from_name: Chuck Smith

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikimedia at TakingItGlobal

body:
> > Also, I think it would good if we could put the
> Wikipedia project
> > and the Wikimedia foundation in the TakingItGlobal
> database which is
> > a database for activists, so that we can connect.
> TIG works as an
> > umbrella organization for other non-profits.
>
> I've just looked at their site, and I have no
> particular objection to
> our being listed there.  Actually, it looks like I
> can do it right
> now, so I will.

Well, one good idea out of three ain't bad.  If anyone
is interested, they can view the page at
http://www.takingitglobal.org/opps/orgdir.html?vieworg=4652
 If you have an account there, make sure you say
you're affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

Best wishes,
Chuck

=====
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http://www.esperantomobilo.org/

_________________________________________________________
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list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Alexandre NOUVEL

subject: [Wikitech-l] blocked ip (Brion)

body:
Hello all,

---Sasha Noyes wrote:
>On Friday 07 November 2003 15:14, Anthere wrote:
>
>> I do not know if he still has the pb, but he has not
>> contributed since the 25. I think he got desperate :-(
>>
>> Could someone check if he is indeed blocked on fr and
>> en ?
>
>193.x.x.x is not blocked on either en or fr.
>Chances are that the person has quit wikipedia after being blocked and not
>being successfull in reaching anyone.

Thanks for myself, I'm quite persevering :)

I'm not much connected at home any more, so I only got Anthere
latest answers on my wikipedia talk page this evening.

I've also just seen Brion's answer about the problem I encounter.

At work I access the web through a proxy and firewalls; I don't
know about bots that would spider the wikipedia from my company
(actually this would sound strange to me).
I'm not sure that many people from my company use the wikipedia
and there should be no much ways to track them as we all have
the same IP address outside our network.

The browser I use is Netscape 7.01/Win2kPro ; I've not tried to
launch IE5.5/Win2kPro to see if it works better. I'll try this
back to work on Monday I think. Then I'll drop a word here to
let you know what happened.

It may be useful to have a short note on the server's error pages
to explain people why their request cannot be fulfilled, and some
robot-proof email address to be contacted... :))

Thanks to all for your kind help,
  best regards from France,
--
Alexandre.NOUVEL at alternatif.net
|-> http://www.bigfoot.com/~alexandre.nouvel
|-> la copie priv?e et l'auto-diffusion menac?es : http://eucd.info
\ I hate spam. I kill spammers. Non mais.


list: wikien-l

from_name: kosebamse at gmx.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wik's views

body:
Although there is a seemingly constant debate about [[User:Wik]]'s conduct,
people do not seem to care too much about the consequences of tolerating his
behavior. I would like to raise some concerns.

It is not particularly easy to analyse Wik's contributions, as he rarely
comments his edits and does a great number of minor changes. It is however
obvious that he has a tendency to get involved in reversion wars, is generally
unwilling to discuss his views, frequently uses words like "vandals" and
"trolls", and refuses to talk to people whom he has declared as such. I had a long
conversation with him over a few days (see [[User talk:Wik]], where all the
following quotations are taken from) and would like to report my impressions,
because I believe that some of the more distressing points about Wik are not
too obvious but should be discussed.

Wik: "There is no way to reconcile POV and NPOV". When we discussed this, he
has made it clear that he sees it as his right to decide what "the NPOV
version" of an article is, and to engage in reversion wars to "defend" it. Wik:
"As far as I know NPOV is the community norm, and I am its staunchest
defender. And this inevitably (and regrettably) involves getting into edit wars. What
is the alternative, just leaving the POV version there?" He refuses to
accept that reversion wars create unstable articles, while NPOV measures create
stable articles. He refuses to enter conversation with his adversaries and has
stated his goal of continuing reversion wars to victory. Wik: "Edit wars
aren't endless, at some point one side gives up." Behind this attitude is
apparently his conviction that respecting other's views is somehow "POV relativism",
as he likes to call it. He also seems to believe that a gradual improvement
of an article should not be pursued once he has unilaterally declared what
"the NPOV version" is.

Wik has a list of users he doesn't like and with whom he refuses to discuss
anything and whom he calls "vandals and trolls" rather frequently. He does
not accept the hard-and-fast policy of "no personal attacks" and insists that
his use of such vocabulary is purely descriptive. Wik: "I'm always talking,
except with those people where it would be wasted time. I'm using the terms
vandals and trolls exactly where appropriate."

When some articles where he had been engaged in reversion wars were
protected, and others started discussing them, bridging their differences and working
on a compromise, Wik outright refused to ever participate in this approach
but stated his freedom of reverting any result of their work. Despite clear
evidence to the contrary, he wrote: "It is a fundamental misconception to think
that edit wars can be solved by protecting the page and telling the people
to discuss." This seems to be related to his condescending view of people who
disagree with him, as he maintains that once having declared his opinions,
further talk would be useless, even while others were now actively debating
points that had been the subject of his reversions before.

Wik's attitude towards his fellow Wikipedians is often rather reckless, and
he demonstrates disrespect of  many of Wikipedia's very foundations (NPOV,
cooperation, policies, respect for others, Wikiquette). He has often been told
(by Jimbo Wales, Stan Shebs, and Angela to name only a few) that his conduct
is not acceptable but I can see no tendency of his to change his ways.
Although one may try talking to him, my experience with him makes me believe that
he is unwilling to accept advice. He has even declared his will to "make
[Wikipedia] less lame or be banned in the attempt". Given that by saying "lame" he
seems to refer to our fundamental dogmas, I see little hope that he can be
convinced to become more collegial. I do not think that we should set a
precedent by continuing to tolerate such conduct.

Kosebamse

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list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Carl Witty

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia public relations

body:
On Fri, 2003-11-21 at 00:56, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Nov 21, 2003, at 00:25, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> > IIRC he said that there were no /plans/ for ads in the forseeable
> > future. I
> > think that that is the best we can all hope for. But donations alone
> > may not
> > be able to always pay the bills. In that case I wouldn't mind having
> > something smart like Google AdSense serve ads to anons. In that
> > scenario an
> > added benefit would be to give anons another reason to log-in: no more
> > ads!
...
> If you want to set up your own Wikipedia mirror with ad banners and
> send the money to the foundation, go for it; but the day there are
> advertisements on the main Wikipedia site we'll lose a lot of people,
> including me.

I don't know how much ad space is worth, so this is probably way too
much effort for way too little money, but how about this:

en.wikipedia.org gets a sister site en.ads.wikipedia.org (or .com).
This is exactly the same, except that it serves ads.  Part of the "how
to donate" links explain that you can give wikipedia a little extra
money by browsing the with-ads version.  Every page on the with-ads
version has a link to the corresponding without-ads page ("Click _here_
to see this site without the ads").  The with-ads version sets up
robots.txt to avoid search engines.

I, for one, would use the with-ads site, if I knew it was helping donate
even tiny amounts of money to the foundation.

Carl Witty


from_name: Tomos at Wikipedia

subject: [Wikitech-l] SQL queries

body:
Since many of the special: pages have been disabled for quite a while now,
some people want updates on those info.

I'm wondering if it is okay to run a query to list pages with links to
themselves. On the English Wikipedia's Wikipedia:Database_queries, there is
a sample query to get the list, and it says it takes 24 seconds. On it's
talk page, one person says not to use that query.

Should I not use that?

Also, I am wondering if I can somehow get a list of lonely pages updated.

I'm speaking of Japanese wikipedia, by the way.

Thanks in advance for your advice.

Tomos

_________________________________________________________________
Set yourself up for fun at home!  Get tips on home entertainment equipment,
video game reviews, and more here.
http://special.msn.com/home/homeent.armx


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Mediawiki-l] Patch for Bug #770011

body:
On Nov 21, 2003, at 10:55, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> OK, so, I took my first crack at working on MediaWiki with an attempt
> to check for cookies when logging in (bug #770011).

Great! I'm in the middle of the SoCal Linux Expo and will look this
stuff over when I get a chance... If some of the other developers could
look after this that'd be great.

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

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wik, Ed Poor and Brian Corr

body:
It isn't just that Wik is allowed to have his way.
Several days back, Brian Corr and Ed Poor agreed to mediate on
an article containing fiction and propaganda.

I sincerely provided lots of information and asked that we go
over it point by point. They promised to do so and led me to believe
that they were sincere in their efforts.

I suddenly faced silence and I haven't heard from them for some
time. At least they could have been honest with me.

libertarian

_______________________________________________
No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding.
Introducing My Way - http://www.myway.com


from_name: Fantasy

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Advertisement  (was Wikipedia public relations)

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> but the day there are advertisements on the main Wikipedia site
> we'll lose a lot of people, including me.

I know also people who will stop donating...

Wikipedia can stay free (of advertisement). I am sure of that.

Fantasy :-)


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wik's views

body:
As much as I dislike Libertarian, I have to agree with him/her here.  Wik is very difficult, and needs to be completely banned or made to understand that his/her edit does not HAVE to be the most recent.

RickK

libertarian <libertarian at myway.com> wrote:

--- On Fri 11/21, < kosebamse at gmx.net > wrote:

> It is not particularly easy to analyse Wik's contributions,

It is very easy if you realize that his minor edits are for the
purpose of making sure that his contribution is *the* top contribution
in that particular thread of discussion (allow me to use the word
discussion since Wikipedia is like a discussion board where the
latest poster's contributions are on top and many of the users
are not knowledgeable.)

