from_name: Jeff V. Merkey

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>WiktionaryZ currently supports multilingual free-text attributes and
>will support other data type attributes in the future. The data you
>can associate with a WiktionaryZ entitity will likely depend on what
>class that entity belongs to. For instance, if an entity is of type
>person, you could associate a birthdate, death date, place of birth,
>place of death, first name/last name (though that might be handled on
>another level), etc.
>
>If the entity belongs to the class "publication", you could associate
>references to specific edition; if it belongs to class "author", you
>could associate publications, and so on.
>
>In this generic model, a reference is just one instance of an entity
>whose associated data you might want to display in a Wikipedia
>article. So we would probably come up with a special type of template
>that can fetch data from WiktionaryZ and insert it into a page layout.
>Then you could, for instance, use
>
><<person:Jimmy Wales>>
>
>to display the person data about Jimbo, or
>
><<country:Germany>>
>
>to make a nice country infobox. Then again, you could also do
>
><<ref:The Origin of Species|author=Charles Darwin|class=book>>
>
>to show _any_ book edition of Darwin's work, or
>
><<ref:The Origin of Species|ISBN=whatever>>
>
>to cite a specific edition. If the title is not ambiguous, you might
>even only have to do something like
>
><<ref:The Cosmic and the Comic: Einstein's Scientific Spirituality>>
>
>and all the properties would be derived automatically from that. In
>fact, the WiktionaryZ model very much matches the work/expression
>distinction, though we use the terminology the other way around: an
>expression refers to _any_ possible meaning of a string of characters,
>whereas each meaning ("work" in this context) has its own defined
>meaning ID and can also be disambiguated by its relations and other
>associated data (for publications: author, year, various codes, etc.).
>
>One advantage, in my view, is that we do not require people to pass
>around codes and numbers unless they really need to and want to, and
>even then, we retain the expression (work title) in the wiki source
>text, making it easy to see what a particular reference is about.
>
>Erik
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
Erik,

Anything you can do to reduce the dependencies on extensions is a great
move. You should incorporate all of them you
can into the main mediawiki tree. You need to setup the exportDump.php
program to output dynamically generated
image names into the actual names as well.

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess

is a great example of HOW NOT to code a template for image generation.
It makes it a lot easier to keep images
synced up between distributed wikipedia mirrors. For now, I have
modified your php code to create a collision listing
of missing image names when the page is converted into HTML for the
first time so the wikix tools can grab and
input the images into the database.

Jeff


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Foundation-l] Project Proposal: Wikicat


list: wikien-l

from_name: geni

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Dead wikipedians and how to really make a project
	boring to death

body:
On 7/28/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe, but "it risks..." is rarely a good reason not to try something
> with no negative consequences.
>
> Steve

I has negative consequences. It makes the project less free. We've
already got enough problems with people ignoreing copyright. We don't
need any more.

--
geni


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Dead wikipedians and how to really make a project
 boring to death

body:
Death Phoenix wrote:
> On 7/27/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>On 7/27/06, Death Phoenix <originaldeathphoenix at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>I have to agree with Anthere in that this seems a little heartless. It's
>>>not like the Deceased Wikipedians page is meant for the encyclopedia, but
>>>rather, it's meant for the community.
>>
>>A seperate wikimedia memorial project would seem to be the logical answer.
>
> A decent idea, though such a memorial project would (hopefully) be small,
> confined to just a few pages.

We already have Meta, don't we?

The current policy on Meta seems to be to only allow GFDL uploads,
though a quick look at the image list suggest it's not followed very
strictly.  But would there actually be any reason not to allow non-free
images on Meta _if_ they are on-topic; such as, say, photos of deceased
Wikipedians?

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] giving medical advice

body:
On Jul 28, 2006, at 11:40 AM, Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:

>>
>> This is the Heimlich Manoeuvre and it would be very irresponsible not
>> to have detailed advice.
>>
>>
>
> As the article notes:
>
>
>> Some countries such as Australia have banned its use in favour of
>> safer, more effective techniques.
>>
>
> It is entirely irresponsible to be promoting it *at all*.
>
> The last sentence of the lead,
>
>
>> The thrust was later mastered by Dr. Earl Peters in the early 80's
>> and became the universal way to stop a person from choking.
>>
>
> is also completely wrong and incredibly Americentric.

But in the movie Groundhog Day the weatherman saves a life by using
the Heimlick Manoeuvre, and in the TV ad for the National Bank of
Scotland, same thing.

Right though, the article could be improved, especially to report
differences in medical opinion.

Fred


list: wikitech-l

from_name: djafer3107 maatallah

subject:
[Wikitech-l] RE : Re: OT: What language would *you* have done it in,
	and why?

body:
english

Ivan Krstic <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> a ?crit :  Steve Bennett wrote:
> I googled this and found references to a seven stages by Tom Christiansen...

Gnat gave the (relatively famous) YAPC talk, though the original 'seven
stages' observation was by Tom, yes.

--
Ivan Krstic | GPG: 0x147C722D
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

---------------------------------
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subject: [WikiEN-l] giving medical advice

body:
On 7/28/06, zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
 Maybe there should also be a disclaimer.
>
> Zero.
>

There is.

--
geni


subject: [Wikitech-l] Problem linking to an anchor

body:
mboverload wrote:
> I put this:
>
> [[Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser#prod_tag_deletion.3F__Oh_noes.]]
>
> However, it came out like this in the destination URL
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:AutoWikiBrowser#prod_tag_deletion.3F_Oh_noes.
>
> As you can see, the double underscore was removed and the link doesn't work
> anymore.  It still has the double underscore in the wikisource, but not the
> generated HTML.

That's because the consecutive spaces in titles are collapsed _before_
the anchor part is removed.  Either we should change that, or we should
make sure the same collapsing is done to the anchor targets.  I'd favor
the latter, if only for simplicity.

Mind you, there are other known bugs with section anchors, such as the
fact that the rules used to generate them from edit summaries don't
always match the ones used on the actual page, leading to broken section
links in the history/recentchanges/watchlist.  I should really look into
that some day...

--
Ilmari Karonen


subject:
[Wikitech-l] RE : RE : Re: OT: What language would *you* have done
	it in, and why?

body:
hello
   I would like to learn the English language for reason strictly professionnele

djafer3107 maatallah <djafer3107 at yahoo.fr> a ?crit :
  english

Ivan Krstic a ?crit : Steve Bennett wrote:
> I googled this and found references to a seven stages by Tom Christiansen...

Gnat gave the (relatively famous) YAPC talk, though the original 'seven
stages' observation was by Tom, yes.

--
Ivan Krstic | GPG: 0x147C722D
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

---------------------------------
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_______________________________________________
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from_name: Tels

subject:
[Wikitech-l] OT: What language would *you* have done it in,
	and why?

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

Moin,

On Friday 28 July 2006 08:44, Chad Perrin wrote:
[snipauiteabit]
> Perl really strikes me as the clear winner, overall, with Ruby a close
> second about a hair's-breadth behind it.

<offtopic>

I don't know much about Ruby, except that I heard Unicode support is really
lacking. Which pretty much rules it out for anything serious text
processing in this age :-D

However, the entire Ruby project always stuck me as a
me-too-lets-reinvent-the-wheel-and-this-time-make-it-rounder project, like
so many others (*cough*Perl6*cough).

Yes, Perl5 has some problems, like carrying baggage from a decade or two
that nobody really needs anymore, but I am not sure that
yet-another-interpreted-language (that is only 60..90% complete,
undertested etc) is the real answer. It just fragments the coder base even
more.

We have way too many programming languages already.

Best wishes,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Fri Jul 28 12:35:59 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "Wo die Schoschonen sch?n wohnen."

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body:
On 7/28/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Allowing a mechanism whereby people can explicitly state that for once
> they are consciously ignoring copyright,

We already de facto have that.

> based on consensus achieved
> with a wide group of other users

I wasn't aware that consensus had anything to do with copyright

> does not sound like the top of a
> slippery slope to me.

Past experce suggests that there are plenty of times where almost all
the users who care about an image want to use it in spite of it being
a copyvio. I do not need people being able to point to exceptions.

--
geni


from_name: Carlos

subject:
[Wikitech-l] OT: What language would *you* have done it in,
 and why?

body:
Tels wrote:
> I don't know much about Ruby, except that I heard Unicode support is really
> lacking. Which pretty much rules it out for anything serious text
> processing in this age :-D

Does MediaWiki do "anything serious text processing"?

--


list: foundation-l

from_name: Domas Mituzas

subject:
[Foundation-l] Reporting & communication (was: Wolf Mountain
	MediaWiki Appliances Released)

body:
Hi!

> /me notes "the bureaucracy and hierarchy of WMF is as complicated as
> ... some christian denominacions which claim their apostelic
> traditions

:-) yeah, all that stuff to prove there is no cabal..

> nothing in details for what they contributed to the Foundation. And as
> far as I know, many of them believe they donate for hardware purchase.
> It would be good to inform them how their former donations were used.

Haha, well, the best report for what tech team is doing is that site
is still up. ;-)
All our major hardware purchases (well, other stuff than a meter of
UTP cable)
are shown on meta pages, and reports used to be more of an overview of
problems and visions.

> is spent for those. Or it was done under the name of WMF. Other kinds
> of reports are therefore informative and helpful to develop the
> Foundation's and consequently our own activities on the projects.

