from_name: Phroziac

subject: [WikiEN-l] Dynamic navigation boxes

body:
Lupin helped me get the dynamic navigation box stuff set up right. It
now works while i'm logged in, and it should work for pretty much
anyone in a modern browser, and it should fail quietly in ancient
browsers. It's only in the monobook skin for now though.

Check it out at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Dynamic_navigation_box

It still has the show/hide thing at the top, but meh, I like it that
way. Now the cabal members just need to unilaterally force these
things on everyone else. Err....TINC...


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Arbeo M

subject: [Wikipedia-l] excessive posting

body:
In reply to Gerrit and Ray:

>It's clear that Jack would not have defended his
>position with such enthusiasm if no one had answered.

Correct. My remark about excessive posting was not
limited to Jack.

>Most keyboards have a feature which is consistent
with >having a life. It's the delete button. Some of
us are >even so advanced that we can delete several
messages >at once. :-)

>Don't complain about messages; the subject is clear,
>you know what thread it's a part of, and you are very
>welcome to delete any message you like.

With the enormous output of mails some participants
produce here and the impossibility of reading all of
them, important arguments can be overlooked easily. On
top of that, the arguments of members who don't have
the time to write a dozen or more e-mails per day are
sometimes drowned out by an overly productive
minority.

I've sure heard about that delete button but I think
it can't replace a sound culture of discussion. In an
oral conversation you can't talk 80% of the time.
Here, I sometimes get the impression that some people
believe the more (and the longer) e-mails they write,
the more right they are.

Sorry, I just needed to get rid of this.

Have a nice weekend!

Arbeo

___________________________________________________________
Was denken Sie ?ber E-Mail? Wir h?ren auf Ihre Meinung: http://surveylink.yahoo.com/wix/p0379378.aspx


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] excessive posting

body:
Walter van Kalken wrote:

>> I've sure heard about that delete button but I think
>> it can't replace a sound culture of discussion. In an
>> oral conversation you can't talk 80% of the time.
>> Here, I sometimes get the impression that some people
>> believe the more (and the longer) e-mails they write,
>> the more right they are.
>
> I second this. Sometimes discussions are ended this way before most
> people even found out it had started. It is not necassary in a
> discussion to immediately respond to every mail another person writes
> within 10 seconds of the mail arriving in your inbox. Waiting 24 hours
> never hurts!

The 24-hour wait is a reality in a world-wide project where we all live
in different time zones.  Those in your own time zone can respond
quickly, but those on the other side of the world won't  see your
message until tomorrow.

Ec


from_name: Ros’ Haruo

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia-l Digest, Vol 26, Issue 60

body:
Ausir wrote:

Well, I would say that if a word exists that is understandable on both sides
of the Ocean, even if used not as often as other forms, it should be
preferred. Other than that, however, I see nothing wrong with using either
British, American, Canadian, Australian in any article.

 I think that is a good solution, so long as the word chosen actually means
the same thing on both sides of the Ocean. "Hood" is a part of a motorcar on
both sides of the River, but not the same part. (Or at least this was true
thirty years ago when I was becoming aware of such distinctions.)
 Haruo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] re English English, Ausir's take

body:
I am not quite awake, so I forgot to change the subject line. Sorry...

On 9/24/05, Ros' Haruo <rosharuo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ausir wrote:
>
> Well, I would say that if a word exists that is understandable on both
> sides of the Ocean, even if used not as often as other forms, it should be
> preferred. Other than that, however, I see nothing wrong with using either
> British, American, Canadian, Australian in any article.
>
>  I think that is a good solution, so long as the word chosen actually
> means the same thing on both sides of the Ocean. "Hood" is a part of a
> motorcar on both sides of the River, but not the same part. (Or at least
> this was true thirty years ago when I was becoming aware of such
> distinctions.)
>  Haruo
>

--
Meet the Whole World Halfway ? Learn and Use Esperanto!
http://www.scn.org/~lilandbr/lang_tax.html ? http://lernu.net


from_name: Giuseppe DAngelo

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: rubbish bin?

body:
Now here's a bloke who is making sense (although personally I would have referred to it as the rubbish bin because it is neither a can nor does it contain dust).  In fact a a thread could perhaps be started on this subject alone - we could go on for the next two months without a problem!
pippu d'angelo

>4. Re: Wikipedia English English (Michael Snow)
Message: 4
Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 16:56:31 -0700
From: Michael Snow
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia English English
Hi. Could somebody please remove the pots and kettles (whether black or any other colour/color) from the cooker/stove and deposit them in the dustbin/trashcan, and end this discussion?
>--Michael Snow

---------------------------------
Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi, antispam, antivirus, POP3


list: wikien-l

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Fair use" abuse on user pages

body:
Fastfission wrote:

>Whether people will read it or not, having a set of concrete resources
>can aid in discussions with obstinate users as well. Resources can be
>forms of authority in and of themselves -- "Look at this, it says you
>are wrong."
>
Dealing with the obstinate ones, and enforcing rules is a different
problem.  The more immediate issue is getting people of good will to
understand what they are talking about.

>I don't participate in Meta, and I don't know what the gameplan is
>there. And though copyright law applies to all of the Wiki projects,
>it applies to them in different ways varying by their content. Commons
>is exclusively about image and sound media; Wikisource is about
>wholesale textual media; Wikiquote is about what degree of quotation
>is copyrightable; etc. So I think having resources tailored to
>individual projects makes sense, in the same sense that Wikiquote
>ought to have its own Copyrights page distinct from Wikipedia's (which
>it now does).
>
Certainly the "way" these laws are applied will vary, but we are still
dealing with fundamentally the same law.  If you strip a problem down to
its basics it becomes much easier to see how each of these projects
deviates from those basics.  When sports teams begin to perform
erratically a good coach will take the time to get the players to
practice basic skills.

>The goal of the resources I'm proposing is to focus on simplicity,
>ease, and low-investment (of time, energy, brain, etc.) on the part of
>the user. Whether some users refuse to make any use of it, I still
>think on the whole it's not a bad idea and could be quite useful. But
>it's just one of many such things.
>
Nobody's saying it's a bad idea.

Ec


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Netocrat

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Patch: suppress auto-numbering of TOC and honour user
	prefs

body:
This is a minimal change to add a new magic token that prevents
numbering of the TOC and to do the same when the user option "Auto-number
headings" under "Misc" in "Preferences" is set.  This option is already
retrieved through $this->mOptions->getNumberHeadings(); but currently not
used effectively.

The token directive is useful because some sections in a wiki may already
include numbering as part of the heading and suppressing auto-numbering is
useful in those cases.

Index: includes/Parser.php
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/wikipedia/phase3/includes/Parser.php,v
retrieving revision 1.509
diff -u -r1.509 Parser.php
--- includes/Parser.php	23 Sep 2005 12:10:39 -0000	1.509
+++ includes/Parser.php	24 Sep 2005 12:57:48 -0000
@@ -2461,8 +2461,15 @@
 	 */
 	function formatHeadings( $text, $isMain=true ) {
 		global $wgMaxTocLevel, $wgContLang, $wgLinkHolders, $wgInterwikiLinkHolders;
-
-		$doNumberHeadings = $this->mOptions->getNumberHeadings();
+
+		# if the string __NOTOCNUM__  (not case-sensitive) occurs in the HTML,
+		# or if the user prefers not to, do not add TOC Numbering
+		$mw =& MagicWord::get( MAG_NOTOCNUM );
+		if( $mw->matchAndRemove( $text ) ) {
+			$doNumberHeadings = false;
+		} else {
+			$doNumberHeadings = $this->mOptions->getNumberHeadings();
+		}
 		$doShowToc = true;
 		$forceTocHere = false;
 		if( !$this->mTitle->userCanEdit() ) {
@@ -2647,7 +2654,7 @@
 				$anchor .= '_' . $refcount[$headlineCount];
 			}
 			if( $doShowToc && ( !isset($wgMaxTocLevel) || $toclevel<$wgMaxTocLevel ) ) {
-				$toc .= $sk->tocLine($anchor, $tocline, $numbering, $toclevel);
+				$toc .= $sk->tocLine($anchor, $tocline, $doNumberHeadings?$numbering:'', $toclevel);
 			}
 			if( $showEditLink && ( !$istemplate || $templatetitle !== "" ) ) {
 				if ( empty( $head[$headlineCount] ) ) {
Index: languages/Language.php
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/wikipedia/phase3/languages/Language.php,v
retrieving revision 1.684
diff -u -r1.684 Language.php
--- languages/Language.php	23 Sep 2005 12:10:39 -0000	1.684
+++ languages/Language.php	24 Sep 2005 12:58:06 -0000
@@ -190,6 +190,7 @@
 #   ID                                 CASE  SYNONYMS
 	MAG_REDIRECT             => array( 0,    '#redirect'              ),
 	MAG_NOTOC                => array( 0,    '__NOTOC__'              ),
+	MAG_NOTOCNUM             => array( 0,    '__NOTOCNUM__'           ),
 	MAG_FORCETOC             => array( 0,    '__FORCETOC__'           ),
 	MAG_TOC                  => array( 0,    '__TOC__'                ),
 	MAG_NOEDITSECTION        => array( 0,    '__NOEDITSECTION__'      ),

--
http://members.dodo.com.au/~netocrat


from_name: Rob

subject: [WikiEN-l] WTF? Is it suddenly OK to ignore consensus on AfD?

body:
Why is this an emergency?  Why not just email the guy
and let the issue sit until tomorrow?  Wikipedia will
not fall because a couple school stubs didn't get
undeleted for 24 hours.

__________________________________
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Bryan Derksen

body:
Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:

>Even so, you really should have tried to communicate with him before
>taking it too the list. I agree that the decision is totally absurd,
>but you should let him defend himself first. And if he does, as you
>suggest he will, ignore/blank you, you will have more ammo for a
>discussion.
>
>
Okay, he should have tried talking to Neutrality first.

