subject: [Wikipedia-l] Censored by China?

body:
Ed, You just don't get it. The only article acceptable to them will be an
article that is neither objective or neutral.

Fred

>Better yet, if we could write article (even about Taiwan, et al.) so
>NEUTRALLY that even mainland China had no objections, that would be a big
>plus -- besides being a public service to China and the world.
>
>Ed Poor
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Larry Sanger [mailto:lsanger at nupedia.com]
>Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 11:08 AM
>To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
>Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Censored by China?
>
>
>Can anyone find out whether Wikipedia has been censored by China?
>
>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2540309.stm
>
>While of course that would be very unfortunate, it would be a great
>selling point for the website: "Censored by China!"  I can even see making
>some great banners and graphics.  ;-)
>
>Larry
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Last edit rollback

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>I think I forgot to mention this except on the French list; earlier
>today I added a rollback-last-edit function (for sysops). It's currently
>accessible from the user contributions page; next to 'top' revisions,
>there's a 'rollback' link which will resave that page with the most
>recent revision by an author other than the most current.
>
>
Do you check if the "most current" edit is still the same as the one
whos contributions page you are looking at? Otherwise, this might happen:
* User A vandalizes pages, X among them
* Sysop B looks at A's "contributions", with X being a top edit
* Others users have been alerted as well, and just after B loads A's
contributions, user C reverts X manually
* Now, B uses "revert". The top edit is from user C, reverting the vandalism
* So, the revert gets reverted, bringing the vandalism to top again!

Am I paranoid, or what?

Magnus


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [Wikitech-l] Last edit rollback

body:
On Wednesday 04 December 2002 06:40, Andre Engels wrote:
> > Do you check if the "most current" edit is still the same as the one
> > whos contributions page you are looking at? Otherwise, this might happen:
> > * User A vandalizes pages, X among them
> > * Sysop B looks at A's "contributions", with X being a top edit
> > * Others users have been alerted as well, and just after B loads A's
> > contributions, user C reverts X manually
> > * Now, B uses "revert". The top edit is from user C, reverting the
> > vandalism * So, the revert gets reverted, bringing the vandalism to top
> > again!
>
> I did a little test, and this kind of behaviour is indeed possible.

?action=rollback&oldid=131072

phma


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Censored by China?

body:
Better yet, if we could write article (even about Taiwan, et al.) so NEUTRALLY that even mainland China had no objections, that would be a big plus -- besides being a public service to China and the world.

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Sanger [mailto:lsanger at nupedia.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 11:08 AM
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Censored by China?

Can anyone find out whether Wikipedia has been censored by China?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2540309.stm

While of course that would be very unfortunate, it would be a great
selling point for the website: "Censored by China!"  I can even see making
some great banners and graphics.  ;-)

Larry


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Censored by China?

body:
Even this is accessable:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/china

I guess Ed Poor's dream has come true.

Fred

>> Can anyone find out whether Wikipedia has been censored by China?
>
>No, it is not.
>Test it here:
>http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/test/
>
>Giskart
>
>--
>+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
>NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Last edit rollback

in_reply_to:
<3DEDD0AC.3080909@epost.de> from Magnus Manske at "Dec 4, 2002 10:53:48
 am"

body:
> Do you check if the "most current" edit is still the same as the one
> whos contributions page you are looking at? Otherwise, this might happen:
> * User A vandalizes pages, X among them
> * Sysop B looks at A's "contributions", with X being a top edit
> * Others users have been alerted as well, and just after B loads A's
> contributions, user C reverts X manually
> * Now, B uses "revert". The top edit is from user C, reverting the vandalism
> * So, the revert gets reverted, bringing the vandalism to top again!

I did a little test, and this kind of behaviour is indeed possible.

Andre Engels


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Censored by China?

body:
At 10:02 AM 12/4/02 -0800, Ec wrote:
>Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
>>Better yet, if we could write article (even about Taiwan, et al.) so
>>NEUTRALLY that even mainland China had no objections, that would be a big
>>plus -- besides being a public service to China and the world.
>That's not the way it works.  For many bureaucrats it's the most neutral
>articles that are the most offensive.
>
>Ec
I also suspect that the structure of the Wikipedia is enough to get us banned
by censors--even if they found our articles on X, Y, and Z entirely acceptable
when they looked, they know that the articles could change at any time.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


from_name: Kemp, Julie

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Sorry, I can't help being pedantic...

body:
Lir,

No one has comment on your sexuality, AFAIK -- just your gender.  There *is*
a difference.

JHK


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Last edit rollback

body:
> > * So, the revert gets reverted, bringing the vandalism to top again!
>
> I did a little test, and this kind of behaviour is indeed possible.

It seems that it's also possible that in the time between someone clicks
on "delete this page", enters a reason for deletion and clicks on
"delete", another person could write something useful on the page. The
page still gets deleted.

The software can detect EditConflicts, so this shouldn't be possible.

Kurt


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 4

body:
Please, let's do it Axel's way. He contributes most of the math articles. Besides, I also want to be able to edit a math equation directly in my browser.

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Axel Boldt [mailto:axelboldt at yahoo.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 12:47 PM
To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 4

--- Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 07:02:34PM -0800, Axel Boldt wrote:

> > TeX is not just for math nerds.
> > There are several powerful macro packages for creating all sorts of
> > diagrams, flow charts and graphics. These would provide huge
> > benefits to lots of Wikipedians outside of math.
>
> You will still be able to compile them on your computer and upload,
> just like you can do it now.

Sure, but I don't want to, because it's not the wiki way: people who
intend to improve my work are then required to install the necessary
software and recreate the work from scratch. It's clearly much more
user friendly to allow direct editing of the work's description in the
browser.

My point was that you want to give up this advantage for the goal of
output format independence, and that I don't agree with these
priorities.

Axel


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Censored by China?

body:
You may say I'm a dreamer.
But I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us.
Then the world will live as one.
--John Lennon (may he rest in peace)

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Fred Bauder [mailto:fredbaud at ctelco.net]
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 2:25 PM
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Censored by China?

Even this is accessable:

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/china

I guess Ed Poor's dream has come true.

Fred


list: wikien-l

from_name: Tucci

subject: [WikiEN-l] celebrating

body:
To celebrate my newfound sysop status, I had an idea.
It is my impression that celebrities generally have
publicity photos that are widely circulated to
potential agents or whatever.  Has anybody ever tried
e-mailing a big talent agency with famous clients and
asking for the rights to use publicity photos in
articles?  I'd think they'd try to find some way to
come up with a public domain photo--more publicity is
always a good thing.

Potly yours, Tokerboy

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] View article

body:
Recently, the messages to go from a discussion page to the corresponding
page have been changed to get "view user page", "view meta page" etcetera.
It's a nice change, but I now notice that the same has been done on the
non-English Wikipedias too. And that's not nice. I'd rather have a reasonable
text in Dutch than a better one in English on the Dutch Wikipedia. Could this
change thus please be rolled back except for en and meta?

Andre Engels


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] View article

body:
On Mit, 2002-12-04 at 17:31, Andre Engels wrote:
> Recently, the messages to go from a discussion page to the corresponding
> page have been changed to get "view user page", "view meta page" etcetera.
> It's a nice change, but I now notice that the same has been done on the
> non-English Wikipedias too. And that's not nice. I'd rather have a reasonable
> text in Dutch than a better one in English on the Dutch Wikipedia. Could this
> change thus please be rolled back except for en and meta?

Hi,

I warned of this happening. But this would require us to start tracking
individual changes for the different Wikipedias, which would slow down
updates (which is especially bad as Brion seems to be the only one who
has both the permissions and the will to do updates).

I think it's better to annoy people into providing translations. We're
talking about 10 words or so. The problem is, people don't really know
where to go to do so -- meta, intwiki-l, wikitech-l .. we need a
prominent "Provide a missing translation" link on all Wikipedias.

If anyone sends new translations to the list, I'll be glad to apply them
(I can only commit to CVS, though, not update the live code).

Regards,

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


from_name: elian

subject: [Wikitech-l] View article

body:
Erik Moeller <e.moeller at fokus.gmd.de> writes:

> I think it's better to annoy people into providing translations. We're
> talking about 10 words or so. The problem is, people don't really know
> where to go to do so -- meta, intwiki-l, wikitech-l .. we need a
> prominent "Provide a missing translation" link on all Wikipedias.
>
> If anyone sends new translations to the list, I'll be glad to apply them
> (I can only commit to CVS, though, not update the live code).

Perhaps the easiest way to achieve this is to post the
languagefiles which need to be updated on intlwiki or metawikipedia.
And it would be a lot easier, if the strings which need to be translated
were already _in_ the files.

greetings,
elian
--
"Wer mit 18 Jahren kein Kommunist ist, hat kein Herz.
 Wer aber mit 28 Jahren immer noch Kommunist ist, der hat kein Hirn."


