subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
As was mentioned in #wikimania on IRC, jimbo IS mistakenly misquoted,
but nobody really knows what he said. He's been requested to debunk
the screwups already.

On 8/5/05, Zachary Harden <zscout370 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> And how can we mark it as even nice? A template could disrupt the page, but
> IMHO, any type of mark on the article page is just asking for trouble. Plus,
> I still do not know how can one define a "done" article on here and how many
> will be protected on a trial basis.
>
> Regards,
>
> Zachary Harden
>
>
> >From: Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca>
> >Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> >To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> >Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
> >Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 17:29:02 -0700
> >
> >Phroziac wrote:
> >
> >>There's nothing wrong with the minority thing, but it is pretty funny.
> >>I completely agree with locking completed articles. Why should they be
> >>edited if they're done?
> >>
> >>
> >A "done" article? There's no such thing.
> >
> >I hope Jimbo's just been misleadingly quoted, personally. I would like to
> >see a system whereby versions of an article can be marked as "nice" so that
> >it's really easy to get to the most recent "nice" version. Perhaps even
> >have the "nice" version be the default one shown to non-logged-in users
> >and/or users who set a preference for that, with the edit link still taking
> >the user to the current version instead. But I think officially permanently
> >locking an article because someone thinks that it's "done" is a
> >tremendously bad idea. Article protection is a very blunt instrument,
> >blunter even than user bans, and I believe using it this way would damage
> >Wikipedia far worse than any vandalism it might prevent.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Zachary Harden

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
I can also point out that someone can do that to the God Save the Queen
article, and your right, it can go on. Though, I do know what we want to do
is write a serious encyclopedia, it seems that alot of people come here and
write about pop-culture.

Regards,

Zachary Harden

>From: steve v <vertigosteve at yahoo.com>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com>,English Wikipedia
><wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
>Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 13:19:45 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Examples:
>
>:''For the metal band, see [[United States of
>Discontent]]''
>'''United States''' is a country in [[North America]]n
>continent....
>
>:''For the [[Slobulus]] music single regarding
>roosters and alarm clocks, see [[Queen Elizabeth Loves
>the Cock]]''
>[[Majesty|Her Majesty]] '''Queen Elizabeth II'''
>(Elizabeth Alexandra Mary [[House of
>Windsor|Windsor]]), styled '''''HM The Queen'''''
>(born [[21 April]] [[1926]]) is the [[Queen regnant]]
>and [[head of state]] of...
>
>Need I continue?
>
>SV


from_name: Haukur Þorgeirsson

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
> I completely agree with locking completed articles. Why should they be
> edited if they're done?

Articles are never permanently "done", stuff happens. :)

Even articles on ancient history need updating as new
discoveries, new theories and new perspectives arise.
Our idea of what good prose looks like also changes
with time.

Anyone who's worked with 1911-Britannica entries is
familiar with the above problems.

Regards,
Haukur


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletion mechanism on wikis other than en:?

body:
There's a big debate on en: right now about what to use as a deletion
mechanism. The current [[:en:WP:VFD]] mechanism is very controversial -
I and many others think it creates more acrimony than it's worth, and
[[:en:user:Ed Poor]] actually deleted the page a couple of days ago!
While it was quickly undeleted, it's set in motion debates about what to
use for a deletion mechanism. Because I don't think anyone questions that
we needsome sort of deletion mechanism for stuff that isn't obvious
immediate speedy deletes - just that VFD is scaling badly and getting very
acrimonious.

So. What do other Wikipedias use as their deletion procedure?

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
This old edit on [[Holler]] is one of my favorites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Holler&diff=5401691&oldid=4709324

The article went from bogus information
on a purported Norse god to what looks
like a probable copyvio on a Spice Girls
single. (If there was an online source it
can't be found anymore.)

On the Norse mythology articles, which is
my primary sphere of interest on Wikipedia,
irrelevant fancruft tends to accumulate and
distract from the main content of the entries.

For an example see [[Yggdrasil]] which has
a large Popular Culture section and a disambiguation
entry, both of which could be summarized with
"a bunch of things in a bunch of games/novels/etc.
have been named after the mythological Yggdrasil".

Sometimes I snap and delete some of the stuff.
For example I removed the following from [[Fenrisulfr]]:

"Fenrir appears as a summonable character in Squaresoft's Final Fantasy
IX. Also it is a summonable creature in Final Fantasy XI."

Recently, of course, the poor wolf got this added to
the top of his page:

"For the character from the Harry Potter novel, see Fenrir Greyback."

The article on [[N?tt]] the personification of "night"
in Norse mythology had this at its top:

"For the Harry Potter character, see Minor Dark wizards in Harry Potter."

The irony here is that a bunch of real people have been
named "Nott" and singling out a *minor* dark wizard from
the Harry Potter books is patently absurd.

I don't actually mind fancruft. I can even appreciate that
there are probably more people who care about Harry Potter
mythology than Norse mythology. But still, I don't want it
in my face all the time :)

Regards,
Haukur


from_name: Dan Grey

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
On 05/08/05, steve v <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Examples:
>
> :''For the metal band, see [[United States of
> Discontent]]''
> '''United States''' is a country in [[North America]]n
> continent....
>
> :''For the [[Slobulus]] music single regarding
> roosters and alarm clocks, see [[Queen Elizabeth Loves
> the Cock]]''
> [[Majesty|Her Majesty]] '''Queen Elizabeth II'''
> (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary [[House of
> Windsor|Windsor]]), styled '''''HM The Queen'''''
> (born [[21 April]] [[1926]]) is the [[Queen regnant]]
> and [[head of state]] of...
>
> Need I continue?

No, you don't :-).

They're silly. Just take them out.

Dan


from_name: Phroziac

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
Unwikipedia sounds too much like Uncyclopedia. ;/

On 8/5/05, steve v <vertigosteve at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Seems like a cool idea. But given any "Wikipedia 1.0"
> agenda, and putting aside for a moment the aspects of
> being entirely unwiki and oxymoronical, there are a
> few general ways that this could take shape AISI:
>
> * Unwikipedia academic fork: Separate parallel wiki
> with Google ads and paid academics working on
> polishing wikipedia articles. Code would allow for
> easy viewing and merging of Wikipedia and Unwikipedia
> articles
>
> * Ghost of Nupedia (aka. Nupedia's Monster): On-wiki
> institution of Nupedia-style credentialism. Ranking of
> academic degrees by type: conservative American Ivy
> League institutions first, everyone else second, all
> the way down to mail-order degrees from North Korea.
>
> * Perma-Protectionism: Sysops are pruned by
> credentialsm (or less so trust), and allowed to
> protect and lock pages at will, banning anyone who
> even hints at a crackpot theory, poor spelling, or
> youthful ignorance.
>
> * Paranoid Web of Trust: People get ranks (in addition
> to barnstars) and parade them proudly. Everyone sucks
> up to the Board members, and they eventually get
> military-style badges made to pin on their (c)&?
> Wikimedia Nohat-logo sweatshirts.
>
> * PATRIOT ACT : Uniting and Strengthening Wikipedia by
> Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and
> Obstruct Trollism Act of 2005
>
> -SV
>
>
>
> --- Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> > Zachary Harden wrote:
> >
> > > And how can we mark it as even nice? A template
> > could disrupt the
> > > page, but IMHO, any type of mark on the article
> > page is just asking
> > > for trouble. Plus, I still do not know how can one
> > define a "done"
> > > article on here and how many will be protected on
> > a trial basis.
> >
> > Something based on the version rating system that
> > almost got enabled in
> > the most recent version of WikiMedia would be best,
> > IMO - it's my
> > understanding that the basic code is all there, it
> > just needs tweaking
> > and polishing. Trying to kludge something together
> > with the existing
> > functions probably wouldn't work well since there's
> > no way to attach
> > arbitrary metadata to specific versions of a page.
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
>
>
>
> ____________________________________________________
> Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page
> http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

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list: textbook-l

from_name: sada nandan

subject: [Textbook-l] un subscribing

body:
 ?
Please un-subcribe me from the mailing list

tamasoma jyotir gamaya


subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
> I was about to cite the "Popular Culture" section of [[Space Shuttle
> program]] here, but it seems someone finally decided to purge it last
> month, and create [[Space Shuttles in fiction]]... it had grown to a
> truly silly size -
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Space_Shuttle_program&diff=18685575&oldid=18683806

Good move. Some of this is actually interesting to me,
though. If I get this right the space shuttle Enterprise
was named after Captain Kirk's Enterprise, but in the
Star Trek universe the original interstellar Enterprise
and its sister ships were named after the space shuttles.
So, it's a "temporal loop" - or something ;)

Regards,
Haukur


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
On 05/08/05, Haukur ?orgeirsson <haukurth at hi.is> wrote:

> For an example see [[Yggdrasil]] which has
> a large Popular Culture section and a disambiguation
> entry, both of which could be summarized with
> "a bunch of things in a bunch of games/novels/etc.
> have been named after the mythological Yggdrasil".

I was about to cite the "Popular Culture" section of [[Space Shuttle
program]] here, but it seems someone finally decided to purge it last
month, and create [[Space Shuttles in fiction]]... it had grown to a
truly silly size -
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Space_Shuttle_program&diff=18685575&oldid=18683806

[[Space station]], whilst no-where near as long, has a section which
basically seems to consist of "X work of fiction contained a space
station". The potential for expansion of this, given the prevalence of
articles about sf books and individual TV episodes, is not a cheering
one... time to purge a little, I think.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


list: foundation-l

from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

subject:
[Foundation-l] Legal implications of hosting wikis outside of
	United States?

body:
As for Europe, servers are usually not liable.

