from_name: Chad Perrin

body:
JAY JG wrote:
>> JAY JG wrote:
>> > Wikipedia would not be able to handle 43 Vogels.  Even 10 would tax its
>> > current resources and structure.  If 1 in 4000 is intelligent,
>> coherent,
>> > and motivated, Wikipedia is in trouble.
>>
>> I don't think so.  Remember my constant mantra: the purpose of our
>> community is to write a high quality neutral encyclopedia.  Our
>> openness is a means to that end, and a very excellent one we should
>> respect highly.
>>
>> But if 43 Vogels show up, I'll personally ban them all if necessary,
>> and that's that.  That's not likely to be necessary, because we're
>> pretty good at devising community-oriented solutions to such problems.
>
>
> I appreciate your determination, but banning doesn't work for some
> people; people with dialup accounts, for example, who are unafraid to
> create multiple sockpuppets.  How many socks did Cantus use to carry on
> his recent war?  How many has CheeseDreams created?

People that will go to the trouble of picking up a sock puppet (or, at
least, do so more than once) are a decided minority in most online
communities.  If there are 43 egregious offenders, and they all get
banned, I suspect you'll see about five or six come back with sock
puppets.  It's much easier to deal with that smaller number in other
means than to simply ignore the banning option altogether.

Of course, banning is probably best used only after other options are
attempted.  Smack-downs tend to make for rankled egos more than a proper
education for someone that has wandered astray.

--
Chad


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: AndyL

subject: [WikiEN-l] Neo-nazis to attack wikipedia

body:
Here's another Stormfront article
http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1631182
Need more White Nationalists on Wikipedia.com

WhiteBamboo    02-05-2005 05:42 PM
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Need more White Nationalists on Wikipedia.com
?
We need more white people to participate on wikipedia.com or it is going to
become completely Jew Biased.

go to wikipedia.com

sign up

and help build wikipedia with balance and truth.

Not enough White Nationalists issues are covered on wikipedia.
latebloomer    02-06-2005 12:13 AM
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Re: Need more White Nationalists on Wikipedia.com
?
D'ya mind giving a brief overview of the whole "wiki" and "wikipedia" thing?
I've heard about it, but I don't think I've seen it or used it as of yet.

Thanks.
xpac    02-06-2005 03:15 AM
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Re: Need more White Nationalists on Wikipedia.com
?
If you change something it'll be changed back. It's like the Jews patrol it.
For instance I simply added in an article about Zionism "Since 1948, Zionism
cost the US tax payer over $3 billion every year." minutes later it was
taken off.

Also, you can't even edit the article on MLK!!
Celtic_Frost    02-06-2005 03:18 AM
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Re: Need more White Nationalists on Wikipedia.com
?

Quote:
Originally Posted by latebloomer
D'ya mind giving a brief overview of the whole "wiki" and "wikipedia" thing?
I've heard about it, but I don't think I've seen it or used it as of yet.

Thanks.

It's an online encyclopaedia that anybody can edit, as in theory this leads
to objective consensus. However, like Democracy, it becomes a numbers game
whereby the most people on a side wins, usually regardless of an article's
veracity.

See here.
WhiteBamboo    02-06-2005 02:14 PM
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Re: Need more White Nationalists on Wikipedia.com
?
I'm coming to the conclusion that we may need to start thinking about
building our own version of wikipedia.com as the jews on this site are
preventing fair and accurate articles on jewish issues.

Does anyone know how much it would cost to develop an open source
encyclopedia like wikipedia?
Molloy    02-06-2005 09:37 PM
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Re: Need more White Nationalists on Wikipedia.com
?
I spent over six months trying to get a quote added to the "zionist"
article, and eventualy won my case, and had it included. It can take time,
but keep working at it.

Try and adopt one article, and keep working it over, and over, untill they
give in. If your article is reverted without obvious cause, go to the
wickipedia administrators argue that the revert as a Point of View.

All times are GMT -5. The time now is 09:55 PM.

Powered by: vBulletin Version 3.0.5
Copyright ?2000 - 2005, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Live Preview

body:
Pedro Fayolle wrote:
> So far it's still in development and it has some limitations, some of
> which I plan to overcome soon, yet I believe it's mature enough to be
> useful to some.
>
> Please let me know what you think about it.

Note that 1.5 contains an unrelated feature called 'live preview'.

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

from_name: Dori

subject: [Foundation-l] Copyright

body:
On Mon, 7 Feb 2005 06:22:16 +0200, NSK <nsk2 at wikinerds.org> wrote:
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:HURD_first_program_banner.jpg

You could't mention this at the page? I don't see how it's a foundation issue.

--
[[en:User:Dori]]


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Copyright


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Python Wikipediabot framework recent changes

body:
The following changes have been made in the Python Wikipediabot
framework in the last 2 weeks (since January 19, to be precise). The
bot can be downloaded at
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/pywikipediabot/pywikipedia/; for
each change it is specified which version of which file is needed.
Later versions are always okay too. I will try to upload

BUGFIXES (please download when using the specified bot):
For all bots (change in Wikimedia software makes submitting impossible
otherwise):
* wikipedia.py 1.391
* login.py 1.21 (security fix: login.py does not show login data on the screen)

For bots using categories:
* catall.py 1.11
* category.py 1.29
* category.py 1.30 (only outside wikimedia)

For interwiki.py:
* titletranslate.py 1.35 (when used for years)

For specific wikis:
* wiktionary_family.py 1.20 (on Sicilian Wiktionary or Wiktionary interwiki)

NEW BOTS
* pagefromfile.py: Reads a file consisting of a (large) number of wiki
pages, and submits those to the site. Currently being used on the
Sicilian Wiktionary. Strangely, this goes wrong on non-ASCII
characters on Windows 2000, but works correctly on Windows XP (not
checked on Linux yet).

MAJOR CHANGES
* New system for waiting after an edit. The new system also looks at
the time the previous edit took, and the number of bot processes you
are running. In most cases the new version will wait less than the old
one, but if the Wiki is slow or if you are running many bot processes,
it will be slower. You need to upload new versions of all bots you
use, because otherwise they will not remove themselves from the list
of running bot processes when they are ended! (basic: wikipedia.py
1.394, config.py 1.41 * separate bots: brackethttp.py 1.8, catall.py
1.12, category.py 1.61, check_extern.py 1.10, config.py 1.39,
copy_table.py 1.26, editarticle.py 1.17, extract_wikilinks.py 1.5,
find.py 1.3, getimages.py 1.7, imageharvest.py 1.4, imagetransfer.py
1.25, interwiki.py 1.133, login.py 1.22, mediawiki_messages.py 1.21,
pagefromfile.py 1.6, pagelist.py 1.17, recirect.py 1.18, replace.py
1.34, saveHTML.py 1.5, solve_disambiguation.py 1.124, splitwarning.py
1.4, sqldump.py 1.16, standardize_interwiki.py 1.5, table2wiki.py
1.60, template.py 1.11, test.py 1.17, touchall.py 1.4, upload.py 1.19,
us-states.py 1.9, warnfile.py 1.13, wikipedia.py 1.392,
windows_chars.py 1.19)
* New functionality for imageharvest.py, which can now be used to get
a number of images where the URL the same except for a numerical part
(imageharvest.py 1.3)
* New option on extract_wikilinks.py to get the pages sorted by title
(extract_wikilinks.py 1.4)
* The -wiktionary option for interwiki.py now works for capitalised
wiktionaries too (titletranslate.py 1.37)
* summaries in Portuguese added (catall.py 1.10, redirect.py 1.17)
* bot can be used on wiki.mozilla.org (family mozilla) (mozilla_family.py 1.2)

MINOR CHANGES:
* contents has been updated (CONTENTS 1.35)
* Spanish titles of day pages added (date.py 1.17)
* namespace names in Spanish (family.py 1.19)
* bot does not ask for copyright and source when uploading (lib_images 1.61)
* removing a resolved issue in nl-exceptions (nl-exceptions.dat 1.21)


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Cheese Dreams/proposal for a *new* policy

body:
Karl A. Krueger (kkrueger at whoi.edu) [050206 16:20]:

> Most ISPs do have acceptable-use policies that specifically exclude
> breaking the stated rules on other sites.  BT states that users "must
> not gain or attempt to gain unauthorised access to any computer systems
> for any purpose" [1] -- which would seem to include setting up sock-
> puppet accounts to gain access to Wikipedia editing after being banned.
    [...]
> [2] Some ISPs -do- apparently allow privileged customers to spam with
>     impunity.  http://www.spamhaus.org/news.lasso?article=158

This sort of thing is what I mean by the difference between the TOS that is
written and the TOS that is acted upon. Read
http://www.btopenwoe.co.uk/read_woe.asp?id=879 and tell me BT have a clue.

- d.


from_name: Paul Youlten

subject: [Wikitech-l] <br> in Wiki Mark up

body:
I want to add a button to the edit tool bar on my wiki that automatically
adds some text to help users structure their entries - however I also need
to add line breaks (the equivalent of <br> in HTML) - I've looked at the
documentation on Wiki Markup but can't find the answer.

Anyone know if this can be done?