-libertarian

_______________________________________________
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Introducing My Way - http://www.myway.com
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Wik's views

body:
--- On Fri 11/21,  < kosebamse at gmx.net > wrote:

> It is not particularly easy to analyse Wik's contributions,

It is very easy if you realize that his minor edits are for the
purpose of making sure that his contribution is *the* top contribution
in that particular thread of discussion (allow me to use the word
discussion since Wikipedia is like a discussion board where the
latest poster's contributions are on top and many of the users
are not knowledgeable.)

-libertarian

_______________________________________________
No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding.
Introducing My Way - http://www.myway.com


from_name: James Duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] Reddi's POV edits of Current Events

body:
>Ed Poor wrote
>James,
>
>Try saying, "How's that again?"

Hi Ed, here's some examples of Reddi's comments, which left everyone on the
talk page utterly confused about what he was taking about.

:: [snip 'avoid points of the discussion and attack me personally']
:: ''suicide bombing'' means the deliberate MURDER of people, carried out by
a person who kills THEMSELVES as part of the process? THAT'S NOT WHAT IT'S
DEFINED AS!!! [http://www.wordspy.com/words/suicidebomber.asp]
[http://www.wordspy.com/words/homicidebombing.asp]
:: Its meaning could not be clearer? hmmm ok ... sure it does ...
:: ''Homocide bombing'' is a politically manufactured term created to
obscure the methodology of the murder? to yours [and others] POV ... YMMV on
that ...
:: As such it is POV and not in any way wiki-suitable.
:: [snip attack on me personally again and disreguard the points]
:: I'm not misrepresent anything ... my "''agenda''" is to be correct in the
statements of facts ... apearantly it's nice to avofd the facts, they get in
the way of the truth. (see the links @ the top of the page and refer to the
misapplication of the terms hacker and cracker )which is very similiar to
this discussion))
:: Wiki can go on an be incorrect (if everyone want it to be) ...
:: Wiki policy is to use clearly understood, internationally recognised NPOV
terminology? better start using "Martyrdom operation" because BOTH "Homicide
bombing" and "Suicide bombing" is not NPOV internationally (BTW, as a side
note, each term of the three is a "spin" ... you just spin it one way that
you prefer (incorrectly from the definitions, also)).

: ''does not belong''? YMMV on that ... ''getting annoying''?  [chuckles]
: Just a note: particular cartoon -> star wars cartoon; not a US cartoon
network [can we say "distortion"?], it was/is an ''international'' network;
... YMMV on how interesting / topical entertainment news is ... it does
introduce topics for wikipedia. Just an opinion ... "''[[User:Reddi|Not an
irish drunk]]''"

:: call it what ''MANY'' say it is AND what it is in it's nature ...
:: That is NPOV, not POV ...
:: LOL at 99% ... (lie, lies, and staticstics ... really it's only 98 let's not
quibble on math BECAUSE it's irrelevant; see below)
:: Alot of nations helped promote Cuba's propagada? ... ok
:: I expressed america'a view of the situation (which is the ''main view''
... the poiint of which is conviently ignored and not expressed [''see
bilateral dispute''])
::  I didn't "'add''" in any preferred loaded terms ... it is what it is ...
and the view of many american officals (which didn't participate in the
propaganda forum) ...
:: not the first time i've POV'ed [[Current events]]? sure, ''whatever, that
is IYO ...
:: LOL@?IREANN n Breaks '''every'''... which guideline on wikipedia? mabey
the "ignore all rules" guideline? mabey not ...
:: The fact it's a bilateral dispute and it's not a matter of the UN (among
the others i mentioned previously) ... that show that it is propaganda piece
driven by mainly 3rd worlders and European (both o' which are biased; mainly
from thier already biased press) ...
:: Other nations's views are irrelevant to this ... and their input is a use
of propaganda (pretty plain to see, sorry you can't see it (though I don't
expect you to ?IREANN (nor '''some''' other ''individuals'' on wiki) to see
it)) ...
:: This is not the first time you've made allegations of POV [[Current
events]] @ me and attacked me (ala. clumsy, opinionated) ... but that does
nothing for you points (and detracts from them)
:: NPOV involves careful use of language? why don't you look up propaganda
in a dictionary and take out your POV and "try" to see (though I doubt you
will, nor can) ....
:: Attribution of comments and POVs? It was ''facts'' from the article ...
:: Adding in "loaded" language? IYO ...
:: "shoddily written, agenda-driven bit of tabloid-ese"? again IYO ...
:: So ANY editorial lines to the [[Current events]] should be removed? I'll
then make sure I to remove the editorial lines of europeans and 3rd world
nations ....
:: [snip rest o' ?IREANN's POV / personal attack]
:: I really don't care and it's largely irrelevant though, because ppl can
see it for what it is ... a non-binding and non-enforceable piece of
propaganda ...
:: Sincerely, [[User:Reddi|reddi]]

_________________________________________________________________
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from_name: Evan Prodromou

body:
>>>>> "BV" == Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> writes:

    Me> OK, so, I took my first crack at working on MediaWiki with an
    Me> attempt to check for cookies when logging in (bug #770011).

    BV> Great! I'm in the middle of the SoCal Linux Expo and will look
    BV> this stuff over when I get a chance... If some of the other
    BV> developers could look after this that'd be great.

Coolio! The patches I submitted are all independent -- none depends on
another, that I can see, nor should they conflict -- and made against
the HEAD for phase3. Some use global variables, so I'm going to wait
till they're applied (or rejected B-) before trying to jigger with the
$REQUEST hoohaw.

I'm going to try and cut my teeth on the transactions stuff. I
figure I'll just try to find calls to wfQuery() with INSERT, UPDATE,
DELETE in them, and wrap something like wfBegin()/wfCommit() around
them, with wfRollback() for error conditions.

I'll probably miss 20% of them, and screw everything up. Should be a
fun time.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


subject: [WikiEN-l] [mhollist@cox.net: RE: Use of content from Wikipedia]

body:
Here is my opinion on the issue. If others use contents from
Wikipedia, let them do so.

Suing them or intimidating them by threatening to appeal to
authority to use force on the users of information will make
those here no different from the corporate mafias which claim
to own informataion and hence others' brains.

It will be a violation of intellectual liberty to claim ownership
over something that is published. Once you publish it, it should
be for public. Don't give me legalese and try explaining what GPL
means. I know what it means. The whole idea of it originated as
something antithetical to the so called intellectual property
"rights" and there were causes to protect those using GPL from
being preyed upon by these predators.

Just because someone states on their page that they have the
copyright doesn't mean they have the copyright to the specific
arrangement of words. Let us not be mean-spirited. If you really
believe in freedom, you should believe in freedom to claim anything
silly too.

-libertarian

_______________________________________________
No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding.
Introducing My Way - http://www.myway.com


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> IIRC he said that there were no /plans/ for ads in the forseeable
> future. I think that that is the best we can all hope for.

There are ways to deal with ads and communists.  A dynamic website
such as Wikipedia can serve ads selectively, only to readers who use
MSIE and who are not logged in.  The "communists" (who run open source
browsers) will never notice that the ads exist, and will happily
continue to contribute to the contents.  Of course this is evil, but
it keeps them quiet.

This is not a recommendation, only experience.

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


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Mediawiki-l] Gimme something to do

body:
On Friday 21 November 2003 12:52, Brion Vibber wrote:
> If you want an ugly but simple and important job... we'd like to remove
> our dependency on register_globals (the option, formerly on by default,
> in which GET/POST parameters and cookies are dumped into the global
> variable namespace). Since PHP 4.2 this option is off by default, as it
> can lead to security problems when there's sloppy coding and you use a
> variable that turns out to be uninitialized -- until someone slips it
> into a URL or cookie.
>
> Moving from the globals to the $_GET and $_POST arrays would let us
> remove that configuration dependency and potentially clean up some
> security trouble if there are any more surprises. (Also related to bug
> #842921)

Perhaps there is something I don't see, but wouldn't it be the easiest to just
insert before line 21 (global $action, $title...) in wiki.phtml:

$action=$_GET['action']; $title=$_GET['title']; $search=$_GET['search'],
$go=$_GET['go']; $target=$_GET['target']; $printable=$_GET['printable'];
$returnto=$_GET['returnto']; $diff=$_GET['diff']; $oldid=$_GET['oldid'];

Then, without any further changes to the source, register_globals could be
turned off, there would be no configuration dependency, and no security risk
(no new variables would be accepted). The same should be done for $_POST, of
course.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wik's views

body:
I would like to clarify (as it may not be obvious from my last post), that I
agree that Wik probably acts in good faith.  The problem with him is that he
refuses to cooperate with others, and very stubbornly so.

In response to Geoff Burling, it is indeed my impression that Wik does not
seem to understand the whole concept of Wikipedia (consensus writing etc.),
although it has been discussed extensively with him.  There is much more in his
talk page (and subpages linked therefrom) so it needs not be repeated here.

I have no idea what should be done about all this.  It would be most
unfortunate to ban a user who probably acts in good faith (however there seems to be
a precedent case (H.J.) who was eventually banned because of proven
inability to work with others), but somehow it must be made clear to Wik that this is
no humbug.

Kosebamse

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Evan's patches committed, along with some other stuff

body:
On Nov 22, 2003, at 05:58, Tim Starling wrote:
> While I was at it, I noticed that ordinary internal links were
> underlined regardless of the user preferences. Brion took out the
> class=internal from ordinary links a while ago, putting it back in
> seemed to fix the problem.

