subject: [Wikitech-l] Fast

body:
On Dec 3, 2003, at 07:10, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> mmm, yummy.  When will we get up the nerve to turn full-text searching
> back on?

We should run some tests n stuff first. Sometime next couple days?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Alex R.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] governance

body:
From: "Ray Saintonge" <saintonge at telus.net>
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> >I'm with you 100% on the openness thing, and probably with you on the
> >hierarchy thing, too.  And don't even get me started on dmoz's broken
> >culture.
> >
> >The Cunctator wrote:
> >
> >>Claims that mediation and arbitration can't work without secrecy are
> >>false.
> >>
> >>Or to be more positive: any structure set up which involves a level of
> >>secrecy, if we are to move past the benevolent dictator model, MUST have
> >>formal methods of ensuring accountability and oversight by the general
> >>community--that is, everyone, including non-Wikipedians.
> >>
> Arbitration should be a completely open process, where everybody knows
> all that is happening.  This may be different for mediation where the
> objective is to have the warring parties come to some agreement.

I agree with this statement in the context of Wikipedia. Since we are all
involved in the collective maintenance of Wikipedia the arbitration
agreement
is something that we are all part of and we should be able at least to watch
as spectators as it progresses.

Mediation is fundamentally different in objective. It is true that sometimes
mediators and arbitrators are the same individuals (such as judges who try
to settle cases before they go to trial) but the format of mediation is
conciliatory,
the parties try to see each other's perspectives and then resolve their
differences amicably.  That can be done quietly between those involved,
of course what is being mediated are disputes with the Wikipedia community,
so someone must represent Wikipedia's interests in the mediation and this
is why, imo, it gets complicated to manage as a process. Who decides who
represents Wikipedia. Is it the mediator or is it some third party who knows
what the complaints are for the community against the individual? I still
don't
see that any general consensus has been reached on that point.

> The last thing that the mediator needs when he is trying to resolve a
> delicate question is to have a hamhanded newcomer to the war throwing
> flames when the matter is none of his business.  That can drive away one
> combatant, and harden the other in his position.

Here I would say that this is suggesting that the mediator should not be the
person or body representing Wikipedia's interests directly (of course the
mediator is trying to help Wikipedia's interests by dealing with a problem
user, but the role is to listen to the problem user and the complaints, not
to side with those making complaints).

Another point is that mediation can sometimes occur without the intervention
of a mediator per se. In court yesterday I was the mediator between
my client ( a corporation) and the other side. True, I am not completely
impartial, but I am trying to resolve the issues between the two sides,
and convince both my client to settle and the other side (who was not
represented) to settle by getting them both to see the limitations of their
respective claims.  It happens in the hallways of the courhouse without
anyone listening and with no record but it one of the most important
things I do in the resolution of disputes because it produces results on
many occasions sort of like the idea of a [[User:User Advocate]].

Alex from Brooklyn [en:user:alex756]


list: wikien-l

from_name: KNOTT, T

subject: [WikiEN-l] Sans Seriffe

body:
Thanks for pointing it out, it was very funny

Theresa

-----Original Message-----
From: Poor, Edmund W [mailto:Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com]
Sent: 02 December 2003 19:02
To: English Wikipedia
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Sans Seriffe

Drop whatever you're doing and read THIS! You'll bust a gut...

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=San_Serriffe&oldid=1859677

I had nothing to do with this article, but I sure wish I had!

Uncle Ed
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Stuardo Rodríguez (StR)

subject: [Wikitech-l] Fwd: Re: [Intlwiki-l] Pesentation /Presentación

body:
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Hash: SHA1

this is my idea, and they told me to send it to this list.....

who could help me with that??

thanks

- --
		StR <str at strgt.cjb.net>
Ya no uso Messenger! Uso Jabber (str at jabber.org)
- -[http://strgt.cjb.net]-[Just me 'n the world I created]-

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Subject: Re: [Intlwiki-l] Pesentation / Presentaci?n
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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] governance

body:
Alex R. wrote:

>From: "Ray Saintonge" <saintonge at telus.net>
>
>>The last thing that the mediator needs when he is trying to resolve a
>>delicate question is to have a hamhanded newcomer to the war throwing
>>flames when the matter is none of his business.  That can drive away one
>>combatant, and harden the other in his position.
>>
>
>Here I would say that this is suggesting that the mediator should not be the
>person or body representing Wikipedia's interests directly (of course the
>mediator is trying to help Wikipedia's interests by dealing with a problem
>user, but the role is to listen to the problem user and the complaints, not
>to side with those making complaints).
>
>Another point is that mediation can sometimes occur without the intervention
>of a mediator per se. In court yesterday I was the mediator between
>my client ( a corporation) and the other side. True, I am not completely
>impartial, but I am trying to resolve the issues between the two sides,
>and convince both my client to settle and the other side (who was not
>represented) to settle by getting them both to see the limitations of their
>respective claims.  It happens in the hallways of the courhouse without
>anyone listening and with no record but it one of the most important
>things I do in the resolution of disputes because it produces results on
>many occasions sort of like the idea of a [[User:User Advocate]].
>
I basically agree.  The mediator would really be representing
Wikipedia's meta-interest of maintaining peace in the family and a
general atmosphere of NPOV.  Most often it would not be in Wikipedia's
interest to take sides in the substance of the dispute.

I want to avoid any misunderstanding that I may have been criticising
the mediator.  Using your reference of a hallway settlement, suppose
that a complete stranger, unknown to either party, walks by.  He
overhears a bit of the conversation, and decides that he has a solution
for you that he then proceeds to elaborate.  This can come at an
inopportune time, and can at times completely derail the settlement.
 This would be very bad manners in the hallways of the courthous, but
it's a lesson in manners which, regretably, many Wikipedians find
difficult to learn.

Ec


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Fast

body:
I wrote:
>>mmm, yummy.  When will we get up the nerve to turn full-text searching
>>back on?

Andrew Alder wrote:
> Is this even a good idea? I know everyone has assumed we will, but the
> current use of Google has its advantages too (see the Village Pump).
>
> Or has this been fully discussed here already, long ago?

As for me, I always just assumed it.  There are some big drawbacks to
google, namely that it isn't realtime, which makes doing certain kinds
of study difficult.  Also, Michael Hardy has reported to me that one
page he used to find in Google can no longer be found in Google, due
presumably to the vagaries of Google indexing.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Sans Seriffe

body:
I really like the current version of the article, too.  It's serious
at the top, giving the real story, but then we go on to prove that we
aren't sticks-in-the-mud by presenting the actual hoax in NPOV-style.

:-)

--Jimbo

KNOTT, T wrote:

> Thanks for pointing it out, it was very funny
>
> Theresa
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Poor, Edmund W [mailto:Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com]
> Sent: 02 December 2003 19:02
> To: English Wikipedia
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Sans Seriffe
>
> Drop whatever you're doing and read THIS! You'll bust a gut...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=San_Serriffe&oldid=1859677
>
> I had nothing to do with this article, but I sure wish I had!
>
> Uncle Ed
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Errors in conversion?

body:
On [[en:Wikipedia:Protected page]], I find a number of links being
shown as broken links, even though the page they linked to exists.
I tried (quasi-zero-)edits on both the page itself and on one of the
linked pages ([[en:Silesia]] - with apologies for editing a protected
page), and neither solved the problem.

Anyone knows what the problem is, and how to solve it? I find this
especially bad, because with the move these problems should have
been solved - instead they seem to have been added.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] Errors in conversion?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Sans Seriffe

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>"Sheldon Rampton" <sheldon.rampton at verizon.net> schrieb:
>
>>Ed Poor wrote:
>>
>>>Drop whatever you're doing and read THIS! You'll bust a gut...
>>>
>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=San_Serriffe&oldid=1859677
>>>
>>Yep, it's funny all right. The best part is the actual link to a
>>Guardian article. How did they get that into the Guardian?
>>
>
>Check the date...
>
We already had it mentioned since at least April 2002 at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fool%27s_Day

PS: It's good to see that Sheldon is now being quoted by "Scientific
American". :-)

Ec


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] XxWikipedia links don't work - please fix

body:
The XxWikipedia syntax inline links do not work.
Please fix.

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Recentchanges/All_languages

--mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Fast

body:
Full taxt searching can make some editing a lot easier for such
housekeeping as fixing misspellings and broken links.

Ec

Andrew Alder wrote:

> Is this even a good idea? I know everyone has assumed we will, but the
> current use of Google has its advantages too (see the Village Pump).
>
> Or has this been fully discussed here already, long ago?
>
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>> mmm, yummy.  When will we get up the nerve to turn full-text searching
>> back on?
>


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Fast

body:
On Dec 3, 2003, at 12:04, Andrew Alder wrote:
> Is this even a good idea? I know everyone has assumed we will, but the
> current use of Google has its advantages too (see the Village Pump).

It doesn't update live. It can't reach some pages at all. There's no
control over how to cull results by namespace (ie, articles only). etc.

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

body:
On Dec 3, 2003, at 12:55, Nick Reinking wrote:
> Well, this has been discussed before.  Either some kind of load
> balancing equipment (Cisco), load-balancing software (on Linux, say),
> reverse proxy software (such as in Apache), or round-robin DNS
> (easiest).

Yup. Also it would not be impossible to let things that don't claim to
be Mozilla (most browsers claim to be) see only en, while the Mozillas
(and compatibles) get bounced when necessary to en2.

> I forget why we decided to do en and en2 in the first
> place...

Because we don't have a load-balancing router and I have no access to
our DNS server, and it was quick to setup in the meantime.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Till Westermayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Articles and speeches about Wikipedia?

body:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .

