from_name: Rhobite

subject: [WikiEN-l] nofollow status

body:
On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 10:41:37 -0500 (EST), Matthew Trump
<wikipedia at decumanus.com> wrote:
> Can anyone provide an update about the situation of rel="nofollow" on
> the English Wikipedia following the community vote?

I'm wondering this too. According to the vote, the community believes
that we should not add rel="nofollow" to external links. As of now,
the links still include rel="nofollow".

Rhobite


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] no: or nb: (again)

body:
I like "standard norwegian" - you should ignore this guy as he is a
typical norwegian high-school Nynorskhater.

Mark

On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 15:49:30 +0100, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> I got the following message on my (Dutch) userpage:
>
> ===========================================================
>
> I don't subscribe to the mailing list, so I respond here:
>
> The Norwegian Wikipedia uses no: as its interwiki code. Until we have
> decided to do otherwise, please respect our choice of domain and
> interwiki name.
>
> Also, note that no: is not the "bokm?l Wikipedia", as bokm?l is only
> one spelling standard of Standard Norwegian, which also includes
> riksm?l (both bokm?l and riksm?l are major spelling standards, the
> latter being used e.g. by the most significant Norwegian newspaper
> (Aftenposten). Wolfram 2 mrt 2005 15:34 (CET)
>
> ============================================================
>
> So now I have (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-February/037750.html)
> someone saying it would be best to always use nb: and (above) someone
> saying it would be best to always use no:. Then I have people at nn:
> who really don't want it to be called no: at THEIR wiki. Could someone
> please tell me who I am to listen to? By whom and where is the
> decision made in a case like this?
>
> Andre Engels
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: wikien-l

from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] ArbCom - too attached to 'equal treatment'?

body:
>Karl A. Krueger said:
> >
> > It would be unfortunate if people became afraid to report real abuses
> > because they did not want to be forced to defend themselves from unfair
> > or untrue accusations by the abuser.
>
>I don't buy that for one second.  The whole point about an arbitration
>case is that the thing has reached a point where some kind of executive
>action is required.  Unfair and untrue accusations are, by their very
>nature, not going to get anywhere with an evidence-based, proactive
>arbcom, and there are advocates and a right of appeal.

Well, I wasn't actually discussing the issue of untrue accusations, but
rather the concern about bringing an obvious policy violator before ArbCom
for fear of being put under investigative microscope yourself.  The
difference between the system here and that in the real world is that here
the person making the accusation is also automatically both the prosecuting
attorney and the defendant in an inevitable counter-suit; this is a heavy
burden, and a serious disincentive to "get involved".

Jay.


from_name: Delirium

body:
Karl A. Krueger wrote:

>It would be unfortunate if people became afraid to report real abuses
>because they did not want to be forced to defend themselves from unfair
>or untrue accusations by the abuser.
>
>
I agree it's a concern, but to really investigate a dispute between two
users, such as an alleged flame war or edit war, you have to examine all
sides in the dispute.  There's no need to look through the accusing
editor's entire edit history, but it does make sense to look through
both sides' posts and edits in the relevant discussions and articles.
There have been a few cases where the complaintant has really turned out
to be the one mostly at fault, trying to goad his/her opponent into
doing one thing technically against the rules and then filing a
complaint based on it (one user in particular was notorious for filing
dozens of complaints within a few weeks).

That said, I personally have voted against a few of the "equal
treatment" measures.  I tend to vote "yes" on the findings of fact that
say "this user also did the following, which is bad", but then vote "no"
on the "therefore this user is also banned for [x] weeks".  Of course,
it does vary a lot from case to case.

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] ArbCom - too attached to "equal treatment"?

body:
>Charles wrote:
>
>Looking at this one,  my reactions are:
>
>- WP has lived with some proportion of difficult users, since its
>inception;
>- 'getting rid' of troublemakers is not the only approach;
>- if it is really being said that honest hard-working editors are being
>held
>to high standards of behaviour, then I think that is as it should be.
>
>Perhaps there is a click of the ratchet, here.  I hope it is towards a more
>civil place, for everyone.

Your points are well taken, but I wonder what is the best way to achieve
that civility.  True, some problem editors can be reformed into good
editors; but the number of those kinds of successes are small.  Keep in
mind, I'm not talking about the new editor who storms in here, and stirs up
trouble for a few days.  Rather, I'm talking about the kind of editor who
causes persistent difficulties for months and months on end, while
contributing little of value to the project.  For example, I'm aware of two
different editors here who currently do little but try to stir up dissension
on article deletion/undeletion votes; one has been around for several
months, the other, apparently for several years.  These persistent behaviour
patterns cause no end of wasted time for other editors, and end up spoiling
the Wikipedia experience for many.  There are similarly a number of other
editors around who have their own special areas of "trolling" expertise,
making Wikipedia an entirely unpleasant place fo the large majority of good
faith editors, who generally try to avoid conflict.  Eventually some of them
are so goaded by the persistent troublemakers that they respond angrily or
in kind; then if they ever take them to ArbCom, they end up getting spanked
as well.

Jay.


body:
>From: "Tony Sidaway" <minorityreport at bluebottle.com>
>
>JAY JG said:
> > The  difference between the system here and that in the real world is
> > that here  the person making the accusation is also automatically both
> > the prosecuting  attorney and the defendant in an inevitable
> > counter-suit; this is a heavy  burden, and a serious disincentive to
> > "get involved".
>
>AMA.

Hmm, yes.  Anyway, as a different editor put it in an e-mail to me "What is
needed is some instrument that treats violations of behavioral guidelines as
infractions against the whole community and not as part of some dispute with
another user."

Jay.


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] no: or nb: (again)

body:
I got the following message on my (Dutch) userpage:

===========================================================

I don't subscribe to the mailing list, so I respond here:

The Norwegian Wikipedia uses no: as its interwiki code. Until we have
decided to do otherwise, please respect our choice of domain and
interwiki name.

Also, note that no: is not the "bokm?l Wikipedia", as bokm?l is only
one spelling standard of Standard Norwegian, which also includes
riksm?l (both bokm?l and riksm?l are major spelling standards, the
latter being used e.g. by the most significant Norwegian newspaper
(Aftenposten). Wolfram 2 mrt 2005 15:34 (CET)

============================================================

So now I have (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-February/037750.html)
someone saying it would be best to always use nb: and (above) someone
saying it would be best to always use no:. Then I have people at nn:
who really don't want it to be called no: at THEIR wiki. Could someone
please tell me who I am to listen to? By whom and where is the
decision made in a case like this?

Andre Engels


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Apache rewrite rule missing

body:
On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 09:04:02 +0000 (UTC), Walter Vermeir
<walter at wikipedia.be> wrote:

> Can the /wiki/ part not be removed removed completely form the url?

No. As Brion rightly points out, there are, and always will be, URLs
for things other than wiki pages. If, for instance,
http://en.wikipedia.org/skins was the URL of a wiki page called
"skins", where would the files (CSS, images, etc) for displaying the
skin be stored? And even more so, if http://en.wikipedia.org/w
referred to the article [[w]], all the URLs of the form
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=... would instantly break
(in fact, they would point to pages called things like
[[w/index.php?title=...]]).

While we could have all sorts of exceptions and rearrangements and
special cases, it would be an absolute maintenance nightmare, so I
agree with Brion that these short URLs should be considered
"incorrect" even if they work most of the time.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Rowan Collins wrote:
>>One could also say that only wiki articles should live under the
>>en.wikipedia.org namespace and everything else should be somewhere else,
>>like files.wikipedia.org or skins.wikipedia.org etc.
>
> Yes, that would certainly be a possibilty - but note that each
> sub-domain has its own installation of the MediaWiki software, so
> unless we had sub-sub-domains, like skins.en.wikipedia.org (which
> would make administering DNS that much harder), this would probably
> require some pretty major changes to the code to use some "common"
> repository - including some way of handling the exceptions where
> things *need* to be different, etc.

This part's actually not really true. We have a single installation of
MediaWiki, and about a half-dozen copies of the base docroot which
consist of a few identical symlinks and a couple different ones.

Hypothetically we could move some of the skin files etc to a
subdomain... but we could never eliminate a few things things like
robots.txt or the script itself, and we need to maintain the previous
standard URLs as valid entry points. Exceptions aren't tenable for
all-inclusive projects like ours, particularly not for the canonical URLs.

My preference has been to merge the language domains to get URLs like this:

http://wikipedia.org/en/Foobar
http://wiktionary.org/la/imperium

and perhaps things like this:
http://wikipedia.org/edit/fr/Nice
http://wikipedia.org/history/fr/Nice?from=200411112117
http://wikipedia.org/revision/fr/1063501

But we haven't got round to that yet. I've added some preliminary
support for 'action URLs' to the 1.5 code to allow prettifying the
non-view actions (edit, history, etc).

But we cannot and will not have canonical or standard URLs like this, ever:

http://en.wiktionary.org/robots.txt <- is this a dictionary entry or the
robots exclusion file??

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 253 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20050302/9ce34c44/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Chrome Pussycats, Twiddlers & Whackjobs

body:
Christiaan Briggs wrote:

> And at the same time this is the overwhelming beauty of the whole
> system. Not only do we set knowledge free so as to stop others from
> owning it but we also set it free so that you can pick up a set of all
> the tools and drive your car down to where you've bought your own
> garage and proceed to set up a shop with managers, and lead mechanics.

Unfortunately too many people who try to apply this system mispronounce
the word "lead".

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Nofollow (corr)

body:
Matthew Trump wrote:
> What's the status of the rel="nofollow" attribute on the English
> Wikipedia following the community vote?

For those of us who aren't English Wikipedia regulars, could you point
to this vote please? Thanks.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 253 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20050302/b3e322cb/attachment.pgp>


from_name: zero 0000

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: ArbCom - too attached to 'equal treatment'?

body:
I think the issue that Jay raised is a serious one.

The scenario is that A brings an arbitration case
against B, the committee looks at both sides of
the dispute, then both A and B get penalties.

