from_name: Andrew Dunbar

body:
 --- cookfire <cookfire at softhome.net> wrote:
> Gerard.Meijssen schreef:
>
> >Hoi,
> >I have a 8878 big botanical glossary that I want to
> >add to the wiktionary. I already have asked Andre
> >Engels to help me out with preparing the upload and
> >helping me out with doing things more easily aided
> >by programs.
> >
> >However some words are capitalised and some are not
> >as they should be. I do not want to upload all
these
> >words before the capitalisation has been turned off
> >for nl:wiktionary. It is just to much work to have
> >it corrected at a later date.
> >
> >At this moment the slim majority that prevents
> >en:wiktionary to forego first letter capitalisation
> >are some IP-numbers that have it for the Nayes.
This
> >"democratic" process prevents both nl:wiktionary
and
> >de:wiktionary from having the requested
> >capitalisation turned off. In the discussions on
en:
> >it is stated that each project has the choise to
> >decide on this issue. This is however not the case
> >as the programmers want to have all wiktionaries
the
> >same way.
> >
> >In order to have some more discussion on the
> >subject, I send this message both to the wiktionary
> >and wikitech list. I also send it to Jimbo Wales as
> >he does not monitor the wiktionary list afaik. (I
> >spoke with him on sunday..). Please, let us discuss
> >this issue. The nl:wiktionary is on 3123 words, we
> >will already have a big job to get things working
> >again after the transfer. With time this will only
> >increase and again, I will not upload the glossary
> >and have to do these eventually as well.
> >
> >Questions:
> >*How are we goint to resolve this issue?
> >*How can we turn capitalisation