from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia and Politics

body:
Angela wrote:

>>I would like to open up the issue of the WMF getting involved in political
>>matters, such as copyrights and patents.
>>
>>
>This has the potential to disqualify the Wikimedia Foundation from
>501(c)3 status which would mean, not only, that we need to pay tax,
>but also that we would then be severely restricted in the choice of
>grant applications open to us.
>
>According to http://www.irs.gov/charities/charitable/article/0,,id=120703,00.html
>: "no organization may qualify for section 501(c)(3) status if a
>substantial part of its activities is attempting to influence
>legislation (commonly known as lobbying)."
>
>If the Foundation were to have any such involvement, we would need to
>be very careful that our activities were aimed at educating people
>about these issues as opposed to encouraging people to lobby about
>them.
>
>
For a little more information on this, I should mention that the
restriction in section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code ("no
substantial part of the activities" of the organization may be aimed at
"attempting to influence legislation") does not contain an exception for
legislation that is somehow related to the organization's purpose. And
even efforts to educate people can be interpreted as "grassroots
lobbying" under IRS rulings and disqualify an organization from
501(c)(3) status. In particular, efforts at voter education that
coincide with election campaigns tend to come under scrutiny for this;
perhaps more so, in fact, than similar efforts that coincide with the
consideration of specific legislation.

How is it, then, that we see general nonprofit organizations getting
involved in politics? One option is to create a separate organization
under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code for political
activity. This second organization can still be exempt from taxation
itself, but significantly, donations to it are not tax-deductible. The
alternative is for the organization to elect to be subject to section
501(h) of the Internal Revenue Code, which replaces the "no substantial
part" restriction with specific limitations on the organization's
political expenditures.

The basic requirement with a 501(c)(4) lobbying affiliate is that the
two organizations "be separately incorporated and keep records adequate
to show that tax deductible contributions are not used to pay for
lobbying." (Regan v. Taxation With Representation of Washington, 461
U.S. 540.) Whether additional restrictions apply to the relationship
between the two organizations is not always certain, either in IRS
regulations or in terms of the U.S. Constitution. For the sake of
simplicity-don't laugh-I've left out political organizations under
section 527, which are somewhat similar in concept, but less likely to
be affiliated with a specific 501(c)(3) organization and have different
IRS reporting requirements.

Section 501(h) creates a different set of restrictions, and requires the
organization to report its political expenditures to the IRS regularly.
The IRS publication cited by Angela discusses the 501(h) option briefly.
The exact expenditure limitations are based on a percentage of overall
expenditures and capped at $1 million overall. However, "grassroots
lobbying", which is what I guess we might focus on most, is subject to a
lower scale and cap.

In either case, the effort needed for the Wikimedia Foundation to get
involved in any substantial kind of political activity would add
considerable complexity to financial and accounting matters. I'm not
sure if our financial procedures are in a state to support this kind of
change, although certainly they need to get there, regardless of how
politically active we become. However, the Foundation's mission as I
understand it is education and the dissemination of information, and I
think any political activity should be incidental to that mission.

--Michael Snow


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox


list: wikien-l

from_name: Rick

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: A user seems to have spent the day reverting
	articles which appeared to be legitamite edits

body:
It was no mistake.  This person is a troll.  This is the same person who came onto the mailing list as an anon, expressing amazement that his edits to the September 11 attacks page were reverted.  His wide-eyed innocent act doesn't fool me.  He's already filed an RfC on me even though I explained to him on his Talk page why I had acted in the manner I did on the edits he's questioning.  I have no desire to continue discussion with him.

RickK

"KNOTT, T" <tknott at qcl.org.uk> wrote:
Some admins watch recent changes, and have vandalism in progress on
their watchlists. Other don't. Rick is one of the former. In fact, he
deals with vandalism a lot! His user page regularly gets vandalised, and
his talk page regularly gets messages from vandals that he has blocked
(Who are trying to troll him, or merely expressing an opinion about his
sexuality, or his mothers sexuality etc ;-). He probably mistook you for
one.

Theresa

-----Original Message-----
From: R E Broadley [mailto:20041111 at stardate.freeserve.co.uk]
Sent: 26 November 2004 11:37
Cc: English Wikipedia
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: A user seems to have spent the day
revertingarticles which appeared to be legitamite edits

And the fact that he deleted the contents of his talk page as soon as
I'd started this discussion with him also seemed suspicious to me. Why
would he delete our discussion unless he had something to hide?

R E Broadley wrote:

> Tim,
>
> One of us is interpreting the diff displays backwards. I thought it
> was RickK doing the deleting, (including the deletion of the
asterisk).
>
> I shall double-check.
>
> Apologies in advance if it was me reading it wrong, although from one
> of the comments RickK said to me, he did actually confirm that he was
> removing stuff, which reinforced my belief that I was interpreting the

> diff logs correctly.
>
> Regards,
> Edmund
>
> Tim Starling wrote:
>
>> R E Broadley wrote:
>>
>>> When I went back to the users talk page, I noticed that they had
>>> deleted
>>> their talk page, along with the recent discussion on the reverts,
but
>>> thanks to Wikipedia history, I managed to capture the URL of a
version
>>> where the discussion was still there. It is here below:-
>>>
>>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=User_talk:RickK&oldid=7859165
#Articles_reverted_but_no_reason_given
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> The reverts in question look fine to me. The edits were:
>>
>> * Unexplained removal of text saying that the gospels were "compiled
>> from a much larger literature in 327AD under the orders of
>> Constantine the Great", rolled back
>> * Sneaky removal of an asterisk, breaking a bulleted list, rolled
back
>> * Unexplained deletion of a paragraph, rolled back
>>
>> This isn't a violation of policy. I think it's odd that Rebroad
>> characterised these edits as follows:
>>
>> "I appreciate there were spelling mistakes that were obvious to you,
>> but I'm guessing they weren't obvious to the person who put some
>> effort into adding the additional information. And if you felt it was

>> biased, couldn't you have let them know this also?"
>>
>> RickK was not correcting spelling or removing biased information, he
>> was reverting deletion. I think he was well within his rights to
>> remove this complaint from his talk page. I wouldn't mind if the
>> complainant was removed from this mailing list either.
>>
>> -- Tim Starling
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
>
>

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

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

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 All your favorites on one personal page ? Try My Yahoo!


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Fatal Error on start page

body:
On Nov 26, 2004, at 10:50 AM, Roy wrote:
> Any ideas about this message:
>
> Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in
> c:\apache\htdocs\mediawiki\includes\Parser.php on line 1532
>
> I get it right away when I try to go to the main wiki page.

It would help if you could tell us some information about your system,
such as:
* Do other pages on the wiki work?
* What version of MediaWiki are you running?
* Is this a fresh, new install, or have you been using it successfully
and it only recently developed the problem?
* Is it an upgrade? If so, from what version? Did it stop working
immediately after the upgrade?
* If this problem only recently started, have you recently made any
changes to the system?
* Have you made any customizations to the configuration?
* Have you made any customizations to the code?
* Have you changed any of the user interface messages in the MediaWiki:
namespace? If so, which ones? In particular, did you change
[[MediaWiki:Mainpage]]?

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

subject: [Wikitech-l] Implementing Editing Revision Summaries

body:
Brion-
> On Nov 25, 2004, at 10:03 AM, Nick Triantos wrote:
>> In any case, I'd like to see this merged back into the HEAD tree, even
>> if Wikipedia and family don't use it.

> I would not accept it in the tree.

How about if it was limited so that only the summary for the top revision
could be edited?

Regards,

Erik


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Please correct false Nauruan interwiki name

body:
= Ekakair?

I believe that "Naoero" alone is more appropriate for an interwiki link.

In addition, Delaporte's dictionary and grammar are from 1907 I
believe, and the orthography he uses is not the same one used in
modern Nauruan, and some of his work may be inaccurate (missionary
linguistic literature from the period often is, for example
Batchelor's Ainu dictionary makes a distinction between voiced and
unvoiced consonants when the language itself does not, a Dungan
dictionary attempts to explain the etymology for the word "black
smoke" from the word "tobacco" when in fact it is the opposite, etc -
at the time, the general technique was that the missionary would learn
the language, and then write a grammar without consulting native
informants). Thus, I believe it would be better to check with a native
speaker.

In fact, from what I know, "Nauri" is the modern Nauruan name for the
language. "Naoero" in modern orthography is "Nauru", as in "Nauru
bwiema" and not "Naoero boeiema".

Mark

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 18:14:42 +0100 (MET), cdamvvwgs at gmx.ch
<cdamvvwgs at gmx.ch> wrote:
> Maybe you know the Nauruan language or the Nauruan Wikipedia. There used
> to be false interwiki link names for it. For example, "Nauruose" was a
> false name for the word "Nauruan" in Nauruan language. Currently, there's
> another false name for it, "Nauri". But since I've got a very rare grammar
> about the Nauruan language, I know now the real and only correct name. It
> is "Ekakair? Naoero". If it's possible, could you please change the false
> name "Nauri" to the correct name "Ekakair? Naoero" ?? Thank you very much
> for any help.
>
> P.S.: It seems that English Wikipedia can't read the letter U with a tilde
> (N with tilde = ?) because it declares it as a "bad title". The German and
> the Nauruan Wikipedia don't do so. Please check out the last letter in
> this template: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorlage:Lateinisches_Alphabet.
> Thank you and best wishes.
>
> --
> Geschenkt: 3 Monate GMX ProMail + 3 Top-Spielfilme auf DVD
> ++ Jetzt kostenlos testen http://www.gmx.net/de/go/mail ++
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: cdamvvwgs at gmx.ch

body:
Maybe you know the Nauruan language or the Nauruan Wikipedia. There used
to be false interwiki link names for it. For example, "Nauruose" was a
false name for the word "Nauruan" in Nauruan language. Currently, there's
another false name for it, "Nauri". But since I've got a very rare grammar
about the Nauruan language, I know now the real and only correct name. It
is "Ekakair? Naoero". If it's possible, could you please change the false
name "Nauri" to the correct name "Ekakair? Naoero"??? Thank you very much
for any help.