Le 3 ao?t 05 ? 15:07, Brion Vibber a ?crit :

> We've got a new set of servers coming in South Korea real soon, and
> are
> talking about the possibility of additional data centers elsewhere in
> Europe.
>
> With our current software system it's relatively straightforward to
> move
> whole wikis to separate data centers; for instance moving German and
> French Wikipedias and some other languages to Europe, or Korean and
> other Asian languages to Korea. This could allow us to make better use
> of server resources for expansion.
>
> What would be the legal implications of serving some content from
> outside of the United States, in comparison to merely running them
> through a local caching proxy?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


list: wikimedia-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
On 05/08/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 05/08/05, Haukur ?orgeirsson <haukurth at hi.is> wrote:
it had grown to a
> truly silly size -
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Space_Shuttle_program&diff=18685575&oldid=18683806

>From that section:

"A [[2005]] episode involving an alternate universe showed the NX-09
''Avenger'', so perhaps in the ''[[Star Trek]]'' universe, at least
four more shuttles were constructed, one of them being OVA-109
''Avenger''"

No Original Research, eh? But I don't really think anyone cares.

On 05/08/05, Chris L?er <chris at zandria.net> wrote:
> At 04:14 PM 8/5/2005, SPUI wrote:
>
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Green+Day+-+Minority&go=Go
> >gives no relevant results in the first page.
>
> But the Google site search does:
> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awikipedia.org+Green+Day+Minority&btnG=Google+Search

That really goes to show that, while the search system has been
greatly improved this year, it still has a long way to go. I
personally use only Google site search for searching Wikipedia.

Dan


subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
And how can we mark it as even nice? A template could disrupt the page, but
IMHO, any type of mark on the article page is just asking for trouble. Plus,
I still do not know how can one define a "done" article on here and how many
will be protected on a trial basis.

Regards,

Zachary Harden

>From: Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
>Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2005 17:29:02 -0700
>
>Phroziac wrote:
>
>>There's nothing wrong with the minority thing, but it is pretty funny.
>>I completely agree with locking completed articles. Why should they be
>>edited if they're done?
>>
>>
>A "done" article? There's no such thing.
>
>I hope Jimbo's just been misleadingly quoted, personally. I would like to
>see a system whereby versions of an article can be marked as "nice" so that
>it's really easy to get to the most recent "nice" version. Perhaps even
>have the "nice" version be the default one shown to non-logged-in users
>and/or users who set a preference for that, with the edit link still taking
>the user to the current version instead. But I think officially permanently
>locking an article because someone thinks that it's "done" is a
>tremendously bad idea. Article protection is a very blunt instrument,
>blunter even than user bans, and I believe using it this way would damage
>Wikipedia far worse than any vandalism it might prevent.


subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
But athletes are smqrt.

On 8/6/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: RIPEMD160
>
> steve v wrote:
> > * Ghost of Nupedia (aka. Nupedia's Monster): On-wiki institution of
> > Nupedia-style credentialism. Ranking of academic degrees by type:
> > conservative American Ivy League institutions first, everyone else
> > second, all the way down to mail-order degrees from North Korea.
> >
>
> fnord! Ranking of academic degrees by age of institution which offers
> them, with weighting based on age of faculty at that institution.
>
> Anyway, the Ivy League is an athletics association.
>
> > * Paranoid Web of Trust: People get ranks (in addition to barnstars)
> > and parade them proudly. Everyone sucks up to the Board members, and
> > they eventually get military-style badges made to pin on their (c)&?
> > Wikimedia Nohat-logo sweatshirts.
> >
>
> func's micronation is spreading :)
>
> - --
> Alphax                      |   /"\
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>
> iD8DBQFC9Dkw/RxM5Ph0xhMRAwadAJ9Dm5+NEi7qXxx9jTme+diAiZKEJQCeLvtU
> 2SQG95FrfEB/0TUiokyoo+o=
> =RgTp
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
If Jimbo spoke to a German paper, could there have been a screw up in the
translation? Also, how do I get on/join an IRC? TIA

Regards,

Zachary Harden

>From: Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
>Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 20:22:14 -0400
>
>As was mentioned in #wikimania on IRC, jimbo IS mistakenly misquoted,
>but nobody really knows what he said. He's been requested to debunk
>the screwups already.


from_name: Milos Rancic

body:
Serbian Wikipedia has vfd page, but the way of making decisions is not
so formal like on en:. In general, if the article is related to to the
field which some of sr.Wikipedians know good (i.e., we have a couple
of good mathematicians; one has PhD), existence of such article is
related to her/his decision.

We don't delete articles often. We have a group of articles
"huh-ah-hoh, I am the best, you are the worst" :) Those articles are
deleted when one of admins see it. Nazi propaganda, too. But, other
kind of articles usually become a stub or good articles.

Yesterday I deleted one "huh-ah-hoh..." article about one village near
Belgrade (we would make better article about it using NGSA data). But,
one month ca pass between two deletions (except deletion was not made
by creator of the pate or according to her/his demand).

I suggest to make a teams in different fields which can give it's
opinion about deletion of some article. And it should be the part of
deletion process. (Btw, that kind of teams are very important for many
other things, such as facts inside of articles or even new Wikipedias;
I am preparing a mail which is related to this matter.)

Rule can be: if relevant team (for example, the team which works on
geography) say something (for example, to delete the article
"Papajakafana islands"), more then 80% of at least 10 votes should be
enough for opposite decision (i.e., to keep that). And I am sure that
at least 20% + 1 person would be reasonable enough :) And if 80% of
voters say something which is opposite to the team's decision: we
should find what is wrong. Also, if some team constantly votes against
the majority, we should find what is wrong, too.

On 8/5/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>
> There's a big debate on en: right now about what to use as a deletion
> mechanism. The current [[:en:WP:VFD]] mechanism is very controversial -
> I and many others think it creates more acrimony than it's worth, and
> [[:en:user:Ed Poor]] actually deleted the page a couple of days ago!
> While it was quickly undeleted, it's set in motion debates about what to
> use for a deletion mechanism. Because I don't think anyone questions that
> we needsome sort of deletion mechanism for stuff that isn't obvious
> immediate speedy deletes - just that VFD is scaling badly and getting very
> acrimonious.
>
> So. What do other Wikipedias use as their deletion procedure?
>
>
> - d.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Arkady Rose

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
Zachary Harden wrote:

> If Jimbo spoke to a German paper, could there have been a screw up in
> the translation? Also, how do I get on/join an IRC? TIA

Use an IRC client such as XChat, Trillian or mIRC, and join the
freenode.net server.

regards,
Arkady


from_name: Walter van Kalken

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>There's a big debate on en: right now about what to use as a deletion
>mechanism. The current [[:en:WP:VFD]] mechanism is very controversial -
>I and many others think it creates more acrimony than it's worth, and
>[[:en:user:Ed Poor]] actually deleted the page a couple of days ago!
>While it was quickly undeleted, it's set in motion debates about what to
>use for a deletion mechanism. Because I don't think anyone questions that
>we needsome sort of deletion mechanism for stuff that isn't obvious
>immediate speedy deletes - just that VFD is scaling badly and getting very
>acrimonious.
>
>So. What do other Wikipedias use as their deletion procedure?
>
>
>
>
Well on nl: we are still scaling reasonably well. Basically we do not
hold votes on all to be deleted articles. Only when a deletion is
controversial. 95% of the time it is not controversial and it goes. in
cases of "voting" we do not really vote. It is more a the admin who
decides to do the daily cleanup looks at it counts the opinions and does
whatever he feels has the majority. Seems to work peacefully enough
sofar. We do not really have any POV pressuring groups though as en:
seems to have.

Waerth/Walter


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Schoolbooks written open source and printed by pdf

body:
closedshop <closedshop at gmx.de> writes:

> there is a big problem, the government cannot finance the schoolbooks
> anymore and there is in germany as well a tendency to have central tests
> for certificates, this means a central contrywide curriculum of
> excercises to do and test.

Germany, one of the richest countries on earth does not have money and
one with the highest taxes world-wide?  Do not believe what they tell
you.  They just do not want to pay for books they rather want to spend
the money to support building autobahns and the health system.

Of course, there is also something good about the refusual to "waste"
money for the books: school book publishers will eventually have to
adjust the prizes and the Kulturministrien next time must think twice
about an orthography "reform"...

Having free school books as an alternative would be a good thing, sure -
but do not tell us Germany is a poor country ;)

--
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                           |      ,__o
                                                        |    _-\_<,
                                                        |   (*)/'(*)
Key fingerprint = F138 B28F B7ED E0AC 1AB4  AA7F C90A 35C3 E9D0 5D1C


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I'm glad to see that the general reaction in the Wikipedia community was
>to doubt the media rather than simply assume that I've gone insane. :-)
>
>
We all know how hopelessly unreliable the things we read on the Internet
are. :)


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Anti-elitism

body:
That does exaggerate the situation. He was sometimes rude when he
thought he was dealing with poor quality work.

Fred

On Aug 5, 2005, at 10:21 PM, Alphax wrote:

> - From what I've heard - and I could be gravely mistaken - and I
> apologise
> if I am - Larry's approach was "I have more degrees than you, I made
> this whole thing happen, therefore I must be right".


from_name: Skyring

subject: [WikiEN-l] Is this right?

body:
On 8/5/05, Cyberjunkie <swatso at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Skyring [mailto:skyring at gmail.com]

> Ah, yes! Mr Anonymous Editor. Good to hear from you again.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=2
> 11.29.1.21
>
> Well, that confirms my opinion of you. You persist only to besmirch
> others'.

