subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fun with bots

references:
<c2tags$9ul$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<20040313082822.GA20852@tomk32.homelinux.org>
	<c300vv$jac$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Mar 13, 2004, at 14:12, Timwi wrote:
> Thomas R. Koll wrote:
>> On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 04:36:27PM -0500, David Friedland wrote:
>>> I have ~200 files that I would like to upload to the en:Wikipedia.
>>> They are recordings of all the sounds in the International Phonetic
>>> Alphabet. I don't want to upload them by hand, so I am hacking
>>> together a little libwww-perl-based script to upload them
>>> automatically under my username.
>> upload.py from pywikipediabot.sf.net
>
> Not aimed at you in particular, but in general: Please could people
> stop recommending those Python tools when nobody asked for them? If
> someone specifically asks if a script for something already exists, by
> all means, point these out, but I think we should stop making it look
> like they are in some way "official" or "supported" or anything else
> that makes people feel like they should be obliged to use them in
> preference to writing their own.

They are the closest thing to an 'official' or 'supported' bot suite
for Wikipedia; since they've been in active development for some time
they are more mature and well-tested than a one-time hack is likely to
be.

> People should understand that hacking up small scripts can be a lot of
> fun, especially if you do it in your favourite programming language
> rather than being fixed to Python, and also you will understand the
> working of your bot much better if you write it yourself.

Sure, it can be fun. It can also be a pain in the butt when you just
want to get something functional done. If you appreciate Free Software,
you'll understand that there is often significant benefit to being able
to build on the existing corpus of code. Hiding that code is a serious
disservice.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20040313/33183ce4/attachment.pgp>


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Document your features, please

body:
On Sat, 13 Mar 2004, Timwi wrote:

> Karl Eichwalder wrote:
>
> > 1. I like long names a lot.  It is not a good idea to upload
> >    n-castle-1, n-castle-2, n-castle-3, ...  Names should a short
> >    description; thus better names will be: nuremberg-castle-palas-s,
> >    nuremberg-castle-sinwelltower-n, nuremberg-castle-heavensgate-o, etc.
>
> Sorry, what I really meant was "if the name is a long word".
>
> Instead of "nuremberg-castle-sinwelltower-n", you should really be
> calling it "Nuremberg Castle Sinwell Tower (1).jpg" (or whatever).
>
I believe that having a file with spaces in its name can cause problems for
UNIX-like environments -- which is what I believe the Wikipedia servers
run on. Instead of spaces, one should use periods ".", dashes "-" or
underbars "_".

(One can work around this aspect of UNIX-like oeprating systems by using
quote marks -- but why make things more complex?)

Geoff


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On Mar 13, 2004, at 16:15, Geoff Burling wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Mar 2004, Timwi wrote:
>> Instead of "nuremberg-castle-sinwelltower-n", you should really be
>> calling it "Nuremberg Castle Sinwell Tower (1).jpg" (or whatever).
>>
> I believe that having a file with spaces in its name can cause
> problems for
> UNIX-like environments -- which is what I believe the Wikipedia servers
> run on. Instead of spaces, one should use periods ".", dashes "-" or
> underbars "_".

Spaces are fine in UNIX, however the wiki transforms spaces into
underscores (and vice-versa).

If you upload "Nuremberg Castle Sinwell Tower (1).jpg" you'll get
"Nuremberg_Castle_Sinwell_Tower_(1).jpg", and a link [[Image:Nuremberg
Castle Sinwell Tower (1).jpg]] will work just fine.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20040313/4a85e90c/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: <red>tags</red>; and $wgUseDatabaseMessages
	question

in_reply_to:
<c2v8h4$pig$1@sea.gmane.org> (Tim Starling's message of "Sun,
	14 Mar 2004 01:32:38 +1100")

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

> I don't know, I'm not a big fan of HTML-like tags. The general idea of
> wikitext is to use a markup which is easy to type, rather than easy to
> parse.

BTW, on international keyboards (e.g., on a german one) "{}[]|" (and
more) are not easy to type - this is why I use a keyboard with a US
layout ;)

Let's stop adding cryptic layout/markup commands; go for XML and
contributors can use their XML editors or browser plugins.  etc. pp.

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


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 11:42:31PM +0000, Timwi wrote:
> Evan Prodromou wrote:
>
> >So, I amended the Development policy on meta:
> >
> >    http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_policy
> >
> >...to the effect of: "Document new features in the User's Guide."
> >
> >Every programmer in the world is too damn busy coding to communicate
> >what they're doing, true. But if you add a feature to MediaWiki, you
> >are the main person who knows about it.
>
> Speaking of which. Who made the image thumbnail feature? This feature
> does not appear to be documented.

Me. The documentation is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Extended_image_syntax

But as I think Evan is right, documentation should become part of the users guide,
I've included that page into
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Adding_multimedia

> And in particular, it still has this bug that
> [[Image:blah|thumb|''em'']] comes out as <em>em</em> rather
> than em.
>
> I believe whoever wrote this feature should really fix this, since (as
> you said) they are bound to be the one who knows the feature best.

As mentioned before, it's fixed. It will even allow
[[Image:blah|thumb|An image of a ''beautiful'' [[Blah]], seen in the [[zoo]].]]

Best regards,

	JeLuF


from_name: Gabriel Wicke

subject: [Wikitech-l] manual purging Main_Page and similar

body:
I've just added a manual purge action that can be invoked like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Main_Page&action=purge

Works for any title, in all wikis. Hope this makes updating pages that
pull most content from other pages like the front page easier. A small,
hidden link on the main page or similar could make this more acessible if
needed.
--
Gabriel Wicke


from_name: David Friedland

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fun with bots

body:
Update:

The perl script worked like a charm and was only something like 40
lines. If anyone else wants it, I can send it to them, but it has no
user interface to speak of. In fact it has no interface at all, as
everything including username, password, and the files to upload are
hard-coded into the script.

I uploaded the first batch (vowel sounds) as [[User:Nohat]] as well as
part of the second batch (consonants). Brion assigned the bot bit to
[[User:NohatBot]] which was used to upload the rest, but due to a bug in
the MediaWiki code, uploads by bots show up in Recent Changes regardless
of the setting of hidebots. Any future automated uploading/editing I do
will be done under the NohatBot username.

- David

David Friedland wrote:

> I've finished writing the script, and I've been trying to test it on
> test.wikipedia.org, but uploads seem to be broken on the test wiki.
> After hitting submit, the page comes back as
> http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Upload with no content, and the
> file is not uploaded.
>
> Also making testing difficult is the fact that the upload forms are
> different.
>
> - David
>
> David Friedland wrote:
>
>> I have ~200 files that I would like to upload to the en:Wikipedia.
>> They are recordings of all the sounds in the International Phonetic
>> Alphabet. I don't want to upload them by hand, so I am hacking
>> together a little libwww-perl-based script to upload them
>> automatically under my username.
>>
>> Before I do this, I want to run this by wikitech-l:
>>
>> Should I register a separate account for use with my bot, like NohatBot?
>>
>> I've set the useragent of my script to NohatBot/0.9b. Will it be blocked?
>>
>> Finally, should I make the script available in case others want to do
>> bulk uploads? If so, where?
>>
>> Anything else?
>>
>> - David [[User:Nohat]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] In-place install

body:
On Mar 13, 2004, at 16:15, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Because Brion asked for feedback I've taken some time to test the new
> inplace installer. It works great, and thanks for the free link to
> OpenFacts! ;-)
>
> Two things I noticed:
> - In Mozilla, the dropdown box with the languages seems to really screw
> things up. When I scroll through it, the fonts suddenly change, and
> afterwards the form elements become unusable. Could be my setup, but
> I'd
> still recommend using just the Latin transliterations here.

That's odd... Mozilla version and OS?

> - There seems to be no option to create an SQL database account,
> instead
> the standard account seems to be used for that purpose. That's probably
> not the most secure setup. Is there a particular reason for this?

Actually, I'd prefer that Asksql be _completely_ disabled by default.
People with limited access to a shared server may also not be able to
create a mysql user with limited privileges...

> On a more general note, as we move developer status away from being an
> actual developer, we should probably rename the rights flag. I suggest
> something like "siteadmin", which is intuitive and instantly
> recognizable
> from other applications. The first user the script would create would
> always be a site-admin, and that user would be able to assign arbitrary
> rights to other users.

Sounds nice.

> I think we should deprecate the command line scripts ASAP, but
> preferably
> after my Linux Magazine article which explicitly refers to them comes
> out
> ;-) (early April, I think - the German version is already out).

Soon... we have to redo the maintenance scripts at some point to be
friendly to that install environment, as well.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20040313/31439867/attachment.pgp>


list: wikien-l

from_name: Martin Harper

subject: [WikiEN-l] Edit war policy meaningless

body:
Erik asked:

> What exactly is page protection going to accomplish [...] ?

Slight correction: protection on the version that problem user X doesn't like. It's going to
accomplish the important task of annoying people who engage in excessive reversions,
and pleasing people who don't engage in excessive reversions. I believe that these are
called a "stick" and "carrot", respectively.

> [the 24hr ban] policy has been sabotaged for nonsensical reasons

If by "sabotage" you mean that I and eleven other people have voted against a policy
that you support, and by "nonsensical reasons" you mean "reasons that Erik disagrees
with", then I should remind you that disagreeing with your good self is not yet a crime.
We can discuss matters civilly, or we can start accusing each other of sabotage.
Experience suggests that the former tends to be more productive over the long term.

> If people like Wik can engage in edit wars without serious consequences,
> and I on the other hand am attacked for doing what I can to intervene [...], then it
>  is clear that the Wikipedia community as a whole *wants* edit wars to happen.

Well, let's see. You do something people don't like, and you get complaints. Wik does
something people don't like, and Wik gets complaints. I'm not sure how you finesse that
into a community desire for edit wars. Especially given that the overwhelming majority
of the community have expressed their dislike of edit wars, just as you have.

If you don't like complaints, I humbly suggest that you don't do things that cause people
to complain. Those people who complain about certain of your actions are most likely
doing so because they do not like certain of your actions, logically enough.