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Censored by China?

body:
Nathan Silva wrote:

>Currently Wikipedia is blocked according to Harvard.
>http://asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/list.html
>
>
I wonder if that was a Chinese initiative, or if Britannica paid them ;-)

Magnus


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] celebrating

body:
You Wrote:
>To celebrate my newfound sysop status, I had an idea.
>It is my impression that celebrities generally have
>publicity photos that are widely circulated to
>potential agents or whatever.  Has anybody ever tried
>e-mailing a big talent agency with famous clients and
>asking for the rights to use publicity photos in
>articles?  I'd think they'd try to find some way to
>come up with a public domain photo--more publicity is
>always a good thing.

I emailed Moby's site a couple of weeks ago and got no response.

kq


list: sifter-l

source: wayback-mbox

from_name: Larry Sanger

subject: Re: [Sifter-l] Hello all

body:
It would be great to have you on board.  (Good recruiting, Ed.  :-) )

Larry

On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Julie Hofmann Kemp wrote:

> Hi everybody,
>
> Ed shot me an e-mail to let me know what's going on, and I'm trying to
> wade through the archives to see what's up.  Still buried under papers,
> and I'm not going to be around at Christmas, but may have some time next
> quarter.  Looking at the 'pedia these days, I think my activities there
> will be extreeeemely limited, but this looks like it might be
> interesting.  ;-) anyway, just thought I'd stop and say hi!
>
> Jules
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sifter-l mailing list
> Sifter-l@nupedia.com
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/sifter-l
>

--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


from_name: Julie Hofmann Kemp

subject: [Sifter-l] Hello all

body:
Hi everybody,

Ed shot me an e-mail to let me know what's going on, and I'm trying to
wade through the archives to see what's up.  Still buried under papers,
and I'm not going to be around at Christmas, but may have some time next
quarter.  Looking at the 'pedia these days, I think my activities there
will be extreeeemely limited, but this looks like it might be
interesting.  ;-) anyway, just thought I'd stop and say hi!

Jules


from_name: giskart at gmx.net

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Censored by China?

body:
> Can anyone find out whether Wikipedia has been censored by China?

No, it is not.
Test it here:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/test/

Giskart

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 8

body:
Main changes:

== texvc accepts more TeX ==

== texvc_test for mass tests ==

Tested on corpus of TeX equations downloaded and perl-extracted
from PlanetMath, and it accepts 3553 of 6302.

Two things to consider about this numbers:
* These "equations" were extracted by very primitive regular
  expression (/\$([^$]+)\$/), and many of them aren't really equations.
* lot of those that are use features predefined in prefaces
  of particular articles.

It would really help if I could get real TeX sources of PlanetMath somehow.
Any idea ?

== HTML rendering engine is more powerful ==

It can render fractions now, like that one:

<math>\sum^{N+M}_{k=0} k^6 + \frac{\sum_{i=1}^M i}{\prod_{j=1}^N j}</math>

What is transformed into acceptably-looking but impossible to write by hand
code like that:

N+M

M

∑i

i=1

∑k6+

k=0

N

∏
j

j=1

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from_name: phma at webjockey.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] 网上新华书店开张8万图书一律7.5折

body:
Please use plain text when sending email. HTML is not secure when sending
email because it can contain malicious programs; so I view my mail only
in plain text. Please see http://www.houghi.org for how to set this in
your mail program.

phma


from_name: Sven Burkhart

subject: [Wikitech-l] Last edit rollback

body:
Despite all the critics, at least for our first vandal bot on the German
pedia the rollback function came just handy and worked fine. Thanks Brion.

Sven (Ben-Zin)


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 9

body:
Main changes:

= More TeX supported =

Number of passed PlanetMath equations raised from 3553 (56%) to 4432 (70%)
of 6302 total.

Portability of equations from PlanetMath is horrible - authors of articles
just love to create just a few commands more, to make markup look more cute.
Two such definitions: \reals (== \mathbb{R}) and \cnums (== \mathbb{C}) were
so popular that I simply had to add support for them to texvc.

This should be a warning for us - math markup on Wikipedia would be as
horrible as that if we allowed any TeX. (With texvc extensions you can
at least get real TeX from it).

There is also some stuff that I'm not sure if we really want to support,
most notably sub and sup scripting nothing. ($_x$ and $^y$)

Having said that, some of the failures are still texvc's fault.

= AMS Fonts =

If any of special AMS features are used, like \mathbb, AMS (amsmath, amsfonts and
amssymb) is loaded. I'm not sure if there is any point in loading it by default,
it would certainly slow down rendering.

Similar mechanism could be used to support many modules and keep performance
reasonable at the same time.
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subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 4

body:
On Wed, Dec 04, 2002 at 03:03:45PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> Please, let's do it Axel's way. He contributes most of the math articles.
> Besides, I also want to be able to edit a math equation directly in my browser.

You will be able to edit math equations directly in your browsers with texvc.

What you won't be able to do is to edit such things as
TeX descriptions of graphs, chess boards, music scores etc.
At least for now. If suddently tons of people will want to
edit chess boards on Wikipedia, we will be able to easily add
support for it, including generation of HTML tables showing
given chess board.


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 10

body:
The only change is CGI interface (written in Ocaml) to texvc,
available from math/texvc_cgi

It can be used to see HTML output, real TeX and generated image.

It's very rough, not i18ned and it doesn't even try to make sure that
TeX looks well on output. But it's just a small auxiliary script,
not part of Wikipedia proper, so fixing those problems is not a priority.
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subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 11

body:
Main changes:

== $e^\sin x$ means $e^{\sin} x$ not $e^{\sin x}$ now ==
I hope that will make everybody happy.

== More TeX ==
It passes 5241 (83%) of 6302 equations from PlanethMath corpus.

Most popular functions it fails on are:

10 \cD			!
10 \ca			!
10 \size		!
10 \textbf		!
11 \bx			!
11 \ell			OK
11 \x			!
11 \xi			OK
12 \ad			!
12 \kfield		!
13 \F			!
14 \Bbb			Warning: Obsolete command \Bbb; \mathbb should be used instead
14 \P			OK
14 \cidl		!
14 \lag			!
15 \lra			!
15 \vert		OK
16 \O			Warning: Command \O invalid in math mode
16 \fr			!
16 \p			!
17 \text		OK
19 \mv			!
22 \A			!
22 \rm			OK
62 \left		OK

OK = function exists, texvc's fault
!  = function doesn't exist in standard LaTeX, amsmath, amsfonts nor amssymb

What should I do about these !s ?

== It's almost ready ==

A few fixes here and there are of course necessary, but I'd like Wikipedia
admins and all other people to take a look at texvc now.
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from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] celebrating

body:
I think it's a great idea to ask around for this.  Of course we can't
assume that any particular photo is suitable without getting express
permission.  And notice that the permission can't be just to *use* the
photo, but to *redistributed it under the terms of the GNU FDL*.

I have a feeling that last caveat will frighten away many otherwise
cooperative people, who have never heard of such a crazy thing as free
software.

Tucci wrote:

> To celebrate my newfound sysop status, I had an idea.
> It is my impression that celebrities generally have
> publicity photos that are widely circulated to
> potential agents or whatever.  Has anybody ever tried
> e-mailing a big talent agency with famous clients and
> asking for the rights to use publicity photos in
> articles?  I'd think they'd try to find some way to
> come up with a public domain photo--more publicity is
> always a good thing.
>
> Potly yours, Tokerboy
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
> http://mailplus.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Administrative Request: (was: ????????8?????7.5?)

in_reply_to: <E079C39257D0D845AC39E2CA261C43E0A5D18E@sm-nyny-xm04.nena.wdpr.disney.com>; from Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com on Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 08:55:39AM -0500

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> Did anybody else receive an HTML advertising page with lots of
>Chinese writing, images and a Macromedia Flash thing?

Yes.

> I don't think it came from a signed-up contributor -- or even an
>anonymous Wikipedian. Rather, it seems an abuse of the e-mail list.

The list is set -- or should be -- to accept posts only from addresses
that are subscribed.  Perhaps you could recheck that.

> Alternatives:
> * Do nothing (it may have been a fluke)
> * Ban myisking01 at sina.com (the address that sent the advertisement)
> * Other (please specify)

I would either do nothing (because I'm lazy) or ban that address.

There's a chance, I suppose, that this person was a serious Chinese
person trying to talk to us.  Or it might have just been Chinese spam,
which I get some of every day of the week.

--Jimbo


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
Did anybody else receive an HTML advertising page with lots of Chinese writing, images and a Macromedia Flash thing?

I don't think it came from a signed-up contributor -- or even an anonymous Wikipedian. Rather, it seems an abuse of the e-mail list.

My question is what you all would like me do about things like this. As your list administrator, I am happy to serve. But as AxelBoldt reminded me last month, I am not a "Moderator" and thus do not set policy.

Alternatives:
* Do nothing (it may have been a fluke)
* Ban myisking01 at sina.com (the address that sent the advertisement)
* Other (please specify)

Ed Poor
WikiEN-l mailing list administrator

-----Original Message-----
From: myisking01 at sina.com [mailto:myisking01 at sina.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 9:08 PM
To: WikiEN-L at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] ????????8?????7.5?

