from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
 Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] <lapollutionestsimauvaise at yahoo.com> wrote:
we should refer to spacecraft from the USSR according to their Russian name-not according to the English name.

I read the argument on that issue. Meanwhile, I had a foolish thought.

Say, it is maybe not entirely clear in my mind...but is wikipedia intended only for those readers who are share english as their mother langage ?

Or what is not also meant to be a deep-broad-reliable-extensive-neutral-wonderful encyclopedia, which could be a great resource for the whole world (i.e., any person who could more or less read english well enough to benefit from that great tool) ?

If the latter, would not that make sense from time to time maybe, to actually use the most widely used name for an "object" which is not english, or the most widely used "name" for a non-english person, rather than the name which is most widely known by native-english-people ?

Er, well, *cough*, *cough*, just a target audience issue stepping in again. Oups.

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list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Lir and Wikipetiquette

body:
Lir is still being an uncooperative pest. Every several days I spend a couple
of hours undoing daft moves she makes and arguing about the same arguments
over and over again about naming conventions (hint: we name things in
English). She also has the very rude habit of changing people's messages on
her talk page from critical to supportive - this is beyond rude and IMO
somehow morally repugnant and anti-social.

I for one am sick of having to deal with this pest and I'm sure I'm not alone
in this. If our Wikipetiquette policy means anything at all I suggest we
either re-ban her temporarily or at least take away her move page privileges
as a warning.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Lir needs to go

body:
It looks like we just lost user:V due to Lir. IMO she has got to go or we will
lose more contributors.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:V


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 00:18, Anthere wrote:
>  Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] <lapollutionestsimauvaise at yahoo.com> wrote:
> we should refer to spacecraft from the USSR according to their Russian name-not according to the English name.
>
> I read the argument on that issue. Meanwhile, I had a foolish thought.
>
> Say, it is maybe not entirely clear in my mind...but is wikipedia intended only for those readers who are share english as their mother langage ?
>
> Or what is not also meant to be a deep-broad-reliable-extensive-neutral-wonderful encyclopedia, which could be a great resource for the whole world (i.e., any person who could more or less read english well enough to benefit from that great tool) ?

Wikipedia in every language is intended for everyone who can understand
that language. Or are you planning to kick me off the French wiki? ;)

> If the latter, would not that make sense from time to time maybe, to actually use the most widely used name for an "object" which is not english, or the most widely used "name" for a non-english person, rather than the name which is most widely known by native-english-people ?

In general we should use the form that's most widely used in the
language we're writing in; that's just plain sensible. Where alternate
forms exist (eg the form in the language(s) native to or used by or in
or near or with or in conjunction with the person, place or thing
described), they can and should be noted (and usually are!), and if
possible available as redirects.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] multi-language search

body:
On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 00:47, Andre Engels wrote:
> Could people please check the multi-language search at
> http://www.wikipedia.org/tools/wikisearch.php? I get at the moment all kinds
> of search results covering one another, making the result completely
> unreadable.

Looks okay to me. Browser, version, OS, screenshot?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Lir needs to go

body:
Disregard the user:V statement (it was made in a moment of anger caused by
what looked like another loss of a good contributor).

I still think Lir needs to be told to play nice or leave.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
 Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 00:18, Anthere wrote:
> Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
> we should refer to spacecraft from the USSR according to their Russian name-not according to the English name.
>
> I read the argument on that issue. Meanwhile, I had a foolish thought.
>
> Say, it is maybe not entirely clear in my mind...but is wikipedia intended only for those readers who are share english as their mother langage ?
>
> Or what is not also meant to be a deep-broad-reliable-extensive-neutral-wonderful encyclopedia, which could be a great resource for the whole world (i.e., any person who could more or less read english well enough to benefit from that great tool) ?

Wikipedia in every language is intended for everyone who can understand
that language.

Oh, but will we ever be as deep-broad-reliable-extensive-neutral-wonderful an encyclopedia than the english one ??? It is probable only english and maybe spanish language can reach the neutrality through multiple points of views from all over the world.

Or are you planning to kick me off the French wiki? ;)

Never never never never never never never never, Brion friend ;-)
True for anybody who should come and participate in a constructive way.

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subject: [Wikitech-l] multi-language search

body:
On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 01:42, Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
> Besides it searches in fr.wikipedia.com and eo.wikipedia.com instead of
> *.org databases.

Oops! Fixed. Got russian, chinese, czech as well. (Though search on
Unicode wikis is currently somewhat broken still...)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] questions about the SQL structure

in_reply_to: <20021116232331.GA1224@tavaiah>; from taw@users.sourceforge.net on Sun, Nov 17, 2002 at 12:23:31AM +0100

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 16, 2002 at 02:15:40PM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> > If we port this to Postgres, and then expand yet again, we'll be in good
> > shape if some kind soul wants to donate an Oracle license, because we
> > won't have to worry about MySQLisms or PostgreSQLisms in doing the port
> > to Oracle.
>
> Don't even dare to suggest such thing. Should Wikipedia ever cease to be
> runable on 100% Open Source system, it will cause immediate fork of
> the project.

Although I haven't followed this discussion closely, I think Jonathan
was only saying that we should avoid MySQLisms and PostgreSQLisms so
that we *could* run on Oracle.  That makes sense to me, even though we
never would run on Oracle.

We should use, to whatever extent possible, "vanilla" SQL so that we
can easily port to a different DB engine if we want.  I don't think we
would ever use Oracle, and I am *certain* we would never make changes
so that our software would *require* Oracle... for exactly the reason
you mention.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Uploaded cracking attempt

in_reply_to: <1037496533.1069.117.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org>; from brion@pobox.com on Sat, Nov 16, 2002 at 05:28:51PM -0800

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> 3) Allow HTML files to be uploaded, but attempt to strip out javascript.
> This could be annoying.

At first thought, this seems faily easy.  Just replace all instances
of the word 'javascript' with 'java-script' in uploads?

There are probably reasons why this would suck, but it would be easy,
no?


from_name: Jonathan Walther

body:
On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 03:50:27AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>Brion Vibber wrote:
>> 3) Allow HTML files to be uploaded, but attempt to strip out javascript.
>> This could be annoying.
>
>At first thought, this seems faily easy.  Just replace all instances
>of the word 'javascript' with 'java-script' in uploads?
>
>There are probably reasons why this would suck, but it would be easy,
>no?

Not so easy; javascript can be embedded in html tag properties.  To
strip out all such javascript you would need a fullblown HTML parser.
That is why sites like slashdot and kuro5hin and others say "here is a
limited number of html tags you can use, nothing else", and those tags
are pure tags, such as <h2>, never tags with properties, like
<h2 align="center">

Hope this helps.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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from_name: Bridget

from_email: Bridget

subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandal bots

body:
i was watching some city bot spam recent changes and saw the bot wasn't logged in under any name. it occured to me that we should set some kind of limit to the amount of editing that an unregistered user can do so that it's harder to use a bot.

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandal bots

body:
On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 04:30:57AM -0800, Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
>   i was watching some city bot spam recent changes and saw the bot wasn't
>   logged in under any name. it occured to me that we should set some kind of
>   limit to the amount of editing that an unregistered user can do so that
>   it's harder to use a bot.

Your own flood of tiny, continual edits is as annoying as the city bot.
You are making the Recent Changes page useless again.  Perhaps you could
use the Preview button a lot while you are editing, then think,
cogitate, invest some mental effort, and make a real contribution other
than changing an articles punctuation, and taking 10 edits to do so?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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from_name: Matt M.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:vandals

body:
> > * TMC (though whether it's the same as the
> > TMC we know of old, who knows)
>
> I had no involvement with any edits made as "TMC".
> Whatever happened on Saturday (when the above was
> sent), I missed it.

If I remember correctly, the vandalism was done by a party logged in as
"Throbing Monster Cock" with one "b" in "throbing". Another vandal was "Edd
Poor" with two "d"s.

Matt (Montrealais)
Montreal, Quebec


from_name: Larry Sanger

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Encyclopedia meta-searcher up and running

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>>Looks good. I think H2G2 (http://www.h2g2.com) deserves to be listed, it
has much stricter and more consistent quality control than Everything2.<<

Thanks!

Done!  Any other suggestions???  It's easy to add new sources.

Larry (still struggling to stay off the list ;-) )
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


list: sifter-l

source: wayback-mbox

from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: RE: [Sifter-l] Links to other Wikipedia articles

body:
Axel brought to our attention something I don't recall anyone else ever having mentioned: the issues of links from "sifted" articles.

We should definitely address this issue.

When we leave Wikipedia via ISBN, we get an intermediary disclaimer page.

When we leave Wikipedia via an external link, there is (currentl) no warning. You just have to notice the different color of the link, or perhaps you might remember to glance at either the URL textbox of your browser.

If Sifter-pedia has a distinctive page look, that might help, too.

-----Original Message-----
From: Axel Boldt [mailto:axelboldt@yahoo.com]
Sent: Sunday, November 17, 2002 3:54 PM
To: sifter-l@nupedia.com
Subject: [Sifter-l] Lings to other Wikipedia articles

I have a technical question: suppose I review an article and want to
import it into sifter, but it has lots of links and See alsos pointing
to other Wikipedia articles that haven't yet been imported. How should
we deal with those links?

