body:
> I strongly disagree.  The only cites should be good cites.  Bad ones are
> misleading and wasteful.  A good cite is easy enough to make: one that
> accurately describes the cited material and relates it to the subjectmatter.

Maybe I need to state what I meant better; citations should be good
BUT one should cite references to one's sources even when those
sources are not necessarily the best.

I think there are two separate things being discussed here, which are
being confused together (by me at least, and thus I assume probably
others).

One, the quality of the citation.  This is what you described above.
In other words, it identifies the source accurately, gives enough
information to find the needed information easily, and documents its
relation to the subject matter truthfully and accurately.  This has
nothing to do with the actual nature or quality of the source
material.  A high quality of citation is essential.

Two, the quality of the actual source material.  This is a quite
different matter, and contains much more subjectivity and scope for
argument (not to say there isn't any in the previous).  One can have
good cites for bad sources, and bad cites for good sources.

What I really meant in the previous post Tony replied to is that one
should always give good cites for one's sources -- even sources not of
the highest quality, accuracy etc.  A good cite for a bad source beats
a bad cite for a bad source, or no cite at all.  At least the article
is properly referencing and characterising its sources, and is
therefore much more transparent.

Bad cites are an insiduous poison in that they claim authority but
lack it, and are deceptive.  Bad sources are easier to fix or at least
identify.

Sometimes one is forced to rely on poor sources while an article is
still in development, while one is searching for more authoritative
reference material.  On some subjects there are no good sources at
all; all are unreliable or incomplete.  In these cases, it's best for
the conscientous contributor to use what sources are available, cite
them meticulously, mention the problems in the article if it can be
done in a NPOV way, and certainly document the problem on the talk
page for future editors to read.

I hope this clarifies things.

-Matt


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Sheng Jiong

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Individual Wikipedias for different Sinitic
	vernaculars (Cantonese debate) - update

body:
It is totally absurd to set up so many Wikipedias for various Chinese
dialects. Being a native Shanghainess, my mother tongue is Wu. But I
have never seen any books written in the Wu dialect in my entire life,
and I have only heard of one book that was written in Wu in the 1930s,
and apparently it received very limited attention. Speaking language
is very different from the writing system, and in Chinese although
there are hundreds of dialects there is however only one writing
system. Wikipedia being a *written* encyclopedia would mean that we
only need *one* Chinese Wikipedia, written in Chinese characters.
Speakers of the different dialects can pronounce each characters in
very different ways (A Wu speaker can hardly understand Cantonese or
Min-nan, and vice versa), they all have the same grammar and similar
ways of expression, after thousands years of cultural integration
within the unified country. (And by the way Mandarin also has a long
history of being the "offical" spoken language in China: since Qing
dynasty in the 1600s it has been adopted as the language spoken in
Emperor's palace, and during the Republic of China period it was
selected by the parliament as the official spoken language of the
government after a democratic voting.)

Different dialects of course have their own distinct cultures: in
traditional Shanghainese Opera the actors speak only Wu (just like in
Beijing Opera the actors speak in Mandarin); there are also other
similar operas for Cantonese or other dialects and these operas still
receive much attention today in China. However the writing system of
China has been unified since Qing Shihuang's time in around 220BC, for
the convenience of the communications among all Chinese. It will be a
big joke if today someone want to return to the old days when no one
can understand each other.

Interestingly also Mark seem to neglect the fact that really no native
speakers of all these dialects support the proposal, knowing that it
is a totally unworkable proposal.

[[User:Formulax]]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 13:34:36 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> In this e-mail I don't want to personally introduce new arguments but
> I want people to know that further debate on this topic is continuing
> at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages
>
> Some speakers of these languages have lent their support: Steve,
> Instantnood, and Felix Wan for Yue/Cantonese, and Nishishei,
> Pangguanzhe, and alaya for Wu/Shanghainese (Wu also includes the
> varieties of the surrounding areas including for example Suzhou).
>
> Interestingly, on that page, no native speakers have directly
> condemned the idea (only direct opposition is from Shizhao), although
> Toytoy, a Cantonese speaker, has some concerns.
>
> Mark
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Pablo Saratxaga

subject: [Wikipedia-l] sign.wikepedia.org?

body:
Kaixo!

On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 05:59:22AM -0000, Shane Gilchrist ? hEorpa wrote:

> Sign.wikipedia.org
>
> to imply that it is for national sign languages - the real beauty about

There are two major problems with that:
- writting of sign languages is not yet standardized in computers (there
  is writtign system; but it isn't in unicode; and there is opposition
  to it, some people thinking that sign languages must be "oral" only
  (well, visual actually, but not written)), that is actually the
  most important problem, lack of standardization to encode it (often
  a lot of gif images are used instead) and the problem of the input;
  however, the wikipedia has come with a way to encode and display
  egyptian hyerogliphs; so a similar solution could maybe be developped.
- there is not a single sign language, but a variety of them, so a
  unique sign.wikipedia.org would not be possible, there should be
  a different one for each different languages (and I have no idea of
  how much different sign languages exist)

Or, if your proposal was not for a wikipedia written in sign language,
but for content about sign languages written in other languages
(eg: in English), then a specific wikipedia is not needed, you can
just create/enrich the articles on the wikipedia of the language
you want to write in.

PS: for people maybe not aware of it: a writting of sign languages is
a system that describes the body movements used in sign languages,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting
http://www.signwriting.org/

--
Ki ?a vos v?ye b?n,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] sign.wikepedia.org?

body:
Kaixo!

On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 08:44:01AM +0100, Skriptor wrote:

> Excuse my ignorance, but how do you write sign language? I was under
> the impression that no common written form of sign language exists
> (although I know of attempts to create a notification system, which is
> however more like a dance notation language than a normal alphabet).

Writting sign languages with alphabets makes no sense at all, as there
is no sound to encode, but motions and expressions instead.
An ideographic system is much more logical to the nature of the
languages; and while current representations are quite far away
of what we would expect a written language to look like, if it spreads
in use it could well evolve to be something looking like chinese
writting.

--
Ki ?a vos v?ye b?n,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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list: wikien-l

from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Illegitimate block.

body:
Robert Brookes wrote:
> I thought that the beauty of the 3RR rule was its "simplicity" in
>that when a breach is committed there is no doubt? No sooner had the
>ink dried on that policy update that such a breach could lead to a 24
>hour block than some of the more "imaginative" sysops were proposing
>to "interpret" the intention of a specific editor and demanding the
>power to block at will based on their personal interpretation.

A too-strict interpretation will just force edit warriors to randomly
change irrelevant words while still reverting.

For some things, simple common sense is still best.  Anyone can start
to game any rule.

--Jimbo


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikiforum

body:
/me sifflote.

PS : j'ai fait ma part :-)

Nicolas Weeger a ?crit:
> Many thanks for your great work, Aoineko!
>
> *wonders who to bribe to have it installed fast on fr:*
>
> Nicolas 'Ryo'


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Illegitimate block.

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Wikipedia is not primarily an experiment in Internet democracy. It's a
> project to write an encyclopedia.

This should be printed out and handed to every single person on the
planet.  I think I'll start a new nonprofit organzation to do that.
Wikimedia will give everyone an encyclopedia.  The new organization
will give everyone a piece of paper explaining: it's an encyclopedia,
not an experiment in democracy.

We *are* a grand social experiment of course.  But not _primarily_.

Well said.

--Jimbo


from_name: David Monniaux

subject: [Wikipedia-l] liquid information: proposal

body:
I proposed this 6 months ago (but at the time, people were not
interested or feared of server overload):

http://quatramaran.ens.fr/~monniaux/wikilinks/pagea.html

(And, yes, it can be done in an efficient, cache-friendly way. Read the
HTML before talking of "content duplication" and "database overload".)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] client-side search engine

body:
Proposed, too, about 6 months ago:

http://quatramaran.ens.fr/~monniaux/wikipedia_en/search_applet.html

(The index is 6-month-old, I'll reindex the wiki when I have some time -
need to download a newer database dump.)

Client-side search applet.

The search engine could also be used server-side.


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: www.wikipedia.org no longer redirects to the en
	main page

body:
Stephan Walter wrote:
> NSK wrote:
> >The order is chosen with Western-American values. According to what I see
> >on my screen when I access wikipedia.ch, the Japanese and Greek languages
> >are not emphasised at all. The German language is emphasised more than
> >Spanish. The languages are not in alphabetic order. It is discriminatory
> >and should not be applied on wikipedia.org
>
> I designed wikipedia.ch. The reason that some languages are more
> prominently displayed is that these are the official languages in
> Switzerland (german, french, italian, rumantsch) and english is the
> lingua franca in the western world.
>
> It is true that not all languages are shown, this is because I didn't
> want to overload the page.

The design makes perfect sense.  Please don't listen to this odd
complaint and change it.  'ch' is Switzerland.  Anyone who can't grasp
why the 'ch' portal should emphasize German more than Spanish,
Japanese, and Greek, well...

--Jimbo


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] primary and secondary sources

body:
>From: "Tony Sidaway" <minorityreport at bluebottle.com>
>
>Matt Brown said:
>
> >
> > It is definitely the case that we'd rather a bad cite than no cite.
>
>I strongly disagree.  The only cites should be good cites.  Bad ones are
>misleading and wasteful.  A good cite is easy enough to make: one that
>accurately describes the cited material and relates it to the
>subjectmatter.  This latest fuss was, at bottom, over attempts by some of
>us to
>transform a bad cite (a statement that a UN source said something that we
>didn't know it said) into a good one (a statement that a secondary source
>gave a figure and attributed it to a UN source).