Paul Youlten
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andre Engels" <andreengels at gmail.com>
To: <pywikipediabot-users at lists.sourceforge.net>; "Wikimedia developers"
<wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>; "De discussielijst van de Nederlandstalige
Wikipedia" <wikinl-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 06, 2005 10:32 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Python Wikipediabot framework recent changes

> The following changes have been made in the Python Wikipediabot
> framework in the last 2 weeks (since January 19, to be precise). The
> bot can be downloaded at
> http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/pywikipediabot/pywikipedia/; for
> each change it is specified which version of which file is needed.
> Later versions are always okay too. I will try to upload
>
> BUGFIXES (please download when using the specified bot):
> For all bots (change in Wikimedia software makes submitting impossible
> otherwise):
> * wikipedia.py 1.391
> * login.py 1.21 (security fix: login.py does not show login data on the
> screen)
>
> For bots using categories:
> * catall.py 1.11
> * category.py 1.29
> * category.py 1.30 (only outside wikimedia)
>
> For interwiki.py:
> * titletranslate.py 1.35 (when used for years)
>
> For specific wikis:
> * wiktionary_family.py 1.20 (on Sicilian Wiktionary or Wiktionary
> interwiki)
>
> NEW BOTS
> * pagefromfile.py: Reads a file consisting of a (large) number of wiki
> pages, and submits those to the site. Currently being used on the
> Sicilian Wiktionary. Strangely, this goes wrong on non-ASCII
> characters on Windows 2000, but works correctly on Windows XP (not
> checked on Linux yet).
>
> MAJOR CHANGES
> * New system for waiting after an edit. The new system also looks at
> the time the previous edit took, and the number of bot processes you
> are running. In most cases the new version will wait less than the old
> one, but if the Wiki is slow or if you are running many bot processes,
> it will be slower. You need to upload new versions of all bots you
> use, because otherwise they will not remove themselves from the list
> of running bot processes when they are ended! (basic: wikipedia.py
> 1.394, config.py 1.41 * separate bots: brackethttp.py 1.8, catall.py
> 1.12, category.py 1.61, check_extern.py 1.10, config.py 1.39,
> copy_table.py 1.26, editarticle.py 1.17, extract_wikilinks.py 1.5,
> find.py 1.3, getimages.py 1.7, imageharvest.py 1.4, imagetransfer.py
> 1.25, interwiki.py 1.133, login.py 1.22, mediawiki_messages.py 1.21,
> pagefromfile.py 1.6, pagelist.py 1.17, recirect.py 1.18, replace.py
> 1.34, saveHTML.py 1.5, solve_disambiguation.py 1.124, splitwarning.py
> 1.4, sqldump.py 1.16, standardize_interwiki.py 1.5, table2wiki.py
> 1.60, template.py 1.11, test.py 1.17, touchall.py 1.4, upload.py 1.19,
> us-states.py 1.9, warnfile.py 1.13, wikipedia.py 1.392,
> windows_chars.py 1.19)
> * New functionality for imageharvest.py, which can now be used to get
> a number of images where the URL the same except for a numerical part
> (imageharvest.py 1.3)
> * New option on extract_wikilinks.py to get the pages sorted by title
> (extract_wikilinks.py 1.4)
> * The -wiktionary option for interwiki.py now works for capitalised
> wiktionaries too (titletranslate.py 1.37)
> * summaries in Portuguese added (catall.py 1.10, redirect.py 1.17)
> * bot can be used on wiki.mozilla.org (family mozilla) (mozilla_family.py
> 1.2)
>
> MINOR CHANGES:
> * contents has been updated (CONTENTS 1.35)
> * Spanish titles of day pages added (date.py 1.17)
> * namespace names in Spanish (family.py 1.19)
> * bot does not ask for copyright and source when uploading (lib_images
> 1.61)
> * removing a resolved issue in nl-exceptions (nl-exceptions.dat 1.21)
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: André Müller

subject: AW: [Wikipedia-l] sign.wikepedia.org?

body:
I think it was "As Loud As A Whisper" (German: "Der stumme Vermittler").
I know that the person who is signing in the episode is indeed a deaf
person. 'twas a nice episode... :>

- Andr?

-----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] Im Auftrag von Shane
Gilchrist ? hEorpa
Gesendet: Sonntag, 6. Februar 2005 18:59
An: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Betreff: RE: [Wikipedia-l] sign.wikepedia.org?

No? Which episode is it?

Shane

> <geek>
> Does anyone remember that STTNG episode where Data was learning the
sign
> languages from computer animations of hands moving?
> </geek>


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] <br> in Wiki Mark up

body:
On Sun, 6 Feb 2005, Paul Youlten wrote:

>I want to add a button to the edit tool bar on my wiki that automatically
>adds some text to help users structure their entries - however I also need
>to add line breaks (the equivalent of
 in HTML) - I've looked at the
>documentation on Wiki Markup but can't find the answer.
>
>Anyone know if this can be done?

With

:-)
Alfio


subject: [Wikitech-l] <br> in Wiki Mark up

body:
no - that just adds
 onto the edit page.

I think I've got it working with \\n\\n

thanks

Paul Youlten
mobile: +44(0)7814 517 807
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alfio Puglisi" <puglisi at arcetri.astro.it>
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, February 06, 2005 11:10 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l]
 in Wiki Mark up

> On Sun, 6 Feb 2005, Paul Youlten wrote:
>
>>I want to add a button to the edit tool bar on my wiki that automatically
>>adds some text to help users structure their entries - however I also need
>>to add line breaks (the equivalent of
 in HTML) - I've looked at the
>>documentation on Wiki Markup but can't find the answer.
>>
>>Anyone know if this can be done?
>
> With

>
> :-)
> Alfio
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Jake Waskett

body:
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that an activist group has decided
to target Wikipedia. I'm personally aware of one group, recruited through
anti-circumcision activist mailing lists, that have been systematically
pushing their POV at Wiki.

Whether one agrees with their cause or not is hardly relevant. Nor is whether
one is disgusted by their cause. The simple truth is this: if Wiki is to
become a credible, serious encyclopaedia, we *must* maintain NPOV. These
groups *oppose* NPOV.

What can be done about it? The present system is simply *not* *working*. It'll
handle the occasional abuse here and there, but the day-by-day, determined,
and methodical twisting of articles to suit some activist agenda seems
impossible to stop. A few brave souls try to maintain NPOV, but are limited
by the strength of numbers and the 3RR.

I suspect that this only affects a relatively small number of particularly
controversial articles. Perhaps a strategy needs to be devised for those
articles. What do people think?

Jake.

On Sunday 06 February 2005 16:57, AndyL wrote:
> http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=173563
>
> "And this actually means we have to invade WIKI."


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] Bulgarian Wikinews launched

body:
The Bulgarian edition of Wikinews is now set up at:

http://bg.wikinews.org/

An announcement has been posted on the Bulgarian Wikipedia Village Pump,
as well as on the user talk pages of all interested users (all users who
signed up had user pages on bg:, and several had far more than 200 edits).

I'd like to ask the Board to discuss in the meeting tomorrow what steps
are required to decide whether the Chinese Wikinews should be launched.

Regards,

Erik


body:
On Monday 07 February 2005 00:25, AndyL wrote:
> Perhaps we need some sort of intermediate form of ongoing protection for
> certain pages. Perhaps some pages should only have registered editors able
> to actively edit them with non-editors only able to make suggestions on
> talk pages? Perhaps other pages should be protected on an ongoing basis and
> only have admins able to edit them based on proposals on talk pages which
> have achieved consensus or passed a certain standard?
>
> Andy

Superb idea. I'm not sure that Wiki has the facility to have "registered"
editors, but a nominated admin could be responsible for a page and apply
changes that have been voted upon.


from_name: Felix Wan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia in Chinese dialects

body:
On Sun, February 6, 2005 8:57 am, Alex Kwan said:
> Hello,
>
> Sheng Jiong wrote:
>
>> But tell us how much difference are there between "Cantonese
>> characters" and proper Chinese characters? Aren't you still using Chinese
>> characters, with the addition of a few distinctive Cantonese characters?
>
> I've never done a study and I don't have any reference books on that
> topic. But I would highly appreciate it if you drop the "proper", the word
> "standard" or "typical set of" would work equally well for your
> purpose without the connotations.
>
Hi Alex:

Every Wikipedian understands what is NPOV. Do not feel bad about those
words and his attitude. That will only make his arguments less credible.
Why not spend our time and energy in something more creative?

I have created a test site:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-WP/zh-yue
Please try to write some articles in Cantonese, and invite other people
to write. Let's prove the concept to gain support.

Felix Wan


from_name: Alex Kwan

body:
Hello,

Sheng Jiong wrote:
> But tell us how much difference are there between "Cantonese
> characters" and proper Chinese characters? Aren't you still using
> Chinese characters, with the addition of a few distinctive Cantonese
> characters?

I've never done a study and I don't have any reference books on that
topic. But I would highly appreciate it if you drop the "proper", the
word "standard" or "typical set of" would work equally well for your
purpose without the connotations.

Sure I'd be using the usual Chinese characters in addition to the
Cantonese/Yue characters. I can only say that whenever I type in
Chinese, it's usually in Traditional Chinese and I've found all the
characters I need, even the Cantonese ones, when I use the Changjie system.

> please do remember. Majority of the Cantonese speakers live in
> Guangdong, and extremely few, if any, of these people can comprehend
> or write.

...write at all or write Cantonese/Yue? Again, have you done a study in
this? If not, then citations please?

> up if only a minority of the speakers can understand a non-standard
> writing system created by a few people.

I doubt it's a non--standard writing system created by a few people.
Many Cantonese/Yue characters are from the ancient times; only that
we've kept those characters when they fell out of use in Northern China
where they speak Mandarin.

> Again, only HKers can understand your "written Cantonese"! Have you
> forgotten your neighbours in Guangdong??

And again, you know this...how? Citations?

> There is a big difference I agree. But "completely different from
> Mandarin"? I doubt if the grammar is different?

All right, "completely" is an overstatement, but the grammar is
*definitely* different.

> And I doubt how many people can really understand your Cantonese
> Wikipedia?

It's not just *my* Cantonese wikipedia...

> There are 77 million Cantonese living in Guangdong, and how
> many of them can really understand "Cantonese characters"?

I don't know. And we won't know until there is a study or a trial. Can
you name any studies?

And really, how many people understand *Klingon*?! Yet it was set up in
the past... There are 6.8 million people in Hong Kong; even if only one
percent uses the wikipedia, that's sixty thousand people. I think that's
enough reason for a trial.

little Alex


body:
Hello,

Sheng Jiong wrote:
> dialects. I totally agree that dialects are living spoken languages in
> China, but it is absurdly ridiculous to attempt to write in them, as
> there is *no* **standardised** writing system for them!!

Big5-HKSCS, which is standardised in Hong Kong. And we can go on from
there in order to acconodate people who only know Simplified Chinese. I
don't know the situation in Guangdong province, but I do know that you
won't be a good person to ask, not when you've already assumed the
answers without any actual research.

little Alex


body:
Ok, Jimbo, you're right. Let me amend my earlier statement: on the whole, the
system is working, but in a few articles, it is not. Now, the question is
this: what can be done about the problem?

