subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia France

body:
On Sunday 24 October 2004 02:19, Anthere wrote:
> The french association Wikim?dia France was officially
> created today in Paris.

Great news!

Which country is next on the list and where most of your EU contributors live?

--
NSK
Admin of http://portal.wikinerds.org
Project Manager of http://www.nerdypc.org
Project Manager of http://www.adapedia.org
Project Manager of http://maatworks.wikinerds.org


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: NSK

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia France


list: wikien-l

subject: [WikiEN-l] delete all articles with the word green

body:
On Sunday 24 October 2004 03:15, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> Let's ban people who list articles on VfD which aren't deleted.

Nice idea.

--
NSK
Admin of http://portal.wikinerds.org
Project Manager of http://www.nerdypc.org
Project Manager of http://www.adapedia.org
Project Manager of http://maatworks.wikinerds.org


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Drive-by deletion

body:
NSK (nsk2 at wikinerds.org) [041023 01:57]:
> On Friday 22 October 2004 16:36, John Lee wrote:

> > That was tried with Nupedia, Wikipedia's forefather. There's a reason
> > why Wikipedia exists today and Nupedia doesn't, you know...

> IMO the open "anything goes" model of WP is more suited for non-serious sites
> that just accept anything. This kind of sites attract mostly the popular
> masses that just want to push POVs or do something creative in their weekends
> (i.e. they work just for their own satisfaction and not for the common good).

The common good is the source of my satisfaction on Wikpedia. I think
that's true of almost any Wikipedia editor.

As far as seriousness versus quality, note de: recently won a single-blind
comparison with several competitors. Wikipedia can beat the leaders of the
field without trashing the Wiki model; you are arguing from personal
incredulity, but this recent evidence suggests there isn't actually an
irreparable problem, if there is in fact any problem.

I'd like to see Wikipedia articles being better-referenced. The reference
markup language proposals would be damn fine things to see going into
production. This would make better referencing *easy*. It would let the
wiki do the heavy lifting, which is essential to any radical policy change
working.

- d.


list: foundation-l

from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia France

body:
Possibly netherlands, or belgium, or italy ?

Where do more contributors live apart from germany and france, in europe
I'd say England (in geographical Europs)

Ant

NSK a ?crit:
> On Sunday 24 October 2004 02:19, Anthere wrote:
>
>>The french association Wikim?dia France was officially
>>created today in Paris.
>
>
> Great news!
>
> Which country is next on the list and where most of your EU contributors live?
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia France


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion and notability

body:
NSK (nsk2 at wikinerds.org) [041023 09:58]:

> I suggest WP to do the same: Stop trying to compete with Encyclopaedia
> Britannica and become a "neutral factual verifiable knowledge base".

I suggest you spend a bit longer around WP and get a feel for the culture.
This proposal appears to show very little comprehension of how it works.
Everyone is here to write an encyclopedia. I would guess quite a few are
here to write *the* Encyclopedia.

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion and notability

body:
NSK (nsk2 at wikinerds.org) [041023 11:11]:

> I think I have some nice things to propose to WP that can help your community

Whether good ideas or not, I hope you can see that they are unlikely to
achieve traction if presented as "help your community" rather than "help
our community". An outside view is useful, but to achieve traction it would
need to be presented from the inside viewpoint.

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia France

body:
or an organisation

Angela a ?crit:
>>>Which country is next on the list and where most of your EU contributors live?
>>
>>Possibly netherlands, or belgium, or italy ?
>
>
> Possibly also US, India, Britain, or Romania:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/United_States_Wikimedia_Chapter
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_India_chapter
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/British_Wikimedia_chapter
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Rom%C3%A2nia
>
> Angela.


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia France


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia France

body:
oopsie, went to quickly.

Some contributors also think of a european association....

Angela a ?crit:
>>>Which country is next on the list and where most of your EU contributors live?
>>
>>Possibly netherlands, or belgium, or italy ?
>
>
> Possibly also US, India, Britain, or Romania:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/United_States_Wikimedia_Chapter
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_India_chapter
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/British_Wikimedia_chapter
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Rom%C3%A2nia
>
> Angela.


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia France


from_name: Jens Ropers

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion and notability

body:
NSK --

After this email:
>> http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-October/031599.html
and your reaction to Rick as below, I'm not sure what I should think.

Should I think:
	"How convenient for you to have an excuse for ignoring Rick just as he
was asking you about your username"?
Or should I think:
	"What an odd coincidence"?
Which is it?

I don't mean to say that contributors with or without a higher number
of edits were worth more -- I don't believe in that.
I do however believe that getting to know each other is indeed
important when it comes to online communities (and, for that matter,
just about any kind of community).

You've sure made a high number of posts to several mailing lists in the
past days, but I'd still be interested in finding out who you are at
the Wikipedia.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com

On 23 Oct 2004, at 23:21, Rick wrote:

> Apparently not interested in discussing things, I guess.
>
> RickK
>
> NSK <nsk2 at wikinerds.org> wrote:
> On Saturday 23 October 2004 22:19, you wrote:
>> as faulty as your logic.
>
> giantsrick13 at yahoo.com automatically ignored for personal attacks.
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> vote.yahoo.com - Register online to vote today!
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Problems with MediaWiki Setup

body:
On Sunday 24 October 2004 05:12, Kevin Li wrote:
> Hi,

Welcome!

> (0KB size)

Please ensure you have writing permissions in the wiki directory.

In a Unix system, do this:

(first login as root)
cd my-wiki-directory <ENTER>
chmod a+w config <ENTER>

--
NSK
Admin of http://portal.wikinerds.org
Project Manager of http://www.nerdypc.org
Project Manager of http://www.adapedia.org
Project Manager of http://maatworks.wikinerds.org


from_name: Nicholas Knight

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 15, Issue 76

body:
Robin Shannon wrote:

> Firstly, may i speak for the great unwashed, by saying that there have
> been far too many emails on this list from far too few people in the
> last few days.

This is perfectly normal for debates. A handful of people go back and
forth repeatedly, often for long periods of time. An unfortunate
side-effect is that other day-to-day issues end up getting brushed
aside. If you have some magic solution that doesn't stifle debate, I'd
suggest writing it up and posting it somewhere, 'cause you'll quickly
become a legend.

> Thirdly, I would like to provide a hopefully reasonably NPOV summary
> of the positions so far expressed re: WP:VfD
> "Your a wanker" "No, your a wanker, and so is your dead cat"
> These havent been very helpful.

What has occurred on this list recently was a heated debate that got a
little out of hand at times but was nonetheless quite important and
useful. What definitely isn't helpful are your extremely rude
characterizations.


from_name: Ken Ara

subject: [Wikitech-l] Robot request

body:
Thank you Brion and Mark.

I'm sorry but I don't know how to obtain the headers,
however I am able to view the RSS files without
problem with a browser, so I don't think it's a
Wikipedia server issue. I changed the user-agent sent
by the script to that of a popular browser (hadn't
thought of that...) with no improvement. Finally went
to FeedBurner.com and gave them the file to fetch. My
program has been able to read it off the FeedBurner
site without problem (updates every 30 mins, not
ideal).

Any further insights or suggestions are welcome.

Ken

--- Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> On Oct 23, 2004, at 8:21 AM, Ken Ara wrote:
> > I have been reading the "recent changes" and "new
> > articles" RSS-feeds through My Yahoo. Now I've
> written
> > a small Python program to fetch and parse these
> feeds,
> > but it fails most of the time with a message about
> > "intermittent server problem" and warning that my
> > user-agent may be blocked. Since the feeds are
> > available through my browser, I conclude that I
> have
> > been blocked. (My program sends the user-agent,
> > 'WikiWalker' and provides my email address).
>
> Can you provide a dump of the sent and received HTTP
> headers? You might
> just be getting timeouts, the servers have had some
> ups and downs
> lately.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>

> ATTACHMENT part 1.2 application/pgp-signature
x-mac-type=70674453; name=PGP.sig
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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from_name: Daniel P.B.Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Full Nice Handbag Co: My vote is still "strong neutral"

body:
The actual article in question was (full text):

"Full Nice Handbag Co is a handbag exporter and manufacturer in Hong
Kong. It was established in 1992. Its range of products include ladies
handbags, unisex casual bags, travel bags, backpacks, shoulder bags,
cosmetic bags, evening purses, natural & paper straw bags, and sports
bags. Its managing director is Raymond Leung."

I have just submitted it to http://jnana.wikinerds.com

I simply cannot believe that it makes very much difference one way or
the other whether this article is in Wikipedia. I suggest that Pcb21
consider NOT resubmitting it and I also suggest that if he does RickK
and others should just look the other way and NOT list it on VfD. Let's
try not to go off onto grand crusades on principle on things that just
don't really don't matter that much.

What i said last time was: "Strong NEUTRAL.... There's no very good
reason for it to be in Wikipedia, and there's no very good reason for
it not to be in Wikipedia. IMHO it is silly to be expressing any strong
opinion about it either way, and silly to be getting overly worked up
about it. ... I don't care. I vehemently don't care. All be the same in
a hundred years, that's what I say."

Or, as Samuel Butler wrote in "The Way of All Flesh:" "it matters
little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may
make, provided only he follows it out with charitable inconsistency,
and without insisting on it to the bitter end. It is in the
uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or
want of dogma that the danger lies."

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Robot request

body:
Hi Andr??, Hi Tom,

I did change the user-agent: I knew py-urllib had been
banned but not why. Still, I think unique user-agents
should be used - nothing wrong with a little
accountability - when I spot an obviously faked one I
usually deny it as being up to no good. *#&%@(*!!

My 'robot' hardly deserves the name; it only fetches
and parses the Wikipedia RSS feeds. I'll have a look
at PWB, sounds interesting.