This is a clear violation of A's right to due process.
Nobody should be penalised unless a case is brought
against them (by the committee if they wish), it passes
the initial voting as to whether the case should be
heard, then there is a period of argumentation and
collection of evidence specifically in relation to that
person.  This is not true in the case of A, since the
voting and Evidence page argumentation is primarily
in relation to B.

If the witnesses in a criminal trial are found to have
committed crimes themselves, they are sceduled
for their own trials.  They are not given sentences
by the original court.  The same principle should
hold here.

It is not enough to lump A and B together as
defendants at the beginning, as that can still mean
that A is put on trial due to the strength of the
case against B.

Zero.

__________________________________
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 de-sysopped

body:
geni wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 14:33:06 -0600, Phil Sandifer <sandifer at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

>>Why would they all have to recuse? This had nothing to do with the Ambi
>>block...

> Never said it was. It was a joke It's just between us we have probably
> racked up enough incerdents (both good and bad) with the arbcom
> members to make a case for questioning thier  nutrality.

There's *supposed* to be a rule that if half the arbcom recuses, then all
are unrecused and back on the case. It doesn't appear to have made it into
the rules. It or something like it really really needs to be in there.
Came close in the new Anthony case ...

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: Wikipedia reputation

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Tom Haws <hawstom at sprintmail.com> wrote:

>>I notice Jamesday <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jamesday> proposed
>>"...tagging based on quality metrics with no specific print or CD
>>target. Anyone else could then use those metrics to select articles for
>>any arbitrary target they desire, with only those selecting for
>>non-online targets being liable."  His context was legal concerns about
>>an Editorial committee producing a CD or Paper Wikipedia.

> Ack! No more blasted meta tages (meaning templates). A smarter system is needed
> that does not require an editor to edit or in any way change the content of an
> article by using said system.

Magnus Manske's rating system appears to be along those lines, i.e. it's
a separate thing entirely to the article space. We should assume we're
talking about something like that ;-)

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] How long can a title be? Database issue.

body:
> On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 20:14:25 +0000, Rowan Collins
> <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
>>The disadvantage of using {namespace_as_int, title_as_text} for link
>>targets is that this doesn't reflect how they're entered: [[Foo:Bar]]
>>could change in meaning from {0, "Foo:Bar"} to {20, "Bar"} if a custom
>>"Foo" namespace was created; the two forms could not, however,
>>co-exist.

Namespace creation is a rare event which requires administrative work.
Filtering by namespace on the other hand happens constantly.

>> This suggests to me that it would be better to just make the
>>link_to field wider than page_title (i.e. a width of 255 + a constant
>>MAX_NAMESPACE_LENGTH), and retain the current practice of storing the
>>destination as one string.

This would make it very difficult to use the links table for anything;
for instance Special:Recentchangeslinked would no longer be possible.

Richard Holton wrote:
> I notice that in the new schema, the 'page' table uses the
> {namespace_as_int, title_as_text} form, and it doesn't save the
> namespace within the title. (Was that true of the old schema as well?)

Yes. It's been that way for years.

> I don't want to second-guess the new schema. It does seem that the
> link tables should use the same method of identifying pages as the
> 'page' table does.
>
> For 'categorylinks', having the namespace in the index would allow
> fast separation by namespace.

Lemme summarize the situation:

We have four link tables currently: links, brokenlinks, imagelinks, and
categorylinks.

links         is from id->target id
brokenlinks   is from id->(text target namespace+title)
imagelinks    is from id->target title [namespace is 6 by definition]
categorylinks is from id->target title [namespace is 14 by definition]

In all, the 'from' is a key on page_id (cur_id in old schema) which
uniquely identifies the page doing the linking. This number persists
across page renaming.

In imagelinks and categorylinks, the target title can be used in
conjunction with the hardcoded namespace to join to page/cur for the target.

In brokenlinks, the target is ugly ugly text. This can't be used in any
joins. It should be changed to (namespace,title) but we are too lazy and
this hasn't been done yet. There is the additional problem that the size
limit of the field isn't 100% correct so there might be inconsistencies
with long titles.

In links, the target is a page_id/cur_id number, and can be used to do
joins. BUT, since linking is done by *name*, not by number, a
creation/deletion/renaming of the target page will break this entry.
Thus we have to clean up links, and shuffle pages around between links
and brokenlinks when these things happen.

This kind of updating can be a burden on the database during operations
on heavily-linked pages, so it's something we scalability-conscious folk
want to eliminate.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 253 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20050302/e16f9105/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
Think of Wikipedia as a massive garage where you can build any car you
want to. Great tools are provided, a lot of shop manuals are there, and
you get your own lift and away you go. Fantastic. But every one else,
and I mean everyone else in the garage can work on your car with you.
There's no "lead mechanics", no "shop floor managers", no anything. In
fact, the people who are allowed to work on your car can completely
disregard what you were doing with it. They could have flown in from
Boola-Boola Island 2 hours ago, not know the language, can't read the
manuals, and just go in and paint your car pink. And drive it. And leave
it somewhere. Now, since tools are free and paint is free and you can
easily go and retrieve your nice car and get it back to something
resembling sanity, a lot of the people in the garage see there's no
problems. But in fact, the fifth, or the hundredth time you're traipsing
down the lane to find your messed-up, polka-dotted,
covered-in-chrome-pussycats car, you're kind of inclined to drive it
into the lake and leave it upside down, wheels spinning.

This is what the inherent failure of wikipedia is. It's that there's a
small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and
twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the
mass of triddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content
generators stop being so and have to become content defenders. Woe be
that your take on things is off from the majority. Even if you can prove
something, you're now in the situation that anybody can change it. And
while that's all great in a happy-go-lucky flower shower sort of way,
it's when you realize that the people who are going to change it could
have absolutely no experience with the subject whatsoever, then you see
where we are.

(I plagiarized the above from Jason Scott, but I agree with every word.)

Uncle Ed


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: 172 de-sysopped

body:
Anthere wrote

> So, I really do not hold grunge against him.

Indeed, it is hard to see how Ed Poor can be held responsible for Nirvana.

He does, though, seem to think he is in some kind of old-timer WP heaven,
where procedures are at best tenuous.  Accountability rocks.

Charles


from_name: Alison Russell

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Customising the sidebar..removing links,
	adding a Google link..

body:
Hi,

I am using MediaWiki 1.4 beta-6 and the monobook style sheet. I want to
remove the links Community portal and Current events, and add a google link
beneath the search box. I tried following the document
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Customization:Quickbar which tells you to
edit defaultsettings.php.

$wgNavigationLinks = array (
        array( 'text'=>'mainpage', 'href'=>'mainpage' ),
        array( 'text'=>'portal', 'href'=>'portal-url' ),
        array( 'text'=>'currentevents', 'href'=>'currentevents-url' ),
        array( 'text'=>'mylink', 'href'=>'mylink-url' ),
        array( 'text'=>'help', 'href'=>'helppage' ),
        array( 'text'=>'sitesupport', 'href'=>'sitesupport-url' )
  );

I removed the links and saved and refreshed, but they have not been removed.

Any help is appreciated greatly...I am obviously changing the wrong file...
and also does anyone know how to add the Google link?

Thanks in advance,
Alison


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [WikiEN-l] A nasty and weird site

body:
Arno M schrieb:
> However, I do feel compelled to ask : who are those cute young friends on the yacht with Jimbo?

They're the price you get for your ten-millionth edit! :-)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Problems with Wikipedia's Interaction Design

body:
Kesava Mallela wrote:

>     * Too many entries in watch list make it very difficult to clear
> them on a day. Some kind of prioritization needs to be done...like
> ignoring the minor edits...or flagging
>           o the articles which are more prone to vandalism or
>           o an article where some real interesting edits are happening or
>           o articles on which some of your trusted buddies are working on...

I put in an enhancement request for multiple watchlists:

     http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1492

There's a workaround, which is to link the pages on a subpage of your
user page, and watch the "related changes". Though (1) that's clunky
(2) that list is then public, unlike the standard watchlist.

- d.


from_name: Viajero

subject: [WikiEN-l] Exeunt 172

body:
172 has announced on his user page he has left. I know that this is not
the first time and I also know that not everyone on this list will
necessarily find this unfortunate, but I think it is a pity as his
contributions have been enormous. The issue appears to be, not so much
the brief de-sysoping yesterday, but rather the editorial process. Here
is the text on his user page:

[quote]

I am an historian specializing in international political economy, which
allowed me to work on a diverse range of time and place on this site. I
was a Wikipedia contributor from late 2002 to February 2005, and an
administrator from May 2003 to February 2005.

Over the past couple of years, I was using a pseudonymous account, and
the name I was using in my Wikipedia email account was not my own. Given
Wikipedia's sketchy reputation in some circles, I wanted to avoid any
possible negative consequences in the "real world"; and I did not want
the less-than-friendly environment on Wikipedia to come back to haunt me
off-line. Unfortunately, when the community knows you as 'just a
number,' you don't tend to be treated so well.

I will no longer contribute to Wikipedia. The project is no longer
workable. There are no signs of Wikipedia developing an authoritative
public review process. The absence of one fosters a total disregard for
expertise in this community; whether nor not you are taken seriously
depends not on the merit of your work but rather how many friends you
have made with the users who dominate the mailing list, IRC, and the
administrative pages.

Instead, we have a dispute resolution process fetishizing increasingly
rigid (and idiosyncratic) community norms and customs without reference
to who's writing encyclopedic material and who's not. As a result, far
too much power and status is given to people who are frankly nothing
more than trolls, as long as they're good at gaming the system. The
admins are increasingly obsessive of process, disregarding the public
credibility of the project. Far too many seem to get off on "patrolling"
conflicts between other users that they do not understand, an aspect of
Wikipedia that is poisoning the atmosphere.

Thus, in recent months I was spending more time dealing with users with
no intention of writing encyclopedia content, who were spending many
hours a day feeding off conflict between other users or were dumping
sheer nonsense in as many articles as possible. I no longer have the
patience to deal with this. I will return, however, if there are any
changes allowing me to become a more efficacious user in the future.