One could say the same of you, brother, given the nature of your
message. But that would be equally wrong, wouldn't it?

It is hard to Assume Good Faith of that particular message, but you'd
be hard pressed indeed to find an edit of mine which was malicious or
intentionally offensive.

--
Peter in Canberra


from_name: Chris Lüer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and the future of open source

body:
At 09:54 AM 8/6/2005, Alphax wrote:

>The first graph is INSANE.

Out of those 500,000,000 contributors, 495,000,000 will write
articles about Green Day songs.

         Chl


from_name: Sabine Cretella

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Wikimania - Spanish - we need someone for
	proofreading in Spanish

body:
Hi, we need someone for proofreading of some Spanish texts for Wikimania
- is anyone here who could help us?

Thanks,

Sabine

___________________________________
Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi e allegati da 10MB
http://mail.yahoo.it


list: wiktionary-l

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] Wikimania - Spanish - we need someone for
	proofreading in Spanish


from_name: ABCD

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Deletion sorting: help help help!

body:
This message was sent to Wikipedia-l; I have forwarded it to WikiEN-l,
where it might get more of a response.

This is not to be construed as an endorsement for or against the message
- i.e. don't shoot the messenger.

ABCD

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletion sorting: help help help!
Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 18:56:22 +0900
From: Samuel Henderson <samueljhenderson at gmail.com>
Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
References: <20050804005012.B78C21158419 at mail.wikimedia.org>

Hi folks,

This an invite to all the folks who are unhappy with the present VfD
process:

Please consider joining WikiProject Deletion sorting (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Deletion_sorting ).

We need your help to overcome community inertia and help bring the
deletion process back down to a human scale.  VfD itself has grown
beyond the human scale, and unless we all work together we'll never
get it fixed.  Help is especially needed with:

1.  Detailing exactly how a finalized system would work.
2.  Harvesting VfD, CfD, TfD, and RfD listings and sorting them into
the proposed categories at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Deletion_sorting/Beta
.
3.  Critiquing and improving said categories.
4.  Documenting *specific examples* of the present VfD system's many
serious problems.  (inappropriate use, incivility, reflex voting,
etc.).

I know I'm not the only one disappointed by the community's
reactionary response to efforts at fixing the broken VfD system.
However, in the end we are the Wikipedia community. If we don't find a
way to fix this problem, nobody is going to come in and fix it for us.

Let's get to work!

Cheers,

Visviva
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Deletion sorting: help help help!


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Foundation-l] Licensing Wikinews

body:
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:

> Why don't you chose several licenses and don't you use dual-licensing?
>
>> 3) What should we do about the Wikinews projects which already have a
>> license choosed?
>
>
> They can change it, but the old content will stay under the previous
> license.

I thought the whole purpose for going with public domain was that
everything could be moved to another license once the license issue was
settled?  If it was formally placed in the public domain, there is
nothing stopping you from "claiming the content" and putting it under
license. (Like many dead-tree publishers try to do with PD content).
 Moving from even CC-by-SA to GFDL is going to cause a whole bunch of
other problems.  I think the general community attitude that some sort
of general copyleft license should be applied, but it couldn't be
generally decided exactly which one.

Since this is such a huge issue, the typical Wikimedia "vote for
concensus" and then let the admins decide is not going to work in this
situation... particularly since it has significant legal implications
for those who have already contributed content.  I am not advocating a
specific voting method, but this can't be the decision of just a few
people working in a small committee.  That may have worked out when it
was still being planned, but I think Wikinews has moved beyond that.
 The statistics page lists almost 3800 registered users for en.wikinews,
and Wikinews is in 14 different languages currently.  A license move is
now a very major undertaking affecting a good number of people.  How
many out of the 3800 current users would actually vote is perhaps
another issue, but I'm sure you would get a good number of them.

It is nice, however, to see that this project is so successful.

--
Robert Scott Horning


subject: [Foundation-l] Licensing Wikinews


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] Copyright situation

body:
Why not make a special tag template for this? Something along the lines of:

"This image, produced by the current government of Iran, are believed
to not fall under U.S. copyright laws as Iran is not a member of WIPO.
Should this change, though, the usage of this image is still believed
to fall under the "fair use" clause of U.S. copyright law. Use in
mediums other than on the servers of the English-language Wikipedia,
hosted in the United States by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation,
may not be exempt from either of these requirements."

Then we will also at least have them all marked easily *should* we
want to mass delete them all. (I find it also very unlikely that the
government of Iran would ever sue Wikipedia for use of its images, so
I think this should fall under "low-threat fair use" in our thinking
about it, rather than worrying about WIPO membership)

FF

On 8/4/05, Karl Butcher <measure at gmail.com> wrote:
> If Iran joins international copyright treaties, and we haven't respected
> their copyrights, major changes would have to be made all at once. It is
> simpler to respect their copyrights now, so it can't come up as an issue
> later.
>  -Measure
>
>  On 8/4/05, Skyring <skyring at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 8/5/05, Puddl Duk <puddlduk at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > This has come up before on the copyright problems page. Even if we are
> > > legally able (at the moment) to violate Iran's copyright laws, I don't
> > think
> > > that we should.
> >
> > What advantage would there be in doing so? Surely there's nothing in
> > any Iran-related article that HAS to be sourced this way.
> >
> > --
> > Peter in Canberra
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
>
>
> --
> For every 12 seconds you've spent reading this email,
> Another person has died due to environmental activism.
> http://www.junkscience.com/malaria_clock.htm
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Kate

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: *.caribbean-forum.com

body:
Ed W wrote:

> Tom Ritchford wrote:

> >There seem to be a lot of these... is there not some Apache or
> >otherwise rule that can eliminate people who simply take Wikipedia
> >images with no accreditation?

> Usually the cheapest trick is to look through the logs for image
> downloads where the "referrer" is not another page on your own site.

as it happens, i wrote a script to do exactly this a few months ago.
the intent was to find how much bandwidth this wastes (answer: not
actually very much), but it could probably be extended to create a
"worst referer" list of some kind...

http://www.knams.wikimedia.org/~kate/logmon.pl if anyone wants to have a
go.

> Ed W

kate.


subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
On 06/08/05, Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com> wrote:
> As was mentioned in #wikimania on IRC, jimbo IS mistakenly misquoted,
> but nobody really knows what he said. He's been requested to debunk
> the screwups already.

>From [[Wikipedia:Announcements]]

"Numerous news outlets are quoting a Reuters report that Jimmy Wales
has stated that there will be a "freeze" on editing. Jimbo says that
statements about methods for achieving the widely-discussed stable
"Wikipedia 1.0" were misinterpreted as implying a project-wide
lockdown. Wikipedia's open editing will continue for the forseeable
future, and any potential stablized version would exist alongside the
current system. Jimbo was last seen looking for the 'edit this page'
link on the Reuters article."

<g>

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: What's wrong with the world?

body:
>Something like the plan in [[User:David Gerard/1.0]] would use an article
>rating system (picture a "Rate this page" tab at the top next to "Article",
>"Edit", etc.) to get a rough idea of what is of decent quality to pull for
>a distribution.

I assume you're talking about rating per article, and not per revision (as
the latter would be fairly impossible).  In that case, it'd be quite a rough
idea indeed.

Personally I think we should just use something like featured article status
for our rating system.  At the point where the article becomes "featured"
(or whatever we decide to call it), that's where we'd make our branch.
Obviously we'd have to tweak the featured article process to be more closely
aligned with a print version (featured articles shouldn't have non-free
images in them), but something similar to the featured article process would
work much better than article ratings, in my opinion.

>Any branching and polishing would be left as late as
>possible. Think of the Mozilla process, where the alpha, beta and final are
>branched from the nightlies, slightly polished for a few days (or weeks)
>and then released. This would provide minimal disruption of and diversion
>of resources from the live Wikipedia.

If the Mozilla process does this, then presumably its programmers are not
supposed to introduce brand new features during the alpha and beta stages of
development.  I find that rather hard to believe, but maybe Mozilla is a
small enough project that it can do such a thing.

Wikipedia isn't.  In fact, Wikipedia is still growing exponentially.  New
information is being added faster than it can be fact checked and proofread.
  The only way I can see avoiding a fork and coming out with a respectible
encyclopedia would be to freeze all new development for a really long time,
and that is obviously unacceptable.

Again, I don't know much about Mozilla development, but any major
development project on the order of something like Wikipedia is going to
have branches off the main trunk which are maintained for long periods of
time.  This causes some wasted time since things need to be merged and
backported, but it's the fastest and most efficient way to produce a high
quality product.  I'm afraid that "slightly polished for a few days (or
weeks)" isn't going to cut it.

Diversion of resources isn't such a big problem as long as the branch is
maintained properly.  New information goes into the main trunk.  "Bug fixes"
(typos, inaccuracies, small wording changes, POV removal) are implemented in
the branch, and merged into the main trunk if applicable.  Really important
new information (the twin towers are destroyed, the leader of a world
superpower is assassinated, etc.) might get backported, i.e. added into the
main trunk and then merged into the the branch; but this should be the
exception, not the rule, and should only be done while the branch is still
active.

Of course, maybe our only disagreement here is over how long it's going to
take to get from the point of the fork to the point where the branch is no
longer maintained.  In my opinion a few weeks isn't going to be anywhere
near enough time to fix all the inaccuracies.