I sure agree that it is nice to communicate :) I also believe that
method for that should be part of our common sense :)

Anyway, I think that at least tech stuff is pretty transparent for
those who care.
We're communicating (and always online :) in IRC, there's active
mailing list, our wikis (and logs in them) are public, yadda yadda.
Some guys even read village pump ;-)
If only everyone around would provide that much of information about
activities ;-)

> So we expect you remember other present and important issues clearly,
> including the informally proposed Houserule for Wikimania?

I'm rebellious, surely not following that one. :)

--
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] LIVE MIRROR, please block

body:
?? ??? wrote:
> I found this page:
> http://ja.andmoretop.info/pacman-online/Special:Recentchanges.html
>
> which is mirroring Wikipedia live, also English version

Killed.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Jonathan Leybovich

body:
GerardM wrote:

> The project that you propose has a very large
overlap with the WikiAuthors
> project.

Yes, a little bit of d?j? vu here ;)  :

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WikiAuthors#Wikicat

>
> This project is as it is described on Meta about
among other things
> the disambiguation of Pubmet articles. This project
is extremely likely to
> be realised. The functionality that you describe can
and will by and large
> be modelled using Wikidata technology.
>
> As this project does use the Wikidata technology, it
would make very much
> sense to collaborate and share our efforts and make
one big and beautiful
> project.

Absolutely.  The issue Wikiauthors is trying to
address ([[w:authority control]]) ideally should not
be occurring in a professionally-run catalog, and
there may still be the possibility that beneath the
Pubmed web interface enough information is being
recorded in the bibliographic records to uniquely
distinguish authors.  But in any case the ability to
correct or enhance bibliographic data is something
Wikicat will definitely need to support, and this
hopefully will meet all the needs of Wikiauthors.

> Please let us discuss how we can / will collaborate.

Sure.  Let's me, you, and Erik take our discussion off
the foundation list so as not to bother everyone with
unnecessary technical details.

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


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Accented characters (was Re:  fancruft)

body:
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
> On 26 Jul 2006 at 15:31, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>> mboverload wrote:
>>
>>> I'm not sure why you're mentioning it, but I recently changed every mention
>>> of Pokemon to Pok?mon.
>
> [snip]
>
>> A few years ago there was a big debate over whether names should include
>> accents, and I believe that was settled back then.  This doesn't meant
>> that we don't have a few retro-luddites who would still believe that the
>> results should have been different.
>
> I guess whoever programmed the system that produces and distributes
> the digest form of this list is among those "luddites", since the
> digest is done in strict US-ASCII, and the accented letter above
> shows up as a question mark.
>

Why, praytell, are you using digests???

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
On 7/28/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> That wouldn't do it.  Cash and equipment are both assets on a balance
> sheet.  If it ever came to that, either could be used to satisfy a
> debt.  Buying hardware just so that it can have an opportunity to
> depreciate does not seem like a sensible strategy.

It reduces the value of your balance sheet. which reduces your
atrativeness as a target.

>Although it's
> important to plan for equipment breakdown and obsolescence there is also
> a value to delaying purchases.  The same $10,000 that you might spend
> prematurely today for a desired piece of equipment might give you a more
> advanced piece of similar equipment a year from now.
>

But we need the equipment now.

--
geni


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
On 7/28/06, mboverload <mboverload at gmail.com> wrote:
> Whats the name of the Wikimedia lawyer again?  I searched for in in gmail
> but I'm really not sure what to search for =P

Brad Patrick. He's already comented.

--
geni


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


body:
> Don't take this as an insult, because I'm really not sure, but I
> was really
> joking.  Building Mediawiki in javascript is a joke, which is
> impossible....right?.  I mean, how would javascript write to the
> database.
> Maybe you were thinking I was talking about AJAX?

You haven't heard about bittorrent? There will be no need for the
database!!!

(BTW, server side javascript, and various mutations, exists too).

--
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]


from_name: Steve Bennett

body:
On 7/28/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> I has negative consequences. It makes the project less free. We've
> already got enough problems with people ignoreing copyright. We don't
> need any more.

Allowing a mechanism whereby people can explicitly state that for once
they are consciously ignoring copyright, based on consensus achieved
with a wide group of other users does not sound like the top of a
slippery slope to me. Nor does it sound irreversible.

But there you go.

Steve


from_name: Samuel Klein

subject:
[Foundation-l] Reporting & communication (was: Wolf Mountain
 MediaWiki Appliances Released)

body:
Hi,

On Fri, 28 Jul 2006, Domas Mituzas wrote:

>> nothing in details for what they contributed to the Foundation. And as
>> far as I know, many of them believe they donate for hardware purchase.
>> It would be good to inform them how their former donations were used.
>
> Haha, well, the best report for what tech team is doing is that site is
> still up. ;-) All our major hardware purchases (well, other stuff than a
> meter of UTP cable) are shown on meta pages, and reports used to be more
> of an overview of problems and visions.

Problems and visions : useful things to report on.

We could use a designated reporting setup -- either a person or a
place/schedule -- for each committee and major project, with some
standards tats/report-elements that would help minimize scaling pains.

SJ


from_name: henna

body:
On 7/28/06, Carlos <angus at quovadis.com.ar> wrote:
> Tels wrote:
> > I don't know much about Ruby, except that I heard Unicode support is really
> > lacking. Which pretty much rules it out for anything serious text
> > processing in this age :-D
>
> Does MediaWiki do "anything serious text processing"?

In case you didn't know, mediawiki works with several non-english
language, which are more or less impossible to support unless your
programming language understands Unicode.

henna
--
"Maybe you knew early on that your track went from point A to B, but
unlike you I wasn't given a map at birth!" Alyssa, "Chasing Amy"


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Giuseppe DAngelo

subject: [Wikipedia-l] top post

body:
I always top post - take it or lump it.

  But...the e-mail I use doesn't seem to automatically signal the original e-mail  - don't ask me why - I don't know the answer - but I would have thought you would all be smart enough to know that I had included a quote from 5 minutes ago.

  Now, about that thesis of mine...

  pippu d'a

 Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
 http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] [Fwd: [WiktionaryZ] Definition in UI language,
 if present in that language]

body:
Hoi,
Sabine posted this on the WiktionaryZ blog.. This new feature shows that
from an architecture point of view we care about all languages equally ..
Thanks,
   GerardM

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[WiktionaryZ] Definition in UI language, if present in that
language
Date: 	Fri, 28 Jul 2006 00:35:14 -0700 (PDT)
From: 	Sabine Cretella <sabine_cretella at yahoo.it>
To: 	gerard.meijssen at gmail.com

 >From today on WiktionaryZ has another nice feature. When your user
interface is for example set to Italian and you click on any term
(English, German etc.) and there is an Italian definition present you
will get that one show up. Only if there is no definition in the
language of the user interface you chose an English definition will show
up.

--
Posted by Sabine Cretella to WiktionaryZ
<http://wiktionaryz.blogspot.com/2006/07/definition-in-ui-language-if-present.html>
at 7/28/2006 09:31:00 AM


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Common sense exceptions to our copyright policy.

body:
On 7/28/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/28/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 7/28/06, Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 7/27/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > We shouldn't rely on the completely clueless when determining rules
> > and
> > > > actions with regard to copyright.
> > >
> > > We shouldn't?  Then why do we give everyone an upload button and
> > > encourage them to use it?
> > +1 insightful
>
> I'm still not sure why that is. Personally, I find doing that is a bad idea.

I can't speak for the rest of you If Wikipedia didn't permit editing
by anons I never would have started and  If I had to go ask permission
to upload I probably never would have uploaded...

Actually, the friction of figuring out the uploading procedure
(tagging, commons, policy, etc) resulted in me asking someone else to
upload my first image submission ([[Celesta]]).  At the time I had
many hundreds of edits as an anon, I had an account I had recently
opened, and I was already operating another Mediawiki wiki, so I
understood uploading technically..  What I wasn't comfortable with was
policy.

I am strongly in support of taking action to reduce the amount of
copyright outrageous violations that we get...   But I think it would
be self defeating to implement any policy which discourages real
contribution.   There must be some solution which simultaneously
curtails copyright violation (or at least its impact) and encourages
contribution.

Our challenge is to find that solution.


body:
henna wrote:

> On 7/28/06, Carlos <angus at quovadis.com.ar> wrote:
>
>>Tels wrote:
>>
>>>I don't know much about Ruby, except that I heard Unicode support is really
>>>lacking. Which pretty much rules it out for anything serious text
>>>processing in this age :-D
>>
>>Does MediaWiki do "anything serious text processing"?
>
>
> In case you didn't know, mediawiki works with several non-english
> language, which are more or less impossible to support unless your
> programming language understands Unicode.

And how is it possible now?

Tip: investigate before answering (search for 'xc0' in the code tree).
--


body:
On 7/28/06, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> Actually, the software for Wikipedia in a peer to peer environment has
> already largely been written..

Really? Where can I download it?


from_name: Aphaia

subject: [Foundation-l] Wolf Mountain MediaWiki Appliances Released

body:
On 7/27/06, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Now strings are defined by community, as community supports Wikipedia.
> I'm not CFO, so I'm quite happy about that ;-)

And although you might disagree, I have no reason you are not Hardware
Officer either. I know Delphine calls herself "the former" Chapter
Officer (and now Chair of LCCom). Danny thinks himself GrO still,
Elian resigned, as for other officers, I have no clue.