One idea would be this: following such a link brings the reader to a
disclaimer page "You are now leaving the peer reviewed encyclopedia
project and entering Wikipedia, where anybody can edit any article.
Click here to proceed."

As soon as one of those articles is imported into sifter, the
disclaimer link would automatically change into a sifter-internal link.
This assumes that article titles in Wikipedia and sifter are identical,
which I think is a good thing anyway.

Other ideas?

Axel

P.S. Name proposal: ReviewedEncyclopedia.org

__________________________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Lir needs to go

body:
Maveric, as always I agree with you -- and you still carry my proxy (i.e., I'll vote with you on this).

We need to craft some written guidelines, a short list of no-no's -- so we can point to it and say, "You've violated this once too many times. Take a day/week/whatever suspension".

We also have to deal with the aftermath of a username ban, should our sponsor, Mr. Wales, agree to such a thing.

A "banned" user might just (a) post anonymously or (b) create a new alias. We would then face the puzzle of correlating the new contributions with the old user; it could get tricky.

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Mayer [mailto:maveric149 at yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 4:22 AM
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: Lir needs to go

Disregard the user:V statement (it was made in a moment of anger caused by
what looked like another loss of a good contributor).

I still think Lir needs to be told to play nice or leave.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
Jonathan,

I thank you for the flattering remarks about my technical ability.

Bear in mind, though, that my mere 1 week of experience with the
Wikipedia database, combined with my utter lack of knowledge of the code
it supports, make me reluctant to "back up" any particular proposal to
change the database.

So for, the only change I've felt confident about was Jimbo's proposed
transformation of T.M.C.'s username to 'TMC'. The query Brion wrote was
just a data update, not a change in structure.

Some general rules:
1. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
2. Don't "fix" something you don't understand.
3. Hacking at something usually leaves knife marks.

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikitech-l] Too many darn queries!

body:
Brion,

Thank you for posting the queries which each page view request triggers. These might be optimized somewhat, as you suggested.

I'm ever more concerned, though, with the pauses of 10 seconds or more -- some even lasting several minutes! -- during which no access to the Wikipedia is possible at all.

Are these "no access" periods due to the page view queries? I thought the delays were caused rather by table locks.

In my experience with MS SQL Server 6.5 (and above), mere read-only queries do not cause table locking. Rather, it is only update queries which lock tables -- especially when performed within a "transaction".

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:vandals

body:
Oi, veh.

I already apologized for the "F.A." episode -- which was half a dozen Wikipedia edits to call attention to this very issue. I won't be doing it again; that's implicit in the apology.

Also, I never post on weekends: I'm too busy.

Maybe we need to go with the "grey list" & "e-mail authentication" ideas that Neil Harris proposed.

Ed Poor


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:

> we should refer to spacecraft from the USSR according to their Russian
> name-not according to the English name.

But the English wikipedia has agreed on using English names. For the
title of the article, that is. The "native" name can be prominently
mentioned in the opening paragraph.

I agree that it sometimes feels funny when I follow a link to some place
I never heard of before, and it turns out to be a major city or region
here in Germany ;-) but it seems to be the best solution. And, we can
always redirect the native name to the English one.

Magnus


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] multi-language search

body:
Could people please check the multi-language search at
http://www.wikipedia.org/tools/wikisearch.php? I get at the moment all kinds
of search results covering one another, making the result completely
unreadable.

Andre Engels


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: vandalism spree

body:
>I still think the "VANDALISM in progress" page is a terribly named page
>which encourages juvenile behavior, and the ALL CAPS SHOUTING is
>entirely unnecessary, especially now that we have watchlists.

I think the shouting should go, too, and for the same reason.

kq


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
> Hi all,
>
> I took a some time out the past few days and used my developing Perl
> skills to write an encyclopedia meta-search engine, which will at least
> temporarily live at:
>
> 	http://www.seeatown.com/search/

Looks good. I think H2G2 (http://www.h2g2.com) deserves to be listed, it has
much stricter and more consistent quality control than Everything2. They
cover quite a few fringe topics and their articles are generally more humorously
written, but it's free and has the words "Don't Panic" in large, friendly
letters on it. Too bad they don't use the FDL or something similar.

Regards,

Erik

--
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NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


from_name: Jason Richey

subject: [Wikitech-l] Request for Danish mailing list (Was: Request for setting up of the Polish mailing list)

in_reply_to: <014e01c28daf$4b6504e0$cdf5f6ce@james>; from clist@visi.net on Sat, Nov 16, 2002 at 03:32:32PM -0500

body:
The list has been created...

Jason

Christian List wrote:

> > Anybody else need a list?
>
> Could we please have a WikiDA-l at wikipedia.org for the danish Wikipedia.
> I am willing to be the administrator.
>
> Regards
> Christian
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

subject: [Wikitech-l] multi-language search

body:
On 18-11-2002, Brion Vibber wrote thusly :
> On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 00:47, Andre Engels wrote:
> > Could people please check the multi-language search at
> > http://www.wikipedia.org/tools/wikisearch.php? I get at the moment all kinds
> > of search results covering one another, making the result completely
> > unreadable.
>
> Looks okay to me. Browser, version, OS, screenshot?

Besides it searches in fr.wikipedia.com and eo.wikipedia.com instead of
*.org databases.

Regards,
Kpjas.


subject: [Sifter-l] Larrypedia, the free reliable encyclopedia ;)

body:
Magnus, I love your "pre-alpha" version of sifter.

I guess we're free to joke around a bit with a pre-alpha release (or "non-release", one might say).

I like the look: a calm, blue background for the top and left strips.

I like also the 2 colors of links:
* red for "missing links", i.e., no approved article yet
* blue for good links, i.e., it leads to another approved article

I see you have incorporated Axel's request for a "disclaimer" page :-)

Suggestions:

* wider margins, especially on the right (see article.php?title=Biology) -- I prefer 8 to 12 pixels.
* column headings for the Recent Changes page: Article, Reviewer, Date

Excellent start! Keep up the good work!!

Ed Poor
"opinions mine, not those of the nice folks who pay me"


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Erik's team certification proposal

body:
> I'm still seeing way too many similarities between having multiple themed
> Sifter groups and Erik's team certification proposal. What is the putpose
> of
> Erik's idea? From what I gather it is to create selections of articles
> that
> have been reviewed by different groups. Each group would have its own
> rules
> on certification and on who they decide should be group members. These
> members would "certify" certain articles based upon those criteria and
> then a
> list of articles certified by any particular group would be automatically
> generated. Heck, this can be done right now without any change to the
> software so long as group members manually added articles to a list.

Actually, what I proposed is very similar to what you propose:
- Every user has a list of trusted teams.
- There may be a default team that is trusted by all users, possibly the one
that applies the most rigid certification criteria.
- When a user views an article, he gets a notification:

 "This article has been certified by Team X"
 "An [[older version]] of this article has been certified by Team X"
 "This article has been certified by Teams X, Y, and Z"

-- depending on whether the article has been changed or not since the
certification, and on whether several teams have certified it or just one. Only
teams trusted by the user would be listed here. It would be possible, as you
suggest, to show the differences between the older version and the new,
uncertified one (which is easiest if both versions are stored in the same database).

Furthermore, in order to solve the problem of stumbling across uncertified
content even if you don't want to, I have suggested to give the user the
option to view the entire Wikipedia in a mode where only articles certified by at
least one team are displayed. This would allow all types of filtering,
including the family filters that some people want.

My proposal has several advantages over a simple static HTML sifter:

- Teams can work according to different criteria. They can certify high
quality articles, low quality ones, factually correct ones, stylistically correct
ones, neutrally written ones etc. With different rules and different goals,
they would be open not just to certified experts but to anyone who wants to
take part in the quality selection process.

- It gives users the option to have both the advantages of certification and
to enjoy Wikipedia as a huge, dynamic project -- it is part of the editing
process, not separate from it. Certification, by default, is only an
indicator, not a filter.

- It allows the combination of approval criteria (several trusted teams) for
indication and filtering, something that is only possible if the filtering
is done within Wikipedia.

- It makes it possible for a team culture to grow and thrive within
Wikipedia (instead of requiring users to join separate sifter projects), thereby
greatly increasing the potential size of the effort. It's a very wiki-ish idea
because it relies a lot on social interaction.

The idea does not contradict the Sifter project, every team could define a
static HTML repository where its certified articles are stored as Larry
suggested.

Note that my original proposal was posted to the wikitech list and only
forwarded here in part. It is here:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2002-October/001089.html

Regards,

Erik

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Static HTML Wikipedia (CD-ROM)

body:
On 16-11-2002, Steve Rawlinson wrote thusly :
> There seems to be some interest in creating a static HTML distribution
> (dump) of Wikipedia, most notably it is requested on the
> Wikipedia:Database_download page and in Feature Requests #596830 on
> Sourceforge.  This would allow people to download the Wikipedia for use
> offline, for example from a CDROM.
>
> So, I have started work and made my initial version (English only)
> available online for anyone on this list to evaluate and test.  I am
> looking for feedback, suggestions, bug reports and general comments.
>
> http://www.rawlinson.ca:8080/wikipedia/index.html
>
> Please do not attempt to mirror the site as my server and bandwidth won't
> be able to handle it.  The site is only intended for developers to try and
> give feedback.  Once everyone is happy with it I will make .tar and .iso
> packages available for distribution.