>
>
>- d.

Anthony

_________________________________________________________________
FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar ? get it now!
http://toolbar.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200415ave/direct/01/


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Anti-elitism

body:
Alphax wrote:

> - From what I've heard - and I could be gravely mistaken - and I apologise
> if I am - Larry's approach was "I have more degrees than you, I made
> this whole thing happen, therefore I must be right".
>
> Sounds exactly like the sort of elitism he warns against.

First, Larry warns us against "anti-elitism" not against "elitism".
He's an advocate of elitism.

I think your summary of his approach is unfair to him as well.  Larry
would react very badly to the notion that he would ever say "I have more
degrees than you, etc."  That's not like him at all.

Larry and I have our disagreements but I feel that his impact in the
early years was substantial and should be respected.

--Jimbo


from_name: Alphax

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
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steve v wrote:
> * Ghost of Nupedia (aka. Nupedia's Monster): On-wiki institution of
> Nupedia-style credentialism. Ranking of academic degrees by type:
> conservative American Ivy League institutions first, everyone else
> second, all the way down to mail-order degrees from North Korea.
>

fnord! Ranking of academic degrees by age of institution which offers
them, with weighting based on age of faculty at that institution.

Anyway, the Ivy League is an athletics association.

> * Paranoid Web of Trust: People get ranks (in addition to barnstars)
> and parade them proudly. Everyone sucks up to the Board members, and
> they eventually get military-style badges made to pin on their ?&?
> Wikimedia Nohat-logo sweatshirts.
>

func's micronation is spreading :)

- --
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Anti-elitism

body:
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Fred Bauder wrote:
> Larry Sanger did many good things for Wikipedia, set many important
> policies which have served us well. However, as anyone who tangled  with
> him learned from experience, an "often unpleasant and even  hostile
> working atmosphere"  was often part of working with him. He  did not
> respect other people and believed he could bulldoze them,  based on his
> authority as a Wikipedia administrator and as an expert  in academic
> philosophy. His contributions may have correctly parroted  was is being
> taught in freshman philosophy courses, I grant that, but  there is no
> doubt that perspective can be improved on.
>

- From what I've heard - and I could be gravely mistaken - and I apologise
if I am - Larry's approach was "I have more degrees than you, I made
this whole thing happen, therefore I must be right".

Sounds exactly like the sort of elitism he warns against.

Again, I apologise in advance if I am wrong about this. Please correct
me if I am. Don't leave me ignorant of the facts.

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
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subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> "'There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we'd freeze
> the pages whose quality is undisputed,' he said."

This is a translation into English of a statement in German which was a
translation of something I said in English.

The bit about this being an "announcement" is, well, something they just
made up from scratch.  I made no particular announcement.   A reporter
asked me the usual sort of question about "how can we trust it if it can
always be changed, maybe it was good but it gets vandalized then, etc."

And I gave my usual sort of answer that we are discussing ways to
identify particular versions of articles as being good and that we won't
ever lock articles permanently, even if we do have a stable branch.

Somehow this was turned into an "announcement" that we are changing
editorial policy and forming a committee to determine which articles to
lock in perpetuity.

I'm glad to see that the general reaction in the Wikipedia community was
to doubt the media rather than simply assume that I've gone insane. :-)

--Jimbo


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
On 05/08/05, Ben Yates <bluephonic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey; I just wrote an article (jist: wikipedia will soon be more
> important than linux) and wanted to get feedback from people who have
> a detailed knowledge of wikipedia (namely, the people on this list).

+5, Insightful, as they say: an interesting point, and well made,
without labouring the point. [And yes, that graph is hilarious!]

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

subject: [Foundation-l] Licensing Wikinews

body:
>
> But, back to the topic. The 2.5 Creative Commons licenses allow to
> give the attribution NOT to every author of the article, but to the
> whole project - just check 4(b) of
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/legalcode (same applies to
> every other CC license).
>
> This allows us to finally license our content under the CC-Wiki
> (that's what we could call CC-By-SA 2.5) license - now the basic
> questions are:
>
> 1) Do we need to license it right now?

Well the sooner, the better...

> 2) Will we really choose CC-By-SA 2.5, or some other license, like
> GFDL or CC-By, for example?

Why don't you chose several licenses and don't you use dual-licensing?

> 3) What should we do about the Wikinews projects which already have a
> license choosed?

They can change it, but the old content will stay under the previous
license.


subject: [Foundation-l] Licensing Wikinews


from_name: Ben Yates

body:
Done. =p
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Hugegraph.gif

On 8/6/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: RIPEMD160
>
> Ben Yates wrote:
> > Hey; I just wrote an article (jist: wikipedia will soon be more
> > important than linux) and wanted to get feedback from people who have
> > a detailed knowledge of wikipedia (namely, the people on this list).
> >
> > http://wikip.blogspot.com/2005/08/future-of-open-source-5-years-ago.html
> >
>
> The first graph is INSANE. Can you put it on commons or meta?
>


from_name: Samuel Henderson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Deletion sorting: help help help!

body:
Hi folks,

This an invite to all the folks who are unhappy with the present VfD process:

Please consider joining WikiProject Deletion sorting (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Deletion_sorting ).

We need your help to overcome community inertia and help bring the
deletion process back down to a human scale.  VfD itself has grown
beyond the human scale, and unless we all work together we'll never
get it fixed.  Help is especially needed with:

1.  Detailing exactly how a finalized system would work.
2.  Harvesting VfD, CfD, TfD, and RfD listings and sorting them into
the proposed categories at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Deletion_sorting/Beta
.
3.  Critiquing and improving said categories.
4.  Documenting *specific examples* of the present VfD system's many
serious problems.  (inappropriate use, incivility, reflex voting,
etc.).

I know I'm not the only one disappointed by the community's
reactionary response to efforts at fixing the broken VfD system.
However, in the end we are the Wikipedia community. If we don't find a
way to fix this problem, nobody is going to come in and fix it for us.

Let's get to work!

Cheers,

Visviva


from_name: Mark Ryan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: Complaint about 3RR blocking

body:
We received this email to the WikiEN-l adminitrators' account. I feel
compelled to pass it on to the mailing list itself.

~Mark Ryan

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:  <ben at windwavesandsun.com>
Date: Aug 6, 2005 4:36 AM
Subject:
To: wikien-l-owner at wikipedia.org

Ref: USER:Benjamin Gatti

This is to complain that I have been blocked in violation of policy.
Please see arguments at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/3RR#User:Benjamin_Gatti

Than you


from_name: Roozbeh Pournader

subject: [WikiEN-l] Copyright situation

body:
On 8/5/05, Karl Butcher <measure at gmail.com> wrote:
> If Iran joins international copyright treaties, and we haven't respected
> their copyrights, major changes would have to be made all at once. It is
> simpler to respect their copyrights now, so it can't come up as an issue
> later.

I agree. BTW, for the record, Iran is now an observing member of WTO,
and is planning to join as a full member, which would require
implementation of international copyrights.

roozbeh


subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
While I'm personally against "pop-culture cruft", sometimes these "X
in popular culture" pages are not so bad. I complained on here awhile
back that the list of "movies featuring nuclear weapons" in the
[[Nuclear weapon]] article had gotten ridiculously long, so somebody
thoughtfully created [[Nuclear weapons in popular culture]], which is
itself an interesting topic (though the article is still young), one
which allows for more than just a listing.

FF

On 8/5/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 05/08/05, Haukur ?orgeirsson <haukurth at hi.is> wrote:
>
> > For an example see [[Yggdrasil]] which has
> > a large Popular Culture section and a disambiguation
> > entry, both of which could be summarized with
> > "a bunch of things in a bunch of games/novels/etc.
> > have been named after the mythological Yggdrasil".
>
> I was about to cite the "Popular Culture" section of [[Space Shuttle
> program]] here, but it seems someone finally decided to purge it last
> month, and create [[Space Shuttles in fiction]]... it had grown to a
> truly silly size -
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Space_Shuttle_program&diff=18685575&oldid=18683806
>
> [[Space station]], whilst no-where near as long, has a section which
> basically seems to consist of "X work of fiction contained a space
> station". The potential for expansion of this, given the prevalence of
> articles about sf books and individual TV episodes, is not a cheering
> one... time to purge a little, I think.
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia Announces Tighter Editorial Control (*not*)

body:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/05/2012229&tid=187

Do not believe the media about Wikipedia until you have heard it from Jimbo.

Numerous news outlets are quoting a Reuters report that Jimmy Wales has
stated that there will be a "freeze" on editing. Jimbo says that
statements about methods for achieving the widely-discussed stable
"Wikipedia 1.0" were misinterpreted as implying a project-wide lockdown.
Wikipedia's open editing will continue for the forseeable future, and
any potential stablized version would exist alongside the current
system. Jimbo was last seen looking for the 'edit this page' link on the
Reuters article.

See;
http://tinyurl.com/7npj8 - Statement on /. by Jimbo about this

--
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


from_name: Jack Lynch

subject: [WikiEN-l] Anti-elitism

body:
The wiki has some very serious problems, but anti-elitism is '''not'''
very high on the list. We have a much bigger problem w wiki-democracy,
and the cliques which dominate articles in which they have a vested
POV.

Jack (Sam Spade)


from_name: JAY JG

body:
See also [[User talk:Benjamin Gatti#I've been Blocked!]]

Jay.