172 14:44, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[/quote]

From: [[User:172]]


from_name: Lars Alvik

subject: [Wikipedia-l] no: or nb: (again)

body:
Go for no:.
Riksm?l can be compared to bokm?l as american english and english.
Minor differences. As for Aftenposten it's in theory riksm?l, but
generally the articles is written in moderate bokm?l.

As for me i would welcome a formalization of no: to just bokm?l (and
riksm?l), but with bokm?l as the dominant one, ie, all the categories
in bokm?l. (example S?r-Afrika instead of Syd-Afrika).

mvh.

Lars Alvik
Byr?krat no:wiki.

P? 2. mar. 2005 kl. 15:49 skrev Andre Engels:

> I got the following message on my (Dutch) userpage:
>
> ===========================================================
>
> I don't subscribe to the mailing list, so I respond here:
>
> The Norwegian Wikipedia uses no: as its interwiki code. Until we have
> decided to do otherwise, please respect our choice of domain and
> interwiki name.
>
> Also, note that no: is not the "bokm?l Wikipedia", as bokm?l is only
> one spelling standard of Standard Norwegian, which also includes
> riksm?l (both bokm?l and riksm?l are major spelling standards, the
> latter being used e.g. by the most significant Norwegian newspaper
> (Aftenposten). Wolfram 2 mrt 2005 15:34 (CET)
>
> ============================================================
>
> So now I have
> (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-February/
> 037750.html)
> someone saying it would be best to always use nb: and (above) someone
> saying it would be best to always use no:. Then I have people at nn:
> who really don't want it to be called no: at THEIR wiki. Could someone
> please tell me who I am to listen to? By whom and where is the
> decision made in a case like this?
>
> Andre Engels
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Richard Holton

body:
On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 20:14:25 +0000, Rowan Collins
<rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 13:35:06 -0600, Richard Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > In looking through the MediaWiki schema (both current and new), I've
> > noticed that page titles are given a max length of 255 chars. However,
> > it seems that in some cases, this title includes the namespace, and in
> > others it does not -- namespace is stored as an Int or is implied by
> > context (eg, categorylinks, imagelinks).
>
> Hm, I see what you mean - there aren't that many places where it's a
> problem, but certainly 'brokenlinks' has the namespace as part of the
> [destination] title. So it seems an article could have 255 characters
> + a namespace (because the namespace isn't considered part of the
> title) and not fit in brokenlinks (because that just stores the text
> of the link, rather than a namespace and title).
>
> There's been talk of merging the various links tables to all be
> id->name (rather than some being id->id), because the text of the link
> doesn't change, but the article it refers to might. This problem could
> be addressed by anyone implementing that.
>
> The disadvantage of using {namespace_as_int, title_as_text} for link
> targets is that this doesn't reflect how they're entered: [[Foo:Bar]]
> could change in meaning from {0, "Foo:Bar"} to {20, "Bar"} if a custom
> "Foo" namespace was created; the two forms could not, however,
> co-exist. This suggests to me that it would be better to just make the
> link_to field wider than page_title (i.e. a width of 255 + a constant
> MAX_NAMESPACE_LENGTH), and retain the current practice of storing the
> destination as one string.
>

I notice that in the new schema, the 'page' table uses the
{namespace_as_int, title_as_text} form, and it doesn't save the
namespace within the title. (Was that true of the old schema as well?)

I don't want to second-guess the new schema. It does seem that the
link tables should use the same method of identifying pages as the
'page' table does.

For 'categorylinks', having the namespace in the index would allow
fast separation by namespace.

-Rich Holton
en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


body:
On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 17:04:14 -0500, Poor, Edmund W <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> Think of Wikipedia as a massive garage where you can build any car you
> want to. Great tools are provided, a lot of shop manuals are there, and
> you get your own lift and away you go. Fantastic. But every one else,
> and I mean everyone else in the garage can work on your car with you.
> There's no "lead mechanics", no "shop floor managers", no anything. In
> fact, the people who are allowed to work on your car can completely
> disregard what you were doing with it. They could have flown in from
> Boola-Boola Island 2 hours ago, not know the language, can't read the
> manuals, and just go in and paint your car pink. And drive it. And leave
> it somewhere. Now, since tools are free and paint is free and you can
> easily go and retrieve your nice car and get it back to something
> resembling sanity, a lot of the people in the garage see there's no
> problems. But in fact, the fifth, or the hundredth time you're traipsing
> down the lane to find your messed-up, polka-dotted,
> covered-in-chrome-pussycats car, you're kind of inclined to drive it
> into the lake and leave it upside down, wheels spinning.
>

Except...it's not your car!

--

en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


body:
On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 18:01:58 +0100, Tels <nospam-abuse at bloodgate.com> wrote:

> > And even more so, if http://en.wikipedia.org/w
> > referred to the article [[w]], all the URLs of the form
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=... would instantly break
> > (in fact, they would point to pages called things like
> > [[w/index.php?title=...]]).
>
> No, simple fix: don't redirect URLs with "/" in them. That would not allow
> a redirect for the article "skins/scans", but articles with "/" in them
> are probably in the minority.

Well, as I said "While we could have all sorts of exceptions and
rearrangements and
special cases, it would be an absolute maintenance nightmare".

But to be more specific, the fact that such names are in the
*minority* doesn't make any difference - if short URLs of this form
were to be considered "correct" and even "normal", as people are
suggesting, they would have to *always* work. Otherwise, people would
just be extremely confused when they typed one in which *didn't* work
- if they were never redirected to the longer form (or, arguably, if
they didn't notice it, as with the former setup) they would have no
idea what was wrong with the address they'd typed.

> In fact, without the check for "/", the redirect would also redirect
> "/wiki/article" to "/wiki/wiki/article", so it must be already in place..

No, because this isn't actually a rewrite rule (as Alfio quite
reasonably guessed) but a 404 handler, for when people enter a URL
that doesn't exist. So no exceptions of this kind are needed, because
those URLs *do* exist (in as much as they are handled by the wiki
scripts).

> One could also say that only wiki articles should live under the
> en.wikipedia.org namespace and everything else should be somewhere else,
> like files.wikipedia.org or skins.wikipedia.org etc.

Yes, that would certainly be a possibilty - but note that each
sub-domain has its own installation of the MediaWiki software, so
unless we had sub-sub-domains, like skins.en.wikipedia.org (which
would make administering DNS that much harder), this would probably
require some pretty major changes to the code to use some "common"
repository - including some way of handling the exceptions where
things *need* to be different, etc.

What's more, this still wouldn't deal with the issue of URLs like
.../w/index.php, which are inherently both project-dependent and part
of the core code. What's more, these aren't just used within the
software, but are extensively linked to externally, so any
rearrangement would have to leave them working as expected. Like I
say, any exception you make is going to be very confusing as soon as
somebody tries it expecting the opposite behaviour.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
JAY JG said:

> As the  person e-mailing me put it
>
> "It looks like the arbcom is going to put them both on POV parole,
> which is  silly; they have this thing about equal treatment. It's like
> if I report  someone to the police for a theft, the police first of all
> have to  investigate whether I've committed theft too, because if they
> charge one,  they have to charge both."
>
> Is this a valid concern?
>
I don't think so.  Arbitration is part of dispute resolution.  The
arbitrators must examine the behavior of all parties to the dispute in
order to arrive at factual findings and remedies that will stick.


list: foundation-l

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Q1 2005 Fund Drive was a phenomenal success

body:
All the final updates are in and all told we brought-in the equivelant of
$94,648.70 in this fund drive (26% more than we asked for). 21% of the total
(15,254.66 Euros | US$20,046.15) was from Wikimedia Deutschland.

If I have time I'll conduct an analysis of the fund drive this weekend. I'm
particularly interested in what can be done to improve future fund drives.

Until then, here is the detailed fund drive page:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q1

Daniel Mayer,
Wikimedia CFO

__________________________________
Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday!
Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/


list: wikimedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Q1 2005 Fund Drive was a phenomenal success


body:
On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 23:00:41 +0100, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Does the restriction for 250 characters apply to the number of character
> in the URL or in the number of characters that make up the name of the
> article eg
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Hy-%D5%94%D6%80%D5%AB%D5%BD%D5%BF%D5%B8%D5%BD_%D5%AE%D5%B6%D5%A1%D5%BE_%D6%87_%D5%B0%D5%A1%D5%B5%D5%BF%D5%B6%D5%A5%D6%81%D5%A1%D5%BE%2C_%D5%B4%D5%A5%D5%A6%D5%AB%2C_%D5%B1%D5%A5%D5%A6%D5%AB_%D5%8D%D5%B8%D6%82%D6%80%D5%A2_%D5%A1%D5%BE%D5%A5%D5%BF%D5%AB%D5%BD.ogg
> which is Image:Hy-??????? ???? ? ?????????, ????, ???? ????? ??????.ogg
>

As far as I can tell, it only applies to the article/page title, not
the formed URL

-Rich Holton
en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


body:
On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 17:10:35 +0000, Alison Russell
<alisonrussellireland at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am using MediaWiki 1.4 beta-6 and the monobook style sheet. I want to
> remove the links Community portal and Current events, and add a google link
> beneath the search box. I tried following the document
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Customization:Quickbar which tells you to
> edit defaultsettings.php.

Never edit DefaultSettings.php - as its name suggests, its for the
*default* settings, not your customised ones. All customisation should
be done in your LocalSettings.php file, which is executed later, and
therefore over-rides the defaults. I've added an extra reminder to
this effect in the page you read, although it did already say "...and
copy it to LocalSettings.php"

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Pieter Konink

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Unexpected forwarding to port 2222 at installation
	start

body:
Hi, this is my first post, thank you for looking.

I have uploaded the wikimedia 1.3.11 installation files to my server and
chmodded my config directory to 777. I access my site:

http://www.paperheadache.com/

However, when I click the link to the config page I am taken to here:

http://www.paperheadache.com:2222/

I suppose this might not be much of a problem except that I am using
virtual web hosting and that latter address takes me to my DirectAdmin
site log-in.