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from_name: 网上新华书店

subject: [WikiEN-l] 网上新华书店开张8万图书一律7.5折

body:
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from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [WikiEN-l] celebrating

body:
Tucci wrote:

>To celebrate my newfound sysop status, I had an idea.
>It is my impression that celebrities generally have
>publicity photos that are widely circulated to
>potential agents or whatever.  Has anybody ever tried
>e-mailing a big talent agency with famous clients and
>asking for the rights to use publicity photos in
>articles?  I'd think they'd try to find some way to
>come up with a public domain photo--more publicity is
>always a good thing.
>
>
They won't have a problem with us showing pictures of their stars, but
they might have one with releasing a photo under GFDL.

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] 网上新华书店开张8万图书一律7.5折

body:
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Helga is back under another IP

body:
Done.  If it's from a pool of dynamic ip numbers, she'll be back soon
enough at a different number, and we'll want to unblock this one in a
few days.

Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:

> Helga Jonat is connecting using 66.47.62.78, still arguing over
> Gdansk, weird posts on Lithuanian history (see [[Memet]] for
> example), and signing as H.Jonat (I was fairly sure it was her
> before, but the signed entry on Talk:Gdansk clinches it).
>
> A check yesterday reported that IP address as being somewhere
> at Mindspring. Is that sufficient reason not to block it?
> --
> Vicki Rosenzweig
> vr at redbird.org
> http://www.redbird.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Lir's gender (was: Sorry, I can't help being pedantic...)

body:
Sorry, I can't resist. Look at this cartoon.

http://www.unitedmedia.com/creators/onebighappy/archive/images/onebighappy2002166261128.gif

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Kemp, Julie [mailto:kempj at exegrnnts001.seattleu.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 5:44 PM
To: 'wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org'
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Sorry, I can't help being pedantic...

Lir,

No one has comment on your sexuality, AFAIK -- just your gender.  There *is*
a difference.

JHK


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

body:
Helga Jonat is connecting using 66.47.62.78, still arguing over
Gdansk, weird posts on Lithuanian history (see [[Memet]] for
example), and signing as H.Jonat (I was fairly sure it was her
before, but the signed entry on Talk:Gdansk clinches it).

A check yesterday reported that IP address as being somewhere
at Mindspring. Is that sufficient reason not to block it?
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 12, and lot of details

body:
Main change is support for even more TeX.

= More TeX =

Of 6302 tests:
* 5497 (87.2%) passed
    * in 5072 (92.3%) cases it was able to produce HTML
    * in 425 (7.7%) cases it couldn't, and I doubt this could be significantly
	improved.
* 2 (0.0%) failed due to lexer (and in both cases they should fail)
* 20 (0.3%) failed due to parser, in all cases due to abuse of ^s and _s.
    Could be fixed, but it's not a priority.
* 783 (12.4%) failed due to 203 unknown \-codes
  * 179 \-codes in 684 (10.8%) equations were illegal (couldn't be compiled
    by LaTeX with ams* packages)
  * 24  \-codes in 99 (1.5%) equations were legal
* So 121 (1.9%) failed due to reasons other than genuinely illegal \-codes
* So of 5618 equations not containing genuinely illegal \-codes, 5497
    could be compiled by texvc, what makes up for 97.8%, close to
    promised 99%.

= Performance =

6302 equations, 119 145 bytes total, are all parsed in:

real    0m0.191s
user    0m0.180s
sys     0m0.000s

real    0m0.190s
user    0m0.190s
sys     0m0.000s

real    0m0.196s
user    0m0.190s
sys     0m0.000s

on Athlon 1 GHz box.
These are results of texvc_test, real results will be slightly lower
due to overhead of starting texvc on every equation.

texvc will introduce no performance problems, and in fact can
be faster than "just run TeX" solution as it can find out which TeX
modules should be loaded.

= Open issues =
* transparent PNGs
* Unicode support
* checking which symbols need AMS to be loaded
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from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] ����������������8����������7.5��

body:
What IS this?
Zoe
 ???????????? <myisking01 at sina.com> wrote:_______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---------------------------------
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body:
What IS this?
Zoe
 ???????????? <myisking01 at sina.com> wrote:_______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now
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body:
I vote for banning.
Zoe
 "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:Did anybody else receive an HTML advertising page with lots of Chinese writing, images and a Macromedia Flash thing? I don't think it came from a signed-up contributor -- or even an anonymous Wikipedian. Rather, it seems an abuse of the e-mail list. My question is what you all would like me do about things like this. As your list administrator, I am happy to serve. But as AxelBoldt reminded me last month, I am not a "Moderator" and thus do not set policy. Alternatives:* Do nothing (it may have been a fluke)* Ban myisking01 at sina.com (the address that sent the advertisement)* Other (please specify) Ed PoorWikiEN-l mailing list administrator-----Original Message-----
From: myisking01 at sina.com [mailto:myisking01 at sina.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 9:08 PM
To: WikiEN-L at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] ????????8?????7.5?

> ATTACHMENT part 2 message/rfc822 Subject: [WikiEN-l] ????????????????8??????????7.5??
Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 21:07:37 -0500
From: ????????????
To:

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

---------------------------------
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Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Signing up for SourceForge

body:
How can someone sign up for SourceForge? Dante says he tried twice, but never got in -- and never got an explanation.

----

Do us all a favor, oh great public servant (sysop Tokerboy), and create a Wikipedia:Feature wishlist page. Then, volunteer to coordinate between the various mailing lists, source forge and that new page. You can hold votes and report results. What's stopping you? ;-) --Uncle Ed

Speaking of Source Forge, I've tried to sign up twice (so that I can put in a feature request) and it won't work. I didn't even get a response to my query as to why I couldn't sign up. -- Dante Alighieri 00:27 Dec 6, 2002 (UTC)

----

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 13

body:
On Thu, 2002-12-05 at 19:21, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> Btw. which Wikipedias on new software haven't moved to UTF-8 ?
> It would be so much easier if everyone used the same encoding.

utf-8: cs* el* eo ja* ko* pl ru* tr* zh* meta
latin1: da de en es fr ms* nl sv sep11*

(* not used much yet; few or no contributors, articles)

I'm all in favor of moving to full utf-8, but there are still problems
with popular browsers that break on UTF-8 chars. (See the Help page on
meta.) We need a transparent conversion to/from latin1 to allow known
bad browsers (or not known good) to work with something safer, eg latin1
+ numeric references.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Jonathan Walther

subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 13

body:
On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 08:04:08PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>utf-8: cs* el* eo ja* ko* pl ru* tr* zh* meta
>latin1: da de en es fr ms* nl sv sep11*

Do meta and sep11 belong in the list of languages, or in the list
of namespaces?  This question is in reference to recent discussion
surrounding the page

    http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Clutch/mod_wiki

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

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

body:
Are the language codes always going to be two characters, or might there
be longer ones?  Might we want to support distinctions like en_US and
en_UK one day?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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body:
On Thu, 2002-12-05 at 20:41, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> Do meta and sep11 belong in the list of languages, or in the list
> of namespaces?

They're non-language-specific sections, while en, fr, zh etc are
language-specific sections.

Theoretically, one might keep them as physically separate
wikis/databases while _encyclopedia_ sections in all languages are
consolidated into a single database that is aware of the connections
between languages.

Or, all sections (the encyclopedia in each language, the multilingual
meta-discussion, and the any-language memorial wiki) could go into a
single glob, and we make a distinction between types of sections only
for purposes of linking encyclopedia articles on the same topic
together.

On Thu, 2002-12-05 at 20:45, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> Are the language codes always going to be two characters, or might there
> be longer ones?

Not all languages have two-letter codes; eventually we might move into
three-letter codes, and conceivably also languages which have neither a
2 nor a 3 letter code and have to make do with something like
'art-lojban'.

>  Might we want to support distinctions like en_US and
> en_UK one day?

I'd be reluctant to do that, since there'd be 99% overlap in material,
even worse than the ex-Yugoslav business.

On the other hand, a cleaner way to handle Chinese would be nice;
currently pages in simplified and traditional characters are kind of
mixed together, with disambiguation where necessary... I'm not really
satisfied with it, but then I'm not the target audience either.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Anthere

body:
--- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> Did anybody else receive an HTML advertising page
> with lots of Chinese writing, images and a
> Macromedia Flash thing?

yes

> I don't think it came from a signed-up contributor
> -- or even an anonymous Wikipedian. Rather, it seems
> an abuse of the e-mail list.

yes

> My question is what you all would like me do about
> things like this. As your list administrator, I am
> happy to serve. But as AxelBoldt reminded me last
> month, I am not a "Moderator" and thus do not set
> policy.
>
> Alternatives:
> * Do nothing (it may have been a fluke)
> * Ban myisking01 at sina.com (the address that sent the
> advertisement)
> * Other (please specify)

In my highest magnanimity, on the fr.list, I

* have a temporary block on any mail bigger than xx,
posted by an anonymous...
* when such a message is received, I consider its
interest in the view of the object of the list
* if it can be of any interest (even from an
anonymous), I post it
* if not, I flush it, but I send a message to the
author stating it is a private list etc... (to avoid
losing so who made a mistake)

I did not ask anybody's feeling about that, cause I
don't see any diffence in this behaviour, with what I
do when anybody post anything inappropriate on the
wikipedia.