Um, no.  The cite said exactly that already.  The latest fuss was, at the
bottom, over attempts to exclude the cite altogether because one editor
didn't like it.  And even after it was confirmed as factually correct, he
still made several attempts to exclude it on other grounds.

>The former would have
>misled the reader, the latter would have given the reader more accurate
>information.  As it turned out the cited UN source did not contain the
>information, but another UN source did.

Um, no again.  As it turned out the cited UN source did indeed contain the
information, but the author of the original source presented it in a
misleading way, though it made no difference to the article in question,
since it wasn't used that way in the article.

It's hard to follow exactly what is going on in these debates if you don't
read the relevant information carefully.

Jay.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Illegitimate block.

body:
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> A too-strict interpretation will just force edit warriors to randomly
> change irrelevant words while still reverting.
>
> For some things, simple common sense is still best.  Anyone can start
> to game any rule.

As an ArbCom member I look at the *intent* of the policy allegedly broken, not
just the letter of the policy. Gaming the rules either way is not looked upon
favorably by me, and I dare say most if not all the other ArbCom members.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
All your favorites on one personal page ? Try My Yahoo!
http://my.yahoo.com


from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
Uhh... hello, did you read my e-mail? I listed native speakers
supporting a Wu Wikipedia.

Mark

On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 14:36:57 +0800, Sheng Jiong <sheng.jiong at gmail.com> wrote:
> It is totally absurd to set up so many Wikipedias for various Chinese
> dialects. Being a native Shanghainess, my mother tongue is Wu. But I
> have never seen any books written in the Wu dialect in my entire life,
> and I have only heard of one book that was written in Wu in the 1930s,
> and apparently it received very limited attention. Speaking language
> is very different from the writing system, and in Chinese although
> there are hundreds of dialects there is however only one writing
> system. Wikipedia being a *written* encyclopedia would mean that we
> only need *one* Chinese Wikipedia, written in Chinese characters.
> Speakers of the different dialects can pronounce each characters in
> very different ways (A Wu speaker can hardly understand Cantonese or
> Min-nan, and vice versa), they all have the same grammar and similar
> ways of expression, after thousands years of cultural integration
> within the unified country. (And by the way Mandarin also has a long
> history of being the "offical" spoken language in China: since Qing
> dynasty in the 1600s it has been adopted as the language spoken in
> Emperor's palace, and during the Republic of China period it was
> selected by the parliament as the official spoken language of the
> government after a democratic voting.)
>
> Different dialects of course have their own distinct cultures: in
> traditional Shanghainese Opera the actors speak only Wu (just like in
> Beijing Opera the actors speak in Mandarin); there are also other
> similar operas for Cantonese or other dialects and these operas still
> receive much attention today in China. However the writing system of
> China has been unified since Qing Shihuang's time in around 220BC, for
> the convenience of the communications among all Chinese. It will be a
> big joke if today someone want to return to the old days when no one
> can understand each other.
>
> Interestingly also Mark seem to neglect the fact that really no native
> speakers of all these dialects support the proposal, knowing that it
> is a totally unworkable proposal.
>
> [[User:Formulax]]
>
>
> On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 13:34:36 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > In this e-mail I don't want to personally introduce new arguments but
> > I want people to know that further debate on this topic is continuing
> > at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages
> >
> > Some speakers of these languages have lent their support: Steve,
> > Instantnood, and Felix Wan for Yue/Cantonese, and Nishishei,
> > Pangguanzhe, and alaya for Wu/Shanghainese (Wu also includes the
> > varieties of the surrounding areas including for example Suzhou).
> >
> > Interestingly, on that page, no native speakers have directly
> > condemned the idea (only direct opposition is from Shizhao), although
> > Toytoy, a Cantonese speaker, has some concerns.
> >
> > Mark
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>


from_name: Petr Kadlec

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Commons' Picture of the day on other projects?

body:
The Commons' idea of the Picture of the day seems great to me, so that
an idea occurred to me (yes, it happens sometimes, really!). It would
be perfect if I would be able to include the picture on the title page
of the Czech Wikipedia. It would also attract people to the Commons
project (which is a little bit problem on cs:, users seem to be scared
a little bit by the english-speaking look of Commons etc.).

But there is an obvious problem: I don't think it is possible to do
that. The only syntax I came up with was something like
{{commons:Template:Potd|width=300|float=right|lang=cs}}, but I didn't
even expect _that_ to work (and it did not). I don't believe there
would be some other, working way, but for sure: don't you know about a
method of using Commons' POTD on another project?

Sure, we could copy all required pages from Commons and every day add
a copy of a new one manually, but it would be useless duplication of
work, I think.

As a programmer, I am able to imagine two approaches: either allow
cross-project template inclusion (which seems to be a terrible idea),
or allow some "image redirects" (i.e. on Commons, there would be a
page called e.g. Image:POTD.redirect that would contain something like
"#REDIRECT [[Image:{{Template:Potd/{{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY}}}}]]"),
which seems a little bit more reasonable, but it is only a vague idea.

Any comments?

Best regards,
[[ :cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec ]]


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] Commons' Picture of the day on other projects?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] sign.wikepedia.org?

body:
I think the most viable system is Stokoe (with the modifications used
in the BSL dictionary). It is by far the easiest to learn and doesn't
use more than a couple of non-latin glyphs (the problem is the
positioning of subscript and superscript clusters and diacritics).

Few people write signed languages at all, and when they do they
usually use the "gloss" method (ie, word-for-word translation into the
national spoken language). After this the most popular is Sutton
SignWriting which I personally despise for various reasons, then
Stokoe, then personal systems (yes, prior to Stokoe and SSW some
people wrote signed languages using systems they invented themselves),
then HamNoSys (based on Stokoe, but capable of much more detail,
perhaps paralell to Stokoe not distinguishing from allophones but HNS
distinguishing; mostly used in academic circles).

Stokoe is in fact an alphabet, just because it doesn't record sound
doesn't mean it can't be broken into similar units.

Mark

On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 14:43:41 +0100, Pablo Saratxaga
<pablo at mandrakesoft.com> wrote:
> Kaixo!
>
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 08:44:01AM +0100, Skriptor wrote:
>
> > Excuse my ignorance, but how do you write sign language? I was under
> > the impression that no common written form of sign language exists
> > (although I know of attempts to create a notification system, which is
> > however more like a dance notation language than a normal alphabet).
>
> Writting sign languages with alphabets makes no sense at all, as there
> is no sound to encode, but motions and expressions instead.
> An ideographic system is much more logical to the nature of the
> languages; and while current representations are quite far away
> of what we would expect a written language to look like, if it spreads
> in use it could well evolve to be something looking like chinese
> writting.
>
> --
> Ki ?a vos v?ye b?n,
> Pablo Saratxaga
>
> http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/          PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
> [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
> [min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>
>


list: foundation-l

from_name: Erik Koopman

subject: [Foundation-l] New project proposal: Trade Standard

body:
Trade Standard is a project proposal for:
(a) a public knowledge base for all information about goods, technology and
(way of) trade to stimulate international development,
(b) a public ethic standard and indicator to evaluate international trade
and industry and
(c) a public register to verify the ethic classification of goods,
technology and trade.

Although its high aim is Trade Standard an internet platform very equal to
Wikipedia. The only differences are: (1) focus on technical and ethical
subjects, (2) equal layouts for all articles, including a chapter for
"ethical, social and sustainable characteristics". And (3) the addition of
registers to list the ethical characteristics of chemicals, products etc.

Trade Standard is a project with high potential that (a) stimulates
international spread of free (technical) information, (b) connects
technology with ethics and (c) offers a solution to upgrade today's very
conservative, 'lowest standards'-oriented culture of international trade and
industry.

Please help me with this project, I am a designer of post-modern concepts
not an software specialist or insider in wiki procedures.

Read the whole project proposal at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Trade_Standard

Best regards,

Erik Koopman
NL


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Tels

subject: [Wikitech-l] deluxe wikilinks

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Moin,

On Tuesday 25 January 2005 22:25, David Monniaux wrote:
> I'd like the possibility of showing the intro paragraph of a linked
> article when the mouse hovers over it.
>
> How about something along the lines of:
>
> http://quatramaran.ens.fr/~monniaux/wikilinks/pagea.html
>
> Done exclusively with Javascript *without duplication of content* (read
> the HTML sources).

Wow, that is _neat_. The lag when moving over the link could be a bit
reduced if the script would cache more than the last accessed link - like
the last 5 or so.

One side-effect with Firefox 1.0 is that the favicon of the tab/window
changes when fetching a remote link. However, I think this is a browser
issue.

Cheers,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Wed Jan 26 19:00:02 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "Den wahren Wert dieser Software werden vermutlich nur Fach L?ute und
 Firmen erkennen." -- "So isst es. Ein gewi?er Standart muss schon gewart
 beiben!" --  Kabe (http://tinyurl.com/3kucx)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

iQEVAwUBQffbKncLPEOTuEwVAQEe1wf+IxfN8BBCl0aJXMVYnNXsut0LVzyT2pNC
oKxdGJ3WxgE2d2CwTFi61MHNsfJyZ89pO0ws7rwBED86wxLEhZfrkUuQR9bJzliY
jeffN/wmA2cDpvE710juqVRki35H3gFlO+EDNxcki4nEVkWRsbaeUNfwCuERWDeo
blE1eLzkXRXJgdA6kcCTzBiXmH+k8wQzUE2T2f6oV4bplv7DfY5pYMgBZxk+tL1k
2ovGZh6vhgwtNOiQj4LYlpr/nCKoJ0M0Hh2DKzo46k3r/vw7xoVxockm/P8yv9Ot
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=6KAH
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from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] [weed_harper@bigheavyworld.com: Re: Wikipedia e-mail]

body:
Jeff Bonham (jbonham at mail.utm.utoronto.ca) [050126 19:04]:
> ----- Forwarded message from Weed Harper <weed_harper at bigheavyworld.com> -----

> >> I am receiving a message that I am blocked at address 64.30.208.48 due to user
> Herschelkrustofsky. I know of no reason why I should be blocked. Please
> explain.