Thanks for your work. I am looking forward to the "final" release.

I think this information should be passed on to the major Linux distros
manufacturers. It might be a plus for them to bundle a free encyclopedia
in their distribution packs. This way Wikipedia reaches very wide audience.

Regards,
Kpjas.


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandal bots

body:
On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 07:45, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 04:30:57AM -0800, Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
> >   i was watching some city bot spam recent changes and saw the bot wasn't
> >   logged in under any name. it occured to me that we should set some kind of
> >   limit to the amount of editing that an unregistered user can do so that
> >   it's harder to use a bot.
>
> Your own flood of tiny, continual edits is as annoying as the city bot.
> You are making the Recent Changes page useless again.  Perhaps you could
> use the Preview button a lot while you are editing, then think,
> cogitate, invest some mental effort, and make a real contribution other
> than changing an articles punctuation, and taking 10 edits to do so?

It would be a beneficial habit for Lir to start using the Minor Edit
button.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:vandals

body:
On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 09:40, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> Maybe we need to go with the "grey list" & "e-mail authentication" ideas
> that Neil Harris proposed.
>
Those are profoundly bad ideas for Wikipedia. They represent a complete
shift in the basic policy of openness, trust, and ease of use that makes
this project successful.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Oliver Pereira wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I've just joined this list (two weeks after discovering the Wikipedia),
> and I thought I'd leap into this argument straight away with a
> controversial view, just as my way of saying hello. :)
>
> As far as I can tell, traditional paper-based encyclopaedias had articles
> under common names simply so that people could find them easily. If every
> common name just said "see [less common name]", the readers would become
> annoyed, and reject the encyclopaedia.
>
> With the Wikipedia's automatic redirection scheme, this constraint has
> disappeared. Anyone can look up any article in the Wikipedia under any
> name they want, and be redirected to the article in the blink of an eye.
> (Assuming the redirects have all been put in, of course.) So the
> traditional reason for putting everything under its most common name has
> disappeared.
>
> It seems to me that experts on a topic often want the title of the article
> to be "correct" - whether this means having a book's full and
> unabbreviated title, a person's full name in their original language, or
> whatever. Whereas people with less knowledge just want to be able to find
> it or link to it using the name they know best.
>
> With the redirection scheme in place, can't we have our cake and eat it?
> The experts can put the "correct" name as the title, and make redirection
> pages for all the different abbreviations, translations, colloquial
> variations, and so on. (They would also put these abbreviations,
> translations, colloquial variations in the introductory paragraph of the
> article itself, for reference purposes.) Everyone else can then freely use
> the common names and let the redirection direct them to the "correct"
> name.
>
> Wouldn't that please everybody?

No, because the point of contention is that people disagree on what is the
"correct" name.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: vandalism spree

body:
On Sun, 2002-11-17 at 20:44, TMC wrote:
> tarquin wrote:
> > seems we have multiple vandals:
> >
> > * TMC (though whether it's the same as the
> > TMC we know of old, who knows)
>
> I had no involvement with any edits made as "TMC".
> Whatever happened on Saturday (when the above was
> sent), I missed it.

It was evidently someone who participates in Wikipedia or is otherwise
fascinated by its participants, given the tributes (not of a desired
kind, to be sure) to TMC, Ed Poor, Lir, Ram-Man, and the Wikipedia
moderator concept.

What interests me is not particularly trying to discern who it was, but
the fact that the action was entirely a response to the atmosphere of
paranoia about "vandalism" that pervades so much of the discussion about
Wikipedia.

I still think the "VANDALISM in progress" page is a terribly named page
which encourages juvenile behavior, and the ALL CAPS SHOUTING is
entirely unnecessary, especially now that we have watchlists.

That said, I'm glad that there are people who enjoy keeping the site
clean.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] multi-language search

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>Could people please check the multi-language search at
>http://www.wikipedia.org/tools/wikisearch.php? I get at the moment all kinds
>of search results covering one another, making the result completely
>unreadable.
>
I tried it using "smith" as the search word, and clicking all languages
on except English.  This gave me two overlaps related to the Japanese
and Korean wikis.  If I remove one of those languages I get a single
overlap; if I remove both the problem goes away.

I hope this helps.

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikitech-l] multi-language search

in_reply_to:
<1037610400.1734.182.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org> from Brion Vibber
 at "Nov 18, 2002 01:06:39 am"

body:
> On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 00:47, Andre Engels wrote:
> > Could people please check the multi-language search at
> > http://www.wikipedia.org/tools/wikisearch.php? I get at the moment all kinds
> > of search results covering one another, making the result completely
> > unreadable.
>
> Looks okay to me. Browser, version, OS, screenshot?

Never mind, it looks okay again now. Don't know what was going on.

As a completely different, yet for me related issue: Would it be possible to
allow a subsequence word search? That would be quite useful for searching
interlanguage links, since one could look for America, Amerika, Amerique and
whatever other variations there are with Ameri*, or for Chemie, Chemics,
Chemica etc. with chemi*. If it is possible but too slow, consider allowing
it for title search only.

Andre Engels


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
Lir wrote:

>we should refer to spacecraft from the USSR according to their Russian name-not
>according to the English name.

As it happens, Lir, I agree with you.  English corruptions suck.
(And while we're at it, that's "SSSR", not "the USSR" ^_^.)
But the Wikipedia standard for a rather long time
(as long as *I*'ve been here, at any rate)
has been to use the most common name used in English.
Now, if you want to change that, then this is the place
to make your arguments.  But if you just move articles now,
then you're only going to make people mad at you.
You *first* have to convince the rest of them to agree with you,
and *then* you and I (and anybody else that cares about it)
can start moving articles over to their new names.

This might, of course, never happen.
You might never manage to convince the other people.
If I had to guess, I'd guess that it will never happen,
although I might be wrong, so you should present your arguments.
But please don't try to force your opinion on Wikipedia now.
People will just change it back, and they'll start to hate you,
and then they'll ban you (some are trying to do this already),
and then you won't be able to do anything on Wikipedia ever again.
*I* don't think that that would be a very good outcome.
We all need to work *together*, and that means compromises sometimes.

-- Toby

PS:  Have you signed up for the new English mailing list <wikiEN-l>?
     You can go to <http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l>
     if you want to subscribe to it; else you might miss some responses.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid


subject: Re: [Sifter-l] Links to other Wikipedia articles

body:
I got a non-functional (fault of the web space provider!) version of my
to-be Sifter software ready. You can find it at

    http://mitglied.lycos.de/gnupedia/main.php

Everything works, except actually importing articles, which is due to a
deactivated PHP option of the web space provider. I have manually
imported a few articles from my local copy for you to try out.

ATTENTION: This is pre-beta (pre-alpha, actually), so some things won't
work at all, some are only half-working. You can apply as reviewer,
though, for me or Lee or Larry to grant ;-)

The database will get a clean start once we go online for real, so you
couldn't break anything even if it would work...

Magnus

Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Axel brought to our attention something I don't recall anyone else ever having mentioned: the issues of links from "sifted" articles.
>
>We should definitely address this issue.
>
>When we leave Wikipedia via ISBN, we get an intermediary disclaimer page.
>
>When we leave Wikipedia via an external link, there is (currentl) no warning. You just have to notice the different color of the link, or perhaps you might remember to glance at either the URL textbox of your browser.
>
>If Sifter-pedia has a distinctive page look, that might help, too.
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Axel Boldt [mailto:axelboldt@yahoo.com]
>Sent: Sunday, November 17, 2002 3:54 PM
>To: sifter-l@nupedia.com
>Subject: [Sifter-l] Lings to other Wikipedia articles
>
>
>I have a technical question: suppose I review an article and want to
>import it into sifter, but it has lots of links and See alsos pointing
>to other Wikipedia articles that haven't yet been imported. How should
>we deal with those links?
>
>One idea would be this: following such a link brings the reader to a
>disclaimer page "You are now leaving the peer reviewed encyclopedia
>project and entering Wikipedia, where anybody can edit any article.
>Click here to proceed."
>
>As soon as one of those articles is imported into sifter, the
>disclaimer link would automatically change into a sifter-internal link.
>This assumes that article titles in Wikipedia and sifter are identical,
>which I think is a good thing anyway.
>
>Other ideas?
>
>Axel
>
>P.S. Name proposal: ReviewedEncyclopedia.org
>
>__________________________________________________
>Do you Yahoo!?
>Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site
>http://webhosting.yahoo.com
>_______________________________________________
>Sifter-l mailing list
>Sifter-l@nupedia.com
>http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/sifter-l
>_______________________________________________
>Sifter-l mailing list
>Sifter-l@nupedia.com
>http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/sifter-l
>
>
>


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:vandals

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 09:40, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
>
>>Maybe we need to go with the "grey list" & "e-mail authentication" ideas
>>that Neil Harris proposed.
>>
>>
>>
>Those are profoundly bad ideas for Wikipedia. They represent a complete
>shift in the basic policy of openness, trust, and ease of use that makes
>this project successful.
>
>
I agree that openness, trust, and ease of use are essential goals.

