body:
Info from  Mathias Schindler of Juriwiki:

>> This site is named as Wiki China and is hosted from some chinese
>> companies.
>>

Not according to my data:

DOMAIN: WIKICN.COM

RSP: iDotz.Net - Domain Name Registration Service
URL: http://www.idotz.net

created-date: 2003-12-25
updated-date: 2004-11-25
registration-expiration-date: 2007-12-25

owner-contact: P-LSL24
owner-organization: National Solution
owner-fname: Liang
owner-lname: Lu
owner-street: 6041 Village Bend Dr #1005
owner-city: Dallas
owner-state: TX
owner-zip: 75206
owner-country: US
owner-phone: 214-514-6688
owner-fax: 214-768-2491
owner-email: lul at mail.physics.smu.edu

admin-contact: P-LOL24
admin-organization: We Snap City
admin-fname: Liang
admin-lname: Lu
admin-street: 6041 Village Bend Dr #1005
admin-city: Dallas
admin-state: TX
admin-zip: 75206
admin-country: US
admin-phone: 214-514-6688
admin-email: lul at mail.physics.smu.edu

tech-contact: P-LOL24
tech-organization: We Snap City
tech-fname: Liang
tech-lname: Lu
tech-street: 6041 Village Bend Dr #1005
tech-city: Dallas
tech-state: TX
tech-zip: 75206
tech-country: US
tech-phone: 214-514-6688
tech-email: lul at mail.physics.smu.edu

On Oct 29, 2005, at 9:11 AM, Ting Chen wrote:

> Hello,
>
> as you know at the moment Wikipedia is stil blocked from the china
> mainland
> gouvement. But this is probably not their only measure against the
> WikiMedia-projects.
>
> Please take a look at the following site:
> http://www.wikicn.com/wiki/%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5
>
> This site is named as Wiki China and is hosted from some chinese
> companies.
> They call themselve the first chinese wiki encyclopedia and had
> (machine)
> copied over tens of thousands of articles from the chinese
> Wikipedia site,
> without mentioning their source, and without any hint of GFDL. Most
> articles
> has stil the interwiki-links in them, natuarally without any other
> language
> provided from this site. Further more they have cencored most of the
> sensitive articles, which could probably be the reason of the
> blocking.
>
> Is there any possibility from the board to take any action? A
> mention of the
> source and GFDL is in my oppinion the fundamental action, which
> they should
> take.
>
> Greetings
> Ting ([[:en:User:Philopp]] [[:de:User:Wing]] [[:zh:User:Wing]]
>
> --
> Highspeed-Freiheit. Bei GMX superg?nstig, z.B. GMX DSL_Cityflat,
> DSL-Flatrate f?r nur 4,99 Euro/Monat*  http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Michael Turley

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Can you trust Wikipedia?

body:
On 10/29/05, Puddl Duk <puddlduk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, I hope it doesn't take another 45 years to sift through and
> organise all our submissions :)
>
> But we are going to have to adapt or we'll be relpaced. Early in the
> project any information coming in was good  (a poorly written article
> being better than no article, usually).  As articles mature there will
> be a point where they stop improving, on average, by random edits. I'm
> not a fan of page freezing, I'd prefer some kind or released vs
> working version, plus a mechanism for rev rolling (only for 'released'
> articles). Or any other check-valve that obstructs the random
> degeneration while still allowing constant improvement.

I'm not a fan of random degeneration, but I also don't subscribe to
the view that this is what is occuring.  I think that just as people
know good writing when they see it, you and I will know a good edit on
articles on our watchlist.

I think the real effort should be spent on making the watchlist feature better.
--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Ratings again

body:
After reading the messages below, a couple of (really obvious) suggestions
for the rating feature:

- a "No topics defined" message that appears when no topics are defined,
instead of a strage things like "1-0".

- some reasonable LIMITs on queries, that became limits on the feature: a
maximum number of topics, a maximum number of ratings for a single page,
and so on.

Alfio

On Thu, 27 Oct 2005, Magnus Manske wrote:

> ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
>> There are still numerous issues with this validation feature, both
>> internal and external, I've pointed some of these out in the past.
>>
>> 1. The UI sucks
>>
> The text is changeable through the normal MediaWiki way. The colors etc. are
> CSS.
>> When you turn on this feature, go to a random page and click the
>> "validate" tab you're presented with this:
>> http://kohl.wikimedia.org/~avar/tmp/revisions.png
>>
> Well, apart from the black buttons, which seem to come from your personal
> settings (?), you haven't define any topics to validate/rate, which makes it
> kind of hard to display a list of these...
> See:
> http://magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/rate1.png
> for how it would look like (again, color is CSS).
>> A form that, excuse me for saying so, looks like shit, and furthermore
>> makes no sense at all, if you follow the 'See the validation
>> statistics for "Main Page" here' link you're presented with this:
>> http://kohl.wikimedia.org/~avar/tmp/validation.png
>>
> Again, no topics defined. No topics, no ratings. Of course the page looks
> rather plain.
>> Again, something that makes no sense at all, and it doesn't get any
>> better when you follow the 'Show my validations' link, then you're
>> presented with this:
>> http://kohl.wikimedia.org/~avar/tmp/overview.png
>> ...and those numbers are supposed to mean..?
>>
> Again...
>> And it doesn't get any better, in fact, I've been fiddling with this
>> thing for 20 minutes and still haven't figured out how to make it do
>> *anything at all*, it says things like "Your ratings have been
>> stored!" and yet it saves nothing to the validate table.
>>
>> 2. It's impossible to fully translate the UI
>> Please use wfMsg() for every string that should be translated, don't
>> hardcode messages in the code.
>>
> Is it, keeping up the high quality of your review, in any way possible that
> you didn't use the latest version? Because that *does* use wfMsg throughout.
> The latest version is in CVS HEAD; copying it back to the 1.5 tree should do
> nicely.
>> 3. It's going to be slow
>>
>> Here are some examples, with line numbers, of it making queries with
>> no LIMIT claues where the set of return values could get very large:
>>
>> 82                 $res = $db->select( 'validate', '*', array(
>> 'val_page' => 0 ), 'SpecialValidate::getTopicList' );
>>
> You omitted:
> # NOTE : This query returns only the topics to vote on
> So, if there are, say, fifteen topics defined, it returns fifteen entries.
> This will, of cource, clearly overload our 100+ servers.
>> 225                 $res = $db->select( 'validate', '*', array_merge(
>> array( 'val_page' => $id ), $this->identifyUser($user) ) );
>>
> You omitted:
>       # NOTE : This query gets the votes for a single user on a single page.
>       # Assuming most people will use the "merge" feature,
>       # this will be only a single entry.
>
>> $limit here is a user supplied value with no upper limit enforced:
>> 245                 $b = array ( "ORDER BY" => "val_page,val_revision"
>> , "OFFSET" => $offset , "LIMIT" => $limit ) ;
>> 246                 $res = $db->select( 'validate', '*', $a ,
>> 'getAllVotesList' , $b );
>>
> You omitted:
>   # Reads a partial vote list for this user for all articles
>
> Yes, that one could become potentially large over time, except for the LIMIT
> you quoted yourself. The default call (line 747) sets the limit to 25.
>
>
> So, if we could please go back to the state of the feature *right now*, which
> is basically the same as *before WikiMania*. If there's anything to complain
> about, please tell me or (shock!) take a minute and fix it. It's supposed to
> be a collaborative effort, though this long demanded feature sure as hell
> hasn't see its share of it.
>
> Magnus (state: slightly annoyed)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Can you trust Wikipedia?

body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

> NPOV as a policy is nearly unique to WP. 1911EB is unabashedly
> about describing the world from the British and Western POV -
> they wouldn't have dreamed of representing the then-burning South
> African situation as the Boers or Xhosa saw it, or the Opium Wars
> as they seemed to the Chinese.

I mostly agree, although I think it may be going a bit too far to say
that it's really our invention.  As far as I can tell, most
encyclopedias came around to that ideal before Wikipedia was founded.
Whether or not they've achieved it successfully is quite another
story---I think the Wikipedia process is much better at enforcing NPOV
than the traditional encyclopedia-writing process.  Since at least
post-WW2, though, most encyclopedias would claim that their goal is
unbiased presentation of information, not presentation of an
Anglo-American or otherwise skewed viewpoint.  In fact many have hired
the equivalent of "diversity consultants" to make sure that their
coverage of non-Western people is at the very least not offensive.

It's also typically the stated goal of textbooks, academic survey
papers, and other such "overviews" to present a neutral view of a
subject (again with mixed results).  In a certain sense this may be even
better than if we had completely invented NPOV---we're the realization
of a goal nearly everyone else already agrees is the right one.

-Mark


from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Alfio Puglisi wrote:
>
> After reading the messages below, a couple of (really obvious)
> suggestions for the rating feature:
>
> - a "No topics defined" message that appears when no topics are
> defined, instead of a strage things like "1-0".
Sure, I can do that, not that it would be a problem on wikipedia - we
already have topic lists on meta for en and de waiting to implemented,
once the feature is activated.
>
> - some reasonable LIMITs on queries, that became limits on the
> feature: a maximum number of topics, a maximum number of ratings for a
> single page, and so on.
I'm not sure I follow here. Topics will be decided upon by careful
consensus, as it is hard to change them "after the fact" (that is, after
people rated them). That, and that alone, will determine the number of
topics. Personally, I expect that number to stay below 20.

And what about a "maximum number of ratings for a single page"? Like,
only five people can rate a version of a page? Or one person can only
rate five versions of a page? Sorry, I don't understand.

Magnus

P.S.: I think I actually found a *real* bug; it seems anyone can change
the list of topics. I'll have to restrict that to sysops.


