from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Pages with many/lacking interwikilinks

body:
I (well, actually my robot) have gone through the English Wikipedia
and searched for pages with Interwiki links. The result can be found
on [[Meta:Common Interwiki links]]. It contains a list with the pages
with most interwiki links (repeated below), but also for the most
commons Wikipedia languages a list of the pages with most interwiki
links that do NOT have an interwiki link to that specific language.
These might thus be subjects that are 'missing' in that language (or
they might be there but unlinked...).  Here the list of 100 pages with
most interwiki links. To not overcrowd the list with years and dates,
this list (as well as the others) is restricted to at most 10 years
and at most 5 dates. First are shown the number of interwiki links,
then the title of the page. Thus [[Mathematics]] is the English page
with most interwiki links, having 63 of them, followed by 61 for
[[Biology]] and 60 for [[Chemistry]].

Andre Engels

63 Mathematics
61 Biology
60 Chemistry
59 2004
59 Astronomy
59 Geography
59 Germany
57 United States
55 Physics
54 France
54 May
53 2003
53 Esperanto
53 Europe
53 Internet
53 March
53 Philosophy
53 Religion
52 June
51 January
51 Literature
51 Music
50 European Union
50 February
50 Language
50 September
50 Wikipedia
49 April
49 August
49 English language
49 January 1
49 October
48 Computer
48 Japan
48 List of historical anniversaries
48 November
48 Spain
47 2001
47 2002
47 May 1
47 Sport
46 1991
46 December
46 History
46 January 4
46 List of sovereign states
46 United Kingdom
45 1941
45 1945
45 1989
45 1994
45 Earth
45 January 2
45 January 3
44 1924
44 Belgium
44 Greece
44 Switzerland
43 Canada
43 Mars (planet)
43 Poland
43 Psychology
43 Sociology
42 Denmark
42 GNU
42 Italy
42 Western philosophy
41 Algeria
41 Christianity
41 Computer science
41 Economics
41 Periodic table
40 Africa
40 Archaeology
40 Continent
40 Estonia
40 Hungary
40 Portugal
40 Sun
39 Albania
39 Australia
39 Euro
39 Iraq
39 Russia
38 19th century
38 Architecture
38 Asia
38 Atom
38 Austria
38 Czech Republic
38 Egypt
38 Football (soccer)
38 Gangnihessou
38 Isaac Newton
38 Netherlands
38 Operating system
38 Solar system
37 Encyclopedia
37 Geology
37 Gregorian calendar
37 Hydrogen
37 India
37 Linguistics
37 Romania
37 Wiki
37 World War II


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Report

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I am excited to announce that the Sicilian Wikipedia currently has 113
> articles and is growing rapidly!
>
> It actually started very recently, perhaps a week after an ISO 639
> code was added for Sicilian, and initially there was only one major
> contributor, Joe "Pippu" D'Angelo, who is actually the Chief Finance
> Officer in the (Australian parliamentary) Department of the Senate.
>
> However, as it began to pick up speed, it attracted new contributors
> including Giuseppi Melfi, in Switzerland, from it.wikipedia, and
> others who now contribute regularly.
>
> http://scn.wikipedia.org/

Hey mark,

Thanks for the news, I am happy to see sicilian wiki growing up.

Read the Sicilia article in Sicilian:
    http://scn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilia

:o)

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
Servers in trouble ? noc (at) wikimedia (dot) org
"This signature is a virus. Copy me in yours to spread it."


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Nick Triantos

subject: [Wikitech-l] RSS feeds for individual watchlists?

body:
The problem with NewPages is that for active sites, it will overwhelm
you with info about pages that don't matter to you.

I think that RSS feeds of watchlists, in combination with either an
opt-in policy or global site-wide settings to allow public watchlists,
is the ticket.  I'll try to code something like this up.

thanks all,
-Nick

Evan Prodromou wrote:

>On Tue, 2004-07-12 at 10:00 +0900, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
>
>
>
>>Public watchlist option may be great both for RSS feed and for sharing
>>watchlist (ie. a watchlist for a WikiProject that all people interst in
>>may be able to check). Additionally it may be useful to have a 'only new
>>page' filter in RSS (but perhaps it already exist).
>>
>>
>
>Maybe you're looking for the RSS feed for Special:Newpages?
>
>~ESP
>
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Nick Pisarro

subject: [Wikitech-l] Compiler Errors on phase3 head branch

body:
Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org> writes:
>> Another problem on the 1.5 branch is that it doesn't seem to be
>> recognizing Sysops.
>
>Check in user_groups that your "sysop" is in the sysop group.

Apparently all my Sysops were converted to "group 2", general logged in
users, instead of 3 or 4, Sysops or Bureaucrat. Fixing the database solved
the problem. Is this an upgrader issue?

>> [Mon Dec  6 04:31:31 2004] [error] PHP Fatal error:  Call to a member
>> function on a non-object in /Library/MediaWiki/includes/Image.php on
>> line
>> 115
>
>You'll have to trace the source of the parameter for that. Add an
>if(!is_object($nt)) { wfDebugDieBacktrace(); } or such.

There was record in my 'images' table with a blank name. Title returned no
object in that case. I fixed 'SpecialNewimages.php' to check for that
condition and uploaded the fix to CVS.

Once it got working, the page came up--cool feature!
>

Nick


list: wikien-l

from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] original research

body:
I have recently noticed another form of what I consider to be "original
research," and I'd like to see if the consensus agrees with me.

The article [[The League of Distinguished Gentlemen]] purports to
describe a secret society at Creighton University.  It clearly was
written by the secret society himself and is currently listed for
deletion.  A popular reason given in the votes for deletion is
"unverifiable," the rebuttal to which is "you can't verify it because
it's a /truly/ secret secret society!"

All of which is only mildly amusing, but did lead me to contemplate the
possibility of a /real/ truly secret secret society.  Even if such an
Illuminatus really did exist, and someone really were able to penetrate
it, it seems to me that the resulting expos? would be original research,
and not appropriate for Wikipedia.

Thus, it seems to me that all unverifiable claims about secret societies
are logically either
(A) untrue, in which case they should be deleted, or
(2) true, in which case they are original research and should be deleted.

Comments?

--
  Sean Barrett     | Remember your priorities. Draining the
  sean at epoptic.com | swamp will take care of the alligators.


from_name: Thomas Gries

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Email Notification and Authentication development
 final work changed from REL1_4 to HEAD

body:
I am sending you this info to tell you, that I cannot achieve to have
the Enotif and Eauthent code ready for 1.4, despite all efforts. It is
likely, that I back- port it later to the (forthcoming) 1.4 release,
from which I branched today.

The decision gives me a little time for more tests and optimisation and
for code review by you all, without being in too much hurry. "So next
station: 1.5"
Tom
P.S. End of December, I will meet many of you developers in Berlin, I
guess. Perhaps I can make a presentation talk about all the changes the
Enotif patch introduces (if you like such a talk).


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] Skins in MediaWiki 1.5

body:
On Mon, 2004-06-12 at 15:12 -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:

> Now, perhaps we could get rid of even that, but it's most of the way
> there. What actually needs to be different?

Uh... didn't I just send a great big email about that? B-)

The upshot was: not much. It's really pretty good right now, as I noted
before. But I think it might be easier if you could say:

	$wgDefaultStyle = 'supercool';

or:

	$wgStyles = ['supercool', 'sputnik', 'razorback', 'friedegg'];

If I'm not wrong, the class declaration for the Skin inherited from
Monobook has to be in its own file in a certain place and have a certain
name. Or you have to write some more code to inject it into the list of
available skins.

I think the main thing that bothers me is that we (dev group) keep
turning away people offering to do new designs. We say, "Well, you have
to make a subclass of SkinPHPTal, then a new Tal template, then...".
Yes, I know it's not that way any more, but I think if we can say, "Make
a CSS stylesheet for this sample HTML", we can get a wider variety of
style and interface, like at the CSS Zen Garden:

	http://www.csszengarden.com/

I had a couple of other major points: about subsuming our current skins
into the same Skin subclass as Monobook, using CSS for them; about
pushing the functions that make the menus up to the root Skin directory;
and a couple others.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou                  .O.
http://bad.dynu.ca/~evan/       ..O
evan at bad.dynu.ca                OOO


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

body:
Brion rwote :

> Alternately, a username could be passed as a query string parameter,
> either along with a password/hash/token (potentially unsafe -- this
> will appear in proxy and server logs in addition to going over the
> wire raw) or after an explicit opt-in by the user to allow reading the
> watchlist without authentication.

Public watchlist option may be great both for RSS feed and for sharing
watchlist (ie. a watchlist for a WikiProject that all people interst in
may be able to check). Additionally it may be useful to have a 'only new
page' filter in RSS (but perhaps it already exist).

Aoineko


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] WMF as publisher as in GFDL

body:
I would like a few things to be decided/ clarified regarding GFDL,
partly because I received some complaint by another Wikipedian that GFDL
is so difficult to understand that there needs to be an unofficial
guide to how to use Wikimedia contents in compliance with GFDL.

1. Is Wikimedia Foundation the "Publisher" as in GFDL of Wikimedia contents?

2. When people modify documents, one of the requirements is to change the title,
as in 4-A. The publisher of the original version may permit the licensee to
use the same title. Does Wikimedia Foundation permit that?

3. Another requirement is 4-J, the preservation of network locations of
previous versions. Does Wikimedia Foundation give permission not to preserve
the network locations?

My understanding is that answers to all three questions are yes. But I am
a bit unsure about the last one.

People tend to think link to the live article is important, as I understand.
Some people, based on American law, think this is a good substitute for
the requirement 4-I, the preservation of History section. That aside,
link back to individual articles are important for us to keep google rank.

I personally think this is not the part of contract, because the live article
is not necessarily the "previous version." But Wikimedia Foundation's
enforcement policy would be that if live articles are linked back from
individual pages, and some other important conditions are met, WMF does not
make a big noise about violation of 4-I.