Ken

--- Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:

> Another possibility could be that he failed to
> change the user-agent,
> and the bot uses the default Python user agent,
> which is blocked
> because the Python Wikipediabot used it in the past,
> and at that time
> did not throttle and tended to load pages once to
> check whether they
> existed, and then a second time to read their
> content.
>
> I do wonder why we are still blocking it more than a
> year afterward...
>
> Andre Engels
>
> On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 14:04:44 -0700, Brion Vibber
> <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > On Oct 23, 2004, at 8:21 AM, Ken Ara wrote:
> > > I have been reading the "recent changes" and
> "new
> > > articles" RSS-feeds through My Yahoo. Now I've
> written
> > > a small Python program to fetch and parse these
> feeds,
> > > but it fails most of the time with a message
> about
> > > "intermittent server problem" and warning that
> my
> > > user-agent may be blocked. Since the feeds are
> > > available through my browser, I conclude that I
> have
> > > been blocked. (My program sends the user-agent,
> > > 'WikiWalker' and provides my email address).
> >
> > Can you provide a dump of the sent and received
> HTTP headers? You might
> > just be getting timeouts, the servers have had
> some ups and downs
> > lately.
> >
> > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> >
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >
> >
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

_______________________________
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Express yourself with Y! Messenger! Free. Download now.
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from_name: Kevin Li

body:
Thank you for your help. But unfortunately, I had already set the
permissions on the config directory. Basically everything went fine, and
it said that the installation had been completed (it made new tables in
the database). It's just that when I got to the main page, wiki tries to
access my database with root at localhost (I specified something totally
different during my setup). So I guess my question is, after the
installation, the file "LocalSettings.php" should contain some
information right?

Thank you once again.

Cheers,

Kevin Li
2A Systems Design Engineering
University of Waterloo

NSK wrote:

>On Sunday 24 October 2004 05:12, Kevin Li wrote:
>
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>
>
>Welcome!
>
>
>
>>(0KB size)
>>
>>
>
>Please ensure you have writing permissions in the wiki directory.
>
>In a Unix system, do this:
>
>(first login as root)
>cd my-wiki-directory <ENTER>
>chmod a+w config <ENTER>
>
>
>


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: WikiData: A rant

body:
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
<snip attempt to rescue the thing>

> So when some site wants to use wikidatas, it sends a query to the
> wikidata server associated with their internal reference (ex: name of
> the wikipedia article and language). Wikidata then send them the
> requested data and the wikidata internal reference.
>
> When a wikidata is changed, the site send ping to every site
> referencing  that set of data with the update. From there the site
> using data will answer wikidata with a code:
>  1/ data change acknowledged.
>  2/ no more need for this data, remove me.
>  3/ doesnt answer.
>
> If it doesnt answer, there could be a system that queue the ping so it
> can be sent later (and eventualy be dropped after x days).

That will work nicely, if we restrict WikiData access to "show me that
specific row from that specific table in that specific database". Which
is fine for "Show me data on that species".

But as soon as we allow queries to return lists (e.g., "show me all
species of that family"), we cannot do that anymore. Suppone someone
adds a species to WikiData. How can we know that a wikipedia page needs
to be updated?

Only one way to do that:
* Store the original query, the wikipedia page for that query, and its
results
* On changing any WikiData, rerun *all* these queries, compare their
results to the stored ones, and notify wikipedias if necessary

Rerunning a million queries for each data change will dwarf the possible
traffic generated from pull (pull isn't really better either; that's the
dilemma).

Also, pushing will require extensive infrastructure on the recipient's
site, which is not necessarily a wikimedia project (the data should be
available to everyone).

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Full nice handbag

body:
>
> If you believe the article should be undeleted, then argue the case on
> Votes for Undeletion. Otherwise you're just joining the recent cadre
> of inclusionists who are prepared to violate consensus when it goes
> against them.
>
> -- ambi

Ambi, I *did* argue the case on VfU. The VfU process, *in my opinion*,
failed because it failed to discuss whether the admin weighing up the
original decision made a mistake or not. It became a rehash of the VfD
debate, which is not the purpose of VfU.

Again, my central point is not addressed by any of the replies:

1) Notability is subjective.

2) It is possible that VfD voters have a collective bias in their
subjective reading of notability.

3) Borderline candidates about some subjects (Asian manufacturing
companies) get deleted whereas others (ogres that appear for one line in
one book published years ago, but turned into a geek-popular film) get kept.

We are not creating a neutral encyclopedia without addressing this issue.

Pete


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Consensus

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>Full utilization of VfD requires you to
>spend all your time voting and none of your time writing encyclopedia
>articles.  That's why it's impractical and inefficient.
>
That is THE major problems with that process.

>Direct democracy is
>not a good solution, and my politicians have already recognized that and
>acted upon it (of course here in Florida we do have some direct democracy,
>in the form of 9 constitutional ammendments on the ballot for the year, but
>9 polls a year is hardly the same as 30 a day).
>
There are other significant elements.  I presume that you are able to
deal with all 9 amendments in a single trip to the polls, and not 9
separate trips.  There will also be a lapse of time between the day that
the amendments are proposed, and the day when you must vote.  This gives
you some time to reflect upon the matters.  Our multitude of proposed
deletions require you to make an immediate choice without any time to
reflect or to seek background information on the subject.

>Besides all this, you can only take the anology between Wikipedia and
>government so far.  The purpose of government is to protect the rights of
>its citizens.  The purpose of Wikipedia is to create a free encyclopedia.
>Any notions of democracy in Wikipedia are there solely to facilitate that
>goal.  And that's part of the reason why Wikipedia is not a democracy.
>
Whatever democratic aspects there are to Wikipedia are there to protect
and respect the rights of all contributors, including those who have
minority opinions.  Since there is an apparent general right of all who
come here to contribute, any attempt to delete these writings conflicts
with that right.  This does not mean that we have to accept everything,
only that the onus is upon the deleters to establish their case.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion and notability

body:
Jens Ropers wrote:
> NSK --

> After this email:
>>> http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-October/031599.html
> and your reaction to Rick as below, I'm not sure what I should think.
> I don't mean to say that contributors with or without a higher number of
> edits were worth more -- I don't believe in that.
> I do however believe that getting to know each other is indeed important
> when it comes to online communities (and, for that matter, just about
> any kind of community).
> You've sure made a high number of posts to several mailing lists in the
> past days, but I'd still be interested in finding out who you are at the
> Wikipedia.

Thirded. NSK, do you even edit on Wikipedia? If so, who as?

- d.


from_name: David Carson

body:
NSK wrote:

>On Sunday 24 October 2004 03:15, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
>
>>Let's ban people who list articles on VfD which aren't deleted.
>>
>>
>
>Nice idea.
>
>

Let's ban people who make edits that are subsequently edited by someone
else - after all, if they're not perfect, we don't want them working on
our encyclopedia.

Cheers!
David...


subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki licensing

body:
NSK wrote:

>How about LGPL?
>
>
>
I have co-licensed my waikiki module under LGPL some time ago for use at
WikiRover (http://sourceforge.net/projects/wikirover/ ). Don't know
about their status, though.

Magnus


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Full nice handbag

body:
Pete/Pcb21 wrote

> Again, my central point is not addressed by any of the replies:

Bear in mind that this area threatens to become the OverwhelmingTopic of
this list.

> 1) Notability is subjective.

Certainly, within limits.

> 2) It is possible that VfD voters have a collective bias in their
> subjective reading of notability.

Probably, within smaller limits.

> 3) Borderline candidates about some subjects (Asian manufacturing
> companies) get deleted whereas others (ogres that appear for one line in
> one book published years ago, but turned into a geek-popular film) get
kept.

I'll take your word for it.

> We are not creating a neutral encyclopedia without addressing this issue.

I wouldn't say deletion was a major point about the 'skewed' nature of the
WP-en content; certainly compared with the lack of strong submissions in
neglected areas.

Charles


subject: [WikiEN-l] Full nice handbag

body:
Delirium wrote:

> I'm not sure if things have changed since I stopped being as heavily
> involved in it, but I was under the impression that a 55-60% margin
> wasn't considered enough to delete.  I know I personally don't delete
> things unless it's more like a 75% margin or more.  Perhaps someone
> erred?

Actually it was 14 delete votes to 8 keep votes, so 63% delete, which IS
a little on the low side, although the late addition of a reply from the
a Chinese Wikipedia editor (Duncharris asked them for advice), "Well, I
live in Hong Kong, and I've never heard of it", may have swayed the
admin's opinion.

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archived_delete_debates/June_12#Full_Nice_Handbag_Co
for the discussion.

I personally would have left it on VFD for someone else to action, I too
prefer to only delete things with a 75%+ margin. I'll leave the
controversial stuff for people who have been admins longer than a few
months. :-)

Cheers!
David...


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Robot request

body:
On Oct 24, 2004, at 7:28 AM, Ken Ara wrote:
> I'm sorry but I don't know how to obtain the headers,

If you're using urllib:
   import httplib
   httplib.HTTPConnection.debuglevel = 1

Or use a packet sniffer like ethereal to grab the HTTP traffic.

Basically I'm trying to find out:
a) that your robot is sending all the correct headers, such as the
custom user-agent and the host: header
b) find out what response is being returned that looks like you've been
"blocked"

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] htmlspecialchars applied on wfMsg() messages

body:
On Oct 24, 2004, at 7:01 AM, Petr Kadlec wrote:
> AFAICS this means that no HTML entities may occur in the blockiptext
> message (as every & gets converted to &). Is there any reason for
> that? Why not drop the htmlspecialchars() out? Is there any generic
> rule when it is used and when not? (I mean, some other special pages
> seem to use addHTML( wfMsg( ... ) ) etc.)

Raw HTML is dangerous for several reasons, chiefly these two:
* If a message does not contain 100% valid HTML, pages using it would
become completely inaccessible in strict XHTML output mode. An
accidental change by a sysop to a critical messages could make the
ENTIRE WIKI inaccessible to everyone until someone with direct database
access came in to fix it.

* HTML can contain JavaScript; a sysop account could be used to add a
cross-site scripting attack to EVERY PAGE OF THE WIKI. (On some larger
wikis we have literally hundreds of sysops, who might not all be
trusted; also accounts may be compromised by various means including
unknown but limited-exposure cross-site scripting attacks.)

As such I've been gradually moving wiki messages over to be wikitext
where possible, or else plaintext (via htmlspecialchars). This is not
yet complete.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
> But these are all red herrings, as the Rambot articles, the Pokemon
> articles, most movies, the species articles, all get strong keep votes
> if they're ever put on VFD, and I can't think of a single one of these
> that has been deleted in recent times.

