subject: [Wikitech-l] Templates / duplication of information and meta data

body:
Andrew Lih

>
> The problem is it is inherently non-Wiki.  My hunch is that it would
> severely affect the nature of Wikipedia.  The beauty of Wikipedia and
> wikis is that humans and the evolving community are in control.    Not a
> process and not some imposed database template.  (Clay Shirky has an
> excellent view on this.)  If someone creating an article wants to do
> tables in a particular way, or wants a different disambiguation message,
> or a unique take on doing a timeline, s/he's completely open to it.
> Jiang and Tannin can battle over which way to write up Australia, and in
> the end they agree, and a better template comes out.  I'm nearly
> convinced it's why 1) people feel empowered by Wikis, 2) people stay
> around in the community and 3) good ideas evolve so quickly.
>
> I say I'm nearly convinced, because in the end, it seems that something
> beyond hand-editing everything *has* to evolve. But does it?  I'm not
> sure.  When does this merry go round stop? :) Perhaps that's what's so
> challenging about the "1.0" project.  I'd love to hear ideas on this.

I agree with Andrew wholeheartedly. Moreover, my greatest concerns are not
so much the wasted time (hand editing) and wasted disk space but rather the
search capabilities. I think that it is important as wikipedia grows that a
sophisticated search engine is available. My opinion is just that meta date
makes searching easier. I am open to other suggestions though. Who knows,
maybe we will have smarter algorithms in the future which can interpret and
analyse text like humans, that would solve a lot of the discussed problems
:-)

Cheers,

Jurriaan


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Gutza

subject: [Wikipedia-l] New logo and further process

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>As for having one common logo, I agree that this would be the best
>outcome. I hope that the voters will agree, too. This is basically an
>experiment in the Wikipedia constitution -- are individual Wikipedias to
>be treated like nations, or like states within a nation? I personally
>favor the last option, but in order to accommodate those who seek greater
>independence for their Wikipedias, I have chosen to make the ratification
>process reflect that. This was also always the initial proposal --
>"Individual Wikipedias will get an opportunity to hold their own votes on
>whether they will use the 'official' logo." (from [[International logo
>vote]]).
>
>
Erik, I completely agree with everything you say on a conceptual level,
but take my case in this particular situation: I'm the all-hands-person
for the Romanian Wikipedia (except dev), I have been working in graphic
development for years and I find that logo to be horrible. Can you
honestly ask me to support that logo for the Romanian Wikipedia? I hate
it, I'm sorry, it's nobody's fault, but I do. And the worst thing
psychologically for me is that I believe my opinion is based on
experience, not only on taste. Changing the logo to match my criteria of
usability would mean restyling it beyong recognition, I can't expect
Wikipedians who voted for *THIS* logo to accept being cheated on this
way, I wouldn't accept that if I liked the chosen logo. That's why I
have no option but oppose the logo for the sake of it, and ultimately
accept it because of the braindead decision to have at least 10
wikipedians with 10 edits vote. (We don't have this number of
contributors, and I expect several other Wikipedias don't, but who cares
when you design one-size-fits-all rules? We're probably considered way
too small for self-determination--the large Wikipedias must vote for us,
look how great we all did working together to choose a logo!)

These are the reasons why I'm extremely frustrated with the chosen logo.
I will use it and will not resent Wikipedia because of this, as I said
before, it's nobody's fault that, well, after all, *I'm* not happy with
this logo. (Wanted to write "it's nobody's fault that we chose a
horrible logo", but that'd be POV; I feel however that my POV would be
NPOV for logo designers around the world. Feel my pain! :) )

Ok, I'll stop whining and ranting now, and unless provoked I won't open
this up again. But I had to get it out, you know how it feels.

Gutza


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On Fri, 2003-09-26 at 12:55, Erik Moeller wrote:
> In a
> future contest, it might make more sense to have only one voting round,
> although I shudder at the size of the ballot page that would result.

And I thought we had it bad in California!
http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/c/c6/Sample_ballot_for_CA_recall.png

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikien-l

from_name: Roy Royce

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: [roy_q_royce@hotmail.com: --A RequestRE
	aWIKIArticle--]

body:
[Poor's message failed to appear in my Hotmail inbox, so I am
replying to him via Saintonge's message, which did appear]

[Mr. Poor wrote:]

>Mr. Royce,

>Please do not call other list members names or otherwise make nasty
>personal remarks.

>    "Mr. Tim Starling is either a liar or an easily-fooled person."

Which is worse, calling someone a liar or libel?

As you should know, libel is a false publication, as in writing, print,
signs, or pictures, that damages a person's reputation.

If someone tells lies about you, what are you going to call him?

(And anyone who reads my Usenet messages can see that I am
by no means a vicious person.)

-----RR-----

>From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: [roy_q_royce at hotmail.com: --A
>RequestRE	aWIKIArticle--]
>Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 10:49:02 -0700
>
>Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
>>Mr. Royce,
>>
>>Please do not call other list members names or otherwise make nasty
>>personal remarks.
>>
>>    "Mr. Tim Starling is either a liar or an easily-fooled person."
>>
>Yes, he has fallen into the same sewer as those who called him a crackpot.
>;-)
>
>Ec
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

_________________________________________________________________
Frustrated with dial-up? Get high-speed for as low as $29.95/month
(depending on the local service providers in your area).
https://broadband.msn.com


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: New logo and further process

body:
At 05:42 PM 9/26/03 +0100, Gareth wrote:

>I would like to thank you guys (you will note, this present bunch of pissing
>and moaning is by a group entirely composed of guys)

So, what are Anthere and I, chopped liver?
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


from_name: Robert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Physics, NPOV and policy

body:
Jimbo writes, in regards to various speculative theories
about physics:

> I think this presents challenges for our NPOV policy,
> but not _special_ challenges.  As with any controversial
> subject, and many uncontroversial ones, there are
> mainstream views, minority views, and singular views.
> NPOV does not require us to present all these views
> as if they are equal!  ...If a view is the majority view
> of a broad consensus of scientists, then we say so.
> If a view is a minority view of some scientists,
> scientists who are respected by the mainstream that
> differs with them on this particular matter, then we
> say so.  And if a view is held only by a few people
> without any traditional training or credentials, and if
> that view is dismissed by virtually all mainstream
> scientists, then we can say that, too.
> The reason we can do all of that is that, usually, those
> statements are not controversial to any of the parties
> in the debate.

I agree fully. My experience on Usenet has shown me that
crank theories arise on every science subject;  the topics
that get the most cranks are relativity, anti-gravity,
thermodynamics and "perpetual motion" and anything related
to pre-1200s archaeology. (Lots of odd theories are out
there about mainstream science and/or "the establishment"
somehow surpressing proof of advanced science in ancient
India, ancient Egypt, etc.)

Jimbo's clarification makes sense. The only thing I would
add is that we should follow the above along with the
current provision that Wikipedia is not a place for one's
won personal reasearch. If an idea is by only held one
person (plus or minus their family members!) their views
should not be in any Wikipedia articles.  Otherwise, we'd
have literally hundreds of pages on relativity or gravity,
each idea unique, held only by an individual.

> Singular views can be moved to a separate page and
> identified (disclaimed) as such, or in some cases
> omitted altogether.

For such topics it best to omit singular views. There are
hundreds of people out there who believe they have "proven"
that perpetual motion machines exist; each one of them has
their own unique theory and mathematical model of why
mainstream thermodynamics is wrong, and each would probably
want their own Wikipedia article.

Unless a "crank" view starts to become accepted by some
tiny percentage of mainstream science, there isn't much of
a need or reason to discuss them in our articles.

However, there is a great need for a good article on this
phenomenon. We desperately need an article on the
scientific and psychological reasons why so many people
keep working on perpetual motion machines, why they believe
that you can travel faster than light in normal space (*),
why they believe that fully modern humans lived 5 million
years ago, etc.

Robert (RK)

(*) One very well might be able to travel faster than
light, given wormholes, or the Alcubierre warp drive, etc.
But none of these violate Einsteinian relativity. They are
special cases that are included in relativity; they are
accepted as legitimate areas of research by the mainstream
scientific community.  The problem with cranks is that they
are ignorant of, or dismissive of, the very open-minded
nature of the scientific community. (Physics is very
open-minded; just consider the proliferation of well
written papers in highly regarded physics journals on FTL,
time travel, quantum computing, etc.) Cranks, by contrast,
are characterized by conspiracism and a refusal to allow
inconvenient facts to enter into their research.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


from_name: David Friedland

body:
Gareth Owen wrote:

> FTJ.  Perhaps we should skip the endless recounts and objections over the
> method, and just ask Jeb Bush to refer the whole matter to the Supreme Court
>
> I would like to thank you guys (you will note, this present bunch of pissing
> and moaning is by a group entirely composed of guys) and your ability to
> squabble to excrutiating lengths about what are, in the long run, complete
> irrelevancies for providing me with endless amusement.
>
> Calm down.  It's just a logo.
> Go out on the street and ask people what the logo of Encyclopedia Brittanica
> looks like?  Do they even have one?

> Sometimes this list feels like the lost "B Arc" of the Golgafrinchams.
> Don't you people have telephones to sanitise?

I do care about the logo and submitted a series of calm, considered
reasons why I think adopting the winner of the logo vote would be a bad
idea.

If you don't care about the logo, why are you bothering to argue about
it? Your response seems the most hysterical of any so far. If I don't
care about an issue being discussed on the lists, I just don't read
those posts. You should do the same.


from_name: Steve Vertigum

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logo, third voting phase

body:
I wrote this last night, and thought I'd save it for
today.

--- Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> "Our" logo was not a community work
> "Our" logo choice was not a community decision.

I didnt have the strength to read your whole email,
Anthere...  (its late) but I share some of your
sentiments-- in that the "process of elimination" way
of doing things-- the Darwinistic voting process as it
were-- is ultimately entirely anti-thetical to the
notion of wiki--which is primarily about
collaboration.

There *could have been more emphasis on collaboration,
there *could have been less of an emphasis on
deadline, etc, etc, etc.  But monday-morning
quarterback is easy (American football
reference=after-the-fact etc. ) And theser are things
to think about and learn from.  Before this whole
production  .. it hadnt occured to me how unwiki a
"voting process" can be, if the wiki collaboration
isnt considered.  But now its more clear that the
collaborative element needs to be enhanced in the
future, and that the design of such endeavors and even
the wiki itself will continue to change to better fit
the collaborative ethnic.

Congratulations to Erik for nearly accomplishing the
impossible task of pleasing everyone. :-)
~S~

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Physics, NPOV and policy

body:
--- Robert <rkscience100 at yahoo.com> wrote:
  The problem with cranks is
> that they
> are ignorant of, or dismissive of, the very
> open-minded
> nature of the scientific community. Physics is very
> open-minded; just consider the proliferation of well
> written papers in highly regarded physics journals
> on FTL, time travel, quantum computing, etc. Cranks,
by
> contrast, are characterized by conspiracism and a
refusal >to allow inconvenient facts to enter into
their research.

This is very well said.

~S~

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


from_name: modemac at modemac.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Donating a PC

body:
Regarding Wikipedia's need for a new server:  I spoke with my boss to see if my employer would be willing to make a donation.  He agreed to let me donate one of our older PCs for Wikipedia:

	Dell Optiplex GX100
	Celeron 433 mhz
	20-gig Maxtor hard drive
	64M RAM
	Windows 98 SE

Of course, you can install Red Hat in its place, and upgrade the RAM and hard drive as needed.

If you give the okay, I can ship it to your address ASAP.

I hope this helps.


from_name: Gareth Owen

body:
"For the logo of a serious encyclopedic project contributed by thousands of
 people world-wide and trying to compete world-famous encyclopedias worth
 thousands of dollars a copy, I, Gareth William Owen, being of sound mind and
 only slightly knackered body, am against the concept of a stylized human
 silhouette and I support the concept of a ball made of coloured puzzle
 pieces".

PS : When did we become serious?
--
Gareth Owen
"I love the wikipedia, but sometimes I get the impression that certain people
on this list are very bored, and so argue about something when there's really
bugger all to argue about. Edit some articles, for god's sake." -- LP


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fair use and inline links

body:
--- "Alex R." <alex756 at nyc.rr.com> wrote:

> If this is going to be done it is all the more
> reason for
> the image description page to be completed with
> specific information.

There there needs to be a form to fill out (upon
upload ) thats more than just a comment line--
something to remind people of the basic info they
should get in the habit of including.

~S~

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


body:
If you don't think some of these logos are "successful logos", fine. But
where are the products/companies/organizations with large multi-colored
logos with lots of word plastered all over them?

Most of your objections were petty, uninformed, and/or irrelevant. However:

I included the other encyclopedias' logos not necessarily because I
thought they were good, but because they are our competition. I'm sure
Britannica's logo is the way it is because it has been that way for a
long time. Grolier's logo isn't just the word Grolier, but it has a
swashed R and is in a particular font. Technially, that makes it a
logotype, but the idea of usage is the same.

Coca-cola's logo is written in a variety of scripts, but even though it
is monolingual it is BusinessWeek's #1 global brand. See
http://bwnt.businessweek.com/brand/2003/index.asp

As for Atari, Infogrames recently purchased the Atari brand and changed
their name to Atari. See http://www.atari.com/. They probably did that
because the Atari brand name and logo are still well known long after
the demise of the original company. Truly a sign of a successful logo.
See also
http://images.google.com/images?q=atari+shirt&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search

The USPS logo is a stylized eagle, the traditional symbol of both the
U.S. and the postal service.

And I wanted to include the Nike swoosh, but on Nike's web site the logo
was only embedded in flash animations.

Finally, Eric has indicated that this conversation should take place at
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_talk:Paullusmagnus-logo_(small).png

so this will be my last post to the list on this issue.

- David

Gareth Owen wrote:

> David Friedland <david=nvvn158Aj1ReoWH0uzbU5w at public.gmane.org> writes:
>
>
>>What makes these logos successful is they are all simple, memorable, and can
>>work in a variety of environments
>
>
> Frankly, bollocks.  By and large, these aren't succesful logos, they're the
> logos of succesful things (I exclude the DNC, for obvious reasons).
> Thats a Very Big Difference.
>
> What the hell is memorable about Encarta's three blue ellipses?
> Or Britannica's thistle which is
> i)   Too detailed and therefore hard to scale (c.f. O'Reilly Camel)
> ii)  Symbolic of thorns and difficulty
> iii) Already the symbol of something else, namely Scotland.
>
> Grolier's "simple logo" is the word "Grolier".  Memorable, but only usuable in
> exactly the same environments as the word "Wikipedia."
> (c.f. Microsoft, Sourceforge)
>
> The X Window logo is simple and memorable, but the X Consortium aren't exactly
> setting the business world on fire with their success, are they?
>
> Atari are bankrupt;
> "Coca-Cola" is monolingual and written in an ugly script (as is Walt Disney);
> These are both brands whose success is founded firmly on the product: New Coke
> had the same script, but for some reasong people didn't buy it.
>
> The UN logo is illegible if small
>  (and they're going the way of the X consortium)
> I don't even know what the USPS logo is supposed to be, and only recognise it
>  as Lance Armstrong's shirt design;
> Planned Parenthood looks like Dogbert's Brown Ring Of Quality
> The Mozilla logo is unused outside its development community.
> MIT logo is ugly, Stanford's make them look like a forestry service.
>
> The Playboy bunny is nice, though. As is the Nike swoosh (which you omitted).
> But neither of those firms prospered because they had a nice logo.
> They prospered because guys like expensive training shoes and pictures of
> naked women.
>
> And not necesarily in that order.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

body:
I'm happy with the result of the logo competition, and I endorse
Erik's idea that we revisit it a couple of years from now.  I'm not
happy with the idea of per-langauage ratification, but it's certainly
better than any of the International Wikipedias feeling that we've
shoved something down their throats.  (I do agree with those who say
that the whole point of the process, though, was to have a uniform
logo everywhere!)

Erik Moeller wrote:
> In a future contest, it might make more sense to have only one
> voting round, although I shudder at the size of the ballot page that
> would result.

Possibly a good compromise would be to have people volunteer first for
a design committee, a committee which has (or simply _is_) a separate
(public!) mailing list to hash out the issues.  Only people who have
participated there are eligible to be voting members of the design
committee, and they vote to reduce the huge pile of submissions down
to a manageable number of finalists.

That committee would also be charged with the responsibility of making
a professional judgment as to the simple technical merits of
proposals.  Some that don't meet the design brief would surely not
pass muster at this stage.  The committee, if generally dissatisfied
with the proposals, could report a failure to find a suitable set of
alternatives, or... well, you see what I mean.

It easier to see why a two-step process (committee->public vote) would
make sense if we think about it for technical issues.  Having an open
random public vote on whether to buy 1 big server or 2 small ones, or
whether to get an Athlon or an Opteron, or whether to use SCSI or EIDE
drives, would be silly.  If we were to have public voting on technical
matters, it'd only make sense to have experts refine the choices
first.

How to qualify experts for committees?  I think the wiki way would
work fine -- we just let people volunteer as they see fit.  I have
definite opinions on what sorts of logos that I like, but I know that
I'm not really qualified to judge the artistic or technical merit of
these things.  Someone said that the choice made will be expensive for
letterhead -- oh, that's interesting, I would never have realized that
on my own.  So I'd know better than to join a design committee.

But with a set of proposals that had been vetted by a committee of
self-described experts, I'm sure I could express a preference.

--Jimbo


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV and 'new physics'

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Geoff Burling wrote:
>
>>I'm wondering if the proper crieria for inclusion/exclusion is the
>>fact that any theory, beit mainstream, minority or other, is whether
>>or not it is available in print.
>>
>
>I think that's a very valid way to look at it, yes, absolutely.
>
It's still only one of several possible criteria to consider.

>>I'm sorry, but a post to Usenet or a statement on a webpage just isn't
>>convincing enough for little old me.
>>
>
>That's right, although I can imagine some hypertechnical sticklers
>abusing this notion.  Some facts can be found more or less only
>online, particular facts about contemporary Internet culture.  Who
>is the current maintainer of BIND?  Probably that isn't in a book, but
>it's an uncontroversial fact that could be looked up online.
>
It too is another fact to be considered.

There will always be borderline cases.  In cases of doubt and
uncertainty, I would give the benefit of the doubt to inclusion.  If the
science is really that bad, it will still have value as comic relief.

Ec


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
tarquin-

> And the whole voting process has been a complete fiasco.

Thanks for your constructive feedback, Tarquin. I'll take it into account
the next time I organize something like this.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>On Fri, 2003-09-26 at 12:55, Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>>In a
>>future contest, it might make more sense to have only one voting round,
>>although I shudder at the size of the ballot page that would result.
>>
>
>And I thought we had it bad in California!
>http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/c/c6/Sample_ballot_for_CA_recall.png
>
You only have 135 candidates; this had 137. :-P

Also our candidates had multiple personalities.  Nobody is demanding
separ ate voting for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Terminator.