The internal was removed deliberately to cut bandwidth usage. ;) The
style definition needs to be changed to remove the underline when
non-underlined links are set (and to do *nothing*, leaving browser
default, when the default is set).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject:
[Wikitech-l] How do I install MediaWiki using only FTP and
	HTTP	access?

body:
On Nov 20, 2003, at 14:13, Dan Carlson wrote:
> So, I'm looking for a way to install MediaWiki and set up my site
> using nothing but FTP upload, phpMyAdmin access (full admin/dba
> permissions), and a normal Web browser.  Can anyone provide some
> assistance with this?

Some manual install instructions:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2003-October/000004.html

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons]

subject: [WikiEN-l] Spelling Day?

body:
Today is apparently spelling day, it appears that a number of users are running bots to fix spelling errors. I believe this practice should be stopped; first off, it is a waste of time to correct spelling on articles which are far from finished. But more importantly, the bots are going to write over words which are supposed to be spelled a certain way, I know that there are quotes with deliberately misspelled words in them. Spelling day is a bad idea.
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from_name: Jay Bowks

subject: [Wikitech-l] Still Forbidden...

body:
Hi/Salute/Saluton,
This was quick... actually I think
my inbox just got your message
as I downloaded from my ISP...

You asked...
>On Nov 19, 2003, at 14:16, Jay Bowks wrote:
>> You don't have permission to access / on this server.
>>Does your firewall remove your browser's "user-agent" header?
>>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

I disabled the personal firewall,
which does have some privacy
features included, but this didn't
seem to help.

I still get

" Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Apache/1.3.28 Server at en.wikipedia.org Port 80"

Could my ISP's IP's have
been blacklisted for some
reason?

If you have some idea of
what else I could try I'd
appreciate it...

Thanks/Gratias/Dankon
Jay B.


from_name: Yann Forget

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

Hi,

Le Friday 21 November 2003 17:45, Jimmy Wales a ?crit :
> Chuck Smith wrote:
> > I was thinking the other day that the goals of
> > Wikipedia are in line with those of Unesco and I was
> > wondering if we could somehow try to become officially
> > connected with Unesco to gain a better reputation.

I like this idea, like the project trying to enlist free software as Unesco
world heritage.

> > I know people are going to yell at me, but I think Google AdSense
> > would produce an incredible amount of money for the project.  We
> > could show them to anonymous users and people who log in could turn
> > them off if they wanted.  Well anyway, it's just a suggestion, don't
> > bite my head off.
>
> I know that not many people share my curious political views, but to
> me, it's much worse to seek money from governments, i.e. to ask them
> to take money by force from others, than it is to accept advertising
> money.

Indeed. ;o)
This one I don't like very much. For me getting money from Unesco or
governments is not exactly the same thing. And from big private companies is
not better than from governments.

> However, it is not clear to me that ads would produce "an incredible
> amount of money".  I should look at the traffic and make an estimate,
> just so we have some awareness of what we're giving up.
>
> --Jimbo

Yann

- --
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux
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body:
>>>>> "JF" == Jens Frank <JeLuF at gmx.de> writes:

    JF> I tried that yesterday (using $_REQUEST, so I don't have to
    JF> worry about GET/POST) and it's not that easy. There are many
    JF> additional parameters passed from various dialogs. E.g. the
    JF> code above is missing wpTextbox1, the big textbox you edit the
    JF> wiki articles in.

    JF> I've already got 80% of code working, I think.

Hey, so, I'm sure glad I didn't start working on this one.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


from_name: Jens Frank

references:
<87smkipltk.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>
	<215101A0-1C19-11D8-A3E0-000A95DAA284@pobox.com>
	<200311220703.21154.smolensk@eunet.yu>

body:
On Sat, Nov 22, 2003 at 07:03:20AM +0100, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> On Friday 21 November 2003 12:52, Brion Vibber wrote:
> > If you want an ugly but simple and important job... we'd like to remove
> > our dependency on register_globals (the option, formerly on by default,
> > in which GET/POST parameters and cookies are dumped into the global
> > variable namespace). Since PHP 4.2 this option is off by default, as it
> > can lead to security problems when there's sloppy coding and you use a
> > variable that turns out to be uninitialized -- until someone slips it
> > into a URL or cookie.
> >
> > Moving from the globals to the $_GET and $_POST arrays would let us
> > remove that configuration dependency and potentially clean up some
> > security trouble if there are any more surprises. (Also related to bug
> > #842921)
>
> Perhaps there is something I don't see, but wouldn't it be the easiest to just
> insert before line 21 (global $action, $title...) in wiki.phtml:
>
> $action=$_GET['action']; $title=$_GET['title']; $search=$_GET['search'],
> $go=$_GET['go']; $target=$_GET['target']; $printable=$_GET['printable'];
> $returnto=$_GET['returnto']; $diff=$_GET['diff']; $oldid=$_GET['oldid'];
>
> Then, without any further changes to the source, register_globals could be
> turned off, there would be no configuration dependency, and no security risk
> (no new variables would be accepted). The same should be done for $_POST, of
> course.

I tried that yesterday (using $_REQUEST, so I don't have to worry about
GET/POST) and it's not that easy. There are many additional parameters
passed from various dialogs. E.g. the code above is missing wpTextbox1,
the big textbox you edit the wiki articles in.

I've already got 80% of code working, I think.

Regards,

JeLuF


subject:
[Wikitech-l] How do I install MediaWiki using only FTP and HTTP
	access?

body:
On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 05:13:40PM -0500, Dan Carlson wrote:
> (I apologize if people are receiving this message twice -- I sent it
> out earlier, but I don't think that it was posted to the list.)
>
> I am looking to create my own wikiwiki website using the MediaWiki
> software, but I'm uncertain as to how I should proceed, because I do
> not have access to the command line.  I first attempted to have my
> host's support people run the install.php script for me, but they ran
> into errors and told me that they ran into errors when they ran the
> script from the backend, and to look for errors in the code.  (You'll
> have to forgive my ignorance here -- I'm pretty good with websites, but
> server management isn't something I know anything about yet!)

Did they tell you what kind of errors they got?

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Imran Ghory wrote:

>On Sat, 22 Nov 2003, libertarian wrote:
>
>>Just because someone states on their page that they have the
>>copyright doesn't mean they have the copyright to the specific
>>arrangement of words. Let us not be mean-spirited. If you really
>>believe in freedom, you should believe in freedom to claim anything
>>silly too.
>>
>
>However in some countries claiming copyright over someone elses work is
>not only copyright violation, it also constitutes fraud.
>
A great idea!  especially if that someone else can include the public
domain!

Ec


in_reply_to:
<Sea2-F18xMs1HReectM000096a9@hotmail.com> (Tim Starling's
	message of "Sat, 22 Nov 2003 18:56:49 +1100")

body:
>>>>> "TS" == Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> writes:

    TS> Transactions have to be guarded against user aborts. This
    TS> could be done either with a "critical section" model, where
    TS> user aborts are disabled for the duration of the transaction,
    TS> or alternatively a shutdown function could be used. The
    TS> shutdown function would rollback any active transactions.

OK, I'll take a peek.

    TS> This discussion, and patch submissions, are probably more
    TS> on-topic at wikitech-l than at mediawiki-l.

Gotcha.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Spelling Day?

body:
Nicolas Weeger wrote:

>> I disagree that correcting spelling errors in principle is a bad idea
>> because articles are not finished. This is nonsense, articles on
>> wikipedia are never finished - that doesn't mean they should contain
>> spelling errors.
>
There is nothing wrong with correcting the spelling in unfinished
articles, but as a matter of courtesy when a person is obviously
continuing his work in such an article I would give him the time to
finish his work before I tried to change it.  Still. I see this as a
secondary point in Adam's concerns.,

>> You're right however on the spelling bots: These things are
>> dangerous, and should be avoided. Fixing spelling errors on wikipedia
>> is a massive task. Either we disallow bots for this purpose or we
>> introduce a guideline that each spelling error has to have been
>> looked at by the person running the bot first, and then approved for
>> editing by the bot. I know that this is not directly enforceable, but
>> most policies on wikipedia are not. If someone makes a "spelling
>> correction" with a bot where the spelling was correct in the context,
>> that shows that they have not actually looked at that particular
>> instance. Appropriate measures can then be taken. WDYT?
>
> I don't know how hard that'd be, but couldn't the bots ignore (just
> report) mispelled words between quotes? ''like that'' or "that"?
> If the mispelling (talking about common mistakes here, like taht, not
> words which can have different spelling/meanings :) is intended, it is
> probably meaning something, so the word or expression is probably
> emphazised (hum, what's the spelling? :)) to show, in the article
> itself, that the mispelling IS intended.

It's not just the typos and misspellings that are at issue.  One also
needs to consider variant spellings.  The difference between British and
American spellings is perhaps the most obvious example of that.
 Spelling bots are often rooted in one or the other spelling, and when
they start changing alternative spellings it leaves people needlessly
annoyed.  Spelling bots that do not require human intervention should be
completely outlawed.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Eating up Forbidden... Fruits

body:
> >>Does your firewall remove your browser's "user-agent" header?
> >>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

After much tweaking of settings
with Norton's and Windows XP
firewalls I was able to gain access
to wikipedia sites... it seems my
computer has been the target of
buffer overflow attacks according
to the logs, which were blocked
by Norton's Firewall... the program
went on the defense sutting down
privacy/information access... From
Brion's explanation of cookies with
Safari I figured I'd take a look at
the cookies settings in Norton's and
sure enough it was denying cookies...
I set it back to eating these forbidden
treats and it seems now to access the
wikipedia ok... (And eventhough I
use XP at home, mostly, I also have
a Linux-Mandrake box I use from
time to time, I do use Safari at
work, on an iMac with OS X, one of
the 8 computers in my classroom, I
will pass on the message about insecure
cookies to the other teachers who also
use it at the three schools I work in,
they're Mac inundated, although most
of them are older iMacs using OS 9,
the newer eMacs all come with OS X).