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Deactivating upload on nds.wikipedia

body:
Marcus Buck wrote:
> Please could somebody of the developers deactivate the image upload on
> nds.wikipedia?
>
> I made a request for this on the wiki since July [1]. There were little response
> to this (but this is not astonishing, because there a few regular contributors
> at all) and no real concerns against it. Reasons for the deactivating are, that
> we have no expertise on legal issues regarding images so we couldn't sort out
> violations of licences effectively if such would occur. Additionally we have
> only generated around 100 images in two and a halv years of existence of which
> I already deleted 50, because they were duplicates of images which are now on
> Commons. So it seems better, when users of nds.wikipedia esteem the Commons as
> their main image repository.
>
> Thanks
> Slomox
> Admin on nds.wikipedia
>
>
> [1] http://nds.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ik_bruuk_H%C3%BClp#Hoochladen

Looks like it is disabled.

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Arbitration Committee elections, 2005

body:
On 10/29/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> If you know there will be no answer what's the point of trolling for one?
>
> Ec

I had not at the time writen off the posibility of an answer to my
second question.

--
geni


body:
On 10/29/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> I read Kelly's refusal to be drawn in as a sign of integrity.
>
> Ec

Why?

--
geni


from_name: ea

subject: [Wikitech-l] Misuse of small Wiktionaries

references:
<43620D42.1010407@unet.univie.ac.at> <djuduk$q0k$2@sea.gmane.org>
	<4362F4E7.2060807@unet.univie.ac.at>

body:
Hello, because I am frequently active on the fo.Wiktionary I observed
some spam-entries there. Now I found out, that this seems to be a
problem on small Wiktionaries, because I visited the Nahuatl (nah)
Wiktionary, the Aimara (ay) and the Breton (br) Wiktionary and found the
same entries there. (Also on the qu, gv, mi, eo, vo Wiktionary)
I made some screenshots for you
http://members.kabsi.at/med/ramsch/spam.jpg and
http://members.kabsi.at/med/ramsch/spam2.jpg
I deleted the entries made in the mentioned Wiktionaries but maybe there
are other Wiktionaries or Wikimedia project sites affected too and I
just wanted to inform everyone in case you did not know.
The spam were mostly found in Community portal , Current events,
Help:Contents, w/index.php, Wiktionary:About or Wikipedia:General
Disclaimer, Wiktionary:General Disclaimer.

Best regards, Elisabeth Anderl


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Ting Chen

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Wiki China: Problem with the site,
 attention and action from the board requested

body:
Hello,

as you know at the moment Wikipedia is stil blocked from the china mainland
gouvement. But this is probably not their only measure against the
WikiMedia-projects.

Please take a look at the following site:
http://www.wikicn.com/wiki/%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5

This site is named as Wiki China and is hosted from some chinese companies.
They call themselve the first chinese wiki encyclopedia and had (machine)
copied over tens of thousands of articles from the chinese Wikipedia site,
without mentioning their source, and without any hint of GFDL. Most articles
has stil the interwiki-links in them, natuarally without any other language
provided from this site. Further more they have cencored most of the
sensitive articles, which could probably be the reason of the blocking.

Is there any possibility from the board to take any action? A mention of the
source and GFDL is in my oppinion the fundamental action, which they should
take.

Greetings
Ting ([[:en:User:Philopp]] [[:de:User:Wing]] [[:zh:User:Wing]]

--
Highspeed-Freiheit. Bei GMX superg?nstig, z.B. GMX DSL_Cityflat,
DSL-Flatrate f?r nur 4,99 Euro/Monat*  http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl


list: foundation-l

from_name: Michael Bimmler

subject: [Foundation-l] French-speaking people needed for translation

body:
Hello,
at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Schweiz/International I wrote a
short message in German (on a linked page) and English about the Swiss
Wikipedians meeting on november 13th in Zurich, where the foundation of
Wikimedia Switzerland will be the main topic (thanks to Ilario who
translated it into Italian!). Now we need somebody, who translates this
message also in French. The translator would need to update (i.e. translate)
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Schweiz/Location as well, which is
linked in the message.
Thanks in advance for helping!
Michael

--
An eternity is very, very long, especially towards the end


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Other projects in Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian,
	Montenegrin, ...?

body:
> Mark, please, please, please stop to help us. And, please, stop to
> talk to other people what is the best for us.

...

This is quite interesting to me as you seemed quite a bit more
gracious before I became involved in the Template:User_zb discussion,
which frankly has nothing to do with the wider discussion about bs:,
sr:, hr:, and sh:.

> Bosniaks should have all projects in their own standard language
> because it is better to have three small projects where people would
> want to work then one when people would not want to work. In this
> moment.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this.

> I am sick of your colonialist behaviour. If you really want to help
> us, please find some programmer who would help us to make MW
> extensions faster and/or find some mediator who wants to work on
> relations between our communities.

What? MediaWiki extensions are not difficult. The problem is that
currently everything else is at a standstill, so there's really not
much point in having a MW extension so long as there is 0 use for it.

Mark


body:
> First of all, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are different standard
> languages. When we make machine translation between those standards,
> we would be able to think about further steps.

It's already quite easy. People pretending that it's not are trying to
fend off the inevitable.

> As I can see, English Wikipedia has a lot of disputed pages and it is
> far of NPOV Wikipedia. We have just different approach to solve our
> POV pages.

The difference is that en.wiki has people of diverse opinions and
cultures. bs:, hr:, and sr:, on the other hand, are largely divided by
nationality. Pages on en.wiki that are _marked_ as POV are only tagged
as such because of our diversity. Such a page on a less diverse
Wikipedia is much less likely to be tagged.

MArk


from_name: Tim Starling

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [MediaWiki-CVS] phase3/includes
 DefaultSettings.php, 1.383, 1.384 Parser.php, 1.515, 1.516

references:
<20051026221305.5F47A1AC193F@mail.wikimedia.org>	<43601178.6010100@physics.unimelb.edu.au>
	<djudeo$q0k$1@sea.gmane.org>	<djue8b$si6$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<51dd1af80510281741t5763f2d9p9253cff8edaea9e@mail.gmail.com>

body:
?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
>>Trademark protection is necessary to prevent forks or other encyclopedia
>>projects from claiming to be the real Wikipedia.
>
>
> The issue is not trademark protection, it's copyright protection.
> Wikimedia claims copyright over the images and won't license them
> under a free license, I don't think anyone would have an issue with
> them still protecting it as a trademark if they would do so.

They received legal advice that the trademark might be difficult to defend
in court if they had granted a license which conflicts with the common law
restrictions placed on use of trademarks. The GFDL is such a license, it
explicitly specifies that one may use the licensed content in any way,
making no exception for use of an image in identifying an unaffiliated product.

In other words, someone may well have an issue with them still protecting it
as a trademark, specifically the courts and the trademark infringer.

My idea for dealing with this situation is described at
http://tinyurl.com/85cae#Suggestion .

-- Tim Starling


body:
On Sat, 29 Oct 2005, Magnus Manske wrote:

> Alfio Puglisi wrote:
>>
>> - some reasonable LIMITs on queries, that became limits on the feature: a
>> maximum number of topics, a maximum number of ratings for a single page, and
>> so on.
> I'm not sure I follow here. Topics will be decided upon by careful consensus,
> as it is hard to change them "after the fact" (that is, after people rated
> them). That, and that alone, will determine the number of topics. Personally,
> I expect that number to stay below 20.

Sure, but better enforce it with some hard limit - say maximum 50 topics
or whatever.

> And what about a "maximum number of ratings for a single page"?

That was for a specific db query that I didn't really understand, so scrap
it.

Alfio


from_name: Andrew Venier

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Wiki China: Problem with the site,	attention and
	action from the board requested

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

> Info from  Mathias Schindler of Juriwiki:
>
>>> This site is named as Wiki China and is hosted from some chinese
>>> companies.
>>>
>
> Not according to my data:
>
> DOMAIN: WIKICN.COM
>
> RSP: iDotz.Net - Domain Name Registration Service
> URL: http://www.idotz.net
>
> created-date: 2003-12-25
> updated-date: 2004-11-25
> registration-expiration-date: 2007-12-25
>
> owner-contact: P-LSL24
> owner-organization: National Solution
> owner-fname: Liang
> owner-lname: Lu
> owner-street: 6041 Village Bend Dr #1005
> owner-city: Dallas
> owner-state: TX
> owner-zip: 75206
> owner-country: US
> owner-phone: 214-514-6688
> owner-fax: 214-768-2491
> owner-email: lul at mail.physics.smu.edu
>
That's domain name registration ... however, the IP address of the host
(211.151.95.181), according to APNIC, belongs to Chinese ISP 21ViaNet.
And traffic gets routed there through China Telecom.

*_inetnum_*:      211.151.0.0 - 211.151.255.255
netname:      CHINA-21VIANET
country:      CN
descr:        21VIANET(CHINA),INC
admin-c:      WH381-AP <http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl?searchtext=WH381-AP&form_type=advanced>
tech-c:       WH381-AP <http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl?searchtext=WH381-AP&form_type=advanced>
status:       ALLOCATED PORTABLE
changed:      luoyan at cnnic.net.cn 20040213
changed:      ipas at cnnic.net.cn 20050426
mnt-by:       MAINT-CNNIC-AP <http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl?searchtext=MAINT-CNNIC-AP&form_type=advanced>
source:       APNIC

*_route_*:        211.151.0.0/17
descr:        CHINA-21VIANET
descr:        21VIANET(CHINA),INC
country:      CN
_origin_:       AS9802 <http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl?searchtext=AS9802&form_type=advanced>
mnt-by:       MAINT-CNNIC-AP <http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl?searchtext=MAINT-CNNIC-AP&form_type=advanced>
changed:      ipas at cnnic.net.cn 20040213
source:       APNIC

*_route_*:        211.151.0.0/17
descr:        CHINA-21VIANET
descr:        21VIANET(CHINA),INC
country:      CN
_origin_:       AS9308 <http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl?searchtext=AS9308&form_type=advanced>
mnt-by:       MAINT-CNNIC-AP <http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl?searchtext=MAINT-CNNIC-AP&form_type=advanced>
changed:      ipas at cnnic.net.cn 20040213
source:       APNIC

*person*:       Wei He
_nic-hdl_:      WH381-AP
e-mail:       ipmaster at 21vianet.com
address:      BOE Science Park, 10 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District,Beijing 100016, China
phone:        +86-10-84562121
fax-no:       +86-10-84564234
country:      CN
changed:      wang.zhining at 21vianet.com 20050426
mnt-by:       MAINT-CN-21VIANET <http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl?searchtext=MAINT-CN-21VIANET&form_type=advanced>
source:       APNIC


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Wiki China: Problem with the site, attention and
	action from the board requested

body:
On Sat, 29 Oct 2005, Ting Chen wrote:

> Hello,
>
> as you know at the moment Wikipedia is stil blocked from the china mainland
> gouvement. But this is probably not their only measure against the
> WikiMedia-projects.
>
> Please take a look at the following site:
> http://www.wikicn.com/wiki/%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5
>
> This site is named as Wiki China and is hosted from some chinese companies.
> They call themselve the first chinese wiki encyclopedia and had (machine)
> copied over tens of thousands of articles from the chinese Wikipedia site,

I can't read Chinese, but I see that they have copied user and discussion
pages too..