Ec


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Jurriaan Schulman wrote:
> Yes, but I mean that there is a copy of this table used for *every* article,
> which uses disk space. Normally, if you use a relational database you use a
> reference to a table (the structure). The table template is stored only
> once, only the field data (the content) is saved to disk and is unique for
> every record.

"Disk space is cheap" is the wiki mantra ;-)
(well, one of them, anyway)

>>The pink background colour is to indicate that we are dealing with an
>>animal species.  Green is used for all plants. What colour change would
>>you be proposing.
>
>
> It was only an example. I am quite happy with the pink colour. But imagine
> that a few years from now the wikipedians decide it is better to use yellow,
> or the text shouldn't be centered, or be bold or italic or... They would
> have to alter the background colour for *every* table by hand, which may be
> hundreds of thousends tables by then.
> On the other hand, if you use one table as a template and derive all others
> from it, you would only have to alter this one template table, you see? It
> is a bit like "Styles" in MS Word, you define the style once and when you
> change it, all text with this style is changed too. This may not be
> important for a letter, but if you write a book with hundreds of pages, it
> saves a huge amount of time.

My upcoming wiki table markup can (and will) include the ability to use
"class=xyz" statements, with the style defined in CSS, for
often-repeated tables. That ought to do just fine.

> I just think we should try to design a template for articles on animals (or
> any other subject for that matter) with field like "scientific name", "
> distribution" etc. If everyone would use this template it would be easier to
> search certain patterns (which species lives in Africa? --> search the
> distribution field) and to alter things (see above).

The machine-readable wikipedia was suggested over and again. Maybe we
should start one! But for this 'pedia, machine-readable would mean
human-unreadable (at least the source), and that's a no-no ;-)

Magnus


body:
Gareth Owen wrote:

> David Friedland <david=nvvn158Aj1ReoWH0uzbU5w at public.gmane.org> writes:
>
>
>>If you don't care about the logo, why are you bothering to argue about it?
>>Your response seems the most hysterical of any so far.
>
>
> Then allow me to be pithy.
>
> There was a vote.
> Your choice lost.
> Deal with it.
> And do it without insinuating that Erik somehow rigged the election.

>>If I don't care about an issue being discussed on the lists,
>
>
> I don't care about the logo, but I do care about flagrant attempts to subvert
> democracy ("Let's not ratify") or the continuing unfounded implications that
> something underhand went on during the voting process and the inherent slur on
> Erik's character.
>
> (Remember, if you don't like the logo, you can always fork)

First, I don't know where you get the idea that I was insinunating any
funny-business about how the election was executed. I happen to respect
Erik a lot, as he has always responded to my concerns rationally and
calmly. I don't think anything underhand went on during the voting process.

My suggestion that the results of the election not necessarily be abided
are a result of the fact that until now, no one has argued that
elections are binding and not subject to appeal. Until there is firm
policy set about how decisions on wikipedia are to be made final, it
seems all decision-making processes are subject to discussion and
dissent before, during, and after.

Perhaps an analogy to the 2000 US Presidential election is apt.
Nevertheless, a final decision was made by the Supreme Court, an
organization specified by the Constitution to be supreme judge of the
law of the land. Wikipedia has no constitution, and you are no supreme
court. I therefore don't accept your declaration that the results are
final and not subject to appeal.

Furthermore, I find your characterizations of my objections to the
outcome of the vote as "pissing" and "moaning" offensive. Frankly, I
don't see how they can be characterized as anything but carefully
considered logical argument. The only who who seems to be arguing from a
mainly emotional standpoint is you.

Finally, it seems that even Erik agrees the results of the election are
not final, and that the winner is subject to modification. I have heeded
his request and am making suggestions on meta for how the puzzle sphere
might be improved so as not to be unacceptable to so many people.

- David


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Fri, Sep 26, 2003 at 10:03:21AM +0100, tarquin wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>
> >Now for the tricky part. Each Wikipedia can choose to "ratify" the new
> >logo, or to keep its current one.
> >
> The whole point of this lengthy voting process was to have ONE common logo!
> *wail*

Unless something changed, the choice is still up to each Wikipedia.
Fortunately.


from_name: tarquin

body:
Gutza wrote:

> Yes, thank you. As I said, I am now convinced that logo is appropriate
> for this project.
>
I'm not.

And the whole voting process has been a complete fiasco.
This "ratification" stuff is pure nonsense -- the WHOLE POINT of this
design competition was to have a unified logo across all pedias!

The logo at 33k is innapropriate from a technical standpoint. (#2 is 3k.
#3 is 23k
I would have liked just about any of the other finalists -- we had
plenty of *really great* work and I found it hard to pick my absolute
favourite.
But this dirty-looking ball of crud that takes too long to download -- no!


from_name: Richard Grevers

body:
On 26 Sep 2003 03:03:00 +0200, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> gave
utterance to the following:

> We have a new logo! See
>
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_logo_vote/Results
>
> for the contest results.
>
> What now? As you may have noticed, I have taken the liberty to put the
> logo on the English Wikipedia already. However, this is not necessarily
> permanent but primarily serves to demonstrate how the logo looks in real
> world use. The above URL contains a link to the logo discussion page. You
> can make proposals for changes to the logo, and any change that finds a
> consensus can be made. There is no time limit on this.
>
> Now for the tricky part. Each Wikipedia can choose to "ratify" the new
> logo, or to keep its current one. This was an idea by Anthere (I think),
> and it seems reasonable to avoid hard feelings and to see if we have
> strong enough support for the new logo. If not enough people participate
> in this vote, the logo is automatically ratified.
>
> Thanks for participating, and let's do this again in two years ;-)
>
Yay - months of process and what do we get? The worst result - the logo
that has the biggest technical problems in terms of reproduction in other
media. Its greyscale version is incredibly unclear because it is far too
busy.
You just doubled or tripled the cost of Wikimedia letterhead, folks, so
everyone who voted for it had better donate extra.
--
Richard Grevers
Between two evils always pick the one you haven't tried


body:
Gutza wrote:

>
> Ok, but what can you do? The voting has been fair (give or take, but
> the overall result can't be contested). That's what people want, what
> can you do? Really, what *can* you do?
>
Well since we can "ratify", I'm voting to ratify a different finalist.

The current winner should be disqualified on technical grounds -- it
simply does not meet the design brief of the competition.


from_name: Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons]

subject: [Wikipedia-l] searching logs me out

body:
when I search via google, I am then logged out. This happens despite being set for auto-login.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20030926/3db19064/attachment.htm


from_name: Gutza

body:
Ok, I promised I'd shut up, but I just thought of something: I dare
anyone to stand by the following phrase in public and not feel like a
retard:

"For the logo of a serious encyclopedic project contributed by thousands
of people world-wide and trying to compete world-famous encyclopedias
worth thousands of dollars a copy, I, {your name here}, am against the
concept of a stylized human silhouette and I support the concept of a
ball made of coloured puzzle pieces".

You don't have to argue with me or something, if you support it, just
reply to this message on this mailing list copying only that phrase and
replacing your name in the placeholder. If anyone does that, I'll be
convinced that logo is appropriate for this project.

Gutza

Adam Bishop wrote:

> The first runner-up may be simpler, but I find it as ugly as you find
> the winner. I assume others feel the same way, since it didn't win.
>
> Adam Bishop
>
>
>> From: tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com>
>> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikipedia.org
>> To: wikipedia-l at Wikipedia.org
>> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] New logo and further process
>> Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 10:02:46 +0100
>>
>>
>>
>> Gutza wrote:
>>
>>> Richard Grevers wrote:
>>>
>>>> Yay - months of process and what do we get? The worst result - the
>>>> logo that has the biggest technical problems in terms of
>>>> reproduction in other media. Its greyscale version is incredibly
>>>> unclear because it is far too busy.
>>>> You just doubled or tripled the cost of Wikimedia letterhead,
>>>> folks, so everyone who voted for it had better donate extra.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Plus it's horrible. No offence to anyone, the thing already won, so
>>> it's not a matter of offending the author anymore, but that logo
>>> stinks big time. If this is democracy in action, imagine running a
>>> country this way.
>>>
>>> Gutza
>>>
>>> (Before y'all start with me, yes, I had a few logos in the
>>> competition myself, and mine was obviously not chosen, but I
>>> would've been happy if we chose the first runner-up, which is not
>>> mine either. That would've been a logo, and a good one at that
>>> IMNSHO. The one we chose is neither good, and not even a real logo.
>>> It's a coloured puzzle ball for Chrissake!)
>>
>>
>> I am in complete agreement with you!
>> It's horrible, it's too complex, and the first runner-up would be
>> much better,
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikipedia-l mailing list
>> Wikipedia-l at Wikipedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*.
> http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
David Friedland <david at nohat.net> writes:

> tarquin wrote:
> > Gutza wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Ok, but what can you do? The voting has been fair (give or take, but the
> >> overall result can't be contested). That's what people want, what can you
> >> do? Really, what *can* you do?
> >>
> > Well since we can "ratify", I'm voting to ratify a different finalist.
> > The current winner should be disqualified on technical grounds -- it simply
> > does not meet the design brief of the competition.
>
> I agree. Indeed, the current winner should have been disqualified when people
> first raised their objections to it.