One solution that I favour is to have permanent protection on targetted pages,
and have a nominated admin apply changes that are agreed upon by vote on the
article's talk page.

What do others think?

Jake.

On Monday 07 February 2005 01:48, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> Jake Waskett wrote:
> > The simple truth is this: if Wiki is to
> > become a credible, serious encyclopaedia, we *must* maintain NPOV. These
> > groups *oppose* NPOV.
>
> Yes!
>
> > What can be done about it? The present system is simply *not*
> > *working*. It'll handle the occasional abuse here and there, but the
> > day-by-day, determined, and methodical twisting of articles to suit
> > some activist agenda seems impossible to stop.
>
> I am aware of only 3 instances where this (organized groups trying to
> undermine NPOV editing) is a problem: LaRouche-related articles,
> circumcision, and this new thing with the stormfront postings and VfD
> co-ordination.
>
> I think this is a serious problem, and one which we have long feared.
> But we need not overreact.  The system *is* working in the main, and
> where there are new problems (such as those aptly described by Slim
> Virgin in discussion the pseudo-NPOV of the LaRouche edit warriors),
> we can be confident in our ability to devise new solutions.
>
> --Jimbo
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Frank v Waveren

subject: [WikiEN-l] On a more positive note...

body:
On Sun, Feb 06, 2005 at 08:25:03PM -0500, JAY JG wrote:
> On a more positive note, I am pleased to see that the newly invigorated
> ArbCom has only two outstanding cases, neither more than 11 days old.  The
> backlog has been cleared, and new cases are being dealt with promptly.
> Kudos to all active members.
Yes, I'd like to second this. Good job! I'd considered pasting
[[Image:Choco chip cookie.jpg|frame|300px|Thanks for speeding up
Arbitration!]] elevent times on [[Wikipedia talk:Arbitration
Committee]], but now you've broached the topic here just chiming in
will do nicely.

--
Frank v Waveren                                      Fingerprint: BDD7 D61E
fvw@[var.cx|stack.nl] ICQ#10074100                      5D39 CF05 4BFC F57A
Public key: hkp://wwwkeys.pgp.net/468D62C8              FA00 7D51 468D 62C8

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from_name: Pedro Fayolle

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Live Preview

body:
Hi,

I've been working on an "extension" to the edit page which allows
editors to generate page previews on the fly, directly into the
browser and with no need for page reloads.

I've written a draft with instructions on how to install it which you
can find at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pilaf/Live_Preview

So far it's still in development and it has some limitations, some of
which I plan to overcome soon, yet I believe it's mature enough to be
useful to some.

Please let me know what you think about it.

-Pedro (User:Pilaf)


body:
Fred Bauder (fredbaud at ctelco.net) [050207 04:17]:
> From: AndyL <andyl2004 at sympatico.ca>

> > http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=173563
> > "And this actually means we have to invade WIKI."

> Build it and they will come. All of em. We have yet to find a way to deal
> effectively with systemic POV editing by advocacy groups.

While it would be theoretically nice from the angle of NPOV to find a
neo-Nazi who could research and argue worth a damn, in practice being one
seems to require being hard of thinking, and they are demonstrably unable
to hold a coherent point in open debate on the Internet, hence retreating
to boards like Stormfront, where they self-aggrandise to their hearts'
content. A swarm of Vogels would be annoying but nothing beyond what we
routinely deal with on a regular basis.  I predict the very hardest part
will be getting checkable references out of them and getting them to
actually accept that 2+2=4 when presented with quality references from
those who don't agree with them.

- d.


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

body:
Jake Waskett wrote:
> Ok, Jimbo, you're right. Let me amend my earlier statement: on the
> whole, the system is working, but in a few articles, it is not. Now,
> the question is this: what can be done about the problem?

Yes, this is the right question, and the right way to frame it.

> One solution that I favour is to have permanent protection on
> targetted pages, and have a nominated admin apply changes that are
> agreed upon by vote on the article's talk page.  What do others
> think?

I think this is overkill; surely we can try a "softer" approach first?

--Jimbo


body:
Fred Bauder wrote:
> We have a NPOV policy, not a majority rules policy.

Indeed, and I do agree that Jake's proposal is more than we actually
need in order to start to deal with this.

However, I should point out that voting and NPOV are not _necessarily_
and _always_ at odds.  We don't want to ever get into a situation
where an article of total praise about George Bush is permanently
fixed on wikipedia as long as it is getting 52% of the vote -
obviously.

Wiki-editing works great in most cases to drive towards NPOV.  The
game theory of "mutually assured destruction" means that partisans
have an incentive to try to "write for the enemy".  What we are
considering now is how to deal with a situation in which an
*organized* group starts gaming our social rules (3RR in particular)
to undermine the natural incentive structure of wiki editing.

--Jimbo


body:
Charles Matthews wrote:
> Edits can be reverted, pages protected, lowlifes summarily banned.
> I don't doubt they would be, in any serious attempt at subverting
> what we do.  At the moment Wikipedia is open for business, 24/7, and
> we don't circle the wagons in the face of mere paper threats.

Very well said.  We don't need to panic.  But we also need not doubt
that we'll do what needs doing to protect the quality of our work.

--Jimbo


body:
David Gerard wrote:
> > But we *must* kill the wiki in order to save it. Else all the editors will
> > leave in disgust and Britannica will not take us seriously. Possibly we
> > should vote on it.

Skyring wrote:
> Votes are exactly the sort of things that POV-pushing groups can
> understand. As we see, they can organise themselves for votes. All you
> gotta do is stand up and be counted, the more times the better.

Yes!  But just to make clear, since I know David's views pretty well
and they are generally (roughly, mostly) the same as my own, he was
being humorous here and agrees with you completely.

We know a few things: first, as Charles Matthews (I think) put it: for
every 1 article where something awful is going on, there are 999 being
developed to a very high quality in relative peace.  We don't want to
break the 999 trying to fix the 1.

Second, we know that in some cases (I named 3 yesterday, but I can add
one more that I remembered last night: pedophilia related articles) we
have organized partisans who are carefully working to maintain a
biased point of view in the articles.

Third, we know as per Slim Virgin's explanation, that in the LaRouche
case at least, the bias being inserted into the articles is difficult
to grasp for people who haven't in some fashion made a hobby out of
knowing the subject area.  Pseudo-NPOV is a problem in those articles
and in the pedophilia articles.

Fourth, we know that the community loves *both* openness *and*
quality.  The Cunctator said it this way to me the other day: Openness
is the central principle of the community, but it is not the *purpose*
of the community.

To me what this means is: as always, we look for the softest possible
solution to these problems.  No need to start talking about
permanently locking articles and voting on the content yet.  Yes, this
would work, but there are other, softer, things that we should try
first.

Let me give VfD as an example.  VfD is a *means*, it is not *the end*
that we seek.  If NeoNazis come in and start negatively affecting VfD,
we will not just throw up our hands and say "Oh well, I guess the
majority wins, and if NeoNazis want to take over wikipedia, well,
that's democracy and we have to accept it."

What we will do is say: Look, VfD worked for a long time because the
people voting there, while not agreeing on everything, at least
approached the process with a sincere but diverse view of what needs
to be done.  When an organized group comes in to upset the process, we
remember the *purpose* of the process and *change the rules* -- a
little bit at first, no need to break what's more or less working, but
we do change the rules.

If they want to treat wikipedia as a game, they will lose.  They will
lose because we get to make up the rules.

--Jimbo

--
"La n?fle est un fruit." - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org


body:
David Gerard wrote:
> I expect the very worst we'll get from Neo-Nazis will be pseudointellectual
> historical revisionists with the most remarkably crap references
> imaginable. Assuming they don't decide in a week we're all Zionist
> conspirators.

We can tell them I really enjoyed my trip to Israel, if that will
help.

Did anyone notice I was in Jerusalem *on the very day* of the
Palestinian elections?  If that doesn't prove it, I don't know what
would.

--Jimbo


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: promotional items (was no subject)

body:
Brion Vibber a ?crit:
> Angela wrote:
>
>>> I would like that a little bit of room is planned on one of wikimedia
>>> servers to host all these promotional things.
>>> Second we need to have a way to upload this data on the server.
>>
>>
>> I completely agree. An easy way to implement this might be to extend
>> the range of files on the upload whitelist for the foundation wiki.
>> Since only trusted users can edit there, enabling .pdf, .ppt, and .sxi
>> shouldn't cause any problems, and would allow anyone with an account
>> there to upload leaflets and presentations.
>
>
> .pdf and .sxi are on the upload whitelist for all Wikimedia wikis and
> have been for some time.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Okay, rrrrright.

Well...

Anyone interested by illustrator or xpress or high quality pdf files for
business cards, high resolution logos and leaflets, as well as ppt
presentation may contact me by mail and we'll figure out how to send 20
mb files by mail.


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Bulgarian Wikinews launched

body:
Erik Moeller a ?crit:
> The Bulgarian edition of Wikinews is now set up at:
>
> http://bg.wikinews.org/
>
> An announcement has been posted on the Bulgarian Wikipedia Village Pump,
> as well as on the user talk pages of all interested users (all users who
> signed up had user pages on bg:, and several had far more than 200 edits).
>
> I'd like to ask the Board to discuss in the meeting tomorrow what steps
> are required to decide whether the Chinese Wikinews should be launched.

I am quite certain we will not have time this evening. There are topics
which are much more urgent to fix.
I would appreciate that you do not launch chinese wikinews without more
discussion. The failure of french launching is enough in one month.

> Regards,
>
> Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] spam

body:
we have been having serious problems with spam on meta for now two days.
Each time I block the ip and delete the pages. They are recreated.
So, I kept the pages and protected them, but the spam moved on to other
pages.

What should we do ?

Anthere


body:
Anthere a ?crit:

>> .pdf and .sxi are on the upload whitelist for all Wikimedia wikis and
>> have been for some time.
>>
>> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

oh, and, brion, what is sxi extension for ?