Forgive me if this is an easy question, but I am at a loss how to
circumvent this or if I will not be able to use the Wikimedia installer.
I appreciate any insight.


from_name: Tels

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Moin,

On Wednesday 02 March 2005 16:50, Rowan Collins wrote:
> On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 09:04:02 +0000 (UTC), Walter Vermeir
>
> <walter at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> > Can the /wiki/ part not be removed removed completely form the url?
>
> No. As Brion rightly points out, there are, and always will be, URLs
> for things other than wiki pages. If, for instance,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/skins was the URL of a wiki page called
> "skins", where would the files (CSS, images, etc) for displaying the
> skin be stored?

Er, maybe in <http://en.wikipedia.org/skins/> ?

> And even more so, if http://en.wikipedia.org/w
> referred to the article [[w]], all the URLs of the form
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=... would instantly break
> (in fact, they would point to pages called things like
> [[w/index.php?title=...]]).

No, simple fix: don't redirect URLs with "/" in them. That would not allow
a redirect for the article "skins/scans", but articles with "/" in them
are probably in the minority.

In fact, without the check for "/", the redirect would also redirect
"/wiki/article" to "/wiki/wiki/article", so it must be already in place..

> While we could have all sorts of exceptions and rearrangements and
> special cases, it would be an absolute maintenance nightmare, so I
> agree with Brion that these short URLs should be considered
> "incorrect" even if they work most of the time.

One could also say that only wiki articles should live under the
en.wikipedia.org namespace and everything else should be somewhere else,
like files.wikipedia.org or skins.wikipedia.org etc.

Just my 0.02?,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Wed Mar  2 17:59:14 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "Not King yet."

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

iQEVAwUBQiXxj3cLPEOTuEwVAQGcXQf/SRaJ8syFQ9se179YgWCuOOFLFHxXgsQb
sWH/Lx4G5enspOFrIfJ0ZR9yQkSrTa5gl3x+u7m8eq/Z1/+TQJWsX47j3K2yI6RC
h2XD1HFX+EyJIiDVV1DmALQHOxWB8x92dT0NFxP33v9kd6WhTmCRaw/eRnNHjeAX
eOBeEJyeSzRuOrS3AlhRuVrUzesGsRardqiMhCLzTgn9CYpxws+Q/JmRHMSws+kO
dmFdCx5+vQiKzlJ4qD97GwYOA7vFB8zNlOuYHYyC2Y0pHRXgA+cMMhE2IuApy7Uk
sh31dsojRA7sbzwDxpzqJTTloai9hOwR4gseJb242pKM2DSKI08xrA==
=Q2Nc
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: multilingualism (was Q1 drive)

body:
Henry Tan-Tenn wrote:

> Just now I listened Jimbo's interview by the NPR journalist Brian Lehrer
> , who did mention that Wikipedia had some 160+ languages.  But not
> surprisingly this was hardly a central aspect of the story.  I think one
> reason is that the English edition has garnered the most attention due
> to its age, size and activity, and the criticism specifically directed
> at it by the Encyclopedia Britannica and others.  Another is the
> assumption that should en: fail (or be judged to have failed), one can
> safely assume smaller and less active editions will also fail.  So the
> discourse ends up circling around en: as a test case, almost to the
> exclusion of other innovative aspects of Wikipedia.  This is unfortunate
> but probably unavoidable given the limited understanding and experience
> the public has about how wiki works.  But I do agree that
> "multilingualism" should be cited more often as a central
> characteristics of Wikipedia, in the sense that Wikipedia is not merely
> one edition replicated hundreds of times (though I imagine it may feel
> that way to our developers), but rather the whole is more than the
> individual languages put together.  That might sound a bit of a cliche,
> but I think there's something there worth developing.

I like to point out to people that the *German* version won in a blind
test against two commercial encyclopedias, and we'd like to bring the
English one up to the same standard. This points out that though en: is
a remarkable achievement, at least one other language version has in
fact tested even better!

- d.


from_name: Stephen Forrest

body:
On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 17:32:38 -0600, Richard Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:

> Except...it's not your car!

Well, not quite.  It's *was* his car, but it stopped being so the
moment he brought it into the shop.

>From that point on it became either the property of the shop, or the
collective property of all the people in the shop (depending on how
you see things).

Steve


body:
Pieter Konink wrote:
> However, when I click the link to the config page I am taken to here:
>
> http://www.paperheadache.com:2222/
>
> I suppose this might not be much of a problem except that I am using
> virtual web hosting and that latter address takes me to my DirectAdmin
> site log-in.

If your hosting takes over the /config directory and you can't prevent
this, you can rename it to another directory. You'll have to make a
couple tweaks to config/index.php to change 'config' to the new dir:

index.php:318:$conf->ScriptPath = preg_replace( '{^(.*)/config.*$}',
'$1', $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] );
index.php:411:          chdir( "config" );
index.php:515:                  chdir( "config" );
index.php:677:                  $exit = urlencode(
"$wgServer{$conf->ScriptPath}/config/index.php?License=cc&RightsUrl=[license_url]&RightsText=[license_name]&RightsCode=[license_code]&RightsIcon=[license_button]"
);

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 253 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20050302/d33c7735/attachment.pgp>


body:
Karl A. Krueger said:
>
> It would be unfortunate if people became afraid to report real abuses
> because they did not want to be forced to defend themselves from unfair
> or untrue accusations by the abuser.

I don't buy that for one second.  The whole point about an arbitration
case is that the thing has reached a point where some kind of executive
action is required.  Unfair and untrue accusations are, by their very
nature, not going to get anywhere with an evidence-based, proactive
arbcom, and there are advocates and a right of appeal.


body:
Jay JG wrote

> If one
> has been making thousands of Wikipedia edits over months or years, it is
> almost inevitable that some edits or statements will seem questionable,
and
> there is a belief that ArbCom will feel the need to sanction both sides to
> give the appearance of even-handedness.  I'm not saying this is actually
the
> case, but the belief is certainly out there, and the idea that "it's just
> not worth getting rid of troublemakers" has been expressed more than once.

After an extended period where the major criticism of the ArbCom was that it
was slow to rule - now not the perceived difficulty - it is naturally the
case that some other major points will be brought up.

Looking at this one,  my reactions are:

- WP has lived with some proportion of difficult users, since its inception;
- 'getting rid' of troublemakers is not the only approach;
- if it is really being said that honest hard-working editors are being held
to high standards of behaviour, then I think that is as it should be.

Perhaps there is a click of the ratchet, here.  I hope it is towards a more
civil place, for everyone.

Charles


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 13:55:51 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> In the long-term, why should there be such things?  If something is not
> a wiki page, it shouldn't be using part of the public URL-space on
> en.wikipedia.org.  Such things could be hosted at e.g.
> skins.wikipedia.org, or skins.wikipedia.org/en/ if they must be
> localized.  There already is such a place for images (Wikimedia Commons).

Let me paste a URL from another tab of my browser:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Googlepedia&action=edit
Is that a wiki page? Yes. Is it of the form <server>/wiki/<pagename>?
No. Is there any logic to farming it off to some other domain? No. It
is, always has been, and always should be "using part of the public
URL-space on en.wikipedia.org".

Or consider an address like
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Googlepedia&diff=10548376&oldid=10548329
- the kind of address that people frequently bookmark, refer to in
discussions, e-mails, external websites, etc. Hence, the kind of
address that it would be extremely foolish to break by rearranging the
URL-space.

Sorry if this comes across as rather rude, I'm just fed up of
repeating the same argument again and again because people haven't
understood it. Let me summarise:

* there are things in the URL-space of, e.g., en.wikipedia.org that
are not wiki pages

* some of these, such as elements of the skins, are or should be only
referenced internally, and would therefore be safe to move
* some, however, such as the scripts in the /w/ directory are
extensively referenced in all sorts of external contexts, and
therefore *must* be retained with their current function
* there is no guarantee what URLs the software will need in the
future, and whether they will need to be externally referencable

* it would be possible to create a redirection system with exceptions
for all the things which aren't wiki pages; wiki pages conflicting
with those exceptions would then be inaccessible via that redirection
system
* in order for people to then access such pages, there would need to
be a longer URL format that was not prone to these conflicts
* people would need to know what those longer URLs were
* the software would need to generate those longer URLs, because
unlike a human it couldn't check and then go "oh, maybe I need the
longer form"
* therefore, the longer URLs would have to be considered, as they
always have been, the "correct" and "normal" form
* the 404 handler in its current state does exactly this, by
redirecting people, but informing them that they are being redirected.

Like I say, I do apologise for getting frustrated about this; I do
realise that if people misunderstand me, it's as likely my fault as
theirs.

One final thought is that for particular things like the Foundation
website, invisible redirects could be created *on a case-by-case
basis* so that URLs like http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising
could be given out as "official" URLs (or for cases where they already
have been). The Foundation site is an exception, in the sense that to
most users it is a static site on which they can look up information;
only for a few people is it usable as a wiki (i.e. edittable). It
therefore seems unnatural to have key URLs containning the word
"wiki".

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Exeunt 172

body:
Stephen Forrest wrote:

>On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 12:09:50 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>>Sounds like another POV-pushing PhD holder who's annoyed that everyone
>>doesn't just say "oh, you are an 'expert', do with the articles as you
>>wish".
>>
>>(And anyone who's read any history articles by 172 can attest to the
>>fact that they were highly propagandistic, generally turning into
>>outright apologies, if not screeds, for left-wing dictatorships.)
>>
>
>I know next to nothing about 172 or his editing history.  Based on a
>cursory glance into his edits, I suspect that it would take me a
>nontrivial amount of time for me to find out whether the claim that he
>is a propagandist is true.
>
>So, as a contributor ignorant of the particular details of this
>situation, who will probably remain so, I find the "good riddance"
>attitude I'm getting from this string of emails rather disturbing.
>
Some of us have had long and unpleasant histories with 172. It
wasn't even that many months ago on this list when I had the
temerity to point out a rather suspicious omission in one of "his"
articles, and he announced he was going to quit WP forever unless
I made a public apology for my scurrilous accusation. He even
contacted me directly, begging me to apologize, presumably so that
he wouldn't lose face for backing off his ultimatum. (What person
using a pseudonym worries about reputation? It was very weird.)