> I protected the page which Wik had blanked repeatedly and - gasp - edited it
> afterwards

Yes, it seems you protected [[McFly]], and reverted it to the version that Wik didn't like.
If only there was some sort of suggested policy to allow for that! If there was such a
suggestion, it would probably have been suggested by some good-looking individual
such as myself, perhaps on [[wikipedia talk:revert]], and mentioned a few days ago on
this mailing list.

> If I sound angry, that's because I am.

If I sound like I have a headache and a cold, that's because I have. But that probably
doesn't come across so well over the internet.

Many people are annoyed at some of the problems Wikipedia currently has, and that's
perfectly understandable. If you must get angry, get angry with the problems, not with
the community as a whole. We all have the same goal here, we just differ as to the best
route to it.

-Martin


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Edit war policy meaningless

body:
Martin-

> Slight correction: protection on the version that problem user X doesn't
> like.

That's completely pointless if the user doesn't really care about what
version a page remains in but enjoys the process of fighting per se. That
seems to be the case with Wik. He reverts, reverts, reverts, reverts, then
he even *asks* for protection of the page. As soon as it becomes
unprotected again, he will continue reverting to his preferred version.
This happened with [[McFly]] -- I unprotected it three times already, and
every time Wik came back to revert it almost instantly. It is protected to
this day. So what are we gonna do -- keep it protected forever? That is an
unfair punishment of everyone else.

No, the right thing to do is to tell this user to either abide by our
rules or go away. This is not a matter of debate, it is a matter of fact.

Erik


from_name: Arvind Narayanan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Spambot

in_reply_to:
<c2pq6h$s4u$1@sea.gmane.org>;
	from ts4294967296@hotmail.com on Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 12:39:42AM
	+1100

body:
I have an idea: since the spambot's goal is to add links to a
website, why not give admins the ability to (temporarily) filter
all edits which involve a certain domain (more generally, a regex).
This would apply site-wide. That is, you could prevent any edit which
adds "*.spammersdomain.com/*" to a page. The code would have to be
slightly clever to detect url encodings, etc., but surely doable.

Arvind
--
Its all GNU to me


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Edit war policy meaningless

body:
Erik Moeller wrote

> No, the right thing to do is to tell this user to either abide by our
> rules or go away. This is not a matter of debate, it is a matter of fact.

I agree with the thrust of what Erik is saying (though not with this way of
saying it).  I think it's not hard to prove that edit wars damage the
content of Wikipedia, in more than one way (neglect, concentration on
peripheral points, sensible people keeping a safe distance).  So any
argument against eventual enforcement of tough policies must be in the terms
that they may do more damage.  I really don't see it - for most edit wars,
and most users, stamping them out would just lead to sighs of relief all
round.

Charles


from_name: Angela

subject: [WikiEN-l] Edit war policy meaningless

body:
Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Mediation between me and Wik is now approaching a
> month.  None of our procedure mean anything if
> there's no sense of urgency.
>

There is no mediation in progress between you and Wik.
As you reported to the mailing list last month
(http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-February/010756.html),
Wik refused mediation.

[[Wikipedia:Requests for mediation]] explains that the
process is voluntary. The committee can not force Wik
into mediation with you.

Perhaps you meant to refer to arbitration, not
mediation?  If so, the latest discussions on that
appear to be at [[Wikipedia:Requests for
arbitration/Wik/Decision]].

Angela.

___________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping"
your friends today! Download Messenger Now
http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/download/index.html


in_reply_to:
<c2t131$for$1@sea.gmane.org> (timwi@gmx.net's message of "Fri,
	12 Mar 2004 18:55:18 +0000")

references:
<87n06nxrhf.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>
	<c2qthh$nvr$1@sea.gmane.org> <shad2m3e8k.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<c2t131$for$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> writes:

>> Also whitespace handling is dubious.  Code as follows may or may not
>> work:
>>     [[Image:blah | thumb | 300px | right | foo]]
>> Allowing spaces around "|" is important - otherwise lines get too long
>> and horizontal sliders are addding unnecessarily to the edit boxes.
>
> To be entirely honest, I don't see that as too much of a problem. If the
> image name is too long, rename it;

1. I like long names a lot.  It is not a good idea to upload
   n-castle-1, n-castle-2, n-castle-3, ...  Names should a short
   description; thus better names will be: nuremberg-castle-palas-s,
   nuremberg-castle-sinwelltower-n, nuremberg-castle-heavensgate-o, etc.

2. Long names will not be overridden that easily.

3. If you (the WP managers) don't believe in good names just assign
   randoms letters.

> if the image caption begins with a very long word, rephrase it...

Does not help, often the filename is already too long ;)

> (of course, for readability's sake, allowing spaces here would be nice)

Exactly.

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


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: bandwidth thieves blocked

body:
David Rodeback wrote:
>
> Finally, is there a place at Wikipedia (I know of several elsewhere) for
> registering such spiders with descriptions and contact information, in case
> someone observes the spider working and wonders, or in case there is some sort
> of problem?

You should probably register a username specifically for the bot (for
example: World History Bot) and then leave your information at
[[User:World History Bot]].

Greetings,
Timwi


references:
<87n06nxrhf.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>	<c2qthh$nvr$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<shad2m3e8k.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>	<c2t131$for$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<sh3c8czdlk.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>

body:
Karl Eichwalder wrote:

> Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> writes:
>
>>To be entirely honest, I don't see that as too much of a problem. If the
>>image name is too long, rename it;
>
> 1. I like long names a lot.  It is not a good idea to upload
>    n-castle-1, n-castle-2, n-castle-3, ...  Names should a short
>    description; thus better names will be: nuremberg-castle-palas-s,
>    nuremberg-castle-sinwelltower-n, nuremberg-castle-heavensgate-o, etc.

Sorry, what I really meant was "if the name is a long word".

Instead of "nuremberg-castle-sinwelltower-n", you should really be
calling it "Nuremberg Castle Sinwell Tower (1).jpg" (or whatever).

> 3. If you (the WP managers)

I'm not a Wikipedia "manager" (unless you mean sysop, but sysops hardly
manage anything, to my knowledge...).

>>if the image caption begins with a very long word, rephrase it...
>
> Does not help, often the filename is already too long ;)

As I said, make the filename several words.

Timwi


body:
Jens Frank wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 11:42:31PM +0000, Timwi wrote:
>
>>Speaking of which. Who made the image thumbnail feature? This feature
>>does not appear to be documented.
>
> Me. The documentation is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Extended_image_syntax
>
> But as I think Evan is right, documentation should become part of the users guide,
> I've included that page into
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Adding_multimedia

Who will look for it under "multimedia"? Please make it something that
contains either "image" or "thumb". :-p

>>I believe whoever wrote this feature should really fix this [...].
>
> As mentioned before, it's fixed.

Thanks a lot! :-) I'm looking forward to it going live, then.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fun with bots

body:
Thomas R. Koll wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 04:36:27PM -0500, David Friedland wrote:
>
>>I have ~200 files that I would like to upload to the en:Wikipedia. They
>>are recordings of all the sounds in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
>>I don't want to upload them by hand, so I am hacking together a little
>>libwww-perl-based script to upload them automatically under my username.
>
> upload.py from pywikipediabot.sf.net

Not aimed at you in particular, but in general: Please could people stop
recommending those Python tools when nobody asked for them? If someone
specifically asks if a script for something already exists, by all
means, point these out, but I think we should stop making it look like
they are in some way "official" or "supported" or anything else that
makes people feel like they should be obliged to use them in preference
to writing their own.

People should understand that hacking up small scripts can be a lot of
fun, especially if you do it in your favourite programming language
rather than being fixed to Python, and also you will understand the
working of your bot much better if you write it yourself.

Thanks,
Timwi


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: <red>tags</red>;
	and $wgUseDatabaseMessages question

body:
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:

> On Sat, 13 Mar 2004 10:38:31 +0100, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
>
>>I'm playing with MediaWiki code, and have added the ability of parsing
>>HTML-like tags: for example, <red>text</red> would display text in red color.
>>Is this interesting enough to be included in the code?
>>
>>This was mentioned a month ago in the "support for  tags" thread. Aside
>>from being easier to remember and type then  it would also
>>produce HTML without now deprecated  tags.
>
> Maybe it would be better to use [red][/red] instead.

Or even better yet, [!red text goes here] (becomes text goes here).


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: difference between cvs access and developer access

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Mar 13, 2004, at 07:42, <perl at hush.ai> wrote:
>
>> I was reading "developer policy" and noticed that cvs access seemed to
>> be different than developer access. Is there different policy for both?
>> I assume that developer access means direct ssh access to the server.
>
> "Developer access" is a marker on wiki user accounts. It is largely
> obsolete, but used to allow read-write access to the database through an
> interface in the wiki.  [...]

It seems that you haven't actually answered his question (about the
policy with regards to this kind of access).

I've also asked questions about it before and I've been ignored. Is
there something we're not supposed to know? :-p

> CVS access is the ability to check code updates into our CVS repository
> on sourceforge. It doesn't relate to our servers at all.

Thing is, there are a number of tasks ([[Wikipedia:Changing attribution
for an edit]] for example) for which write-access to the DB is
necessary, and CVS access doesn't help.

What is being done about this? Clearly, we need more people with
write-access if we want less-than-important tasks like this to get
handled, but of course I'm very aware of the potential risk associated
with an account that has DB write-access. This is why I asked if it was
possible to grant this access only temporarily (e.g. for 24 hours), so
someone can perform the task without all these risks associated with it.

Timwi


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

body:
On Sat, 13 Mar 2004 10:38:31 +0100, Nikola Smolenski wrote:

> I'm playing with MediaWiki code, and have added the ability of parsing
> HTML-like tags: for example, <red>text</red> would display text in red color.
> Is this interesting enough to be included in the code?
>
> This was mentioned a month ago in the "support for <span> tags" thread. Aside
> from being easier to remember and type then <font color=red> it would also
> produce HTML without now deprecated <font> tags.

Hello,

Maybe it would be better to use [red][/red] instead.