That's just because we haven't been pounded with them day after day.  If I
listed 20 rambot articles a day (articles only edited by rambot), eventually
one of two things would happen.  1) I would be banned, or 2) some of them
would get >60% votes for deletion.  My bet is on 1.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Consensus

body:
> ...so it doesn't go your way, and therefore it is impractical and
> inefficient. Geez, I'd hate to see how it'd be if our politicians ever
> acted upon this logic...

That's not at all what I said.  Full utilization of VfD requires you to
spend all your time voting and none of your time writing encyclopedia
articles.  That's why it's impractical and inefficient.  Direct democracy is
not a good solution, and my politicians have already recognized that and
acted upon it (of course here in Florida we do have some direct democracy,
in the form of 9 constitutional ammendments on the ballot for the year, but
9 polls a year is hardly the same as 30 a day).

Besides all this, you can only take the anology between Wikipedia and
government so far.  The purpose of government is to protect the rights of
its citizens.  The purpose of Wikipedia is to create a free encyclopedia.
Any notions of democracy in Wikipedia are there solely to facilitate that
goal.  And that's part of the reason why Wikipedia is not a democracy.

But I don't know why I bother wasting my breath.  You took my comment
completely out of context and nitpicked on one little part of it.  Read the
whole comment again.  You'll see that whether or not things go my way has
nothing to do with it.

Anthony


body:
On Oct 24, 2004, at 12:52 PM, NSK wrote:
> On Sunday 24 October 2004 22:33, Petr Kadlec wrote:
>> HTML is dangerous
>
> Perhaps only sysops or devels could use direct HTML and PHP in a
> wikipage.

If you read the following paragraphs you'll see two reasons why that's
insufficient.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] internal or external?

body:
NSK wrote:

>On Sunday 24 October 2004 23:56, Andre Engels wrote:
>
>
>>Wikipedia to Wiktionary are internal links? And if yes, could they
>>
>>
>In my opinion I see no reason why the dictionary needs to be separate from the
>wikipedia. Many dictionaries are like encyclopedias and many pedias are like
>dictionaries. There is definitely some degree of overlap.
>
They are separate projects because the way they approach material is
completely different.  The same can be said of the other project.  Each
sets its own policies subject to a handful of broad policies that cover
all Wikimedia projects.

To the original question, I would answer that the links are external to
Wikipedia but internal to Wikimedia.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] internal or external?


subject: [WikiEN-l] substubs, deletion, and David

body:
> Deleting something certainly _can_ improve Wikipedia.

I agree with this, and I think you have to be dishonest to not accept it.  I
just don't think the benefits of deletion, in cases where it is not legally
mandated, outweigh the potential for abuse.  I think there's always a better
solution, though in some cases this would require changes in the mediawiki
software.

> I don't think the fatal attraction of deletion is that people enjoy
> "being a cop." I think the attracton is that VfD has about the right
> amount of traffic, social interaction, conflict, drama, winning and
> losing to be addictive. I can write whole articles without getting a
> single "attaboy," but almost everything I do in VfD gets interesting
> positive and/or negative responses.

This is probably more the deletionist perspective, though.  Personally, I am
drawn to VfD more because it requires immediate attention.  Writing a stub
can always wait.  Improving an article on cleanup can always wait.  Why put
off til tomorrow what you can put off til the day after tomorrow?  But when
something's listed on VfD, there's a good chance that it is going to be
permanently erased (at least from my view) unless something is done about
it.  That's why I feel so strongly about having access to deleted articles.
If I could only access the article after it were deleted, then it wouldn't
matter if it were deleted.  I could archive it somewhere and worry about it
later.

> But creating a new article has an instant-gratification factor.
> How else can you explain the fact that people would rather
> create eighteen substubs than a single article with eighteen
> short sections?

Creating eighteen substubs is much much easier than creating a single
article with eighteen short sections.  In order to do the former, you just
search google 18 times.  In order to do the latter, you have to find
multiple sources on the same topic which contain 18 different facts
distributed among the different primary source evenly enough that you aren't
infringing the copyright of any single primary source.

And really, that's probably the single biggest reason to keep a poorly
written stub.  It allows a type of [[clean room design]] which can free
information from restrictive copyrights.  I'd rather see 18 people add 1
line to each of 18 articles than to see those same 18 people each add 18
lines to 1 article.  With the latter, you get more fact-checking, you guess
less risk of copyright infringement, and you get a more neutral point of
view.

There are certainly arguments that we shouldn't have substubs and poorly
written articles.  But even these arguments I don't think necessitate
deletion.  If you've got a substub on a topic which could theoretically grow
(but might take a long time to do so), why not move it to the talk page?
Talk pages aren't included in random page, and talk pages don't reflect as
poorly on Wikipedia.  But if someone comes along and decides to improve on
the article, the information will be sitting there in the talk page to help
that person along.

This is part of what I'm talking about when I say that there's always a
better solution.  It doesn't make sense in every situation, such as an
article which is patent nonsense, but in that case we could always mark the
article as deleted (thus taking it out of random page, search engines, and
the database dump) but still allow people to view it if they want to check
and make sure that it really was patent nonsense.


subject: [Foundation-l] internal or external?

body:
On Oct 24, 2004, at 1:56 PM, Andre Engels wrote:
> Is it true that the board has officially declared that links from
> Wikipedia to Wiktionary are internal links?

That's not a meaningful question without a definition of "internal". In
the style sheet they are "extiw" links, but I don't think the board
would have anything to do with that.

>  And if yes, could they
> please specify whether Wiktionary is part of Wikipedia or the other
> way around?

Neither, they are both Wikimedia projects. (IANABM)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] internal or external?

body:
On Oct 24, 2004, at 1:56 PM, Andre Engels wrote:
> Is it true that the board has officially declared that links from
> Wikipedia to Wiktionary are internal links?

That's not a meaningful question without a definition of "internal". In
the style sheet they are "extiw" links, but I don't think the board
would have anything to do with that.

>  And if yes, could they
> please specify whether Wiktionary is part of Wikipedia or the other
> way around?

Neither, they are both Wikimedia projects. (IANABM)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] internal or external?

body:
On Oct 24, 2004, at 1:56 PM, Andre Engels wrote:
> Is it true that the board has officially declared that links from
> Wikipedia to Wiktionary are internal links?

That's not a meaningful question without a definition of "internal". In
the style sheet they are "extiw" links, but I don't think the board
would have anything to do with that.

>  And if yes, could they
> please specify whether Wiktionary is part of Wikipedia or the other
> way around?

Neither, they are both Wikimedia projects. (IANABM)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Foundation-l] internal or external?

body:
On Oct 24, 2004, at 1:56 PM, Andre Engels wrote:
> Is it true that the board has officially declared that links from
> Wikipedia to Wiktionary are internal links?

That's not a meaningful question without a definition of "internal". In
the style sheet they are "extiw" links, but I don't think the board
would have anything to do with that.

>  And if yes, could they
> please specify whether Wiktionary is part of Wikipedia or the other
> way around?

Neither, they are both Wikimedia projects. (IANABM)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Rebecca

subject: [WikiEN-l] Consensus

body:
> ([[Wikipedia:Survey Guidelines]])  It's certainly not a direct democracy,
> and the lunacy of the VfD system shows quite well just how impractical and
> inefficient a direct democracy can be.

...so it doesn't go your way, and therefore it is impractical and
inefficient. Geez, I'd hate to see how it'd be if our politicians ever
acted upon this logic...

-- ambi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Full nice handbag

body:
> Perhaps I shouldn't have, but I came to the conclusion that I would be
> helping Wikipedia if I was bold and reinstated the article anyhow.
> Unfortunately good old RickK got in a right tizz about this. Rick and I
> have exchanged words that just about stay civil on our talk pages, and
> Theresa Knott helpfully suggested I come here to the mailing list (a
> kind of higher court than VfU if you will, and one arena more open to
> more philosophical/esoteric debates) to see if I want did was reasonable.

If you believe the article should be undeleted, then argue the case on
Votes for Undeletion. Otherwise you're just joining the recent cadre
of inclusionists who are prepared to violate consensus when it goes
against them.

-- ambi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Drive-by deletion

body:
> Rick wrote:
>
> > VfD has the consensus support of the community.
>
> This is demonstrably false. Just look at this list.

If VFD does not have the consensus support of the community, then why
not stop bitching here, and go write up a proposal to get rid of it?

And lets see how far it gets.

Of course, you won't do that, because you know what the odds of
success are - which reflects the feelings of the community on this
issue.

-- ambi


body:
But these are all red herrings, as the Rambot articles, the Pokemon
articles, most movies, the species articles, all get strong keep votes
if they're ever put on VFD, and I can't think of a single one of these
that has been deleted in recent times.

-- ambi

On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 21:22:27 -0400, Anthony DiPierro
<anthonydipierro at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > After a couple of articles get no "delete" votes at all, however, I
> > would be inclined to consider listing more of them trolling, yes.
>
> > -Snowspinner
>
> I'm sure I could muster up some delete votes.  But change the topic
> slightly, to something like number articles, or rambot articles, for which I
> could definitely get some delete votes (and which I think should be deleted
> anyway).  I could do it with Federal Standard 1037C articles, or articles
> about non-bestselling albums, or articles about most actors, or article
> about most movies, maybe even many of the species articles, though I
> wouldn't want to.  It's basically what happened with the September 11th
> victims.  At first there was a lot of support for keeping at least some of
> them, but as they got listed over and over and over again the people willing
> to waste their time voting keep waned, to where we've now deleted *even the
> pilots of the aircraft*.  It's what's happening right now with high school
> articles.  It happened with the pokemon articles, but I don't know what the
> outcome of that one was.
>
> Anthony
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Guanaco

body:
I temporarily restored the page so I could retrieve its source, which I
have pasted below.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

'''Full Nice Handbag Co''' is a handbag exporter and manufacturer in [[Hong Kong]].
It was established in [[1992]].
Its range of products include ladies handbags, unisex casual bags, travel bags, backpacks,
shoulder bags, cosmetic bags, evening purses, natural & paper straw bags, and sports bags.
Its managing director is Raymond Leung.