Alfio


from_name: Brian Haws

subject: [WikiEN-l] Page freezing on "good" articles

body:
Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
>There was a lot of talk not too long ago about possibilities of
>protecting certain high-profile articles which are reasonably "good",
>in order to prevent various forms of content degredation which >happen
>even with well-meaning editors, much less from vandals and the
>problems which come up in problematic reverts, etc.

>Is there a designated place to discuss this sort of thing?

>In my mind, it would make sense to have some sort of "Vote for
>Freezing" page for articles of this sort. It would be almost the
>opposite of something like VfD -- an advanced form of FAC, >whereby
>people would vote (and ply some attention on) as to whether an >article
>was good enough to qualify it for this sort of enshrinement. "This
>article is good enough that it doesn't need people to be able to edit
>it constantly without discussing changes first," the status of
>"frozen" would imply. Some standards would need to be developed >(a FA
>which has already run on the main page, another round of peer >review,
>no major rewrites in the past two months, etc.) but it could work out
>(hopefully). Requests for Unfreezing could be done as well for those
>who think that an article was problematically frozen in a state which
>would require more than just the sorts of line edits one can do from >a talk page.

>So anyway, I'm not caught up on the latest status of this debate, >but
>I think something of this sort might be a good idea, and prevent the
>sort of incoherence that sneaks into even good articles over a long
>period of time.

>(And before anyone points out that this would make it hard for new
>users to edit such articles -- that would be the *point* of such a
>policy, not an unintended consequence. And it would, ideally, focus
>users away from such articles and onto the legions which still need
>basic work).

VFF
______________________________________________

Or maybe use the FA process itself to choose articles that meet a high standard and flag that version, but let editing continue.

-Searches/Random Article would return the flagged version of an article if it exists. The most recent version would display if there is no featured version.

-If editors felt another version be a better  they can run it through that version FAC again.

As time goes by more and more articles would have tagged versions without any editing restrictions.

Just thinking.....this might make sense?


from_name: Angela

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Wiki China: Problem with the site,
	attention and action from the board requested

body:
> Is there any possibility from the board to take any action? A mention of the
> source and GFDL is in my oppinion the fundamental action, which they should
> take.

I might be better for someone to write to them in Chinese. Is there
any sign as to whether they are doing this maliciously or whether they
simply don't understand the terms of the license? Are any of the
people working on the site known to the Chinese Wikipedia community?

Angela.


body:
Alfio Puglisi wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Oct 2005, Magnus Manske wrote:
>
>> Alfio Puglisi wrote:
>>>
>>> - some reasonable LIMITs on queries, that became limits on the
>>> feature: a maximum number of topics, a maximum number of ratings for
>>> a single page, and so on.
>> I'm not sure I follow here. Topics will be decided upon by careful
>> consensus, as it is hard to change them "after the fact" (that is,
>> after people rated them). That, and that alone, will determine the
>> number of topics. Personally, I expect that number to stay below 20.
>
> Sure, but better enforce it with some hard limit - say maximum 50
> topics or whatever.
Done. Set it to 25 by deafult, can be overridden in LocalSettings. I
also added an error message if there are no topics defined, pointing you
to the page where you can set them up.
>
>> And what about a "maximum number of ratings for a single page"?
>
> That was for a specific db query that I didn't really understand, so
> scrap it.
Finally! Proof that one doesn't need Perl or C to obfuscate code - I can
do it with SQL as well ;-)

Magnus


subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:_[Wikipedia-l]_Wiki_China:_Problem_with_the_site, =09att?= ention and action from the board requested

body:
> I might be better for someone to write to them in Chinese. Is there
> any sign as to whether they are doing this maliciously or whether they
> simply don't understand the terms of the license? Are any of the
> people working on the site known to the Chinese Wikipedia community?

If I say, this is an attempt of the chinese gouvement to "hijack" chinese
Wikipedia, than this is my own oppinion and I confess, I have no proof for
my suspicion. But there are some evidences:

For one, the site is sponcored from the gouvenment or gouvenment own
institutions or companies. At the head of their homepage they confess that
they get gouvenmental support:
本维客得到了?2003年教育部哲学社会科学研究重大课题攻关项目：博客(Blog)技术及其对组织沟通和社会交流方式的影响研究?的支持。(which
means: This wiki got support from "2003 ministry of education important
project for philosophical and social science: studying of Blog technique and
its enhancement of organizational and social communication"). For my own
oppinion and experience in the PRC, the formulation can also be read as "...
of Blog technique and its enhancement of propaganda".

Second, just to the time when all WikiMedia projects are blocked from
mainland China, this copy of Wikipedia named them self in Wiki China and
announce itself as the first chinese wiki encyclopedia. I do have the
suspect that the two actions are connected.

As for the GFDL. As I mentioned above. These are not some amatuers or
startup companies. These are professionals. I think they know quite well
what GFDL means. But on the other hand. They can also say: well, GFDL is an
american licence, it has no meaning in China. So we don't need to mention it
or to obay it.

Ting.

--
Telefonieren Sie schon oder sparen Sie noch?
NEU: GMX Phone_Flat http://www.gmx.net/de/go/telefonie


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: French-speaking people needed for translation

body:
Michael Bimmler wrote:
> Hello,
> at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Schweiz/International I wrote a
> short message in German (on a linked page) and English about the Swiss
> Wikipedians meeting on november 13th in Zurich, where the foundation of
> Wikimedia Switzerland will be the main topic (thanks to Ilario who
> translated it into Italian!). Now we need somebody, who translates this
> message also in French. The translator would need to update (i.e. translate)
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Schweiz/Location as well, which is
> linked in the message.
> Thanks in advance for helping!
> Michael

Hello Michael,

I posted a quick french translation ;)

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080


from_name: Timwi

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: So,
 you think you're a good writer? The "Fix Crappy Prose" Challenge

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>>===The "Fix Crappy Prose" Challenge===
>>
>>I'd like everyone reading this who thinks they're a pretty good writer
>>to middle-click
>
> I've tried this on 4 or 5 articles already.
>
> See:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:%22Fix_Crappy_Prose%22_Challenge

Please don't add article to categories that aren't real content
categories. Instead, add their talk pages. Thanks.


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Can you trust Wikipedia?

body:
Puddl Duk wrote

>Well, I hope it doesn't take another 45 years to sift through and
organise all our submissions :)

It might take a generation before WP's impact can properly be assessed.

>But we are going to have to adapt or we'll be relpaced.

There are simple scenarios in which WP is replaced within 6 months.  Some
billionaire throws $100 million at cloning the content and putting 50
developers on a crash project to upgrade (streaming video, segmentation of
pages, parental filtering, automatic inference to a stable page version, pro
major topic editors, all the gimmicks you'd come up with). We all go there
to edit.  But that's a huge win as long as it's still GDFL, and run by the
community.  (Well, the management side miight be pants, in which case we all
come back to WP.)

'Being replaced' is kind of a tribute, not a worry.

Charles


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: copyright and NOR policies re: math and science

body:
On 10/28/05, Brown, Darin <Darin.Brown at enmu.edu> wrote:
> Well, you raise some very interesting points.  I know that research papers
> in math have a copyright attached to them...I have always assumed that this
> meant something along the lines of "don't photocopy this and sell it".  (As
> if that's going to happen.)  The copyright of math research papers always
> seemed bizarre to me -- mathematicians *WANT* their papers photocopied and
> distributed without permission!!  Maybe not their textbooks or monographs,
> but certainly their research papers.  It promotes their ideas.  It gets
> people interested in their field and problems.  It advances their careers.
> As far as researh papers are concerned, the entire copyright issue only
> exists because of publishing houses.  We'd be perfectly content to do our
> own peer review, trade papers electronically, etc.  And this is starting to
> be done.

All articles published by major publishers claim to be wholly
copyrighted, but that doesn't make it so. An article in physics which
prints one of Einstein's equations will still claim that the *entire
article* is copyrighted, but that particular aspect of it will simply
not be included as part of the overall copyright. Similarly, if
equations are not copyrighted (again, they may be, I don't know), then
they wouldn't apply. But anyway, we are splitting hairs about IP
issues here.

> To be honest, the only thing math people really care about with regard to
> research is attribution and rigour.

Of course. But that's in part because academic standards of credit and
legal standards of credit are very different for the most part.

> It's an issue that philosophers of math aren't agreed upon, let alone
> judges!!

Yes, but judges generally don't listen to philosophers (the legal
realm generates its own implicit philosophical concepts, some of which
are quite interesting). I think a judge would have a problem with a
mathematician testifying that yes, his work was completely logical and
worked from first principles, though he also wanted to count it as
artistically creative. But I don't know for sure.