In other words, my understanding is that WMF does not change the terms of GFDL,
but simply has some policy as a publisher regarding what type of violations are
bad enough for WMF to take actions.

I am not a lawyer, so my guesses and assumptions could well be wrong. I
appreciate your comments and clarifications.

Thanks,

Tomos


list: wikimedia-l


body:
On Tue, 2004-07-12 at 10:00 +0900, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:

> Public watchlist option may be great both for RSS feed and for sharing
> watchlist (ie. a watchlist for a WikiProject that all people interst in
> may be able to check). Additionally it may be useful to have a 'only new
> page' filter in RSS (but perhaps it already exist).

Maybe you're looking for the RSS feed for Special:Newpages?

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
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from_name: Mark Richards

subject: [WikiEN-l] original research

body:
Actually the 'inclusionist' are usually harping on
about deletion of things that are verifiable by
several external sources. I have never seen the usual
suspect object to something that genuinely cannot be
verified externally.
Mark

--- John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:

> Publish a book about it. If the society is
> interesting enough to be of
> note, sufficient pop culture should arise
> surrounding it to justify an
> article.
>
> The incident you mention is indeed original rsearch
> - that is why we
> need an external source. Original research cannot be
> verified - that is
> why we need an external source. The inclusionists
> harp on it - "But it's
> VERIFIABLE! We gotta' keep it!" Without a source not
> from Wikipedia,
> this is not verifiable at all.
>
> John Lee
> ([[User:Johnleemk]])
>
> Sean Barrett wrote:
>
> > I have recently noticed another form of what I
> consider to be
> > "original research," and I'd like to see if the
> consensus agrees with me.
> >
> > The article [[The League of Distinguished
> Gentlemen]] purports to
> > describe a secret society at Creighton University.
>  It clearly was
> > written by the secret society himself and is
> currently listed for
> > deletion.  A popular reason given in the votes for
> deletion is
> > "unverifiable," the rebuttal to which is "you
> can't verify it because
> > it's a /truly/ secret secret society!"
> >
> > All of which is only mildly amusing, but did lead
> me to contemplate
> > the possibility of a /real/ truly secret secret
> society.  Even if such
> > an Illuminatus really did exist, and someone
> really were able to
> > penetrate it, it seems to me that the resulting
> expos? would be
> > original research, and not appropriate for
> Wikipedia.
> >
> > Thus, it seems to me that all unverifiable claims
> about secret
> > societies are logically either
> > (A) untrue, in which case they should be deleted,
> or
> > (2) true, in which case they are original research
> and should be deleted.
> >
> > Comments?
> >
> > --
> >  Sean Barrett     | Remember your priorities.
> Draining the
> >  sean at epoptic.com | swamp will take care of the
> alligators.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250


body:
On Tue, 2004-07-12 at 07:33 -0800, Nick Triantos wrote:

> The problem with NewPages is that for active sites, it will overwhelm
> you with info about pages that don't matter to you.

I'm just completely lost here, then.  A new-pages-only feature for RSS
feeds for your watchlist just seems weird to me. How do new pages get on
your watchlist if you don't add them? And if you add them, why do you
need to read an RSS feed about them?

> I'll try to code something like this up.

It should be quite easy -- Brion's done a great job with RSS feeds.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
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subject: [WikiEN-l] original research

body:
Sorry! Misunderstood!
Mark

--- David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

> John Lee (johnleemk at gawab.com) [041208 04:45]:
>
> >  The inclusionists harp on it - "But it's
> > VERIFIABLE! We gotta' keep it!" Without a source
> not from Wikipedia,
> > this is not verifiable at all.
>
>
> I eagerly await you either (a) posting a link from
> the history to
> "inclusionists" (plural, as you pluralise) demanding
> an article be kept
> with no sources other than Wikipedia, as you seem to
> be describing; or (b)
> admitting that you're blowing smoke.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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


from_name: Geoffrey Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] original research

body:
On Tue, 7 Dec 2004, Sean Barrett wrote:

> I have recently noticed another form of what I consider to be "original
> research," and I'd like to see if the consensus agrees with me.
>
> The article [[The League of Distinguished Gentlemen]] purports to
> describe a secret society at Creighton University.  It clearly was
> written by the secret society himself and is currently listed for
> deletion.  A popular reason given in the votes for deletion is
> "unverifiable," the rebuttal to which is "you can't verify it because
> it's a /truly/ secret secret society!"
>
> All of which is only mildly amusing, but did lead me to contemplate the
> possibility of a /real/ truly secret secret society.  Even if such an
> Illuminatus really did exist, and someone really were able to penetrate
> it, it seems to me that the resulting expos? would be original research,
> and not appropriate for Wikipedia.
>
> Thus, it seems to me that all unverifiable claims about secret societies
> are logically either
> (A) untrue, in which case they should be deleted, or
> (2) true, in which case they are original research and should be deleted.
>
Actually, the reason we should have a "Quick delete" -- if not a delete on
sight -- ipolicy on any article about a secret society -- or anything
related to the Illuminati -- is very simple:

fnord

Geoff


from_name: Robin Shannon

body:
You know the great thing about PD, there is no clause 4-J that
requires a law degree to understand

On 7 Dec 2004 10:01:01 +0900, wiki_tomos <wiki_tomos at inter7.jp> wrote:
> I would like a few things to be decided/ clarified regarding GFDL,
> partly because I received some complaint by another Wikipedian that GFDL
> is so difficult to understand that there needs to be an unofficial
> guide to how to use Wikimedia contents in compliance with GFDL.
>
> 1. Is Wikimedia Foundation the "Publisher" as in GFDL of Wikimedia contents?
>
> 2. When people modify documents, one of the requirements is to change the title,
> as in 4-A. The publisher of the original version may permit the licensee to
> use the same title. Does Wikimedia Foundation permit that?
>
> 3. Another requirement is 4-J, the preservation of network locations of
> previous versions. Does Wikimedia Foundation give permission not to preserve
> the network locations?
>
> My understanding is that answers to all three questions are yes. But I am
> a bit unsure about the last one.
>
> People tend to think link to the live article is important, as I understand.
> Some people, based on American law, think this is a good substitute for
> the requirement 4-I, the preservation of History section. That aside,
> link back to individual articles are important for us to keep google rank.
>
> I personally think this is not the part of contract, because the live article
> is not necessarily the "previous version." But Wikimedia Foundation's
> enforcement policy would be that if live articles are linked back from
> individual pages, and some other important conditions are met, WMF does not
> make a big noise about violation of 4-I.
>
> In other words, my understanding is that WMF does not change the terms of GFDL,
> but simply has some policy as a publisher regarding what type of violations are
> bad enough for WMF to take actions.
>
> I am not a lawyer, so my guesses and assumptions could well be wrong. I
> appreciate your comments and clarifications.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Tomos
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

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

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Recombo Plus License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/


subject: [WikiEN-l] original research

body:
Geoffrey Burling stated for the record:

> Actually, the reason we should have a "Quick delete" -- if not a delete on
> sight -- ipolicy on any article about a secret society -- or anything
> related to the Illuminati -- is very simple:

I'm sorry, you are not cleared to quick-delete the Illuminati.

--
  Sean Barrett     | Fnords -- they're not just
  sean at epoptic.com | for breakfast anymore.


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Encarta's content used for "stumping"?

body:
I'll allow others to provide the sarcastic commentary :)

>From Slashdot:
"BetaNews' story says Microsoft tapped Jeopardy! king Ken Jennings,
who recently finished his 75-game run on the show, to become the
spokesman for its Encarta product line. Jennings will embark on a
nationwide media tour called 'Quiz the Whiz' that challenges news
desks to stump the human encyclopedia with questions from Microsoft's
Encarta Reference Library Premium 2005."

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/07/0021254&threshold=3&tid=109&tid=162&tid=1

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)


from_name: Patrice Matignon

subject: [Wikitech-l] FW: Meta-Wiki LDAP authentication

body:
Hello all

My name is Patrice Matignon, and I'm interested in MediaWiki LDAP
authentication capabilities for which I was hoping to get more info.

I've read the BugZilla report #814 and the LDAP authentication meta-wiki
page, but I'm still not clear on 2 things:
1) Is this "patch" available already, and if yes, where would that be?
2) The BugZilla refers to the v1.4 baseline, but I was hoping someone would
know whether it would be backward-compatible with a v1.3.8 instance we have.

Thanks much for your time, and best regards.

- Patrice Matignon


body:
aah, sorry, I didn't mean for new pages, I meant for changed pages
(RecentChanges).   Sorry for the mixup.  Newpages + watched pages would
probably be an interesting feed as well...

Evan Prodromou wrote:

>On Tue, 2004-07-12 at 07:33 -0800, Nick Triantos wrote:
>
>
>
>>The problem with NewPages is that for active sites, it will overwhelm
>>you with info about pages that don't matter to you.
>>
>>
>
>I'm just completely lost here, then.  A new-pages-only feature for RSS
>feeds for your watchlist just seems weird to me. How do new pages get on
>your watchlist if you don't add them? And if you add them, why do you
>need to read an RSS feed about them?
>
>
>
>>I'll try to code something like this up.
>>
>>
>
>It should be quite easy -- Brion's done a great job with RSS feeds.
>
>~ESP
>
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Patch: Lilypond support for MediaWiki

body:
On Dec 6, 2004, at 6:31 AM, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> On Fri Dec 3 17:01:05 UTC 2004, Evan Prodromou wrote:
>> Can you clump it all up into a single extension module? By, say,
>> adding a new tag?
>
> Thank you for this hint. As I was developping on 1.2.6, I was not
> aware of this wonderful new feature.

You should upgrade to 1.3.8 immediately. Older versions include a
number of cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and some possible SQL
injection flaws. (For extension development, please look at 1.4beta.)

> Attached is the gzip'ed file which you just have to drop in the
> extensions/ directory. I tested it, and it works Just Fine(tm).
>
> Please CC me in your replies, as I am off-list.