>We received this email to the WikiEN-l adminitrators' account. I feel
>compelled to pass it on to the mailing list itself.
>
>~Mark Ryan
>
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>From:  <ben at windwavesandsun.com>
>Date: Aug 6, 2005 4:36 AM
>Subject:
>To: wikien-l-owner at wikipedia.org
>
>
>Ref: USER:Benjamin Gatti
>
>This is to complain that I have been blocked in violation of policy.
>Please see arguments at
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/3RR#User:Benjamin_Gatti
>
>Than you


body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: RIPEMD160

Ben Yates wrote:
> Hey; I just wrote an article (jist: wikipedia will soon be more
> important than linux) and wanted to get feedback from people who have
> a detailed knowledge of wikipedia (namely, the people on this list).
>
> http://wikip.blogspot.com/2005/08/future-of-open-source-5-years-ago.html
>

The first graph is INSANE. Can you put it on commons or meta?

- --
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from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
Phroziac (phroziac at gmail.com) [050806 06:07]:

> There's nothing wrong with the minority thing, but it is pretty funny.
> I completely agree with locking completed articles. Why should they be
> edited if they're done?

It's a thing called a "wiki" ...

If there's a particularly good version of an article, that version will
always be in the history and can be linked to directly.

The quality vs content thing tends to go: OK article is polished into
really well-written article. Someone adds something which is arguably
relevant but looks lumpy in the structure. So the article has more detail,
but is only good as opposed to great. Polish again to great. And so on.

As much as it pains me, I suspect more good information is better for the
reader than beautiful composition, given the choice.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
steve v (vertigosteve at yahoo.com) [050806 05:49]:

> From [[ minority ]]:
> ''This article is about the concept of a minority. For
> an entry on the [[Green Day]] single, see [[Minority
> (song)|Minority]].''
> !

Heh. In cases like that, {{otheruses}} on the main article and a disambig
with two entries seems entirely sensible to me ;-)

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Anti-elitism

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: RIPEMD160

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Alphax wrote:
>
>
>>- From what I've heard - and I could be gravely mistaken - and I apologise
>>if I am - Larry's approach was "I have more degrees than you, I made
>>this whole thing happen, therefore I must be right".
>>
>>Sounds exactly like the sort of elitism he warns against.
>
>
> First, Larry warns us against "anti-elitism" not against "elitism".
> He's an advocate of elitism.
>

Ah.

> I think your summary of his approach is unfair to him as well.  Larry
> would react very badly to the notion that he would ever say "I have more
> degrees than you, etc."  That's not like him at all.
>

As I said, I hoped someone would correct me if I was wrong. Again, I
apologise.

> Larry and I have our disagreements but I feel that his impact in the
> early years was substantial and should be respected.
>

Agreed.

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
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subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
Haukur ?orgeirsson (haukurth at hi.is) [050806 07:28]:

> On the Norse mythology articles, which is
> my primary sphere of interest on Wikipedia,
> irrelevant fancruft tends to accumulate and
> distract from the main content of the entries.
> For an example see [[Yggdrasil]] which has
> a large Popular Culture section and a disambiguation
> entry, both of which could be summarized with
> "a bunch of things in a bunch of games/novels/etc.
> have been named after the mythological Yggdrasil".
> Sometimes I snap and delete some of the stuff.
> For example I removed the following from [[Fenrisulfr]]:
> "Fenrir appears as a summonable character in Squaresoft's Final Fantasy
> IX. Also it is a summonable creature in Final Fantasy XI."

See [[Lilith]] for what seems so far to be a stable solution to this
problem: all the pop culture is in [[Lilith (disambiguation)]]; and after
someone re-added the ==Lilith in popular culture== section, I made that
section's entire contents "See [[Lilith (disambiguation)]]". You'll
probably want to do that with quite a lot of the pop-culture-infested Norse
mythology articles.

- d.


body:
Ben Yates (bluephonic at gmail.com) [050807 00:25]:

> Hey; I just wrote an article (jist: wikipedia will soon be more
> important than linux) and wanted to get feedback from people who have
> a detailed knowledge of wikipedia (namely, the people on this list).
> http://wikip.blogspot.com/2005/08/future-of-open-source-5-years-ago.html

Love that bar chart ;-) It also explains one of Wikipedia's real problems:
we have a zillion editors making demands, and a way too small number of
actual developers working on the actual MediaWiki code.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
Bryan Derksen (bryan.derksen at shaw.ca) [050806 09:58]:
> Zachary Harden wrote:

> >And how can we mark it as even nice? A template could disrupt the
> >page, but IMHO, any type of mark on the article page is just asking
> >for trouble. Plus, I still do not know how can one define a "done"
> >article on here and how many will be protected on a trial basis.

> Something based on the version rating system that almost got enabled in
> the most recent version of WikiMedia would be best, IMO - it's my
> understanding that the basic code is all there, it just needs tweaking
> and polishing.

A bit worse than that - it puts horrible demands on the server and would
promptly break Wikipedia if we dared enable it live ;-) It needs some
serious algorithm optimisation for Brion to let it anywhere near live.

(Please! Someone! Someones!)

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
Anthony DiPierro (anthonydipierro at hotmail.com) [050806 08:35]:

> The way I read this, there would be a stable version and a current version,
> much like the linux kernel or just about any large bit of source code.  If
> that's what he meant, it sounds like a good idea.
> Of course, it worries me if this quote is accurate, because it makes it
> sound like he plans on imposing this idea upon the community.  We all know
> how long it takes to implement something this major by any means other than
> edict.

Something like the plan in [[User:David Gerard/1.0]] would use an article
rating system (picture a "Rate this page" tab at the top next to "Article",
"Edit", etc.) to get a rough idea of what is of decent quality to pull for
a distribution. Any branching and polishing would be left as late as
possible. Think of the Mozilla process, where the alpha, beta and final are
branched from the nightlies, slightly polished for a few days (or weeks)
and then released. This would provide minimal disruption of and diversion
of resources from the live Wikipedia.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Archives

body:
Anthony DiPierro (anthonydipierro at hotmail.com) [050806 08:53]:

> >I think he is reffering to the guy who got a private mail forwarded to
> >the list and wished his name off it. That sort of thing. I think that
> >those rare cases can be handled on a case by case basis and removed by
> >a developer.
>
> A way to post without revealing one's email address (or even better to
> reveal an alternate email address) would be nice, though.  I read the list
> using my main email account, but I don't want that address accessible via
> google (spam sucks), so in order to post I have to log in to my hotmail
> account, which is a huge pain in the ass.

Surely you can post from your mail client with your Hotmail address in the
From: line?

- d.


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikitech-l] Bug: Text being cut off

body:
There's some kind of bug in 1.5 with text being cut off, compare the
source of the following pages with what's actually being rendered.

Is it a known bug?

* http://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazoo (the caption)
* http://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melding:Restorelink1
* http://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melding:Restorelink


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: What's wrong with the world?

body:
Anthony DiPierro (anthonydipierro at hotmail.com) [050807 03:36]:

> >Something like the plan in [[User:David Gerard/1.0]] would use an article
> >rating system (picture a "Rate this page" tab at the top next to "Article",
> >"Edit", etc.) to get a rough idea of what is of decent quality to pull for
> >a distribution.

> I assume you're talking about rating per article, and not per revision (as
> the latter would be fairly impossible).  In that case, it'd be quite a
> rough idea indeed.

Nope, per article version. See [[m:Article validation feature]]. (I think
"validation" is a misnomer here myself - that was Magnus' name for it,
since he wrote the feature.)

> >Any branching and polishing would be left as late as
> >possible. Think of the Mozilla process, where the alpha, beta and final are
> >branched from the nightlies, slightly polished for a few days (or weeks)
> >and then released. This would provide minimal disruption of and diversion
> >of resources from the live Wikipedia.

> If the Mozilla process does this, then presumably its programmers are not
> supposed to introduce brand new features during the alpha and beta stages
> of development.  I find that rather hard to believe, but maybe Mozilla is a
> small enough project that it can do such a thing.

It's comparable to OpenOffice or KDE in compilation time. Depends if you
call that "small".

> Again, I don't know much about Mozilla development, but any major
> development project on the order of something like Wikipedia is going to
> have branches off the main trunk which are maintained for long periods of
> time.  This causes some wasted time since things need to be merged and
> backported, but it's the fastest and most efficient way to produce a high
> quality product.  I'm afraid that "slightly polished for a few days (or
> weeks)" isn't going to cut it.

The terms I was thinking in were to pull all suitably-rated articles that
the distributor is interested in, then polish that lot. Note that this is
useful to article quality drives in general - anyone could do this at any
time to show up areas that you'd want in an encyclopedia but that need
work.

> Of course, maybe our only disagreement here is over how long it's going to
> take to get from the point of the fork to the point where the branch is no
> longer maintained.  In my opinion a few weeks isn't going to be anywhere
> near enough time to fix all the inaccuracies.

The presumption is that the sufficiently highly rated stuff will be of good
quality anyway. If it isn't, it's material for an article improvement
drive.

- d.


from_name: info at antandsons.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 25, Issue 23

body:
Who can I contact to see if I can add links/content to Wikipedia?