FTJ.  Perhaps we should skip the endless recounts and objections over the
method, and just ask Jeb Bush to refer the whole matter to the Supreme Court

I would like to thank you guys (you will note, this present bunch of pissing
and moaning is by a group entirely composed of guys) and your ability to
squabble to excrutiating lengths about what are, in the long run, complete
irrelevancies for providing me with endless amusement.

Calm down.  It's just a logo.
Go out on the street and ask people what the logo of Encyclopedia Brittanica
looks like?  Do they even have one?

Sometimes this list feels like the lost "B Arc" of the Golgafrinchams.
Don't you people have telephones to sanitise?
--
Gareth Owen
"It's not a human or civic right to edit wikipedia."
                                 -- kq cuts to the core of the banning debate


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Logo, third voting phase

body:
From: Steve Vertigum
<utilitymuffinresearch2 at yahoo.com>
>> "Our" logo was not a community work
>> "Our" logo choice was not a community decision.

>I didnt have the strength to read your whole email,
Anthere...

sorry...I...sometimes...am abusing people time in
going into details :-(

>(its late) but I share some of your
>sentiments-- in that the "process of elimination" way
>of doing things-- the Darwinistic voting process as
it
>were-- is ultimately entirely anti-thetical to the
>notion of wiki--which is primarily about
>collaboration.

>There *could have been more emphasis on
collaboration,
>there *could have been less of an emphasis on
>deadline, etc, etc, etc.  But monday-morning
>quarterback is easy (American football
>reference=after-the-fact etc. ) And theser are things
>to think about and learn from.  Before this whole
>production  .. it hadnt occured to me how unwiki a
>"voting process" can be, if the wiki collaboration
>isnt considered.  But now its more clear that the
>collaborative element needs to be enhanced in the
>future, and that the design of such endeavors and
even
>the wiki itself will continue to change to better fit
>the collaborative ethnic.

Your comment...raise three comments in my mind.

First, reminding that voting results in the
satisfaction of the majority. And that always, a
significant minority will be dissatisfied with the
result. And even if this minority accepts the decision
taken, because it the "rule of the game", it will
resist actively or try to attenuate the consequences
of this decision. And that is why I don't like voting.

Second, reminding that consensus is (imho, at least
ideally) a decision process that will lead to a
solution ***all*** can accept (live with), even if
some would have preferred another solution. It means
some people will be happier than others, but that no
one will be entirely dissatisfied. That is the deep
meaning of "consensus" as majority or "consensus" as
unanimity. It does not aim at pleasing everyone, but
at being at least acceptable to *everyone*.

Third, that I participated in four logos.
One, I made alone, and it did not meet success
(admitedly, it was bad).
One was on the original idea of another user, who
apparently since then is gone.
On two logos, I worked from a mascot suggestion of an
unknown wikipedian. Then I collaborated with Olie to
try to have a stylistic ant. To me, that means these
logos were the results of a 4 people input.

The last one is Erik logo, whom I offered the flower
from a picture I took in one of our nearby cropfield
last June. I did not do much otherwise. Took the
picture one sunny day, and extracted it. But, Erik had
no "free" picture.

I am no graphist. Neither developper, nor
knowledgeable in Communication. I forgot the
transparency on one logo.

But, I had fun making these logos, even if specialists
would say they are bullshit. And doing them with
another person, offering my flower to Erik, each of us
all, bringing a different little bit to these logos,
gave me a lot of happiness :-)

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


body:
David-
> I agree. Indeed, the current winner should have been disqualified when
> people first raised their objections to it.

And when people raise objections to the runner-up, and to the runner-up to
that logo and so forth? It is completely delusional to believe that it
will be possible to reach consensus on something as subjective as a logo.
No matter what modifications are made, there will always be people who do
not like a concept. Some will always find it too simple, too complex, too
colorful, too bland, too busy, too cliche, too bright, too dark ..

The "clutter" concern is a reasonable one and I share it. We are now
working on improving the logo to address this concern. It would be helpful
if you would join these discussions.

> There doesn't seem to have
> been made any effort to ensure that the submussions met the
> requirements, as if they were merely suggestions.

They were, for the most part. Voters were encouraged to take format and
size requirements into account, but if a logo is an absolutely brilliant
concept, it would be unfair to discard it because it contains some Latin
text, has the wrong output format, is too large etc. -- these things can
be worked on.

> I also think that the
> fact that currently there are 73 votes on the English Wikipedia
> ratification, and 41% are against is a strong sign that there are a lot
> of others who agree with me and tarquin.

Many people agree that the puzzle sphere in its current form is not
optimal. I do, too. So let's work on making it better.

> I think that in an organization
> that prides itself on consensus, some effort should be made to address
> the dissenters' concerns.

That's exactly what's happening on Meta right now.

> I have gone to the effort of collecting some famous and successful logos
> from around the web and put them at http://www.nohat.net/logos.html.

This would have been useful when we started the contest.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Ulrich-
> The way how logos
> were submitted was ridiculous - in any size, in any format.

Wrong. The international logo contest contained clear rules on both size
and format. These rules were violated by some submissions, but it would
have been unfair to just throw these logos out, as simple modifications
like transparency, format etc. can be made (and have been made) later.

> The way they
> were presented even more (basically that already was a preselection).

The logos were ranked by the number of votes from the first voting round.
What alternative do you suggest?

> THe way the rules were changed some time during the whole process

They weren't.

> The way the final voting was done was the most ridiculous thing at all,
> because there were'nt just 11 candidates (as they were supposed to be left
> from the first round), there were about 35,

It was always made clear that you would be able to vote on all variants in
the final vote.

> So the "type 2" logos got round the bout
> 2500 points in total,

The total points are irrelevant. The logos were ranked by the average
score, it doesn't matter at all how many people voted on each logo because
the score is the sum divided by the number of voters *for that variant*.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:

> At 04:36 PM 9/26/03 +0300, Gutza wrote:
>
>> Ok, I promised I'd shut up, but I just thought of something: I dare
>> anyone to stand by the following phrase in public and not feel like a
>> retard:
>>
>> "For the logo of a serious encyclopedic project contributed by
>> thousands of people world-wide and trying to compete world-famous
>> encyclopedias worth thousands of dollars a copy, I, Vicki Rosenzweig,
>> am against the concept of a stylized human silhouette and I support
>> the concept of a ball made of coloured puzzle pieces".
>
>
> Happy now?

Yes, thank you. As I said, I am now convinced that logo is appropriate
for this project.

Gutza


body:
David Friedland <david at nohat.net> writes:

> What makes these logos successful is they are all simple, memorable, and can
> work in a variety of environments

Frankly, bollocks.  By and large, these aren't succesful logos, they're the
logos of succesful things (I exclude the DNC, for obvious reasons).
Thats a Very Big Difference.

What the hell is memorable about Encarta's three blue ellipses?
Or Britannica's thistle which is
i)   Too detailed and therefore hard to scale (c.f. O'Reilly Camel)
ii)  Symbolic of thorns and difficulty
iii) Already the symbol of something else, namely Scotland.

Grolier's "simple logo" is the word "Grolier".  Memorable, but only usuable in
exactly the same environments as the word "Wikipedia."
(c.f. Microsoft, Sourceforge)

The X Window logo is simple and memorable, but the X Consortium aren't exactly
setting the business world on fire with their success, are they?

Atari are bankrupt;
"Coca-Cola" is monolingual and written in an ugly script (as is Walt Disney);
These are both brands whose success is founded firmly on the product: New Coke
had the same script, but for some reasong people didn't buy it.

The UN logo is illegible if small
 (and they're going the way of the X consortium)
I don't even know what the USPS logo is supposed to be, and only recognise it
 as Lance Armstrong's shirt design;
Planned Parenthood looks like Dogbert's Brown Ring Of Quality
The Mozilla logo is unused outside its development community.
MIT logo is ugly, Stanford's make them look like a forestry service.

The Playboy bunny is nice, though. As is the Nike swoosh (which you omitted).
But neither of those firms prospered because they had a nice logo.
They prospered because guys like expensive training shoes and pictures of
naked women.

And not necesarily in that order.
--
Gareth Owen
"It's not a human or civic right to edit wikipedia."
                                 -- kq cuts to the core of the banning debate


from_name: Christopher Mahan

body:
--- Roy Royce <roy_q_royce at hotmail.com> wrote:

> [Mr. Poor wrote:]
>
> >Mr. Royce,
>
> >Please do not call other list members names or otherwise make
> nasty
> >personal remarks.
>
> >    "Mr. Tim Starling is either a liar or an easily-fooled
> person."
>
> Which is worse, calling someone a liar or libel?
>
> As you should know, libel is a false publication, as in writing,
> print,
> signs, or pictures, that damages a person's reputation.

Mr. Royce,

When an administrator as busy as Ed Poor takes time to pen a message
to remind you to be civil and courteous to members of this project,
please be kind enough to acknowledge his advice, and be mature enough
to thank him for his direction.

The reminders he pointed to you are not solely his personal views,
but those of the wikipedia group, and while we like to entertain each
other to some degree, we all realize that we are working together to
build an encyclopedia, and that working together means to be civil
and courteous to one another regardless of our differing views and
opinions.

Thank you for taking the time to read these words.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


body:
tarquin wrote:

> Gutza wrote:
>
>> Yes, thank you. As I said, I am now convinced that logo is
>> appropriate for this project.
>
> I'm not.
>
> And the whole voting process has been a complete fiasco.
> This "ratification" stuff is pure nonsense -- the WHOLE POINT of this
> design competition was to have a unified logo across all pedias!
>
> The logo at 33k is innapropriate from a technical standpoint. (#2 is
> 3k. #3 is 23k
> I would have liked just about any of the other finalists -- we had
> plenty of *really great* work and I found it hard to pick my absolute
> favourite.
> But this dirty-looking ball of crud that takes too long to download -- no!