> >See the discussion at:
> >[[Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Posting while blocked]]

> 1. I am not Herscelkrustofsky.
> 2. I am involved in an edit dispute wuth SlimVirgin, who has apparently filed a
> malicious report.
> 3. I have never committed a blockable offense.

So is this a collateral damage report, Weed Harper denying he uses the
Herschelkrustofsky account (which Tim Starling reports is false - he looked
at the access details and firmly established that they are the same person)
or what? It's not clear.

- d.


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikiforum

body:
Guillaume Blanchard a ?crit :

> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>> Wow! Way neat. Is this also supposed to work on talk pages? If so,
>> then the
>> ability to edit above the thread list is absolutely needed (for various
>> permanent messages and templates).
>>
>> -- mav
>
> Hi mav,
> Make the forum work with talk page (or any other namespace) is
> effortless. For example, we can add the namespace number into the URL.
> We can also easily add other option like maximum number of thread per
> forum (less or equal setting maximum) and other stuffs, but this will
> certainly break the cache system. I will add the content of
> [[project_name:Forum]] page (if any) at the top of forum page. Thanks
> for your good advice.
>
> Aoineko

Done!
Put "ns=1" as argument of the URL will change the listed page to
encyclopedic talk pages. Actually, all namespace are available (ns=0
don't work) but I think we have better to limit to talk pages (1, 5, 7,
9, 11, 13 and 15).
I also added a header at the top of the forum page. This header is
included from [[MediaWiki:Forum]] page.
I still working on an optional JS code to be able to hide thread's
contents by default and make them appear when user click on a link/icon.
Who have the ability to add this extension to French Wikipedia and what
are the requirements for that may be done?

Aoineko


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Commons' Picture of the day on other projects?

body:
Petr Kadlec a ?crit:
> The Commons' idea of the Picture of the day seems great to me, so that
> an idea occurred to me (yes, it happens sometimes, really!). It would
> be perfect if I would be able to include the picture on the title page
> of the Czech Wikipedia. It would also attract people to the Commons
> project (which is a little bit problem on cs:, users seem to be scared
> a little bit by the english-speaking look of Commons etc.).

One thing to attract users would be that the commons allow to respect
the gfdl. Right now, it is not. Hence some people do not participate.

Ant


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Emergency Medicine Wikibook: seeking
	programmersand doctors, nurses, paramedics

body:
--- Paris Lovett <paris at pazzah.com> wrote:
> One final, rather big question. I've gone ahead and created an entire set of
> chapters, but the chapters point to (as yet) empty pages. I'm wondering if
> that's the best strategy. It seems possible that it's better to leave blank
> things that haven't been written yet, so people know they need to be
> written.

If I had the same problem on Wikibooks, I'd create the pages with the template
and put (empty) by the link to the empty chapters on the book's main table of
contents page. This way readers know there is nothing there and writers know
that is place that still needs to be filled.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free!
http://my.yahoo.com


from_name: Gavin Chait

subject: [Foundation-l] New project proposal:  Wikineur

body:
There is nothing mysterious about creating wealth.  The right environment combined with the right people automatically results in lots of opportunities creating jobs and money.

The difficulty is that neither the policy makers, nor the entrepreneurs know how to communicate with each other or what each needs.  In countries where the entire social order has broken down, neither group knows how to do anything at all.

Wikineur provides resources to each group:
  a.. Policymakers:  Macro- and micro-economic policies, key legal requirements and mechanisms to support enterprise creation.  Tax policy.  Project how-to's that successfully introduce the concepts of small business.  Business support systems, mentorship and training guides.  Financial support models.
  b.. Entrepreneurs:  Small business strategy, marketing programs, branding, financial systems, bookkeeping.  Staff training, employment contracts and conduct.  Specific industry guidelines and how to such as restaurants, tourism, manufacturing, agriculture, and so on.
The idea behind Wikineur is that it acts as a complete resource to set up a state from scratch with all the institutions required to support the economy.  There is also information on how to run a business in general, as well as information on how to run any specific type of business.

Wikineur becomes a resource for policymakers to see what laws and institutions would assist with generating economic development;  and for entrepreneurs to see what sort of businesses they could start, and how.

I have ten years experience at running economic development projects in South Africa.  I clearly do not have knowledge of all the topics to be covered but have a fair idea of the broad framework required.  This could become an excepionally powerful teaching tool in developing countries.

The complete project proposal and outline is available at:  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikineur

Your support would be much appreciated.

Kind regards,

Gavin Chait
South Africa


body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> > One final, rather big question. I've gone ahead and created an entire set
> > of chapters, but the chapters point to (as yet) empty pages. I'm wondering
> > if that's the best strategy. It seems possible that it's better to leave
> > blank things that haven't been written yet, so people know they need to be
> > written.
>
> No, you should leave empty pages. This suggests to newcomers what is yet
> missing.

Paris - forget what I said. Anthere's method is better since you will likely
change the template and/or page names. Creating a bunch of blank templates
right now will therefore mean more work for you later. It might also upset
those people on Wikibooks who want their module count to mean something. :)

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250


from_name: Craig Franklin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikiforum

body:
That's pretty neat, but there needs to be a way to have threads with
duplicate names (since on a real forum, you can do that).

Otherwise, capital job!  This should make some of the really, REALLY
convoluted talk pages easier to understand.

- Craig

-------------------
Craig Franklin
PO Box 764
Ashgrove, Q, 4060
Australia
http://www.halo-17.net - Australia's Favourite Source of Indie Music, Art,
and Culture.


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
Matt Brown said:

>
> It is definitely the case that we'd rather a bad cite than no cite.

I strongly disagree.  The only cites should be good cites.  Bad ones are
misleading and wasteful.  A good cite is easy enough to make: one that
accurately describes the cited material and relates it to the subjectmatter.  This latest fuss was, at bottom, over attempts by some of us to
transform a bad cite (a statement that a UN source said something that we
didn't know it said) into a good one (a statement that a secondary source
gave a figure and attributed it to a UN source).  The former would have
misled the reader, the latter would have given the reader more accurate
information.  As it turned out the cited UN source did not contain the
information, but another UN source did.  The secondary source proved to be
in error so the inference drawn from it was incorrect in a small but
significant detail.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikiforum

body:
Craig Franklin a ?crit :

> That's pretty neat, but there needs to be a way to have threads with
> duplicate names (since on a real forum, you can do that).
>
> Otherwise, capital job! This should make some of the really, REALLY
> convoluted talk pages easier to understand.
>
> - Craig

Wikiforum is not a real forum :o)
In fact, I can easily code invisible version number to fake many thread
with the same title, but I'm not sure it is a good idea.

Aoineko


subject: [Wikitech-l] IDEA: Tagging capabilities

body:
NSK (nsk2 at wikinerds.org) [050126 22:19]:
> On Tuesday 25 January 2005 23:31, David Wendt wrote:

> > We should implement CVS-style tagging, where specific article revisions
> > are 'tagged' so that the group of revisions with that tag can be called
> > up instantly. This could be used for the push to 1.0 by having a tag for
> > the 1.0 revisions.

> I already tag versions in my wikiprojects, see
> http://nerdypc.wikinerds.org/index.php/Help:Article_versions

Tagging is politically contentious, at least on en:. But rating article
versions has gotten a reasonable reception. (Hence the idea of running
ratings and just gathering data to see what it looks like.)

- d.


from_name: Robin Shannon

subject: [WikiEN-l] Encyclopaedia standards

body:
> On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 10:59:47 -0800, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
> <snip />I have 16,000 articles on my watchlist <snip />

wow, he has 16 000 articles on his watchlist AND he works for apple
(im guessing from the email address); can this guy get any cooler?

paz y amor,
[[User:The bellman]]

--
hit me: robin.shannon.id.au
jab me: saudade at jabber.zim.net.au

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Encyclopaedia standards

body:
Robin Shannon (robin.shannon at gmail.com) [050126 22:25]:
> On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 10:59:47 -0800, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:

> > <snip />I have 16,000 articles on my watchlist <snip />

> wow, he has 16 000 articles on his watchlist AND he works for apple
> (im guessing from the email address); can this guy get any cooler?

Editing from an iPod? On a skateboard?

(About to buy a Mac mini or a recent iBook. Present Mac is a Performa 5200,
aka the iTurd ...)

- d.


from_name: VampWillow

body:
I'm just having dinner and let out a big "eep" when I saw this ...

> There is nothing mysterious about creating wealth.  The right environment
> combined with the right people automatically results in lots of
> opportunities creating jobs and money.

That'll be why all these Nigerian death scams work then ...

>   a.. key legal requirements and mechanisms ... Tax policy.

so everyone on this wiki needs to be a qualified and licenced lawyer in
the particular jurisdiction of the current user? (else watch out for legal
actions if it proves bad advice!)

>  Specific industry guidelines and how to ...

did someone mention anti-trust?

> The idea behind Wikineur is that it acts as a complete resource to set up
> a state from scratch

WOW! are you planning to set up shop on Titan or Mars or stage a coup
somewhere? (Your name is Mark Thatcher and I claim my ?5!)

> with all the institutions required to support the
> economy.

Hey ... that is why their are politicians!

> I clearly do not have knowledge of all the topics to be
> covered but have a fair idea of the broad framework required.  This could
> become an excepionally powerful teaching tool in developing countries.