Hi,

>I am a) writing a student research paper and b) going to have a
>lecture on a german linux-congress about Wikipedia. Has there
>anybody done this before? I know the lecture of Kurt Janson last
>year on 19C3 in Berlin but is there no newer stuff? Well I know
>what to write and talk but I am just wondering why there are so
>little (=practically no) scientific publications or conference
>papers (=everything but simple newspaper articles) on Wikipedia
>yet. On the other hand I don't mind if I am the first one ;-)

>The only references I found (up to now):

>http://wiki.wizards-of-os.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Wikipedia_And_Friend
>s

I haven't read it yet, but the new issue of First Monday contains an
academic article about Wikipedia:

Phantom authority, self-selective recruitment and retention of
members in virtual communities: The case of Wikipedia
by Andrea Ciffolilli
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_12/ciffolilli/

 __ .
 / / / /                            ... Till Westermayer - till we *)
. .
  . mailto:till at tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072
  . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179
  . . . . .


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Sans Seriffe

body:
Ed Poor wrote:

>Drop whatever you're doing and read THIS! You'll bust a gut...
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=San_Serriffe&oldid=1859677

Yep, it's funny all right. The best part is the actual link to a
Guardian article. How did they get that into the Guardian?
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
--------------------------------


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: Sciencedaily.com (was Re: [Wikitech-l] Fast)

body:
Sascha Noyes wrote:

>
>Example for knock-offs scoring higher than wikipedia: Search for 'Napoleonic
>code'
>(http://www.google.com/search?q=Napoleonic+code&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)
>where both sciencedaily.com (IIRC a rather new mirror) and nationmaster.com
>rank higher than wikipedia. This could not be explained with the google
>pagerank algorithm, because wikipedia surely gets a lot more quality and
>quantity links than others do - But it would make sense if the wikipedia
>ranking essentially gets divided by two.
>
>
Sciencedaily.com seems to get referenced a lot by the scientific and
education
communities - I got the impression that the couple running it have a lot of
friends and contacts in those communities, but that might just be a
side-effect of
being journalists.

New WP  slogan idea: "why look at a mirror when you can bask in the sun
of the real Wikipedia?"

(Yeah yeah, sunburned by vandalism then incinerated in the nuclear
furnace of
an edit war... :-) )

Stan


from_name: Nick Reinking

subject: [Wikitech-l] Fast

body:
> This would seem to reduce traffic to wikipedia, which would obviously be a bad
> thing. Is there some different load-balancing scheme that could be
> implemented that would be transparent to google?

Well, this has been discussed before.  Either some kind of load
balancing equipment (Cisco), load-balancing software (on Linux, say),
reverse proxy software (such as in Apache), or round-robin DNS
(easiest).  I forget why we decided to do en and en2 in the first
place...

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [Wikitech-l] Tweaks

body:
On Dec 3, 2003, at 09:12, Andre Engels wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:
>> Also, I noticed that Special:Asksql was a little too permissive; until
>> this is locked down right I've disabled Asksql on the live servers.
>
> Could you please specify what you mean by 'too permissive'? Was it open
> to non-sysops, did it allow things other than selects, or yet something
> else?

It had the old special-case code for 'developer's still in (read
private fields from user, and write capability, by using the wiki's
normal user account instead of the limited sql-only one). That's taken
out now and it's back online.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Peter Gervai

subject: [Wikitech-l] math broken?

body:
Hello,

Could be math regeneration broken?

I tried to put a new formula on [[w:en:user:grin]] (for testing) and it
links to a nonexistant directory.
Same on hungarian wikipedia (where it was noticed first).

Peter


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [Wikitech-l] XxWikipedia in-line links don't work -
	please fix

body:
Cross posted to Wikipedia-l (if fixing this is
anything but a technical issue - which it shouldn't be
since this feature worked before -, then please
respond to Wikipedia-l)

Changing XxWikipedia: in-line links to :xx: in-line
links does not solve the problem that XxWikipedia:
does not work. :xx: needs to be reserved for easy
in-line language linking /within/ a single project
(such as Wiktionary when it finally gets
internationalized - xx: links would therefore be magic
language links) and the more explicit Xx{project_name}
should a failsafe default that will work the same in
any MediaWiki-powered project and meta.

Here is the diff that still shows the broken links:

http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Recentchanges/All_languages&oldid=1865929

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
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Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
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subject: [Wikitech-l] XxWikipedia in-line links don't work - please fix


from_name: Sascha Noyes

subject: [Wikitech-l] Fast

body:
On Wednesday 03 December 2003 14:55, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I wrote:
> >>mmm, yummy.  When will we get up the nerve to turn full-text searching
> >>back on?
>
> Andrew Alder wrote:
> > Is this even a good idea? I know everyone has assumed we will, but the
> > current use of Google has its advantages too (see the Village Pump).
> >
> > Or has this been fully discussed here already, long ago?
>
> As for me, I always just assumed it.  There are some big drawbacks to
> google, namely that it isn't realtime, which makes doing certain kinds
> of study difficult.  Also, Michael Hardy has reported to me that one
> page he used to find in Google can no longer be found in Google, due
> presumably to the vagaries of Google indexing.

I have stumbled upon quite a few wikipedia pages that were not being indexed
by google, but the same pages on one of the many mirror-type (nationmaster,
etc.) sites were being indexed. My take on the whole situation is that google
is treating en.wikipedia.org and en2.wikipedia.org as two different entities.
Search for 'Rivers of France wikipedia'
(http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&q=Rivers+of+France+wikipedia&btnG=Google+Search)
to see an example of both en and en2 competing for the top spot.

Example for knock-offs scoring higher than wikipedia: Search for 'Napoleonic
code'
(http://www.google.com/search?q=Napoleonic+code&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)
where both sciencedaily.com (IIRC a rather new mirror) and nationmaster.com
rank higher than wikipedia. This could not be explained with the google
pagerank algorithm, because wikipedia surely gets a lot more quality and
quantity links than others do - But it would make sense if the wikipedia
ranking essentially gets divided by two.

This would seem to reduce traffic to wikipedia, which would obviously be a bad
thing. Is there some different load-balancing scheme that could be
implemented that would be transparent to google?

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


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject:
[Wikitech-l] FW: [WikiEN-l] Problem with "My Watchlist" on
	en.wikipedia?

body:
-----Original Message-----
From: Arwel Parry [mailto:arwel at cartref.demon.co.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 3:52 PM
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Problem with "My Watchlist" on en.wikipedia?

Something seems to have broken "My Watchlist" on English Wikipedia since

I last used it about 8 hours ago (it's working OK on Welsh Wikipedia).

When I select "my watchlist" I get the headings as far as "My Watchlist
(for user "Arwel Parry") and nothing below, and no menu or logo on the
left. Could someone take a look at it a.s.a.p. please?

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


body:
On Dec 3, 2003, at 15:43, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Changing XxWikipedia: in-line links to :xx: in-line
> links does not solve the problem that XxWikipedia:
> does not work. :xx: needs to be reserved for easy
> in-line language linking /within/ a single project
> (such as Wiktionary when it finally gets
> internationalized - xx: links would therefore be magic
> language links) and the more explicit Xx{project_name}
> should a failsafe default that will work the same in
> any MediaWiki-powered project and meta.

It's much more difficult to maintain a huge number of parallel link
systems and keep them running and in sync on an ever-growing number of
sites. I will not make any more Xx{project_name} prefixes, and I'd
prefer not to re-enable the (already deprecated) XxWikipedia ones that
had previously existed.

To link between projects to a particular language in Wikipedia, use eg
[[Wikipedia:fr:Une page]]. This puts the maintenance burden in a much
smaller area (a single configuration file on one server) and should
work in also interwiki links from other wikis that we don't control and
can't spontaneously add interwiki prefixes too, such as MeatballWiki
(where it would be WikiPedia:fr:Une_page since you need CamelCase on
InterWikis there).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On Dec 3, 2003, at 15:43, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Changing XxWikipedia: in-line links to :xx: in-line
> links does not solve the problem that XxWikipedia:
> does not work. :xx: needs to be reserved for easy
> in-line language linking /within/ a single project
> (such as Wiktionary when it finally gets
> internationalized - xx: links would therefore be magic
> language links) and the more explicit Xx{project_name}
> should a failsafe default that will work the same in
> any MediaWiki-powered project and meta.

It's much more difficult to maintain a huge number of parallel link
systems and keep them running and in sync on an ever-growing number of
sites. I will not make any more Xx{project_name} prefixes, and I'd
prefer not to re-enable the (already deprecated) XxWikipedia ones that
had previously existed.

To link between projects to a particular language in Wikipedia, use eg
[[Wikipedia:fr:Une page]]. This puts the maintenance burden in a much
smaller area (a single configuration file on one server) and should
work in also interwiki links from other wikis that we don't control and
can't spontaneously add interwiki prefixes too, such as MeatballWiki
(where it would be WikiPedia:fr:Une_page since you need CamelCase on
InterWikis there).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Special:Newpages broken?

body:
On Dec 3, 2003, at 16:46, Nils Kehrein wrote:
> i tried to have a look at the newly created articles on de:, but
> Special:Newpages
> shows only articles from the last ~3 days. But i remember that it used
> to
> show new articles from the past week. Do i missed an announcement, has
> anything changed in the software or is it a random feature?

Special:Newpages uses the recentchanges table, which has been rebuilt
on the new server. Due to the way the tables are currently arranged,
this means it won't have marked as new any new pages that were
subsequently edited prior to the database being copied to the new
server.