>
>Of course, it may be that everything is on the level here and the
>claims about 172 are true; I would probably bet on this outcome.  But
>since I don't think I'm capable of verifying this to my own
>satisfaction, I'd be more comfortable if I saw more examinations of
>his stated reasons for quitting, and fewer such dismissals.
>
Sorry, but I don't really have any desire to replay all of it
for you. I used up a bunch of my precious WP time trying to work
with 172, finally gave up and took everything he touched off my
watchlist, was much happier subsequently.

Stan


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] no: or nb: (again)

body:
I don't recall saying all Bokm?l users are Nynorskhaters.

I simply said that this certain person was a nynorsk hater, by which I
meant that they /sounded to me/ like a Nynorsk hater.

Many people will deny that any prejudices against Nynrosk exist in
Norway, but if Nynorsk is your primary language it soon becomes
obvious.

Most of the time, it is due to people resenting having to learn
Nynorsk in school when they saw little practical use for it. Similarly
in the US, when schools were first integrated, sometimes people were
made to drive a really long time to go to a school that was primarily
of the other race, and this often unintentionally breeded hate.

There are certainly many Bokm?l users without such a prejudice, but
when you talk with somebody about the different varieties of Norwegian
it quickly becomes apparent.

Things like using "standard Norwegian" or "normal Norwegian" for
Bokm?l, a sort of obvious resentment that may not be stated outright,
repeatedly belittling Nynorsk, sometimes indicating that Nynorsk is
bad or worthless, sometimes saying outright that they hate Nynorsk,
and almost always showing a clear dominating attitude towards Nynorsk.

There are also different levels of prejudice. Some people dislike
Nynorsk with a passion (read: hate), others don't like it much but
don't mind, and some just have an unconcious aversion to it but have
no real problem with it.

In foreign universities that teach Norwegian, by asking the professors
if they include any teaching about Nynorsk, and if they don't why not,
it will quickly become apparent whether 1. they are a regular user of
nynorsk, 2. they prefer bokm?l but have no problem with nynorsk, or 3.
have a prejudice against Nynorsk.

In my experience most fall into the first and second categories, and
most offer at least some matieral for learning Nynorsk, but there is a
minority that teaches their students that Nynorsk is bad,
insignificant, inferior, and to be avoided.

When it comes down to it, they are both equally official in the state
of Norway. Nynorsk has less people that prefer it, but it is not a
10%-90% division or anything else extreme like that; it is somewhere
between 20-80 and 30-70, and there are a great number of people who
use both regularly but prefer Bokm?l.

Interestingly, the number of people who speak a dialect of Norwegian
which is grammatically and lexically closer to Nynorsk than to Bokm?l
is much higher than the number of people that actually prefer to write
and read Nynorsk.

Mark

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 02:14:16 +0100, Lars Alvik <larsal at stud.ntnu.no> wrote:
> Hmpf, passing jurgement on people you don't really know? And labeling
> everyone that use bokm?l as "nynorskhater". I'm really curious what i'm
> being labeled as. Damn, this debate did really not have anything to do
> with nynorsk vs. bokm?l, they are more or less happily coexisting with
> the status quo. The current debate is about calling no: bokm?l or
> norsk.
>
> mvh.
>
> Lars Alvik
>
> P? 2. mar. 2005 kl. 22:39 skrev Mark Williamson:
>
> > I like "standard norwegian" - you should ignore this guy as he is a
> > typical norwegian high-school Nynorskhater.
> >
> > Mark
> >
> > On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 15:49:30 +0100, Andre Engels
> > <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I got the following message on my (Dutch) userpage:
> >>
> >> ===========================================================
> >>
> >> I don't subscribe to the mailing list, so I respond here:
> >>
> >> The Norwegian Wikipedia uses no: as its interwiki code. Until we have
> >> decided to do otherwise, please respect our choice of domain and
> >> interwiki name.
> >>
> >> Also, note that no: is not the "bokm?l Wikipedia", as bokm?l is only
> >> one spelling standard of Standard Norwegian, which also includes
> >> riksm?l (both bokm?l and riksm?l are major spelling standards, the
> >> latter being used e.g. by the most significant Norwegian newspaper
> >> (Aftenposten). Wolfram 2 mrt 2005 15:34 (CET)
> >>
> >> ============================================================
> >>
> >> So now I have
> >> (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-February/
> >> 037750.html)
> >> someone saying it would be best to always use nb: and (above) someone
> >> saying it would be best to always use no:. Then I have people at nn:
> >> who really don't want it to be called no: at THEIR wiki. Could someone
> >> please tell me who I am to listen to? By whom and where is the
> >> decision made in a case like this?
> >>
> >> Andre Engels
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> >> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> >> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Exeunt 172

body:
On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 12:09:50 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Sounds like another POV-pushing PhD holder who's annoyed that everyone
> doesn't just say "oh, you are an 'expert', do with the articles as you
> wish".
>
> (And anyone who's read any history articles by 172 can attest to the
> fact that they were highly propagandistic, generally turning into
> outright apologies, if not screeds, for left-wing dictatorships.)

I know next to nothing about 172 or his editing history.  Based on a
cursory glance into his edits, I suspect that it would take me a
nontrivial amount of time for me to find out whether the claim that he
is a propagandist is true.

So, as a contributor ignorant of the particular details of this
situation, who will probably remain so, I find the "good riddance"
attitude I'm getting from this string of emails rather disturbing.

Of course, it may be that everything is on the level here and the
claims about 172 are true; I would probably bet on this outcome.  But
since I don't think I'm capable of verifying this to my own
satisfaction, I'd be more comfortable if I saw more examinations of
his stated reasons for quitting, and fewer such dismissals.

Steve


body:
On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 13:35:06 -0600, Richard Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
> In looking through the MediaWiki schema (both current and new), I've
> noticed that page titles are given a max length of 255 chars. However,
> it seems that in some cases, this title includes the namespace, and in
> others it does not -- namespace is stored as an Int or is implied by
> context (eg, categorylinks, imagelinks).

Hm, I see what you mean - there aren't that many places where it's a
problem, but certainly 'brokenlinks' has the namespace as part of the
[destination] title. So it seems an article could have 255 characters
+ a namespace (because the namespace isn't considered part of the
title) and not fit in brokenlinks (because that just stores the text
of the link, rather than a namespace and title).

There's been talk of merging the various links tables to all be
id->name (rather than some being id->id), because the text of the link
doesn't change, but the article it refers to might. This problem could
be addressed by anyone implementing that.

The disadvantage of using {namespace_as_int, title_as_text} for link
targets is that this doesn't reflect how they're entered: [[Foo:Bar]]
could change in meaning from {0, "Foo:Bar"} to {20, "Bar"} if a custom
"Foo" namespace was created; the two forms could not, however,
co-exist. This suggests to me that it would be better to just make the
link_to field wider than page_title (i.e. a width of 255 + a constant
MAX_NAMESPACE_LENGTH), and retain the current practice of storing the
destination as one string.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 16:48:51 -0800, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> Lemme summarize the situation:
>
> We have four link tables currently: links, brokenlinks, imagelinks, and
> categorylinks.
>
> links         is from id->target id
> brokenlinks   is from id->(text target namespace+title)
> imagelinks    is from id->target title [namespace is 6 by definition]
> categorylinks is from id->target title [namespace is 14 by definition]
>
> In all, the 'from' is a key on page_id (cur_id in old schema) which
> uniquely identifies the page doing the linking. This number persists
> across page renaming.
>
> In imagelinks and categorylinks, the target title can be used in
> conjunction with the hardcoded namespace to join to page/cur for the target.
>
> In brokenlinks, the target is ugly ugly text. This can't be used in any
> joins. It should be changed to (namespace,title) but we are too lazy and
> this hasn't been done yet. There is the additional problem that the size
> limit of the field isn't 100% correct so there might be inconsistencies
> with long titles.
>
> In links, the target is a page_id/cur_id number, and can be used to do
> joins. BUT, since linking is done by *name*, not by number, a
> creation/deletion/renaming of the target page will break this entry.
> Thus we have to clean up links, and shuffle pages around between links
> and brokenlinks when these things happen.
>
> This kind of updating can be a burden on the database during operations
> on heavily-linked pages, so it's something we scalability-conscious folk
> want to eliminate.
>

Thanks for the clarity, Brion. If I understand things correctly, we
should look at eventually changing 'links' and 'broken links' to use:
from id->(to namespace, to title).

Would there be a need for separate tables then?  Such a configuration
would require a lookup on the page table for each link when rendering
a page. Although, now that I think about it, that's probably required
now anyway.

Categorylinks seems to be a bit of a special case, since it really
amounts to a reverse link. Adding [[category:foo]] to page 'bar'
effectively adds a link to 'bar' on category:foo. At the same time,
there can be broken category links on a page, but not broken page
links on the category listing.

At the moment, I'm thinking of adding a "fromNamespace" field to
categorylinks. This will decouple the display of pages from the
display of parent categories, and would facilitate breaking the
category display into namespaces.

-Rich Holton
en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


from_name: Marco Krohn

body:
wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org wrote:

> I like to point out to people that the *German* version won in a blind
> test against two commercial encyclopedias, and we'd like to bring the
> English one up to the same standard. This points out that though en: is
> a remarkable achievement, at least one other language version has in
> fact tested even better!

IMHO the English Wikipedia was and continues to be better than
the German one, both in terms of quality and quantity. This of course
does not hold for topics that are related to Germany.

best regards,
  Marco

______________________________________________________________
Verschicken Sie romantische, coole und witzige Bilder per SMS!
Jetzt bei WEB.DE FreeMail: http://f.web.de/?mc=021193


body:
JAY JG said:
> The  difference between the system here and that in the real world is
> that here  the person making the accusation is also automatically both
> the prosecuting  attorney and the defendant in an inevitable
> counter-suit; this is a heavy  burden, and a serious disincentive to
> "get involved".