Your heart may be in the right place, but this whole proposal looks
terribly conceited that anyone who got involved with it would have the
audacity to tell others the "right way" to do anything, let alone run a
country!

Just say no ... you know it makes non-sense otherwise.

Alison
[[VampWillow]]


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Gavin Chait wrote:
> There is nothing mysterious about creating wealth.

Pray tell how much you have made in the last four years?!

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


from_name: Paris Lovett

body:
Hmmm. I did indeed sit down with some board members and a lot of people felt
that it was reasonable to start the Emergency Medicine Wikibook with a few
departures from the previous Wiki norm: registration screen, credentials,
templates.

But after reading these emails and some others that followed my meeting with
the board, I'm feeling that indeed I should just start the thing. So I did.
It's online.

I created a "template" page for people to use, mainly to keep some
consistency in organization.

At this point I'd particularly appreciate it if anyone has time to tweak and
make the template page as good looking and smooth as possible. When I invite
doctors to create new pages they will start by copying the template, so it
will influence the whole look of the book.

I'm a terrible newcomer to the Wiki markup language, I have to admit. If
anyone has time to teach me on some very basic topics, I'd much appreciate
it. (And yes, I have looked them up on the help pages, but just haven't
figured them out yet). Just email me if you have patience for a poor
beginner and a little free time.

One final, rather big question. I've gone ahead and created an entire set of
chapters, but the chapters point to (as yet) empty pages. I'm wondering if
that's the best strategy. It seems possible that it's better to leave blank
things that haven't been written yet, so people know they need to be
written.

Thanks,

Paris.


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wikimedia Foundation : le ver
	dans le fruit ?

body:
On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 07:43:17 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> I do not mind complaints about the path we are taking towards a larger
> and more institutionalized board, although of course helpful comments
> that Assume Good Faith (which I think I have earned) are even
> better. :-)

<tounge in cheek>
Jimbo, i would have thought that you would be more familiar with
wikimedia rules and guidelines. Good Faith is not something which is
earned, it is a basic right of all users, even users that happen to
also be founders.
</tounge in cheek>

--
hit me: robin.shannon.id.au
jab me: saudade at jabber.zim.net.au

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


from_name: Jake Waskett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Blocking for illegitimate reason

body:
User:Fvw has blocked me, claiming "vandalism":

00:34, 27 Jan 2005, Fvw blocked Jakew (expires 12:34, 27 Jan 2005) (contribs)
(user page vandalism)

This is inappropriate, and is not supported by Wikipedia policy. It is clearly
not vandalism as defined by Wikipedia. Please would someone unblock me?

I originally responded to allegations against me on User:DanP's user page. I
wrote:
"Yes, each will doubtless follow similar accusations by yourself. Childish?
Yes. Irresponsible? Yes. Can you find anything after November 2004? I doubt
it. I can change. Can you? - Jakew 00:03, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)"

In response to a message left on my user talk page
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jakew)...

I left the following messages on Fvw's user talk page:
Very well. I'm sure you'll agree that directing users to DanP's talk page is
not objectionable. - Jakew 00:26, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I then moved my comments to the user talk page, replacing it with: "Please see
your talk page. - Jakew 00:23, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)"

There are rules against replacing user pages with profanities or insults. Mere
editing and advising readers to read the talk page is perfectly acceptable. I
suggest that you read up on the matter. - Jakew 00:31, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Jakew.


body:
1. That is to say nothing of Alaya

2. If we subjected all new Wikipedias to such standards, we would
probably only have 20 Wikipedias

3. Why are you so much against these Wikipedias being created if they
are as you say so useless? Could it hurt?

Mark

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 17:08:09 +0800, Sheng Jiong <sheng.jiong at gmail.com> wrote:
> Of course I read, and I checked their user pages too. Felix Wan(who
> was raised in Hong Kong, by the way) confests that he "occasionally"
> edits Chinese Wikipedia, and I doubt if he is going to edit the
> proposed Shanghainese Wikipedia in the future too. NiShishei basically
> made "no* edits at all in English Wikipedia, and he does not even have
> a username in Chinese Wikipedia. Pangguanzhe, again, only registered
> on Jan 21 2005 and made a grand total 8 edits, including 3 edits for
> his own user page. My suggestion: find someone who has really made
> contributions to Wikipedia first before setting up these totally
> useless Wikipedias.
>
> [[User:Formulax]]
>
>
> On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 17:31:27 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Uhh... hello, did you read my e-mail? I listed native speakers
> > supporting a Wu Wikipedia.
> >
> > Mark
> >
> > On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 14:36:57 +0800, Sheng Jiong <sheng.jiong at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > It is totally absurd to set up so many Wikipedias for various Chinese
> > > dialects. Being a native Shanghainess, my mother tongue is Wu. But I
> > > have never seen any books written in the Wu dialect in my entire life,
> > > and I have only heard of one book that was written in Wu in the 1930s,
> > > and apparently it received very limited attention. Speaking language
> > > is very different from the writing system, and in Chinese although
> > > there are hundreds of dialects there is however only one writing
> > > system. Wikipedia being a *written* encyclopedia would mean that we
> > > only need *one* Chinese Wikipedia, written in Chinese characters.
> > > Speakers of the different dialects can pronounce each characters in
> > > very different ways (A Wu speaker can hardly understand Cantonese or
> > > Min-nan, and vice versa), they all have the same grammar and similar
> > > ways of expression, after thousands years of cultural integration
> > > within the unified country. (And by the way Mandarin also has a long
> > > history of being the "offical" spoken language in China: since Qing
> > > dynasty in the 1600s it has been adopted as the language spoken in
> > > Emperor's palace, and during the Republic of China period it was
> > > selected by the parliament as the official spoken language of the
> > > government after a democratic voting.)
> > >
> > > Different dialects of course have their own distinct cultures: in
> > > traditional Shanghainese Opera the actors speak only Wu (just like in
> > > Beijing Opera the actors speak in Mandarin); there are also other
> > > similar operas for Cantonese or other dialects and these operas still
> > > receive much attention today in China. However the writing system of
> > > China has been unified since Qing Shihuang's time in around 220BC, for
> > > the convenience of the communications among all Chinese. It will be a
> > > big joke if today someone want to return to the old days when no one
> > > can understand each other.
> > >
> > > Interestingly also Mark seem to neglect the fact that really no native
> > > speakers of all these dialects support the proposal, knowing that it
> > > is a totally unworkable proposal.
> > >
> > > [[User:Formulax]]
> > >
> > >
> > > On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 13:34:36 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > Hi all,
> > > >
> > > > In this e-mail I don't want to personally introduce new arguments but
> > > > I want people to know that further debate on this topic is continuing
> > > > at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages
> > > >
> > > > Some speakers of these languages have lent their support: Steve,
> > > > Instantnood, and Felix Wan for Yue/Cantonese, and Nishishei,
> > > > Pangguanzhe, and alaya for Wu/Shanghainese (Wu also includes the
> > > > varieties of the surrounding areas including for example Suzhou).
> > > >
> > > > Interestingly, on that page, no native speakers have directly
> > > > condemned the idea (only direct opposition is from Shizhao), although
> > > > Toytoy, a Cantonese speaker, has some concerns.
> > > >
> > > > Mark
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > > >
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Robin Shannon wrote:

>On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 07:43:17 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
><jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I do not mind complaints about the path we are taking towards a larger
>>and more institutionalized board, although of course helpful comments
>>that Assume Good Faith (which I think I have earned) are even
>>better. :-)
>>
>>
>
><tounge in cheek>
>Jimbo, i would have thought that you would be more familiar with
>wikimedia rules and guidelines. Good Faith is not something which is
>earned, it is a basic right of all users, even users that happen to
>also be founders.
></tounge in cheek>
>
Familiarity with the rules includes familiarity with the very important
one that says to ignore all rules.  The ones who best apply that one
also tend to also have enough personal familiarity with common sense to
not appear as usual suspects before the ArbCom.

Your reference to Good Faith is linguistically peculiar, even though I
agree with the sentiment. Good faith describes a WAY of doing things -
in our circumstances more particularly editing.  The basic right,
therefore, is to be _presumed_ to be using good faith.

Ec


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Commons' Picture of the day on other
	projects?

body:
Petr Kadlec (petr.kadlec at gmail.com) [050127 03:35]:

> But there is an obvious problem: I don't think it is possible to do
> that. The only syntax I came up with was something like
> {{commons:Template:Potd|width=300|float=right|lang=cs}}, but I didn't
> even expect _that_ to work (and it did not). I don't believe there
> would be some other, working way, but for sure: don't you know about a
> method of using Commons' POTD on another project?

In general, are there any plans for cross-wiki templates? If not, what
about special cases? I'm thinking here of NUMBEROFARTICLES, which would be
very useful for the portal page (rather than hand-updating the numbers).

- d.


body:
Erik Koopman (mail at erikkoopman.nl) [050127 04:43]:

> Trade Standard is a project proposal for:
> (a) a public knowledge base for all information about goods, technology and
> (way of) trade to stimulate international development,
> (b) a public ethic standard and indicator to evaluate international trade
> and industry and
> (c) a public register to verify the ethic classification of goods,
> technology and trade.

Consumerium without 142? :-)

- d.


body:
Fred Bauder (fredbaud at ctelco.net) [050127 05:04]:

> My flash on this is that it would make a great commercial project with
> bigtime advertising potential. If we do this (before someone else snatches
> it up we might use it to fund Wikipedia.

That or a natural for Wikicities. A lot of these projects seem to be things
that should be run in a "wikilabs" sort of environment first, to see if
they take off.