In a week this will be a moot point, since those will all have dropped
off the list.

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

body:
On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:

> Also, I noticed that Special:Asksql was a little too permissive; until
> this is locked down right I've disabled Asksql on the live servers.

Could you please specify what you mean by 'too permissive'? Was it open
to non-sysops, did it allow things other than selects, or yet something
else?

Andre Engels


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Sans Seriffe

body:
"Sheldon Rampton" <sheldon.rampton at verizon.net> schrieb:
> Ed Poor wrote:
>
> >Drop whatever you're doing and read THIS! You'll bust a gut...
> >
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=San_Serriffe&oldid=1859677
>
> Yep, it's funny all right. The best part is the actual link to a
> Guardian article. How did they get that into the Guardian?

Check the date...

Andre Engels


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] [Wikitech-l] XxWikipedia in-line links don't work
	-please fix

body:
Brion wrote:
>To link between projects to a particular language in
>Wikipedia, use eg [[Wikipedia:fr:Une page]]. This puts
>the maintenance burden in a much smaller area (a
>single configuration file on one server) and should
>work in also interwiki links from other wikis that we
>don't control and  can't spontaneously add interwiki
>prefixes too, such as MeatballWiki (where it would be
>WikiPedia:fr:Une_page since you need CamelCase on
>InterWikis there).

OK, that makes sense. I thought you were getting rid of explicit in-line links
without devising a replacement. Your syntax does make a lot more sense than
the (now depreciated) XxWikipedia syntax.

As I said before I really only care about results, not the details needed to
attain those results (I do often provide suggested ways to attain those
results but that is just to move things along by at least sparking debate).

-- mav


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Sans Seriffe

body:
Sheldon Rampton

> Yep, it's funny all right. The best part is the actual link to a
> Guardian article. How did they get that into the Guardian?

Written by Guardian journalists, natch, as a spoof supplement.  An old gag,
for UK readers; though not as old as the TV documentary reports of the
spaghetti harvest in Italy (from spaghetti trees).

Charles


from_name: Arwel Parry

subject: [WikiEN-l] Problem with "My Watchlist" on en.wikipedia?

body:
Something seems to have broken "My Watchlist" on English Wikipedia since
I last used it about 8 hours ago (it's working OK on Welsh Wikipedia).

When I select "my watchlist" I get the headings as far as "My Watchlist
(for user "Arwel Parry") and nothing below, and no menu or logo on the
left. Could someone take a look at it a.s.a.p. please?

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


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Unable to block an anonymous user

body:
An attempt to block an anonymous user results in the following error message:

A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an illegal search query (see Searching Wikipedia), or it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:
INSERT INTO ipblocks (ipb_address, ipb_user, ipb_by, ipb_reason, ipb_timestamp, ipb_auto ) VALUES ('64.208.58.117', 0, 13800, 'another attempt at blocking user','20031204050338', 0)from within function "Block::insert". MySQL returned error "1062: Duplicate entry '2147483647' for key 1".

RickK
'

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard
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from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] non-English Wikipedias

body:
Karl Eichwalder wrote:

>Please talk about the problematic areas, too.  Often (I'm talking about
>the German version) articles are just listings and another problem is,
>that many a lot home land lovers (Heimatliebhaber) are active - thus
>most of the time you will read only good things within their articles
>and worse, they don'e hesitate to manipulate history.
>
>
This sort of tangentially raises an issue that's been in the back of my
mind for a while: to what extent can the non-English Wikipedias be
expected to reach the same levels of NPOV as the English one?  For a few
other widely spoken languages, including most likely German, and perhaps
a few others, it may be achievable (so my point isn't directly related
to yours).  However, it strikes me as one of the major benefits of the
English Wikipedia that its contributors come from dozens of countries
and many many backgrounds, and it seems unlikely that some of the
lesser-spoken languages will have this advantage.  What are the chances,
for example, that the Greek Wikipedia (assuming it ever gets off the
ground) will have a history of the Greek-Turkish (or Greek-FYROM)
conflict with NPOV standards similar to the descriptions of those
conflicts in the English Wikipedia?  Or, for that matter, what are the
chances of those same conflicts being described in a NPOV manner on the
Turkish Wikipedia?  Or the Serbian Wikipedia's articles on the Kosovo
conflict?  etc.

On the English Wikipedia, some of the more contentious issues are
hammered out in a way that, ideally, will allow all partisans to accept
the article as essentially neutral (even if sometimes grudgingly).  But
on, say, the Turkish Wikipedia, there are unlikely to be many Greek
partisans throwing their opinion into the debate, so it seems that an
NPOV will converge on a consensus Turkish view: something that could be
held as "neutral" by the majority of Turks, but would likely be
considered pretty far from neutral by a Greek (and vice versa).  This,
in my view, would be equivalent to what would happen if there were an
English Wikipedia only edited by people from, say, the United States:
the NPOV we'd converge on would not be the same (and would be inferior,
I'd argue) to the NPOV we currently converge on with an English
Wikipedia edited by people from all over the world.  But, given that not
many people who are not of Turkish background speak Turkish, that seems
unlikely to happen there.  Similar situations exist for many other
languages.

So I guess my question is: do people think it is likely that Wikipedias
in languages that are spoken almost exclusively by people of one
particular national background can ever hope to achieve anything even
remotely resembling the NPOV on the Wikipedias in languages that are
spoken by a wide range of people?  Is having contributors from a wide
range of backgrounds a necessary prerequisite for NPOV (as I suggest)?

-Mark


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: FW: [WikiEN-l] Problem with "My Watchlist"
	on	en.wikipedia?

body:
In message
<E506B3FF6BC1254C9AC1B948C380BC2886BC65 at sm-nyny-xm05.nena.wdpr.disney.com
 >, "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor-GXcTff7tL0M at public.gmane.org> writes
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Arwel Parry
>[mailto:arwel-wfA80NnNzEcG2Il/BtU0GPXRex20P6io at public.gmane.org]
>Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 3:52 PM
>To: wikien-l-Qm5IaAUhVgiGglJvpFV4uA at public.gmane.org
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Problem with "My Watchlist" on en.wikipedia?
>
>
>Something seems to have broken "My Watchlist" on English Wikipedia since
>
>I last used it about 8 hours ago (it's working OK on Welsh Wikipedia).
>
>When I select "my watchlist" I get the headings as far as "My Watchlist
>(for user "Arwel Parry") and nothing below, and no menu or logo on the
>left. Could someone take a look at it a.s.a.p. please?
>

 > From: Arwel Parry [mailto:arwel at cartref.demon.co.uk]
 > Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 3:52 PM
 > To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
 > Subject: [WikiEN-l] Problem with "My Watchlist" on en.wikipedia?
 >
 >
 > Something seems to have broken "My Watchlist" on English Wikipedia
 > since
 >
 > I last used it about 8 hours ago (it's working OK on Welsh Wikipedia).
 >
 > When I select "my watchlist" I get the headings as far as "My
Watchlist
 > (for user "Arwel Parry") and nothing below, and no menu or logo on the
 > left. Could someone take a look at it a.s.a.p. please?

Does this happen consistently or intermittently? Try a couple of
variants:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Watchlist
http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Watchlist
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Watchlist&days=0.1
http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Watchlist&days=0.1
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Watchlist&days=0.01
http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Watchlist&days=0.01

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

It consistently fails to work in all cases where the "days=" parameter
is not quoted. Of course, if you just hit the "My Watchlist" option you
don't get an opportunity to choose a time period!

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


from_name: James Duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Sans Seriffe

body:
>
>Sheldon Rampton
>
> > Yep, it's funny all right. The best part is the actual link to a
> > Guardian article. How did they get that into the Guardian?
>
>Charles wrote:
>Written by Guardian journalists, natch, as a spoof supplement.  An old gag,
>for UK readers; though not as old as the TV documentary reports of the
>spaghetti harvest in Italy (from spaghetti trees).

The famous Panorama report with Richard Dimbleby, which showed women picking
newly 'grown' spaghetti off 'spaghetti trees'. I still buckle up in laughter
everytime I see that broadcast. It was one of the all time great April fool
spoofs.

As to the Sans Seriffe article - bloody brilliant. I haven't laughed as much
in ages. A classic.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: New policy on edit conficts (User:Grin)

body:
Poor, Edmund W a ?crit:
> I endorse Martin's policy wholeheartedly.
>
> In this kind of on-line community, 'authority' means nothing more or less than "how many people will go along with what you recommend". Well, I'm ready and willing to go along with whatever Martin Harper recommends.
>
> (I also listen to Anth?re and Maveric - following their recommendations in nearly all cases - or at least not going AGAINST them without a lengthy period of reflection. I'm still thinking about Mav's advice about science controversies, and haven't edited those articles in nearly a week).
>
> I have not read the rewritten [[wikipedia:edit conflicts]] meta-article yet, but I'm so confident about Martin's good sense that I'm approving it in advance.  Whatever weight my words carry, they carry (Hi, Lir!).
>
> Ed Poor, aka 'Uncle Ed'

Hum...thanks Ed :-)
Joli couple.
You have taught me a lot, you know ?

-----

PS : look Grin, I made it :-)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] non-English Wikipedias

body:
Delirium wrote:
>So I guess my question is: do people think it is likely that
>Wikipedias in languages that are spoken almost exclusively
>by people of one particular national background can ever
>hope to achieve anything even remotely resembling the
>NPOV on the Wikipedias in languages that are spoken by a
>wide range of people?  Is having contributors from a wide
>range of backgrounds a necessary prerequisite for NPOV
>(as I suggest)?