> Send WikiEN-l mailing list submissions to
> 	wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> 	http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> 	wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> 	wikien-l-owner at Wikipedia.org
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of WikiEN-l digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Re: Anti-elitism (Jimmy Wales)
>    2. Re: What's wrong with the world? (Andrew Gray)
>    3. Re: What's wrong with the world? (Jimmy Wales)
>    4. Re: What's wrong with the world? (Bryan Derksen)
>    5. Wikipedia and the future of open source (Ben Yates)
>    6. Re: Is this right? (Skyring)
>    7. Re: Copyright situation (Karl Butcher)
>    8. Re: What's wrong with the world? (David Gerard)
>    9. Re: What's wrong with the world? (David Gerard)
>   10. Re: What's wrong with the world? (David Gerard)
>   11. Re: Wikipedia and the future of open source (Alphax)
>   12. Re: Wikipedia and the future of open source (David Gerard)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2005 13:40:35 +0200
> From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Anti-elitism
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <42F4A1B3.4040304 at wikia.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Alphax wrote:
>
>> - From what I've heard - and I could be gravely mistaken - and I
>> apologise
>> if I am - Larry's approach was "I have more degrees than you, I made
>> this whole thing happen, therefore I must be right".
>>
>> Sounds exactly like the sort of elitism he warns against.
>
> First, Larry warns us against "anti-elitism" not against "elitism".
> He's an advocate of elitism.
>
> I think your summary of his approach is unfair to him as well.  Larry
> would react very badly to the notion that he would ever say "I have more
> degrees than you, etc."  That's not like him at all.
>
> Larry and I have our disagreements but I feel that his impact in the
> early years was substantial and should be respected.
>
> --Jimbo
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 13:12:49 +0100
> From: Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <f3fedb0d050806051244329ff8 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 06/08/05, Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As was mentioned in #wikimania on IRC, jimbo IS mistakenly misquoted,
>> but nobody really knows what he said. He's been requested to debunk
>> the screwups already.
>
>>From [[Wikipedia:Announcements]]
>
> "Numerous news outlets are quoting a Reuters report that Jimmy Wales
> has stated that there will be a "freeze" on editing. Jimbo says that
> statements about methods for achieving the widely-discussed stable
> "Wikipedia 1.0" were misinterpreted as implying a project-wide
> lockdown. Wikipedia's open editing will continue for the forseeable
> future, and any potential stablized version would exist alongside the
> current system. Jimbo was last seen looking for the 'edit this page'
> link on the Reuters article."
>
> <g>
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2005 15:09:00 +0200
> From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <42F4B66C.70603 at wikia.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>> "'There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we'd freeze
>> the pages whose quality is undisputed,' he said."
>
> This is a translation into English of a statement in German which was a
> translation of something I said in English.
>
> The bit about this being an "announcement" is, well, something they just
> made up from scratch.  I made no particular announcement.   A reporter
> asked me the usual sort of question about "how can we trust it if it can
> always be changed, maybe it was good but it gets vandalized then, etc."
>
> And I gave my usual sort of answer that we are discussing ways to
> identify particular versions of articles as being good and that we won't
> ever lock articles permanently, even if we do have a stable branch.
>
> Somehow this was turned into an "announcement" that we are changing
> editorial policy and forming a committee to determine which articles to
> lock in perpetuity.
>
> I'm glad to see that the general reaction in the Wikipedia community was
> to doubt the media rather than simply assume that I've gone insane. :-)
>
> --Jimbo
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2005 08:00:48 -0700
> From: Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <42F4D0A0.6020603 at shaw.ca>
> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=UTF-8
>
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>>I'm glad to see that the general reaction in the Wikipedia community was
>>to doubt the media rather than simply assume that I've gone insane. :-)
>>
>>
> We all know how hopelessly unreliable the things we read on the Internet
> are. :)
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2005 18:20:14 -0400
> From: Ben Yates <bluephonic at gmail.com>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and the future of open source
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <2b76523c05080515207d4abfbe at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hey; I just wrote an article (jist: wikipedia will soon be more
> important than linux) and wanted to get feedback from people who have
> a detailed knowledge of wikipedia (namely, the people on this list).
>
> http://wikip.blogspot.com/2005/08/future-of-open-source-5-years-ago.html
>
> Cheers,
>
> Ben Yates
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Sat, 6 Aug 2005 10:40:48 +1000
> From: Skyring <skyring at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Is this right?
> To: Cyberjunkie <swatso at optusnet.com.au>
> Cc: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <550ccb82050805174019fac1c6 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 8/5/05, Cyberjunkie <swatso at optusnet.com.au> wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Skyring [mailto:skyring at gmail.com]
>
>> Ah, yes! Mr Anonymous Editor. Good to hear from you again.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&target=2
>> 11.29.1.21
>>
>> Well, that confirms my opinion of you. You persist only to besmirch
>> others'.
>
> One could say the same of you, brother, given the nature of your
> message. But that would be equally wrong, wouldn't it?
>
> It is hard to Assume Good Faith of that particular message, but you'd
> be hard pressed indeed to find an edit of mine which was malicious or
> intentionally offensive.
>
> --
> Peter in Canberra
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 14:30:24 -0700
> From: Karl Butcher <measure at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Copyright situation
> To: Skyring <skyring at gmail.com>,	English Wikipedia
> 	<wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <c013b5cf05080414304a075976 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> If Iran joins international copyright treaties, and we haven't respected
> their copyrights, major changes would have to be made all at once. It is
> simpler to respect their copyrights now, so it can't come up as an issue
> later.
>  -Measure
>
>  On 8/4/05, Skyring <skyring at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 8/5/05, Puddl Duk <puddlduk at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > This has come up before on the copyright problems page. Even if we are
>> > legally able (at the moment) to violate Iran's copyright laws, I don't
>> think
>> > that we should.
>>
>> What advantage would there be in doing so? Surely there's nothing in
>> any Iran-related article that HAS to be sourced this way.
>>
>> --
>> Peter in Canberra
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
>
>
>
> --
> For every 12 seconds you've spent reading this email,
> Another person has died due to environmental activism.
> http://www.junkscience.com/malaria_clock.htm
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 8
> Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 00:30:47 +1000
> From: fun at thingy.apana.org.au (David Gerard)
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <20050806143047.GA25060 at thingy.apana.org.au>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> Phroziac (phroziac at gmail.com) [050806 06:07]:
>
>> There's nothing wrong with the minority thing, but it is pretty funny.
>> I completely agree with locking completed articles. Why should they be
>> edited if they're done?
>
>
> It's a thing called a "wiki" ...
>
> If there's a particularly good version of an article, that version will
> always be in the history and can be linked to directly.
>
> The quality vs content thing tends to go: OK article is polished into
> really well-written article. Someone adds something which is arguably
> relevant but looks lumpy in the structure. So the article has more detail,
> but is only good as opposed to great. Polish again to great. And so on.
>
> As much as it pains me, I suspect more good information is better for the
> reader than beautiful composition, given the choice.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 00:31:49 +1000
> From: fun at thingy.apana.org.au (David Gerard)
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <20050806143149.GB25060 at thingy.apana.org.au>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> steve v (vertigosteve at yahoo.com) [050806 05:49]:
>
>> From [[ minority ]]:
>> ''This article is about the concept of a minority. For
>> an entry on the [[Green Day]] single, see [[Minority
>> (song)|Minority]].''
>> !
>
>
> Heh. In cases like that, {{otheruses}} on the main article and a disambig
> with two entries seems entirely sensible to me ;-)
>
>
> - d.
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 10
> Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 00:55:17 +1000
> From: fun at thingy.apana.org.au (David Gerard)
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <20050806145517.GC25060 at thingy.apana.org.au>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
>
> Haukur ?orgeirsson (haukurth at hi.is) [050806 07:28]:
>
>> On the Norse mythology articles, which is
>> my primary sphere of interest on Wikipedia,
>> irrelevant fancruft tends to accumulate and
>> distract from the main content of the entries.
>> For an example see [[Yggdrasil]] which has
>> a large Popular Culture section and a disambiguation
>> entry, both of which could be summarized with
>> "a bunch of things in a bunch of games/novels/etc.
>> have been named after the mythological Yggdrasil".
>> Sometimes I snap and delete some of the stuff.
>> For example I removed the following from [[Fenrisulfr]]:
>> "Fenrir appears as a summonable character in Squaresoft's Final Fantasy
>> IX. Also it is a summonable creature in Final Fantasy XI."
>
>
> See [[Lilith]] for what seems so far to be a stable solution to this
> problem: all the pop culture is in [[Lilith (disambiguation)]]; and after
> someone re-added the ==Lilith in popular culture== section, I made that
> section's entire contents "See [[Lilith (disambiguation)]]". You'll
> probably want to do that with quite a lot of the pop-culture-infested
> Norse
> mythology articles.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 11
> Date: Sun, 07 Aug 2005 00:24:25 +0930
> From: Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and the future of open source
> To: Ben Yates <bluephonic at gmail.com>,	English Wikipedia
> 	<wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <42F4CF21.6040605 at gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: RIPEMD160
>
> Ben Yates wrote:
>> Hey; I just wrote an article (jist: wikipedia will soon be more
>> important than linux) and wanted to get feedback from people who have
>> a detailed knowledge of wikipedia (namely, the people on this list).
>>
>> http://wikip.blogspot.com/2005/08/future-of-open-source-5-years-ago.html
>>
>
> The first graph is INSANE. Can you put it on commons or meta?
>
> - --
> Alphax                      |   /"\
> Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
> OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
> http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iD8DBQFC9M8g/RxM5Ph0xhMRAw7QAKCWX4MvEzQs4T1xsdig/1H1JzpSjwCglMyF
> A7u0puxDsDY72jMHm1HAdyo=NuQb
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 12
> Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 01:00:01 +1000
> From: fun at thingy.apana.org.au (David Gerard)
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and the future of open source
> To: Ben Yates <bluephonic at gmail.com>,	English Wikipedia
> 	<wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <20050806150001.GD25060 at thingy.apana.org.au>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> Ben Yates (bluephonic at gmail.com) [050807 00:25]:
>
>> Hey; I just wrote an article (jist: wikipedia will soon be more
>> important than linux) and wanted to get feedback from people who have
>> a detailed knowledge of wikipedia (namely, the people on this list).
>> http://wikip.blogspot.com/2005/08/future-of-open-source-5-years-ago.html
>
>
> Love that bar chart ;-) It also explains one of Wikipedia's real problems:
> we have a zillion editors making demands, and a way too small number of
> actual developers working on the actual MediaWiki code.
>
>
> - d.
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
> End of WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 25, Issue 23
> ****************************************
>


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: It's about the content, stupid! (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Anti-elitism)

body:
--- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> [Larry Sanger] sees [our anti-elitism] as causing our 2 biggest problems:
> 1. a perception of unreliability (justified or not)
> 2. an often unpleasant an even hostile working atmosphere

We value getting the content right over blindly trusting somebody's
credentials. So yes, things do get unpleasant for people who expect the use of
their credentials and similar appeals to authority will easily win them
arguments over content. I've had enough PhD professors who espoused, as fact,
fairly fringe ideas that I no longer just assume any one of them is right
without checking.

