading and the text font and color and the overall
> look and feel and everything, while changing only the words
> "A ... project" and "Powered By" to proper translations in a
> wiki's local language, ought to be perfectly acceptable (if it
> was technically possible).
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Domas Mituzas

subject: [Wikitech-l] Using dvipng in texvc

body:
Jan,

> Apparently there is no interest in this. Pity.
>
> I'll stay subscribed one week from now (longer if there is any
> response
> at all).

Sorry - your stuff is great, it is just that... volunteer priorities
are pretty mixed, and they tend to forget. :-)
We definitely want this code to replace our current math rendering -
it just needs attention and dev time (I personally would have to
install all ocaml environments to test ;-)

BR,
--
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]


body:
Brion Vibber schrieb:
> HeinzJ wrote:
>> I added this to monobook.php for creating additional sidebar-blocks:
>> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Navigation_bar#Customizing_monobook.php
>>
>>
>>   +

>>   +
<?php $this->msg('navigation') ?>

>>   +

>>   +       <?php $this->msgWiki( 'AnotherMenu' ) ?>
>>   +

>>   +

>>
>> Are there any CONs against this?
>
> Slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, slow, not properly internationalized,
> and missing the ability to specify keyboard shortcuts.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

thx, Brion.

I supposed that.

What would be best way to add additional menu-blocks?
Just a copy of the "sidebar"-code and renaming "sidebar" to something
else e.g 'AnotherMenu'?

HeinzJ


from_name: Joakim Larsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Britannica on Wikipedia

body:
2006/9/3, Ruud Koot <r.koot at students.uu.nl>:
>
> Britannica has an article on Wikipedia
> <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9433599> (maybe they've had it for
> a while, I can't remember finding anything when I looked a few months
> ago).
>
> -Ruud

And how much longer has Wikipedia got an article on Britannica :)

-Gr?n


body:
HeinzJ wrote:
> What would be best way to add additional menu-blocks?
> Just a copy of the "sidebar"-code and renaming "sidebar" to something
> else e.g 'AnotherMenu'?

You can already add as many blocks as you like, as for instance at:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Sidebar
http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Sidebar

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Foundation-l] Edits by project and country of origin

body:
On 9/4/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,
> which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99
> percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It
> would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in
> the sample.

nonononoononon

Read the caveats on the page.

I didn't collect data for the native languages of India.

The data provided suggests that 99% of edits made by people in india
*to the wiki's I collected* were to en.  This is not at all surprising
since I didn't collect the wikis in the native languages.

I didn't bother reporting on smaller language Wikis because greater
care must be taken to avoid revealing personally identifiable
information.. but Kelly's reporting makes that information important
and addresses the privacy issues.

 I will collect this data later.


from_name: Yann

body:
2006/9/4, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com>:
> On 04/09/06, Guillaume Paumier <guillom.pom at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > Some French-language Wikipedians would like to translate the text of the two
> > images at the bottom of each page: "A Wikimedia project" and "Powered by
> > MediaWiki". To answer them I would like to know:
> > * if it is technically possible;
>
> It is not technically possible to translate the "powered by MediaWiki"
> logo at present.
>
> > * what people from the Foundation think about it.
>
> I'm not from the Foundation, but I think that translating the "powered
> by MediaWiki" logo will lead to inconsistencies with other uses of the
> software; that button brands all MediaWiki wikis, and should be kept
> as such.

In some countries there are some laws which **requires** all texts to
be available in the language of the users, especially in countries
with several national languages (Swiss, Spanish, etc.).
So having such a strict rule may forbid the use of Wikimedia in some
of their administration, at least.

Personnaly, I do think that everyone should be free to localize the tools used.

Yann


body:
On 9/4/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
[snip]
> You need to fix the error in the geolocation database, or to
> exclude the IP addresses that you fail to locate correctly.
> Alternatively, you could count the problematic ISP as a virtual
> country of its own.  Just don't count them as Dutch people.

Although it's quite possible, and even likely, that some are
misreported the claim that users from NL and BE are highly
multilingual is supported by data across more than a dozen wikis.

The geolocation database I used is believed to be fairly accurate for
country data, but swapping around some ISPs wouldn't be unlikely.
There is a more accurate version of the database available for a fee,
although I believe the increase in accurate is mostly in the form of
identifying cities.

I could put up a tool on toolserver which will output "Based on your
IP, you are in country X. If this is correct click yes. If this is
incorrect select your real country code from this list...".   Do you
think people would use it?


from_name: Guillaume Paumier

body:
Hi and thanks for your answers so far

On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Forwarding to Foundation list - this is being put as a trademark
> question, not a technical question.
>
> The question: is it allowable to translate the "Powered by MediaWiki"
> and "A Wikimedia project" logos? Given the puzzle globe is routinely
> translated ...
>
>
> - d.
>

Actually, my original email was sent to both foundation-l and wikitech-l...

g.

--
Guillaume Paumier
Disciplus Simplex
http://fr.wikipedia.org : Resistance is futile ? You will be assimilated.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] [Foundation-l] Translation of "A Wikimedia
	project" and "Powered by MediaWiki" images


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] How not to manage opensource project

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>
>>We may use the same words (managing, governing), but these words
>>do not have the same sense in my country and in yours. Saying
>>your sense is the "correct" one, while our sense is the "wrong"
>>one, would be a very wrong approach.
>
>
> As long as the discussion is in English, the English meaning of
> the words is the correct one.

You are missing the point.
We claim to be an international organisation. Which mean people must
understand each other. As Delphine explained, there is what person1 mean
to say, what person1 really say, what person2 hears and what person2
really understand.

There is no "correct" sense. There is a need for people to have the same
interpretation of words.

  When the text is translated to
> French, other words that have the same meaning must be chosen.
> Sorry, I don't speak French so I can't help out with details.
>
> But in this case, the cultural difference seems to be about how
> much importance is given to a single word.  I haven't seen the
> French participants explain exactly which practical problems or
> consequences they see from Jimbo's statement, or how they suggest
> he should have phrased it instead.

The mission statement in the bylaws refers to "support". Not to
governing or managing. If the bylaws statement is incorrect and the
Foundation is governing the projects, then the statement should be fixed.
I suggest we say the Foundation supports the projects, as the mission
statement says (and as I think we are really doing).