- d.


from_name: Anthere

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: Emergency Medicine Wikibook: seeking
 programmersand doctors, nurses, paramedics

body:
Paris Lovett a ?crit:
> Hmmm. I did indeed sit down with some board members and a lot of people felt
> that it was reasonable to start the Emergency Medicine Wikibook with a few
> departures from the previous Wiki norm: registration screen, credentials,
> templates.
>
> But after reading these emails and some others that followed my meeting with
> the board, I'm feeling that indeed I should just start the thing. So I did.
> It's online.

Good :-)

Do not forget to advertise it in the project pump, in particular english
speaking pumps.

> I created a "template" page for people to use, mainly to keep some
> consistency in organization.
>
> At this point I'd particularly appreciate it if anyone has time to tweak and
> make the template page as good looking and smooth as possible. When I invite
> doctors to create new pages they will start by copying the template, so it
> will influence the whole look of the book.

It will, so take your time.

> I'm a terrible newcomer to the Wiki markup language, I have to admit. If
> anyone has time to teach me on some very basic topics, I'd much appreciate
> it. (And yes, I have looked them up on the help pages, but just haven't
> figured them out yet). Just email me if you have patience for a poor
> beginner and a little free time.

I can't help you here. I still do not succeed to use table mark up.
Actually, try to avoid using them...

> One final, rather big question. I've gone ahead and created an entire set of
> chapters, but the chapters point to (as yet) empty pages. I'm wondering if
> that's the best strategy. It seems possible that it's better to leave blank
> things that haven't been written yet, so people know they need to be
> written.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Paris.

No, you should leave empty pages. This suggests to newcomers what is yet
missing.

Ant


from_name: David Monniaux

subject: [Wikipedia-l] client-side search engine

body:
I'm proposing again my idea of a Java-based client-side search engine:

http://quatramaran.ens.fr/~monniaux/wikipedia_en/search_applet.html

(Need good JVM, NOT the old Microsoft VM.)

The index is downloaded by chunks, as needed by the client. There's some
caching.

[The index was generated 6 months ago from a database dumb. I'll remake
it once I get mysql working again.]

What do you think? If interested, I may implement sentence search.
Full-text word search is already implemented.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] deluxe wikilinks

body:
I'd like the possibility of showing the intro paragraph of a linked
article when the mouse hovers over it.

How about something along the lines of:

http://quatramaran.ens.fr/~monniaux/wikilinks/pagea.html

Done exclusively with Javascript *without duplication of content* (read
the HTML sources).


from_name: Skriptor

body:
> 3. Why are you so much against these Wikipedias being created if they
> are as you say so useless? Could it hurt?

That would depend on how much difference there is in the written
languages/dialects in China, wouldn't it?

Owing to my very limited knowledge of Chinese, I have to hypothesize
here. It seems to have been said that Chinese writing is the same all
over the country - same glyphs, same meaning attached to the glyphs.
Only the spoken language appears to differ so much as to be mutually
incomprehensible.

If this is indeed the case, I cannot quite see the point of different
Chinese wikipedias. This would appear to me similar to having a British
wikipedia, an American one, and an Australian one, on the grounds that
both spelling and pronounciation varies. And that would, IMHO, hurt,
because you'd have needless duplication and fragmentation of articles.
It would be so much more difficult for the reader to find information
on a given subject, which is after all the main point of a wikipedia.

Of course, it would be different if there were significant differences
among the way the various Chinese languages/dialects were written.

Skriptor


from_name: vic

subject: [Wikitech-l] Graphviz plugin updated ...

body:
Hi ...
The Graphviz plugin nows support links inside the graphs.
You can view more info at
http://www.wickle.com/wiki/index.php/Graphviz_extension

regards

Thanks to Tels for suggestion ;))

--
Problems with Windows - Reboot.
Problems with Linux   - Be root.

Vic (aKa CoffMan)
vic at wickle.com
wickle at gmail.com


from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
> > 1. That is to say nothing of Alaya
>
> Because he/she does not even have a user page! Go check on meta, en,
> zh, and you can find none!

Nishishei has a userpage on en:, gives his e-mail, has a respected
website on Shanghainese, and is a university student.

> > 2. If we subjected all new Wikipedias to such standards, we would
> > probably only have 20 Wikipedias
>
> Well, Shanghainese is different from Ning-bo dialect (My grandma
> speaks that, and believe me, sometimes I cannot comprehend her
> slangs), Hangzhou dialect (I have been to Hangzhou many times, and
> again I can catch only a few phrases), Suzhou dialect, Subei dialect
> (many old men in Shanghai were from Subei, and they can be easily
> identified once they open their mouths). That makes four varieties of
> Wu already, and there will be more. Considering all other dialects and
> their varieties, you can have hundreds of Wikipedias already. Enjoy
> surfing!

We are talking about a Wu Wikipedia, not a Shanghainese Wikipedia.
Granted Shanghainese is different from Suzhou, but they are definitely
mutually intelligible.

> And why don't you set up some more Wikipedias for dialects in other
> languages? English, for example, has many varities too. Why not have
> an American English Wikipedia, British English Wikipedia, Australian
> English Wikipedia. And yes, even in Britain people speak different
> English as well. So why don't we have one Wikipedia for everybody,
> since we all speak the language differently?

"So differently"? Because these languages, with minimal effort, are
mutually intelligible, we do not need separate Wikipedias, nor has
anybody seriously suggested them.

> > 3. Why are you so much against these Wikipedias being created if they
> > are as you say so useless? Could it hurt?
>
> Yes, It will turn Wikipedia into a big joke.

If we create hundreds, as you suggest, yes. If we create 8 or 9 total,
as I suggest (and only when ech is requested), it won't turn it into a
big joke.

Mark


subject: [Wikipedia-l] sign.wikepedia.org?

body:
All of these notations are standardised and can be used for any signed
language. Unfortujnately, nonve of them are widespread and the only
universally understood option would be to use video clips, which is
horrendus (vrml might work too, but it's still not a viable option)

Mark

On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 01:59:17 +1100, David Gerard
<fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> Neil Harris (usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk) [050128 01:44]:
>
> > The important question is: what do our potential deaf users _themselves_
> > want? Then we can worry about who's going to find the motivation to
> > adapt the software appropriately to support their needs.
> > Given the choice of an underlying notation, a nice general way to
> > proceed would to be able to define a vocabulary in some notation, and to
> > then reference that vocabulary using {{template}}s, thus allowing the
> > re-use of the quite complex gestural symbols units that make up sign
> > language. Multi-layered templates could allow whole phrases or sentences
> > to be built up.
> > Presumably the Holy Grail of any such notation would be that it would be
> > expressive enough to allow the generation of sign-language animations at
> > some later date...
>
>
> The other important question is: to what extent is this [[original
> research]]?  A lot of small dialects don't have teribly standardised
> orthography and their Wikipedia choosing one is already likely to have a
> fair bit of [[observer effect]]. Is there a sign language with an accepted
> standardised notation already, or are we talking about inventing one?
>
>
> - d.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Chris Mahan and Hephaestos

body:
J.F. de Wolff wrote:

> On secondary sources: I note that many medical articles (my personal
> area) are amended to include news articles. If one searches the
> professional literature (e.g. with PubMed or even Google), the news
> articles are often overstatements of scientific findings. If one
> Japanese group discovers a peptide that decreases the rate of mitosis
> of neuroblastoma cell lines, the newspapers will blurb: "CURE FOR
> CANCER FOUND", even though this relates to ONE type of cancer in a
> petri dish, and even then it has not even been tested on patients, let
> alone approved by the regulatory authorities. The list of examples is
> endless. (I've made this one up, incidentally. But have a look at
> "recent findings" in the entry [[Inflammatory bowel disease]], which
> grew this way.)
> If Wikipedia seeks to make core science understandable to the lay
> public (one of the many aims of a good encyclopedia), it will have to
> include primary reference material, not ruminated and regurgitated
> news stories (even from the BBC or CNN).

I would expect this to be a routine activity, replacing news story
links with journal references. If the article is complete enough
to reference the research directly, it's unlikely that the news
stories will have anything to add at that point, and we don't want
any extlinks that don't supply additional information.

Ideally, those news stories will link to us for their "further
reading" rather than the other way around.

Stan


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: next database downloads refresh

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

Jochen Magnus wrote:
| May I repeat this question?
|
| Meanwhile the downloadable cur_file is 20 days old!

Because we have recently had some exciting glitches in some of the
servers we haven't had a spare available to run the public backup dumps
on without risking harming performance of the site.

When our database administrator is comfortable tasking a machine for it
(hopefully this weekend when traffic is lower) it'll get done. Doing
full dumps of all the wikis takes quite a while, and the machine they
run on isn't available for load balancing until the dumps are complete
_plus_ the additional time it takes to catch up on all the changes made
in the meantime.

Separately, I'm working on an update system that will be able to pull
current-page updates from the wiki starting from a prior dump with a
minimum of fuss. That should be in preliminary beta testing within the
next couple of weeks, and if it's working well we can probably open that
up soon for general use.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

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O89dv02AbDrHBdtB8E1AwIE=
=t5Qt
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from_name: Peter Danenberg

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Help needed installing chemistry wikitex in
	mediawiki 1.4beta5

body:
> I have downloaded wikitex-current.tar.gz from wikitex.org

     I  just  updated WikiTeX, Alwyn, to work with 1.4beta5;
and you can get it from CVS via:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous at cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/wikipedia co wikitex

     Alternatively,   check  back  this  evening  (Thursday,
Pacific Standard Time); and I'll have a  pre-packaged  down-
load at wikitex.org.

--
Peter Danenberg                                           .
wikisophia.org                                           ..:


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
I think most of us have had enough of this. If a dispute remains, please use
the Wikipedia dispute resolution procedure.