--
Ashar Voultoiz
http://fr.wikipedia.org/Utilisateur:Hashar
do not send mail to listme at listme.dsbl.org


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Bird

body:
Arno M wrote:

> It sounds like you made the same error as I did - you
> did not read all of the postings before you responded
> to them.

You would probably increase the chances of it being seen in context if
you would post it as a reply to one of the postings in this thread, so
it is displayed within the thread in mail/news applications that handle
threading correctly.


from_name: Ivo Köthnig

references:
<200403131038.32045.smolensk@eunet.yu>
	<1vjtvzdxv8s5z$.vil7xi0uhgz8.dlg@40tude.net>
	<c3019k$jac$2@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Am Samstag, 13. M?rz 2004 23:17 schrieb Timwi:
> Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> > On Sat, 13 Mar 2004 10:38:31 +0100, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> >>I'm playing with MediaWiki code, and have added the ability of parsing
> >>HTML-like tags: for example, <red>text</red> would display text in red
> >> color. Is this interesting enough to be included in the code?
> >>
> >>This was mentioned a month ago in the "support for  tags" thread.
> >> Aside from being easier to remember and type then  it
> >> would also produce HTML without now deprecated  tags.
> >
> > Maybe it would be better to use [red][/red] instead.
>
> Or even better yet, [!red text goes here] (becomes  class='red'>text goes here).

ohh yeah... and [!bold this is bold text], [!italic this is italic text] ...
or short [!b this is bold text] ...

:-)))

--Ivo K?thnig


subject: [Wikitech-l] In-place install

body:
Because Brion asked for feedback I've taken some time to test the new
inplace installer. It works great, and thanks for the free link to
OpenFacts! ;-)

Two things I noticed:
- In Mozilla, the dropdown box with the languages seems to really screw
things up. When I scroll through it, the fonts suddenly change, and
afterwards the form elements become unusable. Could be my setup, but I'd
still recommend using just the Latin transliterations here.

- There seems to be no option to create an SQL database account, instead
the standard account seems to be used for that purpose. That's probably
not the most secure setup. Is there a particular reason for this?

On a more general note, as we move developer status away from being an
actual developer, we should probably rename the rights flag. I suggest
something like "siteadmin", which is intuitive and instantly recognizable
from other applications. The first user the script would create would
always be a site-admin, and that user would be able to assign arbitrary
rights to other users.

I think we should deprecate the command line scripts ASAP, but preferably
after my Linux Magazine article which explicitly refers to them comes out
;-) (early April, I think - the German version is already out).

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Collin

subject: [WikiEN-l] How to roll back a page to an early state?

body:
i.e. to discard recent changes by, maybe, vicious guests and
to make the page back an early state?

Thank you!

Cheers,
Collin


body:
I 've got the answer here :-)

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Rev
erting_a_page_to_an_earlier_version

Collin


references:
<87n06nxrhf.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>
	<c2qthh$nvr$1@sea.gmane.org> <shad2m3e8k.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<c2t131$for$1@sea.gmane.org> <sh3c8czdlk.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<c300b8$ah3$2@sea.gmane.org> <shptbfyh1l.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<shhdwryeft.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>

body:
[CC'd to pywikipediabot-users list]

On Mar 14, 2004, at 01:18, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> For some reason, uploading "grossgruendlach rathaus kirchturmsonnenuhr
> v
> s.jpg" to the german WP via a moderately modified version of
> pywikipedia/upload.py didn't work.  This filename worked:
> grossgruendlach-rathaus-kirchturmsonnenuhr-v-s.jpg.

When given spaces, the upload form stops to warn you that it's changing
the filename and requires a confirmation. (Which is kind of annoying.)
I haven't checked, but the bot may not handle that case.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20040314/5707cbc2/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
"Nikola Smolenski" <smolensk at eunet.yu> wrote in message
news:200403131038.32045.smolensk at eunet.yu...

> I'm playing with
> MediaWiki code, and have added the ability of parsing  HTML-like tags:
> for example, <red>text</red> would display text in red color.  Is this
> interesting enough to be included in the code?
>
> This was mentioned a month ago in the "support for <span> tags"
> thread. Aside  from being easier to remember and type then <font
> color=red> it would also  produce HTML without now deprecated <font>
> tags.

I don't know, I'm not a big fan of HTML-like tags. The general idea of
wikitext is to use a markup which is easy to type, rather than easy to
parse.

> I also have a question: when $wgUseDatabaseMessages is set to false,
> use of  {{msg:}} tags is disabled as well. Is this intended? If yes,
> why? I would  like to fix this, but cannot figure out how.

Aaahh, don't touch! ;) I'm changing this part of the code completely. It's
mostly ready to go.

> This problem
> is apparent on  Serbian and, i guess, other non-English Wikipedias:
> LanguageSr.php is not  copied to database, so database messages must
> be disabled, but that forces  {{msg:}} tags not to work.

The best thing to do is to get the language file copied into the database.
This is easy to do, I imagine it will get done even before the code changes
I mentioned above.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Abe Sokolov

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia for Journalists by Columbia Professor Sree
	Sreenivasan

body:
"Wikipedia for Journalists"
By Sree Sreenivasan
Columbia Professor & Poynter Visiting Professor
Poynter Online

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=32&aid=62126

Here's an excerpt:
"So far, the effort has created numerous reference-quality articles as wide
ranging as the Hutton Inquiry, algorithms, social history of the piano,
origins of the American Civil War, and severe acute respiratory syndrome. As
its quality has improved, news publications have increasingly cited
Wikipedia on subjects such as Wahhabism, crony capitalism, folk metal,
British 'honours' system, Abdul Qadeer Khan and extinct animals. It has even
been used in litigation, when in July 2003, a Wikipedia article on profanity
was cited in a motion to dismiss a case in a Colorado court."

_________________________________________________________________
Learn how to help protect your privacy and prevent fraud online at Tech
Hacks & Scams. http://special.msn.com/msnbc/techsafety.armx


body:
I forgot to sign my last message.
- [[User:172|172]]

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=32&aid=62126

Wikipedia for Journalists
By Sree Sreenivasan
Columbia Professor & Poynter Visiting Professor

_________________________________________________________________
Fast. Reliable. Get MSN 9 Dial-up - 3 months for the price of 1!
(Limited-time Offer) http://click.atdmt.com/AVE/go/onm00200361ave/direct/01/


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Developers should mind their own business

body:
Following on from my proposal regarding developer access, I've created a
meta page:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_access

I was thinking that we could flesh out the details, and start taking
nominations.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Edit war policy meaningless

body:
Erik Moeller a ?crit:
> Martin-
>
>
>>Slight correction: protection on the version that problem user X doesn't
>>like.
>
>
> That's completely pointless if the user doesn't really care about what
> version a page remains in but enjoys the process of fighting per se. That
> seems to be the case with Wik. He reverts, reverts, reverts, reverts, then
> he even *asks* for protection of the page. As soon as it becomes
> unprotected again, he will continue reverting to his preferred version.
> This happened with [[McFly]] -- I unprotected it three times already, and
> every time Wik came back to revert it almost instantly. It is protected to
> this day. So what are we gonna do -- keep it protected forever? That is an
> unfair punishment of everyone else.

Keep it protected for Wik only. Open for others.


body:
But Erik, you are trying to have edit wars solution be based uniquely on
2 or 3 wik-like people, while there are many other very regular and
sometimes very respected contributors, who actually sometimes get into
edit war and reversion war themselves in the heat of the moment.

For Wik-like people, yes, a temporary ban may be a relief. Now, for
regular editors, I think it is a bad solution.

Suggestion :
What about a different policy depending on whether editors are listed as
"frequently involved in wars" people ?

For those "problematic users", for example, though not mandatory, any 3
reverts session could grant either softban or page protection or
slow-editing for 24 hours. Without the sysop doing the ban or the
protection or the slow edit having to justify himself or to argue he did
not commit sysop abuse.

However, none of these three actions would be mandatory. People could
still consider applying one or another, depending on the person.

Now, for people not listed as "problematic", only page protection could
be applied, eventually, after a certain number of reverts.

As for listing people problematic, I can just suggest a poll. If over
75% wikipedians agree a person is problematic, well, he may undergo
harder punishement than others.

This will allow people like Wik to be blocked after 3 reverts. So,
satisfy you and others.
This will allow regular users only to see only article protection
occuring for 3 reverts in most cases, so might satisfy all those against
the ban for 3 revert rule.
This should satisfy both those willing to stop editors like Wik, and
those saying he is part of the project.
This will sent him the signal "better behavior" -> "lighter punishment"

Erik Moeller a ?crit:
> So, are we going to do something about edit wars or not? What exactly is
> page protection going to accomplish if an individual like Wik will engage
> in an edit war on virtually every page they are involved in? Or per-
> article bans? Are we going to ban Wik from dozens of articles? Run after
> him wherever he goes?
>
> I note on the arbitration for Wik that the consensus among the committee
> is leaning towards not handling the case of Wik directly because a 24 hour
> ban policy is *under discussion*.  Well, that policy has been sabotaged
> for nonsensical reasons which could easily have been addressed by flexible
> language in the policy itself.
>
> If people like Wik can engage in edit wars without serious consequences,
> and I on the other hand am attacked for doing what I can to intervene (as
> in the case of [[McFly]], where I protected the page which Wik had blanked
> repeatedly and - gasp - edited it afterwards), then it is clear that the
> Wikipedia community as a whole *wants* edit wars to happen.
>
> Well, if you want edit wars to happen, you sure as hell are going to get
> edit wars. And don't expect me to hold back if someone like Wik gets into
> a conflict with me.
>
> If I sound angry, that's because I am. The bullies are being protected
> with fallacious arguments of free speech and "WikiLove". We need
> enforcement here. And I'm very disappointed in Jimbo for not doing
> something about this issue and endlessly delaying any meaningful decision.
> The solution is trivial. Warn and then temporarily ban people who violate
> the *spirt and the letter* of the rule. There are *no* negative side-
> effects of such a policy.
>
> Erik


from_name: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

body:
On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 04:56, Anthere wrote:

    But Erik, you are trying to have edit wars solution be based uniquely on
    2 or 3 wik-like people, while there are many other very regular and
    sometimes very respected contributors, who actually sometimes get into
    edit war and reversion war themselves in the heat of the moment.