Without this explanation,
> their apparent anger seems irrational.  Perhaps this is a sign
> that something else is wrong?  Perhaps they want to be angry?
>
> In January 2001 Jimbo was careless enough to say Wikipedia might
> have advertising in the future, or something to that end.  You can
> of course interpret words such as "advertising", "might" and
> "future" very differently, but the practical problem is that many
> would dislike the non-commercial wikipedia.org (then .com) to look
> like normal commercial websites.  The consequence at that time was
> that the Spanish user community forked and moved to their own
> website, not because this problem had occurred, but because they
> feared it might occur, perhaps in the near future.  (There could
> of course have been other reasons for the fork, and maybe this
> statement was used only as an excuse. I don't know that, but I
> happen to know that setting up your own server can be great fun.)
> Jimbo later clarified that he saw advertising as a possible last
> resort, i.e. a much weaker interpretation of "might" and "future",
> but then the Spanish fork had already taken place.
>
> Really, all that is required is to "assume good faith".  When a
> statement sounds like terrible news, perhaps there was a simple
> mistake in translation.  It is better to ask for a clarification
> before starting to get angry.

Assume good faith...
Okay. Let me suggest another interesting approach of the issue then...

You know we frequently receive lawyers calls or mails. Some of them
being ... ahum, just plain "invitations to meet in a court in front of a
judge".
The one invited is the *Foundation*. Usually not the author. Usually not
the global community. Not you. It is the Foundation, and through the
Foundation, it is the board.

One of the best arguments we use to defend the Foundation in court is
"the Foundation is NOT the author. The Foundation is not governing the
projects. The Foundation is not in charge. The Foundation does not set
the rules and the editorial policy. The Foundation is ONLY hosting the
projects".

Poor argument to defend ourselves if the Foundation at the same time
publicly claims to be managing and governing the projects.

The lawyer in charge of putting our head in the mud, imho, will not
assume good faith. Lawyers do not know bad faith and good faith. They
know results. The lawyer will simply use the statement to show that the
claim we make in the bylaws of simple "support"... is incorrect.

In short, public statement that we are governing and managing the
projects, not only is incorrect in certain definitions of the words
"managing" and "governing", but on top, it is dangerous.

I am sorry to say that. But I am serious :-(

> Hmm... there is no French interwiki link for
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith

Which is of course always a good reminder anyway :-)


body:
On 9/4/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> not at all what I found. Almost every time I saw a substantive edit, I
> found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the
> site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around
> 10), usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an
> account."
[snip]

I wish Aaronsw had been a little more open about his metholodigy in his results.

While working a bots for automated vandalism I found pure diffwords to
be a poor metric of whats actually changed because confused new users
often manage to insert big gobs of crud that get reverted.

A simmlar test to this which used the IBM history flow tool to
attribute all the text in the most recent version of an article to its
orignal author did not find simmlar results. This might be because
copyediting can cause the history flow tool to misattribute, or it
might be indicitaive of a systematic flaw in Aaronsw's reseach.

In any case, if were going to do studies which sample only a handfull
of articles, it would likely be better to do manual analysis... It
wouldn't take long to step through 400 diffs given the right user
interface.


subject:
[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] Time to Seek Professional Lawyers
	Advice?

body:
Just what *is* the status of {{PD-Soviet}}? Is it bogus or not? Having
a bunch of wiki users vote on legal status doesn't strike me as
legally sound ...

- d.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eugene Zelenko <eugene.zelenko at gmail.com>
Date: 04-Sep-2006 16:20
Subject: [Commons-l] Time to Seek Professional Lawyers Advice?
To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List <commons-l at wikimedia.org>

Hi!

I have not good feelings about several recent discussions on Deletion
requests: trademarks and PD-Soviet. Discussions are more like politics
where more important is number of supporters, not arguments of sides.
And they are more like pack vs. pack fights, since supporters opinions
are defined by project where they are participating.

Professional lawyer advice could resolve such conflicts. So may be
it's good idea to seek such advice in such cases?

Eugene.

PS

{{PD-Polish}} could become next hot topic.
_______________________________________________
Commons-l mailing list
Commons-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l


from_name: Sage Ross

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Semi-solid evidence that process is in fact
	dangerous to Wikipedia

body:
On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 04/09/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > "Who Writes Wikipedia?" ( http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
> )
>
> > "This fact does have enormous
> > policy implications. If Wikipedia is written by occasional
> > contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more
> > rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze
> > more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to
> > broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit.
> > Unfortunately, precisely because such people are only occasional
> > contributors, their opinions aren't heard by the current Wikipedia
> > process. They don't get involved in policy debates, they don't go to
> > meetups, and they don't hang out with Jimbo Wales. And so things that
> > might help them get pushed on the backburner, assuming they're even
> > proposed."
>
>
> This means that if we want the content to grow and be *good*, we need
> to be more newbie-friendly.
>
> This is also a BIG stick to use on Byzantine overengineered processes
> and policy. Excessive process is actively newbie-hostile.
>
> Look at Debian, bogged down in process, to the point where Richard
> Stallman failed to make it in as a Debian maintainer for his own
> software because of excessive process. Look how it took Ubuntu to give
> it a much-needed rocket up the arse. Without Ubuntu, we'd still be
> waiting on Etch. Will it take someone doing a successful fork to
> decalcify Wikipedia policy?

Answering "Who Writes Wikipedia?" in terms of number of surviving words is,
no doubt, better than using edit counts.  But it is also may not be the best
approach for the future, if we are really switching to a "quality over
quantity" mentality.  At the least, there should be careful choices about
what kinds of articles to analyze, before we put too much weight on results
like these.  My intuition is that Featured Articles and Good Articles have a
significantly larger portion of established editors as the main
contributors, even by the word count metric.

-Ragesoss


from_name: Александр Сигачёв

subject:
[Foundation-l] Translation of "A Wikimedia project" and
	"Powered by MediaWiki" images

body:
> * if it is technically possible;

Yes, you can use JavaScript to change it.

--
Alexander Sigachov


from_name: Александр Сигачёв


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikitech-l] Category intersection

body:
On 04/09/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech at gmail.com> wrote:

> Has anyone written code that can handle this efficiently?  Is such
> code even possible?  Storing and updating expensive and often-used
> intersections as sort of "virtual" categories would probably be a good
> idea to begin with, but I'm not exactly knowledgeable on either
> databases or caching.  When I mentioned it on IRC, Domas (database
> person, works for MySQL) was pessimistic.  In addition to what I noted
> above about an unbounded number of checks, he also pointed out that
> intersection tends to make categories larger, which also affects
> performance.

It should be *possible*. What we're talkling about is categories
turning into something more like tags.

- d.


body:
On 9/4/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > This is also a BIG stick to use on Byzantine overengineered processes
> > and policy. Excessive process is actively newbie-hostile.
> >
>
> So is excessive randomness. Policy protects new users.
....
> --
> geni

Is AFC protecting new users? I'd say that and AFD are what burn the
most new users.

~maru


subject: [WikiEN-l] This list

body:
On 04/09/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:

> Why's this list so quiet all of a sudden?  You can hear the crickets
> chirping and the tumbleweeds tumbling.  Is nobody posting here, or is
> there some technical problem that's holding up message distribution?