> Because when something is in the literature, it has
> passed peer review and has been given the stamp of approval by qualified
> experts.  All it means is, "Someone sent this paper to a human being(s), who
> read it, researched it, checked it, and proclaimed it good."  Now, it's
> possible to interpret this as merely an "argument from authority"!  After
> all, in a sense, *all* citations are just "arguments from authority"!  They
> just say, "This person checked it, thought about it, verified it, and we
> should trust them."  What is that, except an argument from authority?!?  And
> that's all that goes on when I say, "suppose a proof is easily verifiable by
> any professional editor in the field at wikipedia".  There's little
> difference between that and submitting something for peer review -- it's the
> same process.

The difference is that I am perfectly willing to trust a known and
"certified" authority (i.e. a guy with a real job) than some anonymous
guy on the internet who claims to know what they are talking about.
Hence the dominance of printed sources from well-respected publishers
over testimonies of any miscellaneous user. Obviously in some cases
these two communities are actually made up of the same people, except
in the "real world" there are many checks and verification steps that
we don't (and won't) have on an open project like Wikipedia.

FF


body:
Sure, but I'm not arguing for permanence. I'm saying, make it so that
people have to discuss changes first. That's all. Which is
considerably less barriers than EB puts up to editing their articles.

And if an article is, at some point, thought to require some extensive
editing, then unfreeze it. Simple as that.

Anyway, it's just an idea I thought I would throw out, see if anything
interesting stirred up out of it. So far I'm not convinced of the
arguments against it, which seem to be based on the idea that all
edits to all articles lead them to better places than they currently
are. I think experience tells us this is not true and that without a
team of dedicated editors knowledgeable about that particular article,
articles stagnate in unpleasant and unreliable ways. I haven't seen a
solid suggestion to stop this, though (I'm still unsure how an article
rating system would really work to end this effect).

FF

On 10/28/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Geoff Burling wrote:
>
> >The continuing arguments around VfD/AfD suggests that some of the
> >community does not understand -- or believe -- that there is a goal
> >to this project, a place where our Wiki will eventually end. I suspect
> >that FF has found another end point to our Wiki.
> >
> >
> Britannica has been editing and rewriting and adding to their
> encyclopedia for two hundred and thirty-seven years now, with no sign
> that they're planning to stop changing stuff and publish the "Final
> Encyclopedia" any time soon. Why do you think Wikipedia is likely to
> start reaching an "endpoint" any time in the forseeable future? I think
> a version-rating method is probably vital in the near future to prevent
> our best articles from backsliding, we've become good enough in many
> areas that IMO this is a real concern. But we're nowhere near "done,"
> and since the corpus of human knowledge is itself constantly changing I
> doubt we ever will be.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:_[Wikipedia-l]_Wiki_China:_Problem_with_the_site, _atten?= tion and action from the board requested

body:
> >> This site is named as Wiki China and is hosted from some chinese
> >> companies.
> >>
> Not according to my data:

This is what stands in their own site as of:
http://www.wikicn.com/wiki/维客中国

The original site was named sopai.org. It was started at April 12, 2005. The
three companies running it is named dopai.com, bokee.com and internet
labratories (互联网实验室,
chinalabs.com). At October 20, 2005 it changed its name to Wiki China.

Ting.

--
Highspeed-Freiheit. Bei GMX superg?nstig, z.B. GMX DSL_Cityflat,
DSL-Flatrate f?r nur 4,99 Euro/Monat*  http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl


from_name: Alphax

subject: [WikiEN-l] New Ideas for AfD

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Ray Saintonge wrote:
> geni wrote:
>
>> On 10/26/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikispam at inbox.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Supports what consensus? I just said, if people can't come to a general
>>> agreement, then there *is* no consensus. You seem to be mistaking
>>> majority
>>> with consensus.
>>>
>>
>> General aggreement isn't going to happen any more on anything. As such
>> in order to get things done we have to shift over to super majority.
>> If you don't like this go and join a smaller project.
>>
> That sounds like a deletionist manifesto.
>
> That seems characteristic of the gang of punks that has been dominating
> the deletion process.  These fanatics are  so obsessed with pushing
> their POV through deletions that they have completely lost touch with
> anything constructive or creative.
> I'm also disappointed in those who are in a position to act against this
> clique that just whine and do nothing.  Sometimes it takes a little
> courage to deal with these disruptive influences.  Even if a large
> proportion of these articles deserves be deleted that doesn't justify
> the inflexible attitude about all the deletions.
>
> If they can't make some effort to reach compromises with others who do
> suggest alternatives for problem articles then maybe they should go
> troll somewher else.
>

People DO NOT seem to understand that there are other options to "keep,
notable" and "delete, cruft".

Here's the (full?) range of options:
 - Transwiki to (some other GFDL wiki, not neccesarily run by Wikimedia)
 - Merge with another article (as Gmaxwell suggests, do NOT use history
merges - use history subpages) and:
   - Redirect, OR
   - Delete the original article with a nonsense title
 - Redirect to another article
 - Move to a better page name
 - Translate (note, untranslated pages which have remained so for the
specified time can be deleted)
 - Slated for cleanup
 - Kept
 - BJAODN'ed
 - Speedied
 - Deleted

That's the full range. Before you vote "d, nn." you should ask yourself:
just what other options are there? What would be the best way to
proceed? What will cause the least stress, pain and gnashing of teeth?

I've found that the criteria for speedy deletion are quite useful in
some of these cases; for example, copyvios with minimal wikification
(esp. linking) which are detected within 48 hours can be speedied under
section A8; biographies which make no claim at notability can be
speedied under A7; stuff which has been AFDed and recreated can be
speedied under G4; and so on.

The bottom line is: don't waste yours and everyone else's time voting
"d, nn. US President" or "keep, we need articles on my nose hairs" when
there are *other, better* options available.

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
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from_name: Any File

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Privacy policy and editing anonymously

body:
Jean-Baptiste Soufron <jbsoufron at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Actually, most laws only require us to record connection informations
> for a limited amount of time. I know that the delay is not established
> in France as of today, but 1 year is commonly accepted. Still, many
> lobbyists are asking for a 3 years delay in the next legislations.
>

In Italy ISP are still required to keep logs for several years.
The situation for other people is, as usual difficult to understand.
This means that also other people in Italy, to avoid any possible problems,
should preafear to keep logs for years. Many law are making requirements
more and more strictly. Everyone who process mail should keept a lot
of logs nowday in Italy, and things are going worse and worse.

AnyFile


from_name: Milos Rancic

body:
On 10/29/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> This is debatable.  Having 3 projects separated on
> ethnic/nationalist/political lines is just about the worst possible
> alternative, IMO, worse even than having no projects, since I cannot see
> how such a project could ever possibly be a legitimate Wikipedia project
> with a neutral point of view.

First of all, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are different standard
languages. When we make machine translation between those standards,
we would be able to think about further steps.

As I can see, English Wikipedia has a lot of disputed pages and it is
far of NPOV Wikipedia. We have just different approach to solve our
POV pages.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Previews

body:
steven l. rubenstein wrote:
> Half the time I click on "Save Page" the next screen is a "Preview" (and
> my edits are not yet saved).

I think the main problem here is that there explicitly exists a code
path that allows for a preview to be generated even if we know full well
that "Save" was clicked, not "Preview". Supposedly there are some
situations in which the preview is legitimately supposed to appear even
when the user clicked "Save"; the problem is that these situations are
either not well-defined, or their definition is so subtle as to make the
behaviour unpredictable for end-users, effectively rendering it a bug.

I think not only the easiest but also the best solution to the problem
would be to just kill that code path and always save if Save was
clicked, even if it means saving it under an IP when the user thought
they were logged in.

Maybe there are good reasons for the behaviour that I don't know, in
which case maybe it would make sense to sit down and formalise the
expected behaviour and then re-design the relevant code logic.

Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Privacy policy and editing anonymously notice.

body:
> (Your previous version was: "Warning: By submitting edits to
> Wikipedia, your IP address, which is personally-identifiable
> information, will be associated with your edit. If you are not logged
> in, your IP address will be permanently and publically associated with
> your edits. If you are logged in, your IP address will not be
> publically displayed, however it will be kept for around 2 weeks.")
>
> My suggested wording is:
>
>     All edits to Wikipedia are recorded and visible, with the [[IP
> address]] they are from. Your IP address is publicly visible on edits
> where you are not [[Special:Userlogin|logged in]]. See
> [[wikipedia:privacy policy|privacy policy]].

Even shorter:

	Your [[IP address]] will be logged when you submit. If you are
	not [[Special:Userlogin|logged in]], it will be shown publicly.
	See [[Wikipedia:Privacy policy|privacy policy]].

Timwi


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Can you trust Wikipedia?

body:
> From: Michael Turley <michael.turley at gmail.com>
>
> I'm not a fan of random degeneration, but I also don't subscribe to
> the view that this is what is occuring.  I think that just as people
> know good writing when they see it, you and I will know a good edit on
> articles on our watchlist.

I am troubled by what I'll call "persistent cruft injection" and I
think it is a real problem. Two that have impinged on me:

One is the use of names for large numbers--names that don't appear in
dictionaries, aren't in real use, and are neologisms or hypothetical
curiosities or useless extensions of systematic naming patterns. Back
in second grade all us nerdy types enjoyed knowing the names of
bigger numbers than our peers knew, but we ought to have outgrown
that. Nevertheless there is a persistent tendency to add
"googolquadruplex" and "brontobyte" and "zebibyte" and so forth. They
are added typically by anons, and, I think, different anons. They
don't care to read through previous discussions or reasons why
certain words should or should not be added or how they should be
described. They know (or think they know) the name of a bigger number
than any other contributor has yet added to the article, so in it goes.

Another is academic boosterism. Virtually every article about any
major university seems to have a continuing tendency to accumulate
more and more braggadocio. I see that Harvard, for example, now
contains as its second sentence "It is widely considered one of the
finest academic institutions in the world." U. S. News and World
Report rankings keep filtering in to university articles, and if an
institution does not rank high in that listing, then other listings
in which it does rank highly ("Washington Monthly," anyone?) will be
used instead. Conversely, any information that is perceived as being
negative gets removed. Sometimes you can get temporary agreement that
a particular paragraph has gotten a little over-the-top, but it
doesn't do much good because a few months later someone else decides
that if Yale is going to mention how many Nobel laureates it has
graduated, then they had better, too.