P.S.: It seems that English Wikipedia can't read the letter U with a tilde
(N with tilde = ?) because it declares it as a "bad title". The German and
the Nauruan Wikipedia don't do so. Please check out the last letter in
this template: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorlage:Lateinisches_Alphabet.
Thank you and best wishes.

--
Geschenkt: 3 Monate GMX ProMail + 3 Top-Spielfilme auf DVD
++ Jetzt kostenlos testen http://www.gmx.net/de/go/mail ++


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia

body:
On Nov 26, 2004, at 11:36 AM, Mark Williamson wrote:

For the same reason you hate arguing without resorting to strawmen.

> It has been noted by more than one developer that, as long as a
> language is a natural language with native speakers, they do not mind
> using some time on it. And really, honestly, how long does it take to
> create a new Wikipedia, for a developer? And I have to ask, with all
> due respect, why on earth you hate minority languages?
>
> Mark
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Erdal Ronahi

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Kurdish wiktionary is off capitalisation

body:
Gerard Meijssen schrieb:

> Hoi,
> I read the first message from Erdal, and asked on the mediawiki
> channel if someone could oblige me.. And they did :) the Kurdish
> wiktionary is now off article capitalisation :) jeronim was so good as
> to do the deed :)

Thanks. I changed all the page titles (there were not too many).
Erdal


body:
It may seem to you that en.wikipedia is totally devoid of this sort of
systemic bias, but in fact no Wikipedia is.

While one the one hand English speakers come from diverse environments
and have diverse cultural experiences, the majority of en.wikipedians
are American (from the USA), and after that are British, Australians,
and Canadians. While this may not be a single nation or a single
culture, the collective cultural experience of the populations of each
of those countries are very similar, especially when compared to that
of, say, Laos or the Maldives. But even the cultures of Laos, the
Maldives, and the aforementioned Anglophone nations seem very similar
when compared with the cultures of the Navajo, Apache, and Hopi (which
are also very distinct from one another, to the same degree that
American culture is different from Laotian culture), part of the
reason being that the former 6 cultures are patriarchal and patrilocal
(the patrilocal part I am not sure of for Laos and the Maldives, in
the Anglophone countries it is, nowadays, the norm for most people to
establish their own home but traditionally they are patrilocal), while
the latter three are matrilocal and matriarchal. If you ask a Laotian,
Maldivian, American, Brit, Australian, or Canadian who he or she is,
after you get a first name, if you say "Yes, but /who/ are you?"
chances are the reply after that will have something to do with a name
inherited from the father and his father in turn and so on (thus they
are patronymic, which seems to be the convention for all UN
memberstates, but I am not sure), while if you ask a Navajo, Apache,
or Hopi you will get a response which includes a name inherited
maternally for generations untold (thus they are "matronymic"; I
believe Tibetan culture is matriarchal but I am not sure, I do know
though that it does allow polyandry in some situations which is fairly
rare among world cultures and usually only occurs in matriarchal
societies, just as polygyny rarely occurs in matriarchal societies).

In addition to this most fundamental cultural experiential difference,
there are plenty more differences which mean that ANY Wikipedia will
have some form of systemic bias.

In en.wikipedia, many articles about strictly American concepts do not
note that fact, and many articles - especially those from 1911 EB -
speak negatively of taboo subjects such as incest, cannibalism,
pederasty, and other things which should be dealt with neutrally. For
example, before I made edits to it, the Ainu article was very racist
and offensive in that it said the Ainu were "primitive" - human
cultures are not primitive if they achieve the requirements a culture
must achieve: telling people where they came from, explaining natural
processes (some cultures, more recently, have replaced this with an
*independent* concept of religion, for example French culture has no
single explanation for the origin of the world and individual natural
processes: some people believe the world was created by a single god,
others may believe it was created by gnomes, others believe in more
complex modern western scientific theory, some may believe it was
sculpted out of clay) - it talked about how hairy they are; note that
not only is this a stereotype, it is from a British point of view: the
Ainu of the time might've described the authors of that article as
bald or almost completely bare, or lacking of any significant amount
of body hair, etc. while they may have actually been what I personally
would consider to be relatively hairy.

Little words like "unfortunately", "fortunately", "tragically",
"interestingly", "peculiarly", "strangely" and short phrases like "one
strange thing about ___ is that it ___" are one of the largest sources
of systemic bias in en.wikipedia. If we are describing a language and
we say one feature is peculiar and interesting, people for whom that
is the native language will beg to differ because to them it is
completely ordinary. We might say it is fortunate that nobody was on a
bridge when it collapsed, but another culture may believe that people
who are standing on a bridge when it collapsed fall not to their death
but to an island paradise. We might say somebody's death is tragic,
but some cultures may see it as a blessing (some cultures view death
positively).

And if you find yourself wanting to respond to any of this with "but
______ IS _____" (for example, "death IS tragic!"), that just shows
the extent of the problem. So even experienced, well-respected
Wikipedians may let through their POV filters things that do not
strike them as POV, because of their collective cultural experiences
and because of their own POV.

Thus this is not just a problem for minority language Wikipedias, it
is a problem for ALL Wikipedias which cannot be completely solved in
the near future (though we can begin to combat it by for example
searching for all occurances of the words noted above and remove them,
as I began to do [removed about 20 occurances of "fortunately" and
"unfortunately"] but it is very repetitive and I had to constantly go
forward and backward between Google and Wikipedia, though this does
not mean I won't do it in the future)

Mark

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 21:50:24 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Mark Williamson wrote:
>
> >But, as noted by Henry, this is difficult even for established
> >Wikipedias and community standards vary depending on the values of the
> >community in question. Thus, what is NPOV to the Basque Wikipedia
> >might seem very POV to the Chinese Wikipedia.
> >
> >
> I think this is the single biggest problem with minority-language
> Wikipedias ever being useful NPOV encyclopedias.  If all speakers of a
> language are relatively homogenous, in terms of location, culture, and
> values, then their encyclopedia will with high probability by quite biased.
>
> By contrast, wikipedias like en:, de:, and fr: have people from multiple
> continents and backgrounds contributing.  An "American English" or
> "Australian English" Wikipedia would, I would hazard a prediction, be
> much inferior in terms of neutrality to the current English Wikipedia,
> simply as a result of the fact that all Americans (or Australians)
> editing a Wikipedia would represent a much narrower set of viewpoints
> than the current large and diverse group of editors.
>
> I'm not sure this is surmountable for languages in which a large and
> diverse group of language speakers don't even exist.  Note that not only
> very tiny languages are affected by this: I imagine that the Turkish and
> Greek Wikipedias are less likely to present a reasonable account of the
> Turkish-Greek conflict than en:, fr:, or de: are.
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
>
>
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Collective POV ("systemic bias") rampant,
	difficult to combat [was: Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia]

body:
It may seem to you that en.wikipedia is totally devoid of this sort of
systemic bias, but in fact no Wikipedia is.

While one the one hand English speakers come from diverse environments
and have diverse cultural experiences, the majority of en.wikipedians
are American (from the USA), and after that are British, Australians,
and Canadians. While this may not be a single nation or a single
culture, the collective cultural experience of the populations of each
of those countries are very similar, especially when compared to that
of, say, Laos or the Maldives. But even the cultures of Laos, the
Maldives, and the aforementioned Anglophone nations seem very similar
when compared with the cultures of the Navajo, Apache, and Hopi (which
are also very distinct from one another, to the same degree that
American culture is different from Laotian culture), part of the
reason being that the former 6 cultures are patriarchal and patrilocal
(the patrilocal part I am not sure of for Laos and the Maldives, in
the Anglophone countries it is, nowadays, the norm for most people to
establish their own home but traditionally they are patrilocal), while
the latter three are matrilocal and matriarchal. If you ask a Laotian,
Maldivian, American, Brit, Australian, or Canadian who he or she is,
after you get a first name, if you say "Yes, but /who/ are you?"
chances are the reply after that will have something to do with a name
inherited from the father and his father in turn and so on (thus they
are patronymic, which seems to be the convention for all UN
memberstates, but I am not sure), while if you ask a Navajo, Apache,
or Hopi you will get a response which includes a name inherited
maternally for generations untold (thus they are "matronymic"; I
believe Tibetan culture is matriarchal but I am not sure, I do know
though that it does allow polyandry in some situations which is fairly
rare among world cultures and usually only occurs in matriarchal
societies, just as polygyny rarely occurs in matriarchal societies).

In addition to this most fundamental cultural experiential difference,
there are plenty more differences which mean that ANY Wikipedia will
have some form of systemic bias.