Ok, but what can you do? The voting has been fair (give or take, but the
overall result can't be contested). That's what people want, what can
you do? Really, what *can* you do?

Gutza


body:
Vicki Rosenzweig <vr at redbird.org> writes:

> At 05:42 PM 9/26/03 +0100, Gareth wrote:
>
>
> >I would like to thank you guys (you will note, this present bunch of pissing
> >and moaning is by a group entirely composed of guys)
>
> So, what are Anthere and I, chopped liver?

I didn't number you amongst the moaning.  You were contributing, but you
weren't moaning.  In fact, you seemed quite content with the status quo.
--
Gareth Owen
I'm very enamoured of the idea of meta-content markup ...
there are a lot of cool possibilities. But we should be reluctant to tamper
much with a system that totally works in an amazing way. -- Jimmy Wales


from_name: Andrew Lih

body:
Jurriann brings up a good point, and no doubt many (myself too) have
thought the same -- instead of hand-modifying everything, why not more
structure, metadata, templates or automated changes.

In software engineering parlance, this implies implementation of
consistency and automation -- a system that checks to make sure a change
keeps content consistent with other content, and ripples forward
necessary modifications through the database.  Certainly this sounds
great -- the system does lots of the grunt work.

The problem is it is inherently non-Wiki.  My hunch is that it would
severely affect the nature of Wikipedia.  The beauty of Wikipedia and
wikis is that humans and the evolving community are in control.    Not a
process and not some imposed database template.  (Clay Shirky has an
excellent view on this.)  If someone creating an article wants to do
tables in a particular way, or wants a different disambiguation message,
or a unique take on doing a timeline, s/he's completely open to it.
Jiang and Tannin can battle over which way to write up Australia, and in
the end they agree, and a better template comes out.  I'm nearly
convinced it's why 1) people feel empowered by Wikis, 2) people stay
around in the community and 3) good ideas evolve so quickly.

I say I'm nearly convinced, because in the end, it seems that something
beyond hand-editing everything *has* to evolve. But does it?  I'm not
sure.  When does this merry go round stop? :) Perhaps that's what's so
challenging about the "1.0" project.  I'd love to hear ideas on this.

Clay Shirky says, "The software makes no attempt to add 'process' in
order to keep people from doing stupid things. Instead, it provides more
flexibility, a crazy amount of flexibility, and intoxicating amount of
flexibility, allowing massive amounts of stupidity and intentional
damage to be done, at will, by roving and anonymous posters."
(http://www.corante.com/many/20030801.shtml#50187)

-Andrew Lih/Fuzheado


from_name: Stevertigo

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Formalize the PM logo improvement process.

body:
I'd like to suggest we now proceed to formalize the
process by which the final logo is improved:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_logo_variants
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/PM logo  (copy of the
[[Image talk:Pallusmg.... .png]] without all the
chat-- just how to recreate the logo-- for those who
want to make their own variants.

Gutza, Anthere, others just now coming out of the
woodwork -- your criticisms about the aethetic
problems with the winner ("Christmas tree decorating")
are valid, and now your help will be needed to make
the PM logo (and the runners up) as good as possible
for possible good use.

Erik: Nice job-- I know I gave you some heck a couple
weeks ago -- but I thought it was better to raise that
issue (that strength of concept should takes
precedence over minor flaws in the execution) during
rather than after. Considering the scope of the
process, the lack of precedent for something on this
scale-- there isnt a single person here who could
honestly state that they could have done it better.

Id like to announce that "Beat Up on Erik Day" is now
over.
~S~

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


body:
David Friedland <david at nohat.net> writes:

> If you don't care about the logo, why are you bothering to argue about it?
> Your response seems the most hysterical of any so far.

Then allow me to be pithy.

There was a vote.
Your choice lost.
Deal with it.
And do it without insinuating that Erik somehow rigged the election.

> If I don't care about an issue being discussed on the lists,

I don't care about the logo, but I do care about flagrant attempts to subvert
democracy ("Let's not ratify") or the continuing unfounded implications that
something underhand went on during the voting process and the inherent slur on
Erik's character.

(Remember, if you don't like the logo, you can always fork)
--
Gareth Owen
I'm very enamoured of the idea of meta-content markup ...
there are a lot of cool possibilities. But we should be reluctant to tamper
much with a system that totally works in an amazing way. -- Jimmy Wales


from_name: Ulrich Fuchs

body:
> Thanks for your constructive feedback, Tarquin. I'll take it into account
> the next time I organize something like this.
>

In fact the whole thing was ridiculous from the start. The way how logos were
submitted was ridiculous - in any size, in any format. The way they were
presented even more (basically that already was a preselection).  THe way the
rules were changed some time during the whole process also weren't quite what
you should expect from a fair contest.

The way the final voting was done was the most ridiculous thing at all,
because there were'nt just 11 candidates (as they were supposed to be left
from the first round), there were about 35, because each alternative was
obviously a seperate candidate. So the "type 2" logos got round the bout 2500
points in total, the "type 1" logo candidates about 1000 points.
Unfortunatly, type 2 had five "alternatives", type 1 just two. That's the
reason, why that silly fish bowl now is the so called "winner". Because there
were less alternative to spread the votes on, not because it got more votes.


body:
--- "Alex R." <alex756 at nyc.rr.com> wrote:

> However, that does not solve the problem that
> each fair use must be specifically described, i.e.
> when one uploads an image it is available to use
> on many encyclopedia pages, what is needed is
> information _about_each_use_

Each use??  IANAL -- but I know when man's "law"
starts contradicting God's Law.. Reason,
reasonability, etc.  No wonder you guys are turned off
to "fair use" -- its almost untenable with that
standard.

If there was (years from now) an image.wikipedia.org,
that *centralized* dealing with images across all
wikis, it would be easier to deal with images as a
whole -- upon input. But you're saying this ideality
would still not satisfy fair use--that each use of
those images must be justified?

Wow.
~S~

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


from_name: Ian Gilfillan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Afrikaans wikipedia down

body:
The Afrikaans wikipedia seems to be down:
http://af.wikipedia.org/wiki.cgi
returns

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable
to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, lee at piclab.com and inform them of
the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have
caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

Apache/1.3.27 Server at af.wikipedia.org Port 80

This doesn't seem to affect any of the other languages.

regards,
Ian Gilfillan


subject: [Wikitech-l] Afrikaans wikipedia down

body:
Ah, apologies, I've just read the message below. I presume this is the
reason.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brion Vibber" <brion at pobox.com>
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 5:37 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] *.wikipedia.com

> On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 08:23, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > On Tue, 2003-09-23 at 05:40, Walter Vermeir wrote:
> > > I have noticed that fy.wikipedia.com and af.wikipedia.com point to a
> > > strange website.
> >
> > Is now forwarding to the proper locations.
>
> (At least, it should be. Updates to the DNS may not have finished
> propagating to every corner of the globe.)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
From: Stevertigo <utilitymuffinresearch2 at yahoo.com>

--- "Alex R." <alex756 at nyc.rr.com> wrote:

> However, that does not solve the problem that
> each fair use must be specifically described, i.e.
> when one uploads an image it is available to use
> on many encyclopedia pages, what is needed is
> information _about_each_use_

Each use??  IANAL -- but I know when man's "law"
starts contradicting God's Law.. Reason,
reasonability, etc.  No wonder you guys are turned off
to "fair use" -- its almost untenable with that
standard.

If there was (years from now) an image.wikipedia.org,
that *centralized* dealing with images across all
wikis, it would be easier to deal with images as a
whole -- upon input. But you're saying this ideality
would still not satisfy fair use--that each use of
those images must be justified?

Wow.
~S~

-----
I see two possibilities

Either we decide it is enough to indicate the image is
copyrighted on the description page, but might fit
with fair use doctrine.
Then, we see the article pages to which the image is
linked.
in these articles, we mention ''in hidden text'' the
fact the use might be said "fair use".

Pb is that the user will not necessarily look at the
source, so will miss the info

Or the image description mention it is cp, but might
be fair use, and try to describe which use are
possible

As for the central database, it would make sense
perhaps, that it contains only gfdl and public domain
images. not cp ones, that would remain on local
wikipedias.
This would favor use of free images.

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


body:
On Fri, Sep 26, 2003 at 03:03:00AM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> What now? As you may have noticed, I have taken the liberty to put the
> logo on the English Wikipedia already.

Reverse it immediately and do it the way it's supposed to be done -
by changing the link to image, not by replacing existing image by completely different one.
The way you've done it every link to old logo is replaced by link to this new logo.


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>tarquin-
>
>
>
>>And the whole voting process has been a complete fiasco.
>>
>>
>
>Thanks for your constructive feedback, Tarquin. I'll take it into account
>the next time I organize something like this.
>
>
The whole point of this process was to choose a logo to represent
Wikipedia in all languages. There was a VERY lengthy debate about how to
have a fair voting system.
To then have this "ratification process" so wikipedias can opt out --
it's like building something only to knock it down!


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Mirroring (was Re: Fundraising)

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> I have no idea what 'real statistics' could either strengthen or weaken the
> point I am making. There are no 'real statistics' about the amount of time
> it costs to make edits on all machines as opposed to doing all on one. There
> has been no Wikipedia implementation on either.