Yeah, we've been too efficient in blocking or threatening to block the
querulous idiots. OH NOEZ!

- d.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
maru dubshinki wrote:

>On 9/4/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>It depends on what you mean by a simple language.  English is second
>>only to Chinese in its simplicity.
>>
>>
>Oh, c'mon. That old prejudice?  Is English really more complex than
>Japanese, or Sumerian and Akkadian and Sanskrit? I greatly doubt it.
>
Huh? I think you misread what I said.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Mail loop on wikipedia-l

body:
I've been getting a pile of these, from two different threads. Is it
something I said? Full message with headers below.

- d.

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On 31/08/06, Akash Mehta <draicone at gmail.com> wrote:

>  there is a template
> you can use to tell people when wikification is not needed, see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikify/wikified_wrongly
> (its for [[WP:WWF]] members, but that doesn't mean you can't use it).

That seems like extra procedure for no good reason. What on earth is
wrong with just removing the {{wikify}} tag when it's not needed? It's
a fairly subjective editorial judgement.

- d.
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
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body:
David Gerard wrote:

>On 04/09/06, Francis Tyers <spectre at ivixor.net> wrote:
>
>
>>On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 10:42 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>
>>
>>>It depends on what you mean by a simple language.  English is second
>>>only to Chinese in its simplicity.
>>>
>>>
>>How would you define "simple" -- Personally I'm not sure that I'd say
>>that any natural language is simple.
>>
>>
>[greatly oversimplified history]
>
>For a long while, English was the language of the lower classes, and
>its grammar simplified greatly because it wasn't used to say much more
>complicated than "Hey, Joe, where do we plant the turnips?" When it
>came back into fashion with the middle to upper classes, there were
>more complicated things to say (the sort of things you have time to
>worry about when you're not spending all your time on subsistence), so
>it started taking vocabulary on from elsewhere, and hasn't stopped.
>The vocabulary of English is *ridiculously* large compared to other
>European languages. The grammar is somewhat simpler. Pity about the
>spelling.
>
Perhaps, as you say, oversimplified but the important points are there.
It's the grammar that I consider most important, particularly the lack
of complicated inflections.  Joe wasn't worried about finding the
correct accusative plural for "turnip" which the corresponding Latin
sentence would require.  This makes syntax and word order more
important.  English forms new words easily, and does not worry about an
Acad?mie Anglaise to debate and dictatate what those words will mean or
whether they will be words.  The new words are often easier to
understand than the old ones, and can be context driven.  Having
Britannia rule the waves for a couple centuries was also an effective
marketting tool for the language, as has the more recent dominance of a
country with a similar language.

The spelling has lagged behind, and there is a continuing effort by some
to fix that, but that's just a matter of time.

>I don't know anything about Chinese (any of the spoken languages) to compare.
>
>
Chinese has even less inflection than English, and has retained its
stability for a very long time.  Very old texts are still readable.  Of
course the script is a deterent to many outsiders, but there is a
peculiar logical structure to the traditional Chinese characters that
has contributed to the stability.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Category intersection

body:
Simetrical wrote:
> See http://bugs.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5244 and the various
> things duped to it.  I'm pretty sure performance would be a major
> issue here; for instance, finding the first 200 pages in a category is
> limited to iterating over 200 members of the category, and likewise
> for all other operations currently supported by categories (as well as
> unions), but finding the first 200 pages in the intersection of two
> categories has no upper bound on the number of iterations required:
> you have to go through every page in each category in the event that
> they have fewer than 200 shared pages and neither is a subset of the
> other.
>
> Has anyone written code that can handle this efficiently?  Is such
> code even possible?

I've floated the possibility of using a full-text search engine (say... Lucene)
for this, since that's basically what it does.

Use an appropriate indexer for your tag words, and presto.

The tricky part might be getting arbitrary sorting out of it, though. :) Easy
for small results, but perhaps hard for large ones.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject:
[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] Time to Seek
 Professional	Lawyers Advice?

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>On 04/09/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Just what *is* the status of {{PD-Soviet}}? Is it bogus or not? Having
>>>a bunch of wiki users vote on legal status doesn't strike me as
>>>legally sound ...
>>>
>>>
>>IMO, as an educated layman, {{PD-Soviet}} is bogus.
>>
>>
>It seems a little ... odd. But the educated layman argument is another
>wiki user vote. I'm asking what the Foundation's actual stated policy
>on whether they're leaving themselves open to this or not is. That is,
>a legal opinion, and not just any legal opinion but *our* legal
>opinion. Hence asking on foundation-l.
>
>(And that would suggest writing to juriwiki-l, but that unfortunately
>seems to be a write-only list in practice.)
>
I also consider {{PD-Soviet}} suspect, despite my own more generally
aggressive views on matters of copyright.  In the absence of a clearly
expressed difference using the Berne Convention standards when you have
no reliable information about the country's laws is a good starting
point.  If soviet era copyright laws are to be ignored the burden of
proof should be on the person trying to make this argument in relation
to a specific piece of work.

Ec


from_name: theProject

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Britannica on Wikipedia

body:
On 9/4/06, Gerrit Holl <gerrit.holl at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 04/09/06, Joakim Larsson <to.joakim at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2006/9/3, Ruud Koot <r.koot at students.uu.nl>:
> > >
> > > Britannica has an article on Wikipedia
> > > <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9433599> (maybe they've had it
> for
> > > a while, I can't remember finding anything when I looked a few months
> > > ago).
> > >
> > > -Ruud
> >
> >
> > And how much longer has Wikipedia got an article on Britannica :)
>
> I can't see how long it is, because it isn't free.
>
> Gerrit.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

It does say 75 of 737 words, though. :-)

theProject


from_name: Matt Brown

subject:
[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] Time to Seek Professional
	Lawyers Advice?

body:
On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> It seems a little ... odd. But the educated layman argument is another
> wiki user vote. I'm asking what the Foundation's actual stated policy
> on whether they're leaving themselves open to this or not is. That is,
> a legal opinion, and not just any legal opinion but *our* legal
> opinion. Hence asking on foundation-l.

Unfortunately, past experience says the foundation doesn't want to get
involved in decisions like that - for quite valid liability reasons, I
suspect.

So in practice, the users ARE the final arbiter of this, nine times
out of ten or more.  This suggests that an attitude of copyright
caution, but not paranoia, is required.

-Matt


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia vs. Ebay on Alexa

body:
--- Milos Rancic <millosh at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> Ebay is at 11th place and Wikipedia is at 16th place, but, Wikipedia
> has better daily reach per million from March/June 2006:
>
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?compare_sites=ebay.com&range=max&size=large&y=r&url=wikipedia.org
>
> Interesting thing is that Wikipedia is backed to exponential growth on Alexa.