In en.wikipedia, many articles about strictly American concepts do not
note that fact, and many articles - especially those from 1911 EB -
speak negatively of taboo subjects such as incest, cannibalism,
pederasty, and other things which should be dealt with neutrally. For
example, before I made edits to it, the Ainu article was very racist
and offensive in that it said the Ainu were "primitive" - human
cultures are not primitive if they achieve the requirements a culture
must achieve: telling people where they came from, explaining natural
processes (some cultures, more recently, have replaced this with an
*independent* concept of religion, for example French culture has no
single explanation for the origin of the world and individual natural
processes: some people believe the world was created by a single god,
others may believe it was created by gnomes, others believe in more
complex modern western scientific theory, some may believe it was
sculpted out of clay) - it talked about how hairy they are; note that
not only is this a stereotype, it is from a British point of view: the
Ainu of the time might've described the authors of that article as
bald or almost completely bare, or lacking of any significant amount
of body hair, etc. while they may have actually been what I personally
would consider to be relatively hairy.

Little words like "unfortunately", "fortunately", "tragically",
"interestingly", "peculiarly", "strangely" and short phrases like "one
strange thing about ___ is that it ___" are one of the largest sources
of systemic bias in en.wikipedia. If we are describing a language and
we say one feature is peculiar and interesting, people for whom that
is the native language will beg to differ because to them it is
completely ordinary. We might say it is fortunate that nobody was on a
bridge when it collapsed, but another culture may believe that people
who are standing on a bridge when it collapsed fall not to their death
but to an island paradise. We might say somebody's death is tragic,
but some cultures may see it as a blessing (some cultures view death
positively).

And if you find yourself wanting to respond to any of this with "but
______ IS _____" (for example, "death IS tragic!"), that just shows
the extent of the problem. So even experienced, well-respected
Wikipedians may let through their POV filters things that do not
strike them as POV, because of their collective cultural experiences
and because of their own POV.

Thus this is not just a problem for minority language Wikipedias, it
is a problem for ALL Wikipedias which cannot be completely solved in
the near future (though we can begin to combat it by for example
searching for all occurances of the words noted above and remove them,
as I began to do [removed about 20 occurances of "fortunately" and
"unfortunately"] but it is very repetitive and I had to constantly go
forward and backward between Google and Wikipedia, though this does
not mean I won't do it in the future)

-Mark (just to make things more confusing for you all)

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 21:50:24 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
 > Mark Williamson wrote:
 >
 > >But, as noted by Henry, this is difficult even for established
 > >Wikipedias and community standards vary depending on the values of the
 > >community in question. Thus, what is NPOV to the Basque Wikipedia
 > >might seem very POV to the Chinese Wikipedia.
 > >
 > >
 > I think this is the single biggest problem with minority-language
 > Wikipedias ever being useful NPOV encyclopedias.  If all speakers of a
 > language are relatively homogenous, in terms of location, culture, and
 > values, then their encyclopedia will with high probability by quite biased.
 >
 > By contrast, wikipedias like en:, de:, and fr: have people from multiple
 > continents and backgrounds contributing.  An "American English" or
 > "Australian English" Wikipedia would, I would hazard a prediction, be
 > much inferior in terms of neutrality to the current English Wikipedia,
 > simply as a result of the fact that all Americans (or Australians)
 > editing a Wikipedia would represent a much narrower set of viewpoints
 > than the current large and diverse group of editors.
 >
 > I'm not sure this is surmountable for languages in which a large and
 > diverse group of language speakers don't even exist.  Note that not only
 > very tiny languages are affected by this: I imagine that the Turkish and
 > Greek Wikipedias are less likely to present a reasonable account of the
 > Turkish-Greek conflict than en:, fr:, or de: are.
 >
 > -Mark


body:
So it's because you're an idiot, too? Small world!

Mark

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 19:38:11 -0600, Phil Sandifer
<sandifer at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
> On Nov 26, 2004, at 11:36 AM, Mark Williamson wrote:
>
> For the same reason you hate arguing without resorting to strawmen.
>
>
>
> > It has been noted by more than one developer that, as long as a
> > language is a natural language with native speakers, they do not mind
> > using some time on it. And really, honestly, how long does it take to
> > create a new Wikipedia, for a developer? And I have to ask, with all
> > due respect, why on earth you hate minority languages?
> >
> > Mark
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbcom Overstepping

body:
I'm seriously concerned about a recent arbcom enforcement. A ban was
ordered against [[User:C Colden]] as per the ruling in the case of
Lyndon LaRouche.

C Colden was not a Wikipedia user when the LaRouche ruling was made. He
was not a party to that case. However, the ruling of the case,
apparently, was a ruling against the insertion of "original research
originating with the LaRouche movement" (Which seems to be an
interchangable phrase with "the LaRouche point of view") into any
article by any user.

This seems to me to reflect a hard arbcom ruling that the LaRouche POV
is not something that need be included under the Wikipedia NPOV policy.
As loathesome as I find the LaRouche movement to be, I am seriously
troubled by the notion that the arbcom can and will make blanket
rulings that certain perspectives are not part of NPOV.

-Snowspinner


list: foundation-l

from_name: Robin Shannon

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Politics

body:
while i fully support all the causes you mentioned, i would hate to
see the foundation become a political body. That having been said, a
group of wikimedians, unattached to wikimedia who campaign in an
organised way for the rights of wikimedians, and for freedom of
information, i would consider joining and supporting.

[[User:The bellman]]
rjs

On 25 Nov 2004 02:16:00 +0100, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I would like to open up the issue of the WMF getting involved in political
> matters, such as copyrights and patents. This has so far been mostly
> theoretical, but the rapid growth of our organization allows us to
> contemplate it, and maybe get our feet wet in a few example cases. I'm
> looking a couple of years into the future here, in part so we can come up
> with a good strategy, but also to open up minds and demolish taboos.
>
> There are two primary risks I see with any political activity of the WMF:
>
> 1) The Board may be too small to make representative decisions on its own,
> so we need a validation process to figure out which issues we can and
> which ones we cannot become involved in.
>
> 2) Advocacy is, by definition, never NPOV, so it cannot happen within the
> context of our content-based projects. A certain extent of alienation is
> inevitable with any position the WMF takes, political or not, but it is of
> key importance that this does not affect the perception or the reality of
> our projects.
>
> There is one risk which I am sure people will bring up, which is that "We
> don't have the resources to do this! We should stick to what we can do!"
> Without wanting to sound too dismissive, that objection is raised to
> virtually every new activity we define. It is valid in the sense that we
> shouldn't start anything which we cannot properly finish. But as new
> projects and new activities attract people from within the community, they
> also attract newcomers, who can cross over into other projects.
>
> In cases where there are strong and experienced groups working on an
> issue, such as software patents, it will often be unwise to start a new
> one, though we may often be able to assist in many ways.
>
> I consider wise political decision-making of key importance for the future
> survival and prosperity of our organization and our projects. We are
> creating a gigantic, global community here, which will increasingly not
> just be Wikipedia, but "the Wikimedia community". This group identity,
> which we will build and strengthen in the coming years, is of immense
> political value, for activism, for its technological superiority to most
> traditional organizations, and for issue-centric fundraising.
>
> We have a great chance to make a world-wide difference, and to change
> society for the better by engaging in smart advocacy and lobbyism. We need
> to proceed carefully, of course, and we can use a few agreeable test cases
> to do that.
>
> == What we can do ==
>
> As I said, any political advocacy has to happen outside the context of our
> individual wiki projects, whose neutrality is inviolable. But there are
> other options:
> - press releases by the Wikimedia Foundation
> - the Wikimedia newsletter
> - the Foundation website
> - a to-be-created email list (wikiaction?)
> - websites which we create for specific campaigns
> - endorsement of a petition or initiative
> - real political lobbyism, AKA "employing professionals to engage in goal-
> oriented discourse with democratically elected representatives"
> - legal action, defense funds
>
> == Issues which concern us ==
>
> The WMF should stay out of general political issues, I think - we should
> seek out those which have a demonstrable impact on our work, and which are
> agreeable to the largest number of people. Here are a few examples:
>
> * Software patents. Various open source leaders have just endorsed the
> www.nosoftwarepatents.com initiative, and I can easily see the WMF being
> one of the supporting organizations. Why does the issue matter so much?
> Because a project like MediaWiki, the software which we use, can be made
> effectively illegal through them. We don't necessarily need to oppose
> patentability of software per se, but we should seek an exemption for open
> source software at the very least. This is one matter where we should
> clearly work with the groups that are there, rather than creating a new
> one.
>
> * Copyright terms. Pretty much everyone who's not a corporation or works
> for one agrees that our current copyright terms are ridiculous. Hence, it
> would be relatively easy to build an effective movement to reduce them.
> Most works are protected for 70 years after the death of the author, which
> means that if I died tomorrow, anything which I have created which is not
> explicitly licensed will only be available for use by Wikimedia projects
> by 2074. Worse, these terms get extended on a regular basis, because
> there's not yet a strong lobby against them.
>
> The potential benefits of even a short reduction in terms for Wikimedia
> are enormous. Thousands of works - encyclopedias, photos, non-fiction
> books, and so forth - would suddenly become available to us. A significant
> reduction, say to a fixed 15 years term, could lead to an unprecedented
> cultural renaissance as millions of works become available for free
> sharing by all of humanity. This is absolutely in line with our mission.
>
> I would estimate the overall cost of an effective global campaign to be
> about $50,000 at least. What we could do fairly soon is endorse existing
> initiatives and groups who are working on this, but unlike for the
> software patent issue, I don't see any single one out there which is doing
> this effectively.
>
> * Copyrights on government-produced materials. As most of you will be
> aware, content created by employees of the federal government of the
> United States in their official capacity is automatically put in the
> public domain. Few other governments have similar rules - and those which
> do tend to use "non-commercial only" licenses.
>
> Changing these rules should not be too hard, as there are clear advantages
> for any government which does this. For instance, right now, many of our
> Wikipedia background articles on the political situation in certain
> countries come directly from the US State Department. This is not good in
> terms of NPOV, and other countries have a strategic interest to have their
> positions represented in works like Wikipedia - which can then try to
> build a neutral picture from a large assortment of public domain sources.
>
> Another example: voanews.com is a US government news site, and thus public
> domain. Wikinews could use its articles, essentially publishing US
> government propaganda (if it is accepted by the community as reasonably
> neutral). If Wikinews becomes important, other countries will have an
> interest in counterbalancing this influence.
>
> Let me make this crystal clear: It's the current situation - just a
> handful of countries putting their materials into the PD - which leads to
> POV. The more countries put there materials in the public domain or under
> a truly free license, the more neutral material we can create on that
> basis.
>
> * Specific copyright issues. One example would be the copyrightability of
> reproductions of images which are in the public domain. So far, courts
> have ruled in our favor on this issue, but many corporations are
> interested in changing this. That would allow corporations, in an unholy
> alliance with museums, to effectively put public domain works into a
> proprietary state: Photos have to be licensed, and museums don't allow you
> to take your own unless you comply with some kind of agreement. Some
> museums already try to do that, though they all know that they're
> currently on shaky legal ground.
>
> Another example is art which is permanently exposed to the public. One
> example would be the wrapping of the Reichstag building in Berlin by the
> Bulgarian artist Christo. A German high court has ruled that, because this
> art installation was temporary, the artist would hold commercial rights on
> photographs of the wrapped Reichstag! Such precedents are very dangerous
> to us, and we should fight them on every level.
>
> * Censorship. This is of course a very broad issue, but it clearly
> concerns us quite directly. It is also, interestingly enough, an issue
> where we can open up new sources of funding. For example, the United
> States government has funded organizations which fight against censorship
> under totalitarian regimes which it opposes. We should be very careful
> with using the "C-word", and try to be cooperative if at all possible. But
> NPOV is not negotiable, and if a wiki project cannot operate as a neutral
> one, then we should work to change the laws to make that possible.
>
> * The Digital Divide. There are quite a few things we can do which
> directly relate to our wiki projects in order to bridge the Digital
> Divide. One idea I like is refurbishing used PCs with Linux and putting a
> Wikimedia Content Reader application on them. We could try to create a
> decentralized, voluntary distribution network for such refurbished
> machines. We can also run fundraising campaigns specifically to distribute
> print editions, or to buy and distribute specialized small, cheap devices
> which are likely to become mainstream in the near future. For developing
> countries, solar or curb power would be good.
>
> == How to proceed ==
>
> With all this future talk, is there anything we can do right now? I
> believe so. There are existing initiatives working on the issues I just
> mentioned, and on others which concern them. We should catalog them, and
> can support them prominently on the Foundation Website, and we can endorse
> their petitions, campaigns and open letters.
>
> I think there needs to be a process for political activity of any kind
> which is similar to the procedure for creating new projects:
> proposal => discussion => poll / consensus => board approval => action
>
> The Board could handle issues which require quick actions: laws which are
> about to be passed, initiatives by other groups, lawsuits, and so forth.
> In such cases, there could be a post-approval process to validate the
> Board's actions, but they should generally only be taken if there's
> precedent.
>
> Within the next 6 months or so, I would like to start one such initiative
> on the software patent issue, i.e. take an official Foundation position on
> the matter and support the organizations, especially in Europe, working on
> it. We can move forward here one issue at a time, without overstretching
> our energy and resources.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
hit me: robin.shannon.id.au
jab me: saudade at jabber.zim.net.au