I have not taken my time to contribute to the source code, so I'll
keep my opinions on the details to myself.  But you are right that
there are no detailed statistics today, and I think that this is sad.

I wish the best for and give my deepest respect to those who take
their time to work on the source code and hardware.  My spontaneous
reaction, however, is that compartmentization of different operations
to different servers is a mistake.  It can certainly work, but it also
risks to make the system more complex and vulnerable than necessary.

The architecture that I would advocate is a single MySQL backend
(possibly with a cold or hot standby) and multiple parallel PHP+Apache
frontends, that are all equal and balance the load among them.  This
should be combined with profiling of any request (both complete
HTTP requests, and individual SQL statements) that takes longer than a
set limit of wallclock time.  The latter would provide the performance
statistics that we are missing today.

Susning.nu doesn't have any hardware of its own.  It runs as a Perl
FCGI script on a web hotel.  The web hotel serves a couple of thousand
websites on a cluster consisting of a single MySQL backend server and
multiple parallel Apache frontend servers that balance the load among
them.  Susning.nu only has 1.8 million page views per month, and is
one of this web hotel's most heavily accessed websites, so it's not a
huge web hotel, but they are friendly and skilled and they run Linux.
To the questions "how to design the hardware", "how to run backups",
and "how to balance the load", my best answer is "I don't - my web
hotel does that for me - for $50 per month".  All I do is to profile
and optimize the Perl script and SQL statements, so the site runs
fast.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/


from_name: Stan Shebs

references:
<8uaLLJqSpVB@erik_moeller> <oprv27kyu4zs1r4a@localhost>
	<3F73FA71.7070108@moongate.ro> <20030926100636.GA24262@tavaiah>
	<3F74E6B3.2080308@corell.dyndns.org>

body:
Thomas Corell wrote:

> - I learned a lot about voting and started to like dictatorship

Ha ha ha! (and apropos for RL as well as WL, heh) I nominate this for
immortalization in [[w:]] somewhere...

Stan


body:
--- "Alex R." <alex756 at nyc.rr.com> wrote:
> From: "Stevertigo"
> <utilitymuffinresearch2 at yahoo.com>
>
> >.... But you're saying this ideality
> > would still not satisfy fair use--that each use of
> > those images must be justified?
> >
> > Wow.
> > ~S~
>
> Bingo! Finally the ah ha moment! Merci beaucoup!

:P

Ah, but its a bittersweet moment-- and the revelation
is; there truly is no reconciliation between rule of
law and ist spirit after all.

:-)
~S~
I had a dog named "Bingo" once.  Not really.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


body:
Ulrich-

> Why? We are now exactly in the situtation that the winning logo does not
> scale very good to small sizes!

That depends on what you mean by small size. The puzzle sphere was
uploaded in 150x150, the required size for the logo is 135x135. It
certainly scaled to that size. There was no requirement that the logo
would scale to, say, 32x32 and, as has been pointed out, most brands do
not properly scale to that size either, which is why favicons are usually
abstractions. (An abstract version of the puzzle sphere would probably
make a pretty nice favicon, but I do not like the current favicon
proposals.)

Except for logo 11, all of the finalists were within the required
dimensions and proportions, and I provided a scaled down version of logo
11 on that logo's discussion page. This shows that voters played the role
of checking the requirements.

> If they all would have the same size from
> the beginning, they would be better comparable, and the logo pages could
> have been downloaded faster.

While that would certainly have helped, it is highly doubtful that, with
over 130 submissions and many more variants, all logos would have fit on a
single loadable page even if they were all of the same dimensions.

When you enforce limits very strictly, you will create other problems --
artists may be scared away by what they perceive as a dictatorial process,
or they may not even understand what is going on (many of the submitters
were newbies). I don't think enforcing logo sizes would have made a
substantial enough impact to justify that. And, frankly, it would have
been a lot of work.

> I'm talking about the first round(!), where the logos were ranked
> according to the time they got in.

I don't see the alternative. As noted above, enforcing logo sizes would
not have made a relevant impact here -- there are simply too many logos
for that. Random ranking has the same (mostly theoretical) problems.

> 1) I doubt that too many people did download page 100-125, because
> downloading page 1-25 already took a long time, 25-50 again a long time and
> so on. You get the point?

Yes, but I doubt that it is true. Among the finalists, logo 4 was number
126 on the original list. Logo 5 was number 129. Logo 6 was number 97.
Logo 11 was number 124. So we clearly have plenty of late logos among the
finalists. And their ranking in the first round correlates fairly well
with their ranking in the second round.

But I do believe that approval voting is more susceptible to this problem
than average voting, where the number of voters does not matter much. In a
future contest, it might make more sense to have only one voting round,
although I shudder at the size of the ballot page that would result.

> 2) New logos were added at the end, while the first logos were already
> visible. I am not sure any more, if they also were already votable, which
> would make it worse. But, what really *does* matter: The Logos on the first
> pages had more time to sink into the brains of people.

What does "sinking in" mean? There is no evidence that I would rate a logo
higher if I've already seen it two months ago. Logo #1 got 3 votes total.
Logo #136, which in my opinion is much worse because it is completely
unusable, got 7 votes.

> The two three highest scoring logos are to be found on page 1-25,

That proves absolutely nothing. It is quite obvious that many people with
a high motivation to produce a great logo will be among the first wave of
submitters. And indeed, if you look at the amount of work that has been
invested by Neolux, Anthere and Paullusmagnus in their logos, the number
of variants etc., it is much higher than that of most logos which came
later.

> the third
> is also the example of the logo contest, to be found on the top page of the
> contest.

Huh? What do you mean with example? Which page?

>> They weren't.

> We first had 10 final candidates, we then had 11.

That was the unfortunate result of unexpected logo swapping, as explained
on the logo page.

> First everyone could vote
> (in the first round), than only people with user pages (also in the first
> round).

All votes were counted in the first round, regardless of userpage or not;
what was necessary was a sig-type vote [[User:Foo]] or even
[[de:Benutzer:Foo]], but it didn't matter whether it pointed to an
existing user page or not. That rule was changed for the second stage.
There was no change of rules in mid process.

>  And so on.

And so on what?

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Voting versus consensus

body:
--- Gutza <gutza at moongate.ro> wrote:
That's why I
> think more refinement via more collaborative design
> and more consensus
> will only result in more clutter. I can only pray
> I'm wrong.

Gutza-- why dont you now put some energy into
developing some variants of the PM logo--- its the
winning concept, accept it, now please give it some of
your touch that it might be more pleasing to the
displeased.

~S~

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


from_name: Björn Lindqvist

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: BuddhaInside banned

body:
>>>The vandalism of the Main Page was the last straw. I have banned
>>>BuddhaInside. This should not require Jimbo's approval since it was a
> case
>>>of simple and obvious vandalism.
>>>I hope we can get rid of all these Deletexxxx pages he idiotically
>
> created
>
>>>now.
>>>
>>>Regards,
>>>
>>>Erik
>>
>>If you had looked a little closer you would have seen that it wasn't
>>done on purpouse.
>>
>>BL
>
>
> Do you mean the move of the main page was not done on purpose?  How could it
> have been an accident? from what others have said this needed a hand-edited
> URL - it wasn't just a mistaken click of a link.  Can you elaborate?
>
> Thanks
>
> sannse

Yes I can. What I claim is that BuddhaInside (BI) wasn't intentionally
vandalising the Main Page even though that is what happened. Since none
of the developers had realised that moving a main page was possible, it
is not justified to believe that BI realised that. Because IF BI's
intention was to vandalize, why didn't he continue after the first move
with other protected pages? However *if* we assume that BI believed that
moving the Main Page would create a *copy* of it on his talk page the
story becomes more reasonable. It is possible that he used a URL instead
of a link because he was busy moving his talk page to the Deletexxx
pages. Tim Starling was the developer that solved the problem so I guess
he knows.

A compilation of the relevant edits BI made are up for public display
at: http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BL/evenmorestuff

BL


body:
Richard-
> On 26 Sep 2003 18:44:00 +0200, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> gave
> utterance to the following:

>>
>> The total points are irrelevant. The logos were ranked by the average
>> score, it doesn't matter at all how many people voted on each logo
>> because
>> the score is the sum divided by the number of voters *for that variant*.

> In that case, why isn't the number of votes for each logo identical - a
> requirement for average voting to work.

No. Read the above again. There are no zero votes -- not voting does not
influence the average for that submission.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Richard-
> The winner doesn't, IMO, comply with the design brief,

In which respect?

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [WikiEN-l] articles about Serbian history

body:
Hello to all.

I subscribed to this list in order to give my word about what I see some
people perceive as a problem made by my actions. By the way, I tried to
subscribe yesterday, but it seems that that didn't work for some reason.

I noticed that there are two separate issues here: the NPOV of the articles
and the links on them. I think that they are separate enough that I could
discuss them separately.

About NPOV: the site is like it is, some of its contents might be
"propagandistic, wrong and/or biased", it might even contain, as someone
said, falsifications of history, but the particular articles that I copied
from the site are not such. Some of them contain simply raw data that has no
POV at all, and those that were not such I NPOVed and, after I was kindly
asked by Eloquence, I NPOVed them even more then I think is needed. And they
could be even further NPOVed by other contributors. I think that this subject
is closed.

Now, about the links.