The greylist idea is intended to make the Wikipedia accessible to users
who share a proxy with a vandal, not to restrict the 99.99% of ordinary
users, logged-in or otherwise.

The alternative is to blacklist IPs shared with vandals, which also
blocks all other users on those IP ranges from editing.  Unless you have
another alternative?

Neil


from_name: Steve Callaway

subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandal bots

body:
I am actually fairly guilty of this, particularly when working on pages with
complex tables. Is this really such a big deal? Save often is my motto. But
I'll save less frequently if the consensus suggests this is the right way to
go....

----- Original Message -----
From: "The Cunctator" <cunctator at kband.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 4:38 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] vandal bots

> On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 07:45, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 04:30:57AM -0800, Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
> > >   i was watching some city bot spam recent changes and saw the bot
wasn't
> > >   logged in under any name. it occured to me that we should set some
kind of
> > >   limit to the amount of editing that an unregistered user can do so
that
> > >   it's harder to use a bot.
> >
> > Your own flood of tiny, continual edits is as annoying as the city bot.
> > You are making the Recent Changes page useless again.  Perhaps you could
> > use the Preview button a lot while you are editing, then think,
> > cogitate, invest some mental effort, and make a real contribution other
> > than changing an articles punctuation, and taking 10 edits to do so?
>
> It would be a beneficial habit for Lir to start using the Minor Edit
> button.
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Ed needs a break

body:
This is the second time in one week I have said goodbye. It just might be permanent this time.

Without a useful anti-vandalism policy, it's just no good. I understand the fatigue and heartache of Mav, Julie, Larry and others who have packed up and left. I've got better things to do with my time.

If someone will run Brion's TMC name-change script -- and also remove the "Edd Poor" username (note the double-D) -- I might think of returning.

But if Cunctator gets to veto every hard security suggestion, and Jimbo lets things go on as he has, I just don't see the point.

Wearily,

Ed Poor


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
> we should refer to spacecraft from the USSR according to their
> Russian name-not according to the English name.

Is this an obvious fact, or your own point of view?  Shouldn't
Wikipedia (NPOV) explain that both names have been used?

During WWII, the German V2 rockets were called V2 by the German
political propaganda and by the British, but the German engineers
called them A4.  Obviously, both names are correct in their context.

There seems to be a trend lately, that the native spelling of foreign
names is introduced in English, rather than using old Anglicisms.
For example, the country where Minsk is capital is now called Belarus.
In older English texts, you can find the names Byelorussia (an English
spelling of Belarus) or "White Russia" (an English translation of the
name).  But Germany is still called "Germany", not "Deutschland".

This can not be explained by English politeness towards Belarus or
widespread admiration of Belarus culture or language, but because
Belarus is so remote and unimportant that giving up the old English
names is an acceptable loss.  The word "Germany" would be a greater
loss to English language, so it still lives on in daily use.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/


from_name: Oliver Pereira

subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
Hello,

I've just joined this list (two weeks after discovering the Wikipedia),
and I thought I'd leap into this argument straight away with a
controversial view, just as my way of saying hello. :)

As far as I can tell, traditional paper-based encyclopaedias had articles
under common names simply so that people could find them easily. If every
common name just said "see [less common name]", the readers would become
annoyed, and reject the encyclopaedia.

With the Wikipedia's automatic redirection scheme, this constraint has
disappeared. Anyone can look up any article in the Wikipedia under any
name they want, and be redirected to the article in the blink of an eye.
(Assuming the redirects have all been put in, of course.) So the
traditional reason for putting everything under its most common name has
disappeared.

It seems to me that experts on a topic often want the title of the article
to be "correct" - whether this means having a book's full and
unabbreviated title, a person's full name in their original language, or
whatever. Whereas people with less knowledge just want to be able to find
it or link to it using the name they know best.

With the redirection scheme in place, can't we have our cake and eat it?
The experts can put the "correct" name as the title, and make redirection
pages for all the different abbreviations, translations, colloquial
variations, and so on. (They would also put these abbreviations,
translations, colloquial variations in the introductory paragraph of the
article itself, for reference purposes.) Everyone else can then freely use
the common names and let the redirection direct them to the "correct"
name.

Wouldn't that please everybody?

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+


subject: Re: [Sifter-l] Larrypedia, the free reliable encyclopedia ;)

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Magnus, I love your "pre-alpha" version of sifter.
>
Thanks! :-)

>I guess we're free to joke around a bit with a pre-alpha release (or "non-release", one might say).
>
I restrained myself from adding the image on Larry's wikipedia user page
to the sidebar ;-)

>I like the look: a calm, blue background for the top and left strips.
>
>I like also the 2 colors of links:
>* red for "missing links", i.e., no approved article yet
>* blue for good links, i.e., it leads to another approved article
>
>I see you have incorporated Axel's request for a "disclaimer" page :-)
>
Actually, this has been sitting around for about a week now; Larry tried
to get it online, but he has database problems and is busy with the
meta-encycopedia-search. Lee wanted to set it up on his piclab server,
but he's been busy as well. The wikipedia server might be a bad choice,
as we'd probably suffer the same outages as wikipedia...
So, you'll have to stick with the ads a little longer :-(

>Suggestions:
>
>* wider margins, especially on the right (see article.php?title=Biology) -- I prefer 8 to 12 pixels.
>* column headings for the Recent Changes page: Article, Reviewer, Date
>
Both done.

>Excellent start! Keep up the good work!!
>
For that, you just made it to sysop on the test site ;-)

Magnus


subject: [Wikitech-l] multi-language search

body:
On 18-11-2002, Andre Engels wrote thusly :
> > On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 00:47, Andre Engels wrote:
> > > Could people please check the multi-language search at
> > > http://www.wikipedia.org/tools/wikisearch.php? I get at the moment all kinds
> > > of search results covering one another, making the result completely
> > > unreadable.
> >
> > Looks okay to me. Browser, version, OS, screenshot?
>
> Never mind, it looks okay again now. Don't know what was going on.
>
> As a completely different, yet for me related issue: Would it be possible to
> allow a subsequence word search? That would be quite useful for searching
> interlanguage links, since one could look for America, Amerika, Amerique and
> whatever other variations there are with Ameri*, or for Chemie, Chemics,
> Chemica etc. with chemi*. If it is possible but too slow, consider allowing
> it for title search only.
Subsequence word search would be definitely useful, however it might be
also useful to translate query according to language of the database
searched. We could use (in future ?) word and phrase equivalents (they are not
necessarily translations) from interwiki links.

Regards,
Kpjas.


from_name: Axel Boldt

body:
--- Steve Rawlinson <steve at rawlinson.ca> wrote:

> As you suggest, I expect the primary use for the static HTML
> will be for a CDROM that people without (or expensive)
> Internet access could use.

It doesn't even have to be expensive: as soon as your internet access
is metered, and the clock is constantly ticking, your surfing habits
change drastically. You simply don't read a three page article about
Catherine the Great "just for fun" online in such a setting. And
metered internet access and metered telephone charges are the norm
throughout the world.

So I think the CDROM Wikipedia meets a great need. In fact, I think
many users in this situation would even want to download Wikipedia so
that they can read it afterwards in peace and quiet. For that, a
minimalistic version that cuts out User: and Talk: and is optimally
compressed would be desirable.  Maybe even put the images in a separate
package. How small can you make it?

Axel

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com


from_name: Steve Rawlinson

body:
On Sun, 17 Nov 2002, Giskart wrote:

> Why should someone buy or use a encyclopedia on a CD-ROM and not use the
> "normal way" online?

As you suggest, I expect the primary use for the static HTML will be for a
CDROM that people without (or expensive) Internet access could use.  I
think that schools and libraries might also greatly benefit from it.

There are some other good reasons for doing this.  Plain HTML format means
that anyone can easily put Wikipedia on their server or LAN for read-only
use.  They won't need to install PHP, MySQL, configure the software,
import the database, etc.

Another possibility:  if the updates to the static HTML were frequent
enough, other's could mirror the site which would reduce the load on
Wikipedia.  Editing and new articles would still need to be done on the
main Wikipedia site, but read-only access could be distributed.

Finally, having lots of HTML copies of Wikipedia around also servers as a
backup.  If for some unfortunate reason the Wikipedia server was ever
destroyed or taken offline, the articles (in HTML format) wouldn't be
lost.

It's also just neat to have your own copy of Wikipedia on CD :)

> Mayby those CD-ROM readers would also like to write or inprove articles.
> It would be nice if there is a way for off-line Wikipedians to work at
> wikipedia.

I agree, the more people working on Wikipedia the better, but I think
having some type of network connection is absolutely necessary for
contributing to Wikipedia.

> Idea;
> someone reads a article on the Wikipedia cd-rom and wants to change
> something. He clicks on ?edit this page?. He gets a form that sends a
> email to Wikipedia by use of his email program.

An interesting idea, but I think if they have email then they are also
very likely to have a web access and could submit changes in the "normal"
way online.  I know of people who currently work this way because their
Internet connection is expensive.  They only connect long enough to get
the most recent changes and upload any updates.