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
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subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia and Politics


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Collective POV ("systemic bias") rampant

body:
On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 23:03:56 -0500, Stirling Newberry
<stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
> You aren't describing systematic bias. Systematic bias is when the
> results are skewed by either selection of inputs or by the process
> applied to inputs. The wiki process realizes that individual editors
> have POV. The solution to use of non-POV phrases is not to proclaim
> systematic bias, which you have not proven by showing a statistically
> significant skew, but instead to go in and edit them.

And thus, the fact that as a general rule more pages at en.wikipedia
are viewed and edited by Americans than anybody else, and by a much
larger margin by more people from Anglophone countries than anywhere
else, is systemic bias.

> The time you spend haranguing people on information which is already
> available, specifically that the English Wikipedia has a cultural bias
> because of its user base - could have been spent engaging in the
> process itself, namely to converge on a consensus result which is the
> best article which we can produce.

As I noted, a consensus version will often retain systemic bias. And
as I also noted in this e-mail, there is currently no viable solution
to this problem, and thus we must live with this systemic bias to a
certain point until international cooperation becomes more possible,
either through loss of linguistic diversity (which I hope isn't how it
ends up) or through improved machine translation techniques, or
through both (If there are only two languages spoken on Earth, all
people who work on machine translation engines will obviously be
working towards the same goal, Lang1<->Lang2 translation, rather than
many different goals and thus the rate at which the quality of
translation improves would be significantly higher).

Consensus versions only help to remove the personal biases of the
author, not the collective bias shared by all those who participate in
this process.

> There is a huge amount of work to be done, might I suggest that you get
> to it?

And what might that work be? I don't work on machine translation
engines, and as a general rule I do not try to proactively speed loss
of linguistic diversity (if I wanted to, I don't think I could bring
myself to do it).

One of the main purposes of this e-mail was to note that when people
say that "...it may be difficult to build a quality NPOV encyclopedic
resource in a language with such a small population..." or similar
things, or when they reveal oh-so-scandalous occurances of POV on
Wikipedias other than their own and imply it couldn't happen on their
own Wikipedia, they are in fact not entirely correct because all
Wikipedias contain systemic bias.

Mark


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] protologisms in Wiktionary

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> A dictionary chronicles the language in both its past and its present.
> Its past needs to be subject to calls for evidence; if a word is
> challenged the burden of proof for verifying its legitimacy needs to
> fall upon the contributor. Otherwise, the rest of us are left with the
> futile task of proving a negative. Evidence for new words is even more
> important. It is not enough to say that the word was used in some
> unspecified episode of a TV series. What amuses the members of today's
> peanut gallery may be completely forgotten by this time next year when
> the forces of marketing will have diverted our attention to some new
> ephemeral fantasy. Web evidence does no better. It is not good to
> accept any word as valid irregardless (sic!) of where you found it.

Disclaimer: I'm a moderate descriptivist, whereas it seems you might be
at least a moderate prescriptivist (see [[en:prescription and
description]]).

I think we ought to document neologisms if they have been used by any
high-profile source (any major author, for example), or if they are used
by any verifiable subculture.  I do agree that if I coin a word and my
friends use it, that doesn't count, so there has to be a judgment call
somewhere.  A widespread neologism with specific connotations, like the
phrase "teh sukc", ought to be documented, though.  Wikipedia's always
has as one of its strengths that it gets articles on new concepts before
almost anyone else, so it'd be a shame if Wiktionary didn't have similar
advantages.

They can of course be discussed neutrally--mention if they're in other
major dictionaries or not, who uses them and to what extent, etc.  But
we're not the language police...

-Mark


body:
Mark Williamson wrote:

>But, as noted by Henry, this is difficult even for established
>Wikipedias and community standards vary depending on the values of the
>community in question. Thus, what is NPOV to the Basque Wikipedia
>might seem very POV to the Chinese Wikipedia.
>
>
I think this is the single biggest problem with minority-language
Wikipedias ever being useful NPOV encyclopedias.  If all speakers of a
language are relatively homogenous, in terms of location, culture, and
values, then their encyclopedia will with high probability by quite biased.

By contrast, wikipedias like en:, de:, and fr: have people from multiple
continents and backgrounds contributing.  An "American English" or
"Australian English" Wikipedia would, I would hazard a prediction, be
much inferior in terms of neutrality to the current English Wikipedia,
simply as a result of the fact that all Americans (or Australians)
editing a Wikipedia would represent a much narrower set of viewpoints
than the current large and diverse group of editors.

I'm not sure this is surmountable for languages in which a large and
diverse group of language speakers don't even exist.  Note that not only
very tiny languages are affected by this: I imagine that the Turkish and
Greek Wikipedias are less likely to present a reasonable account of the
Turkish-Greek conflict than en:, fr:, or de: are.

-Mark


body:
I explained why it is correct. In addition, I said "systemic" and not
"systematic". When you tell somebody they're still using it
incorrectly even though they attempted to validate it on the
principles you yourself stated, it'd be nice if you could tell them
why it's still incorrect.