Ant


from_name: NSK

subject: [Foundation-l] Copyright

body:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:HURD_first_program_banner.jpg

"This image or document is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Specifically, it is licensed under the Creative Commons ShareAlike License,
colloquially known as "cc-sa"."

I don't know where you found that it is CC-SA (BTW this isn't the licence a
use), but if you somehow derived this info from my article, then please take
a closer look and ensure you understood it right:

http://portal.wikinerds.org/gnu-hurd-l4-first-program

This image was found on http://www.marcus-brinkmann.org/banner.jpg

I asked Marcus via email and he had no problem to use the pic on my site. I
also asked at gnu.org about the Hurd logo and they told me it's freely
redistributable.

On the copyright notices posted on my article I say that only the text is
CC-By-SA-2, the images are fair use.

Please note that notices in individual articles override site-wide notices. In
addition, my site is in a transitional period as we just started to allow
multilicensing and using a page-based copyright scheme.

Also, it would be better to cite as source the brinkmann's site and not my
site, since I also got it from there.

--
NSK
http://portal.wikinerds.org/slashdotting2005feb4


subject: [Foundation-l] Copyright


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
Objections need to be reasonable (read rational).

Fred

> From: Jake Waskett <jake at waskett.org>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 12:12:00 +0000
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Neo-nazis to attack wikipedia
>
> One problem that I can see might involve some editors objecting just to be
> difficult, but I'm sure we could deal with such a situation.


from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] tonight?

body:
On Mon, 07 Feb 2005 13:31:25 +0700, Walter van Kalken
<walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
> What time is the IRC meeting planned for?

If you mean the board meeting, it's at 9pm (UTC). It wasn't being
publicly advertised though, since the main point on the agenda regards
a hosting offer we need to discuss, and we have been asked to keep the
exact terms of this confidential for now.

There will be a second board meeting this month (possibly around the
19th?). If there are no objections from the other members of the
board, this one could be made open, as most of our meetings are.

Angela.


subject: [Foundation-l] tonight?


body:
Erik Moeller wrote regarding Chinese Wikinews:

> Do we even need board approval for this? Perhaps a community vote on
> what should be done would be sufficient:
> 1) Launch the project under the same conditions as all others
> 2) Only launch it if a majority of Chinese language community supports it
> 3) Only launch it if a majority of global user community supports it
> 4) ...?

If board approval is needed, a global discussion (and possibly a poll)
would be useful in informing our decision, so either way, I think the
next step is for this to take place, rather than for it to be
discussed at today's meeting.

Angela.


list: textbook-l

subject: [Textbook-l] Re: references

body:
thanks. Mostly science then.

About the wikijunior, it seems to me the solar system one is quite
advanced as well...

Tomer Chachamu a ?crit:
> On Sun, 06 Feb 2005 09:35:14 +0100, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>Could someone points out to me which are currently the english wikibooks
>>in a well developped state (developped text or comprehensive text) ?
>>
>>I need this to show good examples to some possible partners of what we
>>can do.
>
>
> We have the following books, with disadvantages:
> Lucid Dreaming (which is mostly done by one contributor (me) and not a
> "usual"/"orthodox" textbook)
> High School Extensions (for Maths) which is very good in the sections
> it does have completed
> Physics Study Guide (which offers more notes than full explanations,
> as a study guide)
> US History, which covers in detail 1492-1969 and aims to continue right to today
> Cookbook (also not a "proper" textbook)
> How To Build A Computer, covering the component selection well (which
> is not very well formatted at the moment)
> Intelligence Intensification (which, while somewhat wierd, is good in
> the areas it covers)
> GCSE Science (in the small area it has already covered only)
>
> And probably more.


from_name: Tomer Chachamu

subject: [Textbook-l] Re: references

body:
I myself have a scientific bias. Consider going to
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Book_of_the_month/March_2005_voting
and http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Book_of_the_month/February_2005_voting
and checking all the book liste there. :)

On Mon, 07 Feb 2005 06:48:32 +0100, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> thanks. Mostly science then.
>
> About the wikijunior, it seems to me the solar system one is quite
> advanced as well...


body:
Ant-

> I am quite certain we will not have time this evening. There are
> topics which are much more urgent to fix.

Do we even need board approval for this? Perhaps a community vote on
what should be done would be sufficient:

1) Launch the project under the same conditions as all others
2) Only launch it if a majority of Chinese language community supports it
3) Only launch it if a majority of global user community supports it
4) ...?

> The failure of french launching is enough in one month.

No delay would have changed the fact that there is more opposition to
Wikinews in the French language community than in others. That makes it
obviously more difficult to promote the project, and contributors may
feel less comfortable working for it if they feel its very existence is
threatened. It's also true that the time spent on the flamewar about the
French Wikinews could have been spent building it. So, the Swedes (90
articles! I hope they aren't copyvios), the Spanish and the Dutch have a
bit of a headstart, but I'm confident that the French community will
eventually build a truly great resource at fr.wikinews.org. If you can
help in promoting the project, that would be appreciated.

Regards,

Erik


body:
On Sun, 06 Feb 2005 00:42:45 -0800, Nicholas Knight
<nknight at runawaynet.com> wrote:
> > I can't cheack every edit on RC I have to use various methods to
> > select the ones most likely to be a problem.
>
> So your solution to volunteer burnout is to help them find more problems
> to deal with?

What? It was clearly intended to minimize the amount of legitimate
edits on the Recent Changes list if a user is putting special filters
on. The space for legitimate edits would then have possible vandalism
instead.

Less time spent looking at legitimate edits = more time looking at
vandals' edits.


body:
On Monday 07 February 2005 07:14, Anthere wrote:
> oh, and, brion, what is sxi extension for ?

It's OpenOffice.org 1.x Presentation

--
NSK
http://portal.wikinerds.org/slashdotting2005feb4


body:
JAY JG (jayjg at hotmail.com) [050207 06:44]:
>From: David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au>

> >While it would be theoretically nice from the angle of NPOV to find a
> >neo-Nazi who could research and argue worth a damn, in practice being one
> >seems to require being hard of thinking, and they are demonstrably unable
> >to hold a coherent point in open debate on the Internet, hence retreating
> >to boards like Stormfront, where they self-aggrandise to their hearts'
> >content. A swarm of Vogels would be annoying but nothing beyond what we
> >routinely deal with on a regular basis.  I predict the very hardest part
> >will be getting checkable references out of them and getting them to
> >actually accept that 2+2=4 when presented with quality references from
> >those who don't agree with them.

> I hope you're right.  The latest post to the thread is as follows:
> "What we need is to send out a membership emailing and require that all
> 43,000 members of stormfront.org sign up for wikipedia.com and participate
> in its development and also to get a movement on there to oust the small
> minority of members, specifically jews with baby-carrot sized dicks who are
> preventing specific jewish topics on wikipedia.com from being fair and
> balanced.
> If this does not achieve fair and balanced results then we should really
> consider starting our own open source encyclopedia, which actually come to
> think of it is what we should do, we certainly have the army of members to
> get something like that off the ground. Something we really should consider
> building.
> none the less, I recommend everyone to sign up for wikipedia.com and work
> towards building it and going into arbitration to help oust the small
> minority of baby-carrot-dick jews on there.
> go to wikipedia.com now and sign up."

I think it's more likely they'll set up their own MediaWiki server. Can't
wait for the tech support questions on wikitech-l. OPEN SOURCE FOR WHITE
SUPREMACY!

43 strikes me as a more likely number to try it.

> I suggest that 43,000 Vogels would be hard to deal with, even for
> "baby-carrot-dick jews".

I'll just have to use my ARYAN MIGHT for the JEWISH CONSPIRACY!

- d.


body:
Erik Moeller a ?crit:
> Ant-
>
>> I am quite certain we will not have time this evening. There are
>> topics which are much more urgent to fix.
>
>
> Do we even need board approval for this? Perhaps a community vote on
> what should be done would be sufficient:
>
> 1) Launch the project under the same conditions as all others
> 2) Only launch it if a majority of Chinese language community supports it
> 3) Only launch it if a majority of global user community supports it
> 4) ...?

If you desire it so.
But given the general opposition of the chinese community, it would be
nice to ask them their opinion, even though a couple of people are
asking for it.

>> The failure of french launching is enough in one month.
>
>
> No delay would have changed the fact that there is more opposition to
> Wikinews in the French language community than in others.

It would have made a difference. Many french are not opposed strictly,
but think it is too early. So, a delay would have been a good thing.

  That makes it
> obviously more difficult to promote the project, and contributors may
> feel less comfortable working for it if they feel its very existence is
> threatened.

I see not why they feel its existence is threatened. They simply do not
work on it because they are not interested.

It's also true that the time spent on the flamewar about the
> French Wikinews could have been spent building it.

I do not think so, you and I are not contributors to it :-) Neither is
notafish :-)

So, the Swedes (90
> articles! I hope they aren't copyvios), the Spanish and the Dutch have a
> bit of a headstart, but I'm confident that the French community will
> eventually build a truly great resource at fr.wikinews.org. If you can
> help in promoting the project, that would be appreciated.

Sorry, I am rather busy trying to explain journalists the great idea
behind it. Last week, I explained it to Les Echos
(http://www.lesechos.fr/). I would have preferred talking to them about
a successful project such as wikipedia :-)

> Regards,
>
> Erik


body:
Angela a ?crit:
> Erik Moeller wrote regarding Chinese Wikinews:
>
>
>>Do we even need board approval for this? Perhaps a community vote on
>>what should be done would be sufficient:
>>1) Launch the project under the same conditions as all others
>>2) Only launch it if a majority of Chinese language community supports it
>>3) Only launch it if a majority of global user community supports it
>>4) ...?
>
>
> If board approval is needed, a global discussion (and possibly a poll)
> would be useful in informing our decision, so either way, I think the
> next step is for this to take place, rather than for it to be
> discussed at today's meeting.
>
> Angela.

agreed


body:
Anthere-

>
> It would have made a difference.