Ok, enough of my jubilant chat for now,
thanks Brion for the suggestions, and
for the patience of those on Wikitech-l.

Cheers!
Jay B.


from_name: Imran Ghory

body:
On Sat, 22 Nov 2003, libertarian wrote:
> Just because someone states on their page that they have the
> copyright doesn't mean they have the copyright to the specific
> arrangement of words. Let us not be mean-spirited. If you really
> believe in freedom, you should believe in freedom to claim anything
> silly too.

However in some countries claiming copyright over someone elses work is
not only copyright violation, it also constitutes fraud.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


from_name: Sascha Noyes

subject: [WikiEN-l] Spelling Day?

body:
(cross-posting to general list, because policy affects all languages)

On Saturday 22 November 2003 11:01, Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
> Today is apparently spelling day, it appears that a number of users are
> running bots to fix spelling errors. I believe this practice should be
> stopped; first off, it is a waste of time to correct spelling on articles
> which are far from finished. But more importantly, the bots are going to
> write over words which are supposed to be spelled a certain way, I know
> that there are quotes with deliberately misspelled words in them. Spelling
> day is a bad idea.

I disagree that correcting spelling errors in principle is a bad idea because
articles are not finished. This is nonsense, articles on wikipedia are never
finished - that doesn't mean they should contain spelling errors. You're
right however on the spelling bots: These things are dangerous, and should be
avoided. Fixing spelling errors on wikipedia is a massive task. Either we
disallow bots for this purpose or we introduce a guideline that each spelling
error has to have been looked at by the person running the bot first, and
then approved for editing by the bot. I know that this is not directly
enforceable, but most policies on wikipedia are not. If someone makes a
"spelling correction" with a bot where the spelling was correct in the
context, that shows that they have not actually looked at that particular
instance. Appropriate measures can then be taken. WDYT?

Best,
Sascha Noyes
--
Please encrypt all email. Public key available from
www.pantropy.net/snoyes.asc


from_name: Arwel Parry

subject: [Wikitech-l] Oddity with (NUMBEROFARTICLES)

body:
I've just noticed an oddity on cy.wikipedia.org -- if a logged-in user
goes to the main page, NUMBEROFARTICLES shows that we have (currently)
174 articles, but a non-logged-in user going to the same page is told
that we only have 75 articles !

I suspect that the discrepancy could be because the difference is
represented by "year" or "day month" articles which begin with numbers
-- is this a reasonable suspicion? And does anyone have any idea how it
can be fixed?

--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: SQL queries

body:
In message <80CAA890-1C6B-11D8-8ABC-000A95DAA284 at pobox.com>, Brion
Vibber <brion-e+AXbWqSrlAAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> writes
>On Nov 21, 2003, at 13:14, Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:
>> Since many of the special: pages have been disabled for quite a while
>>now, some people want updates on those info.
>
>If you slip "magic=yes" into the URL, it'll temporarily disable miser
>mode for that page load. For the pages that cache an old copy, it'll
>update the cached copy. Please use in moderation.
>
>eg, http://.....org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Lonelypages&magic=yes
>
>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

I tried that on cy.wikipedia and got "You have requested a special page
that is not recognized by the wiki software." :(

--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


body:
Tim Starling ts4294967296-at-hotmail.com |wikipedia| wrote:

> Transactions have to be guarded against user aborts. This could be done
> either with a "critical section" model, where user aborts are disabled
> for the duration of the transaction, or alternatively a shutdown
> function could be used. The shutdown function would rollback any active
> transactions. However note that installing a shutdown function
> effectively disables user aborts anyway. When there is a shutdown
> function, PHP only checks for pending user aborts on output -- in our
> case, once per run.

> If a PHP thread dies while a transaction is active, any locked tables
> will remain locked indefinitely. The wiki will effectively become
> read-only until a developer manually flushes the lock. We've seen this
> happen on the English Wikipedia.

Your last paragraph is not quite true (or shouldn't be at least). If the
thread really dies (that is, segfaults) the mysql connection will be
closed, locks released and transactions rolled back. If the script dies
in a "nice" way, with die() or equivalent, then what you describe will
happen.

This opens up for a very simple solution. One wfQuery("START
TRANSACTION") at the top of wiki.phtml, and one wfQuery("COMMIT") at the
end of it. Top off with a call for wfQuery("ROLLBACK") in the shutdown
function. There you have a complete, safe and simple implementation. One
*may* want to use more fine-grained transactions to reduce the amount of
time spent in a locked state, but I wouldn't spend too much time on that
until it's clear that it's necessary. Especially since locked time isn't
lost time, since there's plenty of work for the db server to choose from.

// E23


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: SQL queries

references:
<BAY10-F93Z3cNfOUwGY00003d97@hotmail.com>
	<BAY10-F93Z3cNfOUwGY00003d97-PkbjNfxxIARBDgjK7y7TUQ@public.gmane.org>
	<80CAA890-1C6B-11D8-8ABC-000A95DAA284@pobox.com>
	<eG9x6oyfU2v$Ewe6@arwel.cartref.demon.co.uk>
	<bposfo$s8q$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Nov 22, 2003, at 15:51, Walter Vermeir wrote:
> Arwel Parry wrote:
>>> eg, http://.....org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Lonelypages&magic=yes
>>>
>>> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>> I tried that on cy.wikipedia and got "You have requested a special
>> page that is not recognized by the wiki software." :(
>
> Also on the dutch wiki
>
> http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciaal:Lonelypages&magic=yes

Yeah, that doesn't work. See my example URL above.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Nathan Russell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wik's views

body:
--On Friday, November 21, 2003 11:49 PM -0800 Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> As much as I dislike Libertarian, I have to agree with him/her here.  Wik is very difficult, and needs to be completely banned or made to understand that his/her edit does not HAVE to be the most recent.

Agreed.  I know that my first hours at wikipedia I found it useful to edit most recently to make it easy to spot which edits on my watchlist I hadn't seen.

After that, I realized it was stupid, and stopped.  Hopefully Wik can do the same.

Nathan


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Evan wrote:
> >>>>> "BV" == Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> writes:
>
>     Me> OK, so, I took my first crack at working on MediaWiki with an
>     Me> attempt to check for cookies when logging in (bug #770011).
>
>     BV> Great! I'm in the middle of the SoCal Linux Expo and will look
>     BV> this stuff over when I get a chance... If some of the other
>     BV> developers could look after this that'd be great.

I might have a quick look now.

>Coolio! The patches I submitted are all independent -- none depends on
>another, that I can see, nor should they conflict -- and made against
>the HEAD for phase3. Some use global variables, so I'm going to wait
>till they're applied (or rejected B-) before trying to jigger with the
>$REQUEST hoohaw.
>
>I'm going to try and cut my teeth on the transactions stuff. I
>figure I'll just try to find calls to wfQuery() with INSERT, UPDATE,
>DELETE in them, and wrap something like wfBegin()/wfCommit() around
>them, with wfRollback() for error conditions.
>
>I'll probably miss 20% of them, and screw everything up. Should be a
>fun time.

Missing 20% is a lot better than missing 100%, which is what we're doing at
the moment. It's really making a mess of our database, we often have to
clean up inconsistencies manually. So everyone will be eternally grateful.

But before you start, I have to make sure you know about the dangers of
transactions. These dangers were discussed by Brion and I on wikitech-l, in
mid-August 2003 under the subject "Using HEAP tables":

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-August/thread.html

Transactions have to be guarded against user aborts. This could be done
either with a "critical section" model, where user aborts are disabled for
the duration of the transaction, or alternatively a shutdown function could
be used. The shutdown function would rollback any active transactions.
However note that installing a shutdown function effectively disables user
aborts anyway. When there is a shutdown function, PHP only checks for
pending user aborts on output -- in our case, once per run.

If a PHP thread dies while a transaction is active, any locked tables will
remain locked indefinitely. The wiki will effectively become read-only until
a developer manually flushes the lock. We've seen this happen on the English
Wikipedia.

AFAIK, killing threads by restarting the webserver doesn't pose a risk,
because the MySQL connections will also be terminated, releasing any lock.

More information about user aborts is at:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.connection-handling.php

This discussion, and patch submissions, are probably more on-topic at
wikitech-l than at mediawiki-l. This post (and a couple of Brion's) have
been cross-posted there.

-- Tim Starling

_________________________________________________________________
Hot chart ringtones and polyphonics. Go to
http://ninemsn.com.au/mobilemania/default.asp


from_name: Dan Carlson

body:
Thanks very much for those instructions, Brion!  I've now gotten the
program up and running properly, but I've found a new problem -- the
default admin user hasn't been created, and so I can't log in to change
some of the internal settings.  How do I create the admin user?  I
tried the "users.sql" script, but I'm not familiar enough with SQL
queries yet to know what all those other various parameters do -- or
more specifically, the server addresses.  Since I assume that the
users.sql file is what I need, what do I need to do to it?