Best Regards,
Steve Rawlinson


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Minor changes (Was: vandal bots)

body:
Steve Callaway wrote:

>I am actually fairly guilty of this, particularly when working on pages with
>complex tables. Is this really such a big deal? Save often is my motto. But
>I'll save less frequently if the consensus suggests this is the right way to
>go....

I never hide minor edits, so it's not a big deal to *me*.
However, I gather that this would be helpful to other people.

As for saving often, that's certainly good policy.
But you may have to save in an external editor instead.
Indeed, you may want to do all of the editing externally,
only copying the text to the Wikipedia edit box
when you want to preview the wiki markup.

My browser crashes more often than my external editor, in any case.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
Steve Callaway wrote:

>You'll find it's CCCP in Cyrillic, Toby.... :-)

No, I'll find it's "????" in Cyrillic.
Which *looks* like "CCCP", but that's merely an illusion.
-_^

-- Toby

PS:  I wrote "SSSR" in my last post because it was in Latin-1,
     so I did a transcription, less evil than a translation.
     This post is in iso-8859-5 -- I hope.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
Tarquin wrote in part:

>I think the time has come for sysops to be able to ban usernamed users.

Let me tell y'all how I spent my weekend.

First, Friday morning (15:00 UCT), I got email from <lorp at myfonts.com>,
who identified himself as [[User:Hotlorp]]
(which was eventually confirmed when he
left a message on my user talk page while signed in).
Apparently his IP (194.117.133.198) was blocked.
Note that Hotlorp contacted me, not the admins that had blocked him,
because I have an email address on my user page,
which is advertised on [[Wikipedia:Administrators]].
Since it had been a week and the IP was dynamic, I unblocked it
once I got his message, which was around noon (19:00 UCT).
I mailed this information to Hotlorp then.

Hotlorp tried again later (around 19:00 UCT),
but was on IP 194.117.133.196, which was still blocked.
So I unblocked that when I got the message (around 23:00 UCT).
Then he came on and made some edits a few hours later
(around 4:00 UCT or so), and I went to bed.

While I was sleeping (around 12:00 UCT), a vandal arrived,
using bots (apparently) to splatter goatse across Wikipedia.
This vandal thwarted our standard blocking mechanisms
by using signed-in user names, which were chosen to make fun of us.
The vandal made fun of Scipius, who responded to the vandal,
but also made fun of people that had nothing to do with
responding to the vandalism: Ed Poor, TMC, proposed moderators.
These moderators were mentioned only on the mailing lists,
and Ed and TMC were also participants in those discussions.
Conclusion: The vandal has been reading the mailing lists.

Suspicion of the vandal fell on 194.117.133.196 (and 194.117.133.198),
which were the last IPs to be used for goatse
and which had (as mentioned) been unblocked less than a day earlier.
These IPs had few redeeming edits -- after all,
all of Hotlorp's good edits didn't show up in their user contribs.
However, these IPs weren't blocked again right away,
and there was no confirmation posted to the VANDALISM page
that these IPs were actually being used by the vandal.
An hour after arriving, the vandal left.
I saw no record of any IPs' being banned at that time.

A couple of hours later (shortly before 15:00 UCT),
Koyaanisqatsi blocked these IPs to stop the vandalism.
In email with KQ, we've been unable to figure out why
the last evidence of the vandalism now on Wikipedia
ended hours before the blocking, even though KQ
remembers seeing vandalism on Recentchanges just before blocking
(and saw that the vandalism stopped after the blocking).
Were people no longer reporting the vandal's user names
to [[Wikipedia:VANDALISM IN PROGRESS]]?
Or was the vandal now creating pages that people were deleting?
(But there were no deletions during that time either;
the last deletion log entry connected to goatse is 12:55 UCT.)
Indeed, AFAICT, there is no particular evidence
that this particular vandal was ever using these IPs,
only that some goatse vandal (maybe a different person entirely)
had used them a week ago.

Whether or not KQ actually blocked the vandal,
he did block somebody else.  Hotlorp had just returned,
and he managed to get in 3 edits before he was blocked again.
He emailed me again (no contact information for KQ)
and I unblocked the IPs when I got the message (just before 24:00 UCT).
I watched [[VANDALISM IN PROGRESS]] like a hawk all night,
looking for a sign of returning goatse, but there was none,
and has been none since.

The problem, of course, is that we're blocking an innocent user
when it's not at all clear that we're even blocking the vandal.
And it's a cruel joke to tell the innocent user
to contact the admin that blocked them
when they have no method of doing so besides editing pages.

Solutions:

* Block more intelligently:

** Let admins see the IP of signed in users.
   Then we can at least know for sure who to block.

** Let admins whitelist a user name known to use a dynamic IP.
   (This can always be undone later if abused.)

** Allow admins to see all contributions from a given IP,
   whether or not they were made anonymously.
   This will allow us to check for multiple users
   and give us the opportunity to create the above whitelist
   at the same time that we block the vandal.

* Give blocked people a way to contact admins:

** At the very least, include a link to [[Wikipedia:Administrators]]
   in the message telling people that they've been blocked,
   so that it will be easy for them to get in touch with me.

** Other admins can advertise their email addresses there too.
   (Risk: I've never yet received inappropriate mail at <toby+wikipedia>,
   and this is the only case where I've been contacted by a blockee.)

** Set up a mailing list for administrators to take blocking complaints
   and give blocked people a link to that on the block message.
   (Same risk as before, and we only need a few admins to sign up.)

* Others?

-- Toby


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Too many darn queries!

body:
On Mon, 2002-11-18 at 06:32, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> In my experience with MS SQL Server 6.5 (and above), mere read-only
> queries do not cause table locking. Rather, it is only update queries
> which lock tables -- especially when performed within a "transaction".

Ah, but this is MySQL, where black is white, up is down, and ignorance
is strength. :)

SELECTs don't (or at least shouldn't) block each other, but the implicit
table-level locking of intermingled SELECTs and UPDATEs can make this
indirectly happen.


from_name: Jonathan Walther

subject: [Wikitech-l] Too many darn queries!

body:
On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 12:08:06AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>I think it was once suggested that breaking the page counters to a
>separate table (two numeric columns, ID and count) might be a good idea.

4th normal form isn't really practical; let's shoot for 3rd normal, and
switch to a real database :)

I'm also thinking that maybe a users "options" are better off encoded in
a Cookie?  For instance, Set-Cookie: options=101010101010
Would save us from doing ANY database accesses; and if the user ever
changed their display preferences, we could set a new cookie.  And
unlike the "login" cookie, this one would be session specific, never
carry across sessions.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikitech-l] question about namespaces

body:
Is a separate integer namespace property actually necessary?  I got the
impresion that namespaces were designated by a prefix in the article
title, such as Special:, User:, or Wiki:

In that case, one could find all the articles in the Wiki: namespace by
doing this query:

    SELECT article_id FROM cur WHERE title LIKE "Wiki:%" ;

And if we had some indexes defined, that search would actually be
extremely quick to do.

Any reasons why we need to keep a separate column for "namespace"?
If we want to keep namespaces in their own column, maybe we should have
a table of namespace id's and their corresponding prefix, and then NOT
put that prefix as part of the articles actual title.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikitech-l] question about namespaces

body:
On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 09:55:35AM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
>>In that case, one could find all the articles in the Wiki: namespace by
>>doing this query:
>>
>>    SELECT article_id FROM cur WHERE title LIKE "Wiki:%" ;
>
>That's how I did it in Phase II. Did work, but this works better. And,
>namespaces are currently *not* part of the title in the database!

Ah, ok. In Phase II was an index defined on the article_title column?
Postgres has b-tree, r-tree, hash, and various other kinds of indexes
that make even string searching blazing fast.

In the sample database Brion posted, I must have overlooked the table
that mapped between namespace Id's, and the name of the namespace.

Namespaces are convenient conceptually, but are they really necessary?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikitech-l] question about namespaces

body:
On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 10:13:35AM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
>>Postgres has b-tree, r-tree, hash, and various other kinds of indexes
>>that make even string searching blazing fast.
>
>OK, we can change that, *once* we've switched to Postgres...

I'm doing preparatory work for a mod_wiki written in C.  It may never be
suitable for the Wikipedia proper, but I have found the Wikipedia
version of Wiki to be the most useful as far as community building goes,
so I want it to at least be capable of running the Wikipedia.

Once it's running I'll experiment with the current database, and then
solicit feedback.  Don't expect it before Christmas.

>It's no table, it is in Language.php...

Ah hah.  Magic numbers embedded in the code.  Not nice :-(

>>Namespaces are convenient conceptually, but are they really necessary?
>
>Yes! How else to tell apart [[Vulture]] and [[user:Vulture]]? And where
>to talk? etc.

So we have the following namespaces: User, User_talk, Global (or Root), Talk,
and Special?  Is Wikipedia actually a separate namespace, or is it just
a prefix to some articles?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikitech-l] question about namespaces

body:
On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 10:58:01AM +0100, Andre Engels wrote:
>> So we have the following namespaces: User, User_talk, Global (or Root), Talk,
>> and Special?  Is Wikipedia actually a separate namespace, or is it just
>> a prefix to some articles?
>
>Yes, Wikipedia is a namespace, as are Wikipedia talk, Image and Image talk.
>I'm not 100% sure about Special, though - there are no 'real' pages in there,
>just query results.