Related to a certain website, I would like to know the exact contact
Wikimedia Officers or their successors concerning updates of reports
from each field. Is there any latest chart of the Wikimedia Foundation
Organisation? Or we can say "the officers are still in office, unless
they resigned"

Um, however, as for Hardware, I think we need to argue with whom and
on what a comcom member should talk to get a new update? <g>

--
Aphaia
aka
Kizu Naoko
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


body:
Erik-

I'll discuss technical integration details with you
and Gerard offline.  However, in a more general vein,
I'm not sure the lexical construct WiktionaryZ wishes
to impose on every sort of Wikidata entity makes
sense.  For example, multi-lingualism is certainly
important in a lexicographic context, but it does not
apply to a catalog.  A catalog has language-specific
data, for sure, but this is not multi-lingual data-
the language(s) in which a book's title is
historically expressed by the author or publisher is
important, and you cannot just do your own translation
into an arbitrary language and say that is also the
book's title.  Similarly, films are given multiple
titles by their distributors for different markets yet
often these are very different from what a direct
translation would look like.  Here is more detail on
these issues:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_Wikidata

This also does not touch the performance/scalability
issues of storing all text data, all numerica data,
etc. in one table.

Regarding different referencing styles, I'm open to
anything though I think you'll find that in practice
standard numbers like ISBN are less cumbersome to use
than titles.  For example, <<ref:The Davinci Code>>-
does this mean the book, the movie, the audio book, or
"The Davinci Code: Fact or Fiction?" ?

Also, citation is not just fetching bibliographic data
for the purposes of displaying it in an info box like
other information.  It is fundamentally about
associating an assertion with evidence or support, and
so must capture the cited "text" as well as the
paraphrase text. Here is a mock-up of these idea in
the context of an enhanced article validation feature:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikicite_spider_review_mockup.jpg

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


from_name: Mark Wagner

body:
On 7/28/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> I admit I don't do a lot of dealing with newbies uploading bad images.
> But given that most of them are new, naive and not malicious there
> must be ways of sheepherding them to give us the results we want. A
> series of questions, wizard style:
>
> a) Is this a photo, a diagram, or something else like a logo or screenshot
> b) If it's a photo, did you take this with your own camera?
> c) If not, do you know where it came from? Where?
> d) Do you know what kind of licence they have? Is it "non-commercial",
> "public domain", etc?
> e) Do you think we can use it under "fair use" provisions? Please explain.
>
> etc.

I'm working on something like this.  It's already up to ten questions
just to decide if an image is under a free license, a non-free
license, or is self-created.  You can't just ask "do you think we can
use it under 'fair use' provisions" -- the answer will always be
"yes".  The set of questions for determining fair use is going to need
to be fairly large.

> I would steer clear of telling them the consequences of "the
> wrong choice". Best that they simply give us as much information as
> possible, and let them know their uploads will be reviewed by others
> for suitability.

Are you offering to do the reviewing?  There are over two thousand
images uploaded each day, about half of which are uploaded by very new
users.

--
Mark
[[User:Carnildo]]


from_name: Amii Asthana

subject: [Wiktionary-l] thanks

body: thanks


from_name: Mario Gzuk

subject: [Wikitech-l] Updating wiki text via external SQL

body:
Hi,
is it possible to update an article via an sql-statement? What I want to
do:

I have a script wich collects texts from other sources:
e.g. /proc/cpuinfo or texts from external websites.
And I have an article named: computername
Now I want to update the article "computername" with the text from a
local file via SQL in a bash script (or a php script...).

Is it possible? Or are there some solutions for this problem?

thanks for an answer.

greetings mario


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
> It reduces the value of your balance sheet. which reduces your
> atrativeness as a target.

hi!!!! does that mean that all physical operations should be made as
separate legal body, and all the blame would go to another one? ;-)

Domas


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


body:
On 7/28/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/28/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I am strongly in support of taking action to reduce the amount of
> > copyright outrageous violations that we get...   But I think it would
> > be self defeating to implement any policy which discourages real
> > contribution.   There must be some solution which simultaneously
> > curtails copyright violation (or at least its impact) and encourages
> > contribution.
>
> How about a middle ground:
> 1) By default, any logged in user can upload any image they themselves
> have produced. (some way of discouraging them from uploading any other
> images needs to be found)
> 2) "Confirmed" users, preferably those who have uploaded 3 or 4 of
> their own images, can upload copyrighted images for fair use.

The general idea is acceptable to me... but will it be sufficient? We
get a lot of "self made public domain" movie screenshots (for example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ep3skies.jpg).

It would seem that uploaders can't even figure out that they aren't
the copyright holder... so a soft security limitation on uploading
possibly questionable content may not be as effective as we'd like...

But would it be effective enough?


from_name: Chad Perrin

body:
On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 05:36:38PM -0400, Delirium wrote:
>
> The current setup has the nice benefit that it is almost ludicrously
> easy to configure: The only prerequisites are the very standard MySQL
> and PHP, and then you just untar the source files and run config.php.

. . . and that is just awesome.

--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving your
hands and hopping when a rock or a club will do." - McCloctnick the Lucid


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] So you think you can be a Wikipedia article

body:
Peter Ansell wrote:

>I do not see why Wikipedia operates with a totally new type of
>community model that can't be at least compared to a proven durable
>model.
>
Being big and online is what makes it different.  Many representative
models have their origins in times when travel over long distances was
not easy, and any practical kind of instant communication was not yet
invented

>Wikipedia is a digital project with over a thousand active editors.
>That makes it a decent size community in my books. Direct democracy
>may have gotten it this far but the problems with it are not going to
>go away by simply saying that it will work for the foreseeable future.
>There are numerous people on this list who have complaints about the
>current structure, of which sockpuppeting is just one of them.
>
In a fair analysis of the situation sockpuppetry is a distraction.  One
needs to begin in good faith from the presumption that most editors will
not engage in such practices.  Some people will remain who will
nevertheless do whatever it takes to get their point accepted, but
dealing with them is still a secondary issue.

Direct democracy fails when it overwhelms the large body of citizenry.
If the average citizen of Wikimedia has to vote on so many issues that
he has time for nothing else the experience is not a worthwhile one, and
his vote will not be guided by an informed and reasoned process.  If an
issue comes forth now that has no apparent relation to what I am doing I
will properly ignore it, but the downside may come two years from now
when my editing is affected and I am faced with a series of cemented
rules that make no sense.

Both direct and representative democracy have their shortcomings.  A
truly democratic system should be temporal as well as spatial.  In other
words there cna be no final determinative vote on almost anything
because those votes make no allowance for the views of those who have
not yet joined us.

For example, copyright law, as we know it, is largely the product of the
efforts of lobbyists with a vested interests; the potential user of the
material does not even know about changes which adversely affect his
interests until it is too late to easily do anything about it.  Someone
who does not stand to receive financial benefits is not going to be able
send a representative to monitor the negotiations of the WIPO cartel ...
even assuming that he would be allowed into the room in the first place.

>On the executive/cabinet role, I thought it was obvious that the
>[[WP:OFFICE]] setup sets the base rules and makes day to day effective
>immediately judgements when it thinks they are necessary.
>
I would only have problems with this process when it stops being limited
to honest emergencies.

Ec


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-07-28

body:
On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 04:47:11AM -0700, mboverload wrote:
> On 7/28/06, Ivan Krstic <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:
> > mboverload wrote:
> > > Wow, your tests can identify the bugzilla number automatically?  neato
> > =P
> >
> > Those are hardcoded manually when the tests are being written.
>
> My ability to convey sarcasm over the internet sucks.  I suck =(

No; Ivan just fell into the Sarchasm.

You think *that* was bad?

	http://ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=83

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	Fanfic: read enough, and you'll loose your mind.  --me


body:
On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 10:59:40AM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote:
> . . . aside from the fact that it often exhibits an at least arithmetic
> increase in execution time as compared with straight C.
>
> Sorry, minor, largely pointless quibble.

It's not pointless when you're putting out >100Mbps continuously.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

	Fanfic: read enough, and you'll loose your mind.  --me


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Hillman's arguments

body:
On 7/27/06, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin at gmail.com> wrote:
> The flaw of this argument is that it projects the ails of a small
> number of articles -- primarily topics of current political and social
> interest -- onto an overwhelming majority of articles that don't
> suffer from them.  Our coverage of the Cassowary is not given
> (purposeful) misinformation, our article on the Siege of Florence
> doesn't really resemble a blog, and so forth.
>
> In other words: alarm is not called for at this point.  Despite the
> failings of a (relatively) miniscule number of articles, the vast
> underbelly of historical, scientific, and literary topics that
> includes most of our coverage is steadily moving forward with "proper"
> encyclopedic work.

Now, what's interesting is to think about where most of the
"deliberate POV" problems in our encyclopaedia reside:

- Currently trading companies
- Political parties, governments etc
- Other living people
- Religions
- Certain highly emotive debates (abortion, circumcision,
neurolinguistic programming - for reasons beyond my comprehension)

It's interesting to note that most traditional encyclopaedias have
steered clear of these areas to a certain extent.

Seems like the POVs fall into three categories:
1) I think X is a god, and I need to fix this bias against him/her/it
2) I think X is evil, and I want everyone to know it
3) I work for/represent X, and it is in my interests to improve
his/her/it's image on Wikipedia

1) isn't too scary, it just takes a fair bit of work to control
2) is what's going to get us sued
3) is the scariest, and the hardest to detect (hamfisted Congress
staffers aside)

Does this analysis help anything?