If not relevant, and clearly abuse, I flush
If not relevant, but likely to be a mistake, I flush
and put a message in the discussion page.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 13

body:
Main changes:

1.
All characters have been automatically checked whether they
require AMS or not, so dynamic loading of AMS should be more robust.

2.
It is possible to use UTF-8 inside \mbox{}, not only ASCII.
I managed to render Polish characters, but it seems that
more work is needed to make latex work with CJK.

Unicode packages are not available in default TeTeX installation,
and have to be downloaded separately from
http://www.unruh.de/DniQ/latex/unicode/

Unicode packages (ucs and inputenc:utf8) are loaded only
if there is \mbox containing non-ASCII characters.

I'm not really happy about this solution, but it should at least
work for English, Polish and Esperanto, and \mbox is not the most
important feature.

Btw. which Wikipedias on new software haven't moved to UTF-8 ?
It would be so much easier if everyone used the same encoding.
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: access to wikipedia server

in_reply_to: <20021206124227.5910.qmail@web14805.mail.yahoo.com>; from wikipedista@yahoo.com on Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 04:42:27AM -0800

body:
Excellent!

What I have done so far is let Brion or LDC or Jason or someone handle
the handing out of developer accounts.  The password needs to go via
some secure channel, telephone is good, or pgp.

I see no reason to restrict your access to just that account, though.

wiki pedista wrote:

> I routinely work on linux and unix machines, and I
> administer my linux box. I do not have much experience
> with php and apache, but I know enough not to break
> havoc.
>
> I wouldn't ask for it if there were a qualified
> developer in the spanish wiki, but I think I am the
> closest person there is.
>
> My intention for the time beeing is just to modify
> the LanguageEs.php file,  so even an account with only
> write access to that directory would be enough.
>
> Ive
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
> http://mailplus.yahoo.com


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wiki consolidation: Please base this on common project goals

body:
Brion wrote:
>Theoretically, one might keep them as
>physically separate wikis/databases while
>_encyclopedia_ sections in all languages are
>consolidated into a single database that is
>aware of the connections between languages.

Yes, please lets have all the encyclopedia sections in
one wiki and keep this separate from non-encyclopedia
projects such as meta, sep11 etc. This is conceptually
clean and also allows for meta to be a place where
Wikipedians can go when, for whatever reason, the
encyclopedia wiki is down (being on a separate sever
would further help). Meta also works differently than
the encyclopedias do and will probably need to become
a hybrid PediaWiki/bbs (or something) in the future.
So in order to allow for the evolution of Meta it
really should be kept separate (the same is true, to
an extent, for the other non-encyclopedia projects).

>Or, all sections (the encyclopedia in each
>language, the multilingual meta-discussion,
>and the any-language memorial wiki) could go
>into a single glob, and we make a distinction
>between types of sections only for purposes of
>linking encyclopedia articles on the same topic
>together.

I don't like this option at all. It does makes perfect
sense to have all encyclopedia sections in one wiki
but tribute sections and Meta should be on their own
Wikis (one for all tribute sections and one for Meta -
ProjectSourceburg should probably also have its own
wiki too since this project really does need special
software features). In terms of either their goals or
software needs each project (encyclopedia, tribute,
meta and source) is a different animal and really
should have their own cages.

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com


body:
On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 10:43:44AM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>I don't like this option at all. It does makes perfect
>sense to have all encyclopedia sections in one wiki
>but tribute sections and Meta should be on their own
>Wikis (one for all tribute sections and one for Meta -
>ProjectSourceburg should probably also have its own
>wiki too since this project really does need special
>software features). In terms of either their goals or
>software needs each project (encyclopedia, tribute,
>meta and source) is a different animal and really
>should have their own cages.

With correct design, each Wiki can run in it's own cage, despite having
a single database in common.  Postgresql supports more than one
connection at the same time... Head on over to Clutches mod_wiki page if
you would like to participate in the design work.

The one problem I see right now is the namespace issue.  Right now the
namespace syntax is overloaded to handle languages as well as
namespaces.  And now namespace syntax is supposed to be overloaded to
point to completely different wikis?  I think we need a newer, more
sensible syntax for expressing all these things as links in our
Wikipedia pages.

Is it really important not to know whether something is a namespace, or
a pointer to an external Wiki?  And how can we distinguish a "language"
code from a namespace?  I don't like the brute force method of comparing
against every possible language code.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Wiki consolidation: Please base this on common
	project goals

body:
On Fri, 2002-12-06 at 10:55, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> Why do you want all projects to share the same user database?

1) Common user database: single account/login for all languages and
meta, saving a lot of trouble for a lot of people

2) Common file upload area: don't have to copy 200 flag images over to X
wiki because they were put in an English-only section; they'll be
available to all

3) Common link database: *Much* easier to track interlanguage links (and
image files linked to from articles in the various languages), including
detection of nonexistent articles and automatic backlinking to the other
languages, even for articles that don't exist in the current language
but are linked to from others (eg, "no article on this topic is yet
available in Florthapian ([[create one now!]]), but it's available in
[[Upper Wuvian]] and [[Quenya]]")

4) As the number of languages running on the new server as separate
wikis increases, maintenance gets more difficult.

Please comment at:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_language_integration

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Edit war over "Palestinian"

body:
I am trying to avert an edit war over the [[Palestinian]] article, but I need advice or maybe help. On the other hand, there may be less of a problem than I think there is.

It's hard for me to be objective, because I myself just finished overhauling the article this week, after it sat idle for about 2 months.

Also, I am way too pro-Israeli to be able to detect my own bias on any article relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

----

A new IP address made some lengthy additions, and when RK put in his 2 cents, the newbie reverted RK's changes. I advised RK on his talk page to hold off and see where the new guy is taking this.

Any advice? Does anything need to be done? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill?

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


subject: [Wikitech-l] bug in utf8 misspelling searching

body:
On Fri, 2002-12-06 at 12:37, youandme at poczta.fm wrote:
> Can maintenance pages, namely misspelling seeking,
> be set up to use the same mechanism as normal search
> on Polish Wikipedia (and perhaps other utf8 ones)?

Oops, I thought I'd done that... Fixed now.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Feature Wishlist page

body:
Do us all a favor, oh great public servant (sysop Tokerboy), and create a Wikipedia:Feature wishlist page. Then, volunteer to coordinate between the various mailing lists, source forge and that new page. You can hold votes and report results.

SourceForge is impractical for several reasons, and just posting to wikitech-l or to this mailing list just isn't good enough.

We need to keep better track of our open issues.

Ed Poor, aka Uncle Ed


from_name: The Cunctator

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Wiki consolidation: Please base this on common
 project goals

body:
On 12/6/02 1:43 PM, "Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Brion wrote:
>> Theoretically, one might keep them as
>> physically separate wikis/databases while
>> _encyclopedia_ sections in all languages are
>> consolidated into a single database that is
>> aware of the connections between languages.
>
> Yes, please lets have all the encyclopedia sections in
> one wiki and keep this separate from non-encyclopedia
> projects such as meta, sep11 etc. This is conceptually
> clean and also allows for meta to be a place where
> Wikipedians can go when, for whatever reason, the
> encyclopedia wiki is down (being on a separate sever
> would further help). Meta also works differently than
> the encyclopedias do and will probably need to become
> a hybrid PediaWiki/bbs (or something) in the future.
> So in order to allow for the evolution of Meta it
> really should be kept separate (the same is true, to
> an extent, for the other non-encyclopedia projects).

<snip>

> In terms of either their goals or
> software needs each project (encyclopedia, tribute,
> meta and source) is a different animal and really
> should have their own cages.

I agree. My only amendment is that all the projects should share the same
user database.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki consolidation: Please base this on common project goals

body:
Why do you want all projects to share the same user database?

Ed Poor


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [WikiEN-l]ÍøÉÏÐÂ»ªÊéµê¿ªÕÅ8ÍòÍ¼ÊéÒ»ÂÉ7.5ÕÛ

body:
On Thursday 05 December 2002 19:15, Zoe wrote:
> What IS this?

Spam in Chinese.

phma


body:
Sounds good to me.

If all the non-English wikipedias want to swim in the same pool with the English wikipedia, why not? Why should there be barriers?

It reminds me of a joke: England and America are two peoples separated by a common language ;-)

I don't get it either!

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Brion Vibber [mailto:brion at pobox.com]
Sent: Friday, December 06, 2002 3:39 PM
To: wikipedia-l; intlwiki-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki consolidation: Please base this on
commonproject goals

On Fri, 2002-12-06 at 10:55, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> Why do you want all projects to share the same user database?

1) Common user database: single account/login for all languages and
meta, saving a lot of trouble for a lot of people

2) Common file upload area: don't have to copy 200 flag images over to X
wiki because they were put in an English-only section; they'll be
available to all

3) Common link database: *Much* easier to track interlanguage links (and
image files linked to from articles in the various languages), including
detection of nonexistent articles and automatic backlinking to the other
languages, even for articles that don't exist in the current language
but are linked to from others (eg, "no article on this topic is yet
available in Florthapian ([[create one now!]]), but it's available in
[[Upper Wuvian]] and [[Quenya]]")

4) As the number of languages running on the new server as separate
wikis increases, maintenance gets more difficult.