Thanks,
Dan Carlson

On Nov 22, 2003, at 10:40 AM, Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Nov 20, 2003, at 14:13, Dan Carlson wrote:
>> So, I'm looking for a way to install MediaWiki and set up my site
>> using nothing but FTP upload, phpMyAdmin access (full admin/dba
>> permissions), and a normal Web browser.  Can anyone provide some
>> assistance with this?
>
> Some manual install instructions:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2003-October/
> 000004.html
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Nicolas Weeger

body:
>I disagree that correcting spelling errors in principle is a bad idea because
>articles are not finished. This is nonsense, articles on wikipedia are never
>finished - that doesn't mean they should contain spelling errors. You're
>right however on the spelling bots: These things are dangerous, and should be
>avoided. Fixing spelling errors on wikipedia is a massive task. Either we
>disallow bots for this purpose or we introduce a guideline that each spelling
>error has to have been looked at by the person running the bot first, and
>then approved for editing by the bot. I know that this is not directly
>enforceable, but most policies on wikipedia are not. If someone makes a
>"spelling correction" with a bot where the spelling was correct in the
>context, that shows that they have not actually looked at that particular
>instance. Appropriate measures can then be taken. WDYT?
>
>
I don't know how hard that'd be, but couldn't the bots ignore (just
report) mispelled words between quotes? ''like that'' or "that"?
If the mispelling (talking about common mistakes here, like taht, not
words which can have different spelling/meanings :) is intended, it is
probably meaning something, so the word or expression is probably
emphazised (hum, what's the spelling? :)) to show, in the article
itself, that the mispelling IS intended.

>Best,
>Sascha Noyes
>
>
Regards
Nicolas


from_name: Martin Harper

subject: [WikiEN-l] Spelling Day

body:
This seems to be being discussed at [[Wikipedia:List of common
misspellings]].


in_reply_to:
<3FBF6B7A.8050309@hotmail.com> (Tim Starling's message of "Sun,
	23 Nov 2003 00:58:18 +1100")

body:
>>>>> "TS" == Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> writes:

    TS> I wasn't sure about Evan's new colour scheme -- I think people
    TS> would be confused by broken links that look like stubs and
    TS> stubs that look like visited links.

Hmm. The whole point was to get rid of that! The original bug was that
stubs and visited links looked exactly alike. Are you sure you got the
stylesheets installed correctly?

The color scheme I added was the one suggested on the Cologne Blue
skin problems page:

    Type       Unvisited  Visited
               ---------  ----------
    Internal   Blue       Dark Blue
    External   Green      Dark Green
    Interwiki  Green      Dark Green
    Broken     Red        Dark Red
    Stub       Purple     Dark Purple

I'm looking at it right now... looks like the stylesheet I sent does
that. Does the light purple really look all that much like the dark
red? And the light purple looks like the dark blue? I tried to use
simple colors to get the idea down for first, but let it get finetuned
later.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] How do I install MediaWiki using only FTP and	HTTP
	access?

body:
On Nov 22, 2003, at 15:57, Dan Carlson wrote:
> Thanks very much for those instructions, Brion!  I've now gotten the
> program up and running properly, but I've found a new problem -- the
> default admin user hasn't been created, and so I can't log in to
> change some of the internal settings.  How do I create the admin user?

I assume you mean a wiki user account; you'll need to manually change
the user_rights field through the db:

   UPDATE user SET user_rights='sysop' WHERE user_name='My admin
account';

>   I tried the "users.sql" script, but I'm not familiar enough with SQL
> queries yet to know what all those other various parameters do -- or
> more specifically, the server addresses.  Since I assume that the
> users.sql file is what I need, what do I need to do to it?

That sets up MySQL user accounts, so the regular wiki scripts can run
without the ability to alter the table structure, while the admin
scripts do, and the sysop sql query feature can only be used for
read-only access and not to read private data from the user tables
(email, password hash, watchlist).

User accounts in MySQL are sort of scary and I'm not sure I understand
it myself. :) It's perfectly possible to run the whole wiki under an
existing all-powerful MySQL user, but could be more damaging if
something goes wrong or a hole is exploited. In particular be careful
about the SQL user account ($wgDBsqluser/$wgDBsqlpassword), since any
wiki user logged in with admin access can issue arbitrary SQL commands
executed as the SQL user.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Tomos at Wikipedia

body:
Is there anyone who is knowledgeable about "donation by clicking" scheme?

A user goes to a page with many ads, and the ad revenue for the site will
become a donation to help wikipedia/ wikimedia.

I am talking about sites like this:

http://www.thehungersite.com
http://www.veggiedirectory.com/

The benefit of it is that it could be done outside the wikipedia.org domain,
and could be done by people other than Jimbo. I have little idea how much
fund it can raise (probably not much, perhaps 1 to $10 a day), and I have
very little idea if there is any handy way to set one up.

Well, just an idea.

cheers,

Tomos

_________________________________________________________________
>From the hottest toys to tips on keeping fit this winter, you?ll find a
range of helpful holiday info here.
http://special.msn.com/network/happyholidays.armx


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: SQL queries

body:
Arwel Parry wrote:

>
>> eg, http://.....org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Lonelypages&magic=yes
>>
>> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
> I tried that on cy.wikipedia and got "You have requested a special page
> that is not recognized by the wiki software." :(

Also on the dutch wiki

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciaal:Lonelypages&magic=yes

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


body:
I wasn't sure about Evan's new colour scheme -- I think people would be
confused by broken links that look like stubs and stubs that look like
visited links. So I committed the new style sheets in an "alternate"
directory. That also required a minor change to the installer.

Setting the default style for <a> tags caused all headings to turn
bright blue, on pages with TOCs. So I commented that line out.

While I was at it, I noticed that ordinary internal links were
underlined regardless of the user preferences. Brion took out the
class=internal from ordinary links a while ago, putting it back in
seemed to fix the problem.

The only other change I made to Evan's stuff was adding the ability to
disable the cookie check in LocalSettings.php

-- Tim Starling.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
Arwel Parry wrote:
>I've just noticed an oddity on cy.wikipedia.org -- if a logged-in
>user goes to the main page, NUMBEROFARTICLES shows that
>we have (currently)  174 articles, but a non-logged-in user
>going to the same page is told that we only have 75 articles !

I suspect this is due to page caching (anon users see cached versions of pages
while logged-in users don't). The last time the cy.wikipedia main page was
chached (when it was last edited) cy.wikipedia probably had 75 articles. Edit
the main page (adding whitespace at the end of line if need be) and then see
if the number of articles gets updated.

Every time I see an announcement that xx.wikipedia has reach # milestone, I
edit their main page to update the cache.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
On Nov 23, 2003, at 12:55 AM, Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Nov 22, 2003, at 15:57, Dan Carlson wrote:
>> Thanks very much for those instructions, Brion!  I've now gotten the
>> program up and running properly, but I've found a new problem -- the
>> default admin user hasn't been created, and so I can't log in to
>> change some of the internal settings.  How do I create the admin
>> user?
>
> I assume you mean a wiki user account; you'll need to manually change
> the user_rights field through the db:
>
>   UPDATE user SET user_rights='sysop' WHERE user_name='My admin
> account';

Ah, THAT'S what I was looking for!  I just didn't know what the name of
the setting would be...

>>   I tried the "users.sql" script, but I'm not familiar enough with
>> SQL queries yet to know what all those other various parameters do --
>> or more specifically, the server addresses.  Since I assume that the
>> users.sql file is what I need, what do I need to do to it?
>
> That sets up MySQL user accounts, so the regular wiki scripts can run
> without the ability to alter the table structure, while the admin
> scripts do, and the sysop sql query feature can only be used for
> read-only access and not to read private data from the user tables
> (email, password hash, watchlist).
>
> User accounts in MySQL are sort of scary and I'm not sure I understand
> it myself. :) It's perfectly possible to run the whole wiki under an
> existing all-powerful MySQL user, but could be more damaging if
> something goes wrong or a hole is exploited. In particular be careful
> about the SQL user account ($wgDBsqluser/$wgDBsqlpassword), since any
> wiki user logged in with admin access can issue arbitrary SQL commands
> executed as the SQL user.

Hehheh, I understand what you mean about MySQL users.  Fortunately, my
web host account has a control panel that allows me to set those kinds
of things up without having to worry about the gritty details.  A
horrifying situation for purists, I know, but simpler for novices. ;-)

Thanks again!
Dan Carlson


subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki patch for register_globals=Off

body:
This is a patch for one of the tasks on Brion's todo
list he sent some days ago. Currently, MediaWiki
requires the setting of

	register_globals = On

in php.ini, which causes some trouble for people
trying to install MediaWiki and which might cause
some security problems. The attached patch enables
MediaWiki to run with register_globals=Off.

There's a test server running this code at

	http://jeluf.mormo.org/wiki/wiki.phtml

Regards,

JeLuF
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body:
On Sun, Nov 23, 2003 at 12:43:28PM +0100, Jens Frank wrote:
> This is a patch for one of the tasks on Brion's todo
> list he sent some days ago. Currently, MediaWiki
> requires the setting of
>
> 	register_globals = On
>
> in php.ini, which causes some trouble for people
> trying to install MediaWiki and which might cause
> some security problems. The attached patch enables
> MediaWiki to run with register_globals=Off.
>
> There's a test server running this code at
>
> 	http://jeluf.mormo.org/wiki/wiki.phtml
>

Tim has found a lot of things I've missed, please
wait for a next release of this patch, this one
doesn't work properly.

Regards,

JeLuF


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Software upgrades

body:
We'll be moving the bug-reduced development branch of MediaWiki into
production this afternoon/evening (US time) / late night (Europe).
There may be some new bugs that haven't been caught yet, so please give
a hoot if you notice anything unusual.

User-visible changes in this round will include:

* Should be faster loading pages with many links.

* Special:Export -- export the source of individual wiki pages,
optionally with their histories, in a thin XML wrapper which includes
metadata (time, etc). This may be useful for those of you working on
automated tools. (There is not yet any comparable import facility.)

* MediaWiki: namespace for adjusting the localization of interface
messages without waiting for a new LanguageXx.php file to get
installed. Limited to sysops.