What is the purpose of namespaces?  Why not have the following tables:

current_articles
current_binaries
current_discussions

previous_articles
previous_binaries
previous_discussions

Knowing whether something is an article, binary, or a discussion seems
to cover what we need.

What other uses were envisioned for namespaces that can't be accomplished
with a "properties" field for each article, where for each possible value
of the properties field, a host of things are defined in another table,
like who exactly can edit the page, who exactly can look at it, and who
exactly can even see that it exists by the existance of links pointing to
it in other articles?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikitech-l] question about namespaces

body:
On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 11:26:09AM +0100, Jens Frank wrote:
>> current_articles
>> current_binaries
>> current_discussions
>>
>> previous_articles
>> previous_binaries
>> previous_discussions
>>
>> Knowing whether something is an article, binary, or a discussion seems
>> to cover what we need.
>
>You would have to double a lot of effort: You need separate SQL-statements
>for things like update_article, update_discussion, update_wikipedia, ....
>Using a namespace you just have one additional attribute to keep track of
>and your code stays simple and readable.

Au contraire.  I believe the code would become more simple and readable.
Notice I never suggested "a table per namespace".  I suggested only the
6 tables that covered every circumstance I could think of.

And there are already a lot of queries; having less queries and making
of them refer to a slightly different set of tables doesn't strike me as
in any way complicating things.  The complication comes when you
shoehorn different things into the same table.

My question remains, do we need namespaces for any other reason than to
know whether the row represents an article, binary, or discussion?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
On 11/19/02 2:12 AM, "Toby Bartels" <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> Solutions:
>
> * Block more intelligently:
>
> ** Let admins see the IP of signed in users.
>  Then we can at least know for sure who to block.
>
> ** Let admins whitelist a user name known to use a dynamic IP.
>  (This can always be undone later if abused.)
>
> ** Allow admins to see all contributions from a given IP,
>  whether or not they were made anonymously.
>  This will allow us to check for multiple users
>  and give us the opportunity to create the above whitelist
>  at the same time that we block the vandal.
>
> * Give blocked people a way to contact admins:
>
> ** At the very least, include a link to [[Wikipedia:Administrators]]
>  in the message telling people that they've been blocked,
>  so that it will be easy for them to get in touch with me.
>
> ** Other admins can advertise their email addresses there too.
>  (Risk: I've never yet received inappropriate mail at <toby+wikipedia>,
>  and this is the only case where I've been contacted by a blockee.)
>
> ** Set up a mailing list for administrators to take blocking complaints
>  and give blocked people a link to that on the block message.
>  (Same risk as before, and we only need a few admins to sign up.)
>
> * Others?

How about not blocking?


subject: [Wikitech-l] question about namespaces

body:
On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 12:56:18PM +0100, Magnus Manske wrote:
>* article ("blank:")
>* "talk":
>* "user:"
>* "user talk:"
>* "wikipedia:"
>* "wikipedia talk:"
>* "image:"
>* "image talk:"
>* "special:" (not stored in the database, generated on-the-fly)

Thanks for the enumeration, Magnus.  It is very helpful.  Could you tell
me, how are Wikipedia namespace articles different from regular
articles?  Are they special in that only sysops can edit them?  Are they
special in that what is in them results in changes being made to the
database and the behavior of the Wikipedia?

>IMHO we could live with a good-but-imperfect database until we have
>explored other ways of optimizing the db/software. One of them would be
>switching to Postgres on a test server.

That is what I'm exploring here.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject: [Wikitech-l] question about namespaces

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:
> Could you tell
> me, how are Wikipedia namespace articles different from regular
> articles?  Are they special in that only sysops can edit them?  Are they
> special in that what is in them results in changes being made to the
> database and the behavior of the Wikipedia?

They are special in that they are one of several categories of "stuff
that isn't articles". When we want to count or show *encyclopedia
articles*, it's very convenient to strip out such things with "WHERE
cur_namespace=0" rather than a whole series of string comparisons.

And, of course, there's the issue of keeping talk page namespaces
assigned in a consistent way. If we treated Wikipedia: pages as regular
articles, we'd get Talk:Wikipedia:Foobar in Engish, and similar
monstrosities in other languages.

Also note that image: pages are _descriptions_ of uploaded files (not
necessarily images; it's a misnomer and I would very much prefer to
change the namespace to file: or somesuch, particularly since image: is
overloaded in links to show the image inline).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
You'll find it's CCCP in Cyrillic, Toby.... :-)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Toby Bartels" <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>; <wikiEN-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 10:29 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

> Lir wrote:
>
> >we should refer to spacecraft from the USSR according to their Russian
name-not
> >according to the English name.
>
> As it happens, Lir, I agree with you.  English corruptions suck.
> (And while we're at it, that's "SSSR", not "the USSR" ^_^.)
> But the Wikipedia standard for a rather long time
> (as long as *I*'ve been here, at any rate)
> has been to use the most common name used in English.
> Now, if you want to change that, then this is the place
> to make your arguments.  But if you just move articles now,
> then you're only going to make people mad at you.
> You *first* have to convince the rest of them to agree with you,
> and *then* you and I (and anybody else that cares about it)
> can start moving articles over to their new names.
>
> This might, of course, never happen.
> You might never manage to convince the other people.
> If I had to guess, I'd guess that it will never happen,
> although I might be wrong, so you should present your arguments.
> But please don't try to force your opinion on Wikipedia now.
> People will just change it back, and they'll start to hate you,
> and then they'll ban you (some are trying to do this already),
> and then you won't be able to do anything on Wikipedia ever again.
> *I* don't think that that would be a very good outcome.
> We all need to work *together*, and that means compromises sometimes.
>
>
> -- Toby
>
>
> PS:  Have you signed up for the new English mailing list <wikiEN-l>?
>      You can go to <http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l>
>      if you want to subscribe to it; else you might miss some responses.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
toby wrote:
>Whether or not KQ actually blocked the vandal,
>he did block somebody else.  Hotlorp had just returned,
>and he managed to get in 3 edits before he was blocked again.
>He emailed me again (no contact information for KQ)
>and I unblocked the IPs when I got the message (just before 24:00 UCT).

My email is on my userpage, and there's also of course the "email this
user" function on each userpage--neither of which, unfortunately,
would have been any help, as I left town to shoot 2 interviews for a film.

As for the snafu I participated in, I'm still more than a little
confused.  Suffice it to say I've had enough of banning for awhile.

kq


subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>* Block more intelligently:
>>* Give blocked people a way to contact admins:
>>* Others?

>How about not blocking?

An obvious solution to the problems of this weekend.
But I don't think that you'll get the rest of Wikipedia
to go along with your suggestion.
Do you think that the other ideas will make things better?

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
The Cunctator:
>>How about not blocking?

Toby:
>An obvious solution to the problems of this weekend.
>But I don't think that you'll get the rest of Wikipedia
>to go along with your suggestion.
>Do you think that the other ideas will make things better?

Assuming people are allowed to continue blocking, could we modify the
blocked IP log to list who's blocked when, and when unblocked (this
would require breaking every 50 entries or so off onto an archive).
Toby, Laurence, and I could not figure out at what time I blocked the
.96 and .98 IPs.  I had a range it could have been in, Toby had one
also; we probably got within 15 minutes or so.

kq


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
 Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
The Cunctator wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>* Block more intelligently:
>>* Give blocked people a way to contact admins:
>>* Others?

>How about not blocking?

An obvious solution to the problems of this weekend.
But I don't think that you'll get the rest of Wikipedia
to go along with your suggestion.
Do you think that the other ideas will make things better?
======

A sysop being able to act by preventing more than one save per xx of time(dunno 2/5 minutes for example) for

- a specific ip
- or a specific user name
- or all non-logged ips

for a given time (dunno again - say 1 hour) ?

These options allow to slow down vandalism process, in particular *bots*.

It gives more time to (quietly) hunt for the vandals ips, and then eventually proceed to a block.

It does not prevent a "good" wikipedian (unjustifiably blocked by very quick protection measures) to actually edit a page though (even if it might be unpleasant to have to wait to save a page...maybe a good way to promote consequent editing ;-))

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your site
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from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Too many darn queries!

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:

> I'm also thinking that maybe a users "options" are better off encoded in
> a Cookie?  For instance, Set-Cookie: options=101010101010
> Would save us from doing ANY database accesses; and if the user ever
> changed their display preferences, we could set a new cookie.  And
> unlike the "login" cookie, this one would be session specific, never
> carry across sessions.

Which reminds me: Should some user options be *only* saved in cookies? I
think about edit box size, maybe some "tiny skin" option, etc.
The reason for this is what I encounter every day: The settings I have
are great on my 1280 screen at home, but they s**k on my 800x600 screen
at work. Changing that would make the 'pedia at home look weird in turn.
I've been working on a "small icons only" skin for tiny
screens/resolutions. I am far from finished, though.

Magnus


subject: [Wikitech-l] question about namespaces

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:

> Is a separate integer namespace property actually necessary?  I got the
> impresion that namespaces were designated by a prefix in the article
> title, such as Special:, User:, or Wiki:
>
> In that case, one could find all the articles in the Wiki: namespace by
> doing this query:
>
>    SELECT article_id FROM cur WHERE title LIKE "Wiki:%" ;

That's how I did it in Phase II. Did work, but this works better. And,
namespaces are currently *not* part of the title in the database!