Very interesting insight! But since you touch on philosophical issues, I
recommend you copy your post and put in on meta (otherwise this thread will
get lost in the mailing list archives).

I'll respond there.

--- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Nils Kehrein

subject: [Wikitech-l] Special:Newpages broken?

body:
Hi,

i tried to have a look at the newly created articles on de:, but Special:Newpages
shows only articles from the last ~3 days. But i remember that it used to
show new articles from the past week. Do i missed an announcement, has
anything changed in the software or is it a random feature?

Regards,
Nils.


subject: Search engine. Was: [Wikitech-l] Fast

body:
On Dec 4, 2003, at 01:47, Andrew Alder wrote:
> But the probability that Google indexes a particular version is
> roughly proportional to the time for which that version is the current
> version. Therefore, the version presented by Google is on average more
> stable than the "current" version. I tried to point this out, but I'm
> afraid I didn't do it very clearly.

When somebody clicks the link in the Google search results they see the
*current* version, not Google's crawl-time cached copy (unless they
happen to know what the Google cache is, how to use it, and prefer to
do so instead of clicking through to the page itself, which is sure to
be a vanishingly small proportion of visitors). The key words in the
search are likely to be in the title itself or general description, and
will probably be fairly stable across revisions.

Google is how people get _to_ Wikipedia and does a good job at it; as
an internal navigation mechanism it's wholly unsatisfactory for
contributors who need to be able to check the current state of things
in detail.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] non-English Wikipedias

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Delirium wrote:
> >So I guess my question is: do people think it is likely that
> >Wikipedias in languages that are spoken almost exclusively
> >by people of one particular national background can ever
> >hope to achieve anything even remotely resembling the
> >NPOV on the Wikipedias in languages that are spoken by a
> >wide range of people?  Is having contributors from a wide
> >range of backgrounds a necessary prerequisite for NPOV
> >(as I suggest)?
>
> Very interesting insight! But since you touch on philosophical issues, I
> recommend you copy your post and put in on meta (otherwise this thread
will
> get lost in the mailing list archives).
>
> I'll respond there.

Good call, mav. And yes, good insight, Delirium... though I think most, if
not all, languages will work themselves out in time, some of the smallest
ones, spoken by a few people passionate about identity, will take the
longest.

-- Jake


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Articles and speeches about Wikipedia?

in_reply_to:
<8z5fYlFxpVB@erik_moeller> (Erik Moeller's message of "02 Dec
	2003 21:47:00 +0100")

body:
erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller) writes:

> At the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart I did a direct comparison with
> Britannica on some key subjects, and Wikipedia clearly came out on top in
> many areas.

Maybe that's valid for the english version.  Concerning the German
version we are facing many a lot gaps and semi-info.

> If you're going to do a comprehensive paper, that's the direction I
> would pursue.

Please talk about the problematic areas, too.  Often (I'm talking about
the German version) articles are just listings and another problem is,
that many a lot home land lovers (Heimatliebhaber) are active - thus
most of the time you will read only good things within their articles
and worse, they don'e hesitate to manipulate history.

Articles like "B?hmen" are always in danger.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


from_name: Andrew Alder

subject: [Wikitech-l] Fast

body:
Is this even a good idea? I know everyone has assumed we will, but the
current use of Google has its advantages too (see the Village Pump).

Or has this been fully discussed here already, long ago?

Andrew Alder
aka user:andrewa

At 07:10 AM 3/12/03 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:

>mmm, yummy.  When will we get up the nerve to turn full-text searching
>back on?
>
>--Jimbo
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>---
>Incoming mail is certified Virus Free.
>Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
>Version: 6.0.532 / Virus Database: 326 - Release Date: 27/10/03

****
andrewa @ alder . ws
http://www.zeta.org.au/~andrewa
Phone 9441 4476
Mobile 04 2525 4476
****

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from_name: Peter Bartlett

subject: Search engine. Was: [Wikitech-l] Fast

body:
 > . The not being realtime may be a plus or minus, this is the very
thing we tossed around a little in the Pump.
 > Certainly for Wikipedia contributors, realtime is best. But perhaps
not so for readers, who are after stable content.

As was pointed out on the pump, there is no reason to suppose that the
pedia was any more "stable" when Google took its snapshot than it is at
any other time..

****

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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] non-English Wikipedias

body:
Delirium-
> to what extent can the non-English Wikipedias be
> expected to reach the same levels of NPOV as the English one?

Two conditions:

1) The project must draw from a reasonably large pool of contributors - no
country is homogenous, so you will inevitably find people who hold views
different from the mainstream, especially in countries with Internet
access (a requirement for working on Wikipedia in the first place).

2) NPOV and Wikiquette must be enforced. If it's possible to push a point
of view through simply through persistence and repeated reverting, as is
currently the case on the English Wikipedia, then on average, the majority
view will prevail.

2) means that every Wikipedia will need mediation and arbitration
procedures that are easy to understand, unbiased and effective. NPOV is
truly the greatest challenge of all for Wikipedia, no matter in which
language.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] non-English Wikipedias

references:
<8z5fYlFxpVB@erik_moeller>
	<shsmk1jg0n.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>	<3FCECBB7.3000000@rufus.d2g.com>
	<46206.160.53.250.101.1070538006.squirrel@ssl.ouvaton.coop>

body:
Yann Forget wrote:

>Hi,
>
>>Karl Eichwalder wrote:
>>
>>This sort of tangentially raises an issue that's been in the back of my
>>mind for a while: to what extent can the non-English Wikipedias be
>>expected to reach the same levels of NPOV as the English one?
>>
>Excuse me. I can't agree with that.
>
>Your argumentation assumes that because the contributors of the  English
>WP come from "all over the world", it is more NPOV. On my POV, the English
>is not more NPOV than others (at least the French one which I know),
>because the fact is that there are very few contributors from Arab,
>African and Asian coutries. In fact, most of the contributors come from
>rich countries and very few from Third World countries.
>
>But that also true for other WP. And that OK as long as you don't pretend
>that it is perfectly NPOV. It is NPOV for English contributors from rich
>countries. Not exactly the same. ;o)
>
NPOV is an ideal that we hopefully all strive for.  Hopefully each edit
gets us closer to it.  What Yann says about the French WP is just as
true about English.  What participation have we had from Ghana, or
Guyana, or Kiribati?  These are all officially English speaking countries.

Still, the NPOV issue needs to be sorted out and worked out separately
for each language.  Any attempt to impose it or enforce it may be a
violation of Star Trek's prime directive by the English speakers.  It's
as stupid as sending troops to another country to enforce democracy.
 The best way to ensure NPOV may be to model it, not just in what we
write but in how we respect what others write.  The second tool may be
by helping when asked to help, and almost only when asked to help.

Neutrality can be a moving target.  It changes as the community change.
 In a language WP with only one member it is perfectly achieved; adding
only one more member to it puts it completely out of balance, and new
accomodations must be found.  The issues that will be important to a
language group will also vary with time.  For a young community
formatting, disambiguating, and getting the software to work with the
language may be the most important issue.  If at the same time all
members of that community share the same POV about abortion (whether for
or against) it is as neutral as you can expect under the circumstances.

Ec


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] We need 10000 to 20000 USD per year?

body:
Fantasy wrote:
> I was just having a look on the wikimedia donation page, and found out,
> that we need 10000 to 20000 USD per year... (posted on 6.Oct.03 by
> Eloquence:
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikimedia_Fundraising_page&oldid=18443
> )

That number didn't come from me, as far as I know.  It sounds vaguely familiar,
though...

I'll answer your questions as best I can, but I should also add that I
think the question is backwards to some extent.  The question is not
"how much money do we need?"  The question is "what do we want to do,
and how can we get the funds to do it?"

As we move towards 1.0 and explore the idea of going to print/cd/etc.,
there will likely be some *investment* needed, but that investment
will (one hopes) be fully returned.  Whether that investment takes
place inside the Wikimedia Foundation vehicle, or separately, is
something we can decide.

Let me be specific.  I'd like to distribute cheaply-printed paperback
copies of Wikipedia to every school in every country in Africa, in
English or French as the local circumstances dictate.  (I'd prefer
native tongues, of course, but en and fr are more likely to be ready
and useful soon.)

When the time comes, I'd like to put together a budget for that
concept, and then go get funding for it, either from the general
public, or from someone like Oprah Winfrey who has taken an interest
in major projects of that kind.  (Or possibly even governments,
although as I have said, I have some real qualms about us using tax
money.)

Do you see what I'm saying?  There a difference between "what we
need", which isn't very much, and "what Jimbo's grandiose goals will
eventually require."

> Would be interresting to know, how much we will (probably) spend in 2004 on:
> - bandwith

I anticipate that Wikipedia will spend $0 on bandwidth in 2004.  I'll
continue to cover that for the foreseeable future.  Traffic tripling
should not be a problem for me, but if we get into 10x our current
traffic levels, I'll start whining a bit.

(This is all making certain assumptions about bandwidth consumption,
pricing, my financial situation otherwise, and what-not.  This is not a promise,
just a forecast!)

> - HW

This depends, too, on the growth, and also on how strong the big
machine really turns out to be.

The next thing we're going to buy is a "normal" server to act as a
load balancer, I think.  That's going to be very helpful in terms of
getting us to our planned scalable system.

After that, I think a mail server would be a good investment.

And both of those assume that we won't first need a third webserver frontend.

> - People (server admin - is this a real plan, or just an idea?)