Please comment at:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_language_integration

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


body:
On Thursday 05 December 2002 08:55, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> Did anybody else receive an HTML advertising page with lots of Chinese
> writing, images and a Macromedia Flash thing?

I got a subject in Chinese and two lines of HTML code. If your mail client
displays lots of Chinese writing, images, and a Macromedia Flash thing, it is
misconfigured. These were not in the message and should not be displayed in
the message. Email is not the Web. A mail client that accesses the Net to
display things in the message is broken and a security hole.

> I don't think it came from a signed-up contributor -- or even an anonymous
> Wikipedian. Rather, it seems an abuse of the e-mail list.
>
> My question is what you all would like me do about things like this. As
> your list administrator, I am happy to serve. But as AxelBoldt reminded me
> last month, I am not a "Moderator" and thus do not set policy.
>
> Alternatives:
> * Do nothing (it may have been a fluke)
> * Ban myisking01 at sina.com (the address that sent the advertisement)
> * Other (please specify)

There is no sense banning that address. The probability that another spam
will come from that address in a year, even if a spam comes each day, is
minuscule. I suggest banning HTML mail and messages from nonsubscribers.

The IP address is not listed in any of the spam blocklists I have used,
except Spamcop, which I advise against using, since it is fairly easy to
maliciously list someone else's address.

phma


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Edit war over "Palestinian"

body:
>From my perspective, all Wikipedia articles remotely touching on the
Arab-Israeli are completely useless because they are heavily biased as
a result of RK's work. Everybody who tries to rectify things is
viciously attacked by RK and reverted. This has been going on for
months.

Axel

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] User accounts

body:
Could user accounts be integrated between Wikipedias ?
(cookie would be set for whole wikipedia.com)

So that people don't have to log for every Wikipedia they modify.
It's most annoying when it's just for adding interwiki links -
often 5 or more logins would be necessary to do it right.

Oh, and why does login expire so fast ?


from_name: youandme at poczta.fm

body:
Can maintenance pages, namely misspelling seeking,
be set up to use the same mechanism as normal search
on Polish Wikipedia (and perhaps other utf8 ones)?

I put "pojedy&naccute;cze" (of course with respective letter
instead of &naccute; entity) on the Misspelling page
and I see only pages with "cze" occurences on the result page.
While the same normal search gives correct results.

TIA
Youandme

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Portal INTERIA.PL zaprasza... >>> http://link.interia.pl/f167c


subject: [WikiEN-l] This page has been accessed times.

body:
I just deleted a page of garbage and at the bottom of the deletion page it
says "This page has been accessed times. The page was last modified 23:59 Dec
31, 1969. This page is available under the GNU FDL.". Xo?

phma


subject: [WikiEN-l] Edit war over "Palestinian"

body:
Well, lately RK has kindly been listening to my pleas for patience. Why, today, he held off for a full two hours!

Good Sabbath, everyone!

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Axel Boldt [mailto:axelboldt at yahoo.com]
Sent: Friday, December 06, 2002 9:23 PM
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Edit war over "Palestinian"

>From my perspective, all Wikipedia articles remotely touching on the
Arab-Israeli are completely useless because they are heavily biased as
a result of RK's work. Everybody who tries to rectify things is
viciously attacked by RK and reverted. This has been going on for
months.

Axel


from_name: Larry Sanger

subject: [Wikipedia-l] reference.com to use Wikipedia?

body:
See:

http://www.reference.com/encyclopedia/

This is a new website, which does not apparently yet actually have a
reference look up (if you search from reference.com, you'll receive
dictionary.com results), but you'll notice that Wikipedia is listed among
the sources.

It seems likely that Reference.com will be using Wikipedia results at some
point soon, just as Dictionary.com uses free dictionaries.  This will
have a probably small, but nonetheless important long-term impact on
public perception of Wikipedia.  It'll be the first time a major website
actually uses Wikipedia articles.

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


body:
--- Pierre Abbat <phma at webjockey.net> wrote:
> I just deleted a page of garbage and at the bottom
> of the deletion page it
> says "This page has been accessed times. The page
> was last modified 23:59 Dec
> 31, 1969. This page is available under the GNU
> FDL.". Xo?
>
> phma

Quote from an "old" harassment to Brion

------

weird thing. Somebody linked fr:agriculture durable to
en:sustainable agriculture. This is currently an empty
page, but the history show the page was created in
1969 31th of december ??? What is going on ?
user:anthere

The page doesn't exist. That's what you get if you're
foolish enough to click "history" for a page that
doesn't exist. :)  It probably should display a
message like "Page doesn't exist, there is no history"
instead of trying to convert a bunch of zeroes into a
meaningful history display, but since it's harmless
and cosmetic and rarely comes up (linked to
nonexistent pages normally are edit pages, which don't
have a history link) nobody's got around to fixing it
yet. --Brion 10:15 Nov 16, 2002 (UTC)

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A Feature Wishlist page

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>Do us all a favor, oh great public servant (sysop Tokerboy), and create a Wikipedia:Feature wishlist page.
>

See http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page -- there's a list at the
top of a few recent proposals such as math markup & tables.

> Then, volunteer to coordinate between the various mailing lists, source forge and that new page. You can hold votes and report results.
>
>SourceForge is impractical for several reasons, and just posting to wikitech-l or to this mailing list just isn't good enough.
>
>We need to keep better track of our open issues.
>
>
>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] ÍøÉÏÐÂ»ªÊéµê¿ªÕÅ8ÍòÍ¼ÊéÒ»ÂÉ7.5ÕÛ

body:
Pierre Abbat wrote:

>On Thursday 05 December 2002 19:15, Zoe wrote:
>
>
>>What IS this?
>>
>>
>
>Spam in Chinese.
>
>
>
Wow! Never had *that* before!

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-12-31&res=l

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2001/20011231l.gif

>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 13

body:
On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 12:17:58AM +0100, Jens Frank wrote:
>On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 08:41:21PM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 08:04:08PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>> >utf-8: cs* el* eo ja* ko* pl ru* tr* zh* meta
>> >latin1: da de en es fr ms* nl sv sep11*
>>
>> Do meta and sep11 belong in the list of languages, or in the list
>> of namespaces?
>
>meta and sep11 are similar to "languages". They are not namespaces,
>they have a db of their own and a domain of their own. Links like
>[[m:bla bla bla]] are treated different to language-links. They are
>rendered inline, similar to a [http://www.blabla.com/] link.

Can you explain that in more detail?  What do you mean, "rendered
inline"?  From where I'm standing, if all the databases were folded into
one wiki database, there would be no problem.

And I still haven't heard any suggestions for a different syntax for
specifying an external wiki; it doesn't seem right to overload the
namespace syntax to handle that function.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

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

subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 13

body:
On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 08:41:21PM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 08:04:08PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> >utf-8: cs* el* eo ja* ko* pl ru* tr* zh* meta
> >latin1: da de en es fr ms* nl sv sep11*
>
> Do meta and sep11 belong in the list of languages, or in the list
> of namespaces?

meta and sep11 are similar to "languages". They are not namespaces,
they have a db of their own and a domain of their own. Links like
[[m:bla bla bla]] are treated different to language-links. They are
rendered inline, similar to a [http://www.blabla.com/] link.

	JeLuF
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subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 13

body:
On Sat, 2002-12-07 at 00:11, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 12:17:58AM +0100, Jens Frank wrote:
> >meta and sep11 are similar to "languages". They are not namespaces,
> >they have a db of their own and a domain of their own. Links like
> >[[m:bla bla bla]] are treated different to language-links. They are
> >rendered inline, similar to a [http://www.blabla.com/] link.
>
> Can you explain that in more detail?  What do you mean, "rendered
> inline"?

In the text instead of spirited up to a list at the top of the screen.
eg the wikicode:

  This [[m:Linking gone mad at meta-wikipedia|link to meta]] is in the
  text. But [[fr:Liens, liens sans fin|this French one]] isn't.

renders as:

  Other languages: <French>
  Some Page
  from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  This <link to meta> is in the text. But  isn't.

unless you're in a talk page or on meta or sep11, in which case you get:

  Talk:Some Page
  from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  This <link to meta> is in the text. But <this French one> isn't.

>  From where I'm standing, if all the databases were folded into
> one wiki database, there would be no problem.
>
> And I still haven't heard any suggestions for a different syntax for
> specifying an external wiki; it doesn't seem right to overload the
> namespace syntax to handle that function.

WikiName:ArticleTitle is the standard interwiki link syntax; the
language codes are just abbreviated forms of the wiki name.

That local namespaces and interwikis both involve some text followed by
a colon shouldn't bug us too badly... after all, URLs start the same
way! (And we really _should_ allow URL links in the same double-bracket
style as wikilinks; newbies try it naturally and get confused when it
doesn't work.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 13

body:
On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 12:47:05AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>> Can you explain that in more detail?  What do you mean, "rendered
>> inline"?
>
>In the text instead of spirited up to a list at the top of the screen.
>eg the wikicode:
>
>  This [[m:Linking gone mad at meta-wikipedia|link to meta]] is in the
>  text. But [[fr:Liens, liens sans fin|this French one]] isn't.