Indeed. That whole Seigenthaler incident and then the Nature article really saturated several
months worth of growth in a short time. Now we are trending up again. That's good. But that also
means we may need a fundraiser before long.

-- mav

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


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Edits by project and country of origin

body:
Kelly Martin wrote:

> * NL and BE are language sluts.

This does not seem very likely.  I just don't see 26.7% Dutch
contributors on the Danish Wikipedia.  Who are they?

Even if you did include some interwiki link robot in the
statistics, 26.7% of all contributions (or contributors?) seems
far too much.

That users in Belgium are split between French and Dutch is the
nature of this country.  Belgium originates 1.8% of all
contributions, which is also reasonable.

It's the number of users from the Netherlands that are far too
many, 6.1% of all contributors, ranking as the 4th contributor
country.  They should rank lower then contributors from France
(5.6%) and closer to Belgium.  Perhaps they should be half their
present number (3.1%).

I guess the odd statistics could be explained by some major ISP
(UPC/Chello?) reporting their entire European network to be
located in the Netherlands.  Did you check this?

Assuming that half of the reported number are real Dutchmen, that
would put their contributions 66% in the Dutch Wikipedia, 25% in
the English Wikipedia, and 9% in other places.  The other half of
the alleged Dutchmen could be equally distributed among other
European countries.  The reported Dutch contributions to other
languages could be moved to each native country, thus the Danish
Wikipedia would have 54.8 + 26.7 = 81.5% contributions from
Denmark.  That makes more sense.

You need to fix the error in the geolocation database, or to
exclude the IP addresses that you fail to locate correctly.
Alternatively, you could count the problematic ISP as a virtual
country of its own.  Just don't count them as Dutch people.

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fighting over (R) and (tm) symbols

body:
On 8/30/06, Carl Peterson <carlopeterson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I thought that a basic rule of thumb was to use a trademark (r, tm, or
> p) symbol at the first usage of that word. However, in my experience, it is
> usually accompanied by a footnote specifying the owner of said trademarks,
> and, as you have stated, is not typically utilized in encyclopedic
> materials.

In my experience it is only done that way in commercial text.  This is
normally because either:

1. The commercial entity owns the trademark themselves
2. They are licensed by another entity to use those trademarks and
thus have to be as careful with them as the owner would (generally
contractually obligated, in fact)
3. They are taking great care to not appear as if they are claiming
the marks for themselves, which could be lawsuit-fodder.

-Matt


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Leaving the project

body:
As long as you leave your talk page history in tact as a historical record
so links and discussions aren't broken, I don't have a problem with
blanking.

If you're burned out, I suggest an extensive wikibreak. Once you've sniffed
in the outside air and spend some time de-stressing, you might look
different at returning.

Have a nice break!

Mgm

On 9/4/06, John Lyden <rasputinaxp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey gang,
>
> I'm pretty burned out on Wiki, and I don't anticipate coming back
> anytime soon, if at all. Please desysop me (and yes, it was me who
> blanked my User and Talk pages).
>
> Thanks,
> John "RasputinAXP" Lyden
>
> --
> John Lyden - rasputinaxp at gmail.com
> "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
> live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
> time..." -Kerouac
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Category intersection

body:
Samuel Wantman wrote:

> I'm writing to ask a developer to take a look at a proposal
> being developed at English Wikipedia at:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Category_intersection

FWIW, I just translated the German help page for the CatScan tool
to English, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CatScan

No, this does not solve the issue, it's just a tool that right now
lets you dig deeper into categories.  Or perhaps not, since it
seems to be having problems with the English Wikipedia.

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


from_name: Akash Mehta

subject:
[WikiEN-l] More on Wikipedia Review, and Brandt,
	and Seigenthaler

body:
Future legislation and litigation against Wikipedia? It makes sense to
watch the site, but I question if any of the content posted there
isn't groundless. Are there any respected editors who are well known
members of the site?

On 9/4/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> (and doesn't "More on" go well with that site?)
>
> Somebody e-mailed me that I probably shouldn't be giving more
> publicity to that silly bunch of losers, but some monitoring of those
> boards might be a good idea because some of the content hints at
> possible future attacks on Wikipedia.  Here's one where Brandt
> recounts his recent attempts to goad Seigenthaler into digging up the
> dead horse of the long-corrected defamation against him last year
> again:
>
> http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=3347
>
> Apparently, Mr. Seigenthaler has enough good sense to decline to
> become a Brandt meatpuppet and do his bidding; Brandt would like him
> to do stuff like sue Wikipedia, or else issue a "do-this-or-else"
> demand to have his article completely removed (so as to serve as a
> precedent that Brandt can then follow), but he has no interest in it.
>  However, Brandt seems to think that Seigenthaler is favorable to
> launching a new media campaign against Wikipedia which might be able
> to pave the way for future legislation and litigation against it.  Or
> maybe Seigenthaler is just being polite to Brandt when they converse,
> and has no plans to agitate on this issue.  But it's worth watching
> for anyway.  When the media decides something is the menace of the
> week, like comic books in the 1950s and a whole succession of drug
> menaces (from crack to ecstasy to Oxycontin) from the '80s on, they
> can pour on excessive hype and prompt legislatures to take unwise
> action.
> --
> == Dan ==
> Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
> Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
> Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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: SJ

subject: [Foundation-l] [Translators-l] Some news from Wikiversity Beta

body:
Dear Guillaume,

This is a lovely update.  For what it's worth, I strongly approve of
trying out the language-selection tool to provide for many languages
on the same wiki -- for this and other incubated projects.  Assuming
this is successful, it could be used to produce a multilingual hub for
older projects as well.