I anticipate that Wikipedia *needs* to spend $0 on people in 2004.
Again, although Jason is a paid employee, he works for Bomis, and
Bomis will absorb his costs as usual.

There is an idea that we could *benefit* from paying for some server
admin costs, and I think that's right.

> - Domain registrations

Probably no more than $1,000.

There will likely be some expenses associated with setting up a European
foundation, although we have a pro bono French attorney sort of lined up.
There will be some bank fees.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Server-side File Caching Using a 404 Handler

body:
Just a couple thoughts...

On Dec 4, 2003, at 10:21, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> * On saving an edit of a page, the software simply *deletes* the
>   cached HTML file. This will trigger the 404 handler on the next hit
>   for the page, which will regenerate the cached file.

This limits us to a single web server per wiki or a networked
filesystem shared between them.

> * Of course, logged-in users want to get their pages rendered
>   _just_so_, with question marks and [edit] links, etc. They should
>   also have all their "My page" and other links working.

We have talk pages and notification for IP addresses, too.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Alphabetical list of entries

body:
On Dec 4, 2003, at 09:53, Richards,Michael wrote:
> There is already an alphabetical list of articles available in
> Wikipedia: it is "All pages by title" on Special Pages or
> Special:Allpages. It has been temporarily disabled but there is always
> a saved copy available.

Two things: Special:Allpages shows only chunks of 480 titles at a time,
which are always current, or a list of available chunks (which may not
be).

Currently the alphabetical order is _not_ correct for any non-English
letters that may pop up. The sort ends up being by Unicode code point,
which is wrong for pretty much any language.

> Brion mentioned on November 21 the miser mode override facility that
> would supposedly let people update the saved copy easily by adding
> &magic=yes to the end of the URL.
> e.g.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allpages&magic=yes

No. No, that's not the correct link.

Read that previous message again.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Richards,Michael wrote:

>
>There is already an alphabetical list of articles available in Wikipedia: it is "All pages by title" on Special Pages or Special:Allpages. It has been temporarily disabled but there is always a saved copy available.
>
>It won't really help you with searching, only with browsing. And even then, considering there are at least 170,000 articles, you will have to browse for a really long time. :-)
>
It's pretty useful for maintenance - different spellings of the same
subject are adjacent,
articles with a common prefix are together, out-of-place articles jump
out at you, etc.
It's also handy as an overview of coverage; there are a lot of good
articles that are
effectively invisible because they're only linked to from one or two
obscure places.

It would be cool to have an additional list that includes redirs colored
differently.

Stan


subject: [Wikipedia-l] non-English Wikipedias

body:
Yann Forget wrote:

>Your argumentation assumes that because the contributors of the  English
>WP come from "all over the world", it is more NPOV. On my POV, the English
>is not more NPOV than others (at least the French one which I know),
>because the fact is that there are very few contributors from Arab,
>African and Asian coutries. In fact, most of the contributors come from
>rich countries and very few from Third World countries.
>
>But that also true for other WP. And that OK as long as you don't pretend
>that it is perfectly NPOV. It is NPOV for English contributors from rich
>countries. Not exactly the same. ;o)
>
>
I don't think that's accurate: there are a *lot* of contributors to the
English Wikipedia who are not from English-speaking countries, and many
of them don't even speak English very well at all (which is fine--as
long as their information is good, others can correct their phrasing and
grammar).  There are in fact *many* contributors from Asian countries on
the English Wikipedia, something which I think cannot be said for, say,
the French or German or Spanish Wikipedias.  Many of our articles on
Hong Kong and Japan, in particular, are written by people who live in
Hong Kong and Japan.  Our articles on India are often contributed to by
people from India.  And so on.

This is what I think is a primary strength of the English Wikipedia:
people from the countries we're writing about are actually here to
participate.  Do we have any idea number in all areas?  No.  But do we
at least have some, and certainly orders of magnitude more than any
other language's Wikipedia?  Yes.

To get decently towards NPOV, I think a Wikipedia needs contributors
from as many countries and backgrounds as possible.  To my knowledge,
the English Wikipedia has contributors from:
the United States, the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark,
Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Romania,
Greece, Italy, Russia, the Ukraine, Spain, Mexico, Israel, Brazil,
Australia, India, China (incl. Hong Kong), Japan, South Korea, Ireland,
Nepal, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Portugal, and likely a lot of
others I've forgotten to list.

I'm skeptical that any other Wikipedias come even close to this, and I'm
also skeptical that many of them ever will: what are the chances that
people from each of the above countries will ever participate in, say,
the Hindi Wikipedia?

My point, more succinctly: to have any chance at all at NPOV, an
encyclopedia needs to be an international project, and so must be
written in a language spoken by many people internationally.  English so
far appears to be the best-off in that regard, though I'm not saying
it's necessarily the only possibility (French, Spanish, and German seem
like good candidates as well).  But I'm skeptical that, say, 300
Wikipedias is a good idea, or likely to lead to anything other than 5-7
good ones, and a hundred incredibly biased ones.

-Mark


subject: [Wikipedia-l] non-English Wikipedias

references:
<8z5fYlFxpVB@erik_moeller> <shsmk1jg0n.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<3FCECBB7.3000000@rufus.d2g.com>

body:
Delirium wrote:
> What are the chances, for example, that the Greek Wikipedia
> (assuming it ever gets off the ground) will have a history of the
> Greek-Turkish (or Greek-FYROM) conflict with NPOV standards similar
> to the descriptions of those conflicts in the English Wikipedia?

I don't really know anything about the Greeks, but I would imagine
that the difficulty of approaching NPOV is inversely related to the
diversity of the population, as you surmise.

It is true that English is spoken by people from many countries, but
it is also true that even within the United States, there is
remarkable diversity of opinion.  I would imagine that Germany has a
similarly wide diversity of opinion, even within Germany itself.

Japan might be a good example, in that (it if often said) Japanese
culture is more homogenous than that of most other "large" countries.

> So I guess my question is: do people think it is likely that Wikipedias
> in languages that are spoken almost exclusively by people of one
> particular national background can ever hope to achieve anything even
> remotely resembling the NPOV on the Wikipedias in languages that are
> spoken by a wide range of people?  Is having contributors from a wide
> range of backgrounds a necessary prerequisite for NPOV (as I suggest)?

I think you're certainly onto something here, but I'd also say that if
the "people of one particular national background" have significant
internal diversity, that's enough.

I mean, I think that the United States has plenty of people ready to
be sharply critical of the U.S. government, even though they live
here.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki on Power Mac?

body:
I've just made "the switch" to a Power Mac G5, which is of course Unix
"underneath".  I'm interested in trying to get wikipedia running
locally on this machine, for my own study.

How hard will that be?  Has anyone tried it, or, barring that, does
anyone have experience with OS X (10.3)?

--Jimbo


subject: Search engine. Was: [Wikitech-l] Fast

body:
G'day Jimmy and the Group
(and Ray and Brion whose posts crossed this one)

At 11:55 AM 3/12/03 -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I wrote:
> >>mmm, yummy.  When will we get up the nerve to turn full-text searching
> >>back on?
>
>Andrew Alder wrote:
> > Is this even a good idea? I know everyone has assumed we will, but the
> > current use of Google has its advantages too (see the Village Pump).
> >
> > Or has this been fully discussed here already, long ago?
>
>As for me, I always just assumed it.  There are some big drawbacks to
>google, namely that it isn't realtime, which makes doing certain kinds
>of study difficult.  Also, Michael Hardy has reported to me that one
>page he used to find in Google can no longer be found in Google, due
>presumably to the vagaries of Google indexing.

Hmmmm. The not being realtime may be a plus or minus, this is the very
thing we tossed around a little in the Pump.

Certainly for Wikipedia contributors, realtime is best. But perhaps not so
for readers, who are after stable content.

And there may be another advantage in using Google. AFAIK Google doesn't
publish their ranking algorithms, or even say if they change, so as to
impede attempts to rig the rankings. But, from time to time they may well
take notice if a number of different IPs using their search engine through
Wikipedia. This isn't rigging the rankings, on the contrary, it's providing
Google with accurate and relevant information, which they may use. It can't
do our rankings any harm!

Food for thought? I'm not at all opposed to having an in-house search
engine, I just thought it might be good to consider the pros, cons, and
alternatives.

I've had no trouble using Google, in fact I've had a couple of instances
where "go to" didn't find an article I knew was there, but Google did! I'm
afraid I haven't documented these, they were no big hassle and may have
been capitalisation or the like.

Andrew A

****
andrewa @ alder . ws
http://www.zeta.org.au/~andrewa
Phone 9441 4476
Mobile 04 2525 4476
****

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikitech-l google

body:
> Google is how people get _to_ Wikipedia and does a
> good job at it; as
> an internal navigation mechanism it's wholly
> unsatisfactory for
> contributors who need to be able to check the
> current state of things
> in detail.

secunded wholeheartedly
sometimes it takes many days for google to index a
page. If you look for it, and do not exactly remember
the title, you are doomed.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now
http://companion.yahoo.com/


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikiquette committee appointments

body:
Everyone who volunteered was appointed to something, and two who
didn't volunteer I appointed anyway.  (Obviously, they can decline if
they must.)

I selected primarily based on your own stated preferences, although in
a couple of cases, I moved people who said "prefer this, but would do
either" to the other side, mostly just to balance out the numbers.

Mediators -- people who are volunteering to get involved in mediating
user disputes, but without any actual power to vote for or recommend a
ban or any other punitive action

Angela
LDan
Geoff
DanteAlighieri
VancouverGuy
sannse
Ed Poor
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Stevertigo

I envision this group being fairly fluid, with new volunteers
appearing, and existing volunteers retiring, as personal preferences
dictate.