We'll just have to agree to disagree about that.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Python Wikipediabot framework recent changes

body:
I forgot to mention that as a result in changes to the Wikipedia
software, the bot will not be able to submit when not logged in. Also,
the change of waiting behaviour had some bugs. These (or at least
those of them that have been found upto now :-0 ) have been corrected
in wikipedia.py 1.394, catall.py 1.13, category.py 1.62,
pagefromfile.py 1.7

Furthermore, I have not been able to upload a new version to
sourceforge, but those interested can get a zipped version of the full
bot from me.

Andre Engels

On Sun, 6 Feb 2005 22:32:51 +0100, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> The following changes have been made in the Python Wikipediabot
> framework in the last 2 weeks (since January 19, to be precise). The
> bot can be downloaded at
> http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/pywikipediabot/pywikipedia/; for
> each change it is specified which version of which file is needed.


body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
> I think we already got the answer to that question.  Sometimes it's useful
> to have a benign dictator who can step in and say "cut it out."

The danger of course is that the benign dictator may turn out to be
biased or wrong himself.  So I hestitate to do this except in cases
where speed is of essence, or where it's just very clearcut and easy.
What I prefer is that I can act as a temporary bridge and "person to
blame" while we work on community solutions.

If 300 NeoNazis show up and start doing serious damage to a bunch of
articles, we don't need to have 300 separate ArbCom cases and a
nightmare that drags on for weeks.  I'll just do something to lock
those articles down somehow, ban a bunch of people, and protect our
reputation and integrity.  And then we can also work in parallel to
think about the best way to really take care of such problems in the
long run.

But if a handful of LaRouche fans want to come in and do pseudo-NPOV
on a handful of relatively obscure articles, I'm not in favor of me
just cracking heads over it. We can't just ignore it and hope it goes
away, either, of course.  We just start thinking about it and working
on it until we come up with something useful.

We're really smart, but we are also really *thoughtful* as a
community.  That's wonderful, and me asking too quickly as
constitutional monarch is not helpful to preserving those values.

But really, we need not fear a massive NeoNazi attack, either.
Because I *will* authorize a quick change of policy if needed.

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] Poll on Chinese Wikinews launch

body:
I've set up a poll at

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/China

to help decide whether we need a formal vote among the Chinese users or
all users before launching the Chinese Wikinews edition (because of the
risk of censorship). Please vote.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] How to become a mediator

body:
Mediators are needed. Please go to the article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mediation_Committee

then consult the section:

How does one become a member of the committee?

If you are a new Wikipedia user that may delay your acceptance as a
mediator, but won't hurt to review the article as a part of your experience.

Fred

> From: Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2005 17:30:39 +1030
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] How to become a mediator
>
> I've been subscribed to this list for about a week now, and
> overwhelmingly I see stuff about dispute resolution. What can I do to help?
>
> [[en:User:Alphax]]
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Charles Matthews

body:
 "Deathphoenix" wrote

> I've only been on the mailing list a short time, but it's sure opening
> my eyes to the community and its concerns.

Remember a few things.  For every problematic article on the English
Wikipedia, there are around 1000 being developed in relative harmony.  For
every community member who brings serious concerns here, there must be at
least ten very active editors who meet little difficulty beyond random
vandals and a few problems with newbies or ill-informed postings.  For every
security and quality-assurance measure WP currently takes, there are several
it could take, but doesn't deign to.

I would say that the current size of wikien means the entryists have left it
far too late to try to swamp the community.  This might have worked two
years ago, or caused the barriers to come down.  That is, enforcement is
currently quite low key, but that's a sign of confidence.  Edits can be
reverted, pages protected, lowlifes summarily banned.  I don't doubt they
would be, in any serious attempt at subverting what we do.  At the moment
Wikipedia is open for business, 24/7, and we don't circle the wagons in the
face of mere paper threats.

Charles


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Angela (beesley at gmail.com) [050207 07:07]:

> We can host them. We just can't allow anyone to upload potentially
> dangerous files. See Brion's email on this when pdf was first
> disallowed: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-September/025472.html

Oh, good lord. TEXT is forbidden?!

/me curses IE's crackmonkey authors

Looks like if I want SVG uploads on Commons I'll need to write a
mathematically-watertight validity checker myself. Barring no new exploits
found that use perfectly valid SVG files. Grah!

- d.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Re: promotional items (was no
	subject)


body:
On Sat, February 5, 2005 11:41 am, Mark Williamson said:
> As far as the expiriment you've set up, it doesn't seem anybody has
> written yet. Maybe Alex and co. are away on the weekend? Do you know
> any Cantonese to write a sample article, Felix?
>
Check this out:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-WP/zh-yue

I have written the instructions on adding sample articles in Cantonese
and English, and started to write the Main Page.

To echo the words from the opposition: I don't want to live in a lonely
Wikipedia either. ^_^  So I will not try to write all the articles, but
start the experiment like any other wiki project: let the enthusiasts
contribute their parts. I will also work on it at a slow pace, using just the time I will normally spend on Wikipedia. If the experiment becomes
successful, we will not only see its feasibility, but also have a group
of initial contributors.

Since there is no time limit on the request for a new Wikipedia, and
there should not be any, we can wait until we gain enough support.

Felix Wan


from_name: Jesse Liberty

body:
One small thing we can do is put the likely pages on our watch lists and
keep an eye on how things develop.  I'm pretty new here, so I'll go lightly
but there is no reason to throw up our hands in despair; there are enough
NPOV Wikipedians to keep things within bounds.

-j

(Of course, as a Queer Jew, I may not qualify as unbiased!)

----------------------------
Jesse Liberty
http://www.ActonEquality.org
http://radio.weblogs.com/0138856/

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


from_name: Sj

body:
On Mon, 07 Feb 2005 06:00:11 +0100, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Well...
>
> Anyone interested by illustrator or xpress or high quality pdf files for
> business cards, high resolution logos and leaflets, as well as ppt
> presentation may contact me by mail and we'll figure out how to send 20
> mb files by mail.

I have about a gig of web-accessible space on my machine you can use
to store files;
can you use FTP to upload them to me?  You can also mail anything
smaller than 5MB to this gmail account...

--
+sj+


from_name: Delirium

body:
John Lee wrote:

> The problem is, groups like Stormfront have a whole different
> definition of what is NPOV.

Not to get too relativistic, but to some extent, so do all cultures and
subcultures.  I'm not sure it's been explicitly mentioned anywhere, but
IMO Wikipedia is in essence defining "NPOV" to mean "neutral according
to what a sampling of reasonably objective liberal intellectuals would
think", perhaps even with the caveat "liberal intellectuals in the
Western rationalist tradition" (where liberal is used in the
non-political sense).  We believe that everything ought to be discussed
(no censorship), including taboo and/or sensitive issues; that rigorous
academic-style inquiry is in general the right way to discover facts;
and so on.

The relationship this has to majority is an interesting one.  In many
countries, both Western and non-Western, it's not the majority one (I'd
argue this would be true of both the United States, and of many Muslim
nations, for different reasons).  If we held a population-wide vote on
some of our decisions, we'd end up with some significantly different
ones.  Of course, that does lead to a bit of a problem---perhaps we can
use majority votes, but only of people who subscribe to the basic tenets
to begin with.  If 500 people register who think that all criticism of
[(religious figure) or (national hero)] is inappropriate for an
encyclopedia, then we'll simply have to discount their votes and keep
it.  Now who decides when that's the case is an interesting question...

-Mark


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Multilingual portal vote

body:
Mark Williamson (node.ue at gmail.com) [050207 08:07]:

> What I don't like about the poll is that the vast, sweeping majority
> of the voters are from en.wikipedia, who found the voting page because
> it was listed on the village pump.

In the time it took you to write this email, you could have listed it on
the equivalent page on several other wikis.

- d.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikistandards

body:
--- Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> In addition, the Wikimedia Foundation put up a new policy regarding how
> to start a new project, and so far there has not even been a single
> project that has been approved through this new process (based largely
> on how the Wikinews project was put together, and to avoid the pitfalls
> of projects like Wikispecies).  If there is some momentum here, I'd like
> to see if we can get Wikistandards to be approved by this process, but
> it isn't going to happen any time very soon.  At a minimum two to three
> months, perhaps even longer if just to see if we can get some community
> support.

I think Wikistandards is a neat idea for a project and its general (meaning all
inclusive in terms of what standards are allowed) scope along with its inherent
importance will make for a viable project. Neat name too, btw. :)

However, I still don't know if this is a good fit for the foundation (just
because it is a good idea, does not necessarily mean we should host it), so
some reasoning in that regard is needed.

I'm also *very* worried by copyright and especially business practice patents
that may be easily infringed in such a project. So I'd like to hear from a
patent lawyer about that or at least somebody who knows a lot about this type
of thing and how patents and copyright apply to standards.

So, yes, a good deal more groundwork is needed. But I think we are on the right
track.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today!
http://my.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikistandards


from_name: David Iberri

subject: [Wikitech-l] Templates (quick question)

body:
On Mon, 7 Feb 2005 19:21:20 +0000, Tomer Chachamu <the.r3m0t at gmail.com> wrote:
> You just need to look at the restrictions in place. No more than 5
> inclusions of the same template work on one page on the MediaWiki
> projects (I think). Further inclusions turn into a link to that
> template. This is not affected by the template size.

FYI, the 5-transclusions per template limit was lifted as of MW 1.4.
See [[m:Help:Template]].

-- David Iberri


subject: [Foundation-l] Project Proposal Demo Pages

body:
--- Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> Before I start really pushing forward and adding content, I wanted to
> ask the foundation community if this is an acceptable practice, and just
> where, perhaps, I should put this content.  While I started this on
> Wikibooks, now that I've been reflecting on this a little bit I'm
> thinking this perhaps should be on meta for now, simply because this
> really is a different thing and is a project proposal.

Please only add books you intend to actually become books on Wikibooks. If this
is just a mock up, then Meta is a better place. Just use subpages. :)

> I'm also suggesing a minor change to the new proposal policy and making
> a demo project as a part of the proposal process.  Obviously if there
> are software changes that have to be made this can't be done on the demo
> side, but a great deal can be done with the tools already available.
>  For most of the proposed projects, it would show if it is a serious
> proposal or simply some wishful thinking that you had daydreaming one night.