The contrast between university articles in Wikipedia and their
counterparts in traditional encyclopedias is dramatic. Ours read like
admissions-office brochures.

Jason Scott's comments were very unpleasant, but his reference to how
one moves from creating content to _defending_ content has a ring of
truth to it.

It is difficult to form a stable consensus when there isn't a stable
community within which to form one.

--
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: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] [[Wikipedia:Good articles]]

body:
On 10/28/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It looks like the area where we have the greatest coverage is in Rail
> Transport. Not entirely surprising when you go through all the
> navigational templates examples and discover that they are mostly on
> trains and such.

 I suspect simply a function of which editors have so found [[Wikipedia:Good
articles]].
 -Matt


from_name: shultz at ksu.edu

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Madchester's wrongful blocking (user: shultz) (ip:
	68.102.193.78.)

body:
He blocked even though the last edits were to MY user talk page. It's
like dictating what I can or can't have at home. He must've been mad,
maybe from losing a job earlier, or something awful in his life.

Really, can an admin block someone for deleting other users entries IN
THEIR OWN USER TALK PAGE?

68.102.193.78. (user:shultz)


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Search index updates

body:
Being the sick man that I am, I've hooked up mwdumper to the search
server to do fresh search index builds out of the page dumps.

This is accomplished thanks to the lovely IKVM Java-on-Mono layer:
http://www.ikvm.net/

The new Wikisource sites are now searchable, and I've set up a search
server in yaseo for the sites Tim has moved there (ko, ms, th, ja
wikipedias). I'm running fresh rebuilds on the rest of the non-wikipedia
and, to follow, wikipedia wikis.

This should tide us over until somebody (perhaps even me!) gets around
to fixing up the on-the-fly update server to not balloon up and die from
memory leaks.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Dennis Dikkerboom

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Frysian Wikipedia reaches new milestone

body:
Dear all,
I'm proud to announce that today (29th October 2005) the Frisian Wikipedia
has reached 2,000 pages. The lucky page is Willem Loadewyk, the Stadtholder
of Frysl?n from 1584 until 1620.

* The first 1,000 pages toke almost two years.
* The second 1,000 toke about a year and 4 months
* The last 250 pages were created in the last four months.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] More wikis moved to Seoul cluster

body:
Question: Shouldn't id.wiki be moved at some point, seeing as it
serves a similar geographical area to but is bigger than ms.wiki?

Mark

On 29/10/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> We've now moved ms.wikipedia.org, th.wikipedia.org and ja.wikipedia.org to
> the Yahoo cluster in Seoul. With the addition of ja, it's now getting most
> of its planned traffic share, there's only a few other small wikis which
> could potentially be moved. It's dealing with the load quite well.
>
> A few teething problems were reported, and there might yet be some to be
> discovered, but for the most part, it's working as planned.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

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from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Previews

body:
>
>
> This bug is associated with a feature which prevents submission of forms
> by
> offsite javascript. For example, if a hacker wanted a page deleted, they
> could write some javascript, put it up on their website, then post a link
> to
> it on the user talk page of an administrator. The bug involved makes some
> unknown random event during an ordinary form submission appear essentially
> identical to this abuse scenario.
>
> -- Tim Starling

So this is what is going on when you get the message "rollback action
cancelled to prevent session hijacking"? Always wondered what was going on -
if it meant my account might have been compromised (I changed my password
after getting that message, just to be safe; always thought I should enquire
about what that meant).

Ian


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: [[Wikipedia:Good articles]]

body:
> - From [[Autism]]: "Autistics sometimes have a persistent, intense
> preoccupation. For example, the child might be obsessed with learning
> all about vacuum cleaners, train schedules or lighthouses."
>
> - From [[Asperger's syndrome]]: "Asperger syndrome can involve an
> intense and obsessive level of focus on things of interest...Particularly
> common interests are means of transport (such as trains), computers,
> and dinosaurs."

This is an example of [[affirming the consequent]].


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Other projects in Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian,
	Montenegrin, ...?

body:
I felt that another reply was in order due to some issues I didn't
address in the first one.

> Mark, please, please, please stop to help us. And, please, stop to
> talk to other people what is the best for us.

Assuming that you meant "please stop helping us" as opposed to "please
stop and help us" (which is really what "please stop to help us" means
-- ie, "please stop, so that you may help us", which is essentially
the opposite), I'm curious as to your definition of "us".

In a Wiki environ

> Bosniaks should have all projects in their own standard language
> because it is better to have three small projects where people would
> want to work then one when people would not want to work. In this
> moment.

Ahh, but as Bosnians will tell you, it's a "Bosnian language"
(Bosanski) and not "Bosniak language" (Bosnjacki). "Bosanski" would,
as some have noted, imply that it is limited to Bosnia and does not
extend to Bosniaks in Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, or elsewhere,
however when you're talking about the standard language it is Bosnian
because that is the official name.

Now, if you discard the issue of what to call the language, I don't
think people would much mind to work on a single project. Whatever
reasons there may be not to work on a single Wikipedia are largely
done away with by Wikisource -- Wikisource is for _sources_, not
original content. Thus, as far as I can tell, conversion is neither
nessecary nor desirable. Croatian sources should display, for all
users, in Croatian (ie, Iyekavian Latin of the Croatian standard), and
Serbian Cyrillic should display for all users in Serbian Cyrillic,
although of course translations can be made.

Please remember that just a few months ago, ALL languages shared a
single Wikisource Wiki. Given that fact, I think it's particularly
outrageous on your part to claim that Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian
all need separate Wikisources, given the plurality which still exists
at the main Wikisource.

> I am sick of your colonialist behaviour. If you really want to help
> us, please find some programmer who would help us to make MW
> extensions faster and/or find some mediator who wants to work on
> relations between our communities.

What is your definition of "colonialist"? According to my dictionary,
it's "advocate of the exploitation by a stronger country of weaker
one; the use of the weaker country's resources to strengthen and
enrich the stronger country." Now, what have I done that has evidenced
_that_??

Mark

> On 10/28/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I'm sending this because I noticed a request for a Bosnian Wikisource:
> >
> > http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Language_domain_requests#bs.wikisource.org_.28Bosanski.29
> >
> > Now, Jimmy Wales said IIRC that it was due to ignorance and that it
> > was a mistake that we had separate Wikipedias for these so-called
> > languages.
> >
> > For this reason, it strikes me as counterproductive to start up a new
> > project in Bosnian.
> >
> > Y?s, there are already Wikisource subdomains for Croatian and Serbian,
> > which in itself strikes me as unfortunate and counterproductive, but I
> > think that it would be even more counterproductive to promote such a
> > farce of forced separation of what could be fantastic combined efforts
> > when there is a clear path to stop the nonsense without hurting the
> > status quo -- with Wikisource, there is no Bosnian version yet, and
> > Croatian and Serbian versions are small, compared to Wikipedias.
> >
> > Just as Angela said with regards to Simple English projects
> > (Wikiquotes and Wikibooks), a source is a source. Since Croatian,
> > Bosnian, and Serbian are 99.9999999% mutually intelligible, it seems
> > nonsensical to me to separate Wikisources, given that Wikisource isn't
> > even supposed to have original content.
> >
> > Now, for all the people out there who would like to tell me that
> > Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian are really separate languages, that's
> > obviously nonsense.
> >
> > The best explanation seems to be that it's a single language, called
> > different names by different people.
> >
> > After all, how else is it possible that people who a decade ago spoke
> > "Serbo-Croatian" now speak a different language? The answer is, it
> > isn't. They still speak the same language, they just call it different
> > things.
> >
> > Mark
> >
> > --
> > If you would like a gmail invite, please send me an e-mail.
> > Si ud. quiere que le env?e una invitaci?n para juntar gmail, env?eme un mensaje.
> > Si vous voulez que je vous envoie une invitation ? joindre gmail,
> > envoyez-moi s.v.p un message.
> > Se vce. gostaria que lhe envie um convite para juntar gmail, favor de
> > envie-me uma mensagem.
> > Se vuleti chi vi manu 'n invitu a uniri gmail, mandatimi n messaggiu.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
If you would like a gmail invite, please send me an e-mail.
Si ud. quiere que le env?e una invitaci?n para ingresar gmail, env?eme
un mensaje.
Si vous voulez que je vous envoie une invitation ? joindre gmail,
envoyez-moi s.v.p un message.
Se vce. gostaria que lhe envie um convite para juntar gmail, favor de
envie-me uma mensagem.
Se vuleti chi vi manu 'n invitu a uniri gmail, mandatimi n messaggiu.


from_name: Elisabeth Anderl

subject: [Wikitech-l] Misuse of small Wiktionaries

body:
ea a ?crit :

> Hello, because I am frequently active on the fo.Wiktionary I observed
> some spam-entries there. Now I found out, that this seems to be a
> problem on small Wiktionaries, because I visited the Nahuatl (nah)
> Wiktionary, the Aimara (ay) and the Breton (br) Wiktionary and found
> the same entries there. (Also on the qu, gv, mi, eo, vo Wiktionary)
> I made some screenshots for you
> http://members.kabsi.at/med/ramsch/spam.jpg and
> http://members.kabsi.at/med/ramsch/spam2.jpg
> I deleted the entries made in the mentioned Wiktionaries but maybe
> there are other Wiktionaries or Wikimedia project sites affected too
> and I just wanted to inform everyone in case you did not know.
> The spam were mostly found in Community portal , Current events,
> Help:Contents, w/index.php, Wiktionary:About or Wikipedia:General
> Disclaimer, Wiktionary:General Disclaimer.
>
> Best regards, Elisabeth Anderl
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Hello again, this seems to be a mayor problem, I visited several
Wiktionaries today because I was interested if they had the same problems.
I found the same entries in the following: aa, als, as, ast, ay, az, be,
bn, bo, bs, co, da, el, eo, eu, fa, fy, gn, hy, kk, kn, km, ks, ky, lt,
lo, ln,
mi, mk, mr, mt, my, ne, oc, pa, ps, qu, sa, sr, sw, te, tg, tk, tl, uz,
ur, vo, yo, za, zu Wiktionaries. There I deleted the spam posts, but for
me it looks like there could be more in other Wiktionaries or other
Wiki-projects.
Hope I could help,
regards, Elisabeth Anderl (aka Spacebirdy)


from_name: Daniel Wunsch

body:
On Sunday 30 October 2005 02:56, Elisabeth Anderl wrote:

> Hello again, this seems to be a mayor problem, I visited several
> Wiktionaries today because I was interested if they had the same problems.
> I found the same entries in the following: aa, als, as, ast, ay, az, be,
> bn, bo, bs, co, da, el, eo, eu, fa, fy, gn, hy, kk, kn, km, ks, ky, lt,
> lo, ln,
> mi, mk, mr, mt, my, ne, oc, pa, ps, qu, sa, sr, sw, te, tg, tk, tl, uz,
> ur, vo, yo, za, zu Wiktionaries. There I deleted the spam posts, but for
> me it looks like there could be more in other Wiktionaries or other
> Wiki-projects.

that's what you get when you have a lot of
languages with very small communities..
doesn't keep people from setting up new ones.

daniel


from_name: Willy on Wheels

subject: [WikiEN-l] Clearing my Conscience

body:
Yes, I am Willy on Wheels.