Best,
  SJ

On 9/3/06, Guillaume Paumier <guillom.pom at gmail.com> wrote:
> [ crossposting on foundation-l, wikiversity-l & translators-l ]
>
> Hello,
>
> Wikiversity Beta is now 10 days old and I think the time has come to give
> some news. I have decided to organize it as a list of FAQ. Feel free to ask
> questions I have not thought about. This page is available in English at
> http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Help:FAQ/En and will be
> available in French soon.
>
>
> * What is Wikiversity?
> --- Wikiversity is a new Wikimedia project [1] exploring ways to use the
> power of wiki to support online learning. This new project will be in beta
> phase during the first six months [2].
>
>
> * What is Wikiversity Beta?
>
> --- Wikiversity Beta is a global platform aiming at coordinating Wikiversity
> projects in several languages [3]. This multilingual coordination intends to
> deal with Wikiversity's mission and general guidelines of the project's
> scope (for example, about original research). Wikiversity Beta is also a
> place where Wikiversity projects which don't have a subdomain yet can
> develop.
>
> --- In a nutshell, Wikiversity is both a meta-wiki and an incubator for
> Wikiversity projects.
>
>
> * How is it possible to have so many languages coexisting on Beta without it
> becoming a mess?
>
> --- Wikiversity Beta intends to take advantage of the input of its many
> members (not only English-speakers). Multilingual discussions should not
> only coexist, but live in symbiosis. A multilingual discussion system has
> been proposed to manage them [4] so non-English speakers can take part in
> discussions. Moreover, Beta is using the Language select feature [5]
> developped on Meta, which allows users to hide foreign languages on
> multilingual pages.
>
>
> * What about separate Wikiversity projects which already have their own
> subdomain?
>
> --- Those separate projects [6] are growing their way. However, their
> participants are strongly encouraged to take part into discussions about
> general guidelines that will apply to all Wikiversity projects. Moreover,
> they are encouraged to post reports [7] about their projects to let
> everybody know about how it grows.
>
>
> * What's next?
>
> --- Now we need people to take part in the discussions on Wikiversity Beta.
> People from existing separate projects and people willing to contribute to a
> future separate project should join the discussions and work together.
> People who do not speak English are encouraged to take part in discussions
> but we also need volunteer translators to translate the talk summaries [4].
>
>
> * Your multilingual system will never work. It requires too many
> translators.
>
> --- If people really sum up their discussions, not only this will help them
> to focus on important things but it will not take much time to translate
> them. Ten days after Beta opening, its main page is already available in
> five languages.
>
> --- By the way, it is just a proposal. Hey, if everybody speaks english,
> very well, we won't have anything to translate. If the system does not work,
> at least we can say we tried.
>
>
> * For a coordination project, it would be much more practical if a single
> language of discussion is chosen.
>
> --- Of course it would be more practical; the question is: should we manage
> Beta the way that is easier for us English speakers or should we manage it
> the way everybody can take part in discussions about guidelines that will
> apply to all projects?
>
>
> * Wikiversity Beta Motto?
>
> --- The shorter, the better. If you want your ideas to reach people speaking
> other languages, write short and understandable summaries.
>
>
>
> Please feel free to ask questions and to make constructive comments. I would
> also like to thank Sebmol & JWSchmidt for their help.
>
> g.
>
>
> [1] Board resolution:
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution_Wikiversity
> [2] Anthere's mail about Wikiversity:
> http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-August/009074.html
> [3] Wikiversity Beta URL: http://beta.wikiversity.org
> [4] Multilingual discussion proposal:
> http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Multilingualism
> [5] Language selection system:
> http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Language_select
> [6] List of separate Wikiversity projects:
> http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Separate_projects
> [7] Reports from separate projects:
> http://beta.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Reports
>
>
> --
> Guillaume Paumier
> Disciplus Simplex
> http://fr.wikipedia.org : Resistance is futile ? You will be assimilated.
> _______________________________________________
> Translators-l mailing list
> Translators-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/translators-l
>
>
>

--
++SJ


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

body:
It seems like a good idea, but I'm not so sure if using actual tags
would be the right way to go. Tags would allow content to really be
done dynamically, but currently using templates that call the cite
templates seems to be the easiest way, and a system for indexing such
templates and encouraging the creation of others would be simpler to
implement.

On 9/4/06, Bogdan Giusca <liste at dapyx.com> wrote:
> I think Wikipedia really needs a central bibliography,
> because there are many books who are used in more than
> one article, some in dozens or even more.
>
> Currently, a book reference is done this way:
>
> <ref>[[Istvan Vasary]] (2005) ''Cumans and Tatars'',
> [[Cambridge University Press]]. ISBN 123546958695,
> page 22</ref>
>
> with a central bibliography, it would be like this;
>
> <book n="Cumans and Tatars" p="22"/>
>
> and the book database would fill in the details in the
> page displayed to the viewer.
>
> I suggest that we use the name instead of the ISBN, because
> it can be seen more clearly in the text, when reading the
> wiki-text. Also, there are many books (especially older
> books, but not only), which have no ISBN number and some
> which have many different editions with different ISBNs.
>
> There is still the problem with two books with the same title,
> in which case we need to add the author, too, for disambiguation,
> but I think this problem is less on the kind of books we use for
> reference. Shorter titles are used especially for fiction.
>
> There could be some benefits for having a central bibliography,
> other than not having to copy-paste the publishing house/ISBN,
> like knowing which articles refer to a certain book.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Very minor technical suggestions

body:
You can do it with Greasemonkey using Platypus and an
if(document.location.href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions"){
[platypus code] }

On 9/3/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Maury Markowitz wrote:
> > The bug I have noticed is that when you click on "my contributions" it does
> > not turn bold, unlike the other items in the "menu bar". Yes, piquane, I
> > know.
> >
>
> You could probably do it with javascript...
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] My irrelevant hatnote disambiguation policy

body:
On 9/4/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Perhaps "mock" is the wrong word.  I agree with Steve that seeing a
> reference to some obscure band's second album or some equally obscure
> video game character on almost every science or history article is
> highly annoying and detracts from the seriousness of the subject.

I don't get this 'detracts from the seriousness of the subject'.  Do
science or history articles get all embarassed to be in the same
encyclopedia as more "trivial" subjects?  Do the writers of such
articles, or the readers?

And should we care?

One of the strengths of Wikipedia is its trivia.  Seriously.  It's the
breadth of our coverage that makes us appealing, and allows us to be a
one-stop source of information for the curious.

To be honest, a good proportion of the history and science is as
trivial as the music and videogames.  This does not mock the science,
nor the history.

-Matt


from_name: Gordon Joly

subject:
[WikiEN-l] You realise this means [[Pokemon]] has to be brought
 to feature quality. (was Well darn, Pokemon is important after all.)

body:
At 13:26 +0200 2/9/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
>On 9/2/06, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly at pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>>  The word "breast" is a classic example of why simplistic "stop words"
>>  approaches will fail. Does anybody want to delete this article?
>>
>>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breast_cancer
>>
>>
>>  Gordo
>>
>
>Not particularly. It's perhaps a bit wordy, but I don't see any policy
>reason to delete this.
>Can you?

The question was rhetorical.

Gordo

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


body:
On 9/4/06, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Answering "Who Writes Wikipedia?" in terms of number of surviving words is,
> no doubt, better than using edit counts.

If you rank Wikipedia editors by edit count, the bots win; in second
place are the editors who function in a very bot-like manner, by
constantly fixing small issues here and there, often with software
assistance.

I also bet that if you ranked editors by surviving words in the
encyclopedia (not project or talk) you might be quite surprised to see
who ranks high.  People get noticed on Wikipedia for participating in
project-space, for one reason or another, not for their article
contribs.