Steve


from_name: Ivan Krstic

body:
mboverload wrote:
> My ability to convey sarcasm over the internet sucks.  I suck =(

"""According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone
of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've
correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the
time.

"That's how flame wars get started," says psychologist Nicholas Epley of
the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger
of New York University. "People in our study were convinced they've
accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their
odds are no better than chance," says Epley."""

 -- full article: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70179-0.html

--
Ivan Krstic <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D


body:
Ilya Haykinson wrote:

>Folks,
>
>Jeff is actually trying to build a business based on reusing Wikipedia
>content, and yet a good half of these posts attack him for making use of the
>content.  Nowhere in our charter does it say that we're building an
>immutable work.  Let people who want to tweak it, rename it, change my
>username to a foul word, rename all mentions of Jimmy Wales to "Evil
>Dictator" or whatever do so.  The source material is Wikipedia.  The end
>users can't call theirs Wikipedia, since that's the WMF's trademark.  Beyond
>that, we should be encouraging all uses --
>
Yes.  The more of these there are the better.  This includes the right
to use all or part of the Wikimedia material to start a new wiki.  The
result still has to be consistent with GFDL, and trademark limitations
should not be that much of a problem.  These new wikis aren't bound by
NPOV, and they can be as liberal or conservative as they want around
copyright law.  If they want to avoid wikilove and establish a
flame-wiki that's up to them too.

This all seems consistent with freedom of information.

Ec


references:
<20060727160106.GD13295@cgi.jachomes.com>
	<eaau76$j39$1@sea.gmane.org> <eabmds$epi$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<20060728062819.GE17663@apotheon.com> <eae6ei$lda$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 07:26:15PM -0400, Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Chad Perrin wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 08:40:35PM -0400, Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> >> Timwi wrote:
> >>> For the parser, I'm sure the "why" is self-evident. For the rest, the
> >>> answer to "why" unfortunately includes "I don't know any Python or
> >>> Ruby". All I know is that PHP is unsuitable for anything larger than a
> >>> quick hack.
> >> Delighted to see that you've called Yahoo! a quick hack. ;-)
> >
> > He said it was "unsuitable for a quick hack", not that people don't use
> > it for anything more than a quick hack.
> >
> > I (mostly) agree.
>
> Not sure if I'm interpreting you correctly: while you're picking holes
> in my logic (correct on all counts), you agree with the basic jist?

I mostly agree that PHP is unsuitable for anything larger than a quick
hack.  That doesn't mean it doesn't get used for things larger than a
quick hack.  That's the point I was trying to make.

--
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
unix virus: If you're using a unixlike OS, please forward
this to 20 others and erase your system partition.


from_name: GerardM

subject: [Foundation-l] Project Proposal: Wikicat

body:
Hoi,
The project that you propose has a very large overlap with the WikiAuthors
project. This project is as it is described on Meta about among other things
the disambiguation of Pubmet articles. This project is extremely likely to
be realised. The functionality that you describe can and will by and large
be modelled using Wikidata technology.

As this project does use the Wikidata technology, it would make very much
sense to collaborate and share our efforts and make one big and beautiful
project.

Please let us discuss how we can / will collaborate.. for your information
WiktionaryZ's codebase is updated daily. This means for instance that today
people will have definitions shown in the language of their user interface.
If this definition is not there, English will be shown. When there is no
English, any definition will be shown.

Thanks,
    GerardM

On 7/28/06, Jonathan Leybovich <jleybov at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> All-
>
> I hereby propose for your consideration Wikicat, a
> project to create an open, bibliographic catalog.  The
> purpose of Wikicat is to both lay the groundwork for a
> scholarly apparatus to be used within Wikipedia as
> well as create a unique and valuable information
> resource in its own right.  In particular, Wikicat
> will:
>
> * facilitate the process of citation by automatically
> fetching bibliographic data based upon unique keys
> such as ISBN, ISSN, and LCCN
> * allow users to more easily navigate between
> information resources by grouping them in a
> functionally significant manner (in particular,
> according to the principles of [[w:FRBR]]) so that,
> for example, different editions, translations, etc.
> are all joined together
> * apply Wikipedia's collaborative content creation
> model to bibliographic data, resulting in a catalog of
> unprecedented detail
>
> In terms of implementation, Wikicat will be defined
> like any other [[m:Wikidata]] dataset and will
> integrate with other datasets such as WiktionaryZ to
> share common entities and perhaps someday support
> something along the lines of a Semantic Mediawiki.  As
> Wikidata is currently not code complete, though,
> Wikicat will be deployed in stages, during the first
> of which it will exist as a read-only database that
> populates itself on an as-needed/"as-cited" basis by
> importing data from the open catalog servers of such
> institutions as the Library of Congress, the
> University of California library system, the U.S.
> National Library of Medicine, etc.
>
> Details about the project, in increasing technical
> detail, are available on the following pages:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikicat
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicat
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicat_Technical_Design
>
> Coding of the first stage of the project is nearly
> complete and a list of its operational requirements
> will soon be forthcoming.  Here is a demo of Wikicat
> integration with the Cite/<ref> extension:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikicat_Cite_screenshoot.png
>
> Thank you for your time and I look forward to your
> comments.
>
>
> Jonathan Leybovich
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Delirium

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>On 7/27/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Unthreaded: in a clear field, Chad, what *would* you have implemented
>>MediaWiki in?  And why?
>>
>>
>
>Much of recent development and administration has focused on caching,
>clustering, failover, load balancing, and so on. It seems to me that
>the decision to use a ready-made application server like JBoss, Resin
>or Zope (or WebSphere if you want proprietary) or a different database
>server would make a greater difference for long term deployment of a
>very large scale wiki farm like Wikimedia than the choice of a
>particular programming language (though of course one may imply the
>other).
>
>
One downside to the application-server approach is that, unless
carefully written so use of the application server was optional, it
would significantly complicate the reuse potential of MediaWiki by
smaller-scale operations.  Now making MediaWiki maximally reusable
open-source software is a secondary goal to using it ourselves, but
insofar as it's the only reliable renderer of our content, it's not
entirely irrelevant.

The current setup has the nice benefit that it is almost ludicrously
easy to configure: The only prerequisites are the very standard MySQL
and PHP, and then you just untar the source files and run config.php.

-Mark


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>On 7/29/06, Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Are you offering to do the reviewing?  There are over two thousand
>>images uploaded each day, about half of which are uploaded by very new
>>users.
>>
>
>Once the images are filtered appropriately, spend as much time
>reviewing them as is appropriate. In "problem areas", delete slabs
>without looking if needed.
>
Every experienced editor should volunteer to process 500 new uploads,
it's most enlightening. For instance, it's not that common to have
even 2-3 images that can be handled as a group, they're all different
in completely random ways. I've never been able to get my time much
below 100 images/hour, and that's only at times when the servers are
responsive.

Stan


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

body:
Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 01:42:45PM +0300, Domas Mituzas wrote:
>>
>>(BTW, server side javascript, and various mutations, exists too).
>
> Eww.  After reading that, I think my brain needs a shower.

Modern JavaScript (okay, ECMAScript) is actually a pretty nice language.
  It's just the browser implementations that generally suck.  But it's
certainly no worse than PHP.

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

subject: [WikiEN-l] Categories for deletion/discussion issues

body:
On 27 Jul 2006 at 20:41, Alphax wrote:

> ScottL wrote:
> > It has a map showing the geographic distribution of pop vs soda vs coke
> > vs. other (usually soft drink).
>
> Pop? Isn't that what you do to bubble wrap?
>
> Coke? Isn't that a fuel made from heating coal in the absence of air, or
> a slang term for cocaine?

Soda?  Do you mean baking soda or the nonalcoholic part of scotch &
soda?

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/


body:
On 7/28/06, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> > And although you might disagree, I have no reason you are not Hardware
> > Officer either. I know Delphine calls herself "the former" Chapter
> > Officer (and now Chair of LCCom). Danny thinks himself GrO still,
> > Elian resigned, as for other officers, I have no clue.
>
> Right now tech. committee has the authority (even more of that!) than
> I did before.
> I still handle the work of 'hardware officer', but I guess I did that
> before we even invented officers.
> And if you want formal hierarchy, then I guess Brion is our chairman ;-)

/me notes "the bureaucracy and hierarchy of WMF is as complicated as
... some christian denominacions which claim their apostelic
traditions

> > Related to a certain website, I would like to know the exact contact
> > Wikimedia Officers or their successors concerning updates of reports
> > from each field. Is there any latest chart of the Wikimedia Foundation
> > Organisation?
>
> I'm sure those reports might be called quite voluntary - at least I
> did them before to describe our activities (then someone thought it
> was good idea to use them as semi-official documents).

You makes a good note. Let me explain here our situation in general.
Currently _all_ editors of its are voluntary, and I understand
committees' members are too, say, it is mundatory for none of us to
edit / update the website (IIRC the resolution which demanded
periodical reports from committe(s) has been pending, so no binding
for us). It's one pole of our world. The other pole is that it is the
official website of the WMF, and external people, including donors
visits that. And the most of informatiom provided to them on that site
is outdated. We are sustained by those good people but they might know
nothing in details for what they contributed to the Foundation. And as
far as I know, many of them believe they donate for hardware purchase.
It would be good to inform them how their former donations were used.