So remember this refrain when confronted with credentialism again:
"It's about the content, not who wrote it, stupid!"

If that is anti-elitist, then so be it.

-- mav

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


from_name: Leif Knutsen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Unauthorized deletion of images

body:
Various people have tried through various ways to censor facts presented in
the article titled "Vaccine controversy." The latest such attempt was to
delete a number of graphs that show that mortality rates in Australia for a
number of infectious diseases had decreased before the introduction of
vaccines. The images were listed for deletion for alleged copyright
violations. I obtained permission from all relevant copyright holders, noted
this fact in the listing for deletions, but now I find that the images were
deleted anyway.

The names of the images were:
Image:Austr mort
diphtheria.gif<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=Austr_mort_diphtheria.gif>
Image:Austr mort
scarletfever.gif<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=Austr_mort_scarletfever.gif>
Image:Austr mort
measles.gif<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=Austr_mort_measles.gif>
Image:Austr mort
typhoidfever.gif<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=Austr_mort_typhoidfever.gif>
Image:Austr mort
polio.gif<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=Austr_mort_polio.gif>
Image:Austr mort
whoopingcough.gif<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=Austr_mort_whoopingcough.gif>

These images must be undeleted immediately, and appropriate action should be
taken against the individuals who deleted them in violation of policy.

--
Leif Knutsen
(also responds to vyerllc at gmail.com and leif at vyer.net)


from_name: Phroziac

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
Ah, heres one....

In medicine, ENT represents the Ear, Nose, and Throat specialism, also
known as otolaryngology. ENT may also refer to the television series
Star Trek: Enterprise. Ents is also a term for a Student Union
Entertainments Officer

...on [[ent]], lol. Is it just me or should ENT have primary disambig?

On 8/6/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Bryan Derksen (bryan.derksen at shaw.ca) [050806 09:58]:
> > Zachary Harden wrote:
>
> > >And how can we mark it as even nice? A template could disrupt the
> > >page, but IMHO, any type of mark on the article page is just asking
> > >for trouble. Plus, I still do not know how can one define a "done"
> > >article on here and how many will be protected on a trial basis.
>
> > Something based on the version rating system that almost got enabled in
> > the most recent version of WikiMedia would be best, IMO - it's my
> > understanding that the basic code is all there, it just needs tweaking
> > and polishing.
>
>
> A bit worse than that - it puts horrible demands on the server and would
> promptly break Wikipedia if we dared enable it live ;-) It needs some
> serious algorithm optimisation for Brion to let it anywhere near live.
>
> (Please! Someone! Someones!)
>
>
> - d.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
signature


subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
Actually, I was bold and that no longer has primary disambiguation.

On 8/7/05, Phroziac <phroziac at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ah, heres one....
>
> In medicine, ENT represents the Ear, Nose, and Throat specialism, also
> known as otolaryngology. ENT may also refer to the television series
> Star Trek: Enterprise. Ents is also a term for a Student Union
> Entertainments Officer
>
> ...on [[ent]], lol. Is it just me or should ENT have primary disambig?
>
> On 8/6/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> > Bryan Derksen (bryan.derksen at shaw.ca) [050806 09:58]:
> > > Zachary Harden wrote:
> >
> > > >And how can we mark it as even nice? A template could disrupt the
> > > >page, but IMHO, any type of mark on the article page is just asking
> > > >for trouble. Plus, I still do not know how can one define a "done"
> > > >article on here and how many will be protected on a trial basis.
> >
> > > Something based on the version rating system that almost got enabled in
> > > the most recent version of WikiMedia would be best, IMO - it's my
> > > understanding that the basic code is all there, it just needs tweaking
> > > and polishing.
> >
> >
> > A bit worse than that - it puts horrible demands on the server and would
> > promptly break Wikipedia if we dared enable it live ;-) It needs some
> > serious algorithm optimisation for Brion to let it anywhere near live.
> >
> > (Please! Someone! Someones!)
> >
> >
> > - d.
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
>
>
> --
> signature
>

--
signature


from_name: ABCD

subject: [WikiEN-l] Test Message

body:
This is a test of the mailing list.  Please disregard this message.

ABCD


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Klingon Wikipedia locked

body:
I have to wonder, is the Lojban Wikipedia next?

Either way, I do think it should be moved to WikiCities, and I don't
see why the WMF needs to be so stingy with its trademarks (the
Tokipona encyclopedia wikicities can't use the name "Wikipesija" since
it is/resembles a Wikimedia trademark).

If they were "kicked out" of using the Wikipedia subdomain, I don't
see what's wrong with letting them continue to call themselves
"Wikipedia" (TP wasn't even using the name "Wikipedia" -- since when
is "Wikipesija" widely agreed upon as a trademark of the WMF??), as
long as they keep up to the standards required by Wikipedia (NPOV,
same licensing, etc)

Mark

On 07/08/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> I've locked the Klingon Wikipedia (tlh.wikipedia.org) on Jimmy's
> request. It remains online for now, but is no longer editable.
>
> (Perhaps it could be moved to WikiCities?)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Zachary Harden

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikimania

body:
Hey Yall,

To whoever is over at Wikimania: how is it?

Regards,

Zach Harden (Zscout370)


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Klingon Wikipedia locked

body:
I've locked the Klingon Wikipedia (tlh.wikipedia.org) on Jimmy's
request. It remains online for now, but is no longer editable.

(Perhaps it could be moved to WikiCities?)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Geoff Burling

body:
On Sun, 7 Aug 2005, Leif Knutsen wrote:

> >But don't do this if they were validly deleted.
> >
> >If you claim to have permission, I can imagine two reasons why the
> >images would have been deleted:
> >1) The permission was not verified (this is up to the uploader)
> >2) The images were with-permission only. As of a mailing list post a
> >few weeks ago from Jimbo
> >(http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-May/023760.html),
> >images that are used on WP with permission but do not fall under any
> >other category may be deleted.
>
> OR - someone violated the policy because they had a point of view on the
> issue and found these facts rather inconvenient.
>
> These were uploaded prior to Jimbo's email on the issue.
>
> Still, they were put forward for deletion because those who wanted it
> deleted complained that permission hadn't been obtained. If there was
> another reason for it, that should have been raised as the reason. I can't
> even find the archives of the discussion.
>
> Can someone please find out who deleted them? I would like to file for the
> appropriate sanctions against the individuals. If I simply upload them
> again, they are sure to be deleted as a result of Jimbo's policy.

If you don't know who deleted the files, how can you be sure that this
wasn't done as a mistake or by accident? If you are certain that if you
upload the files again they will be deleted, but don't know who did it,
then I find it hard not to conclude that you do know who deleted them,
or do know the reason why they were deleted -- or are projecting a
state of mind onto someone you don't know, & who may have committed
an honest mistake.

I've seen an awful lot of one-time subscribers post to this list, claiming
that they are being harshly penalized for their own unwitting mistakes,
asking for understanding & leniency in the matter. I think it would be
a nice gesture for someone in that situation to extend that same
understanding & lenency towards the Admins when asking for help. They
are just as human as every other Wikipedian, & have been known
to make mistakes -- but every petitioner insists that they are
undoubtedly the victim of a tyrant drunk with power. That kind of attitude
only drives those people away from Wikipedia who would respond & help
such requests, & leave the petty tyrants who enjoy smirking at letters
like this.

Geoff


from_name: Sean Barrett

body:
Leif Knutsen stated for the record:

> Still, they were put forward for deletion because those who wanted it
> deleted complained that permission hadn't been obtained. If there was
> another reason for it, that should have been raised as the reason. I can't
> even find the archives of the discussion.
>
> Can someone please find out who deleted them? I would like to file for the
> appropriate sanctions against the individuals. If I simply upload them
> again, they are sure to be deleted as a result of Jimbo's policy.

The user who deleted them has never edited [[Vaccine controversy]]; he
deleted them to comply with published policy, not to censor you.  He
will not be sanctioned.  Take your vendetta elsewhere.

--
  Sean Barrett
  sean at epoptic.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Klingon Wikipedia locked

body:
Using the name Wikipedia, or whatever it is in Klingon, is probably a
bad idea for legal issues. Someone might see something they don't like
on it and send a rediculous legal threat to wikipedia or something.
Just my opinion.