In the meantime, though, I've checked the VfD in question:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Crescent_Park_Elementary_School
and it appears that the basic complaint is true - this was clearly _not_
a consensus to delete. It's very clear that it isn't, too, since as
pointed out there's actually a clear majority of votes for keep/merge
versus delete. I'm putting this on VfU, but really, I think this should
be a speedy undelete.


body:
Bryan Derksen wrote:

> In the meantime, though, I've checked the VfD in question:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Crescent_Park_Elementary_School
>
> and it appears that the basic complaint is true - this was clearly
> _not_ a consensus to delete. It's very clear that it isn't, too, since
> as pointed out there's actually a clear majority of votes for
> keep/merge versus delete. I'm putting this on VfU, but really, I think
> this should be a speedy undelete.

Following up on my own comment, I just noticed while putting the VfU
listing up that Neutrality did pretty much the same thing on
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Manila_Waldorf_School>.
I'll go through a bunch of recent deletions and see if there are others
that need listing on VfU too, and list them there.


list: foundation-l

from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews is now CC-BY

body:
The Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License was the most supported
license in the recent poll at
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/Licensure_Poll>.

Many of the options had very few voters. Of the options with more than
12 voters, the GFDL had only 21% support, and the Wikinews License 0.2
had 60% support (or 64% from Wikinewsies). Fewer people voted on the
Wikinews License option than on the Creative Commons one, meaning 31
people in total supported CC-BY, compared to just 17 supporting WNL
2.0.

With over 87% support from Wikinewsies in the poll, and 82% support
overall, CC-BY has now been agreed upon by the Wikimedia Foundation to
be the new license for all existing and future versions of Wikinews.
Any edits made previously remain public domain - it is only new edits
that will need to be under this Creative Commons License.

The license can be read at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
(that page links to other language versions of the license, and the
full legal code).

Brion has changed the site settings, so the meta data of the wikis
should state they are now CC-BY. However, manually created pages such
as http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Copyright will need to be
updated. MediaWiki namespace pages may need changing if they had been
edited previously. Pages that might need changing include:
[[MediaWiki:Copyright]], [[MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning]],
[[MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning2]], [[MediaWiki:Copyrightpage]],
[[Project:Copyrights]].

I would appreciate it if you could translate this message into the
language of your Wikinews so that all members of the community are
aware of the change.

Angela

--
Angela Beesley
Wikimedia Foundation


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews is now CC-BY


body:
Stephen Bain wrote:

>While I don't necessarily agree with the decision (I think there was
>no consensus either way), one can see how some of the votes might have
>been given greater weight than others. For example:
>
>"Keep, we winning the fight aginst school deletionism."
>"Keep. I heard from Aranda56 that we needed more votes for this article."
>"Keep I heard from Radman's sisters' aunts' brothers' cousins'
>girlfriends' sister that this needed to be kept!"
>"Keep."
>
>
Also:
"*Delete."*
*"Delete*. Usual reasons."
"*Delete* not worthwhile"

So disregarding "low value" votes doesn't look like it swings the vote
clearly in one direction or the other to me, unless one selectively
disregards poorly-supported votes on one side but not on the other. I
certainly wouldn't mind a policy encouraging disregarding such votes,
mind you, I just don't think it would make a difference here.


from_name: Michael Turley

body:
Neutrality just closed a AfD regarding Crescent Park Elementary School
by deleting the article.

The debate and discussion included 19 keep votes, and 15 delete votes,
one merge and one "merge or delete" vote.

Since when does a majority keep mean to delete the article?

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


from_name: Snowspinner

body:
Have you brought this up with Neutrality, or are you taking it
straight to the mailing list?

-Snowspinner

On Sep 25, 2005, at 12:08 AM, Michael Turley wrote:

> Neutrality just closed a AfD regarding Crescent Park Elementary School
> by deleting the article.
>
> The debate and discussion included 19 keep votes, and 15 delete votes,
> one merge and one "merge or delete" vote.
>
> Since when does a majority keep mean to delete the article?
>
> --
> Michael Turley
> User:Unfocused
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On 9/25/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Have you brought this up with Neutrality, or are you taking it
> straight to the mailing list?

Straight to the list, because he's ignored and blanked every message
I've ever left on his talk page.  That itself was the subject of an
RfC at the time, but nobody seemed to think it was a bad idea for an
arbitrator to refuse to communicate in good faith.  This again, is
related to his desire to delete school articles from Wikipedia with or
without consensus, and I don't expect any different treatment from the
last time I tried to communicate on this issue with him.

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: No more new Wikipedias !

body:
Just speaking as one small editor (and user! I read as well as writing!)
primarily in the Esperanta Vikipedio (though I've also made some
contributions to others, probably more to Swahili than anything else besides
English), with reference to Tim Starling's statements, I will be less
fervently supportive of Wikipedia and Wikimedia in general if proposed
Wikipedias that have the level of support Ladino, Neapolitan and Waray-Waray
have are not activated. I don't know much about the innards of
Wikipolicymaking, but I do have some idea what effect this "stagnation" or
whatever you want to call it will have on my loyalties and interest level.
And I'm probably not alone among those of us who do not spend all our days
posting to this list. ;-)
 Haruo


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Arbeo M wrote:
> ... at least not for the past three months or so.
>
> In the past you only had to drop the name of some
> language you'd heard of and a new wiki for that
> language was created right away. This surely wasn't a
> very intelligent approach, for it left us with quite a
> number of inactive Wikipedias.
>
> Nowadays, it's the opposite extreme: there are heaps
> of requests that have been discussed very thoroughly
> by the community (cf.
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages).
> Some of them are pretty well-qualified and supported
> by numerous native speakers willing to contribute.
> However, not a single new Wikipedia has been set up
> for quite a while now.
>
> Some time ago there had been a remark that it was hard
> for our developers to recognize which new language
> proposals can be considered as accepeted by the
> community (and therefore created). That's why I made a
> separate page intended to list languages that
> unambiguously qualify for a new wiki (cf.
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Approved_requests_for_new_languages).
> Since this can be a controversial question I only
> placed those cases there that are 100 % unequivocal
> (at least 5 supporters, at least 2 native speakers,
> ISO code, no objections, etc.).
>

I've stated my position on new language wikis, and we've been through
all the arguments before. Just because I'm no longer interested in
arguing every case, or putting my name on the oppose votes, doesn't mean
I've changed my mind.

I created 5 new Wikipedias in June because I received a request from a
Wikimedia Board member. If I receive another such specific request, I'll
carry it out. I do that out of loyalty to them, not because I think it
contributes to our mission.

The problem with voting on the matter is that it is a vote to expand the
community. It should come as no surprise that those people who are on
the outside are voting to be on the inside. As I've previously said, we
should judge the value of a wiki by the number of readers, and by the
information it brings to those readers, not by the number of editors. A
Wikipedia in Anglo Saxon is a failure regardless of how many articles or
editors it has. I know Anglo Saxon is an extreme case, but I'm not
prepared to argue about every point in between, especially not when a
certain annoying person dominates every discussion. I tired of the
repetitive debate long ago, so I'm happy to consider the current set of
languages sufficient. Hopefully if there's any really important
languages that we've missed, a Board member will let me know.

> [...]
> Before any misunderstandings might arise: I know that
> our developers are extremely busy (and AFAIK unpaid,
> too - good gosh...). I was just wondering if somebody
> has an idea how we could remedy this situation and
> maybe have, like, one new WP per month (so we don't
> lose too many potential new contributors)?

If those potential new contributors only want to write articles in some
little-known conlang, I won't shed any tears if they stay away.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] New request for Cantonese Wikipedia: vote at 29-6

body:
> The conclusion was emphatic among the Cantonese speakers. The
> consensus was - "not at this time." In fact, it was unanimous. (See
> below for full description of the meetup).

I have a hard time believing this, since Littlalex was in fact an
ardent supporter of a Cantonese Wiki the last time around.

And these people are all welcome to vote.

> This was not a group without expertise. Among those present -
> Lorenzarius, one of the original zh: Wikipedians; Little Alex,
> currently studying for a degree in translation; Mcy_jerry, studying
> medicine in Chinese University (an institution coping with
> Mandarin/Cantonese/English issues as the medium of instruction); and
> Simon Shek, Carlsmith, W.F. Siu, Mapocathy, all folks who've grown up
> in the mixed language school environment.

That is... 7 people? What about all of the other Cantonese speakers
who've already voted? Out of ALL of those people, the only one who has
voted is Simon Shek.

> This seems clear this idea should put this out to pasture, for now.

That seems a bit silly to me. If you take a look at the vote, and
exclude all non-Cantonese speakers (at least, as far as I am aware):

Support:
Jasonzhuocn
Bourquie
Connie
Eternal
Jogloran
Felix Wan
Enochlau
CantoneseWiki

Oppose:
Sl
Zektonic
Crosstimer
Jeromy~Yuyu
Simon Shek

That _still_ gives a majority for "support". Now, just because 7
people at a meetup agreed "unanimously", according to you (which I
still doubt, given the fact that it would mean a drastic change in
position for Littlalex), that a Cantonese Wikipedia should not be
created at this time, does not "put the idea out to pasture".

You are still spreading the silly idea that a Cantonese Wikipedia will
take away lots of people and resources from zhwiki. Why not use an
example based on experience -- zh-min-nan?? How much did that take
away?

How many potential contributors do you think a Cantonese WP would draw
away? Given all the things YOU've said about Cantonese in the past, it
seems a contradiction that you're saying that the zhwp will somehow
suffer if a CantoWP is created.

> Excerpt related to Cantonese Wikipedia:
> [...]
> Obviously, one of the biggest issues was Cantonese Wikipedia. After
> discussing it for a while, there was consensus (in fact unanimity)
> that though there is legitimate and desirable use for vernacular
> written Cantonese in casual use, arts, film, newspaper columns and the
> like, the conclusion about Cantonese Wikipedia was - "not at this
> time."

It's a shame we don't have an audio or video recording of this meetup.
I sort of doubt the veracity of your claims here. And if these people
have these feelings, they're welcome to vote, as they have always
been.

> * Current state of Chinese Wikipedia. There was agreement that the
> general quality of the average article in Chinese Wikipedia is
> relatively poor, even though it has 40,000+ articles. The recent stats
> on "short articles" showed zh: contained unusually high number of
> them, and empirically Mcyjerry made the point that they are generally
> lacking in content. Folks felt that it was more important to shore up
> the existing zh: Wikipedia instead of splitting the effort.