A category system is partially in the code but won't be enabled just
yet, pending another look over the code.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Evan's patches committed,	along with some
	other stuff

in_reply_to:
<bppj40$thf$1@sea.gmane.org> (Tim Starling's message of "Sun,
	23 Nov 2003 17:14:35 +1100")

body:
>>>>> "TS" == Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> writes:

    TS> I meant that your unvisited stubs look like the current
    TS> internal visited links (and the browser default visited
    TS> links), and that your broken visited links look like stubs do
    TS> at the moment. So it would be confusing for people who are
    TS> used to the current system, until they got used to it.

Ah! Now I understand what you're saying.

    TS> I'm not saying there's anything wrong with your system, [...]
                                                   ^^^^
Just to be clear: the 8-color link scheme isn't "Evan's". I like it
well enough, but it wasn't my idea. It was on the CBSP page when I
found it; I asked for things to do, and fixing the bugs listed on the
CBSP page was one of those things suggested.

Anyways, I've been trying to figure out a way to narrow the scope and
submit a patch that fixes 827160. I've tried various shades of purple
for the stub color, and none of them seem very distinct from the
visited link color. Any suggestions for stub colors that would work
better? Are we open to a radically different color (orange, yellow,
gray, inverted text, I dunno) for stubs if the change is just
localized to Cologne Blue?

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Project Sourceberg

body:
In response to continual nagging, I've set up an original-sources wiki
so people will stop dumping stuff in ps.wikipedia.org, which is
supposed to be for the Pashto-language Wikipedia.

http://sources.wikipedia.org/ now contains a basic wiki for dumping
source documents into. Final domain name, title, logo, and magic
sources-specific special features (like annotations) are a matter for
the future.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Help?  where's the webmaster

body:
On Nov 23, 2003, at 16:32, Matthew Wb Craig wrote:
> Hi sorry to post to a list, but is there a webmaster for wikipedia.org?
>
> I have a few questions about broken links and downloading a db dump,
> but
> there seems to be no "contact <anyone>" page that is easy to find.

If you had put the questions in this mail, we could have answered them.
:)

If you're trying to download the English Wikipedia old dump, there's a
known problem; now that the file has grown over 2 gigabytes, Apache
refuses to deal with it. Until this is resolved you can grab it in two
parts as described here:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-November/006959.html

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Evan's patches committed,
	along with some other stuff

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:
>     Type       Unvisited  Visited
>                ---------  ----------
>     Internal   Blue       Dark Blue
>     External   Green      Dark Green
>     Interwiki  Green      Dark Green
>     Broken     Red        Dark Red
>     Stub       Purple     Dark Purple
>
> I'm looking at it right now... looks like the stylesheet I sent does
> that. Does the light purple really look all that much like the dark
> red? And the light purple looks like the dark blue? I tried to use
> simple colors to get the idea down for first, but let it get finetuned
> later.

No, light purple does not look like dark red, light purple looks like light
purple. I meant that your unvisited stubs look like the current internal
visited links (and the browser default visited links), and that your broken
visited links look like stubs do at the moment. So it would be confusing for
people who are used to the current system, until they got used to it. I'm
not saying there's anything wrong with your system, I'm just saying that the
conversion would be jarring to regular users, and that it would likely lead
to lots of complaints. It's one of those features that will have to be
discussed and approved by the users before it can be implemented. Perhaps we
can set up a demonstration page somewhere so that people can see whether
they like it or not.

-- Tim Starling.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Software upgrades

body:
On Nov 23, 2003, at 14:05, Brion Vibber wrote:
> We'll be moving the bug-reduced development branch of MediaWiki into
> production this afternoon/evening (US time) / late night (Europe).
> There may be some new bugs that haven't been caught yet, so please
> give a hoot if you notice anything unusual.

Online now! If people can join #wikipedia on irc.freenode.net to report
bugs live, that'd be helpful.

> * MediaWiki: namespace for adjusting the localization of interface
> messages

This part's being temporarily held back due to some last-minute bugs.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Software upgrades

body:
Update cancelled pending additional testing. Some major portions of the
localization interface were not merged correctly. Maybe later tonight.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Matthew Wb Craig

body:
Hi sorry to post to a list, but is there a webmaster for wikipedia.org?

I have a few questions about broken links and downloading a db dump, but
there seems to be no "contact <anyone>" page that is easy to find.

thanks,
matt


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Oddity with (NUMBEROFARTICLES)

body:
In message <200311230215.37144.maveric149 at yahoo.com>, Daniel Mayer
<maveric149-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> writes
>Arwel Parry wrote:
>>I've just noticed an oddity on cy.wikipedia.org -- if a logged-in
>>user goes to the main page, NUMBEROFARTICLES shows that
>>we have (currently)  174 articles, but a non-logged-in user
>>going to the same page is told that we only have 75 articles !
>
>I suspect this is due to page caching (anon users see cached versions of pages
>while logged-in users don't). The last time the cy.wikipedia main page was
>chached (when it was last edited) cy.wikipedia probably had 75 articles. Edit
>the main page (adding whitespace at the end of line if need be) and then see
>if the number of articles gets updated.

Ah, yes, that seems to have had the desired effect. Thanks.

--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia public relations

body:
On Fri, 21 Nov 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Arvind Narayanan wrote:
> >No way!! Many people, me included, contribute to wikipedia
> >because of a spirit of freedom/communist zeal/whatever that
> >would largely evaporate if wikipedia started serving ads. Even
> >a symbolic thing like the change from wikipedia.com to
> >wikipedia.org was a big motivation for me. Anyway didn't Jimbo
> >promise us long back that there would *never* be ads on
> >wikipedia? :)
>
> IIRC he said that there were no /plans/ for ads in the forseeable future. I
> think that that is the best we can all hope for. But donations alone may not
> be able to always pay the bills. In that case I wouldn't mind having
> something smart like Google AdSense serve ads to anons. In that scenario an
> added benefit would be to give anons another reason to log-in: no more ads!

Why don't we do the opposite: Have opt-in ads for logged in users. So that
way we'd only be showing ads to the people who specifically requested
them without alienating anyone else. Hopefully enough people will be happy
to have ads on to make it worthwhile (and profitable) for wikipedia.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


from_name: K Forstner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Spelling Day?

body:
Someone wrote:

> I don't know how hard that'd be, but couldn't the bots ignore (just
> report) mispelled words between quotes? ''like that'' or "that"?
> If the mispelling (talking about common mistakes here, like taht, not
> words which can have different spelling/meanings :) is intended, it is
> probably meaning something, so the word or expression is probably
> emphazised (hum, what's the spelling? :)) to show, in the article
> itself, that the mispelling IS intended.
>
>
Bots correcting spelling mistakes are an unfortunate idea. It's just a
guess, but I believe they'd do more harm than good. If you look at the edit
history of
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_verbs_in_English_consisting_of_Latin_
prefix_and_Latin_verb you can see how hard it can be to correct spelling
mistakes manually. Any form of automated correction would just cause
confusion.

A MUCH better way would be not to make spelling mistakes in the first place.
I honestly believe it can be done.

KF


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Sun, Nov 23, 2003 at 01:03:36PM +0100, Jens Frank wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 23, 2003 at 12:43:28PM +0100, Jens Frank wrote:
> > This is a patch for one of the tasks on Brion's todo
> > list he sent some days ago. Currently, MediaWiki
> > requires the setting of
> >
> > 	register_globals = On
> >
> > in php.ini, which causes some trouble for people
> > trying to install MediaWiki and which might cause
> > some security problems. The attached patch enables
> > MediaWiki to run with register_globals=Off.
> >
> > There's a test server running this code at
> >
> > 	http://jeluf.mormo.org/wiki/wiki.phtml
> >
>
> Tim has found a lot of things I've missed, please
> wait for a next release of this patch, this one
> doesn't work properly.

Fixed lots of thing's I've missed, second try.

Regards,

JeLuF
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from_name: Ray

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Project Sourceberg

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> In response to continual nagging, I've set up an original-sources wiki
> so people will stop dumping stuff in ps.wikipedia.org, which is
> supposed to be for the Pashto-language Wikipedia.
>
> http://sources.wikipedia.org/ now contains a basic wiki for dumping
> source documents into. Final domain name, title, logo, and magic
> sources-specific special features (like annotations) are a matter for
> the future.

Good!

It didn't take long for people to start screwing it up though.  My
understanding of the project is that it was for '''original sources'''.
 Already somebody has moved in a number of lists that properly belong on
Wikipedia, an undocumented piece of quasi-Latin, and a purported
questionnaire from Marcel Proust of uncertain copyright status.

I think some people need to learn the meaning of "original source", as
well as how to document what they put in.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Software upgrades

body:
Okay, the update is back, with fewer bugs! Hooray!

Still some oddities, hopefully low-key ones.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Who's a good mediator?

body:
On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 05:44, Erik Moeller wrote:

    With discussion about mediation going on again, off again, maybe we should
    ask ourselves what kind of people we want to do the job, besides Ed who
    regularly reminds us that *he* wants to do it. Seeing that I have a
    reputation for spreading peace and justice on Wikipedia even among morons
    and pathological liars, I think I am well qualified to lay out the
    criteria needed for achieving the ultimate WikiHarmony. My initial thought
    was to kick out all the Republicans, but I'm not sure if Jimbo would
    authorize a vote on that.