Specifically, I am one of six people who have chronically trolled numerous
wikis, notably the English version of Wikipedia. Recently, Wikipedia saved
me from failing a research project horribly, and thus, I have decided to
repent for my past colourful actions.

This whole mess started as a prank in an IRC channel. One of our members
loaded Wikipedia pages in Firefox tabs, and performed a mass-move vandalism.
Normally, this wouldn't be funny, but we had just returned from the pub and
were thorougly sloshed by then.

After we saw the reactions that people made, the vandalism became a bad
habit. We would vandalize, or attempt to vandalize pages just to get a
frantic reaction from Wikipedians. Eventually, one of our group developed a
tool written in PERL script to automate the creation of usernames and page
vandalism. Eventually, we started hunting for proxies to continue the
vandalism.

I'm done for good, and will never again vandalize Wikipedia. After it proved
so useful to me, I realized what our vandalism was taking away from others.
If someone had vandalized the pages I needed, I would have likely failed out
of university. I hope to eventually contribute to this shared knowledge for
the benefit of more than just my warped humour.

I don't expect most of you to believe me, but at least I can rest easy
knowing that I've moved beyond this childish behavior.

--Alec

For the sake of non-repudiation:
126f060696ce9f41757052316647c3c7

_________________________________________________________________
De todo para la Mujer Latina http://latino.msn.com/mujer/


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject:
[Juriwiki-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation of our
	'MediaWiki' mark

body:
--- Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> All I see is a company offering to host pre-configured MediaWiki
> installations for customers under the terms of the GPL. Where's the
> problem?

Use of the term 'Media Wiki' as if it were their product or service. It is not.
That degrades our MediaWiki trademark and must be defended against if we wish
to keep control of that trademark.

All that is really needed is for somebody from the foundation to ask them to
rewrite their adverts and other descriptions of their service to make it clear
that they are offering a hosting service for installations of MediaWiki. Using
the wording 'MediaWiki hosting' implies an official branding agreement. It is
not.

This is the same reason why websites can't put a copy of Wikipedia content on
their website and call it 'Wikipedia' or publish a bound copy with the word
'Wikipedia' and/or the Wikipedia logo on its cover. Doing so implies that their
copy is an official publication by Wikipedia. Oh, and this is a separate issue
from giving credit; doing so correctly does not present trademark issues.

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click.
http://farechase.yahoo.com


body:
--- Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> There are 30,000 Google hits for the phrase "MediaWiki hosting" and
> there are no official branding agreements, so I dispute the idea that
> the wording implies this. Is there really anything wrong with saying
> MediaWiki hosting if you are offering to host a site on MediaWiki?

This is what really caught my eye: "Webhosting Provider, Aplus.Net, Launches
Media Wiki" along with the first sentence: "San Diego webhosting provider,
Aplus.Net, has introduced a new offering to its customers - the Media Wiki."
and "The new product is licensed under the GNU Public License, and is the same
system that serves popular collaborative sites such as Wikipedia.org."

How can they launch MediaWiki when it already exists? MediaWiki is *not* a new
product of Aplus.Net. *That* along with the other things I mentioned is
confusing the brand ID.

Read the whole thing here:
http://www.cheaphostingdirectory.com/news-webhosting-provider-aplus-net-launches-media-wiki-1538.html

-- mav

__________________________________
Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click.
http://farechase.yahoo.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Can you trust Wikipedia?

body:
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Can you trust Wikipedia?
> Since at least
> post-WW2, though, most encyclopedias would claim that their goal is
> unbiased presentation of information, not presentation of an
> Anglo-American or otherwise skewed viewpoint.

Oh? It was widely reported circa 1999 that the U. S. version of
Encarta says Edison invented the light bulb while the U. K.
U. K. version credits Swann.

Encarta no longer seems to be free-as-in-beer, so I can't
cast much light on the current situation of this heated topic.

--
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: [WikiEN-l] Re: Can you trust Wikipedia?

body:
>I see that Harvard, for example, now  contains as its second sentence "It
>is widely considered one of the  finest academic institutions in the
>world."

The last list I saw, the Chinese survey, went 1. Harvard 2. Cambridge, 12-1
bar these two.  Or something.

Of course there shouldn't be POV in those articles, or unsourced tendentious
assertions, any more than elsewhere.  Do we have articles on 'prestige
surveys'?

Charles


from_name: Han Dao

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Wiki China: Problem with the site,
	att ention and action from the board requested

body:
We should not sink to the low level that the teenage crackers dude. Hacking
is not ethical.

On 10/30/05, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:
>
> Ting Chen wrote:
>
> >The situation escalated today morning. Someone, probably some chinese
> >Wikipedian hacked the site of Wiki China and deformated the homepage.
> >Probably they even deleted some content. At first they placed an
> >announcement we were just formulating in the chinese Wikipedia. You can
> see
> >the announcment and the deformed homepage of Wiki China here:
> >
> >http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:%E7%BB%B4%E5%AE%A2%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD
> >
> >This action is a deed of one or several people. It does not represent the
> >oppinion of the chinese wikipedia community. But because one of our
> >announcement draft was placed on the deformed page. We have formulated a
> >statement on our own home page to say that this action is not an action
> of
> >the chinese community and that we condumn any hacker attack on who so
> ever.
> >
> >Regards
> >
>
> Well whether you denounce it ...... I applaud it. Long life that hacker.
>
> Walter/Waerth
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Webcomics/Deletion again

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Mark Gallagher stated for the record:
>
> G'day Sean,
>
>> Note that the disruption is of /Wikipedia/.  It is impossible to
>> disrupt /AfD/ with deletionism, no matter how lunatic -- that entire
>> subsystem is maliciously designed to support and encourage lunatic
>> deletionism.
>
>
> I know the hyperbole on this list comes thick and fast most of the time,
> but when readers start to seriously wish they could tag as {{nonsense}}
> entire paragraphs of one's emails, it's time to think a little before
> spewing crap.

When a system is so destructively broken that numerous members of the
community realize that it is impossible to repair and begin calling for
its complete abolition (and use apt phrases such as "dynamite enema"),
it is time for that system's defenders to question their fanaticism.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | George was very curious.
 sean at epoptic.com |
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFDZOCXMAt1wyd9d+URAu8PAJ47MMJaEViCWL9Qw5L2XDAaowRZYACfahix
Ppn+KxWYEwegyZvFJWRSGfc=
=ok+n
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki China: Problem with the site,
	attention and action from the board requested

body:
On 10/30/05, Ting Chen <Wing.Philopp at gmx.de> wrote:
>
> This is what stands in their own site as of:
> http://www.wikicn.com/wiki/维客中国
>
> The original site was named sopai.org. It was started at April 12, 2005. The
> three companies running it is named dopai.com, bokee.com and internet
> labratories (互联网实验室,
> chinalabs.com). At October 20, 2005 it changed its name to Wiki China.

FYI, bokee.com is a one of the more famous "blog" companies in China,
but it also has a reputation for commercializing blogs that has peeved
lots of grassroots bloggers. We should keep that in mind.

I also agree with Wing (who presented at Wikimania about the Chinese
Wikipedia) that the timing of the Wikipedia block and this site going
up seem like an interesting coincidence.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Wiki China: Problem with the site,
	attention and action from the board requested


from_name: Chris Lüer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Can you trust Wikipedia?

body:
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:

>The contrast between university articles in Wikipedia and their
>counterparts in traditional encyclopedias is dramatic. Ours read like
>admissions-office brochures.

The same goes for company articles. [[Coca-Cola]] reads like an
advertising brochure where someone has -- here and there -- inserted
some disclaimers that not all of this stuff might actually be true.

         Chris


from_name: GerardM

body:
On 10/30/05, Daniel Wunsch <the.gray at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> On Sunday 30 October 2005 02:56, Elisabeth Anderl wrote:
>
> > Hello again, this seems to be a mayor problem, I visited several
> > Wiktionaries today because I was interested if they had the same
> problems.
> > I found the same entries in the following: aa, als, as, ast, ay, az, be,
> > bn, bo, bs, co, da, el, eo, eu, fa, fy, gn, hy, kk, kn, km, ks, ky, lt,
> > lo, ln,
> > mi, mk, mr, mt, my, ne, oc, pa, ps, qu, sa, sr, sw, te, tg, tk, tl, uz,
> > ur, vo, yo, za, zu Wiktionaries. There I deleted the spam posts, but for
> > me it looks like there could be more in other Wiktionaries or other
> > Wiki-projects.
>
> that's what you get when you have a lot of
> languages with very small communities..
> doesn't keep people from setting up new ones.
>
> daniel
>
>
Hoi,
What a "wonderfull" opportunity to plug the idea of Ultimate Wiktionary.
With the content of all wiktionaries in one resource, any vandalism will be
more visible and it will be more easy to keep it in check.