I'd not be surprised if you were the one who brought this up in the
first place, trying to make it sound logical when it makes no sense
whatsoever. "splitting the effort" is not going to happen. There will
be no mass-exodus. This is all FUD on your part, trying to scare the
others at the meetup into opposing the creation of a Cantonese
Wikipedia by making the claim that zhwp will suffer because of it,
even though that is extremely unlikely and it's not clear how you
reached that conclusion as you've never offered anything to support
it.

> * Universities and Cantonese use. Mcyjerry and Lorenzarius, students
> at Chinese University of Hong Kong explained that their science and
> medicine classes were not done in Cantonese, and if they were it would
> be confusing. They can elaborate more as to why, but Chinese
> University was setup to promote Chinese education in a (then) British
> Colony.

Well, others have testified here to the exact opposite. How are we to
sort out which is correct, and which is not?

Mark


body:
> When did membership to the email list constitute any more legitimacy
> than folks who are "offlist"? That's one of the more odd arguments
> I've seen about this issue.

I actually agree with you on this one.

> No, because the vote pertaining to Wu and Yue (Cantonese) was all
> stuck together into one combined poll, which I pointed out as a flaw
> very early on. In effect, the "votes for" became a union of folks
> interested in one or the other. You shouldn't take the AND of an OR
> vote.

When you originally "pointed [it] out as a flaw", somebody else
pointed out that you were not correctly understanding the
instructions.

As was previously noted by at least two users besides myself, "If you
wish to choose on a case-by-case basis, please vote in both sections
but note which requests you support and which you oppose" DOES NOT
mean that there is a separate section for each Wikipedia, but rather:

If you support the creation of one but not another, you should list
your name under both "Support" and "Oppose", noting which ones you
support and which you oppose. I don't see how you still didn't
understand this after it was explained to you. And, if you felt it was
unclear, you could always have changed it: after all, it IS a Wiki
page.

Some users did in fact say "I support _____, but not ______" or "At
this time, I only support ____".

Lankiveil supported Cantonese and Wu but not Hakka (at least not at
this time); CantoneseWiki noted that his vote was only for Cantonese
and that he doesn't have a comment on Shanghainese or Hakka at the
moment. Polyhedron said that he agreed to Classical Chinese, but none
of the contemporary "regional varieties" (probably the most neutral
term).

> How do you draw that conclusion? The issues brought up were that
> written Cantonese is used today in nonstandard ways, and that it is
> unusual to use it in formal writings. That might change over the
> years, but for now, to folks at the meetup it was not desirable to
> embark on the starup of an entire project in writing Cantonese
> encyclopedia entries the way you find in zh:, en:, de:, etc.

Had I been there, I would've brought up quite a bit more, including
that we have Wikipedias in "regional vernaculars" not used in formal
areas generally, such as Asturian, Platt, Limburgish, Sicilian,
Occitan... also, others which were until very recently not used in
formal situations, such as the Ukrainian WP.

> Pretty weak strawman argument. See Tim Starling's post earlier today.
> Wikipedia's goal is to make the sum of all human knowledge available
> for free. And right now, zh: is one, if not the most, prominent
> weakness in the Wikipedia universe.

You didn't really respond to his argument. The thing is, you haven't
yet explained why it is logical to assume that the Chinese Wikipedia
will lose a significant number of potential contributors if a
Cantonese Wikipedia is created.

> To quote Mark again: "Waerth and I both think it's unfair to let
> anybody but the actual language community make decisions about whether
> or not they should get a Wikipedia whether or not they should get a
> Wikipedia."

Yes, and if you look at the way Cantonese speakers have voted on the
Meta page, it's quite clear: the majority want a separate Wikipedia.

> Yet here we are, with non-Cantonese folks spearheading the effort, and
> a Cantonese-based
> meetup saying no, they don't want one.

Yes, since a meetup _obviously_ represents 100% of the
Cantonese-speaking world. You still haven't shown that a majority
opposes the idea -- on the votes page, more Cantonese speakers voted
"support" than "oppose".

Mark


body:
Another argument to add:

Many of the existing Wikipedias (Catalan, Basque, Galician, Sicilian,
Scots, etc etc) are in languages whose speakers are generally also
highly fluent in a more widely-spoken language (Spanish or French,
Spanish or French, Spanish or Portuguese, Italian, and English,
respectively).

Should we delete these Wikipedias?

I think that, with time, a Neapolitan Wikipedia could grow to be the
size that the Italian Wikipedia is today. Will they ever be the same
size at the same time? Probably not. But it's also unlikely that the
Italian Wikipedia will overtake that English Wikipedia in size... it
seems to have to do more with when they were started, how well they
were publicised, etc., rather than some sort of internal value for
each language.

Mark


body:
On 9/25/05, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Even so, you really should have tried to communicate with him before
> taking it too the list. I agree that the decision is totally absurd,
> but you should let him defend himself first. And if he does, as you
> suggest he will, ignore/blank you, you will have more ammo for a
> discussion.

Ammo for discussion?  What's wrong with simply discussing the issue
rather than gathering "ammo"?

Look at it from my point of view: an arbitrator/administrator rebuffed
my attempts to communicate with him.  An RfC was started, and it went
nowhere, apparently because so many people refused to believe the RfC
was about refusal to communicate, instead choosing to believe it was
that he nominated articles en masse to VfD.

If I had any reason to believe I would get a good faith answer from
the person in question, I would post on his talk page.  However, not
only have I not been given reason to believe that he'll communicate,
I've seen the opposite because shortly after the last time, he added a
somewhat hostile "policy" to his talk page which seems to be meant to
justify his capriciousness.

I'm not one to go banging my head against brick walls.  I don't like
to waste my time, and I don't like the headaches.  Ignore me if you so
choose, but I prefer to discuss this in the open with several other
reasonalbe users rather than try to start a conversation with a single
user who's already proven unresponsive to myself and several others on
this exact issue.

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


from_name: Jtkiefer

body:
I'd just like to note that Mr. Turley has recently disputed a AFD I
closed as well recently, that AFD being the one for
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck the South, the resulting conversations
can also be found at my talk page and at votes for undeletion.

-Jtkiefer


body:
Jtkiefer wrote:

> I'd just like to note that Mr. Turley has recently disputed a AFD I
> closed as well recently, that AFD being the one for
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck the South, the resulting
> conversations can also be found at my talk page and at votes for
> undeletion.
>
> -Jtkiefer
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
ugh, link Error, here's the link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck the South
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck%20the%20South>

-Jtkiefer


body:
On 9/24/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:

> I created 5 new Wikipedias in June because I received a request from a
> Wikimedia Board member. If I receive another such specific request, I'll
> carry it out. I do that out of loyalty to them, not because I think it
> contributes to our mission.

I doubt you'll get another such request since I've been told that new
language wikis is not a Board issue and I shouldn't be taking
decisions on these or asking developers to start them. What people
fail to realise is that if the Board doesn't take these decisions (and
perhaps they're right and the Board shouldn't) - then who is going to
take them? There is increasingly resistance to the Board doing
anything, but also resistance to them delegating any authority they
may have had, which is just leading to stagnation. So, who should be
taking the decision on new language wikis (and also on new projects),
especially when no
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_policy_for_wikis_in_new_languages>
has ever been agreed upon?

Angela.


body:
On 9/25/05, Jtkiefer <jtkiefer at wordzen.net> wrote:
> I'd just like to note that Mr. Turley has recently disputed a AFD I
> closed as well recently, that AFD being the one for
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck the South, the resulting conversations
> can also be found at my talk page and at votes for undeletion.

And in this case, I posted on your talk page because I felt confident
that I would not be ignored by an unresponsive administrator.
Obviously my good faith was not misplaced in you as you responded both
on your talk page, and by undeleting the article in question.  Thank
you for both.

I don't know what point you are trying to make in mentioning this.
Perhaps you will explain what the relevance is to a different article
where the majority view was to keep, and the admin deleted anyway?

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


list: commons-l

from_name: mds_444 at yahoo.com

subject: [Commons-l] Join Milton Devadoss on Yahoo! Messenger!

body:
Milton Devadoss wants to talk with you using the new Yahoo! Messenger with Voice:

Accept the invitation by clicking this link:

http://invite.msg.yahoo.com/invite?op=accept&intl=us&sig=oyKT5MGwRRnWWMN2n3dJ6rsuJByrUext2WsbimQLQF7e9wITRWGEv0SeZwlviwKl5OTzgibVdRyaFICGDoW7bc5LfTWf9NnX4YNs0ISCg9iYJrrvmjhzLwcT8q62_HYXfTlj

With Yahoo! Messenger with Voice, you get:

 Free worldwide PC-to-PC calls.* All you need are speakers and a microphone (or a headset). If no one's there, leave a voicemail!

 Simple photo sharing. It's as easy as dragging-and-dropping pictures right into your instant message window.

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 So what are you waiting for? It's free. Get Yahoo! Messenger with Voice and start connecting how you want, when you want.

 * Emergency 911 calling services not available on Yahoo! Messenger. Please inform others who use your Yahoo! Messenger they must dial 911 through traditional phone lines or cell carriers. By using Yahoo! Messenger you agree to not use PC-to-PC calling in countries where prohibited. The above features apply to the Windows version of Yahoo! Messenger.
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from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Any usage stat?

body:
Here you go, thanks to the Google (is there anything they can't do?)
cache: http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:1eofE6U0Iw8J:www2.knams.wikimedia.org/logwood/logwood.php%3Fsite%3Den.wikipedia.org+&hl=en

--gkhan

On 9/23/05, Jakob Voss <jakob.voss at nichtich.de> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> A few days ago there was a usage stat at
>
> http://www2.knams.wikimedia.org/logwood/logwood.php?site=en.wikipedia.org
>
> where you could get a list of the top 100 most viewed wikipedia articles
> (a lot of sexual related articles but also other stuff). Unfourtunately
> I have not saved this page - does anyone have a copy or can you please
> switch it on again? I just need a list and a date so I can cite it in my
> paper and compare it it with the most edited articles.
>
> Thanks a lot,
> Jakob
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
On 9/25/05, Rob <gamaliel8 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Why is this an emergency?  Why not just email the guy
> and let the issue sit until tomorrow?  Wikipedia will
> not fall because a couple school stubs didn't get
> undeleted for 24 hours.