Look at the recent changes on tlh/klingon. 8 changes in the last 30
days! I see more edits then that in the regular 7 day view on
jbo/lojban.

Klingon was made for movies and tv series's anyway. Lojban wasn't.
Lojban is actually designed to be used by humans. It is the native
language of Lojbanistan (hah!).

By the way, isn't it great there exists a mediawiki wiki host that
will host an encyclopedia in pretty much any language, and doesn't
even charge anything, at the expense of a few small text ads? yay :)

On 8/7/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have to wonder, is the Lojban Wikipedia next?
>
> Either way, I do think it should be moved to WikiCities, and I don't
> see why the WMF needs to be so stingy with its trademarks (the
> Tokipona encyclopedia wikicities can't use the name "Wikipesija" since
> it is/resembles a Wikimedia trademark).
>
> If they were "kicked out" of using the Wikipedia subdomain, I don't
> see what's wrong with letting them continue to call themselves
> "Wikipedia" (TP wasn't even using the name "Wikipedia" -- since when
> is "Wikipesija" widely agreed upon as a trademark of the WMF??), as
> long as they keep up to the standards required by Wikipedia (NPOV,
> same licensing, etc)
>
> Mark
>
> On 07/08/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > I've locked the Klingon Wikipedia (tlh.wikipedia.org) on Jimmy's
> > request. It remains online for now, but is no longer editable.
> >
> > (Perhaps it could be moved to WikiCities?)
> >
> > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
> QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
> POSSIT MATERIARI
> ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
signature


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
> > >Something like the plan in [[User:David Gerard/1.0]] would use an
>article
> > >rating system (picture a "Rate this page" tab at the top next to
>"Article",
> > >"Edit", etc.) to get a rough idea of what is of decent quality to pull
>for
> > >a distribution.
>
> > I assume you're talking about rating per article, and not per revision
>(as
> > the latter would be fairly impossible).  In that case, it'd be quite a
> > rough idea indeed.
>
>
>Nope, per article version. See [[m:Article validation feature]]. (I think
>"validation" is a misnomer here myself - that was Magnus' name for it,
>since he wrote the feature.)
>
I don't get it.  How many ratings do you think an average revision is going
to get?  2 or 3?  Probably much less than that, and that's without averaging
in all the 0s.

I must not be understanding the feature.

> > If the Mozilla process does this, then presumably its programmers are
>not
> > supposed to introduce brand new features during the alpha and beta
>stages
> > of development.  I find that rather hard to believe, but maybe Mozilla
>is a
> > small enough project that it can do such a thing.
>
>
>It's comparable to OpenOffice or KDE in compilation time. Depends if you
>call that "small".
>
Well, from what I've read about it, this isn't the way Mozilla development
works anyway.  In other words, the 1.0 branch is kept in maintenance mode
while what will eventually become 2.0 is still worked on in the main trunk.

> > Of course, maybe our only disagreement here is over how long it's going
>to
> > take to get from the point of the fork to the point where the branch is
>no
> > longer maintained.  In my opinion a few weeks isn't going to be anywhere
> > near enough time to fix all the inaccuracies.
>
>The presumption is that the sufficiently highly rated stuff will be of good
>quality anyway. If it isn't, it's material for an article improvement
>drive.
>
Well, I don't understand how the ratings will work.  How will a popular
article which is receiving regular edits ever get more than a few ratings
for a single revision?  ([[Helium]] was edited 4 times just in the past
week.  Are people expected to rate this every single time it is changed?)

And then, what do we do when the highest rated version of an article isn't
the latest version?  Let's say a version of [[Helen Gandy]] somehow manages
to get 50 ratings.  Then, maybe even just because of the attention of having
so many ratings, it starts to get heavily edited.  Which version goes into
1.0, the old version, or the new one?  If it's the old one, what if we have
to fix a few typos in that old one?  We've essentially created a branch, and
we've done so at some random point rather than an intentionally selected
one.  (And don't forget, this assumes a particular version manages to get a
lot of ratings in the first place, which seems incredibly unlikely as I
don't foresee people going through the history rating version after version,
people are just going to rate the most recent version).

>
>- d.

Anthony

_________________________________________________________________
Don?t just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/


body:
>But don't do this if they were validly deleted.
>
>If you claim to have permission, I can imagine two reasons why the
>images would have been deleted:
>1) The permission was not verified (this is up to the uploader)
>2) The images were with-permission only. As of a mailing list post a
>few weeks ago from Jimbo
>(http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-May/023760.html),
>images that are used on WP with permission but do not fall under any
>other category may be deleted.

OR - someone violated the policy because they had a point of view on the
issue and found these facts rather inconvenient.

These were uploaded prior to Jimbo's email on the issue.

Still, they were put forward for deletion because those who wanted it
deleted complained that permission hadn't been obtained. If there was
another reason for it, that should have been raised as the reason. I can't
even find the archives of the discussion.

Can someone please find out who deleted them? I would like to file for the
appropriate sanctions against the individuals. If I simply upload them
again, they are sure to be deleted as a result of Jimbo's policy.


from_name: Dan Grey

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
On 06/08/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Something like the plan in [[User:David Gerard/1.0]] would use an article
> rating system (picture a "Rate this page" tab at the top next to "Article",
> "Edit", etc.) to get a rough idea of what is of decent quality to pull for
> a distribution.

Remind me. What is preventing this from being done?

Dan


body:
Dear Leif,

I do not think images can be undeleted, so what you need to do is upload the
photos again, provide the copyright information and put them back in the
article.

Regards,

Zachary Harden (User:Zscout370)

>From: Leif Knutsen <vyerllc at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: vyer at earthlink.net,English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Unauthorized deletion of images
>Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 12:49:25 -0400
>
>Various people have tried through various ways to censor facts presented in
>the article titled "Vaccine controversy." The latest such attempt was to
>delete a number of graphs that show that mortality rates in Australia for a
>number of infectious diseases had decreased before the introduction of
>vaccines. The images were listed for deletion for alleged copyright
>violations. I obtained permission from all relevant copyright holders,
>noted
>this fact in the listing for deletions, but now I find that the images were
>deleted anyway.
>
>The names of the images were:
>Image:Austr mort
>diphtheria.gif<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=Austr_mort_diphtheria.gif>
>Image:Austr mort
>scarletfever.gif<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=Austr_mort_scarletfever.gif>
>Image:Austr mort
>measles.gif<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=Austr_mort_measles.gif>
>Image:Austr mort
>typhoidfever.gif<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=Austr_mort_typhoidfever.gif>
>Image:Austr mort
>polio.gif<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=Austr_mort_polio.gif>
>Image:Austr mort
>whoopingcough.gif<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=Austr_mort_whoopingcough.gif>
>
>These images must be undeleted immediately, and appropriate action should
>be
>taken against the individuals who deleted them in violation of policy.
>
>--
>Leif Knutsen


from_name: Kate

subject: [Wikitech-l] mail outage

body:
hi,

all mail services (lists, wiki mail, OTRS) will be offline for several hours
during Monday morning UTC while mail services are moved to another machine.

kate.


from_name: Stephan Walter

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Archives

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> A way to post without revealing one's email address (or even better to
> reveal an alternate email address) would be nice, though.

Use gmane.org, it'll encrypt your e-mail address. Plus you won't have
thousands of emails in your inbox every day (if you subscribe to a lot
of mailinglists)

> In other words, mailing lists are so 1995.

The are so 1985 and so 2005 as well, don't worry...

-Stephan
[[en:User:Stw]]


from_name: Sam Korn

body:
On 8/8/05, Zachary Harden <zscout370 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Leif,
>
> I do not think images can be undeleted, so what you need to do is upload the
> photos again, provide the copyright information and put them back in the
> article.
>
> Regards,
>
> Zachary Harden (User:Zscout370)

But don't do this if they were validly deleted.

If you claim to have permission, I can imagine two reasons why the
images would have been deleted:
1) The permission was not verified (this is up to the uploader)
2) The images were with-permission only.  As of a mailing list post a
few weeks ago from Jimbo
(http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-May/023760.html),
images that are used on WP with permission but do not fall under any
other category may be deleted.

Cheers,
Sam


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: mail outage

body:
David Gerard wrote:

> What was the apparent outage from about Saturday 15:00 UTC to just a short
> while ago?

postfix broke.

> - d.

kate.


from_name: Arkady Rose

body:
info at antandsons.com wrote:

>Who can I contact to see if I can add links/content to Wikipedia?

You don't. See that little "edit this page" link? You just dive right on in.

Regards,
Arkady


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with the world?

body:
Dan Grey (dangrey at gmail.com) [050808 08:15]:
> On 06/08/05, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

> > Something like the plan in [[User:David Gerard/1.0]] would use an article
> > rating system (picture a "Rate this page" tab at the top next to "Article",
> > "Edit", etc.) to get a rough idea of what is of decent quality to pull for
> > a distribution.

> Remind me. What is preventing this from being done?

Code issues. Magnus' code works well enough to demonstrate the feature, but
switching on the present implementation on en: would bring the wiki to a
screeching overloaded halt. See [[m:Article validation feature]] and the
link to Brion's message about it. Brion is also not entirely convinced the
feature is a good idea, but if someone can write code that doesn't do
hideous things to the Wikimedia databases then it's got a chance. Magnus is
very much after people to work on it. Presumably it needs some deep
thinking about algorithms that won't overload the database.

- d.