Mark

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 23:55:20 -0500, Stirling Newberry
<stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Nov 26, 2004, at 11:35 PM, Mark Williamson wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 23:03:56 -0500, Stirling Newberry
> > <stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
> >> You aren't describing systematic bias. Systematic bias is when the
> >> results are skewed by either selection of inputs or by the process
> >> applied to inputs. The wiki process realizes that individual editors
> >> have POV. The solution to use of non-POV phrases is not to proclaim
> >> systematic bias, which you have not proven by showing a statistically
> >> significant skew, but instead to go in and edit them.
> >
> > And thus, the fact that as a general rule more pages at en.wikipedia
> > are viewed and edited by Americans than anybody else, and by a much
> > larger margin by more people from Anglophone countries than anywhere
> > else, is systemic bias.
>
> You are still using "systematic bias" incorrectly. When you start using
> terms correctly, perhaps there will be some value to having a
> discussion with you.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
And in addition, I believe what would apply in this case is the
"selection of inputs", mainly that the current system only allows, at
least on a functional level, for the input of people who speak at
least some English, and favours by a large margin people from
anglophone nations and cultures.

Mark

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 21:59:58 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> I explained why it is correct. In addition, I said "systemic" and not
> "systematic". When you tell somebody they're still using it
> incorrectly even though they attempted to validate it on the
> principles you yourself stated, it'd be nice if you could tell them
> why it's still incorrect.
>
> Mark
>
> On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 23:55:20 -0500, Stirling Newberry
>
>
> <stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On Nov 26, 2004, at 11:35 PM, Mark Williamson wrote:
> >
> > > On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 23:03:56 -0500, Stirling Newberry
> > > <stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
> > >> You aren't describing systematic bias. Systematic bias is when the
> > >> results are skewed by either selection of inputs or by the process
> > >> applied to inputs. The wiki process realizes that individual editors
> > >> have POV. The solution to use of non-POV phrases is not to proclaim
> > >> systematic bias, which you have not proven by showing a statistically
> > >> significant skew, but instead to go in and edit them.
> > >
> > > And thus, the fact that as a general rule more pages at en.wikipedia
> > > are viewed and edited by Americans than anybody else, and by a much
> > > larger margin by more people from Anglophone countries than anywhere
> > > else, is systemic bias.
> >
> > You are still using "systematic bias" incorrectly. When you start using
> > terms correctly, perhaps there will be some value to having a
> > discussion with you.
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>


from_name: Stirling Newberry

body:
You aren't describing systematic bias. Systematic bias is when the
results are skewed by either selection of inputs or by the process
applied to inputs. The wiki process realizes that individual editors
have POV. The solution to use of non-POV phrases is not to proclaim
systematic bias, which you have not proven by showing a statistically
significant skew, but instead to go in and edit them.

The time you spend haranguing people on information which is already
available, specifically that the English Wikipedia has a cultural bias
because of its user base - could have been spent engaging in the
process itself, namely to converge on a consensus result which is the
best article which we can produce.

There is a huge amount of work to be done, might I suggest that you get
to it?

(Grumbles and returns to editing his own book.)


body:
On Nov 26, 2004, at 11:35 PM, Mark Williamson wrote:

> On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 23:03:56 -0500, Stirling Newberry
> <stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
>> You aren't describing systematic bias. Systematic bias is when the
>> results are skewed by either selection of inputs or by the process
>> applied to inputs. The wiki process realizes that individual editors
>> have POV. The solution to use of non-POV phrases is not to proclaim
>> systematic bias, which you have not proven by showing a statistically
>> significant skew, but instead to go in and edit them.
>
> And thus, the fact that as a general rule more pages at en.wikipedia
> are viewed and edited by Americans than anybody else, and by a much
> larger margin by more people from Anglophone countries than anywhere
> else, is systemic bias.

You are still using "systematic bias" incorrectly. When you start using
terms correctly, perhaps there will be some value to having a
discussion with you.


body:
> I'm pretty willing to accept the fact that there is no way to write
> without writing to some cultural context. We cannot simply imagine a
> culturally unbiased perspective and then write from it. This systemic
> bias, real as it may be, is unavoidable. As such, I am unable to
> seriously consider it a problem.

I personally believe it is a problem, but that it cannot be solved at
the moment and that Wikipedia may seem a bit "sterile" without it.

However, I think we *do* need to be a bit more careful about things
which can be seen if you check carefully, such as "unfortunately"s and
"interestingly"s.

Mark


body:
And let's not forget the most rampant bias in Wikipedia, one that
affects all of the language Wikipedias, namely the belief that it is
worthwhile to present all sides of an issue.

Which is to say that the neutral perspective is itself a bias. As the
NPOV policy is pretty explicit about.

I'm pretty willing to accept the fact that there is no way to write
without writing to some cultural context. We cannot simply imagine a
culturally unbiased perspective and then write from it. This systemic
bias, real as it may be, is unavoidable. As such, I am unable to
seriously consider it a problem.

-Snowspinner


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbcom Overstepping

body:
It is not that Lyndon LaRouche is not important or significant or that an
article which concerns him or his political activities are not subject to
the NPOV policy. The decision is based on experience with his supporters
which involve insistance that the LaRouche perspective be included articles
which relate to him only in peripheral ways. However, it is quite possible
that [[User:C Colden]]'s edit warring on behalf of that perspective was
engaged in without knowledge of the ruling and perhaps a warning would have
been appropriate first.

"The three users are inserting claims into [[Lyndon LaRouche]] and
[[Frederick Wills]], without third-party attribution, which are designed to
enhance the image of Lyndon LaRouche, and have reverted deletion of the
claims three times in the last 16 hours.

Frederick Wills was a former Guyana government official who later in life
became a member of the [[Schiller Institute]], which is part of the LaRouche
movement. In 1976, before there is evidence of his involvement with
LaRouche, he apparently gave a speech to the U.N. advocating a third world
debt moratorium.  The above users are inserting that he gave this speech
only after coming into contact with LaRouche, and that the speech was
designed to promote LaRouche's proposal. They've provided no evidence to
support this claim. Wills has died and therefore can't be asked what's true.
This is an attempt to claim ownership on behalf of LaRouche of Wills'
proposal on debt relief."

See
[[Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_arbitration/Admin_enforcement_requested#Enough
_is_enough]]

The problem is that LaRouche has over a long career taken a number of
positions, a very great many of which have been noted by no one outside his
movement or those who oppose him, but arguably could be included in a great
many Wikipedia articles. His endorsement of third world debt relief is
typical. He didn't propose it first, no one of significance noted his
endorsement of it, but according to him, he is a noted statesman with
respect to this issue. This particular article is somewhat ambiguous as
Frederick Wills did eventually affiliate with LaRouche activities.

That said, the proper course of action for Caroline Colden is to appeal to
Jimbo.

Fred

> From: Phil Sandifer <sandifer at sbcglobal.net>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 20:57:58 -0600
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbcom Overstepping
>
> I'm seriously concerned about a recent arbcom enforcement. A ban was
> ordered against [[User:C Colden]] as per the ruling in the case of
> Lyndon LaRouche.
>
> C Colden was not a Wikipedia user when the LaRouche ruling was made. He
> was not a party to that case. However, the ruling of the case,
> apparently, was a ruling against the insertion of "original research
> originating with the LaRouche movement" (Which seems to be an
> interchangable phrase with "the LaRouche point of view") into any
> article by any user.
>
> This seems to me to reflect a hard arbcom ruling that the LaRouche POV
> is not something that need be included under the Wikipedia NPOV policy.
> As loathesome as I find the LaRouche movement to be, I am seriously
> troubled by the notion that the arbcom can and will make blanket
> rulings that certain perspectives are not part of NPOV.
>
> -Snowspinner
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley

body:
I just joined this list less than an hour ago (and I'm very new to WP too), but
I thought I'd drop in my 2cents on the msg by Mark Williamson. (Yes, I was being
UScentric; no, I'm not in the US; yes, I was being intentionally ironic.)

Really, every piece of information, every datum, every idea, everything is
biased to what we (or the authors) know.  When we find that there are new
planets with intelligent life out there, we will discover that everything we
wrote is Earth-centric; when we discover new parallel universes or time-travel,
that it was universe- or time-ist.  What about WP being NPOV- or truth-centric?
 Doesn't the imaginary world in my head have a right to be documented to?

For these reasons, I think using this as an argument for saying that WP is
biased
is an invalid argument due to its absurdity; and misunderstands that bias is a
sliding scale, so the semantics of the word, unbiased, always imply a certain
amount of what you would call bias (in the same way that the term, biased, does
not imply that something has total bias and is meaningless as this is also
impossible).  WP is IMO the least biased document that it is possible to create
because it is based on a free self-selecting meritocratic democracy.

A truly unbiased encyclopedia would be infinite (and contain totally random
content--although true randomness implies infinity and vice versa) and contain
everything thereby deeming it as useful as an empty encyclopedia; though
content is king--conciseness can be more important than sheer quantitiy.  A
finite
encyclopedia (or other piece of information) can never be truly unbiased.  So
what?  It would be absurd (and impossible) to make it so.  Mark's last post was
suggesting any changes to Wikipedia to solve the problem, because it can never
be solved really, so let's all not worry about it.

The only possible way to reduce bias is to try and increase the number and range
of editors on WP (and to some extent by increasing the content).

Also, your points about systematic bias are kind of moot, because in order to
say there is systematic bias in something due to bias in a set of individuals,
A, there must be a larger set, B, which contains A, that you are comparing A
with.  That set, B, is part of a larger set, C, which means that set B is
biased wrt C, therefore when you talk about systematic bias, your idea of
systematic bias is itself biased.

Just thought I'd join in and make that point.  Hopefully it makes some sense as
I've been on this machine for 13 hours and havent slept for several days  (and
I don't know anything about bias or stats).