Fred

> From: BJ?rn Lindqvist <bjourne at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: BJ?rn Lindqvist <bjourne at gmail.com>, English Wikipedia
> <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 20:51:15 +0100
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] primary and secondary sources
>
>>> I strongly disagree.  The only cites should be good cites.  Bad ones are
>>> misleading and wasteful.  A good cite is easy enough to make: one that
>>> accurately describes the cited material and relates it to the
>>> subjectmatter.  This latest fuss was, at bottom, over attempts by some of
>>> us to
>>> transform a bad cite (a statement that a UN source said something that we
>>> didn't know it said) into a good one (a statement that a secondary source
>>> gave a figure and attributed it to a UN source).
>>
>> Um, no.  The cite said exactly that already.  The latest fuss was, at the
>> bottom, over attempts to exclude the cite altogether because one editor
>> didn't like it.  And even after it was confirmed as factually correct, he
>> still made several attempts to exclude it on other grounds.
>
> Actually, the attempts that this "one editor" did,  was to tell the
> readers that the "cite" inserted did refer to something completely
> different from what all the other "cites" referred to. Those attempts
> were completely resisted
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Estimates_of_the_Palestinian_Refuge
> e_flight_of_1948&diff=9512567&oldid=9511977)
> for some reason.
>
> --
> mvh Bj?rn
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] sign.wikepedia.org?

body:
Yes, but does that mean we shouldn't have Wikipedias in, for example,
Frisian, Limburgish, Irish, or Basque?

While reading an encyclopedia in a secod language you use on a daily
basis is definitely doable, in many cases it would be easier and
possibly preferred for somebody to be able to read content in their
native language.

The reason we aren't flooded with thousands of requests for new
languages each day is because a relatively tiny number of people know
that they have the option to request these languages, and they are
left to believe that using the Wikipedia in the LWC (language of wider
communication) is their only option.

Wikipedia being primarily written rather than oral or gestural, it is
obviously very difficult for us to have languages that are exclusively
or almost exclusively spoken/signed. Thus, while some people may write
signed languages, at the moment the literacy rate in the first
language is SO incredibly low that an encyclopedia in one of these
languages would have next to no audience - most signed languages have
less than 1000 speakers (remember the general definition of speech
doesn't limit it to oral communication), some such as American Sign
Language have in the hundreds of thousands, and a couple (Indian Sign
Language and Chinese Sign Language) have over 1 million.

In some of these cases (almost completely limited to Indian Sign
Language and Chinese Sign Language), a great number, even the
majority, of the speakers of these languages are monolingual or have
very poor national language skills (in China, some places have
communes exclusively for deaf people so they live effectively in their
own communities; India has some similar things but not so much so),
but also perhaps .0001% of them are literate in the signed language,
and even then they may use different writing systems, so they are
unreachable with anything but a visual medium.

Since it isn't our job to campaign for literacy, I think we shouldn't
have Wikipedias for /any/ signed language until literacy reaches at
least 1%, and while this is certainly the case for some signed
languages (in Scandinavia, I believe) these are also some of the
places where the deaf population is most linguistically integrated,
and they mostly use SSW which is next to impossible to represent on a
computer without using images (which would be extremely high
bandwidth).

Mark

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 19:16:28 +0100, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> Neil:
> > The important question is: what do our potential deaf users _themselves_
> > want? Then we can worry about who's going to find the motivation to
> > adapt the software appropriately to support their needs.
>
> Not to discourage, but I can well imagine that many deaf users are
> quite happy with what is already there. Sign language is probably
> their first language, but many will have their literacy in the spoken
> language - that's the language they read and write, often on a daily
> basis.
>
> It's the same with many other speakers of dialects and smaller
> minority languages - the 'big' language is the language of schooling
> and written communication. Smaller languages often remain just oral
> languages - or in the case of sign language, signed languages.
>
> Of course this is all spoken by someone who does not have any direct
> experience with deaf people, so I gladly admit I'm wrong if someone
> else with more direct experience tells me differently. :-)
>
> Andre Engels
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] MediaWiki:pages not used

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

Stanislav Traykov wrote:
| we have a problem on bg.wikipedia. Our MediaWiki namespace pages aren't
| used for system messages anymore. The pages are still there, of course,
| but it's as if someone had turned off message substitution.

Please point to a specific instance of the problem so that it can be
confirmed and checked.

Best to include:
a) a particular URL to a particular page
b) a *very specific* sample a message which is displaying incorrectly.
(cut and paste the expected and actual values, describe where it is on
screen, and list the message name so it can be checked against the page
and default values).

Also check for caching and user-specific problems.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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fpBnlwky8ugIkpMWAE7Spcs=
=Jn7P
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia.ie portal

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

John Collison wrote:
| I did not no until recently about the existence of the wikipedia.ch
| portal, but when I found it I thought it was a very good idea. Checking
| out wikipedia.ie, I found that it does not exist. Wouldn't it be a good
| idea to register this and set up an Irish portal?

Please don't! Someone (possibly you) will be locked into re-registering
yet another domain name every couple years in perpetuity, and when they
forget people will throw a fit that it's been taken over by a squatter
and old links have broken. It is simply not practical to buy up every
domain name with the word "wikipedia" in it, and every one that someone
does buy with good intentions because a maintenance burden for the
foundation.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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0Nfcd625/hwPM2X7nUG1adM=
=Taw1
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Please check and test language files before committing
	them

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

I've reverted LanguageNl.php in HEAD back a couple revisions to the last
version that didn't contain corrupt Unicode or extra whitespace at the
end of the file which, either of which would break proper functioning of
the wiki to some degree.

Please remember to check your check-ins for validity.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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Bn4tBvGozyIWZr+j5zHZw4Y=
=GgsT
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikitech-l] Antispam / antivirus on mailing list server

body:
Hi,

I?propose to set up a basic antispam / antivirus check on the mailing list
server. The administration of mailing lists became a burden due to spams and
virus.

I propose several steps:
* first blocking mails from invalid domains and virus. This take very little
server resource, but should remove a big part of unwanted trafic.
* if this is not enough, then setting a specific antispam with Spamassassin
for blocking most unwanted mails. This will also require more server
resources.

Here below are the rules I propose to implement for the first step. These are
the rules I?use myself for the last 2?years.

========================
/etc/postfix/main.cf:

smtpd_helo_required = yes
disable_vrfy_command = yes

unknown_address_reject_code = 554
unknown_client_reject_code = 554
unknown_hostname_reject_code = 554

# Default: not needed
smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
    reject_invalid_hostname,
    reject_non_fqdn_hostname,
    reject_non_fqdn_sender,
    reject_non_fqdn_recipient,
    reject_unknown_sender_domain,
    reject_unknown_recipient_domain,
    reject_unauth_pipelining,
    permit_mynetworks,
    reject_unauth_destination,
    reject_rbl_client relays.ordb.org,
    reject_rbl_client opm.blitzed.org,
    reject_rbl_client list.dsbl.org,
    reject_rbl_client sbl.spamhaus.org,
    reject_rbl_client cbl.abuseat.org,
    reject_rbl_client dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net,
    reject_rbl_client blackholes.easynet.nl,
    reject_rbl_client proxies.blackholes.wirehub.net,
    reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net,
    reject_rbl_client dnsbl.njabl.org,
    permit

smtpd_client_restrictions =
    permit_mynetworks,
    reject_unknown_client,
    reject_unknown_sender_domain,
    reject_non_fqdn_sender,
    reject_invalid_hostname,
    reject_non_fqdn_hostname,
    reject_non_fqdn_recipient,
    reject_unknown_recipient_domain,
    reject_unauth_pipelining,
    reject_unauth_destination,
    reject_rbl_client relays.ordb.org,
    reject_rbl_client opm.blitzed.org,
    reject_rbl_client list.dsbl.org,
    reject_rbl_client sbl.spamhaus.org,
    reject_rbl_client cbl.abuseat.org,
    reject_rbl_client dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net,
    reject_rbl_client blackholes.easynet.nl,
    reject_rbl_client proxies.blackholes.wirehub.net,
    reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net,
    reject_rbl_client dnsbl.njabl.org,
    permit

smtpd_helo_restrictions =
    permit_mynetworks,
    reject_invalid_hostname,
    reject_unknown_hostname,
    reject_non_fqdn_hostname

smtpd_sender_restrictions =
    reject_unknown_sender_domain,
    reject_non_fqdn_sender,
    reject_invalid_hostname,
    reject_non_fqdn_hostname,
    reject_non_fqdn_recipient,
    reject_unknown_recipient_domain,
    reject_unauth_pipelining,
    permit_mynetworks,
    reject_unauth_destination,
    reject_rbl_client relays.ordb.org,
    reject_rbl_client opm.blitzed.org,
    reject_rbl_client list.dsbl.org,
    reject_rbl_client sbl.spamhaus.org,
    reject_rbl_client cbl.abuseat.org,
    reject_rbl_client dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net,
    reject_rbl_client blackholes.easynet.nl,
    reject_rbl_client proxies.blackholes.wirehub.net,
    reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net,
    reject_rbl_client dnsbl.njabl.org,
    permit

header_checks = regexp:/etc/postfix/header_checks
mime_header_checks = regexp:/etc/postfix/mime_header_checks

==========
/etc/postfix/mime_header_checks:

/.*name=".*\.(exe|pif|zip|scr|com|dat|vbs)"/ REJECT

==========
/etc/postfix/header_checks: (new rules could be added as needed)

/Subject:.*Hydrocodone.*/                   REJECT
/Subject:.*Valium.*/                        REJECT
/Subject:.*Vicodin.*/                       REJECT
/Subject:.*Pharmacy.*/                      REJECT
/Subject:.*Xanax.*/                         REJECT
/Subject:.*Rolex.*/                         REJECT
/Subject:.*VIAGRA.*/                        REJECT
/Subject:.*Network Critical Update.*/       REJECT

Regards,
Yann

--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux


subject: [Wikipedia-l] MediaWiki:pages not used

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

Stanislav Traykov wrote:
| The obvious place:
|
| http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allmessages
|
| Actual result:
|
| No rows appear pink, columns 2 and 3 (default text, current text) are
| completely identical.