Sounds like a good idea.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The all-new My Yahoo! - What will yours do?
http://my.yahoo.com


body:
We could have two recent changes, one that has everything, another that has
pages of interest, a sort of watchlist for everyone that had all pages that
were embroiled in controversy listed.

Fred

> From: "Karl A. Krueger" <kkrueger at whoi.edu>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2005 13:51:15 -0500
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Neo-nazis to attack wikipedia
>
> On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 04:58:55PM +0000, Jake Waskett wrote:
>> On Monday 07 February 2005 17:06, David Gerard wrote:
>>> I'm not sure we need this for *all* pages - it's really the problematic
>>> 0.1%.
>>
>> I'm sorry, I meant only the highly controversial (read: problematic) pages.
>
> One place where a few more technical tools might be useful is in
> ascertaining where the problematic pages are, and bringing it to more
> people's attention when a page goes into edit-war.
>
> As the volume of editing on Wikipedia increases, it's harder and harder
> to discern anything about current problems by looking at Recent Changes
> -- there are hundreds of changes every hour.  I'll notice an edit war if
> it shows up on my watchlist or WP:RFC, but if nobody is watching and the
> editors involved don't post to WP:RFC (or don't know about it), the
> problem can persist indefinitely.
>
> Each of us can name some pages that have experienced edit wars, NPOV
> controversies, and problems with advocates insisting on unverifiable
> inclusions.  But consider an editor who wants to help resolve these
> problems but doesn't know where the worst of them are ... or an editor
> who's in the middle of one of these conflicts and doesn't realize that
> it's *unusual*, that the behavior they're facing is well outside of the
> Wikipedia norm, and that it's time to ask for help.
>
> It should be relatively simple to automatically discern if a given edit
> is a revert to a previous version of the article.  (Even if an abuser is
> using cut-and-paste reverts instead of editing older versions, the
> people *responding* to the abuse will probably use older versions.)
> Given this, the software could calculate a "revert temperature" of each
> article -- the number of times it's been reverted over the past 48 or 96
> hours, say.
>
> Articles with a high revert temperature get listed on a special page --
> which might serve as a short list for admins protecting articles.
> (Automatic protection would probably be a BAD idea, since the software
> can't tell if a version is a blatantly vandalized one ... and it could
> be deliberately gamed to lock-in a maliciously edited version.)
>
> Possibly other technical cues might kick in when an article's revert
> temperature gets high ... such as a warning on the edit page that the
> reverts were getting noticed, and recommending dispute resolution; or a
> requirement that the edit comment be filled in; or the like.
>
> --
> Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu>
> Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Felix Wan

body:
On Mon, February 7, 2005 10:39 am, Alex Y. Kwan said:
> Hello,
>
> Felix Wan wrote:
>
>> I have written the instructions on adding sample articles in
>> Cantonese and English, and started to write the Main Page.
>
> Oooh, cool.
>
> You okay if I edit some bits to make it even "more" Cantonese/Yue?
>
You are surely welcome to edit. It does not matter who started the test.
It is a wiki. Everyone may edit.

Felix Wan


from_name: Jake Waskett

body:
On Monday 07 February 2005 11:19, David Gerard wrote:
> Jake Waskett (jake at waskett.org) [050207 13:05]:
> > Ok, Jimbo, you're right. Let me amend my earlier statement: on the whole,
> > the system is working, but in a few articles, it is not. Now, the
> > question is this: what can be done about the problem?
> > One solution that I favour is to have permanent protection on targetted
> > pages, and have a nominated admin apply changes that are agreed upon by
> > vote on the article's talk page.
> > What do others think?
>
> Consensus is a means to NPOV, not something that trumps it.  A vote would
> exacerbate the recruitment problem you have described.

Yes, I see your point. Unfortunately, though, there's no way of automating a
test for neutrality, so humans have to be involved.

What about unanimous vote? If every editor had the ability to veto a change,
it could work. Nobody would (presumably) object to truly NPOV changes, but at
least one person would surely object to any attempt to insert POV changes.

I guess I'm assuming that at least two "sides" will be represented in such a
controversial article here, but the evidence suggests that is not such an
unreasonable assumption. The nice thing about this is that it doesn't matter
how many neo-nazis (or whatever) descend upon Wiki - it only takes one
non-nazi editor to keep the article neutral.

One problem that I can see might involve some editors objecting just to be
difficult, but I'm sure we could deal with such a situation.

Thoughts?

Jake.


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikistandards

body:
C T wrote:

>Our class has studied or is studying
>
>Electrical Theory 1 & 2
>Semiconductors 1
>Digital Devices 1
>
>Does Wikistandards cover these topics?
>
>Where can I veiw the efforts already engaged?
>
>Thanks,
>Craig
>
>
>
I think you are mistaking the purpose of what we are doing here.  You
originally proposed:

"A place to gather international standards for electricity, electronics,
and robotics. Instead of paying large sums of money to the IEEE and ISO for
access to their standards."

And I was pointing out that I had a similar effort that was more broadly
based as a generic standards repository, that would obviously include
international standards for these specific areas you mentioned.

Trying to start up a new project is obviously challenging, if only to
gather supporters together.  I've been working on this proposal since
August, and in truth I've been working on variations of something like
this for almost five years.  This isn't something that will happen
immediately.  The Wikimedia Foundation is not here to host just any
project, but to foster new projects that are in harmony with the other
projects that are here.  A quick look at the list of proposed projects
shows about fifty (50) different projects that have been proposed, most
of them over the past year or so on the current list.  There are only
six major projects and four others that are still struggling trying to
get going.  Of those four, two are showing signs of trouble, Wikispecies
and the 9-11 Memorial, because of various internal problems and its
limited scope.  (I am ignoring Meta and the Foundation websites as
special creatures in their own right).

In addition, the Wikimedia Foundation put up a new policy regarding how
to start a new project, and so far there has not even been a single
project that has been approved through this new process (based largely
on how the Wikinews project was put together, and to avoid the pitfalls
of projects like Wikispecies).  If there is some momentum here, I'd like
to see if we can get Wikistandards to be approved by this process, but
it isn't going to happen any time very soon.  At a minimum two to three
months, perhaps even longer if just to see if we can get some community
support.

In short, I don't have any specific resources to put forward that would
be able deal with the electronics theory concepts that you are
suggesting, although there are some items in Wikibooks that might be of
some use to you right now.  If you know of some standards documents
involving electronics that we might be able to put together, it would be
appreciated.  One thing I would have appreciated years ago when I was
taking some Electrical Engineering classes was a book or guide to
7400-series digital logic chips.   You can get this information often
from chip manufactures, but an objective guide would have some value on
its own.  Please let me know if you have anything currently, or
something that you are debating about in class right now that could be
included.

--
Robert Scott Horning


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikistandards


from_name: Chad Perrin

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

> Wiki-editing works great in most cases to drive towards NPOV.  The
> game theory of "mutually assured destruction" means that partisans
> have an incentive to try to "write for the enemy".  What we are
> considering now is how to deal with a situation in which an
> *organized* group starts gaming our social rules (3RR in particular)
> to undermine the natural incentive structure of wiki editing.
>

That strikes me as the real crux of the matter: this is more of a
contentious testing of the administrative rules of Wikipedia than it is
an actual assault on the project itself.  There will always be those
with an axe to grind and an agenda to propagandize.

I'm not sure that anything at all "needs to be done" to deal with the
matter.  In fact, there's not really anything necessarily wrong with POV
getting into an article, as long as no POV is pushed as the only valid
POV.  Rather, multiple POVs* might be a more desirable status of an
article than no POV at all, where each is clearly identified as being a
particular perspective with identified adherents.  Thus, if Stormfront
troopers swarm in and add some biased information as though it were
gospel, rather than actively oppose it, editors should simply . . . edit
it.  Tidy up the language, make it non-repetitive, collect it in one
section, and label it as a particular perspective.

Where a Stormfront (darn, the militant racists get all the cool names)
activist enters some figures identifying the amount of money supposedly
cost the country by Zionists, stick it into an appropriate POV corral
and provide some academic analysis of where those figures might
originate.  If treated properly, such attempts to monkeywrench the
bias-mitigating machinery of Wikipedia can actually become a rich source
of information.

I guess, in short, my point is that a lack of bias and a lack of
point-of-view are two different and separate things.  Points of view are
good.  Bias is favoritism to a particular point of view, and that's bad.
  Tell me if I'm wrong.

--
Chad

* = I keep thinking "Personally Owned Vehicle" when I type POV.  Bah.


from_name: Pedro Fayolle

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Live Preview

body:
Hm, then I'd better think of a new name. Would 'Quick Preview' be OK?
'InstaView'?

-Pedro

On Sun, 06 Feb 2005 22:12:46 -0800, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Pedro Fayolle wrote:
> > So far it's still in development and it has some limitations, some of
> > which I plan to overcome soon, yet I believe it's mature enough to be
> > useful to some.
> >
> > Please let me know what you think about it.
>
> Note that 1.5 contains an unrelated feature called 'live preview'.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>
>


body:
I've been working on a new project proposal, and I've considered trying
to demonstrate what the site would look like by creating a few wiki
pages and putting a little content together.  Rather than going through
the whole hassle of trying physically setting up the website as a demo
on my own server, and because I don't have a 24/7 internet connection at
the moment, I'd like to demonstrate what I think the website could look
like by setting up some content pages demonstrating the concept.

Right now, I've put together the following page:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/WikiStandards

Before I start really pushing forward and adding content, I wanted to
ask the foundation community if this is an acceptable practice, and just
where, perhaps, I should put this content.  While I started this on
Wikibooks, now that I've been reflecting on this a little bit I'm
thinking this perhaps should be on meta for now, simply because this
really is a different thing and is a project proposal.

If it is acceptable to do something like this, I'd also like some
guidelines regarding mainly how much content should be on a demo site
like this.  Obviously this is something that is just starting out, but I
also don't intend to make this a working sub project either and treating
this as a fully-funtional wiki in its own right.  In this case I think
it will be easier for me to explain what I am proposing by actually
showing real content and how it could be useful to the Wikimedia
community in general.  If the project gets approved, it would also be a
good way to seed the new project right away.