Happy wikipediaing,
Joe Ll. G. Blakesley.

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body:
Quoting Stirling Newberry:
>>You are still using "systematic bias" incorrectly.<<

Maybe your definition is biased ;-).  Maybe there is systematic bias in all our
definitions of `systematic bias'.

Joe Ll. G. Blakesley

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subject: FW: [Wikipedia-l] Collective POV ("systemic bias") rampant

body:
----------
From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net>
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 05:11:17 -0700
To: "Mark Williamson , wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org" <node.ue at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Collective POV ("systemic bias") rampant

On the English Wikipedia you can expect people of many nationalities to show
up and participate in debates about articles which concern people of other
than English cultural orientation. Chinese edit the People's Republic of
China article and the Tibet article; Ukrainians, Poles and Russians weigh in
on [[Collectivisation in the USSR]] as do advocates of Stalin. American and
English culture are international cultures and diverse viewpoints are
expected.

To a certain extent people are "spoken for", Tibetans, Ainus and victims of
the Great Famine don't show up themselves.

Fred

> From: Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>, wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 21:35:13 -0700
> To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Collective POV ("systemic bias") rampant
>
> And thus, the fact that as a general rule more pages at en.wikipedia
> are viewed and edited by Americans than anybody else, and by a much
> larger margin by more people from Anglophone countries than anywhere
> else, is systemic bias.


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbcom Overstepping

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:
> That said, the proper course of action for Caroline Colden is to appeal to
> Jimbo.

Caroline Colden was not directly subject to an arbcom ruling, and
therefore an appeal to me is unnecessary.  Any sysop can unban the
user, as the blocking appears to have been made based on a
misinterpretation of the arbcom ruling.

The arbcom's remit does not extend to the content any more than mine
did.  That is to say, sweeping rulings about future users with respect
to any particular point of view are misplaced.  This is not an open
invitation for LaRouche supporters to misbehave, of course.  But the
point is that it is misbehavior (including persistent POV editing)
that has to be dealth with.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: JoeM hard-ban

body:
The username "Today Iraq, Tomorrow France!" is inherently offensive
trolling and sufficient grounds for a ban on the spot.  Writing to the
list from an email address advocating "nuking iraq" is not helpful,
either.

> So please unblock me now.

I'm known primarily as a naively optimistic and trusting person, but
even *I* see little hope for that.  If you're ready to put aside
hateful comments and edit pages in a neutral manner, then you'll need
to demonstrate it by talking to a lot of people and apologizing for
your past behavior.

--Jimbo


from_name: Nick Pisarro

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Implementing Editing Revision Summaries--An idea

body:
>> I recently upgraded our MediaWiki run site to 1.3.7. In a fit of
>> programming frenzy, I have implemented a new feature; the ability to
>> edit
>> the summary and Minor Edit flag of an article revision.
>
Brion Vibber <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org> writes:
>I would strongly, strongly recommend against this. The edit history is
>an audit trail, and should as much as possible not be allowed to be
>tampered with.

But

Nick Triantos <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org> writes:
>True, but the comment itself is not really part of that audit trail,
>it's just a note that came along for the ride.  The majority of comments
>in the wiki that I administer are blank, if people wanted to go and add
>a comment, I'd be all for that...

I happen to believe that the comments go along for the ride. The *real*
audit trail, on low volume wikis anyway, is the Recent Changes log and I
am definitely not proposing changing that. The problem with the main
Wikipedia sites is that the volume of recent changes is so vast that the
Recent Changes log is barely usable.

There are changes to an article you can make now, that are NOT reflected
in the History. If you move an article, there is no clue, in the History,
that an article once had another name. Here, the Recent Changes file is
the keeper of the fact that the move took place.

John Lee <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org> writes:
>The problem is, users sometimes include violations of policy (i.e.
>personal attacks) in their edit summaries. Allowing them to edit them
>would render this audit trail worthless.

This is a very good point, at least for Wikipedia. Enabling this feature
could start a whole new form of flame wars!

I have an idea of how to modify this feature that would address the very
valid concerns that Brian and John Lee have about turning this feature on.

The main reason I have implemented this feature is to allow people who
omitted a comment or made an error in it, to correct it. The secondary
reason was to allow Sysops to add a comment where one is needed and,
perhaps, to remove offensive language.

1) What if I add a variable $wgUserEditCommentTimeout, which specifies a
*time limit*, in minutes, and specifies the amount time a user has to
modify a comment before the comment "becomes permanent"? Most users
discover any error they've made almost immediately on saving a revision.
Allowing them a limited amount of time in which they can modify a comment
would allow them the opportunity to fix their comment without opening up
comments to rampant violations of etiquette. I could allow values of 0,
don't allow users to make any changes to comments, which would satisfy
Nick Triantos's request, or -1 to allow a user all the time in the world
to modify a comment.

For Wikipedia, one might set $wgUserEditCommentTimeout to a low value,
like 5 or even 0 until 2), below were implemented. Most sites that use
this software would probably institute more liberal change policies.

2) Comment changes should be logged in Recent Changes. Recent Changes is
the most accurate audit trail now and should have note of these changes. A
brief look at the definition of the table 'recent changes' suggests to me
that it may need modification to record these changes. This should be made
as a separate CVS change, perhaps made by someone more expert in this area
than myself.

3) One could, as a future enhancement, create a db table and actually log
comment changes and optionally, hopefully, show such changes in the
History. But I think this may be more bookkeeping than is required.

The vast majority of users, I'm sure most would agree, are conscientious,
and would welcome the opportunity to adjust their summary comments. The
history is less valuable if it is full of omissions and errors. Remember,
normally only the user who submitted a revision is allowed to change the
comment by this feature. I spent a fair amount of time implementing this
feature, and making it as bulletproof as possible because I do think it
will prove to be a quite valuable on most wiki sites. There are many
valuable features in the MediaWiki software, that it is not practical to
turn on for Wikipedia though I think it will prove useful there to.

Just as one wants to make the articles as accurate as possible, one would
like the History to be as accurate as well.

Nick

P.S. A test by me shows that users' Watch Lists show the comments from the
actual revisions, not the Recent Changes log.--NP


body:
>>Which is to say that the neutral perspective is itself a bias. As the NPOV
policy is pretty explicit about.<<

Exactly. See my comment in my last post: "everything is
biased...What about WP being NPOV- or truth-centric?".

>>This systemic bias, real as it may be, is unavoidable. As such, I am unable
to
seriously consider it a problem.<<

As I said earlier, what is the point in discussing it if we cannot change the
bias (with the possible exception of WP's being NPOV, which, although a bias in
itself, actually results in less bias in the long run in the same way
unbiasedness itself is a bias [e.g.: away from an encyclopedia that is a total
random mixture of words regardless of their truth and whether they make any
sense] although one may argue that the words, `biased' and `bias' do not cover
this sort of "bias")?  In fact why am I joining in this discussion?  I'll stop
now.

All the evidence put forward (e.g.: cultural bias) for this "systematic bias"
applies equally well to any other encyclopedias or WWW sites in general (and
probably to books, journals, newspapers and nearly all other forms of
information).  In fact, IMO, WP's system, transparency, freedom ,openess, &c
mean it is far less biased than nearly all other sources of information
available in the world.  Some biases, will always exist regardless of the
system; for instance, it is impossible to avoid some bias towards the language
that the article was orignally written (or even translated into).  The fact
that we usea particular language (or the fact that language in general, as
opposed to, say, pure mental ideas/thought streams is used) to communicate this
stuff is a major bias in and of itself (or the fact that the information was
typed or
marked using wikimedia or or was made machine-readable or was written by a human
or was previewed visually (or aurally or whatever assuming with have
visually-impaire editors).

Although I'm all for removing particular biases where there is a suggested way
to do this (e.g.: I think the markup needs to be even more semantic than it
already is (and never visual only) I think we need to promote WP to speakers of
languages were we don't have a WP or it is very small so they can add stuff; I
think the edit-side WWW UI needs to made less visually-orientated;  I think
references to dollars and the list of billionaires &c needs to have it made
clear they refer to the US and even better have other equivalents for other
cultures available; &c)  However, Mark seems to be moaning about the fact that
nothing is 100% unbiased generally.  Well, the fact is that nothing is
perfectly or 100% anything in the real world and it is something you just have
to live with as part of life.

Joe Ll. G. Blakesley

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from_name: Benjamin Esham

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [[Abu Graib prisoner abuse (no pictures)]] on VfD

references:
<cnk7ga$3on$1@sea.gmane.org> <co6bk4$e1$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<623d73380411270135bdba284@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On Nov 27, 2004, at 4:35 AM, Robin Shannon wrote:

> I very strongly oppose text-only pages for only certain articles,
> however, as a general attribute that can be turned on or off by the
> user
> for all pages (With the defult obviously being on FOR ALL PAGES) i have
> no real objections.

Perhaps we could have a tag (something like __NOIMAGES__) that would
keep
all images on the page hidden by default.  When the user clicks on "Show
Images" a JavaScript script would go through and make each image
visible.

(One potential way to do this would be to set src="blank.png" or similar
on each of the images initially and then have the JavaScript iterate
through the images and set the proper `src' attribute for each one.
OTOH,
this might totally break images for people with non?JavaScript-capable
browsers.)

This would, of course, require some changes to MediaWiki, so it would be
less trivial to implement than a simple [[foo (text only)]] version, but
then it wouldn't be necessary to keep the two articles in sync.