> But it is also may not be the best approach for the future, if we are really
> switching to a "quality over quantity" mentality.

Are we?  Because there are huge swathes of important stuff as-yet
undocumented in Wikipedia.  (Of course, we're probably close if not
there in terms of covering every topic covered in traditional general
encyclopedias, but Wikipedia is not just a general encyclopedia; it's
all the specialist encyclopedias too).

> At the least, there should be careful choices about
> what kinds of articles to analyze, before we put too much weight on results
> like these.  My intuition is that Featured Articles and Good Articles have a
> significantly larger portion of established editors as the main
> contributors, even by the word count metric.

David points out correctly that FA is a political game and thus favors
the established.  Good Articles started off as an idea to get away
from this and actually identify informally what's actually pretty well
done, but it has now turned into mini-FA.

I do see the point of identifying which articles are established vs.
text dumps or the like - perhaps looking at articles over N edits, or
over N months old?

-Matt


subject: [WikiEN-l] "Approved" versions on Wikipedia FAQ

body:
At 23:00 +0100 30/8/06, David Gerard wrote:
>On 30/08/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  On 8/30/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  > On 30/08/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  > > Um, Anthony is referring to it becoming less possible for new users to
>>  > > make accounts (certainly a drop in open-ness)
>
>>  > Er, when did this happen?
>
>>  Um, I naturally meant "less possible for new users to make article".
>>  I don't understand how you misunderstood...
>
>
>Gosh darn this fiendish "words" thing!
>
>- d.

"The mind commands the body, and it obeys instantly; the mind
commands itself, and is resisted."
  -- St. Augustine (354-430)

Gordo

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


from_name: HeinzJ

subject: [Wikitech-l] a simple Q -> Database

body:
Witch table in mediaqiki 1.71 holds the actual text?

thx. HeinzJ


from_name: James Hare

subject: [Foundation-l] Use of Wikimedia-Logo's in articles

body:
That's what happens when you're no longer allowed to use the logos for
unauthorized Wikiprojects -- you have to break out the anime.

On 9/4/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I would have to shoot you for that except that I never realised we had
> > a Wikipedia OS-tan. What a great idea!
> >
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikipe-tan_sockpuppet_show.png
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikipe-tan_head.png
>
> unfortunetly there is a dark side:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Cvutan.png
>
> --
> geni
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


body:
On 04/09/06, Francis Tyers <spectre at ivixor.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 10:42 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> > It depends on what you mean by a simple language.  English is second
> > only to Chinese in its simplicity.

> How would you define "simple" -- Personally I'm not sure that I'd say
> that any natural language is simple.

[greatly oversimplified history]

For a long while, English was the language of the lower classes, and
its grammar simplified greatly because it wasn't used to say much more
complicated than "Hey, Joe, where do we plant the turnips?" When it
came back into fashion with the middle to upper classes, there were
more complicated things to say (the sort of things you have time to
worry about when you're not spending all your time on subsistence), so
it started taking vocabulary on from elsewhere, and hasn't stopped.
The vocabulary of English is *ridiculously* large compared to other
European languages. The grammar is somewhat simpler. Pity about the
spelling.

I don't know anything about Chinese (any of the spoken languages) to compare.

- d.


from_name: Francis Tyers

body:
How would you define "simple" -- Personally I'm not sure that I'd say
that any natural language is simple.

Fran

On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 10:42 -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> It depends on what you mean by a simple language.  English is second
> only to Chinese in its simplicity.
>
> Ec
>
> Akash Mehta wrote:
>
> >That would make sense at the least. English has always been seen as
> >overcomplicated, as opposed to simple languages like German (maybe
> >thats why de wiki has so many contributors?).
> >
> >On 9/4/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>On 9/4/06, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>HoI,
> >>>Thanks for the positive apreciation of the Dutch and Belgian effort. There
> >>>is no positive meaning to the word slut.. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slut
> >>>
> >>>Thanks,
> >>> GerardM
> >>>
> >>>
> >>I think it was meant to be humorous, since normally *English* is the
> >>slut of languages, as has been pointed out because of its
> >>indiscriminate importation of words. At least, that's how I read it.
> >>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
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body:
On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 04/09/06, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > My intuition is that Featured Articles and Good Articles have a
> > significantly larger portion of established editors as the main
> > contributors, even by the word count metric.
>
>
> That's because it's bloody impossible to get through them without
> being fabulous at the politics, even for experienced editors. FAC in
> particular is a great example of gratuitous requests for shrubberies
> BY POLICY!!!

True enough, to some extent.  Maybe instead of using process-dependent
criteria, choose well-cited articles and/or long articles... or articles
also present in Britannica (i.e., mainstream significant topics).  The real
issue is, adding new content is only the first stage in an article's life.
At some point, most of the significant information is there, but to improve
beyond a somewhat disorganized collection of unverified information
(probably true, but unverified nonetheless) and become a decent article, it
often takes rewriting, reorganizing, fact-checking/citation, etc.  Using
AaronSW's metric, mature articles will likely be more the product of
established editors than the example in the blog article.  And at a minimum,
I don't think we can consider an article mature without a high level of
citations.  The point is valid that much of what anons do is NOT typos and
vandalism, but it doesn't (necessarily) mean the head of the Wikipedia
editors distribution doesn't still create the majority of Wikipedia's
content value.

It's not very easy to write a coherent article on a complex topic several
paragraphs at a tiime (with a different person adding each chunk).  The
people who become involved enough to do research, track down citations, and
re-write and re-organize articles have to spend a fair amount of time on
Wikipedia (and, naturally, rack up a fair number of edits).
-Ragesoss


subject: [Foundation-l] RAFT

body:
Hello

Last week, I participated in a forum in Geneva, focused on "toward
global access to health", in a session dedicated to medical on-line
information. One of the organiser of this forum is involved in a project
called RAFT. The core activity of the RAFT is the webcasting of
interactive medical courses. They put the emphasis on knowledge sharing
across care professionals, usually in the form of presentations and
dialogs between experts in different countries. The technology for the
webcasting works with a slow (25 kbits/sec) Internet Connexion.

They feature several activities. But a strong emphasis is put on the
development of capacities for the creation, maintenance and publication
of quality medical didactic content. More is available on
http://raft.hcuge.ch

After discussion with them, it seems that two domains should be
developed. Amongst those the creation of content...

People in charge know our project, and invited us purposefully to the
forum to make contact. After discussion, we decided to meet for a longer
time and with more people involved to discuss potential paths for
collaboration. It so happens that I'll be again in Geneva, in transit,
next week, so I will take this opportunity to meet them again.