I'm also suggesing a minor change to the new proposal policy and making
a demo project as a part of the proposal process.  Obviously if there
are software changes that have to be made this can't be done on the demo
side, but a great deal can be done with the tools already available.
 For most of the proposed projects, it would show if it is a serious
proposal or simply some wishful thinking that you had daydreaming one night.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
Jake Waskett said:
> Ok, Jimbo, you're right. Let me amend my earlier statement: on the
> whole, the  system is working, but in a few articles, it is not. Now,
> the question is  this: what can be done about the problem?
>
> One solution that I favour is to have permanent protection on targetted
> pages,  and have a nominated admin apply changes that are agreed upon
> by vote on the  article's talk page.
>
> What do others think?
>
Wikipedia doesn't work by voting, but by trusting people.  In particular,
you must never use a vote to decide whether something is NPOV.
If some people abuse that trust, we should deal with those people, not the
articles.  The vast majority of our editors can be trusted to decide which
articles to edit and not treat Wikipedia as if it was a collection of
Usenet groups.  We should try to let them get on with it.  Giving some
articles special treatment is probably not the way to go, in my opinion.


body:
Deathphoenix said:
> You'd probably need to have a small team of volunteers willing to act
> as  moderators for each article (of course, people would be moderating
> much  more than a single "protected article"). The current
> {{protected}}  system is good for protecting the article so that only
> admins can edit  it, so if the moderators were admins, that would work.

Create content moderators and you create a point of weakness.  The best
safeguard of content is verifiability.  The existing dispute resolution
process can deal with people who repeatedly make unverifiable edits.


from_name: John Lee

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Multilingual portal vote

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:

>What's your point?
>
>Mark
>
>On Mon, 7 Feb 2005 11:39:48 +1100, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>
>
>>Mark Williamson (node.ue at gmail.com) [050207 08:07]:
>>
>>
>>
>>>What I don't like about the poll is that the vast, sweeping majority
>>>of the voters are from en.wikipedia, who found the voting page because
>>>it was listed on the village pump.
>>>
>>>
>>In the time it took you to write this email, you could have listed it on
>>the equivalent page on several other wikis.
>>
>>- d.
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>
>>
>>
His point is: Stop wasting your and our time. David was trying to tell
you {{sofixit}}.

John Lee
([[en:User:Johnleemk]])


from_name: steven l. rubenstein

body:
Jake Waskett wrote,

On Monday 07 February 2005 00:25, AndyL wrote:
 > Perhaps we need some sort of intermediate form of ongoing protection for
 > certain pages. Perhaps some pages should only have registered editors able
 > to actively edit them with non-editors only able to make suggestions on
 > talk pages? Perhaps other pages should be protected on an ongoing basis and
 > only have admins able to edit them based on proposals on talk pages which
 > have achieved consensus or passed a certain standard?
 >
 > Andy
Superb idea. I'm not sure that Wiki has the facility to have "registered"
editors, but a nominated admin could be responsible for a page and apply
changes that have been voted upon.

This is a very dangerous idea.  I agree we need a strategy for dealing with
massive organized assaults on Wikipedia, whatever the source.  I hope we
can come up with something better than putting an administrator in charge
of a site and taking votes.

This brings us back to an issue I and others have raised: we have
mechanisms for resolving disputes over behavior; we do not have, but need,
mechanisms for resolving disputes over content.  I think Jake is basically
suggesting just such a mechanism.  But it is a mechanism I oppose -- I
don't trust putting any admin. in charge of a page, and I don't think votes
are a good way to resolve issues of conflict (especially when 43,000 storm
troopers are threatening Wikipedia!  Let's not forget that Hitler  took
advantage of votes as well).

So: I do agree that we need mechanisms to resolve conflict over content
(even though I reject this particular mechanism).  I believe that such a
mechanism, along with vigorous enforcement of NVOP, No Original Research,
and Verifiability will be enough to protect ourselves against any
small-scale assault.

But Jay's point is that none of these mechanisms will protect us against a
43,000 person assault.  Fred might be right, that our worst-case scenario
will not happen, but I tend to agree with Jay that we need to consider this
and think of ways to deal with it.  But I do not think that the solution to
this kind of problem will be anything like the mechanisms we currently rely on.

Steve

Steven L. Rubenstein
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Bentley Annex
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio 45701


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Multilingual portal vote

body:
That was what I meant by "what's your point". I could do that for ja:,
zh:, and perhaps fr: or es:, but...

Mark

On Mon, 7 Feb 2005 19:42:47 +0000, Tomer Chachamu <the.r3m0t at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 7 Feb 2005 11:39:48 +1100, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> > Mark Williamson (node.ue at gmail.com) [050207 08:07]:
> > > What I don't like about the poll is that the vast, sweeping majority
> > > of the voters are from en.wikipedia, who found the voting page because
> > > it was listed on the village pump.
> > In the time it took you to write this email, you could have listed it on
> > the equivalent page on several other wikis.
>
> ...which he, of course, knows the language to.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Robert Jones

subject: [Wikitech-l] Templates (quick question)

body:
Are there any signigicant server load issues relating to extensive use of
templates or use of templates within templates on a mediawiki installation?
What (if anything) relating to use of templates would be bad for server
load?


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Neo-nazis to attack wikipedia

body:
>From: zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com>
>As has been pointed out here, it is likely that many
>of the "keep" votes on a certain VfD page were made at
>the prompting of the lowlife Nazi scum at Stormfront.
>This is highly regretable, and personally upsetting
>to people like me who voted "keep" for reasons which
>I believe to be legitimate.

As I pointed out earlier on the relevant Talk: page, Zero0000 made
compelling arguments why the article should be kept.  Unfortunately, he was
the only "keep" voter who did so, and most of the rest of the "keep"
arguments actually indicated why the article should be deleted.

And the antics of one particular long-time editor and Keep voter, in trying
to rig the vote page, then accusing some editors who have been on Wikipedia
for months of being sockpuppets, then trying disqualify the Delete votes on
the grounds that putting in some Google links to usage of the term meant the
article had changed enough that their votes no longer applied, and finally
to immediately putting it up for undeletion, have done the Keep side no
good.

>I'd just like to point out that before Stormfront
>started lobbying for votes many people were alerted
>to the page via the large mailing list which a
>certain Wikipedian maintains for just this purpose,
>and it is reasonable to assume that many of the
>"delete" votes came from recipients of that mailing.
>
>All of which shows that the concept of "consensus"
>in VfD is all but meaningless.

Not quite.  I'm not sure the exact mathematical formula for "consensus", but
I figure it has something to do with number of editors, their contribution
to Wikipedia, and how trusted they are.  With that in mind, I did a little
bit of obsessive statistical analysis on the vote, and discovered the
following:

The 49 Delete voters averaged 4759 edits each, and included 13
administrators (27%).  On the other hand, the 27 Keep voters averaged 1715
votes each, and included only 2 administrators (7%).

What if you pull out all the "questionable" votes?  I don't know who is on
that list you mention, but let's say we remove those voters with fewer than
75 edits?  Well, you find that the remaining 43 Delete voters (30% of them
administrators) averaged 5417 edits each, vs. 13 Keep voters (15% of them
administrators) averating 3553 edits each.

>From what I can see, that's actually a pretty strong consensus among
significant Wikipedia contributors to delete.


body:
Skyring said:
>
> I go for the verifiable research test - if NeoNazis are anything like
> the sort of fringe dwellers I see on Usenet, their idea of research
> consists of something they might have heard on TV or talkback radio. --

Though I'm sure I should not try to speak for David, I think he was
employing that deadly antipodean weapon: sarcasm.  He doesn't want a vote,
either.


references:
<BE2BB6BF.4E5C%andyl2004@sympatico.ca>	<BE2B9F86.B5A0%fredbaud@ctelco.net>
	<20050206174320.GB7930@thingy.apana.org.au>
	<4206B618.2030608@hackish.org>

body:
Delirium said:
> The circumcision-related
> articles have tended to be a mess from both sides as well, including
> recruitment of activists from off-wikipedia mailing lists.
>
While the editing process on these articles may sometimes be somewhat
fraught, I don't think there are a lot of problems with the product.
Looking at "Medical analysis of circumcision", for instance, both before
and after the systematic involvement of anti-anti-circumcision activists,
the article doesn't seem to have suffered greatly.  Looking at the
earliest edits and the latest, much the same issues are dealt with and the
lay reader gets a reasonable feel for the pros and cons, though minor
detail differs.  This doesn't seem to be a "brave white heroes fight off
Jewish cultural pollution" thing at all.


from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Foundation-l] tonight?

body:
What time is the IRC meeting planned for?

Waerth/Walter van Kalken


subject: [Foundation-l] tonight?


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikistandards

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>
>
>>In addition, the Wikimedia Foundation put up a new policy regarding how
>>to start a new project, and so far there has not even been a single
>>project that has been approved through this new process (based largely
>>on how the Wikinews project was put together, and to avoid the pitfalls
>>of projects like Wikispecies).  If there is some momentum here, I'd like
>>to see if we can get Wikistandards to be approved by this process, but
>>it isn't going to happen any time very soon.  At a minimum two to three
>>months, perhaps even longer if just to see if we can get some community
>>support.
>>
>>
>
>I think Wikistandards is a neat idea for a project and its general (meaning all
>inclusive in terms of what standards are allowed) scope along with its inherent
>importance will make for a viable project. Neat name too, btw. :)
>
>However, I still don't know if this is a good fit for the foundation (just
>because it is a good idea, does not necessarily mean we should host it), so
>some reasoning in that regard is needed.
>
>I'm also *very* worried by copyright and especially business practice patents
>that may be easily infringed in such a project. So I'd like to hear from a
>patent lawyer about that or at least somebody who knows a lot about this type
>of thing and how patents and copyright apply to standards.
>
>So, yes, a good deal more groundwork is needed. But I think we are on the right
>track.
>
>-- mav
>
>
As I indicated earlier, I don't think copyright is that big of an issue.
 If it doesn't fit with the GFDL, it should be removed just like
anything that is posted on Wikipedia.  I think there is going to be far
more problems of copyright violation with Wikipedia then we will ever
have with something like Wikistandards.  I'm pushing for already
open/free standards to be hosted here, not existing copyrighted
standards.  If people want to use those copyrighted standards documents,
they should pay for them from the sources that already are dealing with
them.