    For Wik-like people, yes, a temporary ban may be a relief. Now, for
    regular editors, I think it is a bad solution.

    Suggestion :
    What about a different policy depending on whether editors are listed as
    "frequently involved in wars" people ?

    For those "problematic users", for example, though not mandatory, any 3
    reverts session could grant either softban or page protection or
    slow-editing for 24 hours. Without the sysop doing the ban or the
    protection or the slow edit having to justify himself or to argue he did
    not commit sysop abuse.

    However, none of these three actions would be mandatory. People could
    still consider applying one or another, depending on the person.

    Now, for people not listed as "problematic", only page protection could
    be applied, eventually, after a certain number of reverts.

    As for listing people problematic, I can just suggest a poll. If over
    75% wikipedians agree a person is problematic, well, he may undergo
    harder punishement than others.

    This will allow people like Wik to be blocked after 3 reverts. So,
    satisfy you and others.
    This will allow regular users only to see only article protection
    occuring for 3 reverts in most cases, so might satisfy all those against
    the ban for 3 revert rule.

Sorry Anthere, but you are wrong. The majority of those who oppose the
three reverts policy are just those problematic users, so they probably
would not be satisfied with a policy that would still have their warring
thwarted.

    This should satisfy both those willing to stop editors like Wik, and
    those saying he is part of the project.
    This will sent him the signal "better behavior" -> "lighter punishment"

This would also create a new class of users: "Explicitly Untrusted
Users".
Not a good idea IMHO. Might just drive users like lir to just regress
into
multiple personality mode.

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20040314/05ab9323/attachment.htm


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
The arbitration committee's proposed rule include votes on acceptance of
cases, including cases referred by the mediation committee. At least 4
arbitrators must accept jurisdiction. Now what happens to cases not
accepted... depends on the nature of the problem. For example, the complaint
that Anthony started a fork, likely to be not accepted because he broke no
Wikipedia or indeed Wiki rule, nothing happens. Complaints considered too
trivial, again nothing, but the parties might consider negotiation or
mediation. Compaints that are too much for us to deal with would go to
Jimbo.

Fred

From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <jheiskan at welho.com>
Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Date: 14 Mar 2004 14:37:58 +0200
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Root and Branch - it's the only way.

Please, let us invest the Mediation Committee with an explicit
power of binding referral to the Arbitration Committee. No coming
back to the Mediation Committee, and asking: "Did you *really* try
mediation already?" If the Mediation Committee *independently*
decides that Arbitration is the way to go, they can initiate it on
their own say so, without the Arbitration Committee second
guessing the Mediation Committee.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20040314/7c0b79dd/attachment.htm


body:
Matters we feel good about rapidly receive the four votes necessary.

Fred

> From: Angela <sloog77 at yahoo.co.uk>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 13:54:07 +0000 (GMT)
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Root and Branch - it's the only way.
>
> couldn't the default be
> acceptance of cases we refer to them rather than the
> insistence of a vote every time?


body:
Such a case would require a special solution should it arise and would
probably receive it. We promise to learn from experience, not to provide for
any conceivable eventuality.

Fred

From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <jheiskan at welho.com>
Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Date: 14 Mar 2004 16:02:15 +0200
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Root and Branch - it's the only way.

What I see as a nightmare, is a situation where the Mediation
Committee decides that a case is not one of theirs, and says:
"Try arbitration!", whereupon the Arbitration Committee refuses
to take the case, but bounces it back to mediation. which then
decides that it is properly not a matter for mediation but in
actual fact a case for arbitration, etc., etc., etc...

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20040314/8cef6e37/attachment.htm


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

in_reply_to:
<c300b8$ah3$2@sea.gmane.org> (timwi@gmx.net's message of "Sat,
	13 Mar 2004 22:01:00 +0000")

references:
<87n06nxrhf.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>
	<c2qthh$nvr$1@sea.gmane.org> <shad2m3e8k.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<c2t131$for$1@sea.gmane.org> <sh3c8czdlk.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<c300b8$ah3$2@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> writes:

> Instead of "nuremberg-castle-sinwelltower-n", you should really be
> calling it "Nuremberg Castle Sinwell Tower (1).jpg" (or whatever).

The 'n' is short for 'north' ;)

Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> writes:

> I believe that having a file with spaces in its name can cause problems for
> UNIX-like environments -- which is what I believe the Wikipedia servers
> run on. Instead of spaces, one should use periods ".", dashes "-" or
> underbars "_".

Yes, I still do not believe in filenames with spaces.

> (One can work around this aspect of UNIX-like oeprating systems by using
> quote marks -- but why make things more complex?)

Yes, that's usually my reasoning.  Maybe, I should start chaning my mind.

Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> writes:

> Spaces are fine in UNIX, however the wiki transforms spaces into
> underscores (and vice-versa).
>
> If you upload "Nuremberg Castle Sinwell Tower (1).jpg" you'll get
> "Nuremberg_Castle_Sinwell_Tower_(1).jpg", and a link
> [[Image:Nuremberg Castle Sinwell Tower (1).jpg]] will work just fine.

This all is interesting and encouraging.  Only the suffix part ".jpg"
does not look nice.

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


from_name: Evan Prodromou

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

>>>>> "GB" == Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> writes:

    GB> I believe that having a file with spaces in its name can cause
    GB> problems for UNIX-like environments -- which is what I believe
    GB> the Wikipedia servers run on. Instead of spaces, one should
    GB> use periods ".", dashes "-" or underbars "_".

    GB> (One can work around this aspect of UNIX-like oeprating
    GB> systems by using quote marks -- but why make things more
    GB> complex?)

So, it's not Unix-likes but the Web that doesn't allow spaces. You're
not supposed to put spaces in an URL. (Some browsers will retrieve an
URL with spaces in it, but you're still not _supposed_ to.)

~ESP

- --
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFAVHQBozwefHAKBVERAjxbAJ9NR7gEDM8bAACSjbmvjgPLIuMsvQCfSnNT
Y6ugut4gSZsP8XJVOpEZJgM=
=OmMh
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


in_reply_to:
<shptbfyh1l.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de> (Karl Eichwalder's message
	of "Sun, 14 Mar 2004 09:22:14 +0100")

references:
<87n06nxrhf.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>
	<c2qthh$nvr$1@sea.gmane.org> <shad2m3e8k.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<c2t131$for$1@sea.gmane.org> <sh3c8czdlk.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<c300b8$ah3$2@sea.gmane.org> <shptbfyh1l.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>

body:
Karl Eichwalder <ke at gnu.franken.de> writes:

> Yes, that's usually my reasoning.  Maybe, I should start chaning my
> mind.

For some reason, uploading "grossgruendlach rathaus kirchturmsonnenuhr v
s.jpg" to the german WP via a moderately modified version of
pywikipedia/upload.py didn't work.  This filename worked:
grossgruendlach-rathaus-kirchturmsonnenuhr-v-s.jpg.

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


references:
<200403131038.32045.smolensk@eunet.yu>
	<1vjtvzdxv8s5z$.vil7xi0uhgz8.dlg@40tude.net>
	<c3019k$jac$2@sea.gmane.org> <200403132347.38855.koethnig@web.de>

body:
Ivo K?thnig <koethnig at web.de> writes:

> ohh yeah... and [!bold this is bold text], [!italic this is italic text] ...
> or short [!b this is bold text] ...

Or proper SGML (reference concrete syntax):

    <b/this is bold text/

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


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] A Proposal Concerning Banning

body:
Just a thought I had yesterday, & it still seems attractive to me
today, but I don't know if this solves the problems we currently
have with Wikipedia -- or any problems. (And if it seems acceptible,
I would want it adopted only after it passed a poll, made known to
all Wikipedians.)

We allow sysops to ban users with accounts for 24 hours, subject
to the following procedure:

1. Immediately following the banning, notice of the ban is entered
on a page, say, [[Persons Banned for 24 hours]].

2. Within the next 48 hours a certain number of other sysops (say
3 or 5), must add their votes approving this ban.

Failure of both of these acts (or one sysop voting _against_ the
ban) then forces this act to be immediately reviewed by a committee
(say the Arbitration Committee), who may then remove sysop powers
from the person making the ban, reprimand her/him, or decline to
act.

The point of this procedure is to allow sysops to ban people they
believe are disruptive to Wikipedia _if the sysop is willing to
risk her/his reputation_. Hopefully, this will allow sysops to deal
with contributors who are disruptive or causing trouble, while
checking abuse with the possibility of a severe penalty.

Any thoughts? I'll assume if no one comments that this proposal
doesn't answer any pressing need on Wikipedia.

Geoff


subject: [WikiEN-l] Root and Branch - it's the only way.

body:
On Fri, 2004-03-12 at 20:39, Jimmy Wales wrote:

    Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:

    >
    >
    > Let's review where the Mediation/Arbitration system currently stands
    > in practice:
    >
    > *The genuine custom for mediation is somewhere between zero and zip.
    >
    >
    >     *Mediation is requested as a method of trolling. So far only
    >     once successfully.
    >
    >     *Mediation is requested and once it starts, one or both of the
    >     disputants will insist on behaving as if it were arbitration.
    >     (This has happened more than once, but which cases, I will not
    >     disclose)
    >
    >
    > *Once the Arbitration Committee set itself up, it immediately dropped
    > even the pretense at arbitration and constituted itself as a panel of
    > grievance hearings with independent power of adjudication.
    >
    >
    > Where do we go from here?
    >
    > Well, the first thing to acknowledge is that this how it was always
    > going to go, no matter what we might have wished. Reality is a harsh
    > mistress.
    >
    > The only logical thing to do is to rename the Arbitration Committee
    > into something more close to what their actual role is, and rename
    > the Mediation Committee into the Arbitration Committee, and give it
    > live ammunition. What do I mean with live ammunition? I honestly
    > don't know! Anything the current "socalled" Arbitration Committee can
    > bear to part with...
    >
    > J-V Heiskanen (Formerly Cimon Avaro on a pogostick - RIP)

    I think these remarks are insightful.  It is true that as it is
    shaping up, the arbitration committee doesn't really do arbitration as
    people commonly understand that word.  And people have come to view
    mediation as something to do for a few days, more or less meaningless.