Perhaps special attention needs be paid to the interesting name of the company.
It is an English translation of the original Chinese name of the company, and is arguably both literal and phonetical.
For traditional Chinese businesses it is more common to have names using words like "Joyful", "Full",
"Prosperous" than to use the names of the founders/owners of the company.

==External link==

*[http://www.fullnice.com Official Website of Full Nice Handbag Co]

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

   * (cur) (last)  22:11, 23 Oct 2004 Pcb21
   * (cur) (last) 07:40, 10 Jun 2004 147.8.219.50
   * (cur) (last) 20:09, 1 Jun 2004 Everyking m (oh, i see they do spell it that way)
   * (cur) (last) 20:09, 1 Jun 2004 Everyking m
   * (cur) (last) 18:46, 1 Jun 2004 Pcb21 m (fmt)
   * (cur) (last) 06:07, 1 Jun 2004 Andris ({{subst:vfd}})
   * (cur) (last) 06:05, 1 Jun 2004 130.88.185.84

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Guanaco

Daniel P.B.Smith wrote:

> The actual article in question was (full text):
>
> "Full Nice Handbag Co is a handbag exporter and manufacturer in Hong
> Kong. It was established in 1992. Its range of products include ladies
> handbags, unisex casual bags, travel bags, backpacks, shoulder bags,
> cosmetic bags, evening purses, natural & paper straw bags, and sports
> bags. Its managing director is Raymond Leung."
>
> I have just submitted it to http://jnana.wikinerds.com
>
> I simply cannot believe that it makes very much difference one way or
> the other whether this article is in Wikipedia. I suggest that Pcb21
> consider NOT resubmitting it and I also suggest that if he does RickK
> and others should just look the other way and NOT list it on VfD.
> Let's try not to go off onto grand crusades on principle on things
> that just don't really don't matter that much.
>
> What i said last time was: "Strong NEUTRAL.... There's no very good
> reason for it to be in Wikipedia, and there's no very good reason for
> it not to be in Wikipedia. IMHO it is silly to be expressing any
> strong opinion about it either way, and silly to be getting overly
> worked up about it. ... I don't care. I vehemently don't care. All be
> the same in a hundred years, that's what I say."
>
> Or, as Samuel Butler wrote in "The Way of All Flesh:" "it matters
> little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may
> make, provided only he follows it out with charitable inconsistency,
> and without insisting on it to the bitter end. It is in the
> uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or
> want of dogma that the danger lies."
>
> --
> Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
> "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
> Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
> Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: delete all articles with the word green

body:
phil hunt wrote:

>Perhaps the VFD rules could be changed to make deletion harder
>unless there is a real consensus. One formula might be:
>
>delete if deletion_votes > 10 + 3 * keep_votes
>
>
That's too open for abuse by sockpuppets, and it's unusual for 11 people
to vote to delete a listing. The most blatant spam is usually skipped
over unless it's speedily deleted.

Maybe this would work:

<pseudocode>
# Ignore excessive sockpuppet votes
if ( deletion_socks > deletion_votes / 4 )
    { deletion_votes = deletion_votes + deletion_votes / 4 - deletion_socks
       deletion_socks = deletion_votes / 4
}
if ( keep_socks > keep_votes / 4 )
  { keep_votes = keep_votes + keep_votes / 4 - keep_socks
     keep_socks = keep_votes / 4
}

# Require a majority, even with sockpuppets. Note the code above that
removes excessive sockpuppet votes from deletion_votes and keep_votes
if (
    ( deletion_votes > keep_votes )
# consensus test (requires 75% of the total plus 3 votes -- sockpuppets
don't count)
    and ( deletion_votes + 3 * keep_socks > 3 * keep_votes +
deletion_socks + 3 )
) {
    delete
}
else {
    keep
}

</pseudocode>

More tests would probably be necessary, but I think this proves the
point that a simple formula cannot handle VfD, and it's a start if we're
actually going to use a formula.

Guanaco


from_name: Petr Kadlec

body:
I am working on an update of really outdated LanguageCs.php (using the
up-to-date messages in cs:MediaWiki namespace) and I have found a
problem I do not understand:

In SpecialBlockip.php, there are commands like

$wgOut->addWikiText( htmlspecialchars( wfMsg( "blockiptext" ) ) );

AFAICS this means that no HTML entities may occur in the blockiptext
message (as every & gets converted to &). Is there any reason for
that? Why not drop the htmlspecialchars() out? Is there any generic
rule when it is used and when not? (I mean, some other special pages
seem to use addHTML( wfMsg( ... ) ) etc.)

Thanks,
[[cs:User:Mormegil|Mormegil]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Viewing deleted articles

body:
> Well, an alternative way to accomplish the same thing would be a
> software change to either

> a) create a separate class of user with power to view deleted articles, or
> b) allow all logged-in users to view deleted pages.

I'd actually prefer:

c) allow a list of ip addresses to use Special:Export on deleted articles

But, whichever is decided, I'd be willing to code it myself.

As for getting admin access, I've already applied for admin access for this
purpose.  Granted this was several months ago and I've completely reformed
myself since then, but a lot of people seem to still hold a grudge against
me, so I doubt it will ever happen.  Maybe if I set up a few sockpuppets I
can eventually get one of them adminned...

Anthony


from_name: Dori

subject: [Wikitech-l] PDF

body:
Such an export tool has already been done, but it's not been
incorporated (since that's the hard part I guess):
http://wiki.auf-trag.de/

On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 23:38:34 +0300, NSK <nsk2 at wikinerds.org> wrote:
> Hi
>
> I will implement downloadable PDF export to my customised MW, so that readers
> can export any wikipage in PDF. This code can be made available under GPL.
>
> Is there anybody who would like to work with me on this, or is the MW team
> interested in incorporating this code in MW1.4?
>
> --
> NSK
> Admin of http://portal.wikinerds.org
> Project Manager of http://www.nerdypc.org
> Project Manager of http://www.adapedia.org
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
[[en:User:Dori]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: htmlspecialchars applied on wfMsg() messages

body:
OK, although I would imagine that wrapping the parameters to
htmlspecialchars() would be a little bit "more correct", I can
understand that.

So I'll ask a question that seems to be far off this topic, but it is not. :-)
What importance, meaning and purpose is there in the following message
that appears in some LanguageXx.php files?

# This file is encoded in UTF-8, no byte order mark.
# For compatibility with Latin-1 installations, please
# don't add literal characters above U+00ff.

What difference is there between e.g. U+00FF (UTF-8 encoding C3, BF)
and U+0100 (encoded to C4, 80), with regards to Latin-1 installations?

And if the message would be true, what is the other method I could use
to include characters above U+00FF in my messages? (Which is the only
reason for using UTF-8 anyway.) As I see from the previous problem
(ha! topic connection :-) ), I cannot use HTML entities like "scaron".

Well, anyway we do use literal characters above U+00FF in
LanguageCs.php just because there is no other practically usable way
to write Czech...

So, my final deduction is that the abovementioned message is rather
strange and I should ignore it, write any Unicode character to the
file normally, and generally not use HTML entities. (Which is
unfortunate especially for nbsp, which is normally indistinguishable
from a plain space character.) Am I correct?

Thanks,
[[cs:User:Mormegil|Mormegil]]


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

subject: [Wikitech-l] Robot request

body:
Hi,
You know about pywikipediabot.sf.net ?
Maybe you can include your bot, that will solve your problem.

ciao, tom
--
== Weblinks ==
* http://shop.wikipedia.org - WikiReader Internet zu kaufen
* http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
* http://www.hammererlehen.de - Urlaub in Berchtesgaden


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] SQL wrapper functions

body:
Some time ago, I introduced alternative names for some of the SQL
wrapper functions, in an attempt to atone for the horrible naming scheme
I set up. It was derived from the previous non-OO naming scheme, and it
really shouldn't have been. But I didn't make it clear that I intended
the old names to be obsolete, and I didn't systematically update the
code. I'm now attempting to correct that. I've removed the old names
completely and updated all the code, in HEAD.

The changes are as follows:

getField -> selectField
getArray -> selectRow
insertArray -> insert
updateArray -> update

The "array" qualifier was to distinguish from functions which took raw
SQL clauses instead of other data. Those functions are obsolete. The
current functions encapsulate that functionality by detecting the
variable type.

The following SQL wrappers are unchanged:

select
insertSelect
replace
delete
deleteJoin

The set() function is obsolete.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Mark Pellegrini

subject: [WikiEN-l] Would granting Anthony right to view deleted

body:
Give Anthony administrator rights the same way we give them to
everyone else - by securing consensus on the RFA; not by some
backdoor method that rewards his "provacative edits" (as the arbcom
previously called them).

--Mark


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Robot request

body:
Another possibility could be that he failed to change the user-agent,
and the bot uses the default Python user agent, which is blocked
because the Python Wikipediabot used it in the past, and at that time
did not throttle and tended to load pages once to check whether they
existed, and then a second time to read their content.

I do wonder why we are still blocking it more than a year afterward...

Andre Engels

On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 14:04:44 -0700, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Oct 23, 2004, at 8:21 AM, Ken Ara wrote:
> > I have been reading the "recent changes" and "new
> > articles" RSS-feeds through My Yahoo. Now I've written
> > a small Python program to fetch and parse these feeds,
> > but it fails most of the time with a message about
> > "intermittent server problem" and warning that my
> > user-agent may be blocked. Since the feeds are
> > available through my browser, I conclude that I have
> > been blocked. (My program sends the user-agent,
> > 'WikiWalker' and provides my email address).
>
> Can you provide a dump of the sent and received HTTP headers? You might
> just be getting timeouts, the servers have had some ups and downs
> lately.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>


from_name: NSK

body:
On Sunday 24 October 2004 16:42, Kevin Li wrote:
> access my database with root at localhost

In the wiki installation form you need to specify a new username and new
userpassword to be created for MySQL as well as your already existing MySQL
root password.

MediaWiki will login in your MySQL server (which can be localhost) as root
with the root password you supplied and create a new MySQL user. After the
creation of the tables, MW will access the database with the wiki MySQL user.

> "LocalSettings.php" should contain some information right?

LocalSettings.php should contain lots of information, which will be a subset
of the information contained in the ./includes/DefaultSettings.php file.