What makes you think it's an emergency?

I didn't email, as I explained earlier, because Neutrality has been
completely unresponsive in the past with several of us who disagree
with him regarding the presence of school articles in Wikipedia.
Since I couldn't reasonably expect a response from Neutrality, I
brought it to a place where I could count on thoughtful consideration
and discussion of the issues involved.

--
Michael Turley
User:Unfocused


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews is now CC-BY

body:
On 9/25/05, Aphaia <aphaia at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Any edits made previously remain public domain - it is only new edits
> > that will need to be under this Creative Commons License.
>
> you meant in fact "remain public domain or the other licence which
> each project had chosen", I suppose.

Yes, that is what I meant. Edits remain whatever they originally were
(often PD, but I realise this wasn't the case for some wikis). If any
text was licensed under something not compatible with CC-BY, it might
be best to protect those pages and note on them that they were
licensed under <whatever>.

> One technical question: can "CC-By-2.1-(a certain country) or later"
> switch to merely "CC-By-2.5" or "CC-By-2.5-(another certain country)?

I don't know enough about the iCommons licenses to know whether that
switch is permitted.

Angela


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews is now CC-BY


body:
> Consider the folks who were at the meeting part of the "no" votes.

That the summary says it was "unanimous" does not specify how strongly
people felt about it. I still doubt what you said about the meeting.

> If you look at the photo from the meeting, you'll see I am sitting
> right next to Little Alex. But why not ask her yourself?

Umm... yeah, I saw the photo. I know she was there. That's why I
doubted what you said.

> > You are still spreading the silly idea that a Cantonese Wikipedia will
> > take away lots of people and resources from zhwiki. Why not use an
> > example based on experience -- zh-min-nan?? How much did that take
> > away?
>
> Your exaggeration again. I never said it will take away "lots of
> people and resources" away. But every bit put behind zh: would help.
> The exaggerated case helps you try to make your case, but that's your
> error.

I didn't say you SAID it. I said you're spreading that idea. Which you
still are.

I think it's silly to try to prevent a Cantonese Wikipedia's creation
just because "every little bit helps". Why not try to close zh-min-nan
down while you're at it??

> LOL.
>
> The meeting was attended by eight Wikipedians and two guests. The
> summary is sitting on a public wiki that anyone who attended could
> amend. Shek translated it into Chinese, so that's one more check on
> the record. Feel free to leave a message for any and all the folks who
> showed up, and ask for verification of the meeting observations.
>
> But you, sitting in Arizona have a better sense of it, I'm sure.
>
> This is bordering on tinfoil hat territory now.

I did not say that the summary was inaccurate. My point was that I
wouldn't have a hard time believing that you or somebody else said
something rediculous which nobody called.

> > I'd not be surprised if you were the one who brought this up in the
> > first place, trying to make it sound logical when it makes no sense
> > whatsoever.
>
> Wrong. It was Mcy_jerry who brought it up, talking about the generally
> poor article quality of the average zh: article compared to others.

Quality? So, did he bring up quantity? Were you completely silent
during this whole portion of the meetup, or did you just express
agreement without making any points??

> > "splitting the effort" is not going to happen. There will
> > be no mass-exodus.
>
> "Mass exodus" - these are your words, not mine or those of anyone at
> the meetup. It is not a case that was made.

I did not say that you, or anybody else at the meetup, said "mass
exodus". However, you seem to imply it when you talk about a division
of effort.

> > Well, others have testified here to the exact opposite. How are we to
> > sort out which is correct, and which is not?
>
> Again, this shows the whole flaw with the "Sinitic policy" vote,
> because there was no finding of fact laid out or debated to provide
> proper background on the merits of the idea, not to mention the

There were Wikipedia articles and external websites linked. If you
felt it was inadequate, you are and have always been more than welcome
to change the page.

> selective publicity it received.

You mean, advertising it specifically to CANTONESE SPEAKERS only? I
didn't even look for Cantonese speakers who I thought would vote
"support". Just ALL CANTONESE SPEAKERS with a babel template to
indicate it. And I sent a notification e-mail to this list. I wouldn't
call that "selective publicity".

> It became a straight up or down vote
> with the flaw of roping Wu and Yue into one bin, pandering to the
> inclusionist, embrace anything-and-everything-attitude at the expense
> of any subject knowledge or first hand experience with the language,
> culture or issues.

Nobody roped Wu and Cantonese into one bin. This has been explained to
you at least 4 times now, by me and at least two other people.

> The reason why I (and others) have not participated in the vote, is
> because of the major flaws with it. Participating in it would be
> implicitly endorsing the flawed methodology and structure setup by the
> originator of it (ie. you). The hope was that the existing discussion
> would dissipate with folks realizing the invalid "vote". But since it
> keeps being brought up as an indication of the will of the community,
> here's directly why it's not only nonbinding, but flawed and useless.

Uhh... HELLO! It's a WIKI PAGE. Sofixit. If it's flawed, don't whinge
about it. Don't complain about how it's invalid or nonbinding. You had
your chance to edit the page, add or change things. And you had your
chance to vote. YOU STILL DO, because there is no end-date for the
poll. Thus, in my view, the poll is valid: you had an opportunity to
make modifications, but you didn't.

> A properly run vote would have:
>
> - Laid out the issues in an NPOV-like manner using community input,
> with historical background and a preset amount of time for crafting
> the parameters of the vote. A list of liks to generic articles about
> Chinese and Cantonese is not good enough.

Well, I disagree. But you could've added that yourself.

> - Had separate voting sections for Wu, Yue and Hakka, like other
> proper votes in Wikipedia. See how reform of speedy deletion was
> handled: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Proposal

It was made very clear in the voting information that one could
specify which they supported. If they didn't, that implied support of
all of the above. If you felt that wasn't good enough, you should've
said it then. Instead, you couldn't wrap your mind around the simple
rules of the vote, even when they were explained to you by 3 separate
people, and so kept whinging.

> - Made an open call for participation in all relevant communities.
> Certainly, not advertising it on wikizh-l until late was problematic.
> Even the after-the-fact advertisement was not adequate, as the yea/nay
> lists had already been influenced by one particular set of
> constituents.

"Relevant" is POV. I do not think zh.wiki is a "relevant". But since
you did, you could've advertised it, as could anyone else.

To advertise it on wikizh-l would result in just as much of an
influence by "one particular set of constituents", namely those whose
only native variety is Mandarin, for example Shizhao.

However, even after it was advertised on wikizh-l, all of the votes
coming in from people who were most likely linked from their followed
approximately a previous pattern.

> - Avoided singling out folks right away as this one did with Shizhao
> and myself as the main opposition. I don't particularly care about
> being singled out, but it's improper to personalize a vote on the
> issues.

Sofixit.

> So we get to this point - you have somehow disregarded your own advice:

Sofixit.

> The fact is with the prevailing mood - the case for creating a
> Wikipedia has to meet a very high threshold with respected members of
> the Wikipedia community, and it's not there now.

I'm pretty sure that the main criteria are:

*Supporters who are native speakers (we have plenty of those, in fact
on the voting page they are in the majority)
*Different from any existing Wikipedia (Shizhao may dispute this, and
you may or may not say it's not "different enough", but it is
nevertheless "different" to such a degree that Milcheflasche claimed
to have difficulties understanding the Test-wp articles, and Jogloran
claimed that he understood the Test-wp articles better than those on
zh-wp.)
*Overwhelming majority in support (ie, not 50-50 or 60-40).

"A very high threshold with respected members of the Wikipedia
community" was not a condition met for most of the Wikipedias
currently in existance.

And your case still seems to always come back to the "every little bit
helps". That's just it -- only one little bit would leave. And to
cling to it so desparately, to the point of attempting to prevent
people from getting a separate Wiki in their native language, seems
extremely selfish to me.

Actually, I highly doubt that anybody will _completely_ leave zhwiki
for a Cantonese Wikipedia. I would suspect that they would instead
share their time, much as many users of Indic language Wikipedias do
with English and the like.

Mark


from_name: Walter van Kalken

subject: [Wikipedia-l] excessive posting

body:
>
>I've sure heard about that delete button but I think
>it can't replace a sound culture of discussion. In an
>oral conversation you can't talk 80% of the time.
>Here, I sometimes get the impression that some people
>believe the more (and the longer) e-mails they write,
>the more right they are.
>
>

>Arbeo
>
>
>
I second this. Sometimes discussions are ended this way before most
people even found out it had started. It is not necassary in a
discussion to immediately respond to every mail another person writes
within 10 seconds of the mail arriving in your inbox. Waiting 24 hours
never hurts!

Waerth/Walter


body:
Even so, you really should have tried to communicate with him before
taking it too the list. I agree that the decision is totally absurd,
but you should let him defend himself first. And if he does, as you
suggest he will, ignore/blank you, you will have more ammo for a
discussion.

--gkhan

On 9/25/05, Michael Turley <michael.turley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/25/05, Snowspinner <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Have you brought this up with Neutrality, or are you taking it
> > straight to the mailing list?
>
>
> Straight to the list, because he's ignored and blanked every message
> I've ever left on his talk page.  That itself was the subject of an
> RfC at the time, but nobody seemed to think it was a bad idea for an
> arbitrator to refuse to communicate in good faith.  This again, is
> related to his desire to delete school articles from Wikipedia with or
> without consensus, and I don't expect any different treatment from the
> last time I tried to communicate on this issue with him.
>
> --
> Michael Turley
> User:Unfocused
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Why is this an emergency?

body:
On Sep 25, 2005, at 3:09 AM, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:

> Why is this an emergency?  Why not just email the guy
> and let the issue sit until tomorrow?  Wikipedia will
> not fall because a couple school stubs didn't get
> undeleted for 24 hours.

Because the debate over schools has had very little to do with
anything relating to actual articles for a long time. It is just an
arena for an unpleasant sports event between two factions.

(Note: carefully chosen metaphor. No metaphorical human beings were
killed or injured in the making of this metaphor).