--
Benjamin D. Esham      {      http://bdesham.net
bdesham at gmail.com      }      AIM: bdesham 1 2 8
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - wikipedia.org


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia off-line

body:
On Nov 27, 2004, at 11:17 AM, James R. Johnson wrote:

> I can install MediaWiki on my computer?

Sure!  See e.g. [1] or [2].

[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/
MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide#For_system_administrators
[2]
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/phase3/README?
rev=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup

--
Benjamin D. Esham      {      http://bdesham.net
bdesham at gmail.com      }      AIM: bdesham 1 2 8
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - wikipedia.org


subject: [Wikipedia-l] We've been verbed

body:
I think it would be good to lay in some remedies for swelled head.

Fred

> From: Frank v Waveren <fvw.wikipediaml at var.cx>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 19:16:17 +0100
> To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] We've been verbed
>
> On Fri, Nov 26, 2004 at 06:42:01AM -0700, Fred Bauder wrote:
>> We are becoming an institution...
> Does that mean we replace the Wikipedia T-shirts with
> straight-jackets? I've been advocating that for some time now.
>
> --
> Frank v Waveren                                      Fingerprint: 9106 FD0D
> fvw@[var.cx|stack.nl] ICQ#10074100                      D6D9 3E7D FAF0 92D1
> Public key: hkp://wwwkeys.pgp.net/8D54EB90              3931 90D6 8D54 EB90
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] user RickK - vote rigging

body:
Yawn.  More trolling.

RickK
R E Broadley <20041111 at stardate.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
Hi,

Someone else spotted RickK up to no good, and referred to the following
on his talk page:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia%3AVotes_for_deletion%2FBlogsome&diff=7896162&oldid=7894630

The diff above is all by RickK in one edit, so I can't see how he can
possibly claim he thought the vote was by an anonymous person.

I'm confused, looking at RickK's user page, he looks like a well
respected user, but given this and other recent strange reverts, does
anyone think it's likely his account has been stolen?

Regards,
Edmund

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body:
You seem to be stalking me.  I'd request that you go off and work on your own subjects and stop trying to redo everything I do.

RickK

R E Broadley <20041111 at stardate.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
Dear Rick,

You misunderstand me, but it's ok, most people do, so I won't take it
personally. I'm not sure what you mean by me being on the mailing list
anonymously, is my name or email address hidden?

I would say this. Power corrupts, and without adequate self-analysis,
one can become arrogant, throw their weight around, and revert any edits
on the spot just because they didn't understand what the person had
written. Your Chicago edit today for instance, if you'd merely clicked
on the "world city" article, you would have been able to find out what
an "alpha world city" is, but instead you just removed the word "alpha"
from the article, because you weren't familiar with the term. At least
you gave a reason in your edit comments though, which is an improvement,
so thanks, I was then able to reword the article with the knowledge of
why it had been changed.

Regards,
Ed

Rick wrote:

>It was no mistake. This person is a troll. This is the same person who came onto the mailing list as an anon, expressing amazement that his edits to the September 11 attacks page were reverted. His wide-eyed innocent act doesn't fool me. He's already filed an RfC on me even though I explained to him on his Talk page why I had acted in the manner I did on the edits he's questioning. I have no desire to continue discussion with him.
>
>RickK
>
>"KNOTT, T" wrote:
>Some admins watch recent changes, and have vandalism in progress on
>their watchlists. Other don't. Rick is one of the former. In fact, he
>deals with vandalism a lot! His user page regularly gets vandalised, and
>his talk page regularly gets messages from vandals that he has blocked
>(Who are trying to troll him, or merely expressing an opinion about his
>sexuality, or his mothers sexuality etc ;-). He probably mistook you for
>one.
>
>Theresa
>
>

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from_name: R E Broadley

subject: [WikiEN-l] user RickK - vote rigging

body:
Hi,

Someone else spotted RickK up to no good, and referred to the following
on his talk page:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia%3AVotes_for_deletion%2FBlogsome&diff=7896162&oldid=7894630

The diff above is all by RickK in one edit, so I can't see how he can
possibly claim he thought the vote was by an anonymous person.

I'm confused, looking at RickK's user page, he looks like a well
respected user, but given this and other recent strange reverts, does
anyone think it's likely his account has been stolen?

Regards,
Edmund


from_name: Robert

subject: [WikiEN-l] The Larouche issue: Strawman criticisms

body:
Snowspinner writes:
> I'm seriously concerned about a recent arbcom
> enforcement. A ban was ordered against [[User:C Colden]]
> as per the ruling in the case of Lyndon LaRouche.
>
> ....However, the ruling of the case, apparently, was a
> ruling against the insertion of "original research
> originating with the LaRouche movement" (Which seems
> to be an interchangable phrase with "the LaRouche point
> of view") into any article by any user.

This is a false charge. You are making this up. No one is
claiming that an NPOV description of LaRouche's point of
view is original research, or is forbidden. Your claim is
nonsense.

The problem here is that many Larouche supporters violate
Wikipedia editorial policy by shoving in their own original
research, or pushing their own personal point-of-view as
fact. Further, they systematically distort many Wikipedia
articles by pushing the Larouche POV in places where it has
no meaning or relevance.  They are taking the POV of a
fringe, cult-like convicted criminal, and falsely
presenting it as a POV that is just as widely accepted as
those of any mainstream political party.

One could do the same thing with any of a dozen other
fringe self-styled political leaders who have been
convicted of crimes. However, the views of a self-styled
political messiah with little following does not deserve
the grand attention and treatment that a handful of
LaRouche supporters are giving it. Further, his views
certainly must be presented in an NPOV way without any
original research, which is not what his supporters do.

> This seems to me to reflect a hard arbcom ruling that
> the LaRouche POV is not something that need be included
> under the Wikipedia NPOV policy.

Nonsense. This is a strawman argument against a position
that no one has made.

> As loathesome as I find the LaRouche movement to be,
> I am seriously troubled by the notion that the arbcom
> can and will make blanket rulings that certain
> perspectives are not part of NPOV.

Nonsense. You are arguing a strawman criticism that a
number of LaRouche supporters have been doing here for some
time. We aren't falling for it.

Robert (RK)

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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] We've been verbed

body:
Frank v Waveren wrote:

>On Fri, Nov 26, 2004 at 06:42:01AM -0700, Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>
>>We are becoming an institution...
>>
>>
>Does that mean we replace the Wikipedia T-shirts with
>straight-jackets? I've been advocating that for some time now.
>
Okay, but since it's hard to type with one's hands in a straightjacket,
we would need to supply voice recognition software to go with them. :-)

Ec


from_name: Anthere

body:
Michael Snow <wikipedia at ...> writes:

> In either case, the effort needed for the Wikimedia Foundation to get
> involved in any substantial kind of political activity would add
> considerable complexity to financial and accounting matters. I'm not
> sure if our financial procedures are in a state to support this kind of
> change, although certainly they need to get there, regardless of how
> politically active we become. However, the Foundation's mission as I
> understand it is education and the dissemination of information, and I
> think any political activity should be incidental to that mission.
>
> --Michael Snow

Thank you Michael for all these details.

I suppose that any decision in the sense of changing the goals of the
Foundation itself and the tax category it belongs to in the USA would probably
impact the goals and very likely the tax categories of all the local
associations as well.

Perhaps can Aurevilly tell us more about this the possible legal implications
he can think of ?

Anthere


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia off-line

body:
I think you can install mediawiki to your machine, and that would be
exactly what you want.

I am currently using TikiWin. It is a wiki you can run on your desktop,
and its tags are quite close to MediaWiki's. The major difference I guess
is that It is small and easy to install.

If you can read Japanese (I know Mark can), and using a Windows
computer, you may want to try it.

You can get it here: http://todo.org/download/tikiwin/

And I am relatively sure that if you look for it there must be something
similar. I would like to know other desktop wikis.

happy editing!

Tomos


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] $wgEnableEmail $wgEnableEmailUser

body:
On Nov 27, 2004, at 11:11 AM, Thomas Gries wrote:
> you have recently introduced two new variables (see Subject) without
> consulting me. This action put a lot of pressure to me, as I am
> working on a perfect Email Authentication by using the principles as
> fully described in
>
> http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=866
> [Bug 866] Email authentication by a dummy "forgot my password" cycle
>
> which is almost ready. I would kindly like to ask you that you inform
> my about such variables, which influence my work.

We have a CVS commit log mailing list:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-cvs

Also, I recommend you avoid implementing 866 as I'm about to change the
'forgot my password' system; mailing a password directly usable to
login (and never expired until the next attempt) isn't very safe.

> Please can you explain to me the reasons for your variables

E-mail functions are not always available on a given server (or may be
available but non-functional), and in general open e-mail can be
abused. Being able to disable all e-mail functions on the wiki prevents
false presentation of unusable features, and disabling of user-to-user
e-mail could cut down on abuse (for instance as a spam relay).

>  - they make no sense without an ***email authentication*** as for
> example disclosed in my
> http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=868 .

This assertion is completely false, as they are unrelated.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] subpages are case sensitive (first character)

body:
On Nov 27, 2004, at 4:00 PM, Reinhardt Wiewe wrote:
> Please take a look at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gangleri/tests/links .
>
> Please note that
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gangleri/tests/Links (with capital
> "L") is another page in the namespace.