Magnus


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Too many darn queries!

body:
On Die, 2002-11-19 at 09:08, Brion Vibber wrote:
> I think it was once suggested that breaking the page counters to a
> separate table (two numeric columns, ID and count) might be a good idea.

It would probably help with our current configuration. If we really want
to make the switch to PostgreSQL, it can't harm.

We could also use the InnoDB plugin. Both Slashdot and K5 use it for
performance reasons, and it shouldn't require us to modify much/any
code. Besides better locking, it could provide huge performance benefits
because of its caching.

http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/InnoDB_overview.html

InnoDB provides MySQL with a transaction-safe (ACID compliant) table
handler with commit, rollback, and crash recovery capabilities. InnoDB
does locking on row level and also provides an Oracle-style consistent
non-locking read in SELECTs. These features increase multiuser
concurrency and performance. There is no need for lock escalation in
InnoDB, because row level locks in InnoDB fit in very small space.
InnoDB tables support FOREIGN KEY constraints as the first table type in
MySQL.

InnoDB has been designed for maximum performance when processing large
data volumes. Its CPU efficiency is probably not matched by any other
disk-based relational database engine.

Technically, InnoDB is a complete database backend placed under MySQL.
InnoDB has its own buffer pool for caching data and indexes in main
memory. InnoDB stores its tables and indexes in a tablespace, which may
consist of several files. This is different from, for example, MyISAM
tables where each table is stored as a separate file. InnoDB tables can
be of any size also on those operating systems where file-size is
limited to 2 GB.

--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


subject: [Wikitech-l] question about namespaces

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:

> Postgres has b-tree, r-tree, hash, and various other kinds of indexes
> that make even string searching blazing fast.

OK, we can change that, *once* we've switched to Postgres...

> In the sample database Brion posted, I must have overlooked the table
> that mapped between namespace Id's, and the name of the namespace.

It's no table, it is in Language.php...

> Namespaces are convenient conceptually, but are they really necessary?

Yes! How else to tell apart [[Vulture]] and [[user:Vulture]]? And where
to talk? etc.

Magnus


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
The Cunctator Wrote:
>No, seriously, how about not blocking?
>
>If you try to think of solutions to our problems that don't involve
>blocking, the solutions are generally much cleaner.
>
>For example,
>1. more powerful ways of searching and sorting edits,
>2. more powerful ways of rolling back edits
>3. Bayesian filtering of contributions
>
>I see #3 as an interesting solution that would deal with most of our
>problems.
>
>http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/background.html

I'd support trying it.  The current system is frequently inaccurate
and unfair, even without human or technical error.

how would it be implemented?  who has the power and interest to try it?

kq


subject: [Wikitech-l] InnoDB, counter updates

body:
I just learned a bit about InnoDB. While it seems to provide significant
performance advantages and reduce locking issues, it doesn't, in the
current stable version, support MySQL/MyISAM's FULLTEXT index. That's
the reason Kuro5hin currently only allows 30 day searches. According to
InnoDB.com, MySQL 4/InnoDB will support FULLTEXT.

So InnoDB isn't an option for the time being. If we want to get quick
improvements, moving the article counters out of the CUR table sounds
like a good idea.

PostgreSQL appears to have a module for full text indexing:
http://techdocs.postgresql.org/techdocs/fulltextindexing.php

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>How about not blocking?
>
How do you propose we fend off vandals?
It sometimes seem there are too many of them and not enough of us to
revert their changes.

Granted, the new search feature which shows only the pages where the
user in question is the last to have edited will be extremely useful in
cleaning up.

May I suggest another utility to speed up the cleaning process for sysops:
one of:
* a "revert last edit" link
* a "restore this version" link available when viewing an old version


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] question about namespaces

in_reply_to:
<20021119093619.GA19883@reactor-core.org> from Jonathan Walther
 at "Nov 19, 2002 01:36:19 am"

body:
> So we have the following namespaces: User, User_talk, Global (or Root), Talk,
> and Special?  Is Wikipedia actually a separate namespace, or is it just
> a prefix to some articles?

Yes, Wikipedia is a namespace, as are Wikipedia talk, Image and Image talk.
I'm not 100% sure about Special, though - there are no 'real' pages in there,
just query results.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] Database

body:
On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, Magnus Manske wrote:

> Just how much RAM does the wikipedia server have?

2 gigs. Our databases collectively are somewhat larger than this and
increasing.

>     http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Orchard/5802/fastdb.html

Hmm. No php interface and doesn't speak normal SQL; performance known to
reduce dramatically when not all data fits in memory.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] X-System to Unicode conversion

body:
On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, [iso-8859-1] Chuck Smith wrote:
> We need to be able to allow our users to type in
> x-system or Unicode and have the result be in Unicode.
>  We also need to allow the users to view the Esperanto
> encyclopedia in x-system in case they are using an
> older browser that does not support it.  In the older
> software, this worked perfectly.  We also had an extra
> link on the top which allowed the user to switch their
> view simply from X-System to Unicode and back by
> manually editing a user preference.

Currently you must manually switch this on in your preferences, and you
get both X edit and X display or neither; I haven't had a chance yet to
hack in the big, friendly button at the top of the screen.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] question about namespaces

body:
On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 02:09:37AM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 10:58:01AM +0100, Andre Engels wrote:
> >>So we have the following namespaces: User, User_talk, Global (or Root),
> >>Talk,
> >>and Special?  Is Wikipedia actually a separate namespace, or is it just
> >>a prefix to some articles?
> >
> >Yes, Wikipedia is a namespace, as are Wikipedia talk, Image and Image talk.
> >I'm not 100% sure about Special, though - there are no 'real' pages in
> >there,
> >just query results.
>
> What is the purpose of namespaces?  Why not have the following tables:
>
> current_articles
> current_binaries
> current_discussions
>
> previous_articles
> previous_binaries
> previous_discussions
>
> Knowing whether something is an article, binary, or a discussion seems
> to cover what we need.

You would have to double a lot of effort: You need separate SQL-statements
for things like update_article, update_discussion, update_wikipedia, ....
Using a namespace you just have one additional attribute to keep track of
and your code stays simple and readable.

	JeLuF


from_name: Bridget

subject: [Wikipedia-l] stupid anglicization

body:
Yes, I agree there should be some agreement about what is done on wikipedia. This is why I, and others, keep advocating that wikipedia start becoming a democracy and voting on stuff. Atm, wikipedia is pretty totalitarian-basically if mav, larry, vibber, and one of a couple others doesn't agree with something, it doesn't happen. One of the things they don't agree with is the idea that wikipedia, rather than striving to maintain the mistakes of earlier information sources, we should strive to eliminate those mistakes.

Sadly, one of wikipedias basic premises amounts to, "And we should always strive for a anglo-americanized naming schema because this is america and if you want foreign names then maybe you should leave the country cuz this is america and this is the american wikipedia and we are gonna use american names here and thats the end of the discussion"

however, as far as I can tell far more people seem to support using native spellings of names, and that includes the use of non-western alphabets, an ability we have due to the power of #REDIRECT. It is also noteworthy that most of the people who speak out against using such "unamerican and inappropriate" naming generally make an argument stating, "Well, I tend to agree that we should use the native names but it's really not a big argument"

This of course is why I urge voting. It would certainly be worthless to have a vote tommorrow and never discuss the issue, rather we should have a permanent poll in which any user can change their mind at any time.

I also urge you to look at http://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/expinfo.html which I believe shows that we should use a naming such that satellites are named with roman numerals.

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
> ** At the very least, include a link to [[Wikipedia:Administrators]]
>    in the message telling people that they've been blocked,
>    so that it will be easy for them to get in touch with me.

I've added this to the CVS version, as soon as Brion or someone else updates
the code again, it's live.

As for blocking more intelligently, we definitely need this. Not blocking is
not an option -- this may work on less active wikis where you just let the
vandal work and then fix their changes when he gets tired, but there are
actually people who want to use Wikipedia in the meantime.

The easiest way to stop vandalism, of course, would be to limit new members
(automatically by requiring validated email addresses or manually by
approving each member individually) and to require signing in to edit pages. I don't
like that much either, but it would work.

Regards,

Erik

--
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from_name: Zoe

body:
Be sure that if you save into an external editor, that you re-type your apostrophes and quotation marks when you paste back into the Wiki space, some editors' special characters show up as weird characters on Wiki.
Zoe
 Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:Steve Callaway wrote:

>I am actually fairly guilty of this, particularly when working on pages with
>complex tables. Is this really such a big deal? Save often is my motto. But
>I'll save less frequently if the consensus suggests this is the right way to
>go....

I never hide minor edits, so it's not a big deal to *me*.
However, I gather that this would be helpful to other people.

As for saving often, that's certainly good policy.
But you may have to save in an external editor instead.
Indeed, you may want to do all of the editing externally,
only copying the text to the Wikipedia edit box
when you want to preview the wiki markup.

My browser crashes more often than my external editor, in any case.