Ok, that makes sense.  I had intended for language links to also be
inline, unless they were at the very top of the page (somewhat like with
#REDIRECT).  Any objections to doing it that way?

>WikiName:ArticleTitle is the standard interwiki link syntax; the
>language codes are just abbreviated forms of the wiki name.

How so?  In that case, maybe we should change the syntax from
lang:wiki:title to wiki:lang:title?  Much easier conceptually, because
then you can leave out the language and it will make sense if it's a
unilingual wiki

>That local namespaces and interwikis both involve some text followed by
>a colon shouldn't bug us too badly... after all, URLs start the same
>way! (And we really _should_ allow URL links in the same double-bracket
>style as wikilinks; newbies try it naturally and get confused when it
>doesn't work.)

Yes, I am wondering why we use [[]] for wiki links, and [] for URL's
proper.  Actually, I am not wondering.  It is a useful syntactic aid to
parsing.  If only the pipe '|' syntax for [] was the same as [[]], that
would be great.  Any objections?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 13

body:
On Sat, 2002-12-07 at 00:47, Jonathan Walther wrote:
(language links & inline appearance)
> Ok, that makes sense.  I had intended for language links to also be
> inline, unless they were at the very top of the page (somewhat like with
> #REDIRECT).  Any objections to doing it that way?

Sounds nice; a link vanishing from the middle of the text is confusing,
but the edges are where 'magic' can be reasonably expected to take
place. Note that a few pages have the lang links stuck at the bottom
instead of the top, and whitespace is common.

> >WikiName:ArticleTitle is the standard interwiki link syntax; the
> >language codes are just abbreviated forms of the wiki name.
>
> How so?

"de:Deutschland" is shorter and more site-specific than
"DeWikiPedia:Deutschland", but functionally the same (seeing the special
prefix, we use a stored URL associated with the prefix and slap the
remainder of the title onto the end of the URL as an external link,
instead of treating it as an internal wiki link - ie checking for page
existence, linking to our own server, using an edit link form if the
page doesn't exist).

That we sometimes move the link to the top of the screen and name it for
the language is just a UI matter.

> Yes, I am wondering why we use [[]] for wiki links, and [] for URL's
> proper.

Historical cruft; our wikicode syntax is largely inherited from
UseModWiki. I think the freelink syntax ([[foo|bar]]) was added after
the single-bracket named URL links; the space isn't usable as the
separator for free links since they can contain spaces in the link
portion.

>  Actually, I am not wondering.  It is a useful syntactic aid to
> parsing.  If only the pipe '|' syntax for [] was the same as [[]], that
> would be great.  Any objections?

The space should be maintained for compatibility, but allowing the pipe
to work as expected would be a very good thing. At that point, using
double brackets would give a working link with an extra pair brackets
around it; though some find that annoying. I would prefer having the
double-brackets work 'as expected'.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 13

body:
On Sat, 2002-12-07 at 01:25, Jens Frank wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 12:11:46AM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> > From where I'm standing, if all the databases were folded into
> > one wiki database, there would be no problem.
>
> Several other language teams have split over the time, some
> have merged with the main project again. If joining db's
> some will feal that they won't be free to choose anymore.

Please comment and encourage others to comment at
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_language_integration ! I want
to hear from people who have concerns *so we can address them*.

It would be trivial to make partial database dumps for each language
available for download, so if someone wants to exercise their right to
fork and only wants to take material from one language, that's easy
enough to accomodate.

Rejoining later wouldn't be more difficult than it is now; if every
single contributor for that language had left for the forked wiki, we
could simply replace every changed article by importing their db dump.
If some people remained at Wikipedia while others worked on a forked
project, we would have to integrate them.

Of course, forking isn't the only thing you can do -- getting involved
and becoming part of the Wikipedia development and maintenance team to
improve it where it's got problems is always an option.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Rollbacks: SoftSecurity on Steroids

body:
On Wednesday 04 December 2002 03:38 pm, wikitech-l-request at wikipedia.org
wrote:
> Despite all the critics, at least for our first vandal bot on the German
> pedia the rollback function came just handy and worked fine. Thanks Brion.
>
> Sven (Ben-Zin)

Mega Dittos! I love this feature because it offers an easy way to wear-down
vandals without having to block the vandal's IP. Rolling back each edit a
vandal makes two seconds after they make it should cause most vandals to lose
interest and leave for good instead of instantly getting pissed-off by
getting blocked (therefore evoking the "I'll show you" response whose only
outlet would be circumventing the block or jumping wikis). Thus a string of
rollbacks would tend to reduce the chance that the vandal will come back
later with bigger guns (or trash a sleeping non-English wiki).

For example; as soon as I determine that an IP is a vandal, I leave that IP's
user contribs page open and periodically hit reload. And WAMMO! I click on
the rollback link each time the vandal makes an edit. So far every vandal has
gotten the hint after less than 10 rollbacks.

It would be nice, however, if clicking on rollback takes you back to the user
contribs page and not the reverted article. But I understand that there still
in the problem of possible rollback conflicts where two Admins hit rollback
in succession and Admin 2 reinstates the vandal version that Admin 1 already
reverted. So until that can be fixed I don't mind hitting the back button.

When it does get fixed I would like to propose that a limited rollback feature
be added as a logged-in user default. The limited part would be this; Regular
logged-in users would not be able to rollback edits made by other logged-in
users. But IPs would be fair game.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

Payment for this post:
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Ruthenium&diff=463516&oldid=461717

PS IMO there already are way too many features available to the greenest of
newbies. It would be nice if we started off new accounts with basic features
and automatically added more features based on the number of edits that user
has made and the age of the user account (maybe have three feature-set
levels: novice, intermediate and old hand). I fear that having too many
features is intimidating to many non-technical new users. I'm also a wee bit
apprehensive that new users would abuse features we might otherwise want to
give to many users (such as the limited rollback feature described above).

However, after the Lir fiasco I'm no longer in favor of automatically granting
pure meta-level powers to users. Old hands can and should continue to ask and
be invited to ask about being Admins.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Rollbacks: SoftSecurity on Steroids


body:
On Fri, 2002-12-06 at 18:50, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> I just deleted a page of garbage and at the bottom of the deletion page it
> says "This page has been accessed times. The page was last modified 23:59 Dec
> 31, 1969. This page is available under the GNU FDL.". Xo?

Should be fixed now; counter/modify date won't show on the
immediately-after-deletion page, and also the delete, rename, and
protect links should be hidden when viewing a page that doesn't exist.
(And delete should now give an error if you do try to delete something
that doesn't exist, for instance if someone else deleted it just before
you got there.)

Also the old page history of a nonexistent page cosmetic problem that
Anthere mentioned is fixed.

(BTW, if anyone's seeing other oddness with page deletion, such as pages
refusing to be deleted, or appearing as edit boxes after deletion, or
something, please let me know in as much detail as possible _exactly_
what you did and what the wiki showed, step by step. The above tweak may
or may not have solved such issues, and I haven't found a way to
reproduce it.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 13

body:
On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 03:12:59AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>On Sat, 2002-12-07 at 01:25, Jens Frank wrote:
>> On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 12:11:46AM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
>> > From where I'm standing, if all the databases were folded into
>> > one wiki database, there would be no problem.
>>
>> Several other language teams have split over the time, some
>> have merged with the main project again. If joining db's
>> some will feal that they won't be free to choose anymore.
>
>Please comment and encourage others to comment at
>http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_language_integration ! I want
>to hear from people who have concerns *so we can address them*.
>

I have changed my mind.  Languages are definately namespaces.  Talk about an
English article can go in the en_Talk namespace.  Users, Meta, etc, can
all be non-lingual.

I propose the following:

CREATE TABLE namespaces (
  ns integer,
  name text,
  external boolean,
  urlprefix text
);

INSERT INTO TABLE namespaces VALUES (
  1, 'en', false, 'http://www.wikipedia.org/en'
);

INSERT INTO TABLE namespaces VALUES (
  2, 'en_Talk', false, 'http://www.wikipedia.org/en/Talk'
);

INSERT INTO TABLE namespaces VALUES (
  3, 'Images', false, 'http://www.wikipedia.org/Images'
);

INSERT INTO TABLE namespaces VALUES (
  4, 'fr', true, 'http://fr.wikipedia.org'
);

I also propose only a single level of namespaces; none of this
en:Image:foo stuff.  If the image really needs to be "English" we can
have an en_Image namespace, yielding en_Image:foo.

The external flag tells us that the link is "external"... not contained
within the database, not dealt with by us.  As official Wikipedias split
off or come back into the fold, we can just change the flag in the
namespaces table, and it will all just work.

Anyone see anything essential missing?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

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

subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 14

body:
CGI interface to texvc moved to PHP (texvc_cgi.phtml).
It's much more sane now.