Arbitration -- people who are volunteering to get involved in
arbitrating user disputes, with the results of the arbitration being
formally binding in the sense that it is at least possible for the
arbitration committee to vote to ban someone or take some lesser
action to enforce their decision

C - Gutza
C - MyRedDice
C - NoHat
C - Epopt
B - Fred Bauder
B - Delirium
B - Maveric149
B - Camembert
A - Jdforrester
A - Kat/UninvitedCompany
A - Cunctator*
A - Erik Moeller*

These last two are marked with a '*' to indicate that I'm drafting
them, if they don't refuse.

The letters indicate groups up for re-election in the future.  I'm
thinking that these posts are to be held for 3 year terms, with group
A up for re-election next December, group B, the following year, group
C, the following year.  (People were partitioned in this way randomly,
with the exception of Cunc and Erik, who I placed in the shortest
group because they didn't even volunteer in the first place!)

Terms begin January 1, which means we have the rest of this month to
argue about what the hell all this means.  :-)

---------

Both committees should meet via email -- we should set up public
mailing lists, I think -- to work on procedures and policies.  We'll
have to write this up cognizant of the difficulty of obtaining a
quorum at times, etc.

In any event, I'm holding as a 'reserved power' the right to pardon
anyone who is banned by the arbitration committee, in the unlikely
event that the process seems to be going astray.

Also, just to be really clear on this, I'm also holding as a reserved
power to "disband parliament" if problems appear to be made worse
overall by this change.  We can always go back to our current
'benevolent dictator' model, if it works out better.  (But it's really
exhausting for me to try to figure out that someone needs to be
banned.)

In the future, if this is working well, and if elections are producing
good results, then I'm certainly willing to make stronger promises
about not just overturning the whole thing.  I'm just very cautious
about the whole concept right now, and think we should try it and
learn from it before we imagine that it's "the way things are".

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Double checking

body:
If I overlooked anyone in my appointments, don't be insulted and don't
hesitate to ask about it.  It was unintentional.  I tried to appoint
everyone who volunteered.  Anyone who is left over and would still
like to be appointed will be appointed to mediation.

Oh, there's one exception.  Alex R. volunteered, but what he wrote made
it sound more like he's volunteered to act as a "public defender" for
anyone who is facing the arbitration committee's judgment (i.e. a
possible ban).  So I took that to mean that he's volunteering to be
part of the overall process, but that role is actually different from
either mediation or arbitration, and so of course if he wants to offer
to anyone who needs it, that's great.

--Jimbo


body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> Why can't we provide some sort of stipend for Brion Vibber? If my
> occasional glances at the Wikitech mailing list are any indication, it
> seems like he's doing at least as much work as Larry ever did.
>
> Can you hire him for Wikimedia, and let him do extra work for Bomis --
> or should it be the other way around?

Does he need a job?  I have to confess that I have no idea what he
does, even.  :-(

But, yeah, I'm all for it.  The funny thing is, though, that people
will gladly volunteer to do stuff that we couldn't begin to afford to
pay them to do.  I can't imagine what Brion must charge for his day
job, I hope it's a lot more than the Wikimedia Foundation can afford
to pay.  :-)

--Jimbo


body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> > From: The Cunctator Thursday, December 04, 2003 3:25 PM
> >
> > > From: Jimmy Wales
> > > Arbitration -- people who are volunteering to get involved in
> > > arbitrating user disputes, with the results of the arbitration being
> > > formally binding in the sense that it is at least possible for the
> > > arbitration committee to vote to ban someone or take some lesser
> > > action to enforce their decision
> <snip>
> > Sounds fine to me.
>
> I should amend, of course, except that I'm more than a bit skeeved out
> by the whole development of institutionalized hierarchies.

And so all the more reason, from my point of view, for me to want you
to be part of the process, to help ensure that it is as unhierarchical
as possible.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] contributions of User:Mr-Natural-Health

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> >This person needs a stern talking to.
> >From his user page:
> >under "modified pages"
> >"Alternative medicine - I cleaned up this article. I removed the anti-bias
> >and made it pro-alternative medicine."
> >
> >under "Interests"
> >"To get important natural health related information and definitions in an
> >Internet accessible encyclopedia / dictionary."
> >
> >It is clear that /his/her/its purpose is to inject their POV and remove
> >that of others.
> >
> So he's trying to put his own spin on things.  How is that so different
> from what most Wikipedians are trying to accomplish?  Announcing areas
> of interest is pretty normal.

But doesn't that first one go pretty far beyond announcing an area of
interest?  We don't want articles to be "pro-alternative medicine" or
"anti-alternative medicine".

Certainly, if he came across an anti-biased article, and made it more
neutral, that's wonderful, not a problem at all.  But if his intention is
to make it pro-, hmmm, not really right, eh?

The second one, I agree, is a perfectly valid goal.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] FDL used to stifle distribution of articles

body:
delirium at rufus.d2g.com wrote:
> Well, I think the plain language of the FDL is that Ulrich is correct.  It
> doesn't say you can point to a list of the authors elsewhere: it says that
> *you* have to list the authors, and on the title page, no less

But, where is the 'title page'?  My interpretation is that a link to a
page containing the title of the article and the history of
contributions *is* the "title page" in the sense of the GNU FDL.

> (not in a list at the end of the document, for example, and
> *certainly* not with only a link at the end of a document to a list
> elsewhere).

Why can't the end of the article have a link at the end saying, for
example "click here to see the 'title page' for this article"?

> Now whether Wikipedia would like to use the FDL is another matter.  But we
> currently do, and changing our license seems pretty impossible at this
> point.

That much is true.  We've discussed before making some kind of
licensing change, but it's really a lot of trouble, particularly when
*I* think that most of the alleged violations (such as the one you're
talking about here) are not actually violations at all.

--Jimbo


body:
Ulrich Fuchs wrote:
> That site actually reserves the right to distribute the material in any form,
> including for example on paper, smartphones or on PDAs (since the site is
> down I'm citing that from google cache).  That makes a weblink to Wikipedia
> practically useless. In addion, Flexikon states "so dass Sie keine Inhalte
> einstellen d?rfen, wenn Sie sp?ter eigene Rechte geltend machen wollen" (You
> may not upload content, if you want to claim rights on the text later).
> That's not true, putting a text under GNU FDL does not mean, *losing* ones
> rights on the text.  What makes me especially angry is DocCheck/Flexikon
> putting a "(c) 2002 by DocCheck Medical Services GmbH" under each article
> page, and refering to the GNU FDL just on one general "usage" page. It all
> looks like a de facto re-closing of open content.

I would agree with you, given the totality of these facts.  But in the
past, we have had very good success with just writing a kind letter
asking people to do the right thing.

> I agree with everyone thinking the GNU FDL is completely unsuitable for
> Wikipedia. We act against this license a hundred times a day moving content
> from one article to another, translating from english to german and just
> stating there "aus en:".

I'm not convinced that any of that amounts to even a technical
violation of the license, properly interpreted.

> It's a fact that the license is at it is. We should have choosen a better one
> in the first place, but now we have the GNU FDL and it's likely that we have
> to live with her. The only way for having any changes would be a nother
> version of the license released by the GNU Foundation.

I believe this to be a possibility.  Richard Stallman has indicated to
me that he would look favorably on a "lesser FDL", similar to the
"LGPL" or "Lesser GPL", if it is free and serves people's needs
better.  It's really just a matter of us doing the hard work to design
that license and campaign for it to be adopted.

> But the license does not allow for hijacking of the material: If one is going
> to use the material in a commercial context, we should insist on our rights
> to keep the content free, to have any derived work free again and to have
> mentioned our effort in developing that content.

Yes, I agree with you.

Have you heard back from the offending site?  What's their story?

--Jimbo


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikipedia-l] non-English Wikipedias

body:
Hi,

> Karl Eichwalder wrote:

> This sort of tangentially raises an issue that's been in the back of my
> mind for a while: to what extent can the non-English Wikipedias be
> expected to reach the same levels of NPOV as the English one?  For a few

Excuse me. I can't agree with that.

Your argumentation assumes that because the contributors of the  English
WP come from "all over the world", it is more NPOV. On my POV, the English
is not more NPOV than others (at least the French one which I know),
because the fact is that there are very few contributors from Arab,
African and Asian coutries. In fact, most of the contributors come from
rich countries and very few from Third World countries.

But that also true for other WP. And that OK as long as you don't pretend
that it is perfectly NPOV. It is NPOV for English contributors from rich
countries. Not exactly the same. ;o)

Regards,
Yann

--
http://non-violence.org Site coop?ratif sur la non-violence
http://forget-me.net Alternatives et non-violence
http://fr.wikipedia.org Encyclop?die libre
http://forget-me.net/pro/ Formations et services Linux


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Double checking

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> If I overlooked anyone in my appointments, don't be insulted and don't
> hesitate to ask about it.  It was unintentional.  I tried to appoint
> everyone who volunteered.  Anyone who is left over and would still
> like to be appointed will be appointed to mediation.

I volunteer but have not been appointed.  Is there something we need to
talk about?

the Epopt, aka

--
  Sean Barrett     | Hostes alienigeni me abdxerunt.
  sean at epoptic.com | Qui annus est?


from_name: Richards,Michael

body:
> Would it be possible to automatically create an alphabetical list of wikipedia entries/articles?
> This is available in many electronic encyclopedia and would make searching easier.

> Cheers,

> Jurriaan

There is already an alphabetical list of articles available in Wikipedia: it is "All pages by title" on Special Pages or Special:Allpages. It has been temporarily disabled but there is always a saved copy available.

It won't really help you with searching, only with browsing. And even then, considering there are at least 170,000 articles, you will have to browse for a really long time. :-)

The current saved copy is rather old (13 May 2003) - could someone please update it.

Brion mentioned on November 21 the miser mode override facility that would supposedly let people update the saved copy easily by adding &magic=yes to the end of the URL.
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allpages <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allpages&magic=yes> &magic=yes
However this currently returns "You have requested a special page that is not recognized by the wiki."
Is this the correct syntax? If so, does anyone know why it doesn't work? Not so much for Allpages but for some of the other special pages it would be useful to have updates every week or three.

Michael (Nanobug)
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body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>>C - Epopt

Oops, disregard previous.

--
  Sean Barrett     | Hostes alienigeni me abdxerunt.
  sean at epoptic.com | Qui annus est?


subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki on Power Mac?

body:
On Dec 4, 2003, at 11:24, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> I've just made "the switch" to a Power Mac G5, which is of course Unix
> "underneath".  I'm interested in trying to get wikipedia running
> locally on this machine, for my own study.
>
> How hard will that be?  Has anyone tried it, or, barring that, does
> anyone have experience with OS X (10.3)?

I run a test copy on my PowerBook (thanks to the support of Wikipedians
like you!)

I threw together some partial install tips:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_MediaWiki_on_Mac_OS_X

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

body:
We have a good server-side file caching system already. I'm proposing
another one.

It's almost always true with Web servers in general and Apache in
particular that serving static files from the file system is going to
be much, much faster -- usually an order of magnitude faster -- than
doing any dynamic processing. In other words, any PHP page is going to
be significantly slower than a plain HTML page.

For this reason, I'm proposing using a directory in a MediaWiki
installation as a static file cache. Here's how it would work:

* There's a Web directory where static pages go -- say, "/var/www/wiki".

* URLs for articles point to that directory: the link for
  "Foo Bar" renders to "/wiki/Foo_Bar".

* Initially, an HTTP hit for "/wiki/Foo_Bar" will fail -- no page
  there.

* Apache has a directive -- ErrorDocument -- for mapping a script to
  handle missing files (among other errors). We map a script --
  /w/404Handler.phtml or something -- to handle these errors for the
  "/wiki/" directory.

  <Directory /var/www/wiki/>
    ErrorDocument 404 /w/404Handler.phtml
  </Directory>

* The 404 handler tries to retrieve the article from the database. If
  the article doesn't exist, it shows an edit form for the article,
  just like a broken link works now. If the article is Special:, it
  lets wiki.phtml do the work.

* If the article _does_ exist, the handler renders the page *to a file
  in the cache directory*, e.g. "/wiki/Foo_Bar.html". It then opens
  the file and serves it to the current user, too. (There are probably
  some other ways to optimize this, but the best I can see is that
  they would require two hits to the server, which is wasteful. It's
  easier and cheaper just to read the file that was written.)

  (Of course, it returns an HTTP 200 response on success.)

* For the next hit to come in for "/wiki/Foo_Bar", the Web server will
  find the file there (MultiViews will find the ".html" version -- a
  future 404 handler might also write out ".xml" or other document
  file formats), and thus serve it directly, without running any PHP
  code.

* On saving an edit of a page, the software simply *deletes* the
  cached HTML file. This will trigger the 404 handler on the next hit
  for the page, which will regenerate the cached file.

  Similar cache invalidation would be necessary for moving or deleting
  a page.

* If an edit would change the appearance of links to a page (say,
  making a new article (broken link to good link), or deleting an
  article (good link to broken link), or crossing the default stub
  boundary (if it exists)), saving a page would also delete the cached
  versions of any pages that link to the changed page. These, also,
  will be regenerated by the 404 handler on the next hit (with the new
  link appearance).

* A garbage-collection cron job runs every N minutes to keep the size
  of the cache to a reasonable level (# bytes, # files). It deletes
  the least recently used pages, by filesystem access time.

  (There's a possible race condition where a huge influx of activity
  could overflow the cache between garbage collection runs. If the
  installation is susceptible to this -- say, it has hard disk space
  limits -- garbage collection could happen in the 404 handler rather
  than in a cron job. This would obviously slow display of pages,
  though.)

* Of course, logged-in users want to get their pages rendered
  _just_so_, with question marks and [edit] links, etc. They should
  also have all their "My page" and other links working.

  It may be possible to do most of this with JavaScript -- checking
  the UserId cookie, and showing and hiding parts based on that. Then
  the same .html file can be served to logged-in and not-logged-in
  users, with the client side doing the customization.

  But probably the easiest way is just to run the dynamic pages every
  time for logged in users. We can use the Apache rewrite engine to
  serve different stuff, based on whether you're logged in or not. We
  use a RewriteCond line to check if the UserId cookie exists:

  RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} ^.*UserId=.*$
  RewriteRule ^/wiki/(.*)$ /wiki.phtml?title=${ampescape:$1} [L]

  This kinda depends on having a significant number of users
  not-logged-in. If 100% of users are logged in, we get no benefits,
  and a slight cost from Rewrite-checking the cookie on every hit.

* A more aggressive version could try to cache some of the other
  features of MediaWiki, like user contributions, page histories,
  etc., with the same strategy.

Some advantages with this design:

* Reduce the amount of dynamic page servicing

* Apache handles all the tweaky optimizations like compression,
  content negotiation, client-side caching, etc. It simplifies the
  MediaWiki code.

Some disadvantages I see with this design:

* There'd probably be some problems with funky characters -- spaces,
  punctuation, etc. "/wiki/Foo Bar" and "/wiki/Foo_Bar" should
  probably (usually) map to the same file. Some work needed here.

* You lose view counting. However, a periodic Web server log checker
  could provide the same functionality -- reading the Web log,
  updating the database with new view counts.

* Directory entries. Having a few thousand files in a single directory
  could get kinda losey for some file systems. There may be some
  rewrite tricks that could allow writing multiple sub-directories,
  like we do with images in the /upload dir right now, but having them
  appear as being in the /wiki directory.

* Redirect articles are tricky.

Anyways, I've been thinking about this for a while, thought I'd throw
it out here to get responses. I'll probably rewrite this and put it on
meta soon.

~ESP

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


body:
>> Brion mentioned on November 21 the miser mode override facility that
>> would supposedly let people update the saved copy easily by adding
>> &magic=yes to the end of the URL.
>> e.g.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allpages&magic=yes

>No. No, that's not the correct link.

>Read that previous message again.

Oops - try http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Allpages&magic=yes

instead of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allpages

i.e. insert "/w", prefix article title with "wiki.phtml?title=" and suffix with "&magic=yes"

Sorry about that.

Michael


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: Search engine. Was: [Wikitech-l] Fast

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Dec 4, 2003, at 01:47, Andrew Alder wrote:
>
>> But the probability that Google indexes a particular version is
>> roughly proportional to the time for which that version is the
>> current version. Therefore, the version presented by Google is on
>> average more stable than the "current" version. I tried to point this
>> out, but I'm afraid I didn't do it very clearly.
>
>
> When somebody clicks the link in the Google search results they see
> the *current* version, not Google's crawl-time cached copy (unless
> they happen to know what the Google cache is, how to use it, and
> prefer to do so instead of clicking through to the page itself, which
> is sure to be a vanishingly small proportion of visitors). The key
> words in the search are likely to be in the title itself or general
> description, and will probably be fairly stable across revisions.
>
> Google is how people get _to_ Wikipedia and does a good job at it; as
> an internal navigation mechanism it's wholly unsatisfactory for
> contributors who need to be able to check the current state of things
> in detail.
>
Why not offer all:
Search box - search button - radio button "Go" (preselected) - radio
button "fulltext" - radio button "Google"

Magnus


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
Jimbo,

Why can't we provide some sort of stipend for Brion Vibber? If my
occasional glances at the Wikitech mailing list are any indication, it
seems like he's doing at least as much work as Larry ever did.

Can you hire him for Wikimedia, and let him do extra work for Bomis --
or should it be the other way around?

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Additional CSS for new table markup

body:
IMHO we should use CSS classes in the new table markup, where
appropriate (e.g., chemical elements), to simplify markup. These would
go into the existing CSS file, or maybe a new one just for table markup.

Suggestions? Examples? Counter-arguments?

Magnus


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki on Power Mac?

body:
> From: Jimmy Wales
>
> I've just made "the switch" to a Power Mac G5, which is of course Unix
> "underneath".  I'm interested in trying to get wikipedia running
> locally on this machine, for my own study.
>
> How hard will that be?  Has anyone tried it, or, barring that, does
> anyone have experience with OS X (10.3)?
>
I'm an OS X user; it shouldn't be too hard. Your life would be easier
with OS X Server, since that provides nice widgets to configure Apache
and the such. But none of that is needed; Apache is already installed,
and MySQL and PHP run happily on OS X. I haven't bothered trying to set
up MediaWiki (what can I say? I dislike PHP) but it shouldn't be much of
a hassle.

Also, 10.3.1 is pretty nicely up-to-date with its installed *nix
components/compilers etc. so life whould be pretty comfortable.

One of these days I'm going to rewrite MediaWiki to get back to Perl, I
swear.

:)


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] non-English Wikipedias

references:
<8z5fYlFxpVB@erik_moeller>
	<shsmk1jg0n.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>	<3FCECBB7.3000000@rufus.d2g.com>
	<20031204205027.GA18937@tavaiah>

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 09:52:55PM -0800, Delirium wrote:
>[...]
>
>
>>So I guess my question is: do people think it is likely that Wikipedias
>>in languages that are spoken almost exclusively by people of one
>>particular national background can ever hope to achieve anything even
>>remotely resembling the NPOV on the Wikipedias in languages that are
>>spoken by a wide range of people?  Is having contributors from a wide
>>range of backgrounds a necessary prerequisite for NPOV (as I suggest)?
>>
>>
>
>But the English Wikipedia isn't NPOV at all !
>Especially on anything related to Middle East conflict, it almost
>invariantly has Israeli bias, probably because of relatively large number
>of American Jewish contributors, compared to hardly any Arab contributors.
>
>
That's quite possibly true; I wasn't arguing the English Wikipedia is
perfect on all topics, or anything remotely close to that.  I do think
though, that if any Wikipedia is going to succeed in creating something
approaching a NPOV description of the Middle East conflict, the English
Wikipedia has a *much* better chance of doing so than, say, either the
Hebrew or Arabic Wikipedias do.

-Mark


body:
> From: Jimmy Wales
> Arbitration -- people who are volunteering to get involved in
> arbitrating user disputes, with the results of the arbitration being
> formally binding in the sense that it is at least possible for the
> arbitration committee to vote to ban someone or take some lesser
> action to enforce their decision
>
> C - Gutza
> C - MyRedDice
> C - NoHat
> C - Epopt
> B - Fred Bauder
> B - Delirium
> B - Maveric149
> B - Camembert
> A - Jdforrester
> A - Kat/UninvitedCompany
> A - Cunctator*
> A - Erik Moeller*
>
> These last two are marked with a '*' to indicate that I'm drafting
> them, if they don't refuse.

Sounds fine to me.


from_name: Russell Jones

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Need developers

body:
How about subversion?  I don't know what the limitations on the import
process are. None, apparently.

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/html-chunk/apb.html

Russell

Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Nov 28, 2003, at 18:14, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> [suggests 'arch' for source control instead of cvs]
>
> Could we import our existing CVS repository with history, or would we
> have to break everything (again) at that point?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

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

    Me> * On saving an edit of a page, the software simply *deletes*
    Me> the cached HTML file. This will trigger the 404 handler on the
    Me> next hit for the page, which will regenerate the cached file.

    BV> This limits us to a single web server per wiki or a networked
    BV> filesystem shared between them.

Yeah, I think you're right. I'm not coming up with a better way to
invalidate caches across multiple servers -- except maybe some kind of
RPC, which would be real real losey.

    Me> * Of course, logged-in users want to get their pages rendered
    Me> _just_so_, with question marks and [edit] links, etc. They
    Me> should also have all their "My page" and other links working.

    BV> We have talk pages and notification for IP addresses, too.

Thanks! I thought about this, but forgot to put it in. I don't have a
clever idea for how to do notifications for non-logged-in users with
static files.

It's definitely a trade-off -- whether the performance advantage of
serving static files would outweigh the loss of functionality from
always generating dynamic pages.

~ESP

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


body:
> From: The Cunctator Thursday, December 04, 2003 3:25 PM
>
> > From: Jimmy Wales
> > Arbitration -- people who are volunteering to get involved in
> > arbitrating user disputes, with the results of the arbitration being
> > formally binding in the sense that it is at least possible for the
> > arbitration committee to vote to ban someone or take some lesser
> > action to enforce their decision
<snip>
> Sounds fine to me.

I should amend, of course, except that I'm more than a bit skeeved out
by the whole development of institutionalized hierarchies.


subject: Search engine. Was: [Wikitech-l] Fast

body:
Perhaps internal realtime searches should be available only to
registered members to keep load down?
Also, there may not be a contradiction between using Google and having
realtime updates.  Perhaps you could provide Google.com with information
directly by arrangement and inform them of changes?  I'd be surprised,
given the freedom their research people are reputed to have and the
number of 'beta' projects they've had if they are unable to do this.
Whether they're willing is another matter.

An XML service or similar would be useful to people running 'pedias
off-line and synching with the main server at intervals. Running
off-line would lower lag time for editing users and (back to the point)
allow searches of the local copy without hitting the server.

OTOH, updates could be irrelevant to the person running the off-line
copy and be wasting resources.  I need to think about this some more.
Index updates?  On demand checking (a local but internetworked copy)?
Hmmm...

Russell

>
> Google is how people get _to_ Wikipedia and does a good job at it; as
> an internal navigation mechanism it's wholly unsatisfactory for
> contributors who need to be able to check the current state of things
> in detail.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

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body:
> From: Jimmy Wales Thursday, December 04, 2003 3:28 PM
> delirium at rufus.d2g.com wrote:
> > Now whether Wikipedia would like to use the FDL is another matter.
But
> > we currently do, and changing our license seems pretty impossible at

> > this point.
>
> That much is true.  We've discussed before making some kind of
> licensing change, but it's really a lot of trouble, particularly when
> *I* think that most of the alleged violations (such as the one you're
> talking about here) are not actually violations at all.
>
Fortunately there *is* the possibility of an out, that being to convince
FSF to amend the GFDL usefully. (e.g. to allow people to use the equiv.
creative-commons license)

They're obviously skeptical of doing so, but as statistically the only
website to use the GFDL, our opinions and needs have validity.


from_name: Alex T.

subject: [WikiEN-l] Double checking

body:
 From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>
To: <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 2:54 PM
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Double checking

> If I overlooked anyone in my appointments, don't be insulted and don't
> hesitate to ask about it.  It was unintentional.  I tried to appoint
> everyone who volunteered.  Anyone who is left over and would still
> like to be appointed will be appointed to mediation.
>
> Oh, there's one exception.  Alex R. volunteered, but what he wrote made
> it sound more like he's volunteered to act as a "public defender" for
> anyone who is facing the arbitration committee's judgment (i.e. a
> possible ban).  So I took that to mean that he's volunteering to be
> part of the overall process, but that role is actually different from
> either mediation or arbitration, and so of course if he wants to offer
> to anyone who needs it, that's great.

That is right Jimmy and considering the other things I am doing around
here it looks more like I am a de facto member of the Wikimedia
legal affairs department, and it might get confusing if I put on too many
hats. If there is anyway I can help anyone faced with all this power
that building up and it is alright with you (and I guess the rest of the
board once they come on line) I'd rather just be in the wings willing
to help buffer someone who might have difficulty dealing with a
difficult situation (as long as it does not get me into an unwaivable
conflict of interest situation where I would have to withdraw from
helping Wikimedia and any member facing discipline of one or another
sort).

Alex R.


subject: Search engine. Was: [Wikitech-l] Fast

body:
On Dec 4, 2003, at 16:36, Andrew Alder wrote:
> Again, agree. I've now been through this both on the list and on the
> Pump. My comments relate to *readers*, not *contributors*.
>
> Contributors certainly need fully realtime tools, which means
> in-house. I said that before.

So why are we talking about this? Google isn't going to vanish from the
web because we get the internal search back online.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] NPOV again. [was Re: Non-English Wikipedias]

body:
> From: Tomasz Wegrzanowski
> Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 3:50 PM
> To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] non-English Wikipedias
>
> On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 09:52:55PM -0800, Delirium wrote:
> [...]
> > So I guess my question is: do people think it is likely that
Wikipedias
> > in languages that are spoken almost exclusively by people of one
> > particular national background can ever hope to achieve anything
even
> > remotely resembling the NPOV on the Wikipedias in languages that are
> > spoken by a wide range of people?  Is having contributors from a
wide
> > range of backgrounds a necessary prerequisite for NPOV (as I
suggest)?
>
> But the English Wikipedia isn't NPOV at all !
> Especially on anything related to Middle East conflict, it almost
> invariantly has Israeli bias, probably because of relatively large
number
> of American Jewish contributors, compared to hardly any Arab
contributors.

*Nothing* on Wikipedia is NPOV. It can't be. For one thing NPOV stands
for "Neutral point of view" and the sentence "Wikipedia is neutral point
of view" is nonsensical.

But I'll put that fight against newspeak aside.

It's impossible for any given entry on Wikipedia to have a truly neutral
point of view.

What we can do, what we can measure, is what is the direction of
Wikipedia's coverage of a subject. If the coverage is becoming more
comprehensive, more grounded in references, more based on detail and
reportage and fact, then we can say that the coverage is approaching a
neutral point of view.

NPOV should be a measure of change and direction, a way to judge the
Wikipedia process, not an avenue to attack an instant in Wikipedia's
history.


body:
> From: Jimmy Wales Thursday, December 04, 2003 3:20 PM>
> The Cunctator wrote:
> > > From: The Cunctator Thursday, December 04, 2003 3:25 PM
> > >
> > > > From: Jimmy Wales
> > > > Arbitration -- people who are volunteering to get involved in
> > > > arbitrating user disputes, with the results of the arbitration
being
> > > > formally binding in the sense that it is at least possible for
the
> > > > arbitration committee to vote to ban someone or take some lesser
> > > > action to enforce their decision
> > <snip>
> > > Sounds fine to me.
> >
> > I should amend, of course, except that I'm more than a bit skeeved
out
> > by the whole development of institutionalized hierarchies.
>
> And so all the more reason, from my point of view, for me to want you
> to be part of the process, to help ensure that it is as unhierarchical
> as possible.
>
My goal is to make such institutions unnecessary, but history shows us
that once people are given power they're loathe to give it up, even if
their institution is harmful or obsolete.

In other words, this is a step in the wrong direction which is not
likely ever to be reversed.