AMA.


from_name: dpbsmith at verizon.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Cars, articles, magic pennies

body:
> From: "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>
>

> Think of Wikipedia as a massive garage where you can build any car you
> want to. Great tools are provided, a lot of shop manuals are there, and
> you get your own lift and away you go. Fantastic. But every one else,
> and I mean everyone else in the garage can work on your car with you...
[snip]
> But in fact, the fifth, or the hundredth time you're traipsing
> down the lane to find your messed-up, polka-dotted,
> covered-in-chrome-pussycats car, you're kind of inclined to drive it
> into the lake and leave it upside down, wheels spinning.
> (I plagiarized the above from Jason Scott, but I agree with every
> word.)

> Uncle Ed

> From: Richard Holton <richholton at gmail.com>

> Except...it's not your car!

Ah, that old problematical analogy. The magic thing about intellectual
"property" is that if someone takes your car and puts polka-dots on it
and covers it in chrome pussycats the result is that... now you have
TWO cars.

For example, if Ed Poor borrows Jason Scott's car, Ed Poor has a car
and Jason Scott still has his. (In this case, I certainly remember the
phrase about moving from creating content to defending content. I may
be recalling incorrectly but I don't remember chrome pussycats. Is it
possible that _Ed_ added chrome pussycats to _Jason's_ car?

Anyone else know Malvina Reynold's "Magic Penny?"

Love is something if you give it away, give it away, give it away,
Love is something if you give it away, you end up having--more!

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Henry Tan-Tenn wrote:

> Just now I listened Jimbo's interview by the NPR journalist Brian
> Lehrer, who did mention that Wikipedia had some 160+ languages.  But
> not surprisingly this was hardly a central aspect of the story.  I
> think one reason is that the English edition has garnered the most
> attention due to its age, size and activity, and the criticism
> specifically directed at it by the Encyclopedia Britannica and
> others.  Another is the assumption that should en: fail (or be judged
> to have failed), one can safely assume smaller and less active
> editions will also fail.  So the discourse ends up circling around en:
> as a test case, almost to the exclusion of other innovative aspects of
> Wikipedia.  This is unfortunate but probably unavoidable given the
> limited understanding and experience the public has about how wiki
> works.  But I do agree that "multilingualism" should be cited more
> often as a central characteristics of Wikipedia, in the sense that
> Wikipedia is not merely one edition replicated hundreds of times
> (though I imagine it may feel that way to our developers), but rather
> the whole is more than the individual languages put together.  That
> might sound a bit of a cliche, but I think there's something there
> worth developing.

Hoi,
When Wikipedia is to be in the news, people want Jimbo. He is seen as
the main man, the icon of our effort and, Jimbo does do a great job. The
thing with Jimbo is however, that he does not scale. He travels more and
more and even at home, he gives loads of interviews and is increasingly
unavailable on irc. This is great in that his work really increases the
awareness of our wikimedia projects but it would be much better when the
projects establish their own press contacts and present themselves as
valid spokespersons for the projects.

This can be done by individuals but it would be easier when chapters
take a more assertive role in seeking the limelight. One way of
promoting the non English languages is by promoting them, by going to
computer shows, writing press releases, giving interviews, engaging
other organisations. By making use of the talents that exist in our
community Jimbo does not have to scale and, we have plenty of talent to
scale up our presence. We just have to appreciate why this is necessary
for our projects and why it is worth the effort.

Thanks,
    GerardM


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Q1 2005 Fund Drive over

body:
There is no specific number.

Of all the officially-recognised minority nationalities, there are
large ones (over 6 million), and there are small ones (under 1000).

Mark

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 03:17:48 +0000, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason
<avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 12:43:11 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think that, as long as you are careful to say "even available in
> > minority languages" rather than "there are also versions in the other
> > major languages of China" (which they really are - all of the
> > languages I mentioned have over 1m speakers in China), and as long as
> > you don't mention Tibetan by itself.
> >
>
> If I recall correctly the official definition of a "minority" anything
> in China is ~4-6 million, calling 1 million of anything over there
> might in their eyes be plain factually wrong.
>
> > On a side note, I forgot to include Mongolian.
> >
> > Mark
> >
> > On Tue, 01 Mar 2005 13:00:14 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> > > Mark Williamson wrote:
> > >
> > > >Some people may not think it is notable, but to give a local example
> > > >drives home that Wikipedia is very diverse. If you are presenting in
> > > >China, please don't forget to mention that we have places for people
> > > >to build Wikipedias in Yi, Zhuang, Tibetan, Uyghur, and many other
> > > >languages.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > I don't disagree with this, but it's probably worth noting that
> > > languages are intimately connected to culture, nationalism, and
> > > politics, so when to mention what can sometimes be a sensitive issue.
> > > In China, in particular, promoting of regional languages is often
> > > connected to promoting regional political independence (i.e. secession
> > > from China, or at least increased autonomy), so needs to be done
> > > somewhat carefully so we don't become seen as a meddling US-based
> > > political organization that's trying to break apart China or something
> > > like that.
> > >
> > > -Mark
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Exeunt 172

body:
BJ?rn Lindqvist wrote:

>I believe this is not the first
>time you have slandered 172 on this mailing list and I don't approve
>of it, especially not the part in which you pretend that your opinion
>is the commonly accepted one.
>
>
Please cite a specific message or STFU, to use your pleasant diction.

-Mark


body:
Marco Krohn wrote:

>wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org wrote:
>
>
>
>>I like to point out to people that the *German* version won in a blind
>>test against two commercial encyclopedias, and we'd like to bring the
>>English one up to the same standard. This points out that though en: is
>>a remarkable achievement, at least one other language version has in
>>fact tested even better!
>>
>>
>
>IMHO the English Wikipedia was and continues to be better than
>the German one, both in terms of quality and quantity. This of course
>does not hold for topics that are related to Germany.
>
>best regards,
>  Marco
>
Hoi,
Is it relevant what wikipedia is better ? I think the different
wikipedias can not be compared because few articles are translated and
most articles are rewritten. This way the information is more relevant
to the public reading the language and the bias that can be found in the
en:wikipedia is replaced by the bias that is prevalent in the non
English language. With a believe that the en:wikipedia is better, you
will not look into the other projects and find out what the strength is
of the other projects.

One nice translation excercise I learned about the other day were
Italian students translating German wikipedia articles into Italian. The
texts were chosen by the teacher, the students translate the article,
the student corrects and does the proof reading and the translated
article is posted in the Italian wikipedia. When the students become
more able with the German language, they will translate into German. :)

Thanks,
    GerardM

Thanks


body:
zero 0000 wrote:

>The scenario is that A brings an arbitration case
>against B, the committee looks at both sides of
>the dispute, then both A and B get penalties.
>
>This is a clear violation of A's right to due process.
>Nobody should be penalised unless a case is brought
>against them (by the committee if they wish), it passes
>the initial voting as to whether the case should be
>heard, then there is a period of argumentation and
>collection of evidence specifically in relation to that
>person.  This is not true in the case of A, since the
>voting and Evidence page argumentation is primarily
>in relation to B.
>
>If the witnesses in a criminal trial are found to have
>committed crimes themselves, they are sceduled
>for their own trials.  They are not given sentences
>by the original court.  The same principle should
>hold here.
>
>It is not enough to lump A and B together as
>defendants at the beginning, as that can still mean
>that A is put on trial due to the strength of the
>case against B.
>
>
This isn't the scenario here though---there are no cases against
specific people, only disputes *between* multiple people.  We require
that earlier steps of the dispute-resolution process be followed first,
such as mediation.  If these are unsuccessful, the matter goes to
arbitration.  The arbitration is thus arbitration of the dispute between
two people, and is charged with resolving it in some way.

The proper analogy, as the name implies, is to arbitration hearings, not
to court cases.  It is standard practice in arbitration that sanctions
may be levied against either or both of the parties to a hearing.

-Mark


body:
Delirium wrote:

> This isn't the scenario here though---there are no cases against
> specific people, only disputes *between* multiple people.  We require
> that earlier steps of the dispute-resolution process be followed
> first, such as mediation.  If these are unsuccessful, the matter goes
> to arbitration.  The arbitration is thus arbitration of the dispute
> between two people, and is charged with resolving it in some way.
>
> The proper analogy, as the name implies, is to arbitration hearings,
> not to court cases.  It is standard practice in arbitration that
> sanctions may be levied against either or both of the parties to a
> hearing.

I should clarify that the distinction in practice is admittedly
blurred.  Early on, arbitration cases were always labelled "X vs. Y",
but these days they're more often labelled with just one person's name,
which does pretty clearly imply that there's a single defendant.  The
actual discussions and decisions still go on under the assumption that
this is arbitration between disputants though, since that was how the
function of the arbitration committee was conceived.

Whether this ought to be changed to some other model, perhaps more
approximating court cases, is of course open to debate.

-Mark


body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Moin,

On Wednesday 02 March 2005 20:37, Rowan Collins wrote:
> On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 13:55:51 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
wrote:
> > In the long-term, why should there be such things?  If something is
> > not a wiki page, it shouldn't be using part of the public URL-space
> > on en.wikipedia.org.  Such things could be hosted at e.g.
> > skins.wikipedia.org, or skins.wikipedia.org/en/ if they must be
> > localized.  There already is such a place for images (Wikimedia
> > Commons).
>
> Let me paste a URL from another tab of my browser:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Googlepedia&action=edit

My apologies, I didn't know about /w/.

I still think it would made have (make?) sense to not put things except
wiki-articles under XY.wikipedia.org, however, this is too late now to
change.

Also, thank you explaining these matters. I know it must be frustrating to
have explain things over and over again. Maybe a FAQ for these things
could be created.