The Wikipedian community seems to me to be the sort of community that
really does rely on common goals and shared values.

It is unlike organizational structures that _assume_ that
factionalism is the _norm_, and consequently are designed to measure
the relative strength of factions with precision. Such structures
rely on hierarchies, constitutions, parliamentary procedure, and voting.

Oldtimers: is the school struggle just par for the course, or does it
represent an emerging and deepening _lack_ of consensus on important
issues?

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


body:
Yes, I agree totally, and that is precisely why he should have talked
to Neutrality first. I looked at it too, and this isn't some academic
discussion on the merits of true consensus decisions, this is an admin
that made a clear and obvious mistake. And that's why he should have
had the chance to defend himself first ("ohh, sorry 'bout that, i was
drunk at the time" or something)

--gkhan

On 9/25/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:
>
> >Even so, you really should have tried to communicate with him before
> >taking it too the list. I agree that the decision is totally absurd,
> >but you should let him defend himself first. And if he does, as you
> >suggest he will, ignore/blank you, you will have more ammo for a
> >discussion.
> >
> >
> Okay, he should have tried talking to Neutrality first.
>
> In the meantime, though, I've checked the VfD in question:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Crescent_Park_Elementary_School
> and it appears that the basic complaint is true - this was clearly _not_
> a consensus to delete. It's very clear that it isn't, too, since as
> pointed out there's actually a clear majority of votes for keep/merge
> versus delete. I'm putting this on VfU, but really, I think this should
> be a speedy undelete.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Were they sockpuppets? Are they anonymous? Are they banned? If not,
why should they count more than

"Delete another primary school of utter nonimportance."
"Delete. A non-notable public school."
"Delete. Usual reasons"
"Delete yet another completely nn school"

No matter how you spin it, this call was ridiculus.

--gkhan

On 9/25/05, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/25/05, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> >
> > In the meantime, though, I've checked the VfD in question:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Crescent_Park_Elementary_School
> > and it appears that the basic complaint is true - this was clearly _not_
> > a consensus to delete. It's very clear that it isn't, too, since as
> > pointed out there's actually a clear majority of votes for keep/merge
> > versus delete. I'm putting this on VfU, but really, I think this should
> > be a speedy undelete.
>
> While I don't necessarily agree with the decision (I think there was
> no consensus either way), one can see how some of the votes might have
> been given greater weight than others. For example:
>
> "Keep, we winning the fight aginst school deletionism."
> "Keep. I heard from Aranda56 that we needed more votes for this article."
> "Keep I heard from Radman's sisters' aunts' brothers' cousins'
> girlfriends' sister that this needed to be kept!"
> "Keep."
>
> --
> Stephen Bain
> stephen.bain at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Dariusz Siedlecki

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews is now CC-BY

body:
Quick question - does that mean Wikinews is going out of Beta now?

--
Regards,
Datrio


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews is now CC-BY


from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews is now CC-BY

body:
Hooray ;-)
Thank you for your notice on our [[ja:n:WN:RL|Izakaya]], Angela

I would like you to make it sure on one issue; that is

On 9/25/05, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> The Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License was the most supported
> license in the recent poll at
> <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/Licensure_Poll>.
>
> With over 87% support from Wikinewsies in the poll, and 82% support
> overall, CC-BY has now been agreed upon by the Wikimedia Foundation to
> be the new license for all existing and future versions of Wikinews.
> Any edits made previously remain public domain - it is only new edits
> that will need to be under this Creative Commons License.

you meant in fact "remain public domain or the other licence which
each project had chosen", I suppose. Or not. It is our serious concern
because Japanese Wikinews had chosen Cc-By-2.1-Jp, so somehow the
switch would go smoothly there, but because of difference of
jurisdiction and available version (2.1-JP is the latest version
currently; 2.5-JP availability is uncertain - or not; I don't know who
knows it... eh, hum).

One technical question: can "CC-By-2.1-(a certain country) or later"
switch to merely "CC-By-2.5" or "CC-By-2.5-(another certain country)?

And of course, three language versions of Wikinews had chosen GFDL.
They would like to make a similar question.

--
Aphaea@*.wikipedia.org
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews is now CC-BY


from_name: Pawe³ Dembowski

body:
> I didn't email, as I explained earlier, because Neutrality has been
> completely unresponsive in the past with several of us who disagree
> with him regarding the presence of school articles in Wikipedia.
> Since I couldn't reasonably expect a response from Neutrality, I
> brought it to a place where I could count on thoughtful consideration
> and discussion of the issues involved.
> Michael Turley
> User:Unfocused

I personally don't like school articles, but there was clearly no
consensus to delete. I speedy undeleted it.

--
Ausir
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org


from_name: Sabine Cretella

subject:
[Foundation-l] Formal request for the creation of the Neapolitan
	Wikipedia

body:
Good morning!

Now all the requirements on meta for the creation of the Neapolitan
Wikipedia have been fulfilled. At this stage I am asking for the opening of

http://nap.wikipedia.org

I already received the first bits of the User Interface that are going
to be integrated in the table that is online in my user profile on the
Italian wiktionary.

Thank you for creating it asap.

Have a great Sunday!

Ciao, Sabine

*****
Sabine Cretella
Public Relations - Translations
s.cretella at wordsandmore.it
skype: sabinecretella
Meetingplace for translators
http://www.wesolveitnet.com

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


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Formal request for the creation of the Neapolitan
	Wikipedia


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Formal request for the creation of the Neapolitan
	Wikipedia


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

>Angela wrote:
>
>
>>On 9/24/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>I created 5 new Wikipedias in June because I received a request from a
>>>Wikimedia Board member. If I receive another such specific request, I'll
>>>carry it out. I do that out of loyalty to them, not because I think it
>>>contributes to our mission.
>>>
>>>
>>I doubt you'll get another such request since I've been told that new
>>language wikis is not a Board issue and I shouldn't be taking
>>decisions on these or asking developers to start them. What people
>>fail to realise is that if the Board doesn't take these decisions (and
>>perhaps they're right and the Board shouldn't) - then who is going to
>>take them? There is increasingly resistance to the Board doing
>>anything, but also resistance to them delegating any authority they
>>may have had, which is just leading to stagnation. So, who should be
>>taking the decision on new language wikis (and also on new projects),
>>especially when no
>><http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_policy_for_wikis_in_new_languages>
>>has ever been agreed upon?
>>
>>
>
>There's no stagnation, Wikipedia is growing faster than ever. I'm happy
>to make decisions regarding how I use my time, and I've done so on many
>occasions. I'm hardly going to agree to a policy which puts that
>decision in the hands of others.
>
>I'm not asking for the Board to approve new language requests, in fact
>I'd be happier if they didn't. I'm just saying I'd honour them if they did.
>
>
>
Your definition of "Wikipedia" is relevant here. Yes, the English
project does well. When it is you who decides what a good policy is, it
means that we need more people who can and will do things that are
necessary. So that you can decide what you want to do but that it will
not frustrate the things that should happen as the result of accepted
procedures.

>Arbeo M wrote:
>
>
>>If this the current attitude of Wikipedia's
>>decision-makers on the issue I'll accept it, of
>>course. However, I think the fact that Wikipedias for
>>new languages are created solely upon requests from
>>Wikimedia board members needs to be annouced to the
>>"general public". Because, at the moment, most users
>>don`t seem to be aware of this fact (at least I wasn't
>>as yet). Several pages like e. g.
>>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:How_to_start_a_new_Wikipedia
>>still create a very different impression, i. e. that
>>you _can_ actually have a new WP in your language if
>>you request it, find supporters, convince the
>>community etc. Given the reality you just informed me
>>about, that's quite misleading. I guess we should
>>change those pages so they don't cause people to put a
>>lot of time and effort into projects that don't have a
>>change of success.
>>
>>
>
>Of course it's not announced anywhere, it's a bureaucratic black hole.
>We cover up the fact that there is no procedure by pretending the
>procedure is just really difficult.
>
>
The way procedures are created and maintained is the black hole. When
there is a tentative consensus that a procedure is to be used it has one
SPOV. This single point of failure are the people who have to act on it.
It takes a developer to create new language projects. When they decide
not to honour the result of a procedure, there is no come back.
Procedures like the one about new language projects ARE torpedoed in
that way. Saying that there is no procedure is not reasonable because
the new proposals are made to go through these hoops. It is not
reasonable that you suggest that there is no procedure after months of
it being actively being enforced.

>Mark Williamson wrote:
>
>
>>Tim, we're not talking about dead languages or conlangs.
>>
>>We're talking about languages that are spoken by real, tangible people
>>as their everyday native language, and which have at least 5
>>supporters, native speaker support, and no oposition at all.
>>
>>Specifically, now people are waiting for Ladino, Waray-Waray, and
>>Neapolitan. You can look any of them up on Ethnologue if you like.
>>Waray-Waray and Neapolitan have millions of speakers; Ladino has at
>>least tens of thousands but might have more.
>>
>>
>
>Literate speakers of Neapolitan can all read Italian. Italian is the
>language of instruction in state schools in the area. The same can be
>said for Ladino with respect to Turkish or Hebrew. Waray-Waray now
>rarely appears in print in its local area, having been displaced by
>English, both in local schools and in print.
>
>In all three cases, the majority of speakers are accustomed to obtaining
>information in a national language. Even if we create it, the Wikipedia
>in Waray-Waray or Neapolitan will never be comparable in size to the
>Wikipedia in English or Italian. So regardless of what we do, they'll
>have to continue to obtain most of their information in the same way.
>The function of these wikis, it seems to me, would be pride rather than
>education. That's not the function I volunteered to promote when I
>signed up with Wikipedia.
>
>
There is a law under way in Italy that will have education in Neapolitan
in schools. 89% of schools in Napels have indicated that they will teach
Neapolitan when the law has passed. When you also consider that Sicilian
is doing really well. There is no reason that Neapolitan will not do
well as a project. Continuing the discussion about what the merits are
for these particular languages should be beside the point of this mail.
This threat is about "no more new Wikipedias"

Tim Starling is as well known as Mark Williamson for his POV. They are
at both ends of the spectrum. There is just one difference. Tim is the
one that can create new projects and won't while Mark is the one that
can't create new projects and would. You can say a lot about Mark, but
he tries to involve himself in many projects and spends much effort in
making the smaller projects work. He is putting his effort in where his
mouth is.