I'll be very happy that those of you who are healthcare professionals
have a look at the project. It is limited to french speaking countries
(with a country in focus, Mali), but many documents are translated due
to the international implications. I find such projects absolutely
fascinating. I doubt very much the very specialised content could ever
be produced on our projects (likely, wikibooks), but if it is produced
under a free licence, we might host it. Besides, they could make use of
our general content to support their own content. Last, this project
imply the creation of "internet spot", with tech support. It could be
possible to stimulate/organisation participation to Wikipedia using this
frame.

This was just the 10 minutes to inform you of stuff being discussed.
More later.

Ant


subject: [Foundation-l] RAFT


from_name: maru dubshinki

body:
On 9/4/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> maru dubshinki wrote:
>
> >On 9/4/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>It depends on what you mean by a simple language. English is second
> >>only to Chinese in its simplicity.
> >>
> >>
> >Oh, c'mon. That old prejudice? Is English really more complex than
> >Japanese, or Sumerian and Akkadian and Sanskrit? I greatly doubt it.
> >
> Huh? I think you misread what I said.
>
> Ec

Apparently. Chinese is far from simple, so the only logical way I
could read it was as sarcasm and understatement. What did you mean?

~maru


body:
If the 'view current version' feature is there, will most editors be
able to go through the unchecked revisions and mark them as ok or not
ok, then edit the final version to remove the factual error?

On 9/4/06, ScottL <scott at mu.org> wrote:
> Peter Ansell wrote:
> > On 31/08/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> This is in response to the somewhat silly English-language press we've
> >> had lately. I'll be sending copies of this out to the sources of
> >> recent articles on the subject that got it precisely backwards.
> >>
> >> The following is, I understand, technically accurate, based on text
> >> from Amgine, Phillipp Birkin (de:wp), Jimbo and Mathias Schindler (I
> >> think), and comcom discussions (press relations being part of that
> >> job). Corrections welcomed - you have about five minutes.
> >>
> >> (and geni, I expect you to ask how this makes the new patrollers' jobs
> >> easier - by having what's effectively a feed of new-editor and
> >> anonymous edits, is what I was thinking of.)
> >>
> >>
> >> - d.
> >>
> >>
> >> "Approved" versions on Wikipedia FAQ
> >>
> >>
> >> * What is changing?
> >>
> >> We want to open up editing without damaging the reader's experience.
> >>
> >> We want to be more wiki and let editors edit freely, which is where
> >> all the good things come from. At present a small percentage of
> >> articles (a few hundred out of 1.5 million on the English language
> >> Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/) are locked or partially locked
> >> from editing. We want to open these up. But Wikipedia is a top 20
> >> website (Alexa ratings, no. 17 on 3 month average; no. 15 on 30 August
> >> 2006 - http://www.alexa.com/), so we must keep it good for the
> >> readers.
> >>
> >> The new feature will mean that edits from new or anonymous editors
> >> will be delayed before being shown to readers - they will see a
> >> 'flagged OK' version by default, with a link to the live version. The
> >> idea is to enhance the *reading* experience, and free us to enhance
> >> the *editing* experience. If vandalism can't be seen by the general
> >> public, there will be less motivation to vandalise.
> >>
> >> Anonymous or new-editor edits will need to be approved by a logged-in
> >> editor. Of the thousands of editors on the large Wikipedias, many
> >> concentrate on checking revisions and dealing with odd changes and
> >> vandalism - this will assist their work and we do not expect new
> >> delays.
> >>
> >> We are also considering a related feature to flag particular versions
> >> of articles as being of high quality. This is to a different end: a
> >> high-quality finished product. This will likely be tested first on the
> >> German language Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/), which has
> >> already had three stable editions released on CD and DVD, which have
> >> sold quite well. If the feature works there, it may be used on other
> >> language Wikipedias.
> >>
> >> These features are not finished, so we don't have a lot of fine detail
> >> as to how it will all work as yet. But we hope this change will allow
> >> us to do things such as open up the George W. Bush article or even the
> >> front page itself to full unrestricted editing.
> >>
> >>
> >> * When was this proposed?
> >>
> >> Jimmy Wales asked for a time-delay feature for casual readers in late
> >> 2004; after very fast editing on the Indian Ocean tsunami produced a
> >> very high-quality article
> >> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake) very
> >> quickly, but with some highly visible vandalism; we've hotly discussed
> >> how to achieve stable high-quality editions of Wikipedia since almost
> >> the start of the project, in 2001.
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> WikiEN-l mailing list
> >> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> >> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> >> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >>
> >
> > What version would new editors be editing if they found an error on a
> > page and attempted to edit what they thought was that page?
> >
> > Semantically I would think they would have to update in turn from the
> > latest available version in the database. There could quickly be
> > problems with multiple versions of the page branching, and being hard
> > to combine, if they were not editing the latest version.
> >
> > Peter Ansell
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>    My understanding of the proposal and feature is that only one version
> of the article is editable.  The Edit this page link is removed and
> replaced with "view current version".
>
> SKL
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On 04/09/06, Berto <albertoserra at ukr.net> wrote:

> I'd say that english is the easiest language I've ever met. Its grammar can
> be written in 20-30 pages, and basically you need only the first 3-4 to

Speaking *excellent* English is a lot more work, but I don't see that
it would be any more than any other language. (Note that I speak no
other languages.)

> If I have to say the plain truth, I guess english speakers love to rate
> their language difficult as an excuse for their being usually unable to
> learn just even a second language :)

Nah, that's just not bothering because they don't have to.

>  Anyway, in the next
> ten years native english speakers will really become a minority on the net,
> so I guess we (the not natives) will eventually enforce radical reforms in
> the language, by pure brute force. It already happened in small with en_us,
> it's going to big really big with en_int.

Will they notice? The American Empire will need to fall first.
(Starting with the US dollar bubble bursting.)

- d.


from_name: Anthony

body:
On 9/3/06, Tuvic <tuvic.tuvic at gmail.com> wrote:
> The discussion is about the logo's:  some editors say the content of
> Wikipedia is GFDL, and the logo is not, so the logo should not be in the
> article.
> Others think the use is allowed, because the logo's are the
> Wikipedia-logo's, and if we themselve can't use them, they are just
> obsolete.
> Eve other just say: it's on Commons, so it's alright.
>
It's probably not a violation of the GFDL, any more than Red Hat
putting proprietary works onto a Red Hat Linux CD violates the GPL
(which it doesn't).

There also doesn't seem to be any guidance from the foundation, so
that leaves it up to each project to decide for itself, I suppose...

Anthony


body:
On 04/09/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/4/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Just what *is* the status of {{PD-Soviet}}? Is it bogus or not? Having
> > a bunch of wiki users vote on legal status doesn't strike me as
> > legally sound ...

> IMO, as an educated layman, {{PD-Soviet}} is bogus.