That is why I think Report on Budget and Hardware purchase, those two
items would be crutial parts of that website. But not only hardware,
but also other activities are matters, as far as the Foundation budget
is spent for those. Or it was done under the name of WMF. Other kinds
of reports are therefore informative and helpful to develop the
Foundation's and consequently our own activities on the projects.

Formerly Quarto provided its readers quarterly reports but it hasn't
been issued since last year. A report twice a year  (it's currently
just my personal thought, I need to discuss this idea on Comcom lter)
for example might be easiler to make than quarterly ones, and more
visitor-friendly than webpages not undated through about one year.

>
> > Or we can say "the officers are still in office, unless
> > they resigned"
>
> Or we can say - we have community of nice guys who do stuff. Titles
> are nice, but they're not tags that make us act in some specific
> ways. :)

Yep. And our currently potential problems are, so I presume, 1) there
is no particular community on that [and perhaps it would be one reason
most of its editors are inactive] and 2) many people who have an
account on that seem to tend to think they need titles or tags alike
to make a significant contributions [and it makes a sense in some
cases; but personally some people seem to take it too a big deal, as
if even they are disqualified to make a draft for updating. The tag
"Official" might scare them].

> > Um, however, as for Hardware, I think we need to argue with whom and
> > on what a comcom member should talk to get a new update? <g>
>
> We already discussed that, didn't we? :)

So we expect you remember other present and important issues clearly,
including the informally proposed Houserule for Wikimania?

--
Aphaia
aka
Kizu Naoko
email: Aphaia @ gmail (dot) com


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 12:44:33AM -0600, Chad Perrin wrote:
>
> I like the proposed idea of writing one or two core, high-load
> components in C, or even (if we're really adventurous) something better
> performing like Ada, though that's probably really pushing it.  Since I
> don't much enjoy looking at C code, though, I might just ask someone
> else to write the C, so I guess *I* in particular might not implement
> any of it in C.  Eh.
>
We actually do this. The diff engine exists as a PHP plugin written in C
(or C++, which is nearly the same). Tim is working on another plugin
that will do much faster translations of UTF-8 strings from e.g.
traditional to simplified Chinese.

Regards,

	jens


from_name: Edward Z. Yang

subject: [Wikitech-l] Happy Sysadmin Day!!!

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

mboverload wrote:
> I'm running in Windows under an account with administrator privileges, does
> that count? =D

No... (a few extra points if it's a multiuser system, but still no dice).
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFEyprIqTO+fYacSNoRAkR6AJ9w87BOgWnZPTcEYF3B+N/Z8XRaegCdEFC2
k6+6noU/wgIux0FXjG1VTTQ=
=/KkA
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
WiktionaryZ currently supports multilingual free-text attributes and
will support other data type attributes in the future. The data you
can associate with a WiktionaryZ entitity will likely depend on what
class that entity belongs to. For instance, if an entity is of type
person, you could associate a birthdate, death date, place of birth,
place of death, first name/last name (though that might be handled on
another level), etc.

If the entity belongs to the class "publication", you could associate
references to specific edition; if it belongs to class "author", you
could associate publications, and so on.

In this generic model, a reference is just one instance of an entity
whose associated data you might want to display in a Wikipedia
article. So we would probably come up with a special type of template
that can fetch data from WiktionaryZ and insert it into a page layout.
Then you could, for instance, use

<<person:Jimmy Wales>>

to display the person data about Jimbo, or

<<country:Germany>>

to make a nice country infobox. Then again, you could also do

<<ref:The Origin of Species|author=Charles Darwin|class=book>>

to show _any_ book edition of Darwin's work, or

<<ref:The Origin of Species|ISBN=whatever>>

to cite a specific edition. If the title is not ambiguous, you might
even only have to do something like

<<ref:The Cosmic and the Comic: Einstein's Scientific Spirituality>>

and all the properties would be derived automatically from that. In
fact, the WiktionaryZ model very much matches the work/expression
distinction, though we use the terminology the other way around: an
expression refers to _any_ possible meaning of a string of characters,
whereas each meaning ("work" in this context) has its own defined
meaning ID and can also be disambiguated by its relations and other
associated data (for publications: author, year, various codes, etc.).

One advantage, in my view, is that we do not require people to pass
around codes and numbers unless they really need to and want to, and
even then, we retain the expression (work title) in the wiki source
text, making it easy to see what a particular reference is about.

Erik


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

Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 08:40:35PM -0400, Edward Z. Yang wrote:
>> Timwi wrote:
>>> For the parser, I'm sure the "why" is self-evident. For the rest, the
>>> answer to "why" unfortunately includes "I don't know any Python or
>>> Ruby". All I know is that PHP is unsuitable for anything larger than a
>>> quick hack.
>> Delighted to see that you've called Yahoo! a quick hack. ;-)
>
> He said it was "unsuitable for a quick hack", not that people don't use
> it for anything more than a quick hack.
>
> I (mostly) agree.

Not sure if I'm interpreting you correctly: while you're picking holes
in my logic (correct on all counts), you agree with the basic jist?
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from_name: Platonides

subject: [Wikitech-l] Category redlinks

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> There are also cases where categories do not need to belong to another
> category to be "useful", like "1911 Encyclopaedia" or "Pages needing
> cleanup" or whatever. They can be made *even more useful* by
> categorising, but that's not saying much...
>
> Steve

They are self-explanation but, how do you know that such category exist?
It's the reason of the category trees. So you could arrive to "Pages needing
cleanup" from "Wiki maintenance" and "1911 Encyclopaedia" from "Articles
by sources". And, would you write "1911 Encyclopaedia" or "1911
Encyclopedia" ?
It's an easy mistake, so you end up with both categories...


body:
"Domas Mituzas"wrote:
>> Don't take this as an insult, because I'm really not sure, but I
>> was really
>> joking.  Building Mediawiki in javascript is a joke, which is
>> impossible....right?.  I mean, how would javascript write to the
>> database.
>> Maybe you were thinking I was talking about AJAX?
>
> You haven't heard about bittorrent? There will be no need for the
> database!!!

Well, this was thought as a joke, but it exists! It's a mix of wiki &
peer2peer. You pass to your contacts those articles you think are good
and block those bad.
A complete anarchy, impractical for wikipedia, we would lose our benevolent
dictator ;-)


body:
"Carlos" wrote:
>
>> In case you didn't know, mediawiki works with several non-english
>> language, which are more or less impossible to support unless your
>> programming language understands Unicode.
>
> And how is it possible now?
>
> Tip: investigate before answering (search for 'xc0' in the code tree).

MediaWiki uses the php binary strings, where you can store anything.
Unicode or not.


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Everyone _did_ see the article in The Onion?

body:
On Fri, 28 Jul 2006 09:15:17 +0200, "Steve Bennett"
<stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

>> http://www.theonion.com/content/node/50902
>But I saw that one...

Pure genius :-)

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Platonides wrote:
> "Domas Mituzas"wrote:
>
>>> Don't take this as an insult, because I'm really not sure, but I
>>> was really
>>> joking.  Building Mediawiki in javascript is a joke, which is
>>> impossible....right?.  I mean, how would javascript write to the
>>> database.
>>> Maybe you were thinking I was talking about AJAX?
>>>
>> You haven't heard about bittorrent? There will be no need for the
>> database!!!
>>
>
> Well, this was thought as a joke, but it exists! It's a mix of wiki &
> peer2peer. You pass to your contacts those articles you think are good
> and block those bad.
> A complete anarchy, impractical for wikipedia, we would lose our benevolent
> dictator ;-)
Hoi,
Actually, the software for Wikipedia in a peer to peer environment has
already largely been written.. The part that needs doing is the
modelling of the distribution given an evolving demand for content. To
do this a GRID network is available to do the emulation of the network
and the algorithms involved. In order to run this emulation traffic data
is needed. There is a tool that can collect our traffic data real time..
The waiting is for the implementation of all this... It can be
implemented when there is a decision that such an exercise is not only
of great academic interest but has also a great potential benefit.

PS this tool can also give us statistics of the traffic to our services ..

Thanks,
    GerardM


subject: [Wikitech-l] Pageview counters

body:
>> Another problem could be avoiding spamming the view list.
>
> I'm not clear what you mean by this.
>
> -Erik

We talked about it on the irc. Leon (user) put the second on the top100 the
Leon (article) with a tiny script in minutes. So it's not very reliable.

Keeping the information on the WM servers should be done very carefully. The
page counting could also affect the wikis flow (did you realize images are
kept on other server so if it's overloaded, you can still read the
articles?). The automatic page counting is disabled on wikipedia for the
load it would give. Archiving on the db should be discarded i think, at
least on the *same* db. There's also little need for the full replication of
statistic data.