In the past projects were started that were silly. Projects for
"languages" like Klingon, problematic are the languages with fewer than
100.000 speakers. But also languages that we really want with tens of
miljons of people are not doing well. For Tim it is a reason not to
create any new projects while it should be a reason for research and
marketing in how to make these projects work.

>>These requests have many supporters, native speaker support
>>(especially in the case of Ladino and Neapolitan, where heaps of
>>native speakers dropped by to show their support), and no opposition.
>>
>>
>
>There are always many vocal supporters, and there are always people who
>are silently opposed. Or rather, they are silent until those in power
>give in to the lobby and create new wikis, and then they open up with
>ridicule and criticism. We've seen it many times before.
>
>-- Tim Starling
>
This is in my opinion a really nasty argument. It basically says, that
anything can be frustrated because there are people who are silently
opposed. It negated all the need of building a visible consensus or
opinion. In essence, given this as a "reasonable" argument, anything
goes as long as you are able to support yourself.

Basically you say to the people who want these new languages that they
should piss off. That your Wikimedia Foundation is not their Wikimedia
Foundation. That they do not need information in their language.

Thanks,
   GerardM


from_name: Andrew Lih

body:
On 9/24/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Since it's now been 4 days over 2 weeks since a posting about this was
> made at the zhwiki village pump, as Angela proposed, and the voting is
> currently at 44-15, still a large margin of "support" votes.
>
> Therefore, I am re-submitting the request.

The issue was discussed at the Hong Kong Wikipedian gathering last
week, which is important since HK is the most prominent place in the
world where Cantonese is used in official government communication,
school teaching and the media.

The conclusion was emphatic among the Cantonese speakers. The
consensus was - "not at this time." In fact, it was unanimous. (See
below for full description of the meetup).

This was not a group without expertise. Among those present -
Lorenzarius, one of the original zh: Wikipedians; Little Alex,
currently studying for a degree in translation; Mcy_jerry, studying
medicine in Chinese University (an institution coping with
Mandarin/Cantonese/English issues as the medium of instruction); and
Simon Shek, Carlsmith, W.F. Siu, Mapocathy, all folks who've grown up
in the mixed language school environment.

And to quote from Mark's previous message:

"The whole point here is that Waerth and I both think it's unfair to
let anybody but the actual language community make decisions about
whether or not they should get a Wikipedia, with exceptions for
artificial languages perhaps."
(Sat Sep 10 20:58:59 UTC 2005,
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-September/041477.html)

This seems clear this idea should put this out to pasture, for now.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

Recap of September18, 2005 HK Wikipedia meetup:
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E8%81%9A%E4%BC%9A/2005%E9%A6%99%E6%B8%AF%E7%B6%AD%E5%9F%BA%E4%BA%BA%E8%81%9A%E6%9C%83#English_version
or
http://tinyurl.com/apmch

Excerpt related to Cantonese Wikipedia:
[...]
Obviously, one of the biggest issues was Cantonese Wikipedia. After
discussing it for a while, there was consensus (in fact unanimity)
that though there is legitimate and desirable use for vernacular
written Cantonese in casual use, arts, film, newspaper columns and the
like, the conclusion about Cantonese Wikipedia was - "not at this
time."

Several things stood out:

* Current state of Chinese Wikipedia. There was agreement that the
general quality of the average article in Chinese Wikipedia is
relatively poor, even though it has 40,000+ articles. The recent stats
on "short articles" showed zh: contained unusually high number of
them, and empirically Mcyjerry made the point that they are generally
lacking in content. Folks felt that it was more important to shore up
the existing zh: Wikipedia instead of splitting the effort.

* Universities and Cantonese use. Mcyjerry and Lorenzarius, students
at Chinese University of Hong Kong explained that their science and
medicine classes were not done in Cantonese, and if they were it would
be confusing. They can elaborate more as to why, but Chinese
University was setup to promote Chinese education in a (then) British
Colony.

[...]


from_name: rebk_rebelde_14 at hotmail.com

subject: [Foundation-l] Wiki projects

body:
Hello,

I'm a wikipedian. Like 3 or 2 years ago I opened a page that was from
your project, Wikipedia. Then the last 7 months I've been using this
page to increase my knowledge, informing me, etc. Just a month ago I
suscribe. And during that month I saw that you have a complete company
of wikis. And my project proposal is to make a wiki website of advisor,
counsillors from everyone's problems. Not like a forum of ordinary
websites, I mean by a wiki project and anonym persons searching for
help, and anonym advisors. Or as you wish! Please think about this
project and email me, if you don't understan it.

Rebk_rebelde_14otmail.com

Thanks


subject: [Foundation-l] Wiki projects


from_name: Kelly Martin

body:
On 9/24/05, Michael Turley <michael.turley at gmail.com> wrote:
> Neutrality just closed a AfD regarding Crescent Park Elementary School
> by deleting the article.
>
> The debate and discussion included 19 keep votes, and 15 delete votes,
> one merge and one "merge or delete" vote.
>
> Since when does a majority keep mean to delete the article?

Neutrality has also ignored consensus on a number of other articles
lately (or found consensus when no consensus reasonably existed).  I'm
becoming concerned about his objectivity in closing AfDs, although I
have not actually spoken to him about this yet.

Kelly


subject: [Wikitech-l] nap, war, lad wikipedias created

body:
To all:

On behalf of the Waray-Waray speakers who recently got their wikipedia created: Thank you very much!!!  We pledge to make this project as active as the others.  And to our Ladino and Neapolitan-speaking friends who also got their wikipedias: we salute and congratulate you as well!!!

Madamo nga salamat ha iyo nga tanan!
(Many thanks to all of you!)

--Harvey Fiji
en:user: Harvsf
ceb:user:Harvs
meta:user:Harvsf
es:user:Harvzsf
tl:user:Harvzsf

Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/25/05, Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> [fu2:wikitech]
>
> Hello,
>
> With the technical assistance of Tim Starling, I created three new
> wikipedia projects which were pending somewhere on meta: .

Thanks Ashar, and thanks to Tim for the assistance. The only problem
seems to be that the interlanguage links are not working. For example,
on , Ladino links to

rather than to the English Wikipedia.

Angela.

---------------------------------
Yahoo! for Good
 Click here to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.


from_name: Poe, Marshall

subject: [Foundation-l] Proposal-Dikimedia (data) vs. Wikimedia (metadata)

body:
Re Robin?s good comments, and the ongoing discussion of the purpose of Wikimedia.

I would say that if WikiMedia is going to host both projects such as Wikipedia and
Wikisource, it needs to make a clear distinction between the two, because they are
very different.

Wikipedia is meta data, in this instance encyclopedia-style analysis of entities such as
(to use my favorite example) the Magna Carta.  As we learn more about the Magna
Carta (data), the Magna Carta *entry* (meta data) can be changed and improved.

Wikisource is data, in this instance exact copies of the text of historical artifacts. If we
have an accurate copy of the Magna Carta in Wikisource, it should not be edited. It can
only become less valuable as it is edited and moves further and further away from the
original source text.

Wikipedia is an analytic project; Wikisource (and Wikiquote, Wikionary, and
Wikibooks) are all descriptive projects.  Fully open read/write wikis are appropriate for
analytic projects?they improve by amendment; Fully open read/write wikis are not
appropriate for descriptive projects?they decline in value by amendment (assuming we
have an accurate copy).

The descriptive sites obviously need to limit access, particularly to artifacts deemed by
the community to be accurate. Why allow people to edit a perfectly good transcription of
the Magna Carta?  If there is an error, users can bring it to the attention of the community
and the community can decide; if there is an error in transcription, the edit can proceed.
If not, then not.

I think it makes good sense to allow any user to *add* a descriptive entry, but that there
needs to be some vetting procedure for *edits*.  Now, you might say that such sites are not
really ?wikis.? Fine, lets configure Wikimedia software to allow additions of data entries by
anyone and editing of data entries by some reasonable vetting process. We?ll call it
something different, and launch a separte entity to host descriptive projects.

How about ?Diki,? where ?d?is for data or description?  Dikimedia?

(And "diki" means "wild in Russian!)

Best, Marshall

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org on behalf of Robin Shannon
Sent: Sat 9/24/2005 8:40 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Proposing New Projects (was Proposal for anewproject: Wikisomething--repost)

I think one of the reasons that new proposals have trouble getting up
is because most of the new proposal ideas just aren't suitable for
wikis. Wikis are not the be all and end all of user driven websites.
There are many, many different paradigms (forums, blogs etc), wikis
are just one of those paradigms. Just  because wikis worked well for
the 'pedia doesn't mean they are going to work well for other things.
I have said it before and i will porbably say it again: we need a
discussion about the future of wikimedia. Are we in the 'buisness' of
wikis, or are we in the 'buisness' of making the sum of human
knowledge avaliable to everyone? If it is the former, we need more
info on the "propose a new project page" about the limitations of
wikis. If it is the latter, then we need some more software tools than
just mediawiki.

paz y amor,
-rjs.