(BTW. You do realize that you were top-posting, and according to a
different thread, should be blocked from editing Wikipedia ;^)

More seriously, I fully stand behind my evaluation of where we are
presently, but stepping back have come to realize that my proposed
remedy was (besides inchoate) too enthusiastic. IMO the Mediation
Committee can not *yet* handle supra-administratorial powers, even
minor ones. Not as it is currently constituted. Some work toward
finding a general Modus Operandi for its internal functions needs
to be covered first.

But one thing that (with courtesy and good will) *could* be sorted
out *right now* is the relation between the Mediation Committee and
the Arbitration Committee.

In my view, what we do *not* want is a situation in which communication
between the committees resembles a conflation of Marx Brothers, Abbott
and Costello and Franz Kafka. I *do* hope we are all agreed on that!

I know this may be a point of contention with the Arbitration
Committee, but I cannot honestly see how they can reasonably oppose
the following suggestion:

Please, let us invest the Mediation Committee with an explicit
power of binding referral to the Arbitration Committee. No coming
back to the Mediation Committee, and asking: "Did you *really* try
mediation already?" If the Mediation Committee *independently*
decides that Arbitration is the way to go, they can initiate it on
their own say so, without the Arbitration Committee second
guessing the Mediation Committee.

This would confer an implicit power on the Mediation Committee,
which does not include sanction, but would be a sufficient power
to perhaps make the disputants take mediation slightly more
seriously. Very small changes in perception, can have major effect
on the process.

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20040314/16205b74/attachment.htm


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
Anthere wrote:

>
>
> Erik Moeller a ?crit:
>
>> That's completely pointless if the user doesn't really care about
>> what  version a page remains in but enjoys the process of fighting
>> per se. That  seems to be the case with Wik. He reverts, reverts,
>> reverts, reverts, then  he even *asks* for protection of the page. As
>> soon as it becomes  unprotected again, he will continue reverting to
>> his preferred version.  This happened with [[McFly]] -- I unprotected
>> it three times already, and  every time Wik came back to revert it
>> almost instantly. It is protected to  this day. So what are we gonna
>> do -- keep it protected forever? That is an  unfair punishment of
>> everyone else.
>
>
> Keep it protected for Wik only. Open for others.
>
As a semi-permanent solution, it is a very poor one.  As a temporary
solution (as in 24 hours or less), perhaps it could be useful, but only
in extreme cases.  Merely breaking the 3 revert rule is not sufficient.


from_name: Hynek Hanke

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A problem with uploading images

body:
Hello all & happy Pi day,

I had recently some problems with uploading images to Wikipedia.
I think the interface doesn't work very well and someone of the
programmers should look at it.

I uploaded a small image of a braille calendar
(braille_calendar_cs.jpg) and everything was ok. But then I noticed it
would be much better to upload a big image and use the new image
syntax to produce a thumbdail for the [[braille]] article.

So I tried to update this picture with a larger one with the same
name by uploading the new version. But something went wrong, because
now the picture (braille_calendar_cs.jpg) has a horrible quality.
This is not caused by strict compression, it was ok on my local system.

Because I thaught that the problem is only that the first image was
of a different size, I tried to upload it under a different name.
I choosed braille_calendar_cs-2.jpg, but it didn't work. No image
is displayed on the corresponding image page. I tried to do it again
with no result. Yet the path on my local system is correct and the
image is also correct. No problems under gqview, gimp, gnome eyes.

Then I finally managed to upload the file under the name
braille_calendar_cs_2.jpg and it's finally correct. But I got the
impression that the uploading subsystem is quite buggy or not well
finished.

It would be great if some of the programmers could devote some of
its time to carefully test it and fix some of the problems.

Also, could someone please point out to me, how do I delete these
"garbage" pictures? Please don't delete them now, because they might
serve as a reference for the bug-hunters, but if something like this
happens to me in the future, I'd like to be able to clean after myself.
(Because there is a risk that someone finds the bad quality picture,
not knowing about the better variants, and uses it somewhere -- which
is highly suboptimal.)

Thank you & thanks everyone for Wikipedia!
Hynek Hanke
http://www.freebsoft.org


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Why does it say "404 Error No File Found" when I open
	index.php?

body:
BTW: I am using the latest version of Mediawiki on Windows
2000.

Could you tell me how to solve the problem?

Thank you very much!

Collin


body:
 --- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <jheiskan at welho.com> wrote:
>Please, let us invest the Mediation Committee with an
>explicit power of binding referral to the Arbitration
>Committee...

I completely agree with Cimon. If participants in
mediation have followed all the steps of the dispute
resolution process, mediation has failed, and the
mediation committee recommends arbitration, is there
any reason the arbitrators still need to vote on
whether to accept the case? Can they not trust the
mediation committee to make these referrals?

The necessity to go through the additional stage of
voting on acceptance of cases seems a waste of time if
the mediators have already decided that arbitration is
the best route for the person they are referring. I'm
not saying they can't veto the referral if they really
think that's best, but couldn't the default be
acceptance of cases we refer to them rather than the
insistence of a vote every time?

Angela.

___________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping"
your friends today! Download Messenger Now
http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/download/index.html


body:
 --- Hynek Hanke <hanke at volny.cz> wrote: >

> Also, could someone please point out to me, how do I
> delete these "garbage" pictures?

Please list them on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Images_for_deletion

After a week with no objections, an admin will delete
the images.

Angela.

___________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping"
your friends today! Download Messenger Now
http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/download/index.html


body:
On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 15:12, Fred Bauder wrote:

        From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <jheiskan at welho.com>
        Please, let us invest the Mediation Committee with an explicit
        power of binding referral to the Arbitration Committee. No
        coming
        back to the Mediation Committee, and asking: "Did you *really*
        try
        mediation already?" If the Mediation Committee *independently*
        decides that Arbitration is the way to go, they can initiate it
        on
        their own say so, without the Arbitration Committee
        second guessing the Mediation Committee.

    The arbitration committee's proposed rule include votes on
    acceptance of cases, including cases referred by the mediation
    committee. At least 4 arbitrators must accept jurisdiction. Now what
    happens to cases not accepted... depends on the nature of the
    problem. For example, the complaint that Anthony started a fork,
    likely to be not accepted because he broke no Wikipedia or indeed
    Wiki rule, nothing happens. Complaints considered too trivial, again
    nothing, but the parties might consider negotiation or mediation.
    Compaints that are too much for us to deal with would go to Jimbo.

    Fred

Indeed. I am courteusly suggesting that you might review that rule,
with a mind to extending the role of the Mediation Comittee as a
body that can discern which cases do fall under the jurisdiction
of the Arbitration Committee. If you do not accept my original
suggestion (which I would regret, because I *did* think it through
*quite* thoroughly; do at least consider the possibility of having
an explicit bias for accepting cases referred by the Mediation
Committee, perhaps accepting them *unless* some Arbiter objects,
where-after it would then be subject to the ordinary "4 Arbiters
to accept" rule. Or if that too is unacceptable, maybe have a lower
threshold for acceptance. (Two arbiters enough to accept a case?)

What I see as a nightmare, is a situation where the Mediation
Committee decides that a case is not one of theirs, and says:
"Try arbitration!", whereupon the Arbitration Committee refuses
to take the case, but bounces it back to mediation. which then
decides that it is properly not a matter for mediation but in
actual fact a case for arbitration, etc., etc., etc...

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20040314/1c99ec7f/attachment.htm


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: <red>tags</red>;	and $wgUseDatabaseMessages
	question

references:
<200403131038.32045.smolensk@eunet.yu>	<1vjtvzdxv8s5z$.vil7xi0uhgz8.dlg@40tude.net>	<c3019k$jac$2@sea.gmane.org>
	<200403132347.38855.koethnig@web.de>

body:
Ivo K?thnig wrote:
> ohh yeah... and [!bold this is bold text], [!italic this is italic text] ...
> or short [!b this is bold text] ...

We should stick to the [..|..] style:

[please make the following text as bold, if it's not too much
trouble|text] ;)

Magnus


from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Edit war policy meaningless

body:
Arbitration, mediation, whatever.  It's all nonsense since it means absolutely nothing.  Whatever it is that is supposedly happening is not being done.

RickK

Angela <sloog77 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Rick wrote:
> Mediation between me and Wik is now approaching a
> month. None of our procedure mean anything if
> there's no sense of urgency.
>

There is no mediation in progress between you and Wik.
As you reported to the mailing list last month
(http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2004-February/010756.html),
Wik refused mediation.

[[Wikipedia:Requests for mediation]] explains that the
process is voluntary. The committee can not force Wik
into mediation with you.

Perhaps you meant to refer to arbitration, not
mediation? If so, the latest discussions on that
appear to be at [[Wikipedia:Requests for
arbitration/Wik/Decision]].

Angela.

___________________________________________________________
Yahoo! Messenger - Communicate instantly..."Ping"
your friends today! Download Messenger Now
http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com/download/index.html
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20040314/a3dae8a5/attachment.htm


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
Angela wrote:
>The necessity to go through the additional stage of
>voting on acceptance of cases seems a waste of time if
>the mediators have already decided that arbitration is
>the best route for the person they are referring. I'm
>not saying they can't veto the referral if they really
>think that's best, but couldn't the default be
>acceptance of cases we refer to them rather than the
>insistence of a vote every time?

We need a way to stem the flood - we are *not* supermen that have no lives
outside of arbitration. These cases take a good deal of time so we need a way
to help regulate the process and also weed out items that are no longer
pressing, or could be handled in lower steps. If needed, we could eventually
recruit more arbitrators in order to better distribute the work load.