Again, thanx for your understanding and patience :)

Best wishes,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Wed Mar  2 20:51:30 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 This email violates U.S. patent #5,546,528 and EU patent EP0689133:

   ________________________________________
   | Header | Body | Attachements |	  |
   |--------+	   +----------------------|
   |					  |
   ~					  ~

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

iQEVAwUBQiYaDXcLPEOTuEwVAQE4+Af9Fwj/eiaFLOQusFus6R/GFcANSNlCMnF5
FaacZROtn44JxLYwoKYtymlMIrLlJMYMdfuQj3eN1fNtL6nkagB0C5TLT2awVVuX
ZQs5G6sq0pCAiHZ5l84tJQy6n8Po8Du0X7AGoKj1+jtWVMs7pi94IUihoRHI5dKn
rJ1kd63PKzlEJRvKwbcU59C/LskdsGt3xZfSFGAEbs4yZzvMSx220t1LOVtfX+70
5Dk79h72k5o8fJvH/oXSEJb1ofi12ZWJnfoxRFb3F0v8tXXllJ+hK0n6etD7ipJ/
yPv7GyVjCfreZNVU3ysRigDuH07nIHgFz8FIfOB0D32tKW82jaLgRw==
=i/r6
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] WMF site update

body:
Thanks by James Day I updated following two pages of the WMF site

*Home (en)
*Current events

Both page contains now a brief report of recent downtime . I think it
is one of news visitors expect the site. I hope it would be updated as
soon as possible. For Japanese pages Tietew promised me to translate
them sonn (tech things are not my field ...) I hope other languages
would be synched. Both pages refer to the latest fund drive too.

WMF Site translation platform is:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WMF

You can find update status of the site here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/WMF/summary/en

Your collaboration will be appliciated very much.

--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


subject: [Foundation-l] WMF site update


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Karl A. Krueger wrote:

> It would be unfortunate if people became afraid to report real abuses
> because they did not want to be forced to defend themselves from unfair
> or untrue accusations by the abuser.

We try not to be stupid :-)

> Fairness doesn't mean that everyone gets treated the same.  It means
> that everyone has to follow the same rules -- and that people who choose
> to break the rules *don't* get treated the same as people who don't.

You mean where the person complained of gets a substantial block for
personal attacks, and the complainant is cautioned not to let themselves
be provoked into responding in kind, with no actual penalty?

- d.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Request for classical Chinese

body:
I hope in the kanbun wikipedia simplified Chinese(China) does not appear.
Obviously those deviate a lot from the normal characters and only spoil the
beauty of kanbun.

As for phonetic transliteration, I personally prefer not to create any new
words from transliteration using kanji. (I'll live with those that are in
common use.) The ancient people did this because they did not think of
creating an alphabet and that caused a lot of confusion in trancribing
foreign words when speakers of different languages follow their own
pronunciation. But now we have quite a few choices of alphabets to use and
there is no need to do that again. If someone still prefers to do that, I
can only suggest he note down the original word, too.

For the procedure of starting a new wikipedia, I'm still not very sure and
hope to hear suggestions from you guys.

--- Felix Wan <felixwiki at earthsphere.org> ?????????
> On Tue, March 1, 2005 12:54 pm, Mark Williamson said:
> > Indeed: Such a Wikipedia would be chaos.
> >
> > It does mirror the proposal from Meta however of a Wikipedia where
> > Cantonese and Mandarin and English, in characters and in
> romanisation
> > (any romanisation of your choosing, no specific one) are all mixed
> > together in one Wikipedia... except even MORE confusing!
> >
> > Mark
> >
> OK, now I get your point.  You mean that Classical Chinese
> interpreted
> by Chinese should not be mixed with kanbun (Classical Chinese
> interpreted
> by Japanese) and other versions of Classical Chinese, don't you?
>
> I am not sure about that.  My impression is that there was only one
> written tradition.  However, because most people are not fluent
> enough
> in it, actual writings in it could differ.  Do we have similar
> problems
> with the Latin Wikipedia?
>
> However, I have seen the different dialects of English coexist in en:
> and the two scripts of Chinese coexists in zh:, I think if there is a
> will, there is a way.  Say, we may collaborate to set a phonetic
> transliteration guideline which everyone should follow.
>
> I want to ask abc_root how many supporters do you expect to find for
> that project.  I know some enthusiasts from a Classical Chinese forum
> and I can ask them if they are interested in the project.  We can
> test
> out the idea at Meta or Wikicities and see how compatible are the
> modern
> Chinese and modern Japanese perception of Classical Chinese.
>
> I am not for splitting the existing zh:.  I am just excited by new
> ideas and enjoy the diversity of Wikipedia.
>
> Felix Wan
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

__________________________________
Let's Celebrate Together!
Yahoo! JAPAN
http://pr.mail.yahoo.co.jp/so2005/


body:
wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org schrieb am 02.03.05 20:41:54:
> Marco Krohn wrote:
> >wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org wrote:

> >>I like to point out to people that the *German* version won in a blind
> >>test against two commercial encyclopedias, and we'd like to bring the
> >>English one up to the same standard. This points out that though en: is
> >>a remarkable achievement, at least one other language version has in
> >>fact tested even better!
> >
> >IMHO the English Wikipedia was and continues to be better than
> >the German one, both in terms of quality and quantity. This of course
> >does not hold for topics that are related to Germany.
> >
> Is it relevant what wikipedia is better ?

I did not wrote anything about the relevance of being better or not.
You wrote that you want to bring the English one to the same standard
and I just pointed out that this is IMHO not necessary, since the English
one already is superior. Also, as Mav correctly remarked, the fact
that the German Wikipedia has been tested does not tell us anything
about the quality of the English version.

Also I doubt that the test was a blind test, at least the two tests
I am aware of were to my knowledge not blind tests, but I can
be wrong about this. Which test do you refer to?

> I think the different
> wikipedias can not be compared because few articles are translated and
> most articles are rewritten.

I have read dozens of articles in both versions and if the topic
is not in particular related to Germany (ICE) the English version in most
cases was better, which does not imply that the German version is bad.
This already is a comparison - of course a limited one, because I am just one
person ;-)

> With a believe that the en:wikipedia is better, you
> will not look into the other projects and find out what the strength is
> of the other projects.

I like orange juice more than apple juice, nevertheless I drink
apple juice from time to time :-)

> One nice translation excercise I learned about the other day were
> Italian students translating German wikipedia articles into Italian. The
> texts were chosen by the teacher, the students translate the article,
> the student corrects and does the proof reading and the translated
> article is posted in the Italian wikipedia. When the students become
> more able with the German language, they will translate into German. :)

This is a great idea! The copyright is a little bit of a problem, but
this should be no big deal as the students probably do not
care about this too much.

best regards,
  Marco

______________________________________________________________
Verschicken Sie romantische, coole und witzige Bilder per SMS!
Jetzt bei WEB.DE FreeMail: http://f.web.de/?mc=021193


body:
slimvirgin at gmail.com wrote:

> A member of the arbitration committee told an editor a few weeks ago
> that the equal-treatment policy of the arbitration committee had been
> adopted deliberately in order to discourage editors from bringing
> cases. Wikipedia is so slow today that I haven't yet been able to find
> the posts where this was said, but it was fairly unambiguous, and I'm
> pretty sure I'm remembering it correctly.
> Perhaps members of the arbitration committee could say here whether
> the policy of symmetrical treatment has been adopted, officially or
> otherwise, in order to cut down on the number of cases coming to
> arbitration.

There isn't such a policy, by name or effect, as far as I know.

We do however try very hard to look at the entire situation and understand
what on earth is actually going on. And we often disagree amongst ourselves
as to what's actually going on. That's why it's a committee, not a single
impeccably fairminded individual such as myself for example. It's not a
seamless borg working in lockstep.

- d.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Unexpected forwarding to port 2222 at installation
	start

body:
Thank you very much, it worked perfectly!

Brion Vibber wrote:
> Pieter Konink wrote:
>
>> However, when I click the link to the config page I am taken to here:
>>
>> http://www.paperheadache.com:2222/
>>
>> I suppose this might not be much of a problem except that I am using
>> virtual web hosting and that latter address takes me to my DirectAdmin
>> site log-in.
>
>
> If your hosting takes over the /config directory and you can't prevent
> this, you can rename it to another directory. You'll have to make a
> couple tweaks to config/index.php to change 'config' to the new dir:
>
> index.php:318:$conf->ScriptPath = preg_replace( '{^(.*)/config.*$}',
> '$1', $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] );
> index.php:411:          chdir( "config" );
> index.php:515:                  chdir( "config" );
> index.php:677:                  $exit = urlencode(
> "$wgServer{$conf->ScriptPath}/config/index.php?License=cc&RightsUrl=[license_url]&RightsText=[license_name]&RightsCode=[license_code]&RightsIcon=[license_button]"
>
> );
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: actionforum at comcast.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] This is backwards (was Re: 172 de-sysopped)

body:
-------------- Original message --------------
> actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
>
> >Desysoping is too minor an action and abuse of sysop powers is too serious an
> offense to wait for the arbcom or community all the time. Any serious mistakes
> can be corrected later.
> >
> If the police had their way the kangaroos would be running the judicial
> system.

I'm not sure what your point is, if you mean admins=police, apparently, they are running the judicial system too, and they are loath to cost anyone their "jobs", read sysop privilege.   Do the admins here unite behind their own version of "The thin blue line"?

                                                  -- Silverback


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Request for classical Chinese

body:
Hi Shizhao,

I'm having some difficulty understanding your message. Can you write
it in Chinese so I can understand it better?