I should warn you that it's somewhat poor netiquette to send binary
attachments to a mailing list you aren't even subscribed to and demand
follow-ups. Mailing without subscribing creates work for the volunteer
moderators and delays delivery of your message; the attachment is
stripped by the mailing list so no one receives your file even if they
wanted it; and you likely won't receive relevant follow-up discussion.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedian gender ratio

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
> But I think in general, in the age range I mentioned above, reasons
> would probably be mostly cultural - many girls here think it's not
> "cool" to be smart and that you should be exactly like everybody else
> if you want to be popular. Boys seem to think the same thing, but I
> think the difference is that, culturally, girls are taught to place a
> great deal of importance on acceptance by a group, while boys are
> taught to place a great deal of importance on personal achievements.
> Thus, schools which we have in the area for highly gifted children
> have, with no exceptions, a large number of boys but a tiny number of
> girls.

In Australia, the reverse is true. Boys are under strong pressure from
their peers to avoid academic acheivement. Those who strive are looked
down on. Girls have similar sensibilities, but to a lesser extent. I was
lucky to get into a selective high school, where I could strive for high
marks to the best of my ability without being bullied for it. This
inequality shows up in the statistics, see for example

* http://www.wisenet-australia.org/issue43/exams.htm
* http://www.wisenet-australia.org/ISSUE44/examgirls.html

I don't think you can say that either girls or boys are more vulnerable
to peer pressure, but the form of that peer pressure clearly varies. A
quick survey of the list of Australian Wikipedians will tell you that
this reversal in academic expectations has not led to a better balance
in contributor numbers.

In Australia, as elsewhere in the world, girls and boys concentrate on
different subjects. For example, computer subjects are dominated by
boys, and girls tend to excel in English.

For some reason the study of computers is dominated by males, whereas
the use of computers is balanced. This appears to be true across various
cultures. Why? I don't know. At my high school, I'm quite sure there was
no stigma against the 3 girls in my year of 180 students who attempted
computer studies at the senior level. If you ask the other girls why
they didn't do it, they'll tell you they just werern't interested. I
suspect you'd get a similar answer from women who don't want to
contribute to Wikipedia.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: shizhao

subject: [Wikitech-l] Add Trackback

body:
Can add Trackback on mediawiki? Trackback is a blog tech.

--[[zh:user:shizhao]]


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] original research

body:
Sean Barrett wrote:

> The article [[The League of Distinguished Gentlemen]] purports to
> describe a secret society at Creighton University.  It clearly was
> written by the secret society himself and is currently listed for
> deletion.  A popular reason given in the votes for deletion is
> "unverifiable," the rebuttal to which is "you can't verify it because
> it's a /truly/ secret secret society!"
>
> All of which is only mildly amusing, but did lead me to contemplate
> the possibility of a /real/ truly secret secret society.  Even if such
> an Illuminatus really did exist, and someone really were able to
> penetrate it, it seems to me that the resulting expos? would be
> original research, and not appropriate for Wikipedia.
>
> Thus, it seems to me that all unverifiable claims about secret
> societies are logically either
> (A) untrue, in which case they should be deleted, or
> (2) true, in which case they are original research and should be deleted.
>
> Comments?

It's a bit like talking about conspiracy theories, or the cabal that
controls Wikipedia. :-)

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] original research

body:
You can document what other people have said about
these things (moon hoax, reptilian humanoids, flat
earth etc) as long as it is in the context of
reporting what someone has claimed.
Mark

--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> Sean Barrett wrote:
>
> > The article [[The League of Distinguished
> Gentlemen]] purports to
> > describe a secret society at Creighton University.
>  It clearly was
> > written by the secret society himself and is
> currently listed for
> > deletion.  A popular reason given in the votes for
> deletion is
> > "unverifiable," the rebuttal to which is "you
> can't verify it because
> > it's a /truly/ secret secret society!"
> >
> > All of which is only mildly amusing, but did lead
> me to contemplate
> > the possibility of a /real/ truly secret secret
> society.  Even if such
> > an Illuminatus really did exist, and someone
> really were able to
> > penetrate it, it seems to me that the resulting
> expos? would be
> > original research, and not appropriate for
> Wikipedia.
> >
> > Thus, it seems to me that all unverifiable claims
> about secret
> > societies are logically either
> > (A) untrue, in which case they should be deleted,
> or
> > (2) true, in which case they are original research
> and should be deleted.
> >
> > Comments?
>
> It's a bit like talking about conspiracy theories,
> or the cabal that
> controls Wikipedia. :-)
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


subject: [Wikitech-l] names of files to be uploaded

body:
On Dec 7, 2004, at 3:14 PM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> I want to upload the following file: fa-???? ???? ???? ????
> ???????.ogg I cannot do this. I can create the file in Windows, but
> when I try to upload the file to Commons I get
>
>        The file you uploaded seems to be empty. This might be due to a
>        typo in the file name. Please check whether you really want to
>        upload this file.
>
> The filename is as far as I am concerned completely correct. It has
> the name of the article with the ISO-639 code in front of it.

I just uploaded to commons and deleted a test file with that name from
my Mac (Mac OS X 10.3.6, uploaded with Safari 1.2.4), so the name
itself is ok if cut-n-paste survived the mail.

a) Can you try it again, and make sure that it wasn't just a temporary
upload failure?

b) Can you try renaming the file with a plain ASCII filename? Does it
still fail to upload, or does it succeed?

c) What exact operating system version, browser, and browser version
are you using? Have you tried other combinations?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] original research

body:
Ray Saintonge stated for the record:

> It's a bit like talking about conspiracy theories, or the cabal that
> controls Wikipedia. :-)
>
> Ec

The first rule of the cabal that controls Wikipedia is "there is no
cabal that controls Wikipedia." The second rule of the cabal that
controls Wikipedia is "there is no cabal that controls Wikipedia."

--
  Sean Barrett     | This message is close-fnorded
  sean at epoptic.com | for the illumination-impaired.


from_name: Andy Rabagliati

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedian gender ratio

body:
On Tue, 07 Dec 2004, Alex Kwan wrote:

> Only Western society? ;)

I think I would agree with that.

When I ran technical training (programming) in the USA, my audience was
almost exclusively male.

I ran the same course in Venezuela, where over half the students were female.

Cheers,    Andy!

User:Wikiwizzy


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedian gender ratio

body:
Andy Rabagliati wrote:

>On Tue, 07 Dec 2004, Alex Kwan wrote:
>
>
>
>>Only Western society? ;)
>>
>>
>
>I think I would agree with that.
>
>When I ran technical training (programming) in the USA, my audience was
>almost exclusively male.
>
>I ran the same course in Venezuela, where over half the students were female.
>
>
Ah, but did you try it in Japan?  Or Saudi Arabia?  Western society is
hardly the only patriarchal society...

-Mark


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] original research

body:
Sean Barrett wrote

>Even if such an
> Illuminatus really did exist, and someone really were able to penetrate
> it, it seems to me that the resulting expos? would be original research,
> and not appropriate for Wikipedia.

Think we should stick with 'Original research' being an 'argument to
delete', and not a 'proof of non-encyclopedic nature'.  It's a kind of goofy
pedantic point that personal knowledge of something should be disqualified.

Charles


from_name: Vina Wang

subject: [Wikitech-l] what's the criteria for the orphaned pages

body:
Is there anyway around this, such as putting the pages with links in a specific namespace?  The Chinese wiki is going through a bunch of maintainence tasks, one of which is a sql dump generated lists of pages without interwiki links.  Coincidentally these tends to be the orphaned pages as well.

If there is no way around it, how often and when does the orphaned page list get refreshed?  I can take down some of the maintainence link pages right before the special pages are refreshed so the results won't be skewed.

I also have a local mysql database set up to run the same sort of offline reports that is on the English wiki to generate the orphaned pages (and deadend pages) if that is a better option.

-Vina

-----Original Message-----
From: Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2004 12:05:23 -0800
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] what's the criteria for the "orphaned pages"

On Dec 3, 2004, at 12:02 PM, Vina Wang wrote:
> What's the criteria for the "orphaned pages"?  Does it include pages
> that no links at all, or those without links from an actual article?

No links at all.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: cdamvvwgs at gmx.ch

subject: [Wikitech-l] Nauruan Wikipedia needs a logo

body:
Dear Wikimedia Technicians,
because the Wikimedia site for logo requests seems not to be viewed much,
I post my request here:

The Nauruan Wikipedia needs a logo. The text should be "Wikipedia -
Encyclopedia Emenengame". Thank you for creating and installing it!

For any comments you can post them here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CdaMVvWgS

The link to the Nauruan Wikipedia is:
http://na.wikipedia.org/

Greetings and thank you again for the logo,
CdaMVvWgS

--
GMX ProMail mit bestem Virenschutz http://www.gmx.net/de/go/mail
+++ Empfehlung der Redaktion +++ Internet Professionell 10/04 +++


from_name: Christopher Larberg

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedian gender ratio

body:
Yes, it's a rather sad meme that's infected society. Fortunately,
there are some that ignore it, but most people seem to accept the view
of education as a boring ordeal that they have to get through in order
to get to the "fun things in life!"

--Slowking Man

On Tue, 07 Dec 2004 19:21:19 +0800, Alex Kwan <litalex at slashyalex.com> wrote:
>It always amazes me that there's *any* discouragement for children to
>learn more and/or be smart. It was downright shocking to me when I moved
>from Hong Kong to the States and got into high school that being
>"brainy" isn't a good thing. American high school really isn't a
>conducive learning environment, you know?


subject: [WikiEN-l] original research

body:
The third rule is, "you are not allowed to talk about the cabal that
controls Wikipedia."