What would be neat would be having the tools recognizing the users.
Configuring tools. the deletions browser available for those with
deletedhistory, configuring with monobooks.js... Hopefully, the single login
should give some external auth system.


from_name: Jeffrey V. Merkey

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>Ilya Haykinson wrote:
>
>
>
>>Folks,
>>
>>Jeff is actually trying to build a business based on reusing Wikipedia
>>content, and yet a good half of these posts attack him for making use of the
>>content.  Nowhere in our charter does it say that we're building an
>>immutable work.  Let people who want to tweak it, rename it, change my
>>username to a foul word, rename all mentions of Jimmy Wales to "Evil
>>Dictator" or whatever do so.  The source material is Wikipedia.  The end
>>users can't call theirs Wikipedia, since that's the WMF's trademark.  Beyond
>>that, we should be encouraging all uses --
>>
>>
>>
>Yes.  The more of these there are the better.  This includes the right
>to use all or part of the Wikimedia material to start a new wiki.  The
>result still has to be consistent with GFDL, and trademark limitations
>should not be that much of a problem.  These new wikis aren't bound by
>NPOV, and they can be as liberal or conservative as they want around
>copyright law.  If they want to avoid wikilove and establish a
>flame-wiki that's up to them too.
>
>This all seems consistent with freedom of information.
>
>Ec
>
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
Well,

I don't have plans to call Jimbo an "Evil Dictator" and slam anyone else
ever again in the
community.

This project is for Native Langauge Preservation with each tribe getting
their own appliance and
translator to translate content and host it locally. I plan to help out
with Foundation with
my translation work, and we are actually one of the few groups actually
using wikibooks
for an actual education program, so the fit is a good one.

As for wikilove, I have my good share of it, after all, I am one of the
few community members
still here and doing my best to help out after the flame war of the
century with the Wikipedia
Community. I just hope everyone can forgive and forget and we can all
work together moving forward.

Jeff


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Category redlinks

body:
On 7/28/06, Platonides <Platonides at gmail.com> wrote:
> They are self-explanation but, how do you know that such category exist?
> It's the reason of the category trees. So you could arrive to "Pages needing
> cleanup" from "Wiki maintenance" and "1911 Encyclopaedia" from "Articles
> by sources". And, would you write "1911 Encyclopaedia" or "1911
> Encyclopedia" ?
> It's an easy mistake, so you end up with both categories...

How do you know that any page exists? Don't confuse the ideal
situation with "anything but the worst possible situation".

Anyway.

Steve


body:
On 7/28/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am strongly in support of taking action to reduce the amount of
> copyright outrageous violations that we get...   But I think it would
> be self defeating to implement any policy which discourages real
> contribution.   There must be some solution which simultaneously
> curtails copyright violation (or at least its impact) and encourages
> contribution.

How about a middle ground:
1) By default, any logged in user can upload any image they themselves
have produced. (some way of discouraging them from uploading any other
images needs to be found)
2) "Confirmed" users, preferably those who have uploaded 3 or 4 of
their own images, can upload copyrighted images for fair use.

Steve


body:
On 7/28/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> How about a middle ground:
> 1) By default, any logged in user can upload any image they themselves
> have produced. (some way of discouraging them from uploading any other
> images needs to be found)
> 2) "Confirmed" users, preferably those who have uploaded 3 or 4 of
> their own images, can upload copyrighted images for fair use.

...err, I clearly left out public domain/free/reusable images, which
would go in bucket 2).

Steve


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject:
[WikiEN-l] somewhat OFFTOPIC (was Re: Common sense exceptions
	to our copyright policy.)

body:
True, it's exactly how it should be. Nothing more required. Some of those
images we were discussing would be the umpteenth in a certain article. I
just took Nicole as an example because most of the violations are with
entertainment-related articles. Nothing against that article specifically.

Mgm

On 7/28/06, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> On 7/27/06, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Take for example [[Nicole Kidman]]. One fair use image to illustrate who
> > we're talking about is okay. Having an entire gallery isn't.
>
> Not to nitpick, but the Nicole Kidman article has a *free* image,
> which should be enough to illustrate who we're talking about.
>
> A second one, [[Image:The hours-nicole kidman.jpg]], would probably be
> OK too, even though it's not free, if the article talked more about
> how Kidman looked in that movie.
>
> Anthony
> _______________________________________________
> 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: Stephen Bain

subject: [WikiEN-l] giving medical advice

body:
On 7/28/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/28/06, zero 0000 <nought_0000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  Maybe there should also be a disclaimer.
> >
> > Zero.
> >
>
> There is.

For those of you playing at home, that's [[Wikipedia:Medical disclaimer]].
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Medical_disclaimer

Despite the disclaimer, it's certainly a good idea to keep detailed
descriptions of procedures down to a brief, concise selection from a
textbook or similar work. This has the advantages of limiting the
impact of the editing process on fuddling the accuracy of the
description, and funnelling readers away from the wiki and to sources
more appropriate for the context.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: John Lyden

subject: [WikiEN-l] Accented characters (was Re: fancruft)

body:
On 7/28/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I guess whoever programmed the system that produces and distributes
> > the digest form of this list is among those "luddites", since the
> > digest is done in strict US-ASCII, and the accented letter above
> > shows up as a question mark.
> >
>
> Why, praytell, are you using digests???
>

Some people just don't LIKE volumes of mail being dumped in their inbox.

That being said, the current rehash of the diacritic vs. non-diacritic
article titles is piping back up on [[WP:HOCKEY]].

I'm still roughly confused as to why some people are pilloried for
applying [[Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English)]] to hockey
players.

-Ras

--
John Lyden - rasputinaxp at gmail.com
"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time..." -Kerouac


body:
On 7/28/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> The general idea is acceptable to me... but will it be sufficient? We
> get a lot of "self made public domain" movie screenshots (for example
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ep3skies.jpg).
>
> It would seem that uploaders can't even figure out that they aren't
> the copyright holder... so a soft security limitation on uploading
> possibly questionable content may not be as effective as we'd like...
>
> But would it be effective enough?

I admit I don't do a lot of dealing with newbies uploading bad images.
But given that most of them are new, naive and not malicious there
must be ways of sheepherding them to give us the results we want. A
series of questions, wizard style:

a) Is this a photo, a diagram, or something else like a logo or screenshot
b) If it's a photo, did you take this with your own camera?
c) If not, do you know where it came from? Where?
d) Do you know what kind of licence they have? Is it "non-commercial",
"public domain", etc?
e) Do you think we can use it under "fair use" provisions? Please explain.

etc. I would steer clear of telling them the consequences of "the
wrong choice". Best that they simply give us as much information as
possible, and let them know their uploads will be reviewed by others
for suitability.

Maybe rather than preventing newbies from uploading, we should simply
force newbies to follow the wizard each time, and permission to bypass
the wizard would be a privilege to obtain.

Steve


from_name: 田中 万太郎

subject: [Wikitech-l] LIVE MIRROR, please block

body:
Hi

I found this page:
http://ja.andmoretop.info/pacman-online/Special:Recentchanges.html

which is mirroring Wikipedia live, also English version
e.g.

http://en.andmoretop.info/pacman-online/Special:Recentchanges.html

This site seems to be doing the same with domains such as

comedypage.info
feederpolitics.info
centraltest.info
getsearchinformation.info

Thankyou

TANAKA

--------------------------------------
Let's start Yahoo! Auction  -  Free Campaign Now!
http://pr.mail.yahoo.co.jp/auction/


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
geni wrote:

>On 7/28/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>That wouldn't do it.  Cash and equipment are both assets on a balance
>>sheet.  If it ever came to that, either could be used to satisfy a
>>debt.  Buying hardware just so that it can have an opportunity to
>>depreciate does not seem like a sensible strategy.
>>
>>
>It reduces the value of your balance sheet. which reduces your
>atrativeness as a target.
>
Making purchases where the only reason is to reduce the asset value on
the balance sheet does not strike me as sound fiscal management.

>>Although it's
>>important to plan for equipment breakdown and obsolescence there is also
>>a value to delaying purchases.  The same $10,000 that you might spend
>>prematurely today for a desired piece of equipment might give you a more
>>advanced piece of similar equipment a year from now.
>>
>>
>But we need the equipment now.
>
That's usually a good reason for buying new equipment.


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-07-29

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)... FAILED!
Running test Magic Word: {{CURRENTMONTHNAMEGEN}}... FAILED!
Running test Template with thumb image (wiht link in description)... FAILED!
Running test message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Running test HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)... FAILED!
Running test Parsing optional HTML elements (Bug 6171)... FAILED!
Running test Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting... FAILED!
Running test Mixing markup for italics and bold... FAILED!
Running test 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line... FAILED!
Running test HTML Hex character encoding.... FAILED!
Running test dt/dd/dl test... FAILED!

Passed 412 of 429 tests (96.04%) FAILED!


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
Brad Patrick wrote:

>One of several strategies which may be considered is the plausibility of
>separating operations from trademark/IP and having a different corporate
>structure for them under the Board umbrella.   Once we have completed
>our audit, we will consider the advantages of those different
>situations.  These are preliminary concepts, not actual plans at this time.
>
I can get behind that approach, and look forward to the completed
audit.  In the meantime different ideas should be welcomed.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
mboverload wrote:

>I'm just not comfortable with leasing period.
>
>I find Wikipedia to be too important to leave in anyone's hands other than
>the immediate foundation.  A company that leases servers may easily give in
>to legal challenges or other backhanded threats. We'd have to have legal
>advice about how this would effect the lawsuit situation and consider what
>we would be giving up.
>
Leasing does not necesarily mean going through an existing for-profit
leasing company.  Many of them would certainly give cause to your
discomfort.  A totally new company established for the purpose of
leasing back the hardware would do just fine.  Whatever contractual
arrangements are made could reflect the values of the community and a
break even business plan.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


body:
On 7/29/06, Mark Wagner <carnildo at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm working on something like this.  It's already up to ten questions
> just to decide if an image is under a free license, a non-free
> license, or is self-created.  You can't just ask "do you think we can
> use it under 'fair use' provisions" -- the answer will always be
> "yes".  The set of questions for determining fair use is going to need
> to be fairly large.