For those who are severly tested because the development takes longer than
initially planned, yes that is righ it is not nice. Be assured that it hurts
noone more that it does myself.

Thanks,
GerardM


body:
On 10/29/05, Dennis Dikkerboom <dennisdikkerboom at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
> I'm proud to announce that today (29th October 2005) the Frisian Wikipedia
> has reached 2,000 pages. The lucky page is Willem Loadewyk, the
> Stadtholder
> of Frysl?n from 1584 until 1620.
>
> * The first 1,000 pages toke almost two years.
> * The second 1,000 toke about a year and 4 months
> * The last 250 pages were created in the last four months.

Hoi,
Gefeliciteerd, echt positief is dat het groeipad is ingezet .. :) Grandioos,
Groetjes,
GerardM


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Previews

body:
Timwi wrote:
> steven l. rubenstein wrote:
>
>> Half the time I click on "Save Page" the next screen is a "Preview"
>> (and my edits are not yet saved).
>
>
> I think the main problem here is that there explicitly exists a code
> path that allows for a preview to be generated even if we know full well
> that "Save" was clicked, not "Preview". Supposedly there are some
> situations in which the preview is legitimately supposed to appear even
> when the user clicked "Save"; the problem is that these situations are
> either not well-defined, or their definition is so subtle as to make the
> behaviour unpredictable for end-users, effectively rendering it a bug.
>
> I think not only the easiest but also the best solution to the problem
> would be to just kill that code path and always save if Save was
> clicked, even if it means saving it under an IP when the user thought
> they were logged in.
>
> Maybe there are good reasons for the behaviour that I don't know, in
> which case maybe it would make sense to sit down and formalise the
> expected behaviour and then re-design the relevant code logic.

Maybe you should read the many mailing list posts more carefully before you
start speculating about the causes and the possible cures. At best we could
give a meaningful error message, we can't just make it save.

This bug is associated with a feature which prevents submission of forms by
offsite javascript. For example, if a hacker wanted a page deleted, they
could write some javascript, put it up on their website, then post a link to
it on the user talk page of an administrator. The bug involved makes some
unknown random event during an ordinary form submission appear essentially
identical to this abuse scenario.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Search index updates

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Being the sick man that I am, I've hooked up mwdumper to the search
> server to do fresh search index builds out of the page dumps.
>
> This is accomplished thanks to the lovely IKVM Java-on-Mono layer:
> http://www.ikvm.net/
>
> The new Wikisource sites are now searchable, and I've set up a search
> server in yaseo for the sites Tim has moved there (ko, ms, th, ja
> wikipedias). I'm running fresh rebuilds on the rest of the non-wikipedia
> and, to follow, wikipedia wikis.
>
> This should tide us over until somebody (perhaps even me!) gets around
> to fixing up the on-the-fly update server to not balloon up and die from
> memory leaks.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

As always: well done brion !

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Trademark violation of our 'MediaWiki' mark

body:
Dori wrote:
> On 10/28/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>Webhosting Provider, Aplus.Net, Launches Media Wiki
>>http://www.cheaphostingdirectory.com/news-webhosting-provider-aplus-net-launches-media-wiki-1538.html
>>
>
>
> I don't think they're diluting the mark, they even link to
> mediawiki.org in their FAQ:
> http://www.apluskb.com/scripts/search_kb.pl?catid=1&sid=4448582990&q=wiki&p=&showquestion=3275
>
> They're just using it IMO

At worse, they misspelled the name by writing 'Media Wiki' instead of
'MediaWiki' as we use to do. Still a valid name to me.

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Webcomics/Deletion again

body:
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Webcomics/Deletion again
> Mark Gallagher stated for the record:

> When a system is so destructively broken that numerous members of the
> community realize that it is impossible to repair and begin calling
> for
> its complete abolition (and use apt phrases such as "dynamite enema"),
> it is time for that system's defenders to question their fanaticism.

"Numerous" members of the community have been calling for the
abolition of VfD, using intemperate rhetoric, for _at least_ two
years. It's not new.

For some literally inflammatory rhetoric see http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/User:GRider, posted a year ago.  I think that's stronger than
"dynamite enema."

I don't see any evidence that it's intensifying. There has been a
constant debate between significantly differing visions of Wikipedia
for as long as I've been paying attention.

--
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: Angela

body:
On 10/29/05, ea <a9502784 at unet.univie.ac.at> wrote:
> Hello, because I am frequently active on the fo.Wiktionary I observed
> some spam-entries there. Now I found out, that this seems to be a
> problem on small Wiktionaries

Thanks for clearing this up on so many wikis. Next time you see it,
please report the URLs at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist so they can be
blacklisted.

Angela.


from_name: Delirium

subject:
[Juriwiki-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation of
	our	'MediaWiki' mark

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Use of the term 'Media Wiki' as if it were their product or service. It is not.
>That degrades our MediaWiki trademark and must be defended against if we wish
>to keep control of that trademark.
>
>All that is really needed is for somebody from the foundation to ask them to
>rewrite their adverts and other descriptions of their service to make it clear
>that they are offering a hosting service for installations of MediaWiki. Using
>the wording 'MediaWiki hosting' implies an official branding agreement. It is
>not.
>
>
This is what literally thousands of webhosts do when they advertise
"MySQL hosting" without having a disclaimer "MySQL is a trademark of
MySQL AB" or some sort of circumlocutory wording stating that they are
only offering "hosting of MySQL installations", and nobody seems to mind
that.

-Mark


from_name: Alphax

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Can you trust Wikipedia?

body:
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charles matthews wrote:
> Puddl Duk wrote
>
>> Well, I hope it doesn't take another 45 years to sift through and
>
> organise all our submissions :)
>
> It might take a generation before WP's impact can properly be assessed.
>
>> But we are going to have to adapt or we'll be relpaced.
>
>
> There are simple scenarios in which WP is replaced within 6 months.
> Some billionaire throws $100 million at cloning the content and putting
> 50 developers on a crash project to upgrade (streaming video,
> segmentation of pages, parental filtering, automatic inference to a
> stable page version, pro major topic editors, all the gimmicks you'd
> come up with). We all go there to edit.  But that's a huge win as long
> as it's still GDFL, and run by the community.  (Well, the management
> side miight be pants, in which case we all come back to WP.)
>

You forget that Mediawiki is GPL, so unless they changed the wiki
software being used - and the current content has been designed by its
contributors to work with Mediawiki - we would also get all those
upgrades back.

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
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body:
On 10/30/05, Walter van Kalken <walter at vankalken.net> wrote:

> I am terribly sorry Angela but do you really feel they could do this in
> error?????????????????

I'm unable to see the site, so I'm assuming good faith. I was
previously getting timeouts, then 404 errors, and now all I see is the
standard "This wiki does not exist yet" error message, with the logo
from meta - the exact same page you get if you go to
http://tokipona.wikinews.org/ for example.

Angela.


body:
On 10/30/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Using the wording 'MediaWiki hosting' implies an official branding agreement.

There are 30,000 Google hits for the phrase "MediaWiki hosting" and
there are no official branding agreements, so I dispute the idea that
the wording implies this. Is there really anything wrong with saying
MediaWiki hosting if you are offering to host a site on MediaWiki?

Angela.


from_name: Ting Chen

subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:_[Wikipedia-l]_Wiki_China:_Problem_with_the_site, =09att?= ention and action from the board requested

body:
The situation escalated today morning. Someone, probably some chinese
Wikipedian hacked the site of Wiki China and deformated the homepage.
Probably they even deleted some content. At first they placed an
announcement we were just formulating in the chinese Wikipedia. You can see
the announcment and the deformed homepage of Wiki China here:

http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:%E7%BB%B4%E5%AE%A2%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD

This action is a deed of one or several people. It does not represent the
oppinion of the chinese wikipedia community. But because one of our
announcement draft was placed on the deformed page. We have formulated a
statement on our own home page to say that this action is not an action of
the chinese community and that we condumn any hacker attack on who so ever.

Regards
Ting.

> I'm unable to see the site, so I'm assuming good faith. I was
> previously getting timeouts, then 404 errors, and now all I see is the
> standard "This wiki does not exist yet" error message, with the logo
> >from meta - the exact same page you get if you go to
> http://tokipona.wikinews.org/ for example.

--
Lust, ein paar Euro nebenbei zu verdienen? Ohne Kosten, ohne Risiko!
Satte Provisionen f?r GMX Partner: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/partner


from_name: Dan Grey

body:
On 30/10/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Dan Grey <dangrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> > All I see is a company offering to host pre-configured MediaWiki
> > installations for customers under the terms of the GPL. Where's the
> > problem?
>
> Use of the term 'Media Wiki' as if it were their product or service. It is not.

It was crystal clear to me the very first time I read it that the
company are just offering MediaWiki installs in their hosting plans,
which afaik they're perfectly entitled to do.

This is a fuss over nothing - if anything, we should be congratulating them!

Dan


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Invalid unicode byte sequences in metadata.

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> Since most of these are in places where I can just go fix them, I've
> been doing a little of that, and will probably eventually go around
> and get them all... I'm assuming that these were entered in before we
> were correctly filtering text,

Yes, some old ones in images etc still.

> but I'm somewhat concerned that there
> may be some data entry paths which are not being filtered. Is this
> possible?   If so, I'll create some test cases.

Unlikely but possible. Check WebRequest.php etc.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
We've now moved ms.wikipedia.org, th.wikipedia.org and ja.wikipedia.org to
the Yahoo cluster in Seoul. With the addition of ja, it's now getting most
of its planned traffic share, there's only a few other small wikis which
could potentially be moved. It's dealing with the load quite well.