--Slowking Man

On Tue, 07 Dec 2004 16:39:46 -0800, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:
> The first rule of the cabal that controls Wikipedia is "there is no
> cabal that controls Wikipedia." The second rule of the cabal that
> controls Wikipedia is "there is no cabal that controls Wikipedia."


from_name: Alex Kwan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedian gender ratio

body:
Hello,

Mark Williamson wrote:
> would probably be mostly cultural - many girls here think it's not
> "cool" to be smart and that you should be exactly like everybody else
> if you want to be popular. Boys seem to think the same thing, but I
> think the difference is that, culturally, girls are taught to place a
> great deal of importance on acceptance by a group, while boys are
> taught to place a great deal of importance on personal achievements.

It always amazes me that there's *any* discouragement for children to
learn more and/or be smart. It was downright shocking to me when I moved
from Hong Kong to the States and got into high school that being
"brainy" isn't a good thing. American high school really isn't a
conducive learning environment, you know?

Anyway, I think boys are taught to place a lot of importance on being
accepted as well, only their way of achieving that is to score high in
the football game or something; and girls are, of course, taught to play
social games and get as many admirers as possible etc. Just different
methods of gaining acceptance. Or maybe I'm just absolutely wrong
because I haven't been in a high school for years.

> of the feminist movement, Western society in general is still very
> much built on the idea that women should stay home and take care of
> kids, while men should earn a living or even that men should live only
> to seek intellectual and physical stimulation.

Only Western society? ;)

little Alex

P.S. Since we're on the topic, I'm a girl and I found the Wikipedia idea
absolutely fascinating. Of course, I'm also a bit of a geek and never
liked being a girl much.


from_name: Benjamin Esham

subject: [WikiEN-l] New notice for common sense Wikipedians.

body:
On Dec 7, 2004, at 8:15 AM, John Lee wrote:

> In response, I've finally decided to multilicense my contributions
> under a
> Creative Commons license. I've been meaning to for some time, but I've
> just been too lazy to really consider it. I've finally done so. Thanks
> for
> the impetus. :-)

Same here :-)  Just for clarification: does adding a dual-licensing
template
to my user page automatically cover all the edits I've already made, or
do
I need to explicitly state that?

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


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] original research

body:
At 04:25 PM 12/7/2004 -0800, Mark Richards wrote:

>You can document what other people have said about
>these things (moon hoax, reptilian humanoids, flat
>earth etc) as long as it is in the context of
>reporting what someone has claimed.
>Mark

This exact same issue came up on Talk:Freemasonry just a few weeks back,
discussing what to do when Masonic secrets wind up on Wikipedia, and this
is the solution that I proposed there too. I expect that someday when the
[[Masonic rituals and practices]] (or whatever) article gets written it'll
be mostly "Author A says X in book N, and Author B says Y in book M. Both
of them say P, but they differ on Q." The credibility and credentials of
the various sources would have to be discussed too.


from_name: John Lee

body:
In response, I've finally decided to multilicense my contributions under
a Creative Commons license. I've been meaning to for some time, but I've
just been too lazy to really consider it. I've finally done so. Thanks
for the impetus. :-)

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])

Trevor Caira wrote:

> I have created a new template for Wikipedians to display on their user
>pages to display they are content with the GFDL and don't feel the need to
>jump on the multi-licensing bandwagon:
>
> You can get to it by typing {{NoMultiLicense}}.
>
>You can see it here:
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:NoMultiLicense
>
>--Ashdurbat
>
>


from_name: Jonah Bossewitch

body:
> Well, as I am subscribed to quite a number of mailing lists, and thereby
> already have almost no time to work on my PhD, and didn't expect that
> short attachments (I kept mine under 3kB) get stripped, I dared to send my
> message to you.
>

You might be interested in a relatively new service called Gmane (gmane.org)
which is a free gateway for turning mailing lists into news groups (or rss).
You can then follow your favorite mailing lists using a standard news reader
or rss reader.  The wikipedia/mediawiki lists all seem to be subscribed
(although perhaps gmane links should be included here if it is the prefered
way to subscribe)

news://news.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical
http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.mediawiki

This might be more convinient for you than subscribing and unscibscribing
from lists to follow a thread.

> As I think that the attachment really is worth to be sent to this list,
> and also is much shorter than the regular flame-bait, I resend it to this
> list, hoping that it will eventually find it's way into the extensions/
> CVS repository.
>

In today's day and age, attachments are trouble regardless of the size.
Putting your work up on a web site and linking to it would be preferable to
sending an attachment.

This reminds me of something that the Plone community uses for collaborative
debugging - http://paste.plone.org/

Is there anyplace on the meta wiki that could serve a similar function?
This is handy when referring to code on irc, or when talking about snippets
of code that would disrupt the conversation.

best regards
/Jonah


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Hoi,
I want to upload the following file: fa-???? ???? ???? ???? ???????.ogg
I cannot do this. I can create the file in Windows, but when I try to
upload the file to Commons I get

        The file you uploaded seems to be empty. This might be due to a
        typo in the file name. Please check whether you really want to
        upload this file.

The filename is as far as I am concerned completely correct. It has the
name of the article with the ISO-639 code in front of it.
Thanks,
GerardM


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Encarta's content used for "stumping"?

body:
Andrew Lih wrote:
> I'll allow others to provide the sarcastic commentary :)
>
>> From Slashdot:
> "BetaNews' story says Microsoft tapped Jeopardy! king Ken Jennings,
> who recently finished his 75-game run on the show, to become the
> spokesman for its Encarta product line. Jennings will embark on a
> nationwide media tour called 'Quiz the Whiz' that challenges news
> desks to stump the human encyclopedia with questions from Microsoft's
>  Encarta Reference Library Premium 2005."
>
> http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/07/0021254&threshold=3&tid=109&tid=162&tid=1
>
>
> -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

Does encarta have an article about [[Ken Jennings]] ? :o)

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
Servers in trouble ? noc (at) wikimedia (dot) org
"This signature is a virus. Copy me in yours to spread it."


list: textbook-l

from_name: kelvSYC

subject: [Textbook-l] Trading cards and their data

body:
I apologize for the crosspost between two of Wikimedia's mailing lists
in advance, as this is somewhat related to both Wikipedia and
Wikibooks.

One of my pet projects is [[b:Pok?mon]], which attempts be a game guide
for everything Pok?mon (some at Wikipedia have proposed that all of the
Pok?mon articles be moved to the books, but that's not a relevant point
here), and part of any good strategy guide is data and lots of it.
Organizing this data is quite the problem.  Here's an example:

One of the subprojects in [[b:Pok?mon]] is the guide to the trading
card game, and I need to solicit opinions on how a list of trading
cards should be presented.  In particular, what would the Wikipedia
convention be when dealing with large amounts of raw data?  Here are a
few ideas I had thought up:

* Each trading card should have its own page.  This will make
categorization a trivial task, but will result in too many
substub-quality pages.
* Each set should have its own page, with each page describing the
cards within that set.  This will make categorization between sets of
cards trivial, but categorization along other lines (such as the type
of the trading card) a pain in the ass.  This goes for giving a page to
any arbitrary group of cards.  My personal direction (not necessarily a
good one) is a variation on this theme: the Pok?mon cards themselves
are described in their corresponding entry in [[b:Wikibooks Pok?dex]].
* Wait until there's a real good Wikidata-like thing before
implementing such an idea.

Part of the problem, I guess, is the lack of contributions from anyone
else in the Wiki community - thus the need to solicit opinions.  Plus,
this idea does not have to specifically apply for my project - this
scenario may arise in any other project in the books or the pedia (for
example, a good application of this idea in the pedia is episode guides
for particularly well-known series).


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Trading cards and their data


body:
Tim was relaying speculation of mine. Two of Google's problems are marketing companies which use very similar affiliate sites linked to a parent company and companies which use real content with marketing junk added, using the key words in the real content to artificially raise ranks. Again, such things commonly point to a master site somewhere.

It's speculation as to whether this has tripped Google filters in some way or not. There are alternative possible reasons in many cases, with some mirrors providing more internal links and possibly spreading rank around within their site better. Some simply offer nicer or more features.

Personally, I think that it is a factor, but only Google knows.

I'm not keen on any great attempts to interpret the GFDL. It's best left as close to that document and nothing else as possible, to avoid the possibility of arguments and upset if an interpretation proves to be wrong or someone argues that some particular interpretation is an implied contract of some sort. This is close to the approach taken by MySQL, which the head of the company says deliberately avoids trying to interpret what the GPL means when applied to their software.

-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Shannon <robin.shannon at gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 13:04:00 +1100
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] WMF as publisher as in GFDL

> Wikipedia's policy (not Wikimedia's) has been to coerce mirrors and
> forks into providing a link back by huffing and puffing about license
> violations, even though a link back is not required by the license. All
> you need to do to fulfill 4-I is create a "History" section like this:
>
> HISTORY
>     * Some Mirror, 2004, John Copier, http://somemirror.org
>     * Wikipedia, 2000-2002, Wikipedia contributors, http://www.wikipedia.org
>     * Marxists Internet Archive, 2002, MIA volunteers,
> http://www.marxists.org
>     * Nupedia, 2000-2001, Nupedia contributors, http://www.nupedia.org
> (see Wikipedia:Nupedia and Wikipedia for a list of articles this applies to)
>
> That's taken from [[Wikipedia:GFDL History (unofficial)]]. Since it's
> unofficial, you could assume it doesn't exist and just start your own
> section, omitting the 3rd and 4th entries.
>
> Wikimedia doesn't have any policy on this. The link back policy appears
> to have destroyed our Google ranking, triggering spam heuristics. In
> many cases we are ranked below the mirrors. This has forced Google to
> consider a change to their ranking algorithm.

what? sorry, why has the link back destroyed our ranking? isnt it that
the more places that link to us the better our rating, and also what
do you mean by spam heuristics? Why are we ranked below our mirrors?

gah, im confused,

paz y amor,
rjs

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

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Recombo Plus License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing

body:
Copyleft effectively kills any chance of it entering the mainstream press. It'll be effectively impossible for any mainstream publication to use any of the stories if there's a requirement that their work be released under a license incompatible with all of their existing licenses. That rules out any likely form of copyleft if the project is to achieve its major goal, though with sufficient studying of all of the contracts news publishers have with their new sources I suppose it's conceivable that some form of copyleft license could be written to be incompatible with a small enough set of them for small publishers to use stories.