If it continues to fail writing the LocalSettings.php, you can manually copy
and paste the DefaultSetting.php in LocalSettings.php and store the
LocalSetting.php in the main wiki directory (not in ./config or ./includes).
After you do that, you will need to customise these settings by hand by using
a text editor like pico, vi, Kate or Notepad.

What OS are you running under and which MediaWiki do you use?

--
NSK
Admin of http://portal.wikinerds.org
Project Manager of http://www.nerdypc.org
Project Manager of http://www.adapedia.org
Project Manager of http://maatworks.wikinerds.org


from_name: phil hunt

body:
On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 21:22:27 -0400, Anthony DiPierro <anthonydipierro at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> After a couple of articles get no "delete" votes at all, however, I
>> would be inclined to consider listing more of them trolling, yes.
>
>> -Snowspinner
>
>I'm sure I could muster up some delete votes.  But change the topic
>slightly, to something like number articles, or rambot articles, for which I
>could definitely get some delete votes (and which I think should be deleted
>anyway).  I could do it with Federal Standard 1037C articles, or articles
>about non-bestselling albums, or articles about most actors, or article
>about most movies, maybe even many of the species articles, though I
>wouldn't want to.  It's basically what happened with the September 11th
>victims.  At first there was a lot of support for keeping at least some of
>them, but as they got listed over and over and over again the people willing
>to waste their time voting keep waned, to where we've now deleted *even the
>pilots of the aircraft*.  It's what's happening right now with high school
>articles.  It happened with the pokemon articles, but I don't know what the
>outcome of that one was.

Perhaps the VFD rules could be changed to make deletion harder
unless there is a real consensus. One formula might be:

delete if deletion_votes > 10 + 3 * keep_votes

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)


from_name: Phil Sandifer

references:
<BAY10-DAV6LYCT4aJ6p000034ff@hotmail.com>
	<slrncnnpod.9h9.zen19725@cabalamat.somewhere>
	<417C13D4.4090003@cox.net>

body:
How about "Admins judge what to do with articles, based on a rough
threshold of 2/3 and their own common sense." Then we can have a page
called "Requests for Undeletion" to deal with things where admins made
dodgy or bad calls.

If VfD is becoming unwieldy, why not split it into some topical pages.
VfD-Popular Culture, VfD-Sciences, VfD-Humanities, VfD-Politics, etc.
That would lighten the load on the single page.

But for the most part, the pendulum has swung back to the deletionists
favor at the moment. I'm sure the trend will reverse shortly and I'll
start getting frustrated at how people vote to keep things that are
obviously deletable. Fear not, inclusionists.

-Snowspinner
On Oct 24, 2004, at 3:43 PM, Guanaco wrote:

>
>
> phil hunt wrote:
>
>> Perhaps the VFD rules could be changed to make deletion harder unless
>> there is a real consensus. One formula might be:
>>
>> delete if deletion_votes > 10 + 3 * keep_votes
>>
> That's too open for abuse by sockpuppets, and it's unusual for 11
> people to vote to delete a listing. The most blatant spam is usually
> skipped over unless it's speedily deleted.
>
> Maybe this would work:
>
> <pseudocode>
> # Ignore excessive sockpuppet votes
> if ( deletion_socks > deletion_votes / 4 )
>    { deletion_votes = deletion_votes + deletion_votes / 4 -
> deletion_socks
>       deletion_socks = deletion_votes / 4
> }
> if ( keep_socks > keep_votes / 4 )
>  { keep_votes = keep_votes + keep_votes / 4 - keep_socks
>     keep_socks = keep_votes / 4
> }
>
>
> # Require a majority, even with sockpuppets. Note the code above that
> removes excessive sockpuppet votes from deletion_votes and keep_votes
> if (
>    ( deletion_votes > keep_votes )
> # consensus test (requires 75% of the total plus 3 votes --
> sockpuppets don't count)
>    and ( deletion_votes + 3 * keep_socks > 3 * keep_votes +
> deletion_socks + 3 )
> ) {
>    delete
> }
> else {
>    keep
> }
>
> </pseudocode>
>
> More tests would probably be necessary, but I think this proves the
> point that a simple formula cannot handle VfD, and it's a start if
> we're actually going to use a formula.
>
> Guanaco
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Drive-by deletion

body:
Two questions, then.

1) Would Anthony be willing to make a promise not to use any admin
rights for anything other than viewing and exporting deleted pages?
(Barring, of course, an RfA  that gives him the authority to do so)

2) Would people vote for an RfA for Anthony were such a promise made by
Anthony?

Also, in practical terms, how many pages are we talking about here? If
it would settle things, I'd be happy to send Anthony a weekly e-mail
with the text of any deleted pages he wants to see, assuming that the
number of pages a week that we're talking about is such that this
wouldn't provide a huge time drain for me.

-Snowspinner

On Oct 24, 2004, at 6:28 PM, Delirium wrote:

> Nicholas Knight wrote:
>
>> Rick wrote:
>>
>>> VfD has the consensus support of the community.
>>
>>
>> This is demonstrably false. Just look at this list.
>
> That's not a demonstration.  I would posit that the people most
> annoyed with the system are the ones most likely to be posting in this
> discussion.  Most of us who think it works fine just use it and don't
> discuss it too much.
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Well, meta:LanguageCs.php did contain the Latin-1 note, but now I see
it was in error. Thanks for claryfying that.

And one (I hope final) request: I have updated meta:LanguageCs.php. I
would like to ask someone to transfer it into CVS. Or, is there
anything special I should do in order to get the CVS updated?

Thanks,
[[cs:User:Mormegil|Mormegil]]


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Drive-by deletion

body:
Nicholas Knight wrote:

> Rick wrote:
>
>> VfD has the consensus support of the community.
>
>
> This is demonstrably false. Just look at this list.

That's not a demonstration.  I would posit that the people most annoyed
with the system are the ones most likely to be posting in this
discussion.  Most of us who think it works fine just use it and don't
discuss it too much.

-Mark


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: delete all articles with the word green

body:
phil hunt wrote:

>On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 15:43:00 -0500, Guanaco <guanaco at cox.net> wrote:
>
>
>>phil hunt wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Perhaps the VFD rules could be changed to make deletion harder
>>>unless there is a real consensus. One formula might be:
>>>
>>>delete if deletion_votes > 10 + 3 * keep_votes
>>>
>>>
>>That's too open for abuse by sockpuppets, and it's unusual for 11 people
>>to vote to delete a listing. The most blatant spam is usually skipped
>>over unless it's speedily deleted.
>>
>>Maybe this would work:
>>
>><pseudocode>
>># Ignore excessive sockpuppet votes
>>if ( deletion_socks > deletion_votes / 4 )
>>   { deletion_votes = deletion_votes + deletion_votes / 4 - deletion_socks
>>      deletion_socks = deletion_votes / 4
>>}
>>if ( keep_socks > keep_votes / 4 )
>> { keep_votes = keep_votes + keep_votes / 4 - keep_socks
>>    keep_socks = keep_votes / 4
>>}
>>
>>
>How do you define who is a sockpuppet?
>
>
It could be anyone for whom there is consensus (perhaps using the same
function, potentially making people perform recursive sockpuppet hunting
:\ ) that the account is not a unique person.

I thought of another test:

and ( deletion_votes >= 5 )
# or another number

Guanaco


from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletion and notability

body:
Fourthed.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])

David Gerard wrote:

> Jens Ropers wrote:
>
>> NSK --
>
>
>> After this email:
>>
>>>> http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-October/031599.html
>>>
>> and your reaction to Rick as below, I'm not sure what I should think.
>> I don't mean to say that contributors with or without a higher number
>> of edits were worth more -- I don't believe in that.
>> I do however believe that getting to know each other is indeed
>> important when it comes to online communities (and, for that matter,
>> just about any kind of community).
>> You've sure made a high number of posts to several mailing lists in
>> the past days, but I'd still be interested in finding out who you are
>> at the Wikipedia.
>
>
>
> Thirded. NSK, do you even edit on Wikipedia? If so, who as?
>
>
> - d.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Full nice handbag

body:
Agreed. When I was working on VFD until I grew fed up of all the
pettiness, I would either continue the discussion for a few days or keep
the article in question if there was no consensus, which I considered to
be at least 75%. If the margin of error was as close as, say, 14 and 8,
I would probably keep it.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])

Delirium wrote:

> Pete/Pcb21 wrote:
>
>> The relentless discussion about deletion that I am just catching up
>> with on this mailing list prompted to review a deletion decision that
>> got on my nerves back in June. "Full nice handbag co" was a pathetic
>> little article about a textile company in Hong Kong. It was never
>> much of an article, but it was real, neutral, factual, verifiable. It
>> was very narrowly VfDed (with a small majority of about 55-60% voting
>> delete) on grounds of non-notability. Following deletion, I objected
>> at VfU - my grounds for undeletion were that the reasons for deletion
>> were so tenuous (see below) and the majority so small that we should
>> have erred on the side of caution and kept the article
>
>
> I'm not sure if things have changed since I stopped being as heavily
> involved in it, but I was under the impression that a 55-60% margin
> wasn't considered enough to delete.  I know I personally don't delete
> things unless it's more like a 75% margin or more.  Perhaps someone
> erred?
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Would granting Anthony right to view deleted articles be
	useful?

body:
I was just reviewing VfU and the main thrust of Anthony's reason for
posting a whole list of things there was because he couldn't see what
had been deleted/couldn't transfer it his fork.

Things might be more comfortable for all of us if we granted Anthony
rights to view deleted articles. In practice this would mean giving
Anthony admin rights and Anthony making a promise not to use them except
for the purpose of viewing/copying deleted material (*). The promise
could be enforced by the prospect of instant deadminship if breached.

It would seem to be the advantage of Anthony (who would be better
equipped to make McFly what he wants to be) and those who don't like
Anthony's behaviour on VfU (he wouldn't need to do it anymore).

Any cons?

Pete/Pcb21

(*) This of course assumes that a full RfAdminship would fail to gain
consensus in this case. There is no doubt in my mind this would be the case.