    So who is qualified to mediate in disputes? I think the following
    attributes are crucial:
    - mostly refrains from editing controversial articles because they seek
    harmony or just want to get work done
    - is patient and willing to listen, but also wants to make decisions
    - keeps strong personal opinions and beliefs mostly to themselves
    - uses clear, non-offensive language (this rules out using a Perl script)
    - treats each act of mediation as a new one, i.e. forgives and forgets

I Don't think there are really that many crucial attributes for either
mediators or arbitrators. The crucial thing is that we have a wide
variety of them. The disputants should have as much liberty to chose who
mediates or arbitrates their case as possible. Maybe someone could be
disqualified for a demonstrated lack of interpersonal skills or
linguistic ability/clarity of thought, but that is just about it.

    Perhaps most importantly, a good mediator is accepted by the entire
    community and has Jimbo's stamp of approval on his forehead in biblical
    fashion.

Could not agree more with the above. Except that the only thing that
should cause disapproval is abuse of "mediator" or "arbitrator" status.
Jimbo should definitely support most strongly all mediators and
arbitrators even when they fail.

However, even though the process should be confidential, an abusive
mediator or arbitrator should be referrable to Jimbo, or even the whole
community in extreme cases of authority overreach. We don't need a "star
chamber".

The rest of your post has been replied to in depth by others, and I
certainly have nothing new to add, but to say that Voting in arbitrators
or mediators is a bad idea. Those who have the argument, choose who they
want between them, and the pool of possible arbitrators or mediators
should be as diverse as possible, and definitely not a popularity
contest.

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (aka Cimon Avaro)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Yay for production testing

body:
Okay, so the dev branch is now running live on the Wikipedia servers. A
few more days to clean up remaining obvious bugs, and we'll branch this
off as the new stable branch. (Should we give it a version number, or a
release codename?)

Problems I found and fixed during the rollout:

* Language.php hadn't gotten updated to use $wgSitename, which broke
some languages and all the non-Wikipedia wikis

* Cached pages were being gzipped twice due to a broken merge (I'd
moved the call to tryFileCache(), and we ended up with both the old and
the new positions calling this function and installing output buffer
handlers! I trimmed the extra call and added a double-call check to the
function.)

* Initial text wasn't being put into the 'reason' field in the confirm
deletion screen due to a missing global declaration (also, this check
wasn't working for non-article namespaces due to incorrect usage of
namespace/title in the queries)

* 'Go' search wasn't skipping the MATCH query when $wgDisableTextSearch
was set, due to a missing global declaration

* Doubled google form, missing the search term in the text box

Problems found that still need to be fixed:

* Cookie check in Special:Userlogin fails if that's the very first page
the visitor came to in the session (possible fix: do a single redirect
if the cookie isn't found; on the second try if there's still no cookie
we complain)

* Editing MediaWiki: messages doesn't clear the entries from memcached.
($wgUseDatabaseMessages is off until this is fixed.)

There are probably other problems out there...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Yay for production testing

body:
Persistent link caching is not being updated properly, I've disabled it
pending further testing.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Dynamic dates

body:
For some reason $wgDynamicDates was being set on in DefaultSettings
(after being set to off, the correct default). This option corrupts
output for languages other than English. It's now set to off.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Yay for production testing

body:
Search engine was still issuing the title query even when disabled,
then discarding the result. :P

Seeming a little snappier now that that's fixed...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
James, I am confused by Reddi's comments.

Is he saying he's /right/ about a certain point, like the "correct
definition" of [[suicide bomber]]? If so, then he is an advocate, rather
than a neutral contributor. We should thus counsel him to re-cast his
view as the POV of a prominent organization or person, and to contrast
it with other views:

Here is a (fake) Jewish view, contrasted with his (real) Word Spy view.
* Hyram N. Fyrem of the Benign Birth Society says that ''suicide
bombing'' means the deliberate murder of people.
* Word Spy [http://www.wordspy.com/words/suicidebomber.asp] defines
''suicide bombing'' in a broader sense that includes acts which kill
only the person detonating the bomb.

I'm not sure /why/ this distinction would matter.

Maybe he's trying to make the point that Arab "human bombs" aren't
/murdering/ the people they kill: it's murder only if the homicide is
both (a) deliberate AND (b) unjustified. He might be saying that he
feels the suicide bombing campaign against Israel or the US is
"justified".

Unfortunately, he's not being clear, and I'm running out of patience
*speculating* on what he might mean.

Feel free to revert any of his edits which don't make sense. If this
doesn't work, we might have to lock the relevant article(s).

Uncle Ed


from_name: Russell Jones

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Switching everything to UTF-8

body:
MediaWiki is user supported, Open Source Software. If the software
doesn't support a minority browser, it's because the people using the
browser are 'too lazy' to add support for it.  There should be no
compulsion, IMHO, on anyone to write support for such browsers.  If you
want it so badly, write it yourself and submit a patch.

Russell

Aliter wrote:

>never demand a user to upgrade. Feel free to tell the user you're too lazy
>to support their software but blaming the break on them is quite insulting.
>
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wik, Ed Poor and Brian Corr

body:
Libertarian,

Sorry for dropping the ball. I am very busy, and if it was "my turn" to
respond but I failed to do so, then I beg you to forgive me. Let's
continue this week.

I'd like to resume with our "point #1" privately, but I'm also willing
to go "public" if that's what you'd prefer. (I think private will work
better, but that's only a guess.)

For a public discussion,
* Raise point #1 on the "talk page" of the relevant article, and then
* Leave a note at my personal talk page, telling me where it is.

I appreciate your patience; this is not an easy process.

Uncle Ed


subject: [WikiEN-l] Spelling Day?

body:
We cannot allow spelling bots unless:

A. The bot is registered
B. The bot draws from an approved list

A word like /thier/ can safely be changed to "their", since it's almost
always a misspelling. However, there are many misspellings which can't
be automatically corrected.

I don't mind HUMANS whiling away their time doing a bit of spell-check
work; I do it myself, when I want to relax.

But if a machine can do it, then it probably shouldn't be done as a
logged-in contributor (robot or "bot"). Rather, let's have our zealous
programming staff write a custom spell-check program.

Uncle Ed


subject: [Wikitech-l] RE: [WikiEN-l] Spelling Day?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Spelling Day?

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>We cannot allow spelling bots unless:
>
>A. The bot is registered
>B. The bot draws from an approved list
>
>A word like /thier/ can safely be changed to "their", since it's almost
>always a misspelling. However, there are many misspellings which can't
>be automatically corrected.
>
You can never be sure without looking at it in person.  Wasn't there a
French statesman by that name a century ago?  If that's the case the
proper correction would be to capitalize. :-)

>I don't mind HUMANS whiling away their time doing a bit of spell-check
>work; I do it myself, when I want to relax.
>
I agree; I did some of that before our search function became
non-operational.  When it's back up and running I may do some more.
 It's a more productive  way to build up personal edit numbers than
engaging in reversion wars. ;-)

>But if a machine can do it, then it probably shouldn't be done as a
>logged-in contributor (robot or "bot"). Rather, let's have our zealous
>programming staff write a custom spell-check program.
>
I would still be suspicious

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Project Sourceberg

body:
On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 01:09:17AM -0800, Ray wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> >In response to continual nagging, I've set up an original-sources wiki
> >so people will stop dumping stuff in ps.wikipedia.org, which is
> >supposed to be for the Pashto-language Wikipedia.
> >
> >http://sources.wikipedia.org/ now contains a basic wiki for dumping
> >source documents into. Final domain name, title, logo, and magic
> >sources-specific special features (like annotations) are a matter for
> >the future.
>
> Good!
>
> It didn't take long for people to start screwing it up though.  My
> understanding of the project is that it was for '''original sources'''.
> Already somebody has moved in a number of lists that properly belong on
> Wikipedia, an undocumented piece of quasi-Latin, and a purported
> questionnaire from Marcel Proust of uncertain copyright status.

All the articles that are currently in Project Sourceberg are copied
from the ps.wikipedia, that has been hijacked to serve as Project
Sourceberg wiki until Brion has set up the new wiki.

The lists were deleted from wikipedia after a very long discussion,
because they do not belong to wikipedia. (It's the "pi to a 1000
places" kinds of lists). If they wouldn't be at Sourceberg, they
would already be gone.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] William Connelley no longer neutral contributor

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>I can no longer consider William a regular contributor. He is an
>authority in his field, and so I think we should cite HIM as the source
>of the POV that there isn't any controversy about CFC mixing.
>
>It's better than a reversion war, anyway.
>
>
I guess I'm not sure what you're getting at. Brittanica can brag about
Albert Einstein writing physics articles etc; presumably it's preferable
to have actual authorities contributing, rather than be an all-amateur
production, and I hope we'll get more authorities to work on WP. A
competent authority would of course understand that WP is a secondary
source and that every sentence should have a reference backing it up.

As an casual onlooker to the dispute, I'd say you're not getting up
early enough in the morning to make the case that Connolley is
inserting personal POV. That's the hard part about disputing with
authorities; they can usually fire back a dozen times in response
to your one shot. Maybe better to recruit your own authorities to help
directly, rather than being filled full of arrows every day, eh?

Stan


subject: [Wikitech-l] Yay for production testing

body:
>>>>> "BV" == Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> writes:

    BV> Problems found that still need to be fixed:

    BV> * Cookie check in Special:Userlogin fails if that's the very
    BV> first page the visitor came to in the session (possible fix:
    BV> do a single redirect if the cookie isn't found; on the second
    BV> try if there's still no cookie we complain)

Do you mean if the user comes straight in to the login form, and
submits the login form? That seems to be working. What _won't_ work is
bookmarking something like:

    wiki.phtml?title=Special:Userlogin&wpName=UserName&wpPassword=password&action=submit

...and loading that without going to any other pages first. It will
tell you that you have cookies disabled when in fact you may not.