Subpages are just regular pages; there just happens to be an (optional)
shorthand for linking to them. There is *NOTHING* special about their
"first" letter -- they don't even have a particular "first" letter.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
I would say there are things we can do to our
direct benefits, and less costly.

Regarding copyright, yes, perhaps many Wikimedians
do have concerns about strong copyright protections
like the lenths of protection, copyright for
non-creative aspects of database, anti-circumvention
prohibition, and potential expansion of indirect
infringements are discussed on mailinglists and on
various pages.

But copyleft licenses and their likes (such as
CreativeCommons Public Licenses, not all of which are
copyleft) enable us to deal with that strong protection.

It is more directly to our benefit to promote GFDL,
and we do not have to influence any legislation to do that.

Also, it is very beneficial for us to help FSF to revise
the GFDL so that we have more flexibility regarding its
requirements, though I know English wikipedia interprets
it rather liberally, and not having serious problems.

As a sidenote, regarding the length of copyright protection,
I am not sure if the shortening of the protection period
would result in an immediate release of currently protected
works into the public domain. When I see the legal texts
and relevant court cases, it is often decided that legal
changes do not  affect the already copyrighted works
unless it is beneficial to the authors and other copyright
holders (But I know mostly about Japanese stuff, so it may
be different for other countries).

We can also try to solve digital divide without lobbying.
We can promote and distribute our free content. How about
a promotional team who can talk to potential users about
our content and answer questions they might have, introduce
them whom they should talk to for technical, legal, and
other questions?

Regards,

Tomos


subject: [Wikitech-l] preview and Unicode characters

body:
On Nov 27, 2004, at 3:54 PM, Reinhardt Wiewe wrote:
> I am using Mozilla Firefox and need to used Unicode characters. I have
> installed lots of fonts (some supporting Unicode).
>
> Please look first at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gangleri/tests/Unicode_ISO_8859-1/
> Table_of_Unicode_characters%2C_128_to_999#how_do_you_like_this then
> edit the section and make a preview. The spaces between the characters
> are different in the preview and what is saved.

I could see only a single pixel difference in some of the line spacing
(which is likely due to accumulated rounding error from the many lines
of text above it in one version and not in the other); this difference
is not noticeable except by pasting the screen shots op top of each
other.

(Tested Firefox 1.0 on Mac OS X 10.3.6)

In the future, please reduce your problem cases to a *minimal* test
case and giving more details about exactly what's amiss. Details of the
operating system and version are helpful. Screenshots of 'before' and
'after' are very helpful. Testing on other computers is extremely
helpful.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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list: commons-l

subject: [Commons-l] Original art on Commons

body:
I am not sure why no-one has responded, but many of your ideas sound very good.

I think there are many people who have a large amount of photos and other media files to offer, some already on the web under free license. But they might feel hesitant to upload one-hundred picture.

I, with help from others, am indeed creating some sound files for each of basic Japanese letters and some compounds to be used in Japanese language wikibook. There are about 100 of them. I am very sure there will be others, if not yet, doing very similar things for similar projects. So I find a batch uploader would be very helpful for others like me.

Tomos


from_name: James R. Johnson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia off-line

body:
I can install MediaWiki on my computer?

James

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of wiki_tomos
Sent: Saturday, November 27, 2004 8:45 AM
To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia off-line

I think you can install mediawiki to your machine, and that would be
exactly what you want.

I am currently using TikiWin. It is a wiki you can run on your desktop,
and its tags are quite close to MediaWiki's. The major difference I guess
is that It is small and easy to install.

If you can read Japanese (I know Mark can), and using a Windows
computer, you may want to try it.

You can get it here: http://todo.org/download/tikiwin/

And I am relatively sure that if you look for it there must be something
similar. I would like to know other desktop wikis.

happy editing!

Tomos
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subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipédia new language : Algerian

body:
On Nov 27, 2004, at 2:16 PM, medifel at altern.org wrote:

> Algerian language, badly named "Arabic", Algerian Spoken, is the
> language
> of more than 20 millions persons. It's a mix of lot of languages like
> arabic, turkish, french, spanish, berber etc.

Western Colloquial Arabic is also spoken in Tunisia and Libya, and is
basically part of the Arabic family of languages in its root and
pattern grammar. The situation there and in many other nations is of
"diglossia", where there is an official standard version of a language,
in this case "Modern Standard Arabic", with colloquial use of a related
language or dialect. The Romans during the empire had a similar
situation, the written Latin being different from the spoken language.
West Colloquial Arabic, sometimes called "spoken Arabic" has almost
30,000,000 speakers between all of its dialects.

That being said, the differences between the dialects - between
countries and between rural and urban variations - are quite large. The
Algerian varieties of the language show the beginnings of creolization
with French, including imports of grammar, phrasing and words that are
integrated at every level of the language. These include code switching
- that is, whole words or phrases lifted from French - down to the use
of words which have been made more arabic in sound and morphology, that
is "loan words", though I've always disliked that term because they
aren't given back.

> It's not exactly arabic, because gramatically it's totaly different.
> Speakers of Algerian who don't know what we call "classical" arabic,
> don't
> understood arabic.

That's not entirely true. when written Western Colloquial Arabic is
closer to written arabic than it is when spoken. As is the case in many
societies where literacy rates are low, the spoken forms diverge a
great deal more than the written forms do.

> Algerian language is the common language of every body in Algeria, but
> since independance (1962), the Pan-arabism vision denied totaly the
> existance of a specific algerian language, as it denied the existance
> berber languages.

Closer to 85%, with numerous smaller languages, including the Berber
familiies, taking up the rest.

> Algerian language was almost not written at all (no newspaper, no book)
> but with the Internet we discovered that we coul wrote our own language
> (using latin alphabet with some specific caracters for special sounds).
> So we want to create an algerian Wikipedia to to persuade people that
> we
> can use our language as a normal one.

There is writing in Western Colloquial Arabic using Arabic characters.
There are also missionaries who use colloquial Arabic for their
conversion work, and there is if I recall correctly, a translation of
the Christian bible into the dialect. Most of the extent source
material is in Arabic characters.

-

Here is where information starts to run out, and judgment enters in.
While there is no standardized form of this language, there is a recent
ethnological dictionary, and there are manuals for spoken courses.
There is little to no publication in the language. The wikipedia would
be, almost literally, the first standardized such project, and is,
almost by definition, an attempt to construct a nationalistic language.
We were talking about nynorsk and bokmal earlier, this would, in
effect, be the same kind of project that created nynorsk as a stable
linguistic set in the first place: taking a series of dialects which
are separate from the "High" version of the language and giving them a
standardize literature which acts as the synchronization point for the
language. Western Colloquial Arabic is a "normal" language - it is
based on dialects that have been spoken in North Africa for hundreds of
years, and has millions of speakers that are majorities in three
nations.

However, the polities of each of these three nations are committed to a
policy of diglossia, that is having a standard Arabic to be connected
with all of the other major Arabic states. The writer referes to the
"pan-arabist" version, which would correspond to the mandating of
Modern Standard Arabic - a modernized version of classical Arabic - as
the official language of government. This isn't to say "no", just to
put forward that there is no government support for creation of WCA as
a literate language.

While people may know that I am an advocate of such projects - the
creation or recreation of languages through the Romantic language
process - I am not sure that wikimedia is in that line of work. The
state of WCA is "normal" for a non-literate language group, that is an
inter-related set of dialects which are mutually intelligible to
various degrees with some written examples, but no communication zone
which works within the language. An analogy would be Middle English
around 1300: there are several dialects, no one of which is
predominant, some literature, but little in the way of standardization.
My instinct would be to ask for proof that the Language formation
process has occured, or is occuring: that is that there is a community
which is conscious of their dialect as an aspect of group identity and
is willing to engage in the work to create a body of literature,
scholarship and standardization that goes with having a literate
language rather than a spoken dialect group. Examples of this would be
a widely read author who uses the "vernacular", publication of
newspapers or books in the language, the creation of associations for
preservation and advancement of the language, broadcasting in the
language by native speakers, web sites dedicated to content creation
and so on. Basically, signs that people for reasons of their own, are
using the spoken vernacular in a written form which is converging on a
written dialect that is distinguishable from MSA.

I don't know if people are looking for advice but here is mine:

1. This sounds an awful lot like node, or someone similar. First rule
out trollship. I'm suspicious because the key feature of Spoken
Algerian Arabic isn't spanish, it is French. And any speaker of WCA
sufficiently with it to write to us would be reasonably fluent in
French, which is both part of WCA and a widely used language in
Algeria.

2. There isn't, to my knowledge, a groundswell for creating WCA as a
written language. The person asking couldn't even like to one website
which is devoted to making WCA a written language and unifying the
dialects. This is a minimum: until there is activity, there is no
"language" in the literate sense, there are dialects with written
examples. Have the person proposing show support from some of these
groups. This both indicates community, and it indicates good faith in
the proposal: after all, a person genuinely wanting to advance such a
cause would be happy to bring in as many groups as possible, where as a
troll looking for a free play space to vandalize would not want others
looking over his/her shoulder.

3. If (2) can be documented, create a wiktionary for it. If the
wiktionary takes off, then that is good evidence for a language
community that wants to have a written version of their spoken
language, and is committed to creating it. If it is just one person
documenting the language, that can be tested against published sources.
If it is trollery, that can be seen fairly quickly.

4. If the wiktionary works, create a wikipedia.

My two cents, YMMV.