It seems a little ... odd. But the educated layman argument is another
wiki user vote. I'm asking what the Foundation's actual stated policy
on whether they're leaving themselves open to this or not is. That is,
a legal opinion, and not just any legal opinion but *our* legal
opinion. Hence asking on foundation-l.

(And that would suggest writing to juriwiki-l, but that unfortunately
seems to be a write-only list in practice.)

- d.


body:
It's not like there's a copyright violation; as far as I'm concerned, Dutch
Wikipedia is allowed to use Wikimedia trademarks. However, the concern would
be if there's any forking involved, in which case it could turn into a fair
use issue. I'm aware that most Wikimedia projects don't allow fair use.

On 9/4/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> On 9/3/06, Tuvic <tuvic.tuvic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The discussion is about the logo's:  some editors say the content of
> > Wikipedia is GFDL, and the logo is not, so the logo should not be in the
> > article.
> > Others think the use is allowed, because the logo's are the
> > Wikipedia-logo's, and if we themselve can't use them, they are just
> > obsolete.
> > Eve other just say: it's on Commons, so it's alright.
> >
> It's probably not a violation of the GFDL, any more than Red Hat
> putting proprietary works onto a Red Hat Linux CD violates the GPL
> (which it doesn't).
>
> There also doesn't seem to be any guidance from the foundation, so
> that leaves it up to each project to decide for itself, I suppose...
>
> Anthony
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Semi-solid evidence that process is in fact dangerous to
	Wikipedia

body:
On 04/09/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:

> "Who Writes Wikipedia?" ( http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia )

> "This fact does have enormous
> policy implications. If Wikipedia is written by occasional
> contributors, then growing it requires making it easier and more
> rewarding to contribute occasionally. Instead of trying to squeeze
> more work out of those who spend their life on Wikipedia, we need to
> broaden the base of those who contribute just a little bit.
> Unfortunately, precisely because such people are only occasional
> contributors, their opinions aren't heard by the current Wikipedia
> process. They don't get involved in policy debates, they don't go to
> meetups, and they don't hang out with Jimbo Wales. And so things that
> might help them get pushed on the backburner, assuming they're even
> proposed."

This means that if we want the content to grow and be *good*, we need
to be more newbie-friendly.

This is also a BIG stick to use on Byzantine overengineered processes
and policy. Excessive process is actively newbie-hostile.

Look at Debian, bogged down in process, to the point where Richard
Stallman failed to make it in as a Debian maintainer for his own
software because of excessive process. Look how it took Ubuntu to give
it a much-needed rocket up the arse. Without Ubuntu, we'd still be
waiting on Etch. Will it take someone doing a successful fork to
decalcify Wikipedia policy?

Greg - you might want to ask Aaron for what he ran, in case you can
run better numbers across the whole database more easily.

- d.


from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] Edits by project and country of origin

body:
The same interest I have. Also a similar data of "edits within
country" in the Eastern Asia will be instructive.

Some Malay/Indonesia based editors I have known by chance said one
problem they faced was font (un)availability. They said that it was
relatively easy to find US-EN input method installed PCs but a bit
hard to find the local language font and input method, specially this
language is not "official language of governent". To promote such
projects, we need to provide information not directly related to wiki,
like "how you can get the font for your language", supposedly.

On 9/4/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> What I find especially interesting is not the native Asutralian languages,
> which have a handful of speakers only, but the fact that in India, over 99
> percent of people prefer to edit in English than in their native languages. It
> would be interesting to see the results once native languages are included in
> the sample.
>
> Danny
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
Kizu Naoko
  Wikiquote: http://wikiquote.org
  * vivemus, mea Lesbia, amemus *


body:
On 9/4/06, James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's not like there's a copyright violation; as far as I'm concerned, Dutch
> Wikipedia is allowed to use Wikimedia trademarks. However, the concern would
> be if there's any forking involved, in which case it could turn into a fair
> use issue. I'm aware that most Wikimedia projects don't allow fair use.
>
What is your concern, that Wikimedia is going to sue a fork for
violating its copyright?  I really don't see that as likely.

The only problem I see is that the image is proprietary in the first place.

Anthony


body:
I didn't really mean to describe "with permission images" more than I meant
to describe "the trademark and the website both belong to the same NGO".
It's why Wikimedia logos (including projects) can be used out of context on
the English Wikipedia (to an extent, at least).

On 9/4/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/5/06, James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It's not like there's a copyright violation; as far as I'm concerned,
> Dutch
> > Wikipedia is allowed to use Wikimedia trademarks.
>
> You've just described what we call "with permission images" that are
> removed on sight these days.
>
> > However, the concern would
> > be if there's any forking involved, in which case it could turn into a
> fair
> > use issue.
>
> Or any reuse in fact.
>
>
> --
> geni
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Tuvic

body:
> You could find the solution here:
>
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikipedia-logo-af.png

I only see the normal Wikimedia-copyright-template, like on all other
Wikimedia logo's. (Am I overlooking something?)

> it seems to be under guidelines:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_visual_identity_guidelines
> and you should ask a permission, but it is also strange look for a
> permission for a Wikipedia logo in Wikipedia contents: it is a
> paradox.

The webpage only talks about how to use the Wikimedia Logo, and how not, is
doesn't tell anything about when it can't be used or not.
I agree: it looks a paradox or something like that.

> It would depend I think on nl:wp policy on corporate logos in general.
> Does nl: allow fair use images? On en:, corporate logos in articles
> about a corporation are allowed as fair use - it's clearly academic
> fair use to use the logo when talking about a company in an article
> about the company.

NL policy does not allow fair use. But, it the logo's are removed from the
articles, shouldn't they also be removed from the template like {{Commons}}
and so? Wouldn't that mean that the logo's (our 'own' logo's) are totally
useless to us?

I was actually hoping for some reaction of the Board or so, because this
isn't only about NL-wiki, but apparently about every wiki not allowing
Fair-use, if I understand this correctly.

Greetings, Tuvic (NL-wiki)


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Anons banned from creating articles

body:
On 04/09/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> I wish Aaronsw had been a little more open about his metholodigy in his results.
> While working a bots for automated vandalism I found pure diffwords to
> be a poor metric of whats actually changed because confused new users
> often manage to insert big gobs of crud that get reverted.
> A simmlar test to this which used the IBM history flow tool to
> attribute all the text in the most recent version of an article to its
> orignal author did not find simmlar results. This might be because
> copyediting can cause the history flow tool to misattribute, or it
> might be indicitaive of a systematic flaw in Aaronsw's reseach.

Hop on the page and suggest useful approaches to him. I assume if he's
running for the board because he thinks this is an important issue, he
would probably prefer not to be leading himself up the garden path.

- d.