Is that _really_ something we have to support? Logging in without the
login form? It seems like a bit of a pathological case. In fact, I
believe that fixing bug 842921 (forms accept GET parameters) would
prevent that URL from working anyways.

One other possible scenario is that there's a form on another Web site
(outside the cookie domain) that has a login form that submits to a
MediaWiki site. Again, I wonder if this is worth development effort.

If it really is worth writing code for, maybe the best way to do this
is to check the referrer and bounce them back to the login form if the
referrer is empty or isn't on the same site.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Dr. Connolley is an expert (was: ... no longer neutral
	contributor)

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> I'm just saying that if he's going to edit a Wikipedia article to say
> that some POV he personally opposes is "clearly false", then he himself
> should be cited as the source of that POV.

I'm coming in with the benefit of not really knowing any of the
details of the dispute, so hopefully I can comment helpfully on the
abstract issue.

If a person editing wikipedia is the sort of person we'd ordinarily
consider a source, then it's perfectly legitimate to attribute
something to them, and nearly mandatory if the statement in question
is in any way in dispute.

The best thing about this is that it can really help to move the
article forward without acrimony.

The only danger here doesn't seem to apply in this case, but is
something we should be watchful for in the future of course.  And
that's the danger of various people coming in and writing on their own
pet topics, citing their own unpublished or self-published manuscrpts
as authority.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] WikimediaFoundation.org not working

body:
At http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising I get:

Warning: Missing argument 1 for article() in
/usr/local/apache/common/php/Article.php on line 24
(There is currently no text in this page)

Honest, I haven't even had time to ssh'd into pliny
yet!

--mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree


subject: [Wikitech-l] Yay for production testing

body:
On Nov 24, 2003, at 09:04, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> Do you mean if the user comes straight in to the login form, and
> submits the login form? That seems to be working. What _won't_ work is
> bookmarking something like:
>
>
> wiki.phtml?title=Special:
> Userlogin&wpName=UserName&wpPassword=password&action=submit
>
> ...and loading that without going to any other pages first. It will
> tell you that you have cookies disabled when in fact you may not.

Errr, that's what I shoulda said. This broke quinlan's emacs
editing-helper tool which does a direct login submission. I did give
him the workaround, though.

> Is that _really_ something we have to support? Logging in without the
> login form? It seems like a bit of a pathological case. In fact, I
> believe that fixing bug 842921 (forms accept GET parameters) would
> prevent that URL from working anyways.

You'd have the same problem submitting that form all through POST.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On Nov 24, 2003, at 12:59, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> At http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising I get:
>
> Warning: Missing argument 1 for article() in
> /usr/local/apache/common/php/Article.php on line 24
> (There is currently no text in this page)

Aha! I'd been trying to figure out what was putting that error message
in the log. Annoyingly, it gives the file/line number of the *function
definition* instead of the *function call* that's missing the
parameter.

Fixed.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Allan Crossman wrote:
> In order to show that William Connolley's edit is POV, you have to
> show that the claim he says is "clearly false" is in fact a serious
> point of contention in the relevant field.

Not having seen the edit in question, I can't comment on it in
particular, but I did want to say that the burden of proof on Ed is
significantly less than this.  It's best to attribute claims that are
in fact a serious point of contention, period, not just "in the
relevant field".

> NPOV is only an issue for claims that are not yet proven or disproven
> to the satisfaction of the vast majority of the relevant experts.
> You'll have to show that what William says is in fact in a serious
> state of dispute in the field. It may or may not be. You've provided
> no evidence on the matter.

This bit is important -- it might be that "within the field" of
postmodern literary criticism (for example), some idea 'X' is accepted
as a matter of course, and that no one within that field questions it.
But outside the field, others may find reason to dispute it
vigorously.

--Jimbo


subject:
[WikiEN-l] William Connelley no longer neutral contributor (Re:
	to Jimbo)

body:
Allan Crossman wrote:
> Here the question is - does nearly every expert in whatever field
> "global warming" falls under (environmental science, or whatever)
> accept William Connolley's claim? I don't know yet.

I'm still not sure that I can agree.

Let's suppose that nearly every expert in environmental science or
whatever agrees with claim X, but at the same time a large number of
political activists disputes it vigorously -- let's imagine that they
are Greenpeace activists, instead of conservative activists, just for
fun.

In a case like that, I don't think that _Wikipedia_ should be in the
business of labelling the view as 'obviously false'.  We can say that
"most scientists say that it is obviously false" or we can say that
"William Connelly, noted thus-and-so, says that it is obviously false"
or any number of things in that neighborhood.

But because it is disputed by non-lunatics, we need to step away from
making the claim ourselves.

--Jimbo


body:
Dr. Connelley is now a "source", and not just a contributor. Despite
repeated warnings, he has once again tried to use the authority of the
Wikipedia to back up one of his pet opinions.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=SEPP&diff=0&oldid=0

<<SEPP (or Fred Singer) has also commented on the question of [[Ozone
depletion]], making the clearly false assertion that the statement "CFCs
with lifetimes of decades and longer become well- mixed in the
atmosphere, percolate into the stratosphere, and there release
chlorine." is controversial>>

I can no longer consider William a regular contributor. He is an
authority in his field, and so I think we should cite HIM as the source
of the POV that there isn't any controversy about CFC mixing.

It's better than a reversion war, anyway.

Comments?

Ed Poor


body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Spelling bots that do not require human intervention should be
> completely outlawed.

I could not possibly agree more.  As usual for Monday, I'm catching up
on the weekend's festivities... is this actually happening, or just a
theoretical discussion?

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Spelling Day?

body:
Ray wrote:
> >A word like /thier/ can safely be changed to "their", since it's almost
> >always a misspelling. However, there are many misspellings which can't
> >be automatically corrected.
> >
> You can never be sure without looking at it in person.  Wasn't there a
> French statesman by that name a century ago?  If that's the case the
> proper correction would be to capitalize. :-)

A quick search on google reveals that, though rare, there is a name
'Thier'.  I think this is actually a great example, because it *did*
seem so unobjectionable at first glance.

--Jimbo


body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>The statement in question is this:
>
>SEPP (or Fred Singer) has also commented on the question of [[Ozone
>depletion]], making the clearly false assertion that the statement "CFCs
>with lifetimes of decades and longer become well-mixed in the atmosphere,
>percolate into the stratosphere, and there release chlorine." is
>controversial [http://www.sepp.org/ozone/ozonefranklin.html].
>
>This seems unobjectionable. There is certainly no credible evidence to the
>contrary.
>
Huh?  If there is no evidence to the contrary, how can he say that it's
clearly false?
Ec


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Project Sourceberg

body:
Angela wrote:

>Ec wrote
>
>>>Already somebody has moved in a number of lists that
>>>
>properly belong on Wikipedia
>
>It was decided at Wikipedia that raw data such as
>lists of postcodes were not encyclopedic, which is why
>they moved from Wikipedia to ps.wikipedia in the first
>place.
>
"It was decided" - passive verb - by whom?

The debate at Talk:Lists of postal and zip codes of the world/Delete
<http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lists_of_postal_and_zip_codes_of_the_world/Delete>
. seems inconclusive, so there wasn't much of a decision there.  The
move to ps seems to have come as a convenient afterthought that really
didn't get much discussion.  It should be sent back to Wikipedia where
all the linkages can be established.

Ec

>
>


subject:
[WikiEN-l] William Connelley no longer neutral contributor (Re:
	toJimbo)

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:
> SEPP (or Fred Singer) has also commented on the question of [[Ozone
> depletion]], incorrectly asserting that the statement "CFCs with lifetimes
> of decades and longer become well-mixed in the atmosphere, percolate into
> the stratosphere, and there release chlorine." is controversial
> [http://www.sepp.org/ozone/ozonefranklin.html].

I suppose it is just a smidge 'softer' to say 'incorrectly' rather
than 'obviously false'.  But it still commits _Wikipedia_ to a stand
on an issue that we shouldn't take.


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
The statement in question is this:

SEPP (or Fred Singer) has also commented on the question of [[Ozone
depletion]], making the clearly false assertion that the statement "CFCs
with lifetimes of decades and longer become well-mixed in the atmosphere,
percolate into the stratosphere, and there release chlorine." is
controversial [http://www.sepp.org/ozone/ozonefranklin.html].

This seems unobjectionable. There is certainly no credible evidence to the
contrary.

Fred

> From: "Allan Crossman" <a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 21:15:39 -0000
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] William Connelley no longer neutral contributor
>
>> I'm just saying that if he's going to edit a Wikipedia article to
>> say that some POV he personally opposes is "clearly false",
>> then he himself should be cited as the source of that POV.
>
> So if I write "Joe Bloggs holds the clearly false view that the Earth
> is flat" I'm violating NPOV? No I'm not, because in that case it
> really is clearly false - though it could do with being rewritten for
> a more sympathetic, encyclopedic style. But NPOV isn't the problem
> there.
>
> In order to show that William Connolley's edit is POV, you have to
> show that the claim he says is "clearly false" is in fact a serious
> point of contention in the relevant field.
>
> NPOV is only an issue for claims that are not yet proven or disproven
> to the satisfaction of the vast majority of the relevant experts.
> You'll have to show that what William says is in fact in a serious
> state of dispute in the field. It may or may not be. You've provided
> no evidence on the matter.
>
> Cheers,
>
> --
> Allan Crossman - http://dogma.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
> PGP keys - 0x06C4BCCA (new) || 0xCEC9FAE1 (compatible)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
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