Business practice patents and software patents are huge legal grey areas
anyway and are causing legal grief elsewhere.  I would have to agree
that the Wikimedia Foundation does need to consider the potential legal
consequences of hosting a project like this one, and the potential for
legal restraining orders and arrest of participants.  On the whole, I
hope I havn't been scaring too many people with these legal threats, and
I believe that the potential for legal issues is roughly identical as
with other projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.  The reverse
engineering documents are a bit of an issue, and an acceptable policy in
the beginning would (IMHO) be to simply not allow these documents for
roughly a year, then bring the issue up in the community and get some
input if they are ever allowed, when, and how.  There are far too many
good things that can be developed and are being developed that can be
hosted to let this issue be the setback.

A standards document that is being developed as a totally new concept
should in theory be free of these issues.  As far as the Wikimedia
Foundation is concerned, they are simply hosting content where the
information is stored.  There are increased legal problems for people
who attempt to implement the information in the standards (create their
own Ogg Vorbis player, as an example), but it could be demonstrated that
the Wikimedia Foundation is innocent of violating the patents as all
that was done is publishing documentation that has copyright clearance
(either public domain or released under the GFDL).  In short, I see a
much bigger problem with libel issues arising from Wikinews than
anything Wikistandards would come up with.  And this is just as big of a
deal with Wikibooks if somebody describes how to implement a patented
process in one of the book modules.

As an example, CompuServ created the GIF image standard years ago and
published the specification, even granting the right to republish the
document freely.  This would even be a document that we could put into
Wikistandards as an acceptable document.  When Unisys came forward
claiming patent violation due to the LZW algorithm patent, all that it
did was affect anybody that used GIF images for content.  Anybody that
wanted to was still free to publish the specification document itself.
 The patent enforcement essentially killed the specification standard as
far as anybody using it, but that didn't stop people from talking about
how it worked and trying to re-implement a new version that avoided the
patent issues, as was done when the PNG specification was created.

In comparison, the DVD CSS lawsuits were done due to a group reverse
engineering an existing specification.  With a lot of hard work by some
very intelligent people, the specific algorithm that was used to encrypt
DVD-Video discs was discovered and an implementation of it in the form
of the deCSS program was published.  The legal issues involved with this
are still unsettled, although the copyright and EULA issues were all
dropped because the copyright status of deCSS was quite clear.  All that
remains now is to decide if it is legal to reverse engineer something
that is a trade secret, and if that trade secret status remains after
the information has been widely published from a reverse engineering
effort.  This is more of why I think reverse engineering specs should be
kept off for now.  As a citizen I think it is incredibly stupid that the
courts should rule against specification of these sort, but it isn't my
money or reputation on the line if the Wikimedia Foundation gets pulled in.

--
Robert Scott Horning
218 Sunstone Circle
Logan, UT 84321
(435) 753-3330
robert_horning at netzero.net


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikistandards


from_name: Karl A. Krueger

body:
On Mon, Feb 07, 2005 at 04:58:55PM +0000, Jake Waskett wrote:
> On Monday 07 February 2005 17:06, David Gerard wrote:
> > I'm not sure we need this for *all* pages - it's really the problematic
> > 0.1%.
>
> I'm sorry, I meant only the highly controversial (read: problematic) pages.

One place where a few more technical tools might be useful is in
ascertaining where the problematic pages are, and bringing it to more
people's attention when a page goes into edit-war.

As the volume of editing on Wikipedia increases, it's harder and harder
to discern anything about current problems by looking at Recent Changes
-- there are hundreds of changes every hour.  I'll notice an edit war if
it shows up on my watchlist or WP:RFC, but if nobody is watching and the
editors involved don't post to WP:RFC (or don't know about it), the
problem can persist indefinitely.

Each of us can name some pages that have experienced edit wars, NPOV
controversies, and problems with advocates insisting on unverifiable
inclusions.  But consider an editor who wants to help resolve these
problems but doesn't know where the worst of them are ... or an editor
who's in the middle of one of these conflicts and doesn't realize that
it's *unusual*, that the behavior they're facing is well outside of the
Wikipedia norm, and that it's time to ask for help.

It should be relatively simple to automatically discern if a given edit
is a revert to a previous version of the article.  (Even if an abuser is
using cut-and-paste reverts instead of editing older versions, the
people *responding* to the abuse will probably use older versions.)
Given this, the software could calculate a "revert temperature" of each
article -- the number of times it's been reverted over the past 48 or 96
hours, say.

Articles with a high revert temperature get listed on a special page --
which might serve as a short list for admins protecting articles.
(Automatic protection would probably be a BAD idea, since the software
can't tell if a version is a blatantly vandalized one ... and it could
be deliberately gamed to lock-in a maliciously edited version.)

Possibly other technical cues might kick in when an article's revert
temperature gets high ... such as a warning on the edit page that the
reverts were getting noticed, and recommending dispute resolution; or a
requirement that the edit comment be filled in; or the like.

--
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu>
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution


body:
>What about unanimous vote? If every editor had the ability to veto a
>change,
>it could work. Nobody would (presumably) object to truly NPOV changes, but
>at
>least one person would surely object to any attempt to insert POV changes.

That's a recipe for article gridlock.  You might as well print and bind
Wikipedia and sell it door to door at that point.

Jay.


from_name: Petr Kadlec

subject: [Wikitech-l] Guessing interface language from Accept-Language

body:
Hi all!

I believe that for anonymous users, the interface language should be
chosen based on their Accept-Language. I think the required code is
simple, see the attached diff for a basic sketch that seems to work
(really only basic, some issues are ignored, e.g. when a new user is
created, his default preferred language should be set to
Accept-Language, too).

There are some further issues that should be considered -- e.g. what
about Main_Page/Hauptseite/...? What to do with a user preferring some
language not supported on the wiki? (Should there be some local
setting with a list of supported languages?) Etc.

But I would like to know -- what do you think about the idea? (My
initial thought was about the Commons -- users from many Wikipedias go
there, only to find that, seemingly, the site is English-only. But
their language is just a few clicks away; unfortunately, the clicks
have to go through the English interface.)

-- [[ :cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec ]]


from_name: uninvited at nerstrand.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] GFDL for uploaded audio clips

body:
Hello everyone

I'm still on extended wikivacation in general but am undertaking a
project to add music clips.  I plan to record my own playing of certain
well-known classical keyboard works and add them to the encyclopedia.
While I am not a great performer, I hope to provide some material of
reasonable quality, and hope to inspire others to contribute in like
fashion.

The GFDL poses problems.  I would prefer not to use it and to use
CC-by-SA only.
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode)

The main problem with the GFDL is that, for a recording of a musical
work, the "transparent copy" -- the "preferred form for modification"
is unclear.  It could be construed to be the WAV file or a lossless
(FLAC etc) encoding of it.  These files are prohibitively large.  It
could also be construed to be the musical score, or the case could be
made that there is no "transparent copy" and that the license is
meaningless.  There are also some audio-specific and music-specific
matters addressed by CC-by-SA, but not by the GFDL.

There are very few audio clips uploaded thus far.  I am only aware of
one that is not public domain (though there may be others).  Therefore,
this is still a solvable problem.

The Uninvited Co., Inc.
(a Delaware Corporation)


from_name: Arne Heizmann

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Converting ZopeWiki data to MediaWiki?

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Arne Heizmann wrote:
>
>> Here at CSR, we are thinking about replacing our company-internal wiki,
>> which is currently running ZopeWiki, with MediaWiki. (I had nothing to
>> do with that decision *whistles innocently*... :) )
>>
>> Does there exist a tool to convert the ZopeWiki data to a MediaWiki
>> database?
>
> None that I'm aware of, but if you write one we could include it. :)

No, you couldn't, because my employer would have the copyright to it.

But I'm probably not going to be able to do it anyway. I would have to
figure out Zope's file format, and to do that, I would probably have to
figure out Python.

Timwi


from_name: Rick

body:
Everybody might want to take a look at [[Wiedergutmachung]]

RickK

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Yahoo! Search presents - Jib Jab's 'Second Term'


body:
Delirium said:
> If 500 people register who think that all
> criticism of  [(religious figure) or (national hero)] is inappropriate
> for an
> encyclopedia, then we'll simply have to discount their votes and keep
> it.  Now who decides when that's the case is an interesting question...

I think we already got the answer to that question.  Sometimes it's useful
to have a benign dictator who can step in and say "cut it out."


body:
A number of people have expressed concern that my proposal is too extreme.
Well, I can't say I agree, but here's a proposal for a "gentler" approach:

Create and use a template for controversial articles, that says, in effect:
"This is a highly controversial article. Before making any changes, please
familiarise yourself with the discussion page, and add a comment describing
your change and the justification for it." We should also link to WP:NPOV.

If that works, great! I doubt it will, but it won't hurt to try.

If it doesn't work, we can create a "3 unjustified edits rule", similar to the
3RR, and enforced in the same way. This need only be applied to articles with
the controversial header.

This should help to some extent, as forcing descriptions and justifications
will slow editors down and may also create a deterrent for edits that authors
*know* are NPOV or are unwilling to discuss the matter. This may help get rid
of the more rabid POV editors.

Comments? I'm running on very little sleep today, so if I'm talking rubbish,
please tell me!

Jake.

On Monday 07 February 2005 12:34, John Lee wrote:
> Jake Waskett wrote:
> >What about unanimous vote? If every editor had the ability to veto a
> > change, it could work. Nobody would (presumably) object to truly NPOV
> > changes, but at least one person would surely object to any attempt to
> > insert POV changes.
>
> The problem is, groups like Stormfront have a whole different definition
> of what is NPOV.
>
> John Lee
> ([[User:Johnleemk]])