It now does another parsing to generate TeX.
I think that's more efficient than caching generated TeX in database.
OTOH it shouldn't have to parse it twice if both image+HTML and TeX are
requested. Well, that certainly isn't going to be performance bottleneck.
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subject: [Wikitech-l] TeX, version 13

body:
On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 12:11:46AM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 12:17:58AM +0100, Jens Frank wrote:
> >On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 08:41:21PM -0800, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> >rendered inline, similar to a [http://www.blabla.com/] link.
>
> Can you explain that in more detail?  What do you mean, "rendered
> inline"?

A language link is added at the top of the page in a list of
"related articles". An inline link is placed in the article,
exactly where an author has put it.

> From where I'm standing, if all the databases were folded into
> one wiki database, there would be no problem.

Several other language teams have split over the time, some
have merged with the main project again. If joining db's
some will feal that they won't be free to choose anymore.

> And I still haven't heard any suggestions for a different syntax for
> specifying an external wiki; it doesn't seem right to overload the
> namespace syntax to handle that function.

Think of useability. Having similar things done in a similar
way is very convenient for users. Perhaps it's not that
convenient for a programmer, but from a users point of view,
what is he doing? Putting a link. To put a link, start with
[[, so what do I want to link to, yes, meta, so put [[m: .
That's simply easy.

While we're at it, couldn't we change external link
syntax from [http://www.bla.com/] to [[http://www.bla.com/]]?
Helga is always doing it wrong, and from a useability
point of view she is the benchmark.

Regards,

	JeLuF


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] ����������������8����������7.5��

body:
I get Chinese and Korean spam daily.  I have no idea why they think I'd want it.
Zoe
 tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:

Pierre Abbat wrote:

>On Thursday 05 December 2002 19:15, Zoe wrote:
>
>
>>What IS this?
>>
>>
>
>Spam in Chinese.
>
>
>
Wow! Never had *that* before!

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-12-31&res=l

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2001/20011231l.gif

>
>

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

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now
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from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Zoe wrote:

> I get Chinese and Korean spam daily.  I have no idea why they think
> I'd want it.
>
> Zoe
>
It's a stretch to think that they thought about it.   :-)


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia mailling lists to usenet

body:
Because it is difficult to explain please read this;

-------- Oorspronkelijke bericht --------
From: admin AT gmane.org (Gmane Administrator)
To: wikinl-l-admin AT wikipedia.org
Subject: wikinl-l added to Gmane
Organization: GNU Mail To News -- http://gmane.org/
Date: Fri, 06 Dec 2002 13:19:35 +0100

We have received a request for adding the wikinl-l AT wikipedia.org
mailing list to the Gmane mail-to-news gateway/archive. A subscription
request message has been sent. If this is contrary to your wishes,
please send a mail to admin AT gmane.org saying so, and the list will be
removed from Gmane.

Gmane is a mail-to-news portal that never expires its messages.  It
therefore also functions as a mailing list archive.  It's a
bi-directional gateway, but Gmane verifies that its users' email
addresses are valid before passing the messages through the
news-to-mail gateway.  (Groups can also be made "read-only", which
means that Gmane won't forward any messages at all to the mailing
list.)

Gmane can encrypt addresses to make address harvesting difficult, and
heeds X-No-Archive and related headers.

If you wish to import older archives into Gmane, send a message to
the Gmane administrators -- just reply to this message.

The following parameters are set for this mailing list:

     * Newsgroup name: gmane.sciencs.linguistics.wikipedia.nederlands
     * Mailing list address: wikinl-l AT wikipedia.org
     * The gateway is bi-directional    * Address encryption is on
     * Spam detection is on
     * The list is described as:
       "The mailing list of the Dutch language Wikipedia, a
collaborative project to produce a free and complete encyclopedia in
every language."
     * News URL:
news://news.gmane.org/gmane.sciencs.linguistics.wikipedia.nederlands
     * Web URL:
http://news.gmane.org/thread.php?group=gmane.sciencs.linguistics.wikipedia.nederlands

This newsgroup will be created when the first message from the
mailing list arrives.

For more information about the Gmane project, go to
<URL: http://gmane.org/>.

This request was handled by
Tom Koelman <tkoelman AT xs4all.nl>.
____________________________________________

I have done some testing and it seems to work very well.
What do you think about to add all wikipedia lists to Gmane.org?
So you can read the lists like the where newsgroups.

It does not change anything to the mailings lists, the Usenet interface
is a extra way of using the lists, that is all. Nobody can send a
message to the list if the are not subscribed.

Because there is email verfication spam will not cause the list
administrator to receive a message about "As list administrator, your
authorization is requested" like i now receive a lot every day.

By the way, is there not possibility to blacklist some addresses to be
send directly to dev/null?
I receive a lot of spam from the same email adress to the lists. I
always report it to spamcop but i keeps coming. It gives a lot of work.

And the auto replay to the sender to inform the spammer that his message
is hold for approval gives a lot a bounce and then i receive a message
to inform my that the email adress of the spammer is invalid.
(=again;"As list administrator, your authorization is requested")

Giskart


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Rollbacks: SoftSecurity on Steroids

body:
> From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>

> PS IMO there already are way too many features available to the
> greenest of newbies. It would be nice if we started off new accounts
> with basic features and automatically added more features based on the
> number of edits that user has made and the age of the user account
> (maybe have three feature-set levels: novice, intermediate and old
> hand). I fear that having too many features is intimidating to many
> non-technical new users. I'm also a wee bit apprehensive that new
> users would abuse features we might otherwise want to give to many
> users (such as the limited rollback feature described above).
>
> However, after the Lir fiasco I'm no longer in favor of automatically granting
> pure meta-level powers to users. Old hands can and should continue to ask and
> be invited to ask about being Admins.

Thanks for this great work, but I think you should have stopped before
"PS".

I think we should eliminate the "rollback" feature, and other features,
*for everyone*, if they turn out to be a problem, long before we start
considering making a hierarchy such as you suggest.  This is a wiki,
remember!

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Ireland]] and [[China]]

body:
What do they have to do with each other?

Well, this was news to me a few days ago, but the article at [[Ireland]]
is restricted to the topic of the Republic of Ireland, and the article at
[[China]] is restricted to the topic of the PRC.  The two articles (in
their current state) raise the issue of whether the names of ancient lands
and civilizations should be annexed to the dominant modern political
incarnations, to the exclusion of other, closely related states or
political entities.  But this has nothing to do with *political* debates
over Northern Ireland or Taiwan, as I hope the following remarks will make
clear.

It's bizarre, but the issue developed in two totally different ways on
[[Talk:Ireland]] and on [[Talk:China]].  On the Ireland talk page, Scipius
was the only hold-out for the view that [[Ireland]] should be concerned
only with the Republic of Ireland.  On the China talk page, Roadrunner was
apparently the only defender of the view that [[China]] should be about
all of China, not just the PRC.

A comment from Mav (whose judgment and hard work I admire virtually always
:-) ) suddenly turned a light on in my head (i.e., I had a sudden
realization).  He said: "English speakers call it 'China' in overwhelming
numbers."  I (just now--my China talk page comments are all brand new)
replied by saying the following:

Your pronoun contains the whole problem: English speakers call *what*
China in overwhelming numbers?  They certainly use the word "China" in
overwhelming numbers, and it's safe to say that they use the word "China"
to mean "China" in overwhelming numbers.  Even the following must also be
conceded: when referring to the vast modern state that rules over the
ancient land known as China, people still use the word "China" (rather
than "People's Republic of China").  But it seems that no one has noticed
that glib pronouncements such as "English speakers call it China" simply
do not entail that that is all that the word "China" means.  The following
two statements are converses, and as they are universal affirmative
statements and as I just got done teaching intro logic, I'd like to point
out that they are not logically equivalent:

* Every time someone wants to refer to the PRC is a time they use the word
"China."  (Not actually true, of course, but this is very often, even
usually the case.)
* Every time someone uses the word "China" is a time they want to refer to
the PRC.  (Outrageously false.  It totally depends on the context.
Chinese history isn't the history the PRC, for example.)

End of quote.

I think I understand now why Mav and some others were so seemingly (to me)
peremptory about the issue.  It's because they are working on
[[WikiProject Countries]], and they take it to be in they brief to find
the appropriate short form name of every country on the list.  I suspect
the people at work on this WikiProject see "People's Republic of China"
and say, quite reasonably, that people call the PRC "China"--that's the
popular name.  Similarly for the case of "Republic of Ireland" and
"Ireland.  But again, that doesn't mean that "China" always means the PRC,
or that "Ireland" always means the Republic.  The PRC and the Republic
have been around for less than 100 years, and China per se and Ireland per
se are ancient and far greater and ultimately more important than the
modern states.

I think the biggest mistake here is failing to pay due attention to the
fact that the articles about nations and political entities and countries
are not limited to the list of names given in the CIA Factbook.  In the
context of an encyclopedia, it seems pretty obvious that "China" should be
used to mean China--not just part of it--*all* of China, its whole
history, its many languages, its people (all of them), etc.  This,
unfortunately or not, means that the article about the modern state, the
PRC, cannot dominate the page called [[China]].  Similarly, the article
about the modern state, the Republic of Ireland, cannot dominate the page
called [[Ireland]].  China and Ireland as topics are much bigger than
those states.