First, some people misunderstood the issue: these links are not ==External
links== which, of course, (at least that is my opinion) could be freely
removed by anyone who doesn't think that they belong where they do. These are
links to the site which is the ==Source== of the article, from which the
articles are copied, which is the same case as with the articles that are
copied from, say, FOLDOC. As I understood it, such links are requirement for
copying the data from the site (I used standard permission text, you can see
it at [[User:Nikola Smolenski/FreeSrpska]]).

I understand that some people don't like to see links to such a site here, or
perhaps anywhere on the web, while at the same time don't mind if there are
no articles about the topics. But some other people don't mind the links and
like the articles (and I'm one of them, obviously). I can say that article
about [[Prince Lazar]] is already twice its size, and it did not exist at all
before I copied it from FS. As I said already, the articles would take days
instead of hours to make if they were not copied from the site. And some of
the pictures from them would be very hard or impossible to find elsewhere.

Personaly, I doubt that anyone will click on that links in order to find more
information about the subject (the article is based on a text from the site;
obviously, there is no more information about the subject on the site) or in
order to find information on similar subjects (they are warned that the site
is biased; and if they don't mind reading biased data then why shold we
mind?).

So, to conclude it, I don't think that extracting NPOV data from POV sites is
something wrong or that it will hurt credibility of Wikipedia. To the
contrary, I think that we could be proud for being able to remake even such
sources into brilliant prose.

Finally, I feel the need to stress that, to the best of my knowledge, I have
broke no Wikipedia policy. It is, again to the best of my knowledge, allowed
to copy to WP any material that violates no copyright law, is NPOV, and
encyclopedic in nature, which is what I did. Perhaps new policies have to be
made, but I did nothing wrong.


body:
> Wrong. The international logo contest contained clear rules on both size
> and format. These rules were violated by some submissions, but it would
> have been unfair to just throw these logos out,

Why? We are now exactly in the situtation that the winning logo does not scale
very good to small sizes! If they all would have the same size from the
beginning, they would be better comparable, and the logo pages could have
been downloaded faster. (my next point:)

> > The way they
> > were presented even more (basically that already was a preselection).
>
> The logos were ranked by the number of votes from the first voting round.

I'm talking about the first round(!), where the logos were ranked according to
the time they got in. That had two consequences:

1) I doubt that too many people did download page 100-125, because downloading
page 1-25 already took a long time, 25-50 again a long time and so on. You
get the point? If all logos were 150x150, they would have fit on a single
page.

2) New logos were added at the end, while the first logos were already
visible. I am not sure any more, if they also were already votable, which
would make it worse. But, what really *does* matter: The Logos on the first
pages had more time to sink into the brains of people.

The two three highest scoring logos are to be found on page 1-25, the third is
also the example of the logo contest, to be found on the top page of the
contest.

> They weren't.

We first had 10 final candidates, we then had 11. First everyone could vote
(in the first round), than only people with user pages (also in the first
round). And so on.

>
> > The way the final voting was done was the most ridiculous thing at all,
> > because there were'nt just 11 candidates (as they were supposed to be
> > left from the first round), there were about 35,
>
> It was always made clear that you would be able to vote on all variants in
> the final vote.
>
> > So the "type 2" logos got round the bout
> > 2500 points in total,
>
> The total points are irrelevant. The logos were ranked by the average
> score, it doesn't matter at all how many people voted on each logo because
> the score is the sum divided by the number of voters *for that variant*.

You are totally right here, please take my apologies. I confused our system
with a system with a *limited* number of votes by voter, but here we could
vote for *every* alternative (not just for eg. five of them.)
Sorry again, this was my fault, I was to fast here.

Uli


from_name: Alex R.

body:
From: "Steve Vertigum" <utilitymuffinresearch2 at yahoo.com>

> --- "Alex R." <alex756 at nyc.rr.com> wrote:
>
> > If this is going to be done it is all the more
> > reason for
> > the image description page to be completed with
> > specific information.
>
> There there needs to be a form to fill out (upon
> upload ) thats more than just a comment line--
> something to remind people of the basic info they
> should get in the habit of including.

This is a good idea and it is something that Anthere
has also suggested elsewhere (do you remember where
you brought this up Anthere?).

However, that does not solve the problem that
each fair use must be specifically described, i.e.
when one uploads an image it is available to use
on many encyclopedia pages, what is needed is
information _about_each_use_ that will help
show that the kind of fair use is the kind that
Jimbo has talked about, fair use that covers just
about any GFDL downstream application of
the image in an encyclopedic, informational
context.

Otherwise we are going to get as crazy on the
English Wikipedia about deleting images as
we have become on the French Wikipedia
(and perhaps elsewhere that I am unaware).

Alex756


body:
From: "Stevertigo" <utilitymuffinresearch2 at yahoo.com>

>.... But you're saying this ideality
> would still not satisfy fair use--that each use of
> those images must be justified?
>
> Wow.
> ~S~

Bingo! Finally the ah ha moment! Merci beaucoup!

Alex756


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: [roy_q_royce@hotmail.com: --A Request RE a WIKI
	Article--]

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Allowing Mr. Royce's views at the appropriate place(s) is just fine.

Yes, but Wikipedia is not that place at this point. His theories are at
best his own original research, unpublished except on usenet and on the
web. Should he publish his views and a serious debate ensues, we will
certainly report about it.

Axel


from_name: Geoff Burling

body:
On Fri, 26 Sep 2003, Roy Royce wrote:

> [Poor's message failed to appear in my Hotmail inbox, so I am
> replying to him via Saintonge's message, which did appear]
>
> [Mr. Poor wrote:]
>
> >Mr. Royce,
>
> >Please do not call other list members names or otherwise make nasty
> >personal remarks.
>
> >    "Mr. Tim Starling is either a liar or an easily-fooled person."
>
> Which is worse, calling someone a liar or libel?

Mr Royce, your question is a non sequitor. If you believe that Tim
Starling was wrong abut what he said, the proper way that demonstrates
Wikilove is to say "I belive Tim Starling is in error when he says..."

Presenting yourself to a fresh audience by accusing someone they know
better than you a liar immediately makes all of your words sound shrill.
In a word, you lost credibility off the start. Then, by writing of
lies & libel, you've damaged your credibility further.

[snip]
>
> (And anyone who reads my Usenet messages can see that I am
> by no means a vicious person.)
>
I don't need to read your Usenet messages. I participated in
alt.religion.scientology for several years; I know viciousness.
Your email that I am responding to is vicious.

Take a few minutes to calm down, consider how you can present
your case in a non-accusatory tone, then do so in an email.
Let's assume misunderstandings before you start seeing hostile
intentions where none exist.

Geoff


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Voting versus consensus

body:
Jimmy-
> Without drawing any conclusions for future decisionmaking, I'll just
> point out that one of the negative side-effects of voting that has
> been alleged is that voting encourages partisanship rather than
> co-operation.

To avoid this, we had plenty of time for open discussion. Many users took
the opportunity to comment on the submitted logos, and many refinements
were made on that basis. This was before any votes were made (obviously,
the earlier a logo was submitted, the more it could have benefited from
this).

What was missing was a good overview of the pros and cons of each logo.
This has technical reasons -- with the pages already very big and over 130
submissions, discussions had to be relegated to relatively hidden talk
pages. I'm not very happy with this, because I believe in the principle of
*informed* democracy. Voting is pointless and quickly becomes a kind of
formalized, emotion-based flamewar if people are not aware of the
arguments for and against each option. I am always open to suggestions for
how to point people to these arguments without being obtrusive.

The transition from voting to consensus finding is gradual and vice versa.
But as can be easily mathematically demonstrated, as the number and
diversity of options and the number and diversity of voters grow, real
consensus quickly becomes impossible to achieve. Even with just 2 or 3
very good logos, you will end up with "partisanship". What compromise can
you make between a puzzle sphere and an abstract circle-type logo?
Combining ideas from both sounds good in theory but in practice is the
kind of forced solution that never works.

In the logo contest as it took place, there were consensus finding phases,
voting phases, and now there's a consensus finding phase again (to
optimize the logo). I think this is the way to go on controversial matters
such as this one.

While my favorite didn't win (it didn't even make the list of finalists),
I think the overall logo process worked pretty well. We managed to get
from over 130 submissions down to 11 and now to 1 in about 2 months, with
hundreds of voters from all across the world, with two different voting
systems, open discussion throughout the whole process, and all that
without any additional software support whatsoever, and without
significant cheating. We had translations of contest rules, voting
instructions and ballots in many languages. We had a user contributed
counting script and live-updates of the results. The finalists almost all
complied with the contest rules and were generally agreed to be all of
high artistic quality or at least conceptually good. The amount of
strategic voting was negligible. The winning logo was the leader in both
rounds, under different voting systems. Last but not least, we made a
decision as planned (well, almost).

Regards,

Erik


body:
Jimmy-
> I'm happy with the result of the logo competition, and I endorse
> Erik's idea that we revisit it a couple of years from now.  I'm not
> happy with the idea of per-langauage ratification, but it's certainly
> better than any of the International Wikipedias feeling that we've
> shoved something down their throats.  (I do agree with those who say
> that the whole point of the process, though, was to have a uniform
> logo everywhere!)

As I said, this was primarily done to accommodate those Wikipedias who
already have a nonstandard logo and might feel they are treated unfairly
because they consider their current logo superior to the new one (e.g.
"fat white dove on green gradient = better than puzzle sphere"). But I'm
all for stamping on national idiosyncrasies and building a world
government instead (really!).