Copyleft is only necessary when you want to limit the people who can use the work. That's the antipathy of the objective of Wikinews, which is to get the news published as widely as possible.

-----Original Message-----
From: Mathias Schindler <neubau at presroi.de>
To: Robin Shannon <robin.shannon at gmail.com>, Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at wikimedia.org>
Date: Fri, 03 Dec 2004 13:22:13 +0100
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing

Robin Shannon wrote:
> Well i have contributed 2 articles to wikinews so far, and one of them
> i lifted (more or less) straight from wikipedia (from an article that
> was written about 5 minutes before i sat down to write). I can think
> that there would be plenty of times when lifting a paragraph or so
> from wikipedia would be useful in wikinews. Hence while i would like
> it to be PD, i think that GFDL (provided that becomes CC-BY-SA
> complient sometime) would be the most practical.

Yesterday, ddp, a medium sized news agency copied [[de:Misshandlung]]
from wikipedia 1:1 and sent it over their channel. They didn't even try
to stick to the GNU FDL and it took me some time to explain copyright to
them.

I will not participate in a PD wikinews that does not ensure that free
text remains free. CC-BY-SA does not block newspapers from using the
content and because of the <buzzword>synergy</buzzword> hopes regarding
wikipedia, i suggest a dual licensing of GFDL and CC-BY-SA (keeping in
mind that these two should merge some day...)

Mathias

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing


from_name: shi zhao

subject: [Wikitech-l] Add Trackback

body:
Can add Trackback on mediawiki?

[[zh:user:shizhao]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] original research

body:
Publish a book about it. If the society is interesting enough to be of
note, sufficient pop culture should arise surrounding it to justify an
article.

The incident you mention is indeed original rsearch - that is why we
need an external source. Original research cannot be verified - that is
why we need an external source. The inclusionists harp on it - "But it's
VERIFIABLE! We gotta' keep it!" Without a source not from Wikipedia,
this is not verifiable at all.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])

Sean Barrett wrote:

> I have recently noticed another form of what I consider to be
> "original research," and I'd like to see if the consensus agrees with me.
>
> The article [[The League of Distinguished Gentlemen]] purports to
> describe a secret society at Creighton University.  It clearly was
> written by the secret society himself and is currently listed for
> deletion.  A popular reason given in the votes for deletion is
> "unverifiable," the rebuttal to which is "you can't verify it because
> it's a /truly/ secret secret society!"
>
> All of which is only mildly amusing, but did lead me to contemplate
> the possibility of a /real/ truly secret secret society.  Even if such
> an Illuminatus really did exist, and someone really were able to
> penetrate it, it seems to me that the resulting expos? would be
> original research, and not appropriate for Wikipedia.
>
> Thus, it seems to me that all unverifiable claims about secret
> societies are logically either
> (A) untrue, in which case they should be deleted, or
> (2) true, in which case they are original research and should be deleted.
>
> Comments?
>
> --
>  Sean Barrett     | Remember your priorities. Draining the
>  sean at epoptic.com | swamp will take care of the alligators.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Add Trackback

body:
shizhao wrote:
> Can add Trackback on mediawiki? Trackback is a blog tech.
>
> --[[zh:user:shizhao]]

Hello Shizhao,

There is no such thing in MediaWiki.

Wikipedia plan to be a reference site and articles will probably be
linked to a lot of place. Also I think we want to avoid trackback cause
it will open the site to spamming.

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
Servers in trouble ? noc (at) wikimedia (dot) org
"This signature is a virus. Copy me in yours to spread it."


from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
Really, a separate page for each card? How about having a page for all
cards for fire pokemon, or a page for each set, or even a page for
each pokemon (seeing as how most of them have more than one card, at
least the last time I cared a lot about any of that sort of stuff)?

Alternatively, you could give a general guide to aspects of cards,
list about a hundred or so essential cards or cards that aren't
covered well by your blanket explanation, and leave it at that.

Mark

On Wed, 08 Dec 2004 00:35:02 -0700, kelvSYC <kelvsyc at shaw.ca> wrote:
> I apologize for the crosspost between two of Wikimedia's mailing lists
> in advance, as this is somewhat related to both Wikipedia and
> Wikibooks.
>
> One of my pet projects is [[b:Pok?mon]], which attempts be a game guide
> for everything Pok?mon (some at Wikipedia have proposed that all of the
> Pok?mon articles be moved to the books, but that's not a relevant point
> here), and part of any good strategy guide is data and lots of it.
> Organizing this data is quite the problem.  Here's an example:
>
> One of the subprojects in [[b:Pok?mon]] is the guide to the trading
> card game, and I need to solicit opinions on how a list of trading
> cards should be presented.  In particular, what would the Wikipedia
> convention be when dealing with large amounts of raw data?  Here are a
> few ideas I had thought up:
>
> * Each trading card should have its own page.  This will make
> categorization a trivial task, but will result in too many
> substub-quality pages.
> * Each set should have its own page, with each page describing the
> cards within that set.  This will make categorization between sets of
> cards trivial, but categorization along other lines (such as the type
> of the trading card) a pain in the ass.  This goes for giving a page to
> any arbitrary group of cards.  My personal direction (not necessarily a
> good one) is a variation on this theme: the Pok?mon cards themselves
> are described in their corresponding entry in [[b:Wikibooks Pok?dex]].
> * Wait until there's a real good Wikidata-like thing before
> implementing such an idea.
>
> Part of the problem, I guess, is the lack of contributions from anyone
> else in the Wiki community - thus the need to solicit opinions.  Plus,
> this idea does not have to specifically apply for my project - this
> scenario may arise in any other project in the books or the pedia (for
> example, a good application of this idea in the pedia is episode guides
> for particularly well-known series).
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Johannes Schindelin

body:
Hi Brion, Hi List,

On Tue, 7 Dec 2004, Brion Vibber wrote:

> You should upgrade to 1.3.8 immediately.

I did that, as Evan pointed out to me that there's a better way now,
namely extensions, to implement what I wanted to.

> I should warn you that it's somewhat poor netiquette to send binary
> attachments to a mailing list you aren't even subscribed to and demand
> follow-ups.

Well, as I am subscribed to quite a number of mailing lists, and thereby
already have almost no time to work on my PhD, and didn't expect that
short attachments (I kept mine under 3kB) get stripped, I dared to send my
message to you.

As I think that the attachment really is worth to be sent to this list,
and also is much shorter than the regular flame-bait, I resend it to this
list, hoping that it will eventually find it's way into the extensions/
CVS repository.

> [...] and you likely won't receive relevant follow-up discussion.

I am now subscribed (even if not for long, as I really have to tend my
PhD), so I very much hope to get this really small file included in the
official version of mediawiki. I am now aware that I probably annoyed some
people on this list; I am very sorry. Nevertheless, I am ready to respond
to sensible discussion, and do my very best to make this extension ready
for inclusion. I am also ready to discuss my behaviour and my mails -- off
list.

I hereby apologize to everyone I caused inconvenience by my mail, and hope
that you accept my apology.

Thank you for your time,
Dscho


subject: [WikiEN-l] original research

body:
Exactly. I was using that to make the point that even by your average
inclusionist's standards, this article is unsalvageable without an
outside source.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])

Mark Richards wrote:

>Actually the 'inclusionist' are usually harping on
>about deletion of things that are verifiable by
>several external sources. I have never seen the usual
>suspect object to something that genuinely cannot be
>verified externally.
>Mark
>
>--- John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>>Publish a book about it. If the society is
>>interesting enough to be of
>>note, sufficient pop culture should arise
>>surrounding it to justify an
>>article.
>>
>>The incident you mention is indeed original rsearch
>>- that is why we
>>need an external source. Original research cannot be
>>verified - that is
>>why we need an external source. The inclusionists
>>harp on it - "But it's
>>VERIFIABLE! We gotta' keep it!" Without a source not
>>from Wikipedia,
>>this is not verifiable at all.
>>
>>John Lee
>>([[User:Johnleemk]])
>>
>>


from_name: Rich Holton

body:
--- kelvSYC <kelvsyc at shaw.ca> wrote:

> I apologize for the crosspost between two of
> Wikimedia's mailing lists
> in advance, as this is somewhat related to both
> Wikipedia and
> Wikibooks.
>
> One of my pet projects is [[b:Pok?mon]], which
> attempts be a game guide
> for everything Pok?mon (some at Wikipedia have
> proposed that all of the
> Pok?mon articles be moved to the books, but that's
> not a relevant point
> here), and part of any good strategy guide is data
> and lots of it.
> Organizing this data is quite the problem.  Here's
> an example:
>
> One of the subprojects in [[b:Pok?mon]] is the guide
> to the trading
> card game, and I need to solicit opinions on how a
> list of trading
> cards should be presented.  In particular, what
> would the Wikipedia
> convention be when dealing with large amounts of raw
> data?  Here are a
> few ideas I had thought up:
>
> * Each trading card should have its own page.  This
> will make
> categorization a trivial task, but will result in
> too many
> substub-quality pages.
> * Each set should have its own page, with each page
> describing the
> cards within that set.  This will make
> categorization between sets of
> cards trivial, but categorization along other lines
> (such as the type
> of the trading card) a pain in the ass.  This goes
> for giving a page to
> any arbitrary group of cards.  My personal direction
> (not necessarily a
> good one) is a variation on this theme: the Pok?mon
> cards themselves
> are described in their corresponding entry in
> [[b:Wikibooks Pok?dex]].
> * Wait until there's a real good Wikidata-like thing
> before
> implementing such an idea.
>
> Part of the problem, I guess, is the lack of
> contributions from anyone
> else in the Wiki community - thus the need to
> solicit opinions.  Plus,
> this idea does not have to specifically apply for my
> project - this
> scenario may arise in any other project in the books
> or the pedia (for
> example, a good application of this idea in the
> pedia is episode guides
> for particularly well-known series).