Best,
Mark

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 03:22:08 +0000 (UTC), shi zhao <shizhao at gmail.com> wrote:
> abc_root <abcd_root at ...> writes:
>
> >
> > Dear all:
> >
> > I would like to request a new Wikipedia for classical Chinese or kanbun(
> > ??/???) which is the standard form of Chinese for about two thousand
> > years and was used throughout East Asia as the formal form of writing. Its
> > importance in East Asia is like that of Latin in Europe. Now that
> > Wikipedias are running or being started for many of the languages in East
> > Asia, it seems that the language which is the backbone of these languages
> > should also have a place.
> >
> > One problem that might be encountered in writing articles for kanbun
> > wikipedia is how the foreign loanwords (e.g. from English) should be
> > phonetically transcribed when there is no corresponding word in kanbun
> > itself. If they are transcribed using kanji (Chinese characters), there is
> > the question of which language should be used to read the kanji. Here I
> > suggest using an alphabet system of East Asia (e.g. Japanese kana or Korean
> > hangul, or Taiwanese chu-yin) for the transcription and also note the
> > original word in English (or any other language of origin or the roman
> > transcription if the language is not written in roman alphabet). This
> > allows kanbun users speaking different languages to know the original
> > foreign word.
> >
> > __________________________________
> > Let's Celebrate Together!
> > Yahoo! JAPAN
> > http://pr.mail.yahoo.co.jp/so2005/
> >
>
> Problem is use when of does the classical Chinese write? Ming and Qing? Is
> Tang Sung period? Or does QIN2 HAN4 is period? Or to is more early? Each
> period classical Chinese differ very greatly.The Manchu Dynasty and Han
> dynasty rise of test twice according to the custom of the ancient works, be
> for can let the then person comprehend the people of the past's  work of
> classical Chinese.The ancients is still not apprehensibility more early the
> classical Chinese of the ancients, so which period classical Chinese we use to
> write worthwhile discussion.If use the MIng and Qing period classical  Chinese
> writing, that is much more simple, plus some ????, delete ???.( this and
> Chinese  version difference not big)If use first Qin's classical Chinese
> write, having no several individuals perhaps can write.
>
> [[zh:user:shizhao]]
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
actionforum at comcast.net wrote:

> I'm not sure what your point is, if you mean admins=police,
 > apparently, they are running the judicial system too, and
 > they are loath to cost anyone their "jobs", read sysop privilege.
 > Do the admins here unite behind their own version of "The thin blue line"?

[[WP:AN/I]] and [[WP:AN/3RR]] give me a different picture. I see
quite a bit of disagreement between admins (and of course anyone
can write there).

- d.


body:
Marco Krohn wrote:
> wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org schrieb am 02.03.05 20:41:54:

No idea who this is, but it's not me.

>>Marco Krohn wrote:
>>>wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org wrote:

This was me.

>>>>I like to point out to people that the *German* version won in a blind
>>>>test against two commercial encyclopedias, and we'd like to bring the
>>>>English one up to the same standard. This points out that though en: is
>>>>a remarkable achievement, at least one other language version has in
>>>>fact tested even better!

> Also I doubt that the test was a blind test, at least the two tests
> I am aware of were to my knowledge not blind tests, but I can
> be wrong about this. Which test do you refer to?

I was originally referring to the c't test (I think it was). I thought it
was a blind test: here are three articles, which is best?

- d.


body:
Rowan Collins wrote:

>On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 13:35:06 -0600, Richard Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>In looking through the MediaWiki schema (both current and new), I've
>>noticed that page titles are given a max length of 255 chars. However,
>>it seems that in some cases, this title includes the namespace, and in
>>others it does not -- namespace is stored as an Int or is implied by
>>context (eg, categorylinks, imagelinks).
>>
>>
>
>Hm, I see what you mean - there aren't that many places where it's a
>problem, but certainly 'brokenlinks' has the namespace as part of the
>[destination] title. So it seems an article could have 255 characters
>+ a namespace (because the namespace isn't considered part of the
>title) and not fit in brokenlinks (because that just stores the text
>of the link, rather than a namespace and title).
>
>There's been talk of merging the various links tables to all be
>id->name (rather than some being id->id), because the text of the link
>doesn't change, but the article it refers to might. This problem could
>be addressed by anyone implementing that.
>
>The disadvantage of using {namespace_as_int, title_as_text} for link
>targets is that this doesn't reflect how they're entered: [[Foo:Bar]]
>could change in meaning from {0, "Foo:Bar"} to {20, "Bar"} if a custom
>"Foo" namespace was created; the two forms could not, however,
>co-exist. This suggests to me that it would be better to just make the
>link_to field wider than page_title (i.e. a width of 255 + a constant
>MAX_NAMESPACE_LENGTH), and retain the current practice of storing the
>destination as one string.
>
>
Does the restriction for 250 characters apply to the number of character
in the URL or in the number of characters that make up the name of the
article eg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Hy-%D5%94%D6%80%D5%AB%D5%BD%D5%BF%D5%B8%D5%BD_%D5%AE%D5%B6%D5%A1%D5%BE_%D6%87_%D5%B0%D5%A1%D5%B5%D5%BF%D5%B6%D5%A5%D6%81%D5%A1%D5%BE%2C_%D5%B4%D5%A5%D5%A6%D5%AB%2C_%D5%B1%D5%A5%D5%A6%D5%AB_%D5%8D%D5%B8%D6%82%D6%80%D5%A2_%D5%A1%D5%BE%D5%A5%D5%BF%D5%AB%D5%BD.ogg
which is Image:Hy-??????? ???? ? ?????????, ????, ???? ????? ??????.ogg

Thanks,
GerardM

PS No i did not count them


from_name: Christiaan Briggs

body:
And at the same time this is the overwhelming beauty of the whole
system. Not only do we set knowledge free so as to stop others from
owning it but we also set it free so that you can pick up a set of all
the tools and drive your car down to where you've bought your own
garage and proceed to set up a shop with managers, and lead mechanics.

Christiaan

On 2 Mar 2005, at 10:04 pm, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> Think of Wikipedia as a massive garage where you can build any car you
> want to. Great tools are provided, a lot of shop manuals are there, and
> you get your own lift and away you go. Fantastic. But every one else,
> and I mean everyone else in the garage can work on your car with you.
> There's no "lead mechanics", no "shop floor managers", no anything. In
> fact, the people who are allowed to work on your car can completely
> disregard what you were doing with it. They could have flown in from
> Boola-Boola Island 2 hours ago, not know the language, can't read the
> manuals, and just go in and paint your car pink. And drive it. And
> leave
> it somewhere. Now, since tools are free and paint is free and you can
> easily go and retrieve your nice car and get it back to something
> resembling sanity, a lot of the people in the garage see there's no
> problems. But in fact, the fifth, or the hundredth time you're
> traipsing
> down the lane to find your messed-up, polka-dotted,
> covered-in-chrome-pussycats car, you're kind of inclined to drive it
> into the lake and leave it upside down, wheels spinning.
>
> This is what the inherent failure of wikipedia is. It's that there's a
> small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and
> twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the
> mass of triddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content
> generators stop being so and have to become content defenders. Woe be
> that your take on things is off from the majority. Even if you can
> prove
> something, you're now in the situation that anybody can change it. And
> while that's all great in a happy-go-lucky flower shower sort of way,
> it's when you realize that the people who are going to change it could
> have absolutely no experience with the subject whatsoever, then you see
> where we are.
>
> (I plagiarized the above from Jason Scott, but I agree with every
> word.)
>
> Uncle Ed


from_name: Gerrit Holl

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Using <abbr>

body:
Hi,

a few HTML tags work in Wikipedia article, but <abbr> doesn't. Is there
a Wikisyntax for abbr? If not, could <abbr> be enabled until there is?

regards,
Gerrit Holl.

--
Weather in Twenthe, Netherlands 02/03 22:55:
	-1.0?C   wind 0.4 m/s None (57 m above NAP)
--
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
    -Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17, 1961


body:
Stephen Forrest wrote:

> Richard Holton wrote:
>
>> Except...it's not your car!
>
> Well, not quite.  It's *was* his car, but it stopped being so the
> moment he brought it into the shop.
>
> From that point on it became either the property of the shop, or the
> collective property of all the people in the shop (depending on how
> you see things).

Being a commie punk calling myself an anarchist, I prefer the idea that
it becomes no one's property (GFDL licence aside), as I once argued for
here:
http://anti-state.com/forum/index.php?board=6;action=display;
threadid=5852

That's partly what setting free means right... effectively not being
owned by anybody.

Christiaan


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: www.en.wikipedia.org

body:
On Friday 18. February 2005. 17:08, Walter Vermeir wrote:
> NSK <nsk2 <at> wikinerds.org> writes:
> > I cannot access www.en.wikipedia.org, I know this isn't supposed to be
> > the right domain but I am sure many users make this mistake from time to
> > time, and it can easily be avoided by enabling some new dns aliases.
>
> http://www.nl.wikipedia.org works. But that is only because I asked it when
> NL moved to faseIII.
>
> It is true that it whould be good if *.XX.wikiPROJECT.org whoud point to
> something. Best to xx.wikiPROJECT.org.

I have just encountered a link to www.sr.wikipedia.org, so I agree completely.


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbitrator recusals (was 172 de-sysopped)

body:
David Gerard wrote:

> There's *supposed* to be a rule that if half the arbcom recuses, then all
> are unrecused and back on the case. It doesn't appear to have made it
> into
> the rules. It or something like it really really needs to be in there.

The rule wasn't included in that form because I raised objections, and
still would. The image of properly recused arbitrators suddenly
un-recusing themselves can look really really bad to people skeptical
about our commitment to fairness (about as bad as, say, a properly
blocked admin deciding to unblock himself).

"Something like it", as in an alternative solution to deal with this
scenario, would be much better. My suggestion was for the matter to
bypass the Arbitration Committee and go straight to the Board, or else
for Jimbo or the Board to appoint emergency arbitrators to substitute
for those who are recused.

I think the idea of "pro tempore" arbitrators for these rare cases is
adequate to handle the problem. Wikipedia is big enough that nobody can
get their oar in on every dispute, a principle that applies to the
arbitrators as well and means that almost certainly at least a couple
sitting arbitrators will not need to recuse themselves. Also, it
wouldn't be necessary to reconstitute a full committee of twelve; I'd be
satisfied if emergency appointments brought the number of arbitrators
hearing the case back up to seven or so.

So at most Jimbo would need to come up with four or five people who have
good sense at how to handle these things. I don't think this would be
terribly difficult for him. We have several experienced former
arbitrators whom I at least would happily trust to deal with a case in
an emergency. And I could name a number of other people who might be
qualified, depending on the particular case that presents itself. This
would also be a helpful way to get in some practical observation of
people who may be candidates for election to the Arbitration Committee
in the future.

--Michael Snow