> Possibly a good compromise would be to have people volunteer first for
> a design committee

That's an interesting idea, especially considering that the people who
would complain would then largely be identical to the recipients of the
complaints, so it might cut down on the whining ;-). It would also help to
reduce the workload of individuals. I'm not sure it will work without
*some* benevolent dictator making the basic rules, though.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Richard-
> The calculation actually works in the opposite direction to tht expected,
> but
> your assertion is false. 549/180 != 548/179 Not voting for an entry
> increases its average.

Nonsense. Not voting on an entry has no impact whatsoever on its average.
A logo with only 1 voter who assigns a score of 1 has the lowest score
even if all other logos are voted on by 10000 people.  The numbers 548 and
549 above are arbitrary. New voters can increase or decrease the average
by assigning a value on a scale from 1 to 5.

E.g.

3 + 4 + 2 + 1 / 4 = 2.5
3 + 4 + 2 + 1 + 5 / 5 = 3 - new voter increased total

Whereas not voting on the logo does not affect the average at all.

Regards,

Erik


body:
From: "Anthere" <anthere6 at yahoo.com>

> Pb is that the user will not necessarily look at the
> source, so will miss the info

I think any user who is a downstream licencee will
be lookiing for any due dilligence that they can
rely upon or verify independently. This is important
as we cannot forsee all future fair use scenarios.
A downstream licensee will have to check this out,
already WP states that all text is released under the
GFDL. Someone can verify the edits and the collaborative
authoring process for the text by looking into the
page histories and analyzing all the contributions on
a page (yes this is why IMO the IBM/MIT research
project can be important to the future of the GFDL)
and they will be able to make a decision about the
authorship of texts. For images it will be more a question
of public domain or trying to understand the relationship
between their use of the GFDL materials vs. the
Wikipedia use and see if their use is also a "fair use".
If not, they either delete the image, or they ask
permission (something that even we can do). If they
are going to make money using GFDL materials I do
not see any contradiction with that and our use of
fair use materials here on Wikipedia. If it is a photo,
for a biography, well, then can hire an artist to make
 a sketch of the person depicted if they cannot get
permission. At least they have an image to work
from.
For people who might want to create their own
native encyclopedia, their use is probably fair use
as well. Why worry so much about that? There is
no reason to get hysterical about it here. Wikipedias
are non-commercial (different from non-profit) and
educational. The amount of material that the photo
represents is relatively minor and with the small size
of the thumbnails used, how can anyone suggest
that the image is anything more than providing some
basic information, i.e. what a person looks like or
what a whale looks like. No one is going to sue
Wikipedia for that (and even then there is the DCMA
OCILLA sec. 512 procedure anyone can follow).

Alex756


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: BuddhaInside banned

body:
Bull.  He had to PURPOSELY type in the name in the URL, then PURPOSELY edit the Main Page to prevent its being move back easily.

RickK

Bj?rn_Lindqvist <bjrn.lindqvist at telia.com> wrote:
> The vandalism of the Main Page was the last straw. I have banned
> BuddhaInside. This should not require Jimbo's approval since it was a case
> of simple and obvious vandalism.
>
> I hope we can get rid of all these Deletexxxx pages he idiotically created
> now.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

If you had looked a little closer you would have seen that it wasn't
done on purpouse.

BL

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subject:
[WikiEN-l] Adam acting the ass again *sigh* (and he is only just
	back)

body:
We did?

RickK

james duffy <jtdirl at hotmail.com> wrote:

I'm afraid Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons] is acting the ass again in exactly the same way as
he did before.

...

We all expected that /this/ time he would stop acting the ass
and grow up.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Welcome back Adam

body:
And already causing trouble.

RickK

cprompt <cprompt at tmbg.org> wrote:

He hasn't used PP in 3 days. Perhaps he's switching to Lir fulltime.

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body:
From: "Stevertigo" <utilitymuffinresearch2 at yahoo.com>
> > > Wow.
> > > ~S~
> >
> > Bingo! Finally the ah ha moment! Merci beaucoup!
>
> :P
>
> Ah, but its a bittersweet moment-- and the revelation
> is; there truly is no reconciliation between rule of
> law and ist spirit after all.
>
> :-)
> ~S~
> I had a dog named "Bingo" once.  Not really.

It is those bittersweet moments that us legal beagles
learn to love, that is what makes law so frustrating and
fascinating. Whoever said, "the truth shall set you
free" did not sit through enough jury trials.

l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Welcome back Adam

body:
Dan,

I'm newer than you, and I've still seen how Lir likes to confuse things with multiple names.  What do you mean, you don't know why he'd want to use two
logins?  Because it's the way he makes things difficult for the rest of us.

RickK

Daniel Ehrenberg <littledanehren at yahoo.com> wrote:
> By the look of things, he is using two logins at the
> moment. See:
>
>
>
http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=Lir&limit=100&offset=0
>
>
http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=Pizza+Puzzle&limit=100&offset=0
>
> FWIW.

We still don't have definitive word that Pizza Puzzle
is Adam, and I don't see why he'd want to use two
logins.
LDan

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body:
I don't think that's anyone's intent.  Adam isn't a scapegoat, he's a troll.

RickK

Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
In the meantime please stop developing excuses to make Adam a scapegoat.

Ec

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from_name: David Friedland

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Voting versus consensus

body:
Gutza wrote:
> Stevertigo wrote:
>
>> Gutza-- why dont you now put some energy into
>> developing some variants of the PM logo--- its the
>> winning concept, accept it, now please give it some of
>> your touch that it might be more pleasing to the
>> displeased.
>>
>>
> You are right, I'm whining too much, and I hate to do it. The problem is
> that I find the very concept to be tainted, it's not like you have to
> work with puzzle pieces, you have to work with a ball made of puzzle
> pieces. And there's not a lot you can do with that. Well, I did give it
> a try this afternoon, and I'll probably give it a try tomorrow as well
> if I find the time, but the results in this afternoon have been... well,
> they made me write the e-mails I did, need I say more? :)
>
> Gutza

Just for everybody's information, I have been in discussion with PM
about the logo and we are working to get the process of rendering the
logo working on my computer, and hopefully on others' too so they too
can modify the logo in fundamental ways. I didn't like the puzzle sphere
much before, but after looking at some of the source files I think it
holds promise. I also have significant design experience (in print,
corporate identity, and web)  so I know exactly where Gutza's complaints
are coming from. I am working now on modifying two aspects of the logo
that are its major detractions:

(1) I have redesigned the text block. The currently using one suffers
from several major flaws: (a) the text is too dense, (b) the (roman)
text is in an ugly font, and (c) there are some gaps in the file that
cut off parts of lines, and overall, it's just kind of an amateurish
jobs. I have made a new text block, with glyphs that are well separated
but not too far apart, and I used the Code2000 font and glyphs from many
many writing systems, not just roman, cyrillic, arabic, and cjk. There
are glyphs from a variety of Indian scripts, Hebrew, Mongolian, Tibetan,
Amharic, Coptic, Runic,  even some made-up ones like Klingon (although
there is only 1 Klingon glyph), as well as some non-alphabetic symbols.
I think it will look much better, although I must confess I haven't got
the renderer working yet so I haven't seen it on the sphere.

(2) Instead of the puzzle pieces simply being a set of black lines
dividing up the image mapped onto the sphere, I am going to make the
puzzle pieces into a bump-map. What this means is that there won't be
black lines all over the sphere that look like puzzle pieces; instead,
at the edges of the puzzle pieces, there will be a 3-d beveled effect
that resembles how the pieces intersect in a real jigsaw puzzle.

I think the combination of (1) and (2) will dramatically reduce the
cluttered or busy look of the current logo. At least I hope so. Of
course if no one likes my modified version, then so be it, but I think
most will see it as an improvement upon the major flaws in the current logo.

After thinking about this issue a lot today, I realize that one of the
major problems with the voting process is that there was  confusion
about whether we were voting for particular logos or just logo concepts.
I think in a future logo selection, it will be helpful for each logo to
have a declaration of concept so that if people like the idea but not
the particular implementation they can still get behind the idea.

Finally, I ask that all those who are objecting to the logo hold off for
a day or two while I finalize my modifications. I believe most will
agree that even if it is not the logo they would have picked, it is one
they can live with.

- David [[User:Nohat]]


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Corporate Responsibility

body:
> Christopher Mahan wrote:
>
> >>From comments on the thread of fundraising as to lack of interest:
> >
> >I suggest the creation of a mailing list dealing specifically with
> >the governance of the Wikimedia.
> >
> >That place should include discussions on what else needs to be done.
> >
> That sounds like a constructive suggestion.
>
> Ec
>

Not to be a jerk, but also one I made 6 days ago.

-- Jake


from_name: Gutza

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>But seriously, although I voted the way you did (well, in the
>preliminary vote, at least... I neglected to vote in round 2, I'm
>sorry to report), lots of people *did* vote that way, right?  So,
>unless they are like me, they probably did so without feeling
>retarded.
>
>
I refrained from voting altogether because I'm one of the logo authors
and didn't want to cheat -- I obviously wouldn't have been able to
refrain from voting my own contributions, and that would've been biased.

To answer the point you're raising, of course all the people who voted
with the winning proposal did so in good faith, and they certainly
didn't feel retarded while doing so (as they well shouldn't). But that
they did by looking at some images, and maybe finding the winning logo
as visually appealing or something. In the message you're commenting on
I was trying to emphasize the *concept* in itself, I was hoping at least
some people would realize that logo isn't what it should be when they
realized how inappropriate its concept is for this project. I failed.

Gutza