Disclaimer first: I am not involved with Wikibooks. I
am involved with Wikipedia.

Structurally, a page for each card makes a lot of
sense. They could then be organized in a variety of
ways: By card number, by set, by color,
alphabetically, etc. each of which has its uses. In
this case, having actual list pages (as opposed to
categories only) would perhaps be useful. Such a list
page could contain a brief summary of each card.

Whether to actually create a page for a given card may
depend upon how much data you have for that card.
However, it seems to me that a minimal amount of data
for each card could be easily gathered to make a page
that would at least make a stub.

Again, I don't participate (yet) in Wikibooks, but it
seems to me that very short pages may be perfectly
acceptable in some cases. I would think the criteria
would be different there than in Wikipedia.

In this particular case, not to have a page for each
card in a book about "everything Pok?mon" seems almost
silly. I know that my kids have such books in paper,
and a page is dedicated to each card. Glancing at
Pok?dex, it seems at present to be almost entirely
about the video game stats. Why not a separate page
for each card?

Is there some reason I'm missing that suggests
differently?

-Rich Holton (en:wikipedia:user:rholton)

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
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from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] original research

body:
John Lee (johnleemk at gawab.com) [041208 04:45]:

>  The inclusionists harp on it - "But it's
> VERIFIABLE! We gotta' keep it!" Without a source not from Wikipedia,
> this is not verifiable at all.

I eagerly await you either (a) posting a link from the history to
"inclusionists" (plural, as you pluralise) demanding an article be kept
with no sources other than Wikipedia, as you seem to be describing; or (b)
admitting that you're blowing smoke.

- d.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedian gender ratio

body:
Hello,

> On Tue, 07 Dec 2004, Alex Kwan wrote:
>>Only Western society? ;)

Andy Rabagliati wrote:
> I think I would agree with that.
>
> When I ran technical training (programming) in the USA, my audience was
> almost exclusively male.
>
> I ran the same course in Venezuela, where over half the students were female.

*cough* If I may be so bold to presume on your place of origin... The
world consists of more than the just the Americas, you know? ;)

Anyway, I came across quite a number of female programmers and
computer-related personnel in Hong Kong. It *is* spread out pretty
evenly, about half and half. In mainland China, however, nearly everyone
in that field is male.

little Alex


from_name: Lane, Ryan

body:
Yes, it is backwards compatible. Actually, it isn't ready for 1.4 yet since
the authentication hook has been added, and the code hasn't been modified to
use it yet.

Currently, there isn't a patch to add this feature for you since it is
scheduled to be included in 1.4. To add this patch you'll have to splice the
code in yourself. I know its a pain, but thankfully the patch is somewhat
small. Make sure you add the bugfixes, as the patch will not work without
them.

Ryan Lane
NAVOCEANO

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org
> [SMTP:wikitech-l-bounces at wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Patrice Matignon
> Sent:	Tuesday, December 07, 2004 2:25 PM
> To:	wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> Cc:	Mel Christie; mail at tgries.de
> Subject:	[Wikitech-l] FW: Meta-Wiki LDAP authentication
>
> Hello all
>
> My name is Patrice Matignon, and I'm interested in MediaWiki LDAP
> authentication capabilities for which I was hoping to get more info.
>
> I've read the BugZilla report #814 and the LDAP authentication meta-wiki
> page, but I'm still not clear on 2 things:
> 1) Is this "patch" available already, and if yes, where would that be?
> 2) The BugZilla refers to the v1.4 baseline, but I was hoping someone
> would
> know whether it would be backward-compatible with a v1.3.8 instance we
> have.
>
> Thanks much for your time, and best regards.
>
> - Patrice Matignon
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


body:
Hoi,
I want to upload the following file: fa-???? ???? ???? ???? ???????.ogg
I cannot do this. I can create the file in Windows, but when I try to
upload the file to Commons I get

The file you uploaded seems to be empty. This might be due to a
typo in the file name. Please check whether you really want to
upload this file.

The filename is as far as I am concerned completely correct. It has the
name of the article with the ISO-639 code in front of it.
Thanks,
GerardM


from_name: Mark Richards

subject: [WikiEN-l] original research

body:
Yes, I agree. Where we would be in trouble on the no
orginal research is if one of us reported on our
personal experiences with masonic rituals.
Mark

--- Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:

> At 04:25 PM 12/7/2004 -0800, Mark Richards wrote:
>
> >You can document what other people have said about
> >these things (moon hoax, reptilian humanoids, flat
> >earth etc) as long as it is in the context of
> >reporting what someone has claimed.
> >Mark
>
> This exact same issue came up on Talk:Freemasonry
> just a few weeks back,
> discussing what to do when Masonic secrets wind up
> on Wikipedia, and this
> is the solution that I proposed there too. I expect
> that someday when the
> [[Masonic rituals and practices]] (or whatever)
> article gets written it'll
> be mostly "Author A says X in book N, and Author B
> says Y in book M. Both
> of them say P, but they differ on Q." The
> credibility and credentials of
> the various sources would have to be discussed too.
> > _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing

body:
user_Jamesday wrote:

>Copyleft effectively kills any chance of it entering the mainstream press. It'll be effectively impossible for any mainstream publication to use any of the stories if there's a requirement that their work be released under a license incompatible with all of their existing licenses. That rules out any likely form of copyleft if the project is to achieve its major goal, though with sufficient studying of all of the contracts news publishers have with their new sources I suppose it's conceivable that some form of copyleft license could be written to be incompatible with a small enough set of them for small publishers to use stories.
>
>Copyleft is only necessary when you want to limit the people who can use the work. That's the antipathy of the objective of Wikinews, which is to get the news published as widely as possible.
>
>
>
I've been lurking on here and I felt I need to respond to this message.

Copyleft is not to limit people who can use a work (like software or a
book), but rather a way to force attribution and to avoid pitfalls of
the "public domain" documents.  If it is in the "public domain", all you
have to do is a minor change and suddenly the work can now be
copyrighted.  The publisher does not have to clarify what is free
material that can be copied and what is original new material.  An
example of this is the Clement C. Moore Poem "'Twas the Night Before
Christmas", which is in the public domain (due to copyright expiration),
but often they change the final phrase from "Happy Christmas" to "Merry
Christmas", call it a new work, and copyright the book.  To enforce it
more, publishers also include new illustrations of Santa, but if you
read inside the cover there is no mention that the poem itself is in the
public domain.

This is where the GFDL is very different, as anything that copies a GFDL
licenced document must also specify somehow what rights you have as an
end consumer.  The same is true for GPL'd software as well.

Even the BSD license (which has almost no real restrictions) does have
the attribution clause that forces you to acknowledge from whom you got
the document and that it is copyrighted material.

And in the case of "mainstream" news agencies, including television &
radio stations (as well as print media), when they cover something from
a wire agency they almost always give attribution in the form of
"According to the Associated Press" or "from wire reports" or "as
published in a copyrighted article in the Washington Post".  In this
case Wikinews has the potential of becoming another news outlet where
newspapers would start out with something like "Moscow (Wikinews) -
President Putin..."

Where I think the license discussion should go along is to discuss what
features authors would like to see, what features from common copyleft
licenses most people here hate, and what the overall goals of the
project are.  A copyleft license can be applied to a news article that
could also be republished by "mainstream" news outlets.... the two are
not mutually incompatable.  Unfortunately most of the discussion I've
seen so far is going into the gritty details and political camps of each
different license.

IMHO, I think a simple attribution that the story came from Wikinews,
and in print media something in a little more detail giving either a URL
to Wikinews or a statement in the copyright section of the publication
(most magazines and newspapers have them buried on page 3 or on the
editorial page somewhere... usually in very fine print) that says
Wikinews articles are republished under the XXX license.  see
http://www.example.com for more details.  Web magazines can do something
very similar (as well as websites for mainstream news organizations that
want to republish wikinews pieces).  Television news broadcasts
typically have a quick blurb at the end giving credit to news sources,
especially if it is from another network or station. These usually
scroll by so quickly that you can hardly read them, but are a way to
give attribution.

The point here is to acknowledge that somebody other than that news
agency created the story, and they are only republishing what can be
obtained elsewhere as a convience to their readers.  I don't see how
this really limits who or how you can use content that is copylefted,
and is incompatable with commercial news wire licenses only if those
other licenses specifically mention that they can't be used together
with other wire services or specifically mention copylefted news
articles used simultaneously in the same publication.  It is likely that
at least in the USA such prohibitions could also be made illegal due to
anti-trust laws, and I know the EU also has simular anti-competition
laws as well, protecting a small-town newspaper that might want to use
Wikinews articles in their publication (for instance).

--
Robert Scott Horning


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing

body:
user_Jamesday wrote:
> Copyleft is only necessary when you want to limit the people who can
>use the work. That's the antipathy of the objective of Wikinews, which
>is to get the news published as widely as possible.

I don't disagree with much of what you said, but I wanted to add a
different perspective to what copyleft does.  In many cases it does
*not* limit the people who can use the work, but rather serves as an
easy way to persuade them to make their own work available under a
free license as well.

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
wiki_tomos wrote:

>  I would like a few things to be decided/ clarified regarding GFDL,
>  partly because I received some complaint by another Wikipedian that
>  GFDL is so difficult to understand that there needs to be an
>  unofficial guide to how to use Wikimedia contents in compliance with
>  GFDL.
>
>  1. Is Wikimedia Foundation the "Publisher" as in GFDL of Wikimedia
>  contents?

That would be my interpretation. For items published before the
Wikimedia Foundation came into existence, you could probably consider
the publisher to be either Bomis or Jimbo Wales.