ps. Marshall, best of luck with memoirbank.com

On 9/25/05, Poe, Marshall <MPoe at theatlantic.com> wrote:
> (Sorry, I reposted this because the formatting was a
> mess; should be easier to read now. MP
>
>
> Thanks very much, Robert, for your good comments. They
> are very apt.
>
> I was the proposer of Wikimemory, and you are right
> about my experience, and I suspect those of other
> proposers.  While I would not say that comments on
> Foundation-l were exactly hostile, they were not for
> the most part friendly, supportive, encouraging,
> numerous, or helpful.  A one line reply like "I think
> this project should be on wikicities" is really not
> very satisfying. I, for one, would like an explanation
> of the various POVs shared.  I tried to offer such
> explanations, at length, and with a certain amount of
> reflection and thought.  With one or two exceptions, I
> rec'd nothing of a similar character.  I'm new to
> Wikimedia, but my experience has made me wonder just
> how serious the "new projects" initiative is.  This is
> a shame, because, as you say, well-meaning people with
>  possibly good ideas are being neglected or even
> frightened away.  In the end, if you want to attract
> serious people, you have to be serious.
>
> The fashion in which new projects are vetted at
> Wikimeida is unprofessional. I mean this with no
> disrespect. Perhaps it is impossible for an
> organization such as Wikimedia to be held to such a
> high standard.  Wikimedia does many things very well
> (I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia).  But professionalism
> just might not be in the cards, and perhaps it
> shouldn't be.  Critics (and I guess I'm one of them)
> will say that Wikimedia's new proposals initiative
> fails exactly because it lacks the standard incentives
> and disincentives built into any real business, that
> is, a strong devotion to the mission, strong incentives
> to pursue said mission, and stong dissincentives
> against unprofessional behavior.  In a successful
> enterprise, if you don't do your job well, there are
> consequences.  In this aspect of Wikimedia, there seem
> to be none.  And perhaps there can be none, because we
> are all uncompensated volunteers.  Again, critics will
> say that this once again demonstrates that
> undisciplined organizations just don't perform very
> well.  When everybody is responsible, nobody is
> responsible.
>
> The question, I guess, is this: can people act
> professionally when they have no motivation other than
> that they should?  My experience suggests the answer is
> no, at least in this narrow instance.
>
> I'm withdrawing Wikimemory from consideration as a new
> project, and am pursuing othere means of realizing it
> (see memoirbank.com).  I believe in it, and hope I can
> find others who do to.  Perhaps someday we can begin
> discussion of something like Wikimemory again, after
> the idea has matured.  I would welcome that.
>
> I will, of course, continue to be a huge fan of
> Wikimedia, and will participate in this and other
> discussions of its future.  Wikimedia can become
> something truely great, and I'd like to help.  It's up
> to us.
>
> Good luck with everything.
>
> Best, Marshall Poe
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org on behalf of Robert Scott Horning
> Sent: Fri 9/23/2005 6:43 PM
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Proposing New Projects (was Proposal for a
> newproject: Wikisomething)
>
> Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
>
> > I want to propose a new idea for a new project: Wikisomething.
> > Wikisomething is dedicated to contain multilingual somethings of all
> > different sorts, therefore it spares us the need to found any new
> > different projects for speficic things. Moreover, we could also
> > integrate our current projects into Wikisomething.
> >
> > cordially,
> > Elian
>
> I know this was in jest, but I would like to know if people on this
> mailing are fed up with all of these sort of proposals or if they need
> to be encouraged more.  I've been vocal about this in the past, but my
> impression is that no new major project will ever be started.  Period.
>  If you take a look at the "No" votes for Wikiversity, for example
>
> (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Vote )
>
> the #1 reason I find credible is that there are some technical issues
> that seem to be preventing new projects from being started.  What are
> those incredible technical issues that are going to force any new
> project from starting for more than a year from now?  Is there any
> reason at all to even encourage anybody to start a new project of any
> kind?  Is a general concensus that new proposals should not even be
> brought up on Foundation-l?
>
> I do believe that at the very least there needs to be a few more steps
> in the development process of a new project proposal before it gets to
> Foundation-l.  I've been a regular contributor to this mailing list now
> for close to a year, and I've seen a dozen or so new project proposals
> get posted, most by very well-meaning people and some of them are very
> well thought out.  There are some proposals that are "not ready for
> prime-time" and perhaps they should be more thought out before they come
> up here.  For most new project ideas, Foundation-l is the very last
> place that anything will be heard about the idea, not the first.
>
> Another related issue is more along the lines of how to publicize the
> kernel of an idea that may be useful but needs a bit more work, such as
> the Wikimemory proposal that has been debated recently.  Requesting help
> for such proposals on this mailing list is throwing the idea before a
> very hostile audience, perhaps unwittingly and certainly without the
> knowledge of new Wikimedia users who happen to come across this mailing
> list as suggested by the New Project Policy.  Perhaps instead of
> announcing the formal new project proposal here, there should be some
> development effort at some Wikiproject or some other sub-community of
> Wikimedia users that are much more receptive of the idea, and can give
> some depth to the idea before it comes here.
>
> At the very least, if there is to be a moritorium on new sister
> projects, please make that official policy on the part of the Wikimedia
> Foundation Board and get that stated on the New Project page, and
> perhaps even on the front page of Meta as well.  On the other hand, if
> the board does intend to allow some new projects to be started if they
> are well thought out and have a support community behind them, there
> should be an official policy to silence the critics who seem to speak in
> a semi-official capacity on behalf of the board (even though I know they
> are not board members).
>
> If there are genuine technical issues that need to be addressed so that
> starting en.wikiversity.org is somehow harder than to.wikibooks.org, I
> would like to know what those issues are that developers seem to be
> screaming about.  Get technical and don't sugar coat it either, and if
> possible give hard examples.  If the concern is purely social and
> getting the new project community organized, that may be a legitimate
> concern.  I don't think it is in as many cases as the critics seems to
> believe it may be, and most new projects tend to recruit more people
> than would normally be participating with Wikipedia alone, so I don't
> think it necessarily bleeds other projects dry from volunteers.  This is
> also an issue I would be more than willing to debate as well.
>
> --
> Robert Scott Horning
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>

--
Show me the way to go 127.0.0.1, i'm tired and i want to go to bed...

Hit me: <robin.shannon.id.au>
Jab me: <robin.shannon at jabber.org.au>
Upgrade to ubuntu linux: <http://www.spreadubuntu.org/>
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l


from_name: Robin Shannon

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Proposing New Projects (was Proposal for a
	newproject: Wikisomething--repost)

body:
I think one of the reasons that new proposals have trouble getting up
is because most of the new proposal ideas just aren't suitable for
wikis. Wikis are not the be all and end all of user driven websites.
There are many, many different paradigms (forums, blogs etc), wikis
are just one of those paradigms. Just  because wikis worked well for
the 'pedia doesn't mean they are going to work well for other things.
I have said it before and i will porbably say it again: we need a
discussion about the future of wikimedia. Are we in the 'buisness' of
wikis, or are we in the 'buisness' of making the sum of human
knowledge avaliable to everyone? If it is the former, we need more
info on the "propose a new project page" about the limitations of
wikis. If it is the latter, then we need some more software tools than
just mediawiki.

paz y amor,
-rjs.

ps. Marshall, best of luck with memoirbank.com

On 9/25/05, Poe, Marshall <MPoe at theatlantic.com> wrote:
> (Sorry, I reposted this because the formatting was a
> mess; should be easier to read now. MP
>
>
> Thanks very much, Robert, for your good comments. They
> are very apt.
>
> I was the proposer of Wikimemory, and you are right
> about my experience, and I suspect those of other
> proposers.  While I would not say that comments on
> Foundation-l were exactly hostile, they were not for
> the most part friendly, supportive, encouraging,
> numerous, or helpful.  A one line reply like "I think
> this project should be on wikicities" is really not
> very satisfying. I, for one, would like an explanation
> of the various POVs shared.  I tried to offer such
> explanations, at length, and with a certain amount of
> reflection and thought.  With one or two exceptions, I
> rec'd nothing of a similar character.  I'm new to
> Wikimedia, but my experience has made me wonder just
> how serious the "new projects" initiative is.  This is
> a shame, because, as you say, well-meaning people with
>  possibly good ideas are being neglected or even
> frightened away.  In the end, if you want to attract
> serious people, you have to be serious.
>
> The fashion in which new projects are vetted at
> Wikimeida is unprofessional. I mean this with no
> disrespect. Perhaps it is impossible for an
> organization such as Wikimedia to be held to such a
> high standard.  Wikimedia does many things very well
> (I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia).  But professionalism
> just might not be in the cards, and perhaps it
> shouldn't be.  Critics (and I guess I'm one of them)
> will say that Wikimedia's new proposals initiative
> fails exactly because it lacks the standard incentives
> and disincentives built into any real business, that
> is, a strong devotion to the mission, strong incentives
> to pursue said mission, and stong dissincentives
> against unprofessional behavior.  In a successful
> enterprise, if you don't do your job well, there are
> consequences.  In this aspect of Wikimedia, there seem
> to be none.  And perhaps there can be none, because we
> are all uncompensated volunteers.  Again, critics will
> say that this once again demonstrates that
> undisciplined organizations just don't perform very
> well.  When everybody is responsible, nobody is
> responsible.
>
> The question, I guess, is this: can people act
> professionally when they have no motivation other than
> that they should?  My experience suggests the answer is
> no, at least in this narrow instance.
>
> I'm withdrawing Wikimemory from consideration as a new
> project, and am pursuing othere means of realizing it
> (see memoirbank.com).  I believe in it, and hope I can
> find others who do to.  Perhaps someday we can begin
> discussion of something like Wikimemory again, after
> the idea has matured.  I would welcome that.
>
> I will, of course, continue to be a huge fan of
> Wikimedia, and will participate in this and other
> discussions of its future.  Wikimedia can become
> something truely great, and I'd like to help.  It's up
> to us.
>
> Good luck with everything.
>
> Best, Marshall Poe
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org on behalf of Robert Scott Horning
> Sent: Fri 9/23/2005 6:43 PM
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Proposing New Projects (was Proposal for a
> newproject: Wikisomething)
>
> Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
>
> > I want to propose a new idea for a new project: Wikisomething.
> > Wikisomething is dedicated to contain multilingual somethings of all
> > different sorts, therefore it spares us the need to found any new
> > different projects for speficic things. Moreover, we could also
> > integrate our current projects into Wikisomething.
> >
> > cordially,
> > Elian
>
> I know this was in jest, but I would like to know if people on this
> mailing are fed up with all of these sort of proposals or if they need
> to be encouraged more.  I've been vocal about this in the past, but my
> impression is that no new major project will ever be started.  Period.
>  If you take a look at the "No" votes for Wikiversity, for example
>
> (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Vote )
>
> the #1 reason I find credible is that there are some technical issues
> that seem to be preventing new projects from being started.  What are
> those incredible technical issues that are going to force any new
> project from starting for more than a year from now?  Is there any
> reason at all to even encourage anybody to start a new project of any
> kind?  Is a general concensus that new proposals should not even be
> brought up on Foundation-l?
>
> I do believe that at the very least there needs to be a few more steps
> in the development process of a new project proposal before it gets to
> Foundation-l.  I've been a regular contributor to this mailing list now
> for close to a year, and I've seen a dozen or so new project proposals
> get posted, most by very well-meaning people and some of them are very
> well thought out.  There are some proposals that are "not ready for
> prime-time" and perhaps they should be more thought out before they come
> up here.  For most new project ideas, Foundation-l is the very last
> place that anything will be heard about the idea, not the first.
>
> Another related issue is more along the lines of how to publicize the
> kernel of an idea that may be useful but needs a bit more work, such as
> the Wikimemory proposal that has been debated recently.  Requesting help
> for such proposals on this mailing list is throwing the idea before a
> very hostile audience, perhaps unwittingly and certainly without the
> knowledge of new Wikimedia users who happen to come across this mailing
> list as suggested by the New Project Policy.  Perhaps instead of
> announcing the formal new project proposal here, there should be some
> development effort at some Wikiproject or some other sub-community of
> Wikimedia users that are much more receptive of the idea, and can give
> some depth to the idea before it comes here.
>
> At the very least, if there is to be a moritorium on new sister
> projects, please make that official policy on the part of the Wikimedia
> Foundation Board and get that stated on the New Project page, and
> perhaps even on the front page of Meta as well.  On the other hand, if
> the board does intend to allow some new projects to be started if they
> are well thought out and have a support community behind them, there
> should be an official policy to silence the critics who seem to speak in
> a semi-official capacity on behalf of the board (even though I know they
> are not board members).
>
> If there are genuine technical issues that need to be addressed so that
> starting en.wikiversity.org is somehow harder than to.wikibooks.org, I
> would like to know what those issues are that developers seem to be
> screaming about.  Get technical and don't sugar coat it either, and if
> possible give hard examples.  If the concern is purely social and
> getting the new project community organized, that may be a legitimate
> concern.  I don't think it is in as many cases as the critics seems to
> believe it may be, and most new projects tend to recruit more people
> than would normally be participating with Wikipedia alone, so I don't
> think it necessarily bleeds other projects dry from volunteers.  This is
> also an issue I would be more than willing to debate as well.
>
> --
> Robert Scott Horning
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>