My presumption was actually to do something like this:
1 Do you think it can be used under fair use? Why?
2 User writes some half-arsed response
3 Image is stored in quarantine
4 Periodically, administrator goes through and checks if any have
decent rationales, and deletes the rest

That is, kind of like a police officer dutifully noting down "So,
you're an extra terrestrial here to save humanity by removing gold
necklaces from "earthlings" necks. That's great, thanks".

I suppose it would be kind of bad faith, but how else to resolve the problem?

> Are you offering to do the reviewing?  There are over two thousand
> images uploaded each day, about half of which are uploaded by very new
> users.

Once the images are filtered appropriately, spend as much time
reviewing them as is appropriate. In "problem areas", delete slabs
without looking if needed.

Steve


body:
On 7/29/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> > Pop? Isn't that what you do to bubble wrap?
> >
> > Coke? Isn't that a fuel made from heating coal in the absence of air, or
> > a slang term for cocaine?
>
> Soda?  Do you mean baking soda or the nonalcoholic part of scotch &
> soda?

I can't think of any other interpretations of "soft drink".

Steve


body:
On 7/29/06, Jonathan Leybovich <jleybov at yahoo.com> wrote:
> A catalog has language-specific
> data, for sure, but this is not multi-lingual data-
> the language(s) in which a book's title is
> historically expressed by the author or publisher is
> important, and you cannot just do your own translation
> into an arbitrary language and say that is also the
> book's title.

A translated version of the book should probably have its own
DefinedMeaning, since you will want to relate all kinds of information
specifically on that level. It could be linked to the original edition
not so much through the synonyms/translations, but through a special
relation type, e.g. "is translated edition of." Even with that
information, you may _still_ want to translate the title to languages
where no actual edition is available, so you can cite a book e.g. with
both its official title, and an unofficial translated title in the
language of the Wikipedia edition you're using.

> This also does not touch the performance/scalability
> issues of storing all text data, all numerica data,
> etc. in one table.

It won't be quite as simple as that, but let's discuss that.

> Regarding different referencing styles, I'm open to
> anything though I think you'll find that in practice
> standard numbers like ISBN are less cumbersome to use
> than titles.  For example, <<ref:The Davinci Code>>-
> does this mean the book, the movie, the audio book, or
> "The Davinci Code: Fact or Fiction?" ?

Referencing books that also have movie adaptations doesn't seem quite
as common. If I look at a real-world example, e.g. [[Emu]], I'll find
references like

* The heat load from solar radiation on a large, diurnally active
bird, the emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae)
* Ventilatory accommodation of oxygen demand and respiratory water
loss in a large bird, the emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae), and a
re-examination of ventilatory allometry for birds
*  Endocrine and testicular changes in a short-day seasonally breeding
bird, the emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae), in southwestern Australia.

I don't think any of these will be turned into movies soon. ;-) In
addition, you could even capture the type of reference with the
template name, e.g. <<book:The Da Vinci Code>> would only refer to an
entity which has the class membership "book". You could also do
pre-save transformations, that is, the user types <<book:Some title>>,
and if the expression unambiguously refers to one publication, a
unique identifier is automatically inserted into the reference in
addition to the title.

Of course, the ideal user interface would probably give you a little
pop-up when you click on a toolbar icon, let you search (or add!) the
reference information, and insert the right tags into the wiki source
text.

> Also, citation is not just fetching bibliographic data
> for the purposes of displaying it in an info box like
> other information.  It is fundamentally about
> associating an assertion with evidence or support, and
> so must capture the cited "text" as well as the
> paraphrase text. Here is a mock-up of these idea in
> the context of an enhanced article validation feature:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikicite_spider_review_mockup.jpg

:-) I see we have indeed been thinking about very similar problem
areas. You'll find a mock-up of a simple scoped citation syntax in
p.190 of the first edition of my book:
http://medienrevolution.dpunkt.de/files/Medienrevolution-1.pdf

I like your systematic source review, though I'm not sure adding this
additional UI layer is necessary. One thing to keep in mind: In a wiki
review process, you'll probably almost never flag things as
"misleading" or "made-up" -- instead, you should encourage direct
editing of the content.

I think we'll have lots to talk about.

Erik


from_name: Tels

subject:
[Wikitech-l] OT: What language would *you* have done it in,
	and why?

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

Moin,

On Saturday 29 July 2006 00:41, Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 05:36:38PM -0400, Delirium wrote:
> > The current setup has the nice benefit that it is almost ludicrously
> > easy to configure: The only prerequisites are the very standard MySQL
> > and PHP, and then you just untar the source files and run config.php.
>
> . . . and that is just awesome.

Indeed. It made painfully aware to me how complicated most softwareis to
install, especially the one written by me. Taking a slice out of that and
making software easier to install and use is now oneof my goals, and
mediawiki is a role model for that.

best wishes,

tels

- --
 Signed on Sat Jul 29 02:10:52 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "Some spammers have this warped idea that their freedom of speech is
 guaranteed all the way into my hard drive, but it is my firm belief that
 their rights end at my firewall." -- Nigel Featherston

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subject: [Wikitech-l] New SVN user

body:
On 7/28/06, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
> Can I comment on this? It has one problem that peeves me on other AJAX
> sites too... :-) The problem is when people overuse AJAX when it is
> inappropriate. In this case, clicking an "edit" link is one such case.
> It completely changes the appearance of the screen, therefore the user
> understands it as a separate page, therefore the user expects to be able
> to go back by clicking the browser's "back" button. Using AJAX to change
> the page removes this functionality and makes it a frustrating
> experience ("It won't let me go back! Help!").

I agree that there may be problems, but I don't necessarily agree that
the edit link should always load a separate page. Editing sections or
whole pages inline would arguably be a more-wiki way than loading
separate pages.

On the idea raised above, live parsing may not be entirely feasible;
perhaps an implementation that still does not require loading a new
page, but is only triggered when the preview button is pushed?

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
On 7/29/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> I hate to spoil your fun, but what is going to stop people from just
> claiming "Yes, I made this" on every random image they get from
> Flickr/Photobucket/Google images?

It is pretty clear that our copyvios come because strangers to our
project don't know any better... It was free for them to obtain from
some site, so they can't see a reason we can't have the picture too.

Unfortunately it seems that when the site tells them no (as happens
with the prohibited options in the drop down, a great many people have
no reservations lying to the site in order to get it to not say their
images will be deleted. :(   I don't think this is because people are
dishonest at heart, but rather because people are conditioned to press
buttons until the computer does whatever they want.

That said, I think "saying no" would cause a real reduction in bad
images... but if we aren't careful how we say no we will encourage
people to twiddle the knobs until they've left misleading metadata.
I'd rather we have more violations which are tagged somewhat correctly
than fewer violations but with them tagged as free content.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Foundation-l] Reporting & communication

body:
Domas Mituzas wrote:
> Hi!
>
>
>>/me notes "the bureaucracy and hierarchy of WMF is as complicated as
>>... some christian denominacions which claim their apostelic
>>traditions
>
>
> :-) yeah, all that stuff to prove there is no cabal..
>
>
>>nothing in details for what they contributed to the Foundation. And as
>>far as I know, many of them believe they donate for hardware purchase.
>>It would be good to inform them how their former donations were used.
>
>
> Haha, well, the best report for what tech team is doing is that site
> is still up. ;-)
> All our major hardware purchases (well, other stuff than a meter of
> UTP cable)
> are shown on meta pages, and reports used to be more of an overview of
> problems and visions.
>
>
>>is spent for those. Or it was done under the name of WMF. Other kinds
>>of reports are therefore informative and helpful to develop the
>>Foundation's and consequently our own activities on the projects.
>
>
> I sure agree that it is nice to communicate :) I also believe that
> method for that should be part of our common sense :)
>
> Anyway, I think that at least tech stuff is pretty transparent for
> those who care.
> We're communicating (and always online :) in IRC, there's active
> mailing list, our wikis (and logs in them) are public, yadda yadda.
> Some guys even read village pump ;-)
> If only everyone around would provide that much of information about
> activities ;-)
>
>
>>So we expect you remember other present and important issues clearly,
>>including the informally proposed Houserule for Wikimania?
>
>
> I'm rebellious, surely not following that one. :)

I missed a step. What is this Houserule ?

As for hardware purchase reports, they have never been as clear as
today, since precise purchases are detailed and voted in a resolution.
They may all be found on the wikimediafoundation site. Now, just a
thought : if you are a visitor not familiar with this website, I wish
you good luck to find the resolutions :-) They are very much hidden. It
would be nice that someone helps to make them more visible. Perhaps even
putting a [[resolutions]] link in the toolbar.

I would love to see reports of the techco, at least to explain what they
are working on right now. I have no idea if Brad gets feedback on this.

The comcom is providing regular reports to the board. They are sent by
the chair (Michael), though I am unsure if they are written by himself
or by a collective. I do not think these reports (or part of them) are
public.