>  2. When people modify documents, one of the requirements is to change
>  the title, as in 4-A. The publisher of the original version may
>  permit the licensee to use the same title. Does Wikimedia Foundation
>  permit that?

No, not if you consider the entire project to be the document. It has
registered the various project names as trademarks to reinforce its
exclusive ownership. If it gave any contributor permission to use the
same title, then anyone could start a fork of Wikipedia with the same name.

>  3. Another requirement is 4-J, the preservation of network locations
>  of previous versions. Does Wikimedia Foundation give permission not
>  to preserve the network locations?

No statement has been made that I'm aware of.

>  My understanding is that answers to all three questions are yes. But
>  I am a bit unsure about the last one.
>
>  People tend to think link to the live article is important, as I
>  understand. Some people, based on American law, think this is a good
>  substitute for the requirement 4-I, the preservation of History
>  section. That aside, link back to individual articles are important
>  for us to keep google rank.
>
>  I personally think this is not the part of contract, because the live
>  article is not necessarily the "previous version." But Wikimedia
>  Foundation's enforcement policy would be that if live articles are
>  linked back from individual pages, and some other important
>  conditions are met, WMF does not make a big noise about violation of
>  4-I.
>
>  In other words, my understanding is that WMF does not change the
>  terms of GFDL, but simply has some policy as a publisher regarding
>  what type of violations are bad enough for WMF to take actions.

Wikipedia's policy (not Wikimedia's) has been to coerce mirrors and
forks into providing a link back by huffing and puffing about license
violations, even though a link back is not required by the license. All
you need to do to fulfill 4-I is create a "History" section like this:

HISTORY
    * Some Mirror, 2004, John Copier, http://somemirror.org
    * Wikipedia, 2000-2002, Wikipedia contributors, http://www.wikipedia.org
    * Marxists Internet Archive, 2002, MIA volunteers,
http://www.marxists.org
    * Nupedia, 2000-2001, Nupedia contributors, http://www.nupedia.org
(see Wikipedia:Nupedia and Wikipedia for a list of articles this applies to)

That's taken from [[Wikipedia:GFDL History (unofficial)]]. Since it's
unofficial, you could assume it doesn't exist and just start your own
section, omitting the 3rd and 4th entries.

Wikimedia doesn't have any policy on this. The link back policy appears
to have destroyed our Google ranking, triggering spam heuristics. In
many cases we are ranked below the mirrors. This has forced Google to
consider a change to their ranking algorithm.

>  I am not a lawyer, so my guesses and assumptions could well be wrong.
>  I appreciate your comments and clarifications.

Same here.

-- Tim Starling


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Dec 7, 2004, at 3:14 PM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> I want to upload the following file: fa-???? ???? ???? ????
>> ???????.ogg I cannot do this. I can create the file in Windows, but
>> when I try to upload the file to Commons I get
>>
>>        The file you uploaded seems to be empty. This might be due to a
>>        typo in the file name. Please check whether you really want to
>>        upload this file.
>>
>> The filename is as far as I am concerned completely correct. It has
>> the name of the article with the ISO-639 code in front of it.
>
>
> I just uploaded to commons and deleted a test file with that name from
> my Mac (Mac OS X 10.3.6, uploaded with Safari 1.2.4), so the name
> itself is ok if cut-n-paste survived the mail.
>
> a) Can you try it again, and make sure that it wasn't just a temporary
> upload failure?
>
> b) Can you try renaming the file with a plain ASCII filename? Does it
> still fail to upload, or does it succeed?
>
> c) What exact operating system version, browser, and browser version
> are you using? Have you tried other combinations?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>l.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
Hoi,
It is not a temporary thing. Firebird 1.0 does not allow me to upload
it. OS Windows 2000
IE 6.0 DOES allow me to upload it.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Fa-%D8%AA%D9%88%D9%84%D8%AF_%D9%85%D9%86%D8%AC%D9%8A_%D8%B9%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85_%D9%88%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%84_%D9%86%D9%88%D9%85%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%83.ogg
allows me to HEAR it.
When I then change the article:
http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%AA%D9%88%D9%84%D8%AF_%D9%85%D9%86%D8%AC%D9%8A_%D8%B9%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85_%D9%88%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%84_%D9%86%D9%88%D9%85%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%83
It does NOT work properly for listening to it in IE or Firefox

Plain ASCI uploads are no problems. I do these all the time.The problem
is with the Farsi characters.

PS it is rather funny to see the categories with all these soundfiles as
thumbs :)

Thanks,
    Gerard


subject: [WikiEN-l] Original research

body:
Shane King wrote:
> I've been thinking about this for a few days, and I can't get around one
> basic issue: we haven't solved the problem. We've shifted the burden of
> evaluating the credibility of the theory to evaluating the credibility
> of the sources. I see no reason to believe we're any better at
> evaluating the credibility of sources than of theories.

Oh, I think it is a lot easier to evaluate the credibility of sources
than the credibility of theories.  If you offer me your personal
theory of "Liquidity, Efficiency, and Bank Bailouts" then it's going
to be quite hard for me to judge whether you are an economics crank or
someone with an interesting theory.  But if you point me to an essay
of that title in _American Economic Review_, I can feel comfortable
that it is at least credible.

> Heck, I see no reason why we should even care whether something is
> credible. The NPOV policy says we shouldn't, as I read it.

I think you're misreading it, then.

Here's a line I use in public talks which always gets a laugh.  "NPOV
does not mean that we have to say 'some say the moon is made of rocks,
some say cheese'."  We absolutely do care that a theory is credible,
as it's essential to a neutral presentation of any topic.

> In fact, I largely see the NPOV policy and the "no original
> research" policy as being in conflict. We have to report neutrally
> on all views, yet we exclude views that experts don't deem
> credible. Am I the only one who sees a contradiction in that?

Sometimes we exclude views, but more commonly we move them to where
they belong -- in an article about theories that are not widely
accepted.

--Jimbo


from_name: Shane King

subject: [WikiEN-l] Original research

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> The basic concept is as follows: it can be quite difficult for us to
> make any valid judgment as to whether a particular thing is _true_ or
> not.  It isn't appropriate for us to try to determine whether
> someone's novel theory of physics is valid, we aren't really equipped
> to do that.  But what we _can_ do is check whether or not it actually
> has been published in reputable journals or by reputable publishers.
> So it's quite convenient to avoid judging the credibility of things by
> simply sticking to things that have been judged credible by people
> much better equipped to decide.

I've been thinking about this for a few days, and I can't get around one
basic issue: we haven't solved the problem. We've shifted the burden of
evaluating the credibility of the theory to evaluating the credibility
of the sources. I see no reason to believe we're any better at
evaluating the credibility of sources than of theories.

Heck, I see no reason why we should even care whether something is
credible. The NPOV policy says we shouldn't, as I read it. In fact, I
largely see the NPOV policy and the "no original research" policy as
being in conflict. We have to report neutrally on all views, yet we
exclude views that experts don't deem credible. Am I the only one who
sees a contradiction in that?

If it was up to me, "no original research" would mean precisely what it
looks like it does. You can't write new stuff directly to wikipedia.
However, if someone else has written it somewhere, it's fair game,
without the need for credibility evaluation.

I think the real purpose of the rule is about not misrepresenting things
on wikipedia, and making crackpots' ideas seem more mainstream than they
are. But if we write with intellectual honesty (ie call minority
opinions minority opinions when they are) and cite our sources, I don't
see any need for the no original research rule as it's currently
formulated.

One of the best things about wikipedia is that it has the ability to
report on the bizarre that would never make it above the radar of a
normal encyclopedia. I find that to be perhaps the most entertaining
part of reading wikipedia. I think it's unfortunate that we have a rule
that restricts that without providing any real benefit that I can see.

Shane.


from_name: steven l. rubenstein

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 17, Issue 7

body:
As wikipedia grows and evolves, standards will change, hopefully become
clearer, and in some cases, I think, should become more stringent.  I think
this is the case with original research.  The Apple Pie article is
informative and well-written -- and does have some outside links.  But if
as we grow we want to be taken seriously, claims about the gendered nature
of "American as apple pie" need to be sourced.  The fact is, there are
sources out there.  For our articles not to provide sources accomplishes
two negative things.  First, it makes our editors appear lazy, as we are
unwilling to do a little more work to acknowledge where our analysis comes
from.  Second, it makes wikipedia less useful as a gateway to further research.

That said, the article is primarily about an object and does not involve
much interpretation or analysis.  As I read others' views and see more
examples, my view is starting to firm up as this: if the article makes no
interpretive, analytical, or synthetic claims, it can rely on primary
sources (and thus, be a secondary source).  But if the article is to make
interpretive, analytical, or synthetic claims, it must rely on secondary
sources (and thus, be a tertiary source).

Re: The league of distinguished gentlemen. I agree strongly with John.  I
disagree with Charles, who writes "It's a kind of goofy pedantic point that
personal knowledge of something should be disqualified."  On the contrary,
this is what rules like "no original research" or "no personal essays" is
all about.  Look, lets say I am a particle physicist and I have conducted
research on muons and want to write the Wikipedia article on muons.  I
should still have to back up my claims with references to published
work.  Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a substitute for a journal or
newspaper.