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Newsweek on WP

body:
Andrew Lih wrote:

>On a lighter note, good thing Halloween is near, otherwise we'd be
>unprepared for the expression on Jimbo's face here:
>http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6298340/site/newsweek/
>
>
Yes, I did think that was a rather unusual shot. Unfortunately, I might
have to wait another year or two before he's famous enough to
successfully pull off dressing up as Jimbo for my Halloween costume.
Then again, maybe I should just do it anyway and use it as an
opportunity to explain to everyone about Wikipedia.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Would granting Anthony right to view deleted articles
	beuseful?

body:
Pete/Pcb21 wrote

>.In practice this would mean giving
> Anthony admin rights ...

You joke, sir.

> Any cons?

IMHO the correct approach is to ignore him, here as elsewhere.

Charles


from_name: Andrew Davis

subject: [Wikitech-l] Integration of Multimedia Editing in MediaWiki

body:
Stop me if you've heard this one before...I have started working on
creating a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike Non-Commercial
mediawiki site at http://filmapart.net/ .  I intend for the site to be
a repository of high-quality video and audio which users may access and
use to create edited multimedia (documentary, short, even feature)
content.

The Wikiness of the site should allow for users to edit one another's
footage and finished content with the mediawiki versioning system and
authorship history fulfilling the full purpose of the creative commons
license.

I realize that average internet access speeds are not up to the task of
transferring such large files at this time, and I also realize that
coding such a system could take quite a long time, but perhaps the
system could be finished and integrated into MediaWiki by the time such
transfer speeds are commonly available.

I'm just throwing this idea out there today.  If any of you have any
comment or suggestion, I encourage your participation.  If this is
something y'all are already working on, count me in and take me to your
leaders.

Andrew Davis


subject: [WikiEN-l] Drive-by deletion

body:
What established policy do you mean? The deletion policy? In any case, I
definitely agree. I don't know how anyone thinks removing listings from
VFD is somehow furthering the building of an encyclopedia. And in any
case, VFD operates on community consensus. If some users want every
article with the word "green" deleted, they're free to make the
frivolous listings, and make frivolous votes.

I think you people are going overboard with your "what if"s. Remember
assume good faith? Remember our perennial optimism in how the good users
will always outnumber the bad? That has to be applied in this case.
Sure, lots of us avoid VFD. I got sick of it after handling the deletion
of entries everyday (see my user page for why). But if somebody was to
go around listing every article containing the word "green" for
deletion, I'd vote "keep". I'd file a case with the arbitration committee.

See, we all agree we want to build an encyclopedia. But some of us
disagree on how to build it. Some think we should use bricks of only one
colour. Some think we should take out a few defective bricks and replace
them with better ones. Some think we should repair the defective bricks
instead. Some think we shouldn't use bricks at all and use old-fashioned
wood. The thing is, if we let anyone do what they damn want, will the
encyclopedia be an architectual masterpiece? Doubtful. It may not even
be an encyclopedia. But if we structure things around a blueprint, and
have foremen to oversee the process, while still allowing any Tom, Dick
and Harry to build the encyclopedia, things will turn out far nicer.

My point? Maybe the builders can't agree on the blueprint - is it
something to stick exactly to or something flexible? In the case of
guidelines such as [[What Wikipedia is not]], it does not claim to be a
definitive guide of what should be criteria for inclusion - "Please feel
free to continue adding to this list as we discover interesting new ways
of not writing encyclopedia articles." So I think that this is why we
have VFD. If not covered by existing policy, VFD is where we debate the
article's inclusion. I propose articles clearly invalid under policy
should go onto the proposed Purgatory page (see [[Wikipedia:Preliminary
Deletion]]) if it is agreed upon, or  moved to speedy deletes if it's a
clear candidate for such.

Just because an article doesn't fall under any existing criteria in
policy for inclusion/deletion does not render it invalid from deletion.
VFD exists to serve the community, not policy. Policy and VFD are the
means to an end, not an end in themselves.

And if people really are committing mass transgressions of policy, I see
no reason to huff and puff about it in private where they can't hear us.
Explain to them directly how they are violating policy - "Ok, while you
think an article having the word 'green' isn't encyclopedic, the
article's topic is certainly listed under Policy X as a valid
encyclopedic topic. Maybe we should discuss this on the article's talk
page, but the usage of the word 'green' isn't an excuse for utter
removal." That's how things should be going (IMO).

If they don't listen, bring it up on RFC, mediation or arbitration. If
the word "green" really isn't an excuse for deletion, there will be many
who agree with you.

In case my opinion of VFD isn't clear enough yet, I think it's a
necessary evil. Sure, the whole community isn't involved, but if there's
a spate of articles unfairly being deleted, there will be an outcry, and
they will make themselves heard, and the whole community will be up in
arms. That's one good thing about extremist inclusionists - they have a
way of drawing people to something.

And for those who are constantly moaning about how evil VFD is and how
we don't need it, I have one question - what do we do with articles that
aren't obvious copyvios, speedies, etc.? Do we keep a twenty-page long
article on George Washington's underwear? How do we decide its worth for
inclusion? I do understand that these are few, but they do exist (the
prime example being Eric B. and Rakim, who's been surprisingly quiet
recently).

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])

Nicholas Knight wrote:

> Rebecca wrote:
>
>> If VFD does not have the consensus support of the community, then why
>> not stop bitching here, and go write up a proposal to get rid of it?
>>
>> And lets see how far it gets.
>>
>> Of course, you won't do that, because you know what the odds of
>> success are - which reflects the feelings of the community on this
>> issue.
>
>
> Stop ascribing positions to me which I do not hold. I don't want VFD
> to go away, I want it to operate according to ALREADY ESTABLISHED
> policy. If anything, I want the extremists on both sides abusing it to
> further their own agendas to go away so actual work can get done.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Would granting Anthony right to view deleted
	articles beuseful?

body:
Charles Matthews wrote:
> Pete/Pcb21 wrote

>>.In practice this would mean giving
>>Anthony admin rights ...

> You joke, sir.

Well, an alternative way to accomplish the same thing would be a
software change to either

a) create a separate class of user with power to view deleted articles, or
b) allow all logged-in users to view deleted pages.

I don't like b) but I believe the user rights management system is being
improved in 1.4, so a) might actually be no big deal.

However I do tend to look for solutions that don't require a software
solution as they are frequently are a time bottlenock.

All admin decisions are logged and with the exception of image deletion
easily reversible, so your fears may be misplaced.

>>Any cons?
>
>
> IMHO the correct approach is to ignore him, here as elsewhere.

If we did this, there would be less for you to ignore :).

> Charles

Pete


from_name: Daniel P.B.Smith

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Encouraging submission of VfD-nominated articles to
	Wikinerds' JnanaBase

body:
See my proposal at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Votes_for_deletion , the
one headed "Sending rejected articles to Wikinerds' JnanaBase, round
2."

My proposal is to put a short link in the VfD banner, something like
"Alternate outlets for rejected articles," which links to a page,
specifically http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Alternate_outlets

This page currently describes JnanaBase and how to submit material to
it. My assumption is that we could add other interested outlets, e.g.
McFly.

NSK, please take a look at the language on this page... and edit it if
it is not to your liking.

Reaction to earlier discussion is that people don't seem to have a
problem with adding a short link to the VfD banner, but there are a lot
of complicated quasi-legal and licensing issues that are involved in
anything that involves Wikipedia itself sending material to any other
entity.

So my idea is that Wikipedia merely puts a pointer to JnanaBase in a
location where contributors of deleted articles are likely to see it,
and whatever happens after that is entirely between people who have
seen the link and JnanaBase.

Copyvios get a different banner from VfD, in which this link would not
appear.

Obviously if Wikipedia publicizes JnanaBase we cannot control who goes
to the site or what they contribute. But the positioning  of the link
would tend to encourage contributions of material nominated for
deletion. (This is, of course, not the same as material that is
actually deleted).

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


from_name: Rick

body:
A user who has not created an account or has not edited prior to the VfD posting.

RickK

phil hunt <zen19725 at zen.co.uk> wrote:

How do you define who is a sockpuppet?

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
vote.yahoo.com - Register online to vote today!


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] user level management commited

body:
Hello,

The new user management things is commited in cvs HEAD.

Anyone actually using HEAD for any kind of public / production site
should STOP updating from HEAD unless it is for development purposes. My
patch is full of bugs, security holes and will certainly crash the
database :o)

For developpers:

Groups are managed through the group class (group.php), it's almost a
copy and paste of the user class so you should not be too lost.

The SpecialUserlevels.php uses HTMLForm class to generate the select /
fieldset ... I am willing to rewrite part of it so HTMLForm provide us a
good HTML abstraction layer.

I think SQL patches are up to date, hopefully modifications made this
morning by JeLuF will still be there.

I provided a dump of my 'groups' table, it's available at:
./maintenance/archives/patch-userlevels-defaultgroups.sql

The whitelist thing is partially re implemented with two new globals in
default settings:
   $wgAnonGroupId = 1;
   $wgLoggedInGroupId = 2;
They define the groupId to be used for user rights. It's not complete.

Some logs are generated through the LogPage object and available at
Special:Log :o)

Bug tracker:
    http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=767

Enjoy.

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: user level management commited

body:
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
<snip>
> For developpers:
<snip>

Forgot to add. Available rights are in define.php , if you want to check
if a user is allowed to do something:
  $wgUser->isAllowed(<right>);

Where <right> is a string.

isSysop, isBureaucrat, isDevelopper will die();.

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar


from_name: Ricky Beam

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Slaves out of sync

body:
On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, Tim Starling wrote:
>> You should implement some form of automatic checkup for empty disk space, or
>> you should consider buying more disks. Disk space is cheap.
>
>Ariel has 6x73GB 15K SCA SCSI drives (4 RAID 1+0 (146GB), 2 RAID 1
>(72GB)), and is out of drive bays. Disk space is not cheap.

ditto.  I have boxes of 9.1G drives, a few dozen 18G drives, maybe a
dozen 73G'ers, and exactly 9 146G drives.  As size increases, cost
exponentially increases.  Let me look through the "inventory" and see
what I can donate -- provided you can actually use them; most will be
fibre channel drives.

Are there enough U's left for a drive shelf? (Like an IBM EXP15?)

>We certainly should write a script to shut down the master database
>server safely before it runs out of disk space. Perhaps we should also
>submit a feature request to MySQL AB asking them to prevent this situation.