The spcom only provided three reports. The first two ones were not
publicly published; They mostly concerned the set up. I published the
third one very recently :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/SPC_Report_April-July_2006.
I omitted some parts on purpose :-)

We got one or two reports of the trademark committee. For obvious
reasons, our strategy with regards to brand is not openly published.

ant


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] giving medical advice

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:
> On Jul 27, 2006, at 11:14 PM, zero 0000 wrote:
>
>> Sorry if this has been discussed before.  I just noticed
>> that [[Abdominal thrusts]] gives detailed advice on how to
>> perform a medical procedure.  Maybe there are other such
>> articles too.  Given the fashionable practice of filing
>> suit whenever a medical procedure fails to work, it seems
>> to me that this is rather dangerous for Wikipedia.
>> Wouldn't it be legally safer (and more likely to be
>> medically correct) if the actual procedure in such articles
>> was presented as a direct quotation from a named medical
>> authority?   With permission, of course.  Maybe there should
>> also be a disclaimer.
>>
>> Zero.
>
> This is the Heimlich Manoeuvre and it would be very irresponsible not
> to have detailed advice.
>

As the article notes:

> Some countries such as Australia have banned its use in favour of
> safer, more effective techniques.

It is entirely irresponsible to be promoting it *at all*.

The last sentence of the lede,

> The thrust was later mastered by Dr. Earl Peters in the early 80's
> and became the universal way to stop a person from choking.

is also completely wrong and incredibly Americentric.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: Fred Bauder

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Regulation of user pages (was: Dead wikipedians and
	how to really make a project boring to death)

body:
On Jul 29, 2006, at 5:16 AM, Ilmari Karonen wrote:

> Instead, perhaps what we should do is establish a rule that all
> pages in
> the User: namespace must be somehow related to the project and not
> contrary to its goals, and must, if necessary, explain how they are
> so;
> if not, they may and should be speedily deleted.
>
> This doesn't mean you couldn't describe yourself on your user
> page.  But
> if the page didn't include _any_ information actually relevant to the
> project, such as your contributions to Wikipedia, areas of interest,
> useful skills, etc., it would be unsuitable and speediable.

To me this is just one more bunch of rules to enforce. We have so far
to go in presenting usable verifiable information from reputable
source that getting after inappropriate user pages seems out of
priority.

Fred


from_name: Pedro Sanchez

subject: [WikiEN-l] Regulation of user pages

body:
On 7/29/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> Fred Bauder wrote:
> > On Jul 29, 2006, at 5:16 AM, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
> >
> >>Instead, perhaps what we should do is establish a rule that all
> >>pages in the User: namespace must be somehow related to the project
> >>and not contrary to its goals, and must, if necessary, explain how
> >>they are so; if not, they may and should be speedily deleted.
> >
> > To me this is just one more bunch of rules to enforce. We have so far
> > to go in presenting usable verifiable information from reputable
> > source that getting after inappropriate user pages seems out of
> > priority.
>
> You do have a point.  On the other hand, people (including Jimbo)
> obviously _do_ care about inappropriate user pages, as evidenced by the
> Great Userbox Wars of '06.  Since this seems unlikely to change, a rule
> that made dealing with such pages simpler and more effective could in
> fact free up more time for actually building the encyclopedia.
>
> --
> Ilmari Karonen
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

I'm annoyed to the userbox controversy being consistently called
"Great Userbox War".
IT was not a war. Wikipedia is not a battlefield.

Such terms only invite trolling and makign people interested in
arguing for the sake of arguing to join the project


from_name: Anthony

body:
On 7/29/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
> > On 7/28/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I am strongly in support of taking action to reduce the amount of
> >> copyright outrageous violations that we get...   But I think it would
> >> be self defeating to implement any policy which discourages real
> >> contribution.   There must be some solution which simultaneously
> >> curtails copyright violation (or at least its impact) and encourages
> >> contribution.
> >
> > How about a middle ground:
> > 1) By default, any logged in user can upload any image they themselves
> > have produced. (some way of discouraging them from uploading any other
> > images needs to be found)
> > 2) "Confirmed" users, preferably those who have uploaded 3 or 4 of
> > their own images, can upload copyrighted images for fair use.
> >
>
> I hate to spoil your fun, but what is going to stop people from just
> claiming "Yes, I made this" on every random image they get from
> Flickr/Photobucket/Google images?
>
If you upload enough random images from Flickr/Photobucket/Google,
you're bound to get caught.  And once you get caught blatantly lying,
all your images should become highly suspect.

Of course, "fair use images" don't really require you to trust anyone,
so if anything *they* should be the ones that any user can upload.

Ultimately I think the best "solution" is the same one that's used for
text.  Assume good faith, require references, and get rid of the
policy violations as much as possible.

Anthony


body:
On 7/29/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> That said, I think "saying no" would cause a real reduction in bad
> images... but if we aren't careful how we say no we will encourage
> people to twiddle the knobs until they've left misleading metadata.
> I'd rather we have more violations which are tagged somewhat correctly
> than fewer violations but with them tagged as free content.

Maybe if there weren't any knobs at all it'd be better.

1) Any logged in user can upload an image, if they include text which
explains why they think the image fits within the policy.  A tutorial
can help guide them as to what the policy is, but ultimately anything
can be uploaded with explanatory text.

2) Only after you've convinced us that you know what you're talking
about and aren't lying about everything, then you get a pulldown menu
of choices.

This strategy would probably work best if there were a way to lock an
image so that it can't appear in any article.  Who would be able to
add or remove the lock, and whether or not the lock would be on or off
by default (personally I'd say probably off) could be tweaked to find
the best solution.  Blatant violations would of course be deleted -
the lock would be for situations where there's just not enough
explanation, or the explanation hasn't been checked.

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions

body:
On 7/29/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> mboverload wrote:
>
> >I'm just not comfortable with leasing period.
> >
> >I find Wikipedia to be too important to leave in anyone's hands other than
> >the immediate foundation.  A company that leases servers may easily give in
> >to legal challenges or other backhanded threats. We'd have to have legal
> >advice about how this would effect the lawsuit situation and consider what
> >we would be giving up.
> >
> Leasing does not necesarily mean going through an existing for-profit
> leasing company.  Many of them would certainly give cause to your
> discomfort.  A totally new company established for the purpose of
> leasing back the hardware would do just fine.  Whatever contractual
> arrangements are made could reflect the values of the community and a
> break even business plan.
>
It seems rather far fetched to me that a company with a big leasing
contract like this is going to just decide to break its contract and
confiscate its servers.  I mean, it'd be easier for someone to
threaten the ISPs providing the bandwidth (which might very well be
willing to provide a reasonable leasing contract themselves).  Add in
a few different leasing companies and it's even more far fetched.

And even if the leased servers did get confiscated, the whole point of
leasing is that not a whole lot would be lost.  The site would
obviously suffer some downtime in this highly unlikely scenario, of
course.

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] Latest board resolutions


body:
On 7/29/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> Anthony wrote:
> >
> > Anyway, looking at the User:SPUI page I guess I see what you're
> > saying.  And I guess the ban on non-free content would tend to lessen
> > this type of thing.  Actually my response would probably be a minority
> > one - I don't really see a problem with providing every Wikipedian
> > with his or her own little private webspace, wholly unregulated by the
> > community except for the limits of the law and space considerations.
>
> In my opinion, the only significant problem with your suggestion is that
> we currently have no formal way to distinguish a "Wikipedian" from
> "anyone who just registered an account".  We may know one when we see
> one, but there's a broad grey area and no agreed-upon threshold for
> considering someone a genuine contributor to the encyclopedia.
>
Well, I wasn't really making a suggestion so much as trying to explain
how I feel about things.

But if it were a suggestion, one solution would be to provide everyone
who contributes with some percentage of unregulated webspace equal to
a percentage of their contributions.  Contribute 100K of text and 10
megs of images?  You get 10K of text and 1 meg of images in free
webhosting.

Is this reasonable?  I dunno.  At the point where you're doing that
you might as well just contract it out and let some third party run
the webhosting site.  But still keep things integrated.  What I liked
about my User page that I can't get at other hosting sites is the
ability to easily create links to Wikipedia.  And while you're at it
you could integrate it into other sites too.

I'm going to repeat this so people don't confuse me.  This isn't a
proposal.  It isn't a suggestion.  It's just half-baked
stream-of-consciousness musing on how I feel about things.

> At the time I considered proposing that we do away with user pages
> entirely, but this turns out to be infeasible since we do want to allow
> user subpages, for article drafts and whatnot, and we are just as
> lacking in a formal way to tell a useful user subpage from a vanity one.
>
Article drafts, lists of links, to-do notes, public watchlists, etc.
User subpages can be very useful because they are integrated into the
rest of the site (red and blue links, related changes, what links
here).  They'd be more useful if you didn't have to worry about people
coming along and changing them or deleting them out from under you,
though.

Anthony


subject: [WikiEN-l] Regulation of user pages

body:
On Jul 29, 2006, at 6:00 AM, Ilmari Karonen wrote:

> You do have a point.  On the other hand, people (including Jimbo)
> obviously _do_ care about inappropriate user pages, as evidenced by
> the
> Great Userbox Wars of '06.  Since this seems unlikely to change, a
> rule
> that made dealing with such pages simpler and more effective could in
> fact free up more time for actually building the encyclopedia.

I suppose. I recused myself from the Arbitration case about the
Userbox wheelwarrs, put a userbox on my page saying I support
userboxes and keep on working on something sensible.

Fred