--
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from_name: Angela

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews is now CC-BY

body:
On 9/25/05, Dariusz Siedlecki <datrio at gmail.com> wrote:
> Quick question - does that mean Wikinews is going out of Beta now?

No, it doesn't. I'd say it's certainly a step towards moving out of
beta, but not the only condition.

It's probably more useful to think about specific language versions
going out of beta rather than Wikinews as whole doing so, since some
will reach that stage much sooner than others. Erik proposed some
criteria earlier this year, which suggested that before moving out of
beta, a Wikinews site should have a large number of new stories every
day, RSS feeds, regular original reporting and associated policies,
solid fact-checking, review and an archival process. See
<http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2005-March/000079.html>
and related mails in that thread.

Angela.


subject: [Foundation-l] Wikinews is now CC-BY


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Angela wrote:

>On 9/24/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>
>
>>I created 5 new Wikipedias in June because I received a request from a
>>Wikimedia Board member. If I receive another such specific request, I'll
>>carry it out. I do that out of loyalty to them, not because I think it
>>contributes to our mission.
>>
>>
>I doubt you'll get another such request since I've been told that new
>language wikis is not a Board issue and I shouldn't be taking
>decisions on these or asking developers to start them. What people
>fail to realise is that if the Board doesn't take these decisions (and
>perhaps they're right and the Board shouldn't) - then who is going to
>take them? There is increasingly resistance to the Board doing
>anything, but also resistance to them delegating any authority they
>may have had, which is just leading to stagnation. So, who should be
>taking the decision on new language wikis (and also on new projects),
>especially when no
><http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_policy_for_wikis_in_new_languages>
>has ever been agreed upon?
>
>
You're essentially correct.  If the Board doesn't make such decisions
maybe no-one will, and sometimes that's not entirely a bad thing.  I
personally think that the proposed policy that you mention makes it too
easy to start a new Wiki; the proposed Cantonese Wikipedia could likely
succeed under these policies.  Leaving that aside there is still a
question of process which remains to be solved.  A strong argument can
be made that adopting such a policy is within the mandate of the Board
because it has an overall impact on the Wikimedia projects as a whole.
This cannot be said of the application of such a policy to a particular
set of circumstances.  The application needs to be delegated to someone
who has enough courage to say no when the criteria have not been met;
that person needs to feel confident that his decision in accordance with
policy will not be undermined when some disgruntled individual goes
whinging to the Board.

The broader stagnation dilemma that you raise is a real problem in
"democratic" structures.  Jimbo has said from time to time on these
lists that Wikipedia is not a democracy.  That's fine, but even
Macchiavelli did not believe in a regime of unremitting suppression.  A
happy populace will always be more productive.  No Board of Directors of
a large corporation will get entangled in the day-to-day micromanagement
of that corporation; that would be disastrous.

What does fall within the Board's scope of operation (not it's
authority, where in law it can do everything) is the right to establish
a basic operating rule outlining what does the Board do itself, and what
it delegates.  It then develops credibility by not interfering with the
work of its delegates as long they act within their duly defined mandates.

When some kind of board structure was being proposed before the
Wikimedia Foundation was formally established I suggested two levels of
boards.  One, essentially the present Board, would function more as
trustees who would ensure that the Foundation remain within the
principles that led to its establishment; it would also be responsible
for such broad issues as the financial viability of the organization.
The second would have a more operational capacity, it could investigate
proposals in greater detail and advise the trustees about current
issues; it would have decision-making powers within defined parameters.

The concept of democracy embraced by some of Wikimedia's citizens leaves
much to be desired.  Sometimes policy changes are passed because no-one
has noticed a subtle change on a policy page; other policies are
subjected to votes where very few people know about the vote or
participate.  In yet other cases policies are debated interminably and
the policy that wins is the one that's left on the policy page after
evryone else is exhausted..  In yet other cases there may be a very
strong debate between two strong-willed individuals with everyone else
completely avoiding the issue and failing to step in with alternatives
that would lead to a generally acceptable solution.

Ultimately the question is not about who makes the specific decision to
go ahead with a new language or project.  It is about how the Board
scalably defines its own role within the organization, and commits
itself to that well defined role.

Ec


body:
> Consider the folks who were at the meeting part of the "no" votes.

They should have voted where they were supposed to vote then.

--
Ausir
Wikipedia, wolna encyklopedia
http://pl.wikipedia.org


body:
Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:

>Were they sockpuppets? Are they anonymous? Are they banned? If not,
>why should they count more than
>
>"Delete another primary school of utter nonimportance."
>"Delete. A non-notable public school."
>"Delete. Usual reasons"
>"Delete yet another completely nn school"
>
>No matter how you spin it, this call was ridiculus.
>
>
>On 9/25/05, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> For example:
>>
>>"Keep, we winning the fight aginst school deletionism."
>>"Keep. I heard from Aranda56 that we needed more votes for this article."
>>"Keep I heard from Radman's sisters' aunts' brothers' cousins'
>>girlfriends' sister that this needed to be kept!"
>>"Keep."
>>
>>
All this proves is that we need more objective criteria and fewer votes.

Ec


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
He was wrong. Now what?

Fred

On Sep 24, 2005, at 11:09 PM, Michael Turley wrote:

> On 9/25/05, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Even so, you really should have tried to communicate with him before
>> taking it too the list. I agree that the decision is totally absurd,
>> but you should let him defend himself first. And if he does, as you
>> suggest he will, ignore/blank you, you will have more ammo for a
>> discussion.
>>
>
>
> Ammo for discussion?  What's wrong with simply discussing the issue
> rather than gathering "ammo"?
>
> Look at it from my point of view: an arbitrator/administrator rebuffed
> my attempts to communicate with him.  An RfC was started, and it went
> nowhere, apparently because so many people refused to believe the RfC
> was about refusal to communicate, instead choosing to believe it was
> that he nominated articles en masse to VfD.
>
> If I had any reason to believe I would get a good faith answer from
> the person in question, I would post on his talk page.  However, not
> only have I not been given reason to believe that he'll communicate,
> I've seen the opposite because shortly after the last time, he added a
> somewhat hostile "policy" to his talk page which seems to be meant to
> justify his capriciousness.
>
> I'm not one to go banging my head against brick walls.  I don't like
> to waste my time, and I don't like the headaches.  Ignore me if you so
> choose, but I prefer to discuss this in the open with several other
> reasonalbe users rather than try to start a conversation with a single
> user who's already proven unresponsive to myself and several others on
> this exact issue.
>
> --
> Michael Turley
> User:Unfocused
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
Now you're talking, but please talk to Neutrality first.

Fred

On Sep 25, 2005, at 12:33 AM, Alphax wrote:

> Bryan Derksen wrote:
>
>> Stephen Bain wrote:
>>
>>
>>> While I don't necessarily agree with the decision (I think there was
>>> no consensus either way), one can see how some of the votes might
>>> have
>>> been given greater weight than others. For example:
>>>
>>> "Keep, we winning the fight aginst school deletionism."
>>> "Keep. I heard from Aranda56 that we needed more votes for this
>>> article."
>>> "Keep I heard from Radman's sisters' aunts' brothers' cousins'
>>> girlfriends' sister that this needed to be kept!"
>>> "Keep."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> Also:
>> "*Delete."*
>> *"Delete*. Usual reasons."
>> "*Delete* not worthwhile"
>>
>> So disregarding "low value" votes doesn't look like it swings the
>> vote
>> clearly in one direction or the other to me, unless one selectively
>> disregards poorly-supported votes on one side but not on the other. I
>> certainly wouldn't mind a policy encouraging disregarding such votes,
>> mind you, I just don't think it would make a difference here.
>>
>>
>
> Ok, that's it. As soon as I get the chance (eg. in a few days time), I
> will launch open a request for comments with everyone listed on
> [[m:AIW]] and [[m:ADW]], and I invite anyone who is sick of the way
> AfD
> is being run to join me.
>
> And if that doesn't go anywhere, I'll open an arbitration case.
>
> --
> Alphax                      |   /"\
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