Did you try editing any of the messages to force it to update the
message cache?

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

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zDIC6H3zLEziZST1PKtXYZI=
=Ka9/
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikipedia-l] sign.wikepedia.org?

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:

>I think the most viable system is Stokoe (with the modifications used
>in the BSL dictionary). It is by far the easiest to learn and doesn't
>use more than a couple of non-latin glyphs (the problem is the
>positioning of subscript and superscript clusters and diacritics).
>
>Few people write signed languages at all, and when they do they
>usually use the "gloss" method (ie, word-for-word translation into the
>national spoken language). After this the most popular is Sutton
>SignWriting which I personally despise for various reasons, then
>Stokoe, then personal systems (yes, prior to Stokoe and SSW some
>people wrote signed languages using systems they invented themselves),
>then HamNoSys (based on Stokoe, but capable of much more detail,
>perhaps paralell to Stokoe not distinguishing from allophones but HNS
>distinguishing; mostly used in academic circles).
>
>
>
The important question is: what do our potential deaf users _themselves_
want? Then we can worry about who's going to find the motivation to
adapt the software appropriately to support their needs.

Given the choice of an underlying notation, a nice general way to
proceed would to be able to define a vocabulary in some notation, and to
then reference that vocabulary using {{template}}s, thus allowing the
re-use of the quite complex gestural symbols units that make up sign
language. Multi-layered templates could allow whole phrases or sentences
to be built up.

Presumably the Holy Grail of any such notation would be that it would be
expressive enough to allow the generation of sign-language animations at
some later date...

-- Neil


body:
A block against me expired at 12:34 today. It is now 15:07, and I find myself
unable to edit. The reason I am given is: "Autoblocked because you share an
IP address with "Jakew". Reason "user page vandalism"."

Of course I share an IP address with myself! Could someone rectify this
problem please?

On the block list, I see we have:
11:34, 27 Jan 2005, Fvw blocked #15196 (expires 11:34, 28 Jan 2005)
(Autoblocked because you share an IP address with "Jakew". Reason "user page
vandalism".)"

The original block:
> 00:34, 27 Jan 2005, Fvw blocked Jakew (expires 12:34, 27 Jan 2005)
> (contribs) (user page vandalism)


from_name: Jochen Magnus

body:
May I repeat this question?

Meanwhile the downloadable cur_file is 20 days old!

Sincerely

jo

> When will the database downloads be refreshed at download.wikimedia.org?
> Currently, the last refresh was 16 days ago (January 7, 2005). The related wiki
> page says refreshes will occur approximately twice a week. Has this schedule now
> changed?


from_name: Phil Sandifer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Policy Proposals

body:
I have revised a pair of old and narrowly rejected policies in the
hopes that the current climate is such that they will pass with more
ease.

The first can be located at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_policy/
Personal_attacks. This proposal would allow sysops to impose 24 hour
blocks for personal attacks, in the vein of the 24 hour blocks for 3RR
violations. The previous policy allowed for longer blocks, and had
fewer admonishments about improper use of the policy.

The second can be located at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_a_troll. This policy has
been changed more substantially. It explicitly notes that sysops may
not ban for trolling, and acknowledges that no firm definition of
trolling will be exhaustive. It also contains a warning about the
impossibility of accurately judging other people's motives. The sole
use of this policy, in its new form, would be to allow the arbitration
committee to, should they be inclined, sanction users for trolling.

I have also, through a small fiat, created [[Wikipedia:Don't be a
dick]]. As this policy is explicitly unenforced and unenforcable, and
meant as a joke with serious content, I did not forsee any problems
with it.

-Snowspinner


from_name: Sheng Jiong

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Individual Wikipedias for different Sinitic
	vernaculars (Cantonese debate) - update

body:
Of course I read, and I checked their user pages too. Felix Wan(who
was raised in Hong Kong, by the way) confests that he "occasionally"
edits Chinese Wikipedia, and I doubt if he is going to edit the
proposed Shanghainese Wikipedia in the future too. NiShishei basically
made "no* edits at all in English Wikipedia, and he does not even have
a username in Chinese Wikipedia. Pangguanzhe, again, only registered
on Jan 21 2005 and made a grand total 8 edits, including 3 edits for
his own user page. My suggestion: find someone who has really made
contributions to Wikipedia first before setting up these totally
useless Wikipedias.

[[User:Formulax]]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 17:31:27 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Uhh... hello, did you read my e-mail? I listed native speakers
> supporting a Wu Wikipedia.
>
> Mark
>
> On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 14:36:57 +0800, Sheng Jiong <sheng.jiong at gmail.com> wrote:
> > It is totally absurd to set up so many Wikipedias for various Chinese
> > dialects. Being a native Shanghainess, my mother tongue is Wu. But I
> > have never seen any books written in the Wu dialect in my entire life,
> > and I have only heard of one book that was written in Wu in the 1930s,
> > and apparently it received very limited attention. Speaking language
> > is very different from the writing system, and in Chinese although
> > there are hundreds of dialects there is however only one writing
> > system. Wikipedia being a *written* encyclopedia would mean that we
> > only need *one* Chinese Wikipedia, written in Chinese characters.
> > Speakers of the different dialects can pronounce each characters in
> > very different ways (A Wu speaker can hardly understand Cantonese or
> > Min-nan, and vice versa), they all have the same grammar and similar
> > ways of expression, after thousands years of cultural integration
> > within the unified country. (And by the way Mandarin also has a long
> > history of being the "offical" spoken language in China: since Qing
> > dynasty in the 1600s it has been adopted as the language spoken in
> > Emperor's palace, and during the Republic of China period it was
> > selected by the parliament as the official spoken language of the
> > government after a democratic voting.)
> >
> > Different dialects of course have their own distinct cultures: in
> > traditional Shanghainese Opera the actors speak only Wu (just like in
> > Beijing Opera the actors speak in Mandarin); there are also other
> > similar operas for Cantonese or other dialects and these operas still
> > receive much attention today in China. However the writing system of
> > China has been unified since Qing Shihuang's time in around 220BC, for
> > the convenience of the communications among all Chinese. It will be a
> > big joke if today someone want to return to the old days when no one
> > can understand each other.
> >
> > Interestingly also Mark seem to neglect the fact that really no native
> > speakers of all these dialects support the proposal, knowing that it
> > is a totally unworkable proposal.
> >
> > [[User:Formulax]]
> >
> >
> > On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 13:34:36 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > In this e-mail I don't want to personally introduce new arguments but
> > > I want people to know that further debate on this topic is continuing
> > > at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages
> > >
> > > Some speakers of these languages have lent their support: Steve,
> > > Instantnood, and Felix Wan for Yue/Cantonese, and Nishishei,
> > > Pangguanzhe, and alaya for Wu/Shanghainese (Wu also includes the
> > > varieties of the surrounding areas including for example Suzhou).
> > >
> > > Interestingly, on that page, no native speakers have directly
> > > condemned the idea (only direct opposition is from Shizhao), although
> > > Toytoy, a Cantonese speaker, has some concerns.
> > >
> > > Mark
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Alex Kwan

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Individual Wikipedias for different
	Sinitic	vernaculars (Cantonese debate) - update

body:
Hello,

Sheng Jiong wrote:
> his own user page. My suggestion: find someone who has really made
> contributions to Wikipedia first before setting up these totally
> useless Wikipedias.

Hey, if the hosting people have space to waste...why not?

little Alex


from_name: Alwyn Noronha

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Help needed installing chemistry wikitex in mediawiki
	1.4beta5

body:
Hi,

Could someone please help me with installing the chemistry module of
wikitex in mediawiki 1.4beta5

I have downloaded wikitex-current.tar.gz from wikitex.org

I copied the folder wikitex below extensions including tmp and have set
the owner of the folder to be the web server (chown -R apache.apache
wikitex)

Then I added the line: include 'extensions/wikitex/wikitex.php'; to
LocalSettings.php

Then I copied the code from the chemistry module to my wiki website and
tested and it does not display the chemical molecules.

I have installed ocaml and compiled texvc in the math folder but if I
understand correctly, wikitex is supposed to REPLACE texvc and not
extend it to chemistry and other things?

Would be much obliged for any help getting the chemistry to work.

Regards and Thanks
Alwyn


body:
> 1. That is to say nothing of Alaya

Because he/she does not even have a user page! Go check on meta, en,
zh, and you can find none!

> 2. If we subjected all new Wikipedias to such standards, we would
> probably only have 20 Wikipedias

Well, Shanghainese is different from Ning-bo dialect (My grandma
speaks that, and believe me, sometimes I cannot comprehend her
slangs), Hangzhou dialect (I have been to Hangzhou many times, and
again I can catch only a few phrases), Suzhou dialect, Subei dialect
(many old men in Shanghai were from Subei, and they can be easily
identified once they open their mouths). That makes four varieties of
Wu already, and there will be more. Considering all other dialects and
their varieties, you can have hundreds of Wikipedias already. Enjoy
surfing!

And why don't you set up some more Wikipedias for dialects in other
languages? English, for example, has many varities too. Why not have
an American English Wikipedia, British English Wikipedia, Australian
English Wikipedia. And yes, even in Britain people speak different
English as well. So why don't we have one Wikipedia for everybody,
since we all speak the language differently?