-- Toby
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subject: [Wikitech-l] MySQL Configuration

body:
Steve Rawlinson wrote:
> So, could someone with database access send me the results of running the
> following two MySQL commands "SHOW STATUS" and "SHOW VARIABLES" (or post
> the output to the list for everyone if they look interesting).  I'll
> examine them and report my findings.

SHOW STATUS:
Aborted_clients 2182
Aborted_connects 136
Bytes_received 352728396
Bytes_sent 542290646
Com_admin_commands 0
Com_alter_table 0
Com_analyze 0
Com_backup_table 0
Com_begin 0
Com_change_db 1182929
Com_change_master 0
Com_check 0
Com_commit 0
Com_create_db 2
Com_create_function 0
Com_create_index 0
Com_create_table 0
Com_delete 49039
Com_drop_db 0
Com_drop_function 0
Com_drop_index 0
Com_drop_table 0
Com_flush 0
Com_grant 0
Com_insert 56839
Com_insert_select 577
Com_kill 0
Com_load 0
Com_load_master_table 0
Com_lock_tables 2
Com_optimize 0
Com_purge 0
Com_rename_table 0
Com_repair 0
Com_replace 0
Com_replace_select 0
Com_reset 0
Com_restore_table 0
Com_revoke 0
Com_rollback 1128135
Com_select 50875647
Com_set_option 2
Com_show_binlogs 0
Com_show_create 2
Com_show_databases 0
Com_show_fields 3
Com_show_grants 0
Com_show_keys 0
Com_show_logs 0
Com_show_master_status 0
Com_show_open_tables 0
Com_show_processlist 0
Com_show_slave_status 0
Com_show_status 1033074
Com_show_tables 0
Com_show_variables 4
Com_slave_start 0
Com_slave_stop 0
Com_truncate 0
Com_unlock_tables 0
Com_update 1538149
Connections 150023
Created_tmp_disk_tables 3227
Created_tmp_tables 159832
Created_tmp_files 4444
Delayed_insert_threads 0
Delayed_writes 0
Delayed_errors 0
Flush_commands 1
Handler_delete 521655
Handler_read_first 70887
Handler_read_key 121827385
Handler_read_next 472585953
Handler_read_prev 75011
Handler_read_rnd 27712353
Handler_read_rnd_next 283536234
Handler_update 22732289
Handler_write 128189283
Key_blocks_used 15582
Key_read_requests 2973620399
Key_reads 8490571
Key_write_requests 85209981
Key_writes 6021786
Max_used_connections 250
Not_flushed_key_blocks 0
Not_flushed_delayed_rows 0
Open_tables 64
Open_files 106
Open_streams 0
Opened_tables 544468
Questions 54979099
Select_full_join 1
Select_full_range_join 0
Select_range 38149
Select_range_check 0
Select_scan 33379
Slave_running OFF
Slave_open_temp_tables 0
Slow_launch_threads 23
Slow_queries 5197
Sort_merge_passes 6675
Sort_range 65131
Sort_rows 20281227
Sort_scan 13879
Table_locks_immediate 51901895
Table_locks_waited 622366
Threads_cached 0
Threads_created 150022
Threads_connected 90
Threads_running 1
Uptime 369589

SHOW VARIABLES:

back_log 50
basedir /usr/local/mysql/
binlog_cache_size 32768
character_set latin1
character_sets latin1 dec8 dos german1 hp8 koi8_ru latin2 swe7 usa7
cp1251 danish hebrew win1251 estonia hungarian koi8_ukr win1251ukr greek
win1250 croat cp1257 latin5
concurrent_insert ON
connect_timeout 5
datadir /usr/local/mysql/var/
delay_key_write ON
delayed_insert_limit 100
delayed_insert_timeout 300
delayed_queue_size 1000
flush OFF
flush_time 0
have_bdb NO
have_gemini NO
have_innodb NO
have_isam YES
have_raid NO
have_openssl NO
init_file
interactive_timeout 28800
join_buffer_size 131072
key_buffer_size 16773120
language /usr/local/mysql/share/mysql/english/
large_files_support ON
locked_in_memory OFF
log OFF
log_update OFF
log_bin OFF
log_slave_updates OFF
log_long_queries OFF
long_query_time 10
low_priority_updates OFF
lower_case_table_names 0
max_allowed_packet 1047552
max_binlog_cache_size 4294967295
max_binlog_size 1073741824
max_connections 250
max_connect_errors 10
max_delayed_threads 20
max_heap_table_size 16777216
max_join_size 4294967295
max_sort_length 1024
max_user_connections 0
max_tmp_tables 32
max_write_lock_count 4294967295
myisam_max_extra_sort_file_size 256
myisam_max_sort_file_size 2047
myisam_recover_options 0
myisam_sort_buffer_size 8388608
net_buffer_length 7168
net_read_timeout 30
net_retry_count 10
net_write_timeout 60
open_files_limit 0
pid_file /usr/local/mysql/var/www.wikipedia.org.pid
port 3306
protocol_version 10
record_buffer 131072
record_rnd_buffer 131072
query_buffer_size 0
safe_show_database OFF
server_id 1
slave_net_timeout 3600
skip_locking ON
skip_networking OFF
skip_show_database OFF
slow_launch_time 2
socket /tmp/mysql.sock
sort_buffer 524280
sql_mode 0
table_cache 64
table_type MYISAM
thread_cache_size 0
thread_stack 65536
transaction_isolation READ-COMMITTED
timezone UTC
tmp_table_size 33554432
tmpdir /tmp/
version 3.23.51
wait_timeout 28800

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] question about namespaces

body:
On Die, 2002-11-19 at 11:24, Jonathan Walther wrote:

> My question remains, do we need namespaces for any other reason than to
> know whether the row represents an article, binary, or discussion?

As has already been noted, namespaces are also used for User pages and
Wikipedia-specific pages. I don't think there's much sense in splitting
stuff up into separate tables, or adding these types of pages as
properties (how is that cleaner than what we have now?). As for storing
binaries in tables, this is not desirable with our current config (table
is already too big), and probably not desirable with PostgreSQL (we only
have your word on performance, and having them as files has various
advantages).

Having the names of the namespaces in the code may not look very clean,
but it actually is, because we need them in various translations ("Talk"
is called "Diskussion" in the German WP etc.), and it's better to have
all localization stuff in one place (Language*.php). If this is properly
documented, I don't see a problem.

Can we stick to the "if it's not broken, don't fix it" rule? If you want
to work on mod_wiki, I think it would be better to do it on a separate
mailing list (I'd actually be interested in that). If you want to help
with the PostgreSQL port of Wikipedia, we should focus on the table
structure, fulltext search, MySQLisms etc. It would probably be the most
efficient for one PostgreSQL expert to just convert everything that's
necessary and then put the code+db dump somewhere, then we can work on a
conversion script.

Other than that, we have many urgent issues, like fixing the current IP
blocking mechanism and giving sysops better tools to restore vandalized
pages.

Regards,

Erik
--
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Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization is stupid

body:
Well, no, I disagree that "*everyone* agrees" the names are incorrect.  In your example of Confucius, should we use the old-style Chinese transliteration or the new version?  Should we not transliterate at all but force those who only know the Latin alphabet to try to figure out his REAL name by only being able to look it up in Chinese ideographs?  An encyclopedia has to be usable.  If a person ONLY knows Confucius by that name, what purpose does it serve to force them not to be able to find his name because we, in our elititst "we know best and you're only idiots who can't be bothered to learn to speak Chinese" decided that his name would ONLY be in Chinese?
Zoe
 Oliver Pereira <omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:Oliver Pereira wrote:

> > With the redirection scheme in place, can't we have our cake and eat it?
> > The experts can put the "correct" name as the title, and make redirection
> > pages for all the different abbreviations, translations, colloquial
> > variations, and so on. (They would also put these abbreviations,
> > translations, colloquial variations in the introductory paragraph of the
> > article itself, for reference purposes.) Everyone else can then freely use
> > the common names and let the redirection direct them to the "correct"
> > name.
> >
> > Wouldn't that please everybody?

Brion Vibber replied:

> No, because the point of contention is that people disagree on what is the
> "correct" name.

No, the point of contention is that the current policy is designed to
perpetuate names which *everyone* agrees are incorrect.

I gave some examples of what I meant by "correct" in my message:
unabbreviated book titles, and original names of people. For the purposes
of this discussion, let's look at one fairly straightforward example:
Confucius. *Everyone* agrees that he was never called that in his
lifteime, and yet that is the version used in the Wikipedia, because it is
the name most commonly used by English-speaking people.

A lot of garbled anglicisations and abbreviations came about because
people didn't have the education (or linguistic skills, or patience, or
whatever else) to use the original names. An encyclopaedia is supposed to
be an educational tool. I see no reason why the Wikipedia should
perpetuate garbled versions of names if it can educate people as to what
the original versions were! It does this anyway (or should do) by giving
the original name in the introductory paragraph, so it would just be a
matter of swapping one name for another in the article title.

Of course there would be disagreement on what to adopt as the "correct"
names. But the fact that people would disagree on *how* to implement a
proposed policy is not sufficient reason not to implement a new policy at
all, especially given that everyone already disagrees on how to implement
the current one! Everyone would learn a lot from the arguments on what to
adopt as the "correct" name, and that, in my opinion, would be a good
thing.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk |
+-------------------------------------------+

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