Steve

>Message: 3
>Date: Mon, 06 Dec 2004 14:57:06 -0500
>From: Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] original research
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Message-ID: <41B4B992.2080000 at hackish.org>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>Charles Matthews wrote:
>
> >Take [[apple pie]], which cites an original source.  WP doesn't need to
> >police whether the conclusions drawn are safely derivative or not.  (That's
> >apple sauce - sorry.)  Any  more than if I wander around Cambridge and see
> >something encyclopedic, I need first to check that it's in a guidebook.
> >
> >
>Yeah, this is somewhat of a tricky issue.  My personal barometer is that
>if I'm documenting facts with a minimum of interpretation, then all I
>need is some reference for the facts.  But if I'm making an
>interpretation, I try to confine it to interpretations that have been
>made before, rather than trying to synthesize primary sources myself.
>
>In a few cases, like [[industrial music]], there's no authoritative
>scholarship in the field (indeed, very little scholarship at all), so
>some amount of original research contentiously creeps in, but there's
>still an attempt to document "prevailing opinion", as far as information
>on it can be found, and trying as much as possible to avoid making novel
>musicological arguments and categorizations.
>
>-Mark
>
>
>Message: 5
>Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 08:37:59 -0800
>From: Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] original research
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Message-ID: <41B5DC67.8000609 at epoptic.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>I have recently noticed another form of what I consider to be "original
>research," and I'd like to see if the consensus agrees with me.
>
>The article [[The League of Distinguished Gentlemen]] purports to
>describe a secret society at Creighton University.  It clearly was
>written by the secret society himself and is currently listed for
>deletion.  A popular reason given in the votes for deletion is
>"unverifiable," the rebuttal to which is "you can't verify it because
>it's a /truly/ secret secret society!"
>
>All of which is only mildly amusing, but did lead me to contemplate the
>possibility of a /real/ truly secret secret society.  Even if such an
>Illuminatus really did exist, and someone really were able to penetrate
>it, it seems to me that the resulting expos? would be original research,
>and not appropriate for Wikipedia.
>
>Thus, it seems to me that all unverifiable claims about secret societies
>are logically either
>(A) untrue, in which case they should be deleted, or
>(2) true, in which case they are original research and should be deleted.
>
>Comments?
>
>--
>   Sean Barrett     | Remember your priorities. Draining the
>   sean at epoptic.com | swamp will take care of the alligators.
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Message: 6
>Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 17:22:05 -0000
>From: "Charles Matthews" <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] original research
>To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Message-ID: <004c01c4dc81$4749b040$9e7c0450 at Galasien>
>Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="iso-8859-1"
>
>Sean Barrett wrote
>
> >Even if such an
> > Illuminatus really did exist, and someone really were able to penetrate
> > it, it seems to me that the resulting expos? would be original research,
> > and not appropriate for Wikipedia.
>
>Think we should stick with 'Original research' being an 'argument to
>delete', and not a 'proof of non-encyclopedic nature'.  It's a kind of goofy
>pedantic point that personal knowledge of something should be disqualified.
>
>Charles
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Message: 7
>Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 01:43:48 +0800
>From: John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] original research
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Message-ID: <41B5EBD4.3050802 at gawab.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>Publish a book about it. If the society is interesting enough to be of
>note, sufficient pop culture should arise surrounding it to justify an
>article.
>
>The incident you mention is indeed original rsearch - that is why we
>need an external source. Original research cannot be verified - that is
>why we need an external source. The inclusionists harp on it - "But it's
>VERIFIABLE! We gotta' keep it!" Without a source not from Wikipedia,
>this is not verifiable at all.
>
>John Lee
>([[User:Johnleemk]])
>

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)

body:
Boy do I disagree with Shane.  Yes, it is true that relying on previously
published source sshifts the burden.  But that doesn't mean there is no
difference.  I can see a difference between our assuming the burden, and
editors of journals and publishers assuming the burden.  First, most
academic articles and books go through a peer-review process.  This process
has its flaws, but it does mean that authors are held accountable to
experts in the field on which they are writing.  Second, published books
and articles are authored and authors are accountable.  This is not the
case in Wikipedia where, as a collaborative project, articles have no
authors.  Problems with wikipedia articles are likely to be debated on talk
pages, which may lead to changes in articles -- an original, innovative,
and interesting process I am happy to participate in.  But when scholarly
books and articles are published, professional researches in the field
often go out and try the experiments over, or re-check sources, or try to
apply theories to other situations, and then publish more articles or books
which carry research further.  Our articles can report on this process and
the debates within academic fields it engenders, but we cannot be a
substitute for it.

One of the big problems with peer-review is, as Shane points out, that it
excludes ideas and research that peers do not find credible.  There
certainly should be a venue for such indiosyncratic and potentially
ground-breaking work.  The internet already provides a venue for
publicizing such work.  I do not think the internet needs one more such
venue.  There are, thanks to the WWW, now an almost infinite space for
people to present such fringe research.  The question is, do we report on
it.  I still say: no.  If such fringe research has merit I truly believe it
will end up in a book or peer-reviewed journal.  We all know how much of
what is our there is crap.  I just don't think we should waste reader's
time with crap, and I think to include it in our encyclopedia articles
demeans the whole project.  How do we decide what is crap?  We don't -- we
let professional editors of journals and presses do that, because that is
their business.  Wikipeida's strength is that it is an amateur's venture,
and that is indeed it is a strength.  It is also a weakness, and I see no
reason why, in this one case, we can't rely on the pros.

Steve

>Message: 7
>Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 12:06:51 +1000
>From: Shane King <shakes at dontletsstart.com>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Original research
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Message-ID: <41B661BB.6000302 at dontletsstart.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
> > The basic concept is as follows: it can be quite difficult for us to
> > make any valid judgment as to whether a particular thing is _true_ or
> > not. It isn't appropriate for us to try to determine whether
> > someone's novel theory of physics is valid, we aren't really equipped
> > to do that. But what we _can_ do is check whether or not it actually
> > has been published in reputable journals or by reputable publishers.
> > So it's quite convenient to avoid judging the credibility of things by
> > simply sticking to things that have been judged credible by people
> > much better equipped to decide.
>I've been thinking about this for a few days, and I can't get around one
>basic issue: we haven't solved the problem. We've shifted the burden of
>evaluating the credibility of the theory to evaluating the credibility
>of the sources. I see no reason to believe we're any better at
>evaluating the credibility of sources than of theories.
>Heck, I see no reason why we should even care whether something is
>credible. The NPOV policy says we shouldn't, as I read it. In fact, I
>largely see the NPOV policy and the "no original research" policy as
>being in conflict. We have to report neutrally on all views, yet we
>exclude views that experts don't deem credible. Am I the only one who
>sees a contradiction in that?
>If it was up to me, "no original research" would mean precisely what it
>looks like it does. You can't write new stuff directly to wikipedia.
>However, if someone else has written it somewhere, it's fair game,
>without the need for credibility evaluation.
>I think the real purpose of the rule is about not misrepresenting things
>on wikipedia, and making crackpots' ideas seem more mainstream than they
>are. But if we write with intellectual honesty (ie call minority
>opinions minority opinions when they are) and cite our sources, I don't
>see any need for the no original research rule as it's currently
>formulated.
>One of the best things about wikipedia is that it has the ability to
>report on the bizarre that would never make it above the radar of a
>normal encyclopedia. I find that to be perhaps the most entertaining
>part of reading wikipedia. I think it's unfortunate that we have a rule
>that restricts that without providing any real benefit that I can see.
>Shane.

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


from_name: Robin Shannon

body:
> Wikipedia's policy (not Wikimedia's) has been to coerce mirrors and
> forks into providing a link back by huffing and puffing about license
> violations, even though a link back is not required by the license. All
> you need to do to fulfill 4-I is create a "History" section like this:
>
> HISTORY
>     * Some Mirror, 2004, John Copier, http://somemirror.org
>     * Wikipedia, 2000-2002, Wikipedia contributors, http://www.wikipedia.org
>     * Marxists Internet Archive, 2002, MIA volunteers,
> http://www.marxists.org
>     * Nupedia, 2000-2001, Nupedia contributors, http://www.nupedia.org
> (see Wikipedia:Nupedia and Wikipedia for a list of articles this applies to)
>
> That's taken from [[Wikipedia:GFDL History (unofficial)]]. Since it's
> unofficial, you could assume it doesn't exist and just start your own
> section, omitting the 3rd and 4th entries.
>
> Wikimedia doesn't have any policy on this. The link back policy appears
> to have destroyed our Google ranking, triggering spam heuristics. In
> many cases we are ranked below the mirrors. This has forced Google to
> consider a change to their ranking algorithm.

what? sorry, why has the link back destroyed our ranking? isnt it that
the more places that link to us the better our rating, and also what
do you mean by spam heuristics? Why are we ranked below our mirrors?

gah, im confused,

paz y amor,
rjs

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

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Recombo Plus License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/


body:
Benjamin Esham wrote:
> Same here :-)  Just for clarification: does adding a dual-licensing
> template
> to my user page automatically cover all the edits I've already made, or do
> I need to explicitly state that?
>

Well, the template says that you agree to multi-license your text
contributions "unless otherwise stated", so I'd assume so. I'm not a
lawyer though.

On this dual-licensing issue, would there be any interest in a user
preference allowing you to state what licenses you release your work
under? That would at least be the first step in getting dual licensing
really meaningful, because then article edits could be identified with a
license.

Shane.


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] Vac 8 Dec 2004 -> 11 Jan 2005

body:
I'm going to be on vacation for a month, and I won't have steady access
to a computer.

Just so you know.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] status of MathML support

body:
On Dec 8, 2004, at 11:34 AM, Robert Miner wrote:
> I saw a thread from last August on the status of MathML support, and
> am writing to inquire if there has been any activity since.

None, so far as I know.

> As co-chair of the W3C Math Interest Group, an editor of the MathML
> spec, and one of the authors of the MathPlayer plug-in for Internet
> Explorer, I am interested in doing what I can to help.

There are two things to look at.

First, is the actual conversion to MathML; currently only a couple of
very simple stub bits are supported, eg nothing where it would actually
be useful. :) The TeX preparser which produces HTML and MathML output
is written in ocaml which unfortunately is perhaps an impediment to
wide hacking on it. Currently more functions are supported for HTML
output than MathML simply because the work hasn't been done.

Second, is producing appropriate output markup. The current system will
embed the MathML code directly into the XHTML output. This works in
Mozilla when the wiki is configured to send an application/xml+xhtml
Content-type for pages, but not when using text/html (as is default
because not all browsers support this and we can't currently guarantee
well-formed markup at all times).

Does the MathPlayer work with directly embedded code, or does it
require some sort of plug-in-style usage?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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