But being hasty will only result in the AC becoming a rubber stamping body for
bans. I also fear that mobs of users could start ganging up on merely unpopular
users. It would be fairly easy to game the system in that case - the mob would
make unreasonable demands to push the issue through the process (got hemlock?).
We need a check on that as well.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam
http://mail.yahoo.com


body:
There's no point in this.  There are sysops who will vote against ANY 24 hour ban, and therefore any sysop who bans someone will be forced to go to arbitration with a chance of having sysop privileges revoked.

RickK

Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
Just a thought I had yesterday, & it still seems attractive to me
today, but I don't know if this solves the problems we currently
have with Wikipedia -- or any problems. (And if it seems acceptible,
I would want it adopted only after it passed a poll, made known to
all Wikipedians.)

We allow sysops to ban users with accounts for 24 hours, subject
to the following procedure:

1. Immediately following the banning, notice of the ban is entered
on a page, say, [[Persons Banned for 24 hours]].

2. Within the next 48 hours a certain number of other sysops (say
3 or 5), must add their votes approving this ban.

Failure of both of these acts (or one sysop voting _against_ the
ban) then forces this act to be immediately reviewed by a committee
(say the Arbitration Committee), who may then remove sysop powers
from the person making the ban, reprimand her/him, or decline to
act.

The point of this procedure is to allow sysops to ban people they
believe are disruptive to Wikipedia _if the sysop is willing to
risk her/his reputation_. Hopefully, this will allow sysops to deal
with contributors who are disruptive or causing trouble, while
checking abuse with the possibility of a severe penalty.

Any thoughts? I'll assume if no one comments that this proposal
doesn't answer any pressing need on Wikipedia.

Geoff

_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20040314/bbdc461d/attachment.htm


body:
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen a ?crit:
> On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 04:56, Anthere wrote:
>
> But Erik, you are trying to have edit wars solution be based uniquely on
> 2 or 3 wik-like people, while there are many other very regular and
> sometimes very respected contributors, who actually sometimes get into
> edit war and reversion war themselves in the heat of the moment.
>
> For Wik-like people, yes, a temporary ban may be a relief. Now, for
> regular editors, I think it is a bad solution.
>
> Suggestion :
> What about a different policy depending on whether editors are listed as
> "frequently involved in wars" people ?
>
> For those "problematic users", for example, though not mandatory, any 3
> reverts session could grant either softban or page protection or
> slow-editing for 24 hours. Without the sysop doing the ban or the
> protection or the slow edit having to justify himself or to argue he did
> not commit sysop abuse.
>
> However, none of these three actions would be mandatory. People could
> still consider applying one or another, depending on the person.
>
> Now, for people not listed as "problematic", only page protection could
> be applied, eventually, after a certain number of reverts.
>
> As for listing people problematic, I can just suggest a poll. If over
> 75% wikipedians agree a person is problematic, well, he may undergo
> harder punishement than others.
>
> This will allow people like Wik to be blocked after 3 reverts. So,
> satisfy you and others.
> This will allow regular users only to see only article protection
> occuring for 3 reverts in most cases, so might satisfy all those against
> the ban for 3 revert rule.
>
> Sorry Anthere, but you are wrong. The majority of those who oppose the
> three reverts policy are just those problematic users, so they probably
> would not be satisfied with a policy that would still have their warring
> thwarted.

Yes ?
I list below those opposed to this policy, that you say are mostly
problematic user

    1. Ruhrjungy
    2. Tannin
    3. Anthony DiPierro
    4. Taku
    5. Wik
    6. Martin:
    7. Jamesday
    8. James F.
    9. Lirath Q. Pynnor
   10. Seth Ilys 20:13, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)
   11. Angela
   12. ugen64
   13. User:Anthere.

I agree there are problematic users here. Not only though.

> This should satisfy both those willing to stop editors like Wik, and
> those saying he is part of the project.
> This will sent him the signal "better behavior" -> "lighter punishment"
>
> This would also create a new class of users: "Explicitly Untrusted Users".
> Not a good idea IMHO. Might just drive users like lir to just regress into
> multiple personality mode.

Very true.
But, I prefer proposing something controversial in an attempt to get
things going on, perhaps raise new ideas, rather than them proceeding
toward a solution I disagree with.

> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen.


from_name: Martin Harper

body:
> at least consider the possibility of having an explicit bias for
> accepting cases referred by the Mediation Committee

We have precisely such a bias in our current [[wikipedia:arbitration
policy]], under "Jurisdiction". Does it need changing?

-Martin


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Jimbo's political theory

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>No, because what goes on in mediation, good or bad is inadmissable in
>arbitration. Posturing as "willing to mediate" will do you no good, nor will
>"piss on that phoney shit" do you any harm. The reason for this is that
>mediation is about actually trying to solve problems between users, not
>building a record to bash each other with.
>
>Fred
>
>>From: Ray Saintonge
>>
>>If either party refuses mediation, that fact should
>>prominently influence the work of the arbitrators.
>>
If a person has completely refused mediation, there is nothing that goos
on "in" mediation  to keep confidential.  I agree with your dexcription
of what mediation is about.

Ec


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki 1.2.0rc4 release candidate

body:
Changes from 1.2.0rc3:
* Fixed new bug that broke 'remember my password' logins
* Fixed text alignment for thumbnail images, enhanced recentchanges in
RTL languages
* $wgSitename auto-detection now includes port number if not running on
port 80
* Tightened up indexes on links tables to try to prevent corrupted
entries

https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=34373

Anyone using rc3 is encouraged to upgrade. (To fix the login bug alone,
you can copy in User.php and Setup.php from rc4 to your rc3
installation.)

If you're using MySQL 4.0, you should also update the linkscc table to
fix the index there. update.php will do this, or remove
LocalSettings.php and re-run the in-place installer. (Or manually run
maintenance/archives/patch-linkscc.sql.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20040314/91c9a5af/attachment.pgp>


subject: [Wikitech-l] some questions about old_table

body:
On Mar 14, 2004, at 17:50, Ivo K?thnig wrote:
> I played a little bit with the (german) old_table (from 20040305) and
> have
> some questions about it.
>
> 1. As I understand the first entry of each row, this is an id,
> incremented for
> each new row. since there are missing some of the numbers, I assume
> that this
> are rows, which was deleted. Is this right?

Correct.

> 2. There is a column timestamp and a column inverse timestamp. For
> what reason
> we need the inverse timestamp?

MySQL 3.x is unable to optimize a descending sort using a column index.
Adding an inverted column to index on dramatically sped up various
features such as page history and user contributions lists as the wikis
continued to grow in size.

On MySQL 4.x this is unnecessary, and we may remove the column from the
next major revision.

> There also seems to be an inconsistency. The entry with the id 494209
> (article
> about "Optik" in namespace 0 has timestamp "20031231041409" but inverse
> timestamp "80008783828360". May this is a new-year-bug? May this
> should be
> corrected manually?!

There was an old bug in page move that didn't properly update
inverse_timestamp. If you see any others incorrect, please make a list
and we'll fix them all...

Additionally, that inverse_timestamp is for the year 1999... there was
a very brief problem at one point where one of the web servers came up
with a dramatically incorrect clock setting and corrupted a number of
articles' dates. That may be an artifact of that incident.

> 3. Which namespace is represented by which of the numbers 0 till 9?

0: (article)
2: User:
4: Wikipedia:
6: Image:
8: MediaWiki:

The odd numbers are for the associated talk/discussion namespaces.

> 4. The column for the "user-comment" in the begining contains often
> '*' but
> later nothing. Was it just the behaviour of the old software to
> represent no
> comment by '*'?

Yes, UseModWiki puts a "*" as the default comment in the edit form.

> 5. The column for the "user_id" in the beginning contains just 0, even
> for
> well-known users. later (after conversion_script appears) the correct
> id is
> printed.

The conversion from UseModWiki is unable to set up user accounts, since
the mechanism for this is wildly different on UseMod than on MediaWiki.
Pre-conversion edits are thus marked without a user_id.

(UseModWiki records _sets of preferences_, not really user accounts.
Multiple "user id"s may have the same username, and there's no
authentication for the use of names.)

>  The column for the "user_name" has the same strange behaviour. It
> contains dns-names instead of IP-adresses. Was this the behaviour of
> the old
> software?

Yes.

> 6. The coulumn "old_flags" seems to contain nothing. (its almost
> always empty,
> but contains one/sometimes '0'). Whats the application of this column?
> What
> flags does it contain?

For a long time it was totally unused. Now it may contain "gzip" if
that revision's text is stored compressed; currently this is used only
on the English Wikipedia on a semi-experimental basis.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20040314/2dc821c5/attachment.pgp>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Document your features, please

references:
<Pine.LNX.4.33.0403131610370.17256-100000@joan.burling.com>
	<877jxno4jh.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>
	<c336f5$rtj$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Mar 14, 2004, at 19:03, Timwi wrote:
> Evan Prodromou wrote:
>> So, it's not Unix-likes but the Web that doesn't allow spaces. You're
>> not supposed to put spaces in an URL. (Some browsers will retrieve an
>> URL with spaces in it, but you're still not _supposed_ to.)
>
> No browser will retrieve a URL with a space in it. It will either
> replace it with "+" or "%20". And in fact, every browsers should
> really be doing that, because this is the standard way of encoding
> characters that are normally not allowed in URLs.

For those in the audience who may not be familiar with HTTP: when you
fetch a page over HTTP, you open a channel to the server and then ask
it like this:

GET /wiki/Some_page HTTP/1.1
Host: en.wikipedia.org

If you tried to put a raw space in there, you'd produce an invalid
request:

GET /wiki/Some page HTTP/1.1
Host: en.wikipedia.org

Apache will reject it with a '400 Bad Request' error, while Squid seems
to try to take out the spaces and pass on a "fixed" URL.