I don't see any "good" solution to such an event.  However, database writes
failing immediately would get people's attention :-)

Might I suggest using LVM.  At that point, a re-sync would not require
killing all writes.  Simply freeze a snapshot and start a new log.  Duplicate
from the frozen snapshot and begin the sync with the now-recording log.
(this is the prescribed method of making a live backup of a SQL db on
 other platforms -- wiki doesn't use solaris, oracle, or veritas :-))

--Ricky


from_name: Thomas Gries

subject:
[Wikitech-l] question and complaint -- current CVS not working -
 neither fresh nor update installation, database error

body:
Dear developers,

I do not know what policy is used for those who are allowed to actually
commit changes to the CVS, but the current CVS is not working -
neither a fresh install (empty database) nor an php
/maintenance/update.php helps -- A DATABASE ERROR OCCURED create table
user_rights .....

Please allow me to propose, that developers who change the database
structure always submit also a correct module for
/maintenance/updaters.inc and /maintenance/tables.sql, so that other
developers can resume their work on their projects without interruption.

Thank you.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Slaves out of sync

body:
On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, NSK wrote:
>Sorry I agree. SCSI disk space and especially disk bays aren't cheap. I
>thought you were using SATA.

Current generation SATA drives are no better than PATA drives.  In fact,
PATA still out performs them in almost all cases.  This will change with
the next generation and NCQ (Native Command Queuing.)

--Ricky


from_name: Petr Kadlec

body:
Yes, I understand why direct HTML is dangerous, but the impossibility
of using HTML entities is annoying when you want to use some Unicode
characters that are not on keyboard (e.g. bdquo, ldquo, nbsp etc.). So
really _plain_ text messages should be IMHO limited only to those
where wikitext support would be too complicated/impossible to add.

[[cs:User:Mormegil|Mormegil]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Viewing deleted articles

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>>Well, an alternative way to accomplish the same thing would be a
>>software change to either
>
>
>>a) create a separate class of user with power to view deleted articles, or
>>b) allow all logged-in users to view deleted pages.
>
>
> I'd actually prefer:
>
> c) allow a list of ip addresses to use Special:Export on deleted articles
>
> But, whichever is decided, I'd be willing to code it myself.

Quite a lot like a) in intent, would be fine with me.

> As for getting admin access, I've already applied for admin access for this
> purpose.  Granted this was several months ago and I've completely reformed
> myself since then, but a lot of people seem to still hold a grudge against
> me, so I doubt it will ever happen.  Maybe if I set up a few sockpuppets I
> can eventually get one of them adminned...

I didn't realise you had done that, but I am not surprised a
run-of-the-mill RfA vote failed. Do you have a link to it?

As I said, you would not be an ordinary admin, and you would not
permitted to use admin powers for anything except the stated purpose.
This is not an expression of my personal opinion of whether you would
make a good admin - just a means of finesseing objections from those who
haven't built up trust in you (or hold a grudge against you, in your
view) in order to make Wikipedia a better place to build a free
encyclopedia.

Would you be interested in such a position, pending changes to software?

Pete/Pcb1


from_name: Nicholas Knight

subject: [WikiEN-l] OFFICIAL Timeout for WikiEN

body:
Andrew Lih wrote:
> Anthony, Rick and others, please take Daniel's cue to move the
> conversation to Vfd.

I'd have no problem with this -- in fact I would love it -- if it
weren't so hard to communicate on Wikipedia's talk pages. Brief
conversations are fine, but anything resembling real debate among
multiple people becomes nearly impossible to engage in coherently.

MediaWiki needs to have a more structured way of handling talk pages
before these kinds of conversations can occur on them.

> As one of the list admins for WikiEN, I've got to help protect
> peoples' mailboxes from overflowing. Thanks.

I'm seeing maybe 1.5MB of traffic since these latest threads started,
spread out over four days. Whose mailbox was overflowing? Tell them I'll
give 'em a lifetime POP3 account with a 25MB quota that increases by
10MB every January 1st (including this next one) free of charge plus my
personal apology if you can provide me with a copy of the bounce message
showing their mailbox was full.


from_name: sannse

body:
Charles Matthews wrote:
> Pete/Pcb21 wrote
>
>
>>.In practice this would mean giving
>>Anthony admin rights ...
>
>
> You joke, sir.
>
>
>>Any cons?
>
>
> IMHO the correct approach is to ignore him, here as elsewhere.

Anthony has argued his position calmly, coherently, and persuasively -
and taken care to respect and fairly represent the other point of view
in the process.

I agree with a large proportion of what he has said - and I find myself
reassessing my own views on where the line should be for inclusion.

I'm not sure whether you are suggesting we should ignore Anthony because
you have a personal dislike of him, or because you dislike his arguments
- but either way it's a poor response that's not likely to help the
discussion, or Wikipedia, in any way.

--sannse


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
> Give Anthony administrator rights the same way we give them to
> everyone else - by securing consensus on the RFA

That certainly would be the best idea.  Thanks for the vote of confidence,
Mark.  Maybe we can lift my standing agreement, too.

Anthony


from_name: Christopher Larberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] OFFICIAL Timeout for WikiEN

body:
And I'd be happy to give anyone having problems with this list filling
up inboxes a Gmail invite. 1 GB of Inbox space at no charge. All you
have to do is ask.

--Slowking Man

On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 21:45:12 -0700, Nicholas Knight
<nknight at runawaynet.com> wrote:
> I'm seeing maybe 1.5MB of traffic since these latest threads started,
> spread out over four days. Whose mailbox was overflowing? Tell them I'll
> give 'em a lifetime POP3 account with a 25MB quota that increases by
> 10MB every January 1st (including this next one) free of charge plus my
> personal apology if you can provide me with a copy of the bounce message
> showing their mailbox was full.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Would granting Anthony right to view deleted
	articlesbeuseful?

body:
sannse wrote

> I'm not sure whether you are suggesting we should ignore Anthony because
> you have a personal dislike of him, or because you dislike his arguments
> - but either way it's a poor response that's not likely to help the
> discussion, or Wikipedia, in any way.

Oh, just adequate experience of those who seem to have time on their hands
to quibble, as he does.

Charles


from_name: NSK

body:
On Sunday 24 October 2004 22:33, Petr Kadlec wrote:
> HTML is dangerous

Perhaps only sysops or devels could use direct HTML and PHP in a wikipage.

When a user tries to add HTML/PHP, it will be rendered as plain text.

--
NSK
Admin of http://portal.wikinerds.org
Project Manager of http://www.nerdypc.org
Project Manager of http://www.adapedia.org


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Foundation-l] internal or external?

body:
Is it true that the board has officially declared that links from
Wikipedia to Wiktionary are internal links? And if yes, could they
please specify whether Wiktionary is part of Wikipedia or the other
way around?

Andre Engels


subject: [Foundation-l] internal or external?


subject:
[Wikitech-l] CVS 1.4 not okay -- Installation fails with current
 CVS 1.4 due to database changes

body:
Somebody has left the CVS 1.4 in an unstable form, installing from CVS
1.4 currently fails with the following error message during install.php:

Creating tables...A database error has occurred Query: CREATE TABLE
user_rights ( ur_user int(5) unsigned NOT NULL, ur_rights tinyblob NOT
NULL default '', UNIQUE KEY user_id (user_id) ) Function: Error: 1072
Key column 'user_id' doesn't exist in table Backtrace: Database.php line
342 calls wfdebugdiebacktrace() Database.php line 294 calls
database::reportqueryerror() install-utils.inc line 116 calls
database::query() index.php line 493 calls dbsource()

Please can someone repair this in the CVS 1.4, thanks.


from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] internal or external?

body:
On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 22:56:16 +0200, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is it true that the board has officially declared that links from
> Wikipedia to Wiktionary are internal links?

I'm not aware of the board having made any such decision, or even
having discussed this. I don't see why this would need to be something
that was decided by the board anyway.

> And if yes, could they
> please specify whether Wiktionary is part of Wikipedia or the other
> way around?

Wiktionary and Wikipedia are projects in their own right, neither
being part of the other, although both part of the wider Wikimedia
project.

Angela.


subject: [Foundation-l] internal or external?


list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Re: [Foundation-l] internal or external?


subject: [Wikitech-l] PDF

body:
Hi

I will implement downloadable PDF export to my customised MW, so that readers
can export any wikipage in PDF. This code can be made available under GPL.

Is there anybody who would like to work with me on this, or is the MW team
interested in incorporating this code in MW1.4?

--
NSK
Admin of http://portal.wikinerds.org
Project Manager of http://www.nerdypc.org
Project Manager of http://www.adapedia.org


from_name: Robin Shannon

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 15, Issue 76

body:
Firstly, may i speak for the great unwashed, by saying that there have
been far too many emails on this list from far too few people in the
last few days.

Secondly, I too would be interested in seeing who NSK is.

Thirdly, I would like to provide a hopefully reasonably NPOV summary
of the positions so far expressed re: WP:VfD
"Your a wanker" "No, your a wanker, and so is your dead cat"
These havent been very helpful.
Hence i prescribe (in my infinate wisdom) a short wikibreak for
everyone on this topic just to let things cool a little. Of course
everybody is free to ignore this and probably will.

Forthly, since there would appear to be some level of disatifation
with VfD i would suggest that those who are worried enough create some
kind of wikipage to discuss various alternatives and then try and
present these alternatives to the community.

paz e amor,
[[user:the_bellman]]

--
robin.shannon.id.au

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


subject: [Foundation-l] internal or external?

body:
On Sunday 24 October 2004 23:56, Andre Engels wrote:
> Wikipedia to Wiktionary are internal links? And if yes, could they

In my opinion I see no reason why the dictionary needs to be separate from the
wikipedia. Many dictionaries are like encyclopedias and many pedias are like
dictionaries. There is definitely some degree of overlap.

--
NSK
Admin of http://portal.wikinerds.org
Project Manager of http://www.nerdypc.org
Project Manager of http://www.adapedia.org


subject: [Foundation-l] internal or external?


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:

> If VfD is becoming unwieldy, why not split it into some topical pages.
> VfD-Popular Culture, VfD-Sciences, VfD-Humanities, VfD-Politics, etc.
> That would lighten the load on the single page.