> 3. Why are you so much against these Wikipedias being created if they
> are as you say so useless? Could it hurt?

Yes, It will turn Wikipedia into a big joke.


from_name: Frank v Waveren

body:
On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 03:09:02PM +0000, Jake Waskett wrote:
> 11:34, 27 Jan 2005, Fvw blocked #15196 (expires 11:34, 28 Jan 2005)
> (Autoblocked because you share an IP address with "Jakew". Reason "user page
> vandalism".)"
>
> The original block:
> > 00:34, 27 Jan 2005, Fvw blocked Jakew (expires 12:34, 27 Jan 2005)
> > (contribs) (user page vandalism)

Unblocked.

--
Frank v Waveren                                      Fingerprint: BDD7 D61E
fvw@[var.cx|stack.nl] ICQ#10074100                      5D39 CF05 4BFC F57A
Public key: hkp://wwwkeys.pgp.net/468D62C8              FA00 7D51 468D 62C8

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from_name: J.F. de Wolff

subject: [WikiEN-l] Chris Mahan and Hephaestos

body:
Hephaestos makes a strong point.
Some issues are being fleshed out endlessly just to satisfy a fringe POV
that someone once inserted and can then not be eliminated anymore, even
though it has been NPOVed gradually.

On secondary sources: I note that many medical articles (my personal area)
are amended to include news articles. If one searches the professional
literature (e.g. with PubMed or even Google), the news articles are often
overstatements of scientific findings. If one Japanese group discovers a
peptide that decreases the rate of mitosis of neuroblastoma cell lines, the
newspapers will blurb: "CURE FOR CANCER FOUND", even though this relates to
ONE type of cancer in a petri dish, and even then it has not even been
tested on patients, let alone approved by the regulatory authorities. The
list of examples is endless. (I've made this one up, incidentally. But have
a look at "recent findings" in the entry [[Inflammatory bowel disease]],
which grew this way.)
If Wikipedia seeks to make core science understandable to the lay public
(one of the many aims of a good encyclopedia), it will have to include
primary reference material, not ruminated and regurgitated news stories
(even from the BBC or CNN).

User:Jfdwolff|JFW

--
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Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.300 / Virus Database: 265.7.1 - Release Date: 19/01/2005


from_name: Stirling Newberry

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Talk:Declaration_of_Independence


subject: [Wikipedia-l] sign.wikepedia.org?

body:
Signed languages are not, as many believe, mere gestural equivalents
of the national spoken language, rather they have different
grammatical structures, different idioms, and different semantic
categories. Thus, conversion between English and ASL is nothing les
than machine translation, except that you also need a synthesizer for
the signs.

Mark

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 23:58:04 +0000 (GMT), Nicholas Moreau
<beaubeaver at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Would it be feasable to just have a program that takes the normal English, French, Hindu... Wikipedia, and just creates a Flash character that signs the article out?
>
> The animation would, in my dream world, change automatically, as the normal English Wikipedia was updated in its normal Latin text format.
>
> Nick/"Zanimum"
>
>
> ---------------------------------
>  ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun!
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] sign.wikepedia.org?

body:
Neil:
> The important question is: what do our potential deaf users _themselves_
> want? Then we can worry about who's going to find the motivation to
> adapt the software appropriately to support their needs.

Not to discourage, but I can well imagine that many deaf users are
quite happy with what is already there. Sign language is probably
their first language, but many will have their literacy in the spoken
language - that's the language they read and write, often on a daily
basis.

It's the same with many other speakers of dialects and smaller
minority languages - the 'big' language is the language of schooling
and written communication. Smaller languages often remain just oral
languages - or in the case of sign language, signed languages.

Of course this is all spoken by someone who does not have any direct
experience with deaf people, so I gladly admit I'm wrong if someone
else with more direct experience tells me differently. :-)

Andre Engels


subject: [WikiEN-l] Encyclopaedia standards

body:
Robin Shannon wrote:

>>On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 10:59:47 -0800, Stan Shebs <shebs at apple.com> wrote:
>><snip />I have 16,000 articles on my watchlist <snip />
>>
>
>wow, he has 16 000 articles on his watchlist AND he works for apple
>(im guessing from the email address); can this guy get any cooler?
>
>paz y amor,
>[[User:The bellman]]
>
<blush> Of course, my management's reaction would be something
like "how are you having any time for WP when there are still
Tiger bugs in your queue!?!"

Stan


from_name: Mark Pellegrini

subject: [WikiEN-l] Featured article by email needs a volunteer

body:
The question has come up often enough lately that I decided to revive it -
Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Raul654/FA

Basically, I need someone to take over Kate's job of sending out featured
articles
by email. It was a popular feature, and since she left, there's been no one
to do it.
I'd like someone to volunteer to take it over.

That page explains it fairly thoroughly.

--Mark (Raul654)


from_name: Robert Brookes

body:
--- Jake Waskett <jake at waskett.org> wrote:

> User:Fvw has blocked me, claiming "vandalism":
>
> 00:34, 27 Jan 2005, Fvw blocked Jakew (expires
> 12:34, 27 Jan 2005) (contribs)
> (user page vandalism)
>
> This is inappropriate, and is not supported by
> Wikipedia policy. It is clearly
> not vandalism as defined by Wikipedia. Please would
> someone unblock me?
>
> I originally responded to allegations against me on
> User:DanP's user page. I
> wrote:
> "Yes, each will doubtless follow similar accusations
> by yourself. Childish?
> Yes. Irresponsible? Yes. Can you find anything after
> November 2004? I doubt
> it. I can change. Can you? - Jakew 00:03, 27 Jan
> 2005 (UTC)"
>
> In response to a message left on my user talk page
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jakew)...
>
> I left the following messages on Fvw's user talk
> page:
> Very well. I'm sure you'll agree that directing
> users to DanP's talk page is
> not objectionable. - Jakew 00:26, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)
>
> I then moved my comments to the user talk page,
> replacing it with: "Please see
> your talk page. - Jakew 00:23, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)"
>
> There are rules against replacing user pages with
> profanities or insults. Mere
> editing and advising readers to read the talk page
> is perfectly acceptable. I
> suggest that you read up on the matter. - Jakew
> 00:31, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)
>
> Jakew.
>

This is very disappointing. Given Fvw's previous
involvement with circumcision related issues one would
have thought that he would have ensured that he kept a
distance from active sysop intervention against those
of a different POV. One can only hope that this was a
one off "slip-up" and that in future so as to keep
himself beyond reproach he will refrain in such acts
which may be interpreted as an abuse of sysop
position.

Robert

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Illegitimate block.

body:
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:

> Robert Brookes wrote:
> > I thought that the beauty of the 3RR rule was its
> "simplicity" in
> >that when a breach is committed there is no doubt?
> No sooner had the
> >ink dried on that policy update that such a breach
> could lead to a 24
> >hour block than some of the more "imaginative"
> sysops were proposing
> >to "interpret" the intention of a specific editor
> and demanding the
> >power to block at will based on their personal
> interpretation.
>
> A too-strict interpretation will just force edit
> warriors to randomly
> change irrelevant words while still reverting.
>
> For some things, simple common sense is still best.
> Anyone can start
> to game any rule.
>
> --Jimbo
>

The converse of course is that too much freedom of
interpretation will make for even greater abuse by
sysops where they block editors at will. As it stands
the evidence is already clear that there are people
who are being elected as sysops after a few months
purely on the basis that they will enforce
"discipline" as their sole contribution to Wikipedia.
This is a dangerous development and rather than
encourage these "gunslingers" futher one should
consider rule changes and adaptions. The use of a
(Gestapo-style) heavy hand in controlling the actions
of people is not something Wikipedia should create an
environment to florish. (So stated to commemorate the
liberation of the prisoners from Auswitz 60 years ago)

Robert

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from_name: BJörn Lindqvist

subject: [WikiEN-l] primary and secondary sources

body:
> >I strongly disagree.  The only cites should be good cites.  Bad ones are
> >misleading and wasteful.  A good cite is easy enough to make: one that
> >accurately describes the cited material and relates it to the
> >subjectmatter.  This latest fuss was, at bottom, over attempts by some of
> >us to
> >transform a bad cite (a statement that a UN source said something that we
> >didn't know it said) into a good one (a statement that a secondary source
> >gave a figure and attributed it to a UN source).
>
> Um, no.  The cite said exactly that already.  The latest fuss was, at the
> bottom, over attempts to exclude the cite altogether because one editor
> didn't like it.  And even after it was confirmed as factually correct, he
> still made several attempts to exclude it on other grounds.

Actually, the attempts that this "one editor" did,  was to tell the
readers that the "cite" inserted did refer to something completely
different from what all the other "cites" referred to. Those attempts
were completely resisted
(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Estimates_of_the_Palestinian_Refugee_flight_of_1948&diff=9512567&oldid=9511977)
for some reason.

--
mvh Bj?rn


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Mark Pellegrini <mapellegrini at comcast.net> wrote:
> Basically, I need someone to take over Kate's job of sending out featured
> articles by email. It was a popular feature, and since she left, there's
> been no one to do it.
> I'd like someone to volunteer to take it over.

This is something that would be much better left to a bot, IMO. However that
will require the protection of all selected anniversary template pages (TFA
templates are already protected). This is to prevent in-the-know vandals from
vandalizing the next day's sel anniv template right before a bot sends its text
to thousands of people.

Currently, all the major people adding to the selected anniversaries pages are
admins. So this won't be too big of an issue (and much less of one after
February 20th since all sel anniv templates from that point to the end of the
year are already done).

-- mav

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