Netscape 4.x will actually produce that invalid request when told to
follow a URL with a raw space in it. Most current browsers though know
that you didn't _mean_ to ask for a space, and before sending it on to
the server will automatically transform the requested URL with the
escape sequence for space, %20:

GET /wiki/Some%20page HTTP/1.1
Host: en.wikipedia.org

A URL that's meant to contain an embedded space should use the %20 to
begin with, and our wiki does escape the URLs it uses. (Besides which
we replace spaces in titles with underscores for historical
compatibility and attractiveness compared to "%20".)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20040314/6193fcd6/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Rob Hooft

subject:
upload.py and spaces (Was: Re: [pyWikipediaBot-users] Re: [Wikitech-l]
	Re: Document your features, please)

references:
<87n06nxrhf.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>	<c2qthh$nvr$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<shad2m3e8k.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>	<c2t131$for$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<sh3c8czdlk.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>	<c300b8$ah3$2@sea.gmane.org>
	<shptbfyh1l.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>	<shhdwryeft.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<3CA6CCF6-7599-11D8-9160-000A95DAA284@pobox.com>

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> [CC'd to pywikipediabot-users list]
>
> On Mar 14, 2004, at 01:18, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
>
>> For some reason, uploading "grossgruendlach rathaus kirchturmsonnenuhr v
>> s.jpg" to the german WP via a moderately modified version of
>> pywikipedia/upload.py didn't work.  This filename worked:
>> grossgruendlach-rathaus-kirchturmsonnenuhr-v-s.jpg.
>
>
> When given spaces, the upload form stops to warn you that it's changing
> the filename and requires a confirmation. (Which is kind of annoying.) I
> haven't checked, but the bot may not handle that case.

This is indeed something I had not encountered yet, it should handle it now.

Rob

--
Rob W.W. Hooft  ||  rob at hooft.net  ||  http://www.hooft.net/people/rob/


body:
Anthere wrote:

> But Erik, you are trying to have edit wars solution be based uniquely
> on 2 or 3 wik-like people, while there are many other very regular and
> sometimes very respected contributors, who actually sometimes get into
> edit war and reversion war themselves in the heat of the moment.

Of course.  And these are now and will always be a minority.  The
interminable debates over ways to deal with these people are completely
out of proportion to their importance, and are far more harmful than
what this handful could ever be.  The Paris Commune was overrun because
the communards did not know when to stop debating among themselves.

I can support something like the three revert concept as a guideline,
but certainly not as a rule, and even less as an enforceable rule.  We
need to begin trusting users again.  That was a key factor in
Wikipedia's growth.   If Wik or some other identified person is a
persistent problem user then let's deal with it without inventing more
new rules to plague the average user.  The bad characters will more
likely than not be multiply offensive, and decisons can be based on
weighing a variety of factors rather than literal rules.

Once an understanding has been reached, someone with the authority needs
to accept the responsibilities for following through.

Ec


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Angela wrote:
>
>>The necessity to go through the additional stage of
>>voting on acceptance of cases seems a waste of time if
>>the mediators have already decided that arbitration is
>>the best route for the person they are referring. I'm
>>not saying they can't veto the referral if they really
>>think that's best, but couldn't the default be
>>acceptance of cases we refer to them rather than the
>>insistence of a vote every time?
>>
>
>We need a way to stem the flood - we are *not* supermen that have no lives
>outside of arbitration. These cases take a good deal of time so we need a way
>to help regulate the process and also weed out items that are no longer
>pressing, or could be handled in lower steps. If needed, we could eventually
>recruit more arbitrators in order to better distribute the work load.
>
>But being hasty will only result in the AC becoming a rubber stamping body for
>bans. I also fear that mobs of users could start ganging up on merely unpopular
>users. It would be fairly easy to game the system in that case - the mob would
>make unreasonable demands to push the issue through the process (got hemlock?).
>We need a check on that as well.
>
Absolutely.  And if you think you're busy now wait until the
"quick-poll" results start sending mor things your way.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] A Plan For Van(dalism)

body:
So, I just installed the CRM114 Markovian spam filtering software:

    http://crm114.sourceforge.net/

The whole thing is based on Bayesian filtering, which is just a way to
make very dumb software make really smart decisions. With sufficient
training, a very simple piece of software can make very accurate
distinctions between spam and non-spam email messages. See Paul
Graham's famous "A Plan for Spam" about this:

    http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html

The CRM114 stuff is Markovian, which means it's _even_dumber_ than
Bayesian stuff, and makes _even_smarter_ decisions. More or less.

Anyways, one thing that's mentioned on the crm114 page is that folks
use the same technology for different kinds of text sorting. Like, for
system administrators, they can sort log file entries into ones
they're interested in and ones they're not.

And I was thinking: you know, it'd be nice to be able to flag
acceptable and problematic articles in MediaWiki Web sites. Like, say,
an admin sees some vandalism going on, and goes to fix it. One of the
checkmarks on saving is "Vandalism fix" or some such. This would tag
the previous version as... ungood. Something.

And then after a while the software gets good at understanding what's
ungood and what's not. And there could be a tracking page to say,
"These seem to be pages in an ungood state." And it would be easier to
find those and fix 'em.

~ESP

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


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Quickpolls - solving the edit war problem

body:
Please look at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Quickpolls

It is a proposed polling system for backing up sysop and developer
decisions in cases like 24 hour bans or emergency desysoppings. Not a
voting system per se but more a way to confirm that the community is
behind a certain action before it is taken. 80% approval is needed for any
quickpoll.

There's a poll on the talk page (of course!) on whether we want to use
this scheme, and what could be done to improve it.

In light of this, please also reconsider your vote on the 24 hour policy.

Contrary to Martin's spamming policy, I'm also putting a notice on the
talk pages of those who voted against that policy (that seems to be the
best way to deal with votes where the options have changed).

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Quickpolls - solving the edit war problem

body:
Erik Moeller a ?crit:
> Please look at
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Quickpolls
>
> It is a proposed polling system for backing up sysop and developer
> decisions in cases like 24 hour bans or emergency desysoppings. Not a
> voting system per se but more a way to confirm that the community is
> behind a certain action before it is taken. 80% approval is needed for any
> quickpoll.
>
> There's a poll on the talk page (of course!) on whether we want to use
> this scheme, and what could be done to improve it.
>
> In light of this, please also reconsider your vote on the 24 hour policy.
>
> Contrary to Martin's spamming policy, I'm also putting a notice on the
> talk pages of those who voted against that policy (that seems to be the
> best way to deal with votes where the options have changed).

I am glad you did. I do not see this as spam, nor did I see this other
person attempt to have us sent press release as spam either. I, but
perhaps others as well, do not follow well, the usual canal of
information that may be the pump. as long as "adverstisement" does not
inflate and is direct and relevant request, it is not spam.


body:
On Mar 14, 2004, at 23:20, Ivo K?thnig wrote:
> That was the only point in that cur_old where a timestamp does not
> match
> with the inverse timestamp. I addionally checked if there is a
> timestamp
> which is older than the first one (200105xxxx). But there was none.

Okay, I've fixed it. Thanks for the notice!

> There is another thing I do not understand. I assumed that the
> timestamps
> should be sorted. Nearly that is true. But often there are some
> timestamps
> which are much smaller (more than month!) than the others around?
> Whats the
> reason for that?

Rows aren't necessarily inserted in chronological order, mainly for two
reasons: conversion from UseModWiki was alphabetical by page name (so a
page written later may be recorded before a page written earlier), and
data for articles which are deleted and subsequently undeleted are
re-inserted with new row id numbers.

>> Yes, UseModWiki puts a "*" as the default comment in the edit form.
>
> Could'n we change that? It should be easy to change all "*" appearing
> before
> the change to the new software. Or is there a good reason for don't
> doing
> that.

I can't think of any reason to change it. What's wrong with leaving
them as they are?

> Since the username should be almost always the same before the
> conversion and
> after it we could change each old id (set to zero know) to the new id
> after the change to the new software. Since we should have a list of
> all
> user-ids and the coresponding user_names we could change all 0-id
> before
> convertion to the new id if the user_name matches?!

That could be done, yes.

> [old_flags]
> Ok, but it even contains 68 times "0" in the german old_cur and is
> empty
> in all others. Could that zeros be changed to ""?

There's no harm in the "0", it doesn't interfere with anything.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20040314/58a97eb2/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Timwi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia Goings-on

body:
Hi,

I just want to say a Very Big Thanks? to Angela for doing the summary of
all the happenings on the mailing lists at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Goings-on/March_7%2C_2004. You're
my hero!

Thanks!
Timwi


body:
Ec wrote:
>I can support something like the three revert concept
>as a guideline, but certainly not as a rule, and even
>less as an enforceable rule.

Last time I checked the 3-revert rule had well over 80% support from a
wide-ranging and large group of Wikipedians. That makes it a policy here in
wikiland.

What there is, is a good deal of disagreement on how to enforce this policy.

Martin's idea for protecting the version a 3-revert-rule-breaking edit warrior
does not like seems to be a reasonable extension of our current protection
guidelines (and are now a part of those guidelines thanks to Jimbo's support
for the idea).

I would like to add a three-strike policy on top of that: if a user breaks the
3-revert rule 3 times or more in a certain time-frame, then that user gets a 24
hour time out (which could get longer for repeatedly striking out until a
certain number is reached - then it is off the arbitration committee).

Sadly, we are not a small little community anymore where informal means of
running the shop could do just fine. We need clear rules and clear ways to
enforce those rules.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Ivo Köthnig

body:
Hello,

I played a little bit with the (german) old_table (from 20040305) and have
some questions about it.

1. As I understand the first entry of each row, this is an id, incremented for
each new row. since there are missing some of the numbers, I assume that this
are rows, which was deleted. Is this right?

2. There is a column timestamp and a column inverse timestamp. For what reason
we need the inverse timestamp?

There also seems to be an inconsistency. The entry with the id 494209 (article
about "Optik" in namespace 0 has timestamp "20031231041409" but inverse
timestamp "80008783828360". May this is a new-year-bug? May this should be
corrected manually?!

3. Which namespace is represented by which of the numbers 0 till 9?

4. The column for the "user-comment" in the begining contains often '*' but
later nothing. Was it just the behaviour of the old software to represent no
comment by '*'?

5. The column for the "user_id" in the beginning contains just 0, even for
well-known users. later (after conversion_script appears) the correct id is
printed. The column for the "user_name" has the same strange behaviour. It
contains dns-names instead of IP-adresses. Was this the behaviour of the old
software?