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Ireland]] and [[China]]

body:
On Sun, Dec 08, 2002 at 09:51:59AM -0800, Larry Sanger wrote:
>called [[Ireland]].  China and Ireland as topics are much bigger than
>those states.

<aol>What he said!</aol>

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

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

body:
Larry Sanger wrote:

>Well, this was news to me a few days ago, but the article at [[Ireland]]
>is restricted to the topic of the Republic of Ireland, and the article at
>[[China]] is restricted to the topic of the PRC.  The two articles (in
>their current state) raise the issue of whether the names of ancient lands
>and civilizations should be annexed to the dominant modern political
>incarnations, to the exclusion of other, closely related states or
>political entities.  But this has nothing to do with *political* debates
>over Northern Ireland or Taiwan, as I hope the following remarks will make
>clear.
>
I had similar personal observations about [[Ireland]], though I confess
that I felt too discouraged to jump into yet another edit war.  For
[[China]] I simply had not wandered into that area of Wikipedia recently
to have a look.

>It's bizarre, but the issue developed in two totally different ways on
>[[Talk:Ireland]] and on [[Talk:China]].  On the Ireland talk page, Scipius
>was the only hold-out for the view that [[Ireland]] should be concerned
>only with the Republic of Ireland.  On the China talk page, Roadrunner was
>apparently the only defender of the view that [[China]] should be about
>all of China, not just the PRC.
>
Bizarre perhaps, but not surprising.  Those concerned with such issues
in one part of the world are often oblivious to similar situations in
other parts of the world.  There are 22 different contributors listed
for [[Ireland]] and 32 for [[China]]; only 7 contributors show up on
both lists, and some of these were only there for minor incidental
housekeeping.  We're mostly dealing with two distinct groups of
contributors.

>A comment from Mav (whose judgment and hard work I admire virtually always
>:-) ) suddenly turned a light on in my head (i.e., I had a sudden
>realization).  He said: "English speakers call it 'China' in overwhelming
>numbers."
>
I don't dispute the factual correctness of Mav's statement (or his hard
work and dedication), but I disagree with the conclusions that he draws
from that statement.  I find him to prone to decide issues based on his
genuflections to the Google God.  With deepest respect I see Mav as a
dedicated simplifier who would very much like to see knowledge in neatly
wrapped little packages; sometimes that means cutting off the sharp and
thorny bits just to get the gift to fit into the package.  Once we get
into that box it is more difficult to look out and see the other
possibilities.

Often, going with the most popular usage can reduce a subject to its
lowest common denominators.  It is a big factor in dumbing-down, which
presumes just what the audience is capable of understanding.  Is our aim
just to make it easier for the readers to find things?  How much
subtlety and depth are we willing to sacrifice to attain simplicity?

>Your pronoun contains the whole problem: English speakers call *what*
>China in overwhelming numbers?  They certainly use the word "China" in
>overwhelming numbers, and it's safe to say that they use the word "China"
>to mean "China" in overwhelming numbers.  Even the following must also be
>conceded: when referring to the vast modern state that rules over the
>ancient land known as China, people still use the word "China" (rather
>than "People's Republic of China").  But it seems that no one has noticed
>that glib pronouncements such as "English speakers call it China" simply
>do not entail that that is all that the word "China" means.
>
The official name for any country is the long form, even if none of us
know about it.  It's fine to use the short form when there is no
reasonable chance of ambiguity, and I would guess that that is probably
the case for most countries.  The Middle Kingdom has too many layers of
meaning to be usurped by the contemporary political entity.  The
situation of [[Ireland]] is less complex, but it is offensive for people
with roots in the six counties to be told that those roots are not from
Ireland.

>I think the biggest mistake here is failing to pay due attention to the
>fact that the articles about nations and political entities and countries
>are not limited to the list of names given in the CIA Factbook.  In the
>context of an encyclopedia, it seems pretty obvious that "China" should be
>used to mean China--not just part of it--*all* of China, its whole
>history, its many languages, its people (all of them), etc.  This,
>unfortunately or not, means that the article about the modern state, the
>PRC, cannot dominate the page called [[China]].  Similarly, the article
>about the modern state, the Republic of Ireland, cannot dominate the page
>called [[Ireland]].  China and Ireland as topics are much bigger than
>those states.
>
Cogent arguments indeed.

Eclecticology


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Languages & namespaces (Was: TeX, version 13)

body:
Clutch wrote in part:

>I have changed my mind.  Languages are definately namespaces.  Talk about an
>English article can go in the en_Talk namespace.  Users, Meta, etc, can
>all be non-lingual.

>I also propose only a single level of namespaces; none of this
>en:Image:foo stuff.  If the image really needs to be "English" we can
>have an en_Image namespace, yielding en_Image:foo.

>Anyone see anything essential missing?

What's missing for me is why.
Wikipedia pages now have a 3level name structure:
language (or meta or sep11), namespace (possibly empty), and title.
What's wrong with this?

-- Toby


body:
On Sun, Dec 08, 2002 at 04:24:34PM -0800, Toby Bartels wrote:
>>I have changed my mind.  Languages are definately namespaces.  Talk about an
>>English article can go in the en_Talk namespace.  Users, Meta, etc, can
>>all be non-lingual.
>
>>I also propose only a single level of namespaces; none of this
>>en:Image:foo stuff.  If the image really needs to be "English" we can
>>have an en_Image namespace, yielding en_Image:foo.
>
>Wikipedia pages now have a 3level name structure:
>language (or meta or sep11), namespace (possibly empty), and title.
>What's wrong with this?

What's wrong is that it is unnecessary complexity.  Can you give any
reason why it has to be 3 levels, instead of 2?  Having the three levels
makes the coding tricky when you have pages that only need the two and
are language independant.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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body:
On Sun, 2002-12-08 at 16:27, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 08, 2002 at 04:24:34PM -0800, Toby Bartels wrote:
> >>I have changed my mind.  Languages are definately namespaces.  Talk about an
> >>English article can go in the en_Talk namespace.  Users, Meta, etc, can
> >>all be non-lingual.

I would disagree. User pages should be available per-language as they
are now. The namespace names also should be localizable, and must not be
explicitly and forever tied to some particular foreign language (ie
English). Special page names are English-only at the moment, and that is
a deficiency that should be repaired.

> >>I also propose only a single level of namespaces; none of this
> >>en:Image:foo stuff.  If the image really needs to be "English" we can
> >>have an en_Image namespace, yielding en_Image:foo.

That's not an "english image", it's an english *image description* page.
Description pages are text, which is in some language.

> >Wikipedia pages now have a 3level name structure:
> >language (or meta or sep11), namespace (possibly empty), and title.
> >What's wrong with this?
>
> What's wrong is that it is unnecessary complexity.  Can you give any
> reason why it has to be 3 levels, instead of 2?  Having the three levels
> makes the coding tricky when you have pages that only need the two and
> are language independant.

Language has to be explicitly known so we can output Content-Language
headers for browser config and search engine filtering; select the
default user interface language to use, in some cases use a slightly
different layout (right-to-left support?); select which bookseller links
to use for ISBN links, etc.

If language and namespce are squished into one level, we would still
need to have a language<->namespace map, both to get the language of a
given page and to select pages in multiple namespace that belong to a
language; this would also make it a lot harder to track certain kinds of
pages across languages (ie, all talk pages; all user pages; all article
pages) since we'd need a map of namespace to namespace functionality...
which pretty much brings us back to square one -- the namespace-language
key and namespace-functionality key would be functionally indentical to
the distinct language and namespace keys. There may be some advantage to
an extra level of indirection there, but I don't know what.

In a use where you only ever have one language/section, you'd just only
ever _use_ one section. Just as you could run the current phase III
software and only ever use pages in the "" namespace, it would sit in
the background and you'd pay it no mind.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
Clutch seems is seriously violating the NPOV policy and needs to stop.

The worst offenses have occured in the social worker article. See diff
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Social_worker&diff=471250&oldid=471244

Note:
"Social workers are often found in hospitals, and play a hand in ear-marking
newborn babies for potential seizure and kidnapping by government adoption
departments."

"Social workers are widely hated."

"Social workers are trained to treat their feelings and gut more important
than reason, rationality, and respect for the human dignity of those they
seek to help. "

and

"Social workers are the foot soldiers of the ivory tower social engineers that
governments and big businesses hire to keep the masses under control."

This is just so bad that no further comment is needed.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Clutch is on a POV tirade

body:
On Sun, Dec 08, 2002 at 05:47:22PM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>"Social workers are widely hated."
>
>"Social workers are trained to treat their feelings and gut instincts as
>more important than reason, rationality, and respect for the human dignity
>of those they seek to help. "
>
>"Social workers are the foot soldiers of the ivory tower social engineers that
>governments and big businesses hire to keep the masses under control."

Looks like Clutch is telling the honest truth, to me.  Sorry you feel
offended by it.  Instead of erasing what he says, try to provide factual
counter-views.  Bet you can't.  Social workers are trained for years to
be really rapid and effective communicators.  This, plus their training
to lie without compunction, and their unaccountability to the court
system, gives them an incredible edge in defending themselves against
factual accusations.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

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