I've had a similar thought but on a different basis.  The most
controversial criterion by far has been notability/encyclopedic.  Why
not simply split off "VfD-Notability".  Perhaps other criteria could be
split off later too if one begins to dominate the discussions.

Ec


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Petr Kadlec wrote:
> I am working on an update of really outdated LanguageCs.php (using the
> up-to-date messages in cs:MediaWiki namespace) and I have found a
> problem I do not understand:
>
> In SpecialBlockip.php, there are commands like
>
> $wgOut->addWikiText( htmlspecialchars( wfMsg( "blockiptext" ) ) );
>
> AFAICS this means that no HTML entities may occur in the blockiptext
> message (as every & gets converted to &). Is there any reason for
> that? Why not drop the htmlspecialchars() out? Is there any generic
> rule when it is used and when not? (I mean, some other special pages
> seem to use addHTML( wfMsg( ... ) ) etc.)

I don't think there's any particular reason for that, besides helping
out translators who generally don't know HTML. Remember that wfMsg() can
take parameters, and such parameters always have to be cleaned before
being output if they come from the user.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Fotios Lindiakos

subject: [Wikitech-l] Access control using PHP tags

body:
I am relatively new to the MediaWiki and PHP scene.  I am working with a
few people setting up a wiki for our floor, http://csh.rit.edu  One
thing I am trying to do is set access control based on whether a user is
logged in for now.  We have some information on there that we might only
want members to see, but most information would be public.  I have a few
things I am trying to do, and any help in at least the right direction
to look for the information would be useful.  If I was not supposed to
ask this question here, please let me know and feel free to delete it.
But here it goes...:
  - I want to make a PHP process so that anything encapsulate in
<private></private> is not rendered if the user is not logged in.
  - I would like to know if there is an easy way to add pages to the
anonymous whitelist, and possibly if there is a way for a user to
specify if the page should be whitelisted or not
  - Finally, we would like it if there was a way for mediawiki to not
process any [[links]] that the user does not have access to, so that
they won't even know that there is a page there.

I would like to implement these things, and would most definitely
contribute them to the project if they work.  Any feedback would be
greatly appreciated.

Fotios "Frank" Lindiakos
-----------------------------------
fotios (at) csh (dot) rit (dot) edu
3rd Year Computer Science major
CSH Web Development Group Head


from_name: phil hunt

body:
On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 15:43:00 -0500, Guanaco <guanaco at cox.net> wrote:
>
>
>phil hunt wrote:
>
>>Perhaps the VFD rules could be changed to make deletion harder
>>unless there is a real consensus. One formula might be:
>>
>>delete if deletion_votes > 10 + 3 * keep_votes
>>
>>
>That's too open for abuse by sockpuppets, and it's unusual for 11 people
>to vote to delete a listing. The most blatant spam is usually skipped
>over unless it's speedily deleted.
>
>Maybe this would work:
>
><pseudocode>
># Ignore excessive sockpuppet votes
>if ( deletion_socks > deletion_votes / 4 )
>    { deletion_votes = deletion_votes + deletion_votes / 4 - deletion_socks
>       deletion_socks = deletion_votes / 4
>}
>if ( keep_socks > keep_votes / 4 )
>  { keep_votes = keep_votes + keep_votes / 4 - keep_socks
>     keep_socks = keep_votes / 4
>}

How do you define who is a sockpuppet?

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk)


subject: [Wikitech-l] PDF

body:
On Monday 25 October 2004 00:14, Dori wrote:
> http://wiki.auf-trag.de/

Thanks.

--
NSK
Admin of http://portal.wikinerds.org
Project Manager of http://www.nerdypc.org
Project Manager of http://www.adapedia.org


body:
Petr Kadlec wrote:
> OK, although I would imagine that wrapping the parameters to
> htmlspecialchars() would be a little bit "more correct", I can
> understand that.
>
> So I'll ask a question that seems to be far off this topic, but it is not. :-)
> What importance, meaning and purpose is there in the following message
> that appears in some LanguageXx.php files?
>
> # This file is encoded in UTF-8, no byte order mark.
> # For compatibility with Latin-1 installations, please
> # don't add literal characters above U+00ff.
>
> What difference is there between e.g. U+00FF (UTF-8 encoding C3, BF)
> and U+0100 (encoded to C4, 80), with regards to Latin-1 installations?

That warning doesn't apply to LanguageCs.php. It only applies to the
language files with that comment. The story is that some wikis (in
particular en, da, nl and sv) have been encoded in latin-1 since the
year dot. The language files for those wikis used to be latin-1, but
that prevented the creation of new utf-8 wikis in those languages. So
Brion converted all the language files to utf-8, and wrote
LanguageLatin1.php, which uses iconv to convert the text to latin-1 at
runtime. Characters above U+00FF can't be represented in latin-1, and
are instead converted to a question mark. This is rarely an issue since
the languages with latin-1 wikis generally only need latin-1 characters.

> So, my final deduction is that the abovementioned message is rather
> strange and I should ignore it, write any Unicode character to the
> file normally, and generally not use HTML entities. (Which is
> unfortunate especially for nbsp, which is normally indistinguishable
> from a plain space character.) Am I correct?

Yes, that's correct.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: internal or external?

body:
No, the board has never discussed this and ever decided one way or another.

However, I did discussed the topic several times in the past weeks

First after Gerard mentionned the current issue occuring in wiktionary
on wikitech.

Second because of the recipe issue on en.wikipedia (please, see my
proposal here :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ARecipes_proposal#.5BWikitech-l.5D_Projects_linking

Third because I put a tech feature request on bugzilla on the matter :
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708

Fourth because I discussed it with you (Waerth, Gerard and you) a few
days ago

Fifth because I discussed the feasibility of linkage with Hashar.

My proposition is not a board proposition, it is just an Anthere
proposition.

I do not consider it a board issue.
The most the board itself could do is to say all projects are part of a
global project, and I doubt Angela or Jimbo would disagree on this. It
is a fact. No project superseed the other, they complete each other.

As such, I think the links are not "external" in the sense we currently
give to external.

I think they are "external-internalized" :-)

Andre Engels a ?crit:
> Is it true that the board has officially declared that links from
> Wikipedia to Wiktionary are internal links? And if yes, could they
> please specify whether Wiktionary is part of Wikipedia or the other
> way around?
>
> Andre Engels


from_name: Jens Ropers

references:
<BAY10-DAV6LYCT4aJ6p000034ff@hotmail.com>
	<slrncnnpod.9h9.zen19725@cabalamat.somewhere>
	<417C13D4.4090003@cox.net>
	<slrncnoh01.ath.zen19725@cabalamat.somewhere>

body:
On 25 Oct 2004, at 02:08, phil hunt wrote:

> How do you define who is a sockpuppet?
>
>

Ah, but that's easy. Just follow these simple pointers:

1. They have voted the other way.
2. Their user page currently happens to be blank, making their username
show up in red.
3. They have voted the other way.
4. I've personally never heard of them before.
5. They have voted the other way.
7. They don't agree with me.
8. They have voted the other way.

If most of these apply the person's a sockpuppet. Easy as pie.


subject: [Wikitech-l] image upload

body:
this is a one-off observation, so it's too little to file a bug report
over, but maybe someone can corroborate this:

If I overwrite an existing image with a new version and a thumbnailed
version of that image is part of some article, then the thumbnail will
not change to the new version until and unless I change the thumbnail
size. Also, I found I had to upload the new version of the image twice
for the actual main image to change.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Encouraging submission of VfD-nominated articles to
	Wikinerds' JnanaBase

body:
On Monday 25 October 2004 03:59, Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
> My proposal is to put a short link in the VfD banner, something like

Thank you very much. I do support this proposal.

JnanaBase (jnana=knowledge in Sanskrit, JnanaBase is a Knowledge Base) will
welcome with open hands any VfD-deleted articles from Wikipedia that do not
contain illegal information or copyright violations.

All Wikipedians are welcome to visit http://jnana.wikinerds.org (it's org, not
com) and write whatever they like there!

> This page currently describes JnanaBase and how to submit material to

The page is great, although it would be a good idea to have my email removed
or written as nsk2--AT--wikinerds--POINT--org in order not to get indexed by
evil spambots :-)

> Obviously if Wikipedia publicizes JnanaBase we cannot control who goes
> to the site or what they contribute.

I welcome more publicity and I promise that if Wikipedia helps Wikinerds.org
to get more publicity, I will place links to Wikipedia in applicable articles
on nerdypc.org , adapedia.org , jnana.wikinerds.org , portal.wikinerds.org et
cetera.

We, the Wikipedia and Wikinerds communities, can cooperate and help each other
in the creation of great educational and general content. Wikinerds.org is
open to any proposals for cooperation.

--
NSK
Admin of http://portal.wikinerds.org
Project Manager of http://www.nerdypc.org
Project Manager of http://www.adapedia.org


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Slaves out of sync

body:
On Monday 25 October 2004 04:33, Ricky Beam wrote:
> Current generation SATA drives are no better than PATA drives.

SATA cable is more sexy.

--
NSK
Admin of http://portal.wikinerds.org
Project Manager of http://www.nerdypc.org
Project Manager of http://www.adapedia.org


from_name: Kate Turner

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia IPv6 support

body:
Preliminary, experimental IPv6 support has been added to Wikipedia.
The wildcard A record now has an AAAA entry for our IPv6 proxy host.
This will probably be tested for the next few days, and may be removed
if it proves unworkable.  However, until then, IPv6-enabled users can
access Wikipedia (only - not any other projects, yet) via IPv6 just as easily
as IPv4.

Please let me know about any issues, problems or other comments
during the test period.

Kate.


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] OFFICIAL Timeout for WikiEN

body:
Christopher Larberg wrote:
> And I'd be happy to give anyone having problems with this list filling
> up inboxes a Gmail invite. 1 GB of Inbox space at no charge. All you
> have to do is ask.

I don't think Andrew meant "mailboxes filling" in the literal sense of
"out of disk space".  For me, and I assume for a lot of people, the
major constraint is *time*.  At some point, a "timeout" on a particular
argument is valuable, when the discussion has reached the state of N-th
repetition with no signs of progress.

--Jimbo