A few teething problems were reported, and there might yet be some to be
discovered, but for the most part, it's working as planned.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] Help: Search does not work

body:
Hauke Zuehl wrote:
> I updated my wiki from 1.3 to latest 1.4. Now I notice that search does not
> work. For those who want to see go to http://www.tuxfutter.de/wiki/Hauptseite
> but maybe someone else has a hint.

Looks fine to me:
http://www.tuxfutter.de/wiki/Spezial:Search?search=windows&fulltext=Suche

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: steve v

subject: [WikiEN-l] Speedy un-VFD please

body:
Someone listed [[ CIA_leak_grand_jury_investigation ]]
for VFD claiming it was redundant with Plame_affair
and Cheneygate (which should have been delete-merged
already).

I dislike the way that the overuse (WP:template
overuse) of templates creates a blight on wikipedia
articles and hence makes wikipedia less condusive to
casual reading than answers or some other sites that
suck our stuff. The VFD box is a prime culprit if its
misused in such a way, and its recent entry on main
page referenced article is a good example of how
process templates, boxes, tags (whatever) essentially
deface a page for readers rather than aid editors in
editing it. Assuming that wikipedia creates a product
intended to be read and assuming that readers outweigh
editors, etc.

end rant
SV

__________________________________
Start your day with Yahoo! - Make it your home page!
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
In the past, whenever I've imported the English Wikipedia metadata
into PostgreSQL I've been forced to use bytea fields because
PostgreSQL's UTF-8 support was limited to BMP characters.  Recently
PostgreSQL has been extended to have full support for all valid UTF-8
codes, including 4 byte ones.

I'd stopped using PG for my Wikipedia work because I'm trying to build
a compariable level of MySQL skill to help me better work with the
project, but I've found that MySQL's query engine is just too stupid
for the analysis queries I run, and that I must use PG if I don't want
to grow old waiting for somewhat fancy queries (like stuff with
subselects) to finish.

I've run into some cases in the Wikipedia metadata where there are
invalid UTF-8 sequences (i.e. not an issue of non-BMP, it's just plain
invalid). Many of these appear to be in the imagelinks table, where
they are describing images that don't exist.  I handle these on import
by feeding the text through iconv -c -f UTF8 -t UTF8, which cleans
them up okay.

Since most of these are in places where I can just go fix them, I've
been doing a little of that, and will probably eventually go around
and get them all... I'm assuming that these were entered in before we
were correctly filtering text, but I'm somewhat concerned that there
may be some data entry paths which are not being filtered. Is this
possible?   If so, I'll create some test cases.


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

body:
On 10/30/05, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> For those who are severly tested because the development takes longer than
> initially planned, yes that is righ it is not nice. Be assured that it hurts
> noone more that it does myself.

[off topic] Where is this development happen anyway? Is there a
version control repository? Can we check it out?


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject:
[Juriwiki-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Trademark violation
	of	our	'MediaWiki' mark

body:
Delirium wrote:

> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>> Use of the term 'Media Wiki' as if it were their product or service.
>> It is not.
>> That degrades our MediaWiki trademark and must be defended against if
>> we wish
>> to keep control of that trademark.
>>
> This is what literally thousands of webhosts do when they advertise
> "MySQL hosting" without having a disclaimer "MySQL is a trademark of
> MySQL AB" or some sort of circumlocutory wording stating that they are
> only offering "hosting of MySQL installations", and nobody seems to
> mind that.
>
> -Mark

I'm not sure where you are looking, but any time you use a trademark
that isn't yours, you need to put a disclaimer in the advertisement or
documentation that the trademark belongs to somebody else.  It is also a
case of pure ethics, regardless of law, that if you use something that
belongs to somebody else, that you give proper credit to where you got
it from.  This is a form a plagerism in this case, to claim that
MediaWiki is software that you wrote or established.  The same goes with
MySQL, where you ought to give credit to MySQL AB just as you've
suggested above.  And yes, MySQL AB does complain when people claim that
they are hosting MySQL installations without using the disclaimer that
the trademark of "MySQL" is a trademark of MySQL AB.

And as has been pointed out, you need to defend trademarks whenever you
can and when you notice that the trademark usage is abused.  Classic
examples of Elevator and Asprin are good examples where they were once
upon a time trademarks but became dilluted through misuse to become
generic terms for the respective kinds of products.  I have a hard time
however seeing MediaWiki becomming a generic term for any sort of Wiki
server software, but the use of the term "Wiki" certainly would qualify
as a generic term that can't be trademarked by itself, or to claim
"royalties" for the use of the term Wiki in a project or product name.
 That could be argued as a dilluted term and to describe a certain kind
of web content editing software.

--
Robert Scott Horning


subject: [Wikitech-l] bugzilla 2.20 out

body:
Hello,

bugzilla 2.20 is out and bugzilla.wikimedia.org ask for an upgrade ;)
Can't do it myself as files are not in the wikidev group :/

New features:
http://www.bugzilla.org/releases/2.20/new-features.html

Comments client-side wrapping sound good, support for "In-Reply-To" too
(look at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=172267 ).

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080


from_name: Brown, Darin

subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: copyright and NOR policies re: math and science

body:
Fastfission wrote:

> Yes, but judges generally don't listen to philosophers (the legal
> realm generates its own implicit philosophical concepts, some of which
> are quite interesting). I think a judge would have a problem with a
> mathematician testifying that yes, his work was completely logical and
> worked from first principles, though he also wanted to count it as
> artistically creative. But I don't know for sure.

In the case of research papers, though, it wouldn't be the mathematician at
all...since the mathematician (or anyone writing for an academic journal, if
I understand correctly) doesn't actually personally have the copyright...the
publisher does.

> The difference is that I am perfectly willing to trust a known and
> "certified" authority (i.e. a guy with a real job) than some anonymous
> guy on the internet who claims to know what they are talking about.
> Hence the dominance of printed sources from well-respected publishers
> over testimonies of any miscellaneous user. Obviously in some cases
> these two communities are actually made up of the same people, except
> in the "real world" there are many checks and verification steps that
> we don't (and won't) have on an open project like Wikipedia.

Well, there are many people with "real jobs" here, and it's easy to verify
that.  I am not talking about research-level material, I'm talking more
about basic skills, undergraduate-, or at most, beginning graduate-level
material.  In the case of math, I really think there's less to worry about.
If a true crank does post some nonsense or even half-nonsense, it will get
viewed by many people quickly.

We allow people here to correct grammar and sentence structure, or at least
check that it's correct, without them having "certified" authority.  You
don't have to submit a paper to Literary Criticism Quarterly to verify that
"Irregardless of what people think, the single most important criteria
determining there future success is whether they could care less." is a
sentence with a lot of mistakes in it.  If you asked them how to fix it,
they would consider it a waste of their time.  Similarly, you don't need to
contact a published print source to verify the mathematical equivalent -- a
routine computation of a limit, integral, or series; or even some
symbol-pushing in algebra or topology.  Usually, you just ask a friend to
look over it.  If worst comes to worst, you can give a reference to a
textbook explaining the concept.

The difference, of course, is that to a certain extent, knowledge of correct
grammar (or the potential knowledge of correct grammar) is something held by
everyone, so that everyone knows the difference between correcting grammar
and verifying sources, claims, and arguments in a particular domain, etc.
And of course, grammar is not considered to be "original research".  Whereas
the mathematical equivalents are still only held by a relative minority, so
to the majority who aren't mathematical, there is no discernable difference
in appearance between the truly trivial and routine, and the genuinely
nontrivial and novel.

darin


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Previews

body:
Tim Starling wrote:
>
> Maybe you should read the many mailing list posts more carefully

Curb your polemics (again), please.

> before you start speculating about the causes and the possible cures.
> At best we could give a meaningful error message, we can't just make
> it save.

I won't let you silence me when I have an idea just because you think of
yourself as more informed or however else superior. I've made that
mistake before.

> This bug is associated with a feature which prevents submission of forms by
> offsite javascript.

Yes, and as I said, this "feature" is to show a preview even though the
"preview" button wasn't clicked. You have not convinced me that this
needs to be done.

> For example, if a hacker wanted a page deleted

Deletion is not editing. Stick to the topic!

> they could write some javascript, put it up on their website, then
> post a link to it on the user talk page of an administrator.

Which is OK, if it's just an edit, and it will be posted by its IP
(rather than the admin's username).

> The bug involved makes some unknown random event during an ordinary
> form submission appear essentially identical to this abuse scenario.

Better phrasing: The bug involved makes some unknown random event during
an ordinary form submission trigger the code path that you intended only
for the abuse scenario. Since it is clearly not as easy as you thought
to pin-point the abuse scenario, let's change the code path's effects to
be less intrusive/obstructive to normal editing. Better yet, let's
consider that the abuse scenario is ridiculous, unlikely, rare, and
would be entirely harmless if the centuries-old request to make image
deletions reversible was implemented, so the problems caused by it are
entirely out of proportion to the problems it's trying to prevent.

Timwi


from_name: Keith Old

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Can you trust Wikipedia?

body:
I would consider that to be a statement as non-controversial as "Shakespeare
has the reputation as one of the greatest of all
writers<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writer>in the English
language <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language> and in
Western<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world>literature, as well
as one of the world's pre-eminent dramatists" from our
Shakespeare article.

It is for example at #1 at the US News & World Report list of America's best
colleges see
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/natudoc/tier1/t1natudoc_brief.php

The Times Higher Education Supplement ranked it as the #1 university in the
world see http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,591-1343946,00.html

They could be cited in support of the statement and possibly should be but
the original statement about Harvard seems fair enough.

Regards

Keith Old
User: Capitalistroadster
On 10/30/05, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
> >I see that Harvard, for example, now contains as its second sentence "It
> >is widely considered one of the finest academic institutions in the
> >world."
>
> The last list I saw, the Chinese survey, went 1. Harvard 2. Cambridge,
> 12-1
> bar these two. Or something.
>
> Of course there shouldn't be POV in those articles, or unsourced
> tendentious
> assertions, any more than elsewhere. Do we have articles on 'prestige
> surveys'?
>
> Charles
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>