6. The coulumn "old_flags" seems to contain nothing. (its almost always empty,
but contains one/sometimes '0'). Whats the application of this column? What
flags does it contain?

--Ivo K?thnig


body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:

> So, it's not Unix-likes but the Web that doesn't allow spaces. You're
> not supposed to put spaces in an URL. (Some browsers will retrieve an
> URL with spaces in it, but you're still not _supposed_ to.)

No browser will retrieve a URL with a space in it. It will either
replace it with "+" or "%20". And in fact, every browsers should really
be doing that, because this is the standard way of encoding characters
that are normally not allowed in URLs.

Timwi


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: upload.py and spaces

references:
<87n06nxrhf.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>
	<c2qthh$nvr$1@sea.gmane.org> <shad2m3e8k.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<c2t131$for$1@sea.gmane.org> <sh3c8czdlk.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<c300b8$ah3$2@sea.gmane.org> <shptbfyh1l.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<shhdwryeft.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<3CA6CCF6-7599-11D8-9160-000A95DAA284@pobox.com>
	<4054BC35.60605@hooft.net>

body:
Rob Hooft <rob at hooft.net> writes:

> This is indeed something I had not encountered yet, it should handle it now.

Thanks, now it is working.

I added support for uploading a bunch of images: upload.py will read
filenames and descriptions from a file name job.txt, every record is
finished with the marker -=- .  My code isn't generic enough to be
useful, I guess:

def main():
    import urllib,os
    fn = "job.txt"
    start = 1
    text = ''
    if os.path.exists(fn):
        f=open(fn)
        for line in f.readlines():
            if line == "-=-\n":

                file = urllib.urlopen(img)
                contents = file.read()
                file.close()
                # Isolate the pure name
                if '/' in img:
                    img = img.split('/')[-1]

                if '\\' in fn:
                    img = img.split('\\')[-1]
                print "The filename on wikipedia will default to:",img
                # Wikipedia doesn't allow spaces in the file name.
                # Replace them here to avoid an extra confirmation form
                img = img.replace(' ', '_')

                description = text

                data = post_multipart(wikipedia.langs[wikipedia.mylang],
                                      uploadaddr,
                                      (('wpUploadDescription', description),
                                       ('wpUploadAffirm', '1'),
                                       ('wpUpload','upload bestand')),
                                      (('wpUploadFile',img,contents),)
                                      )

                start = 1
                text = ''
                continue

            if start:
                img = line
                start = False
                continue

            text = text + line

    return fn

And job.txt looks this way:

/path/to/images/2003-11-16/grossgruendlach schloss ansicht v nw.jpg
;Beschreibung: [[Gro?gr?ndlach]], stadtteil von [[N?rnberg]], schlo?, ansicht von wn (2003-11-16).
;Quelle: Fotographie 2003-11-16
;Fotograph: --~~~
;Copyright Status:   [[GNU Freie Dokumentationslizenz]]

Im hintergrund die kirche.

Weitere bilder dieses objekts:
[[:bild:grossgruendlach schloss ansicht v so.jpg]]

-=-

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


from_name: Nick Pisarro

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: <red>tags</red>; and $wgUseDatabaseMessages	question

references:
<200403131038.32045.smolensk@eunet.yu> <c2v8h4$pig$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<shk71ozqe2.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>

body:
Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org> writes:
>Let's stop adding cryptic layout/markup commands; go for XML and
>contributors can use their XML editors or browser plugins.  etc. pp.

You're forgetting who the wikipedia user base is. XML really isn't meant
to be edited and used by humans despite its ASCII syntax, it is a program
to program interface. HTML isn't much better. The built-in XML editors of
browsers are terrible. All but XML mavens do not have other XML tools
readily available.

The whole idea of the wiki markup is to provide an easy markup that is not
too intimidating to non-technical people. Even the wiki markup is very
intimidating to technophobes who are otherwise highly intelligent people.
So a lot of thought should go into any additions to the wiki markup before
being implemented.

Opinion: XML is one of the worst "languages" to code in and read that I
have personally encountered in my 42 years of writing software. Don't
confuse regularity with ease of use. An extreme example is XSLT which uses
XML format. Descriptions written in it are almost totally undecipherable
except by deep analysis.

Nick Pisarro


subject: [Wikitech-l] Error at en.wikipedia.org

body:
Login successful

>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

 A database query syntax error has occurred. This could be because of an
illegal search query (see [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Searching ]Searching Wikipedia), or
it may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query
was:

 UPDATE user SET user_name= 'Nick Pisarro, Jr.', user_password=
'b363d2206727ebb2b2894e1b40ee5085', user_newpassword= '', user_email=
'nickp at aperture.com', user_options= 'quickbar=2 underline=1 hover=1
cols=80 rows=25 searchlimit=20 contextlines=5 contextchars=50 skin=0
math=1 rcdays=7 rclimit=50 highlightbroken=1 stubthreshold=0
previewontop=1 editsection=0 editsectiononrightclick=0 showtoc=1
showtoolbar=1 date=1 searchNs-1=0 searchNs0=1 searchNs1=0 searchNs2=0
searchNs3=0 searchNs4=1 searchNs5=0 searchNs6=0 searchNs7=0
rememberpassword=0 nickname=NickP timecorrection=-5:00 searchNs8=0
searchNs9=0 disablemail=0 justify=1 hideminor=0 usenewrc=1
numberheadings=0 editondblclick=0 editwidth=0 watchdefault=0
minordefault=0 nocache=0', user_rights= '', user_touched= '20040315115339'
WHERE user_id=35903

from within function "User::saveSettings". MySQL returned error "3: Error
writing file './suda-bin.069' (Errcode: 28)".

-------------------------------

MediaWiki: 1.2.0rc3
 [ http://www.php.net/ ]PHP: 4.3.4
 [ http://www.mysql.com/ ]MySQL: 4.0.17-standard-log

I only got this error once. When I logged in again, I didn't get any error.

Nick Pisarro


body:
> On MySQL 4.x this is unnecessary, and we may remove the column from the
> next major revision.
>
> > There also seems to be an inconsistency. The entry with the id 494209
> > (article
> > about "Optik" in namespace 0 has timestamp "20031231041409" but inverse
> > timestamp "80008783828360". May this is a new-year-bug? May this
> > should be
> > corrected manually?!
>
> There was an old bug in page move that didn't properly update
> inverse_timestamp. If you see any others incorrect, please make a list
> and we'll fix them all...
>
> Additionally, that inverse_timestamp is for the year 1999... there was
> a very brief problem at one point where one of the web servers came up
> with a dramatically incorrect clock setting and corrupted a number of
> articles' dates. That may be an artifact of that incident.

That was the only point in that cur_old where a timestamp does not match
with the inverse timestamp. I addionally checked if there is a timestamp
which is older than the first one (200105xxxx). But there was none.

There is another thing I do not understand. I assumed that the timestamps
should be sorted. Nearly that is true. But often there are some timestamps
which are much smaller (more than month!) than the others around? Whats the
reason for that?

> 0: (article)
> 2: User:
> 4: Wikipedia:
> 6: Image:
> 8: MediaWiki:
>
> The odd numbers are for the associated talk/discussion namespaces.

Thanks!

> Yes, UseModWiki puts a "*" as the default comment in the edit form.

Could'n we change that? It should be easy to change all "*" appearing before
the change to the new software. Or is there a good reason for don't doing
that.

> > 5. The column for the "user_id" in the beginning contains just 0, even
> > for
> > well-known users. later (after conversion_script appears) the correct
> > id is
> > printed.
>
> The conversion from UseModWiki is unable to set up user accounts, since
> the mechanism for this is wildly different on UseMod than on MediaWiki.
> Pre-conversion edits are thus marked without a user_id.
>
> (UseModWiki records _sets of preferences_, not really user accounts.
> Multiple "user id"s may have the same username, and there's no
> authentication for the use of names.)

Since the username should be almost always the same before the conversion and
after it we could change each old id (set to zero know) to the new id
after the change to the new software. Since we should have a list of all
user-ids and the coresponding user_names we could change all 0-id before
convertion to the new id if the user_name matches?!

> > 6. The coulumn "old_flags" seems to contain nothing. (its almost
> > always empty,
> > but contains one/sometimes '0'). Whats the application of this column?
> > What
> > flags does it contain?
>
> For a long time it was totally unused. Now it may contain "gzip" if
> that revision's text is stored compressed; currently this is used only
> on the English Wikipedia on a semi-experimental basis.

Ok, but it even contains 68 times "0" in the german old_cur and is empty
in all others. Could that zeros be changed to ""?

--Ivo K?thnig


from_name: The Centerfielder

subject: [Wikitech-l] Prefixing MySQL table names

body:
Has there been any discussion of prefixing the MySQL table names
to avoid table name collision for those who only have access to
one MySQL database and use other MySQL applications?

For example, Moveable Type uses "mt_", pMachine uses "pm_", and
they also allow one to choose an installation-defined prefix.

I'm new to the list, and did a quick search on the nntp gateway,
and couldn't find this question asked, but it may have been
previously discussed.

thanks


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [webmaster@theroyalhouseofportugal.org: a problem about
	license violation]

body:
Apparently this was not a copyright infringement, since the webmaster of
the site in question says it's o.k.  That's how I read this, anyway, but
someone should follow up?

----- Forwarded message from Royal House of Portugal <webmaster at theroyalhouseofportugal.org> -----

From: "Royal House of Portugal" <webmaster at theroyalhouseofportugal.org>
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 18:23:39 +0100
To: <jwales at bomis.com>
Subject: a problem about license violation

Dear Mr. Jimmy Wales,

I'm the webmaster of the sites www.realcasaportuguesa.org , www.theroyalhouseofportugal.org , www.iird.org, www.museum-rhp.org and I'm the owner of the all documents and materials in these sites.

I have written in the Wikipedia's links named Maria Pia; House of Bragan?a and Duca of Bragan?a but the system has notified me a GFDL license violation. (one of the links is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Braganza)

Please to explain me the resolution to resolve this problem.

Regards

Webmaster of The Royal House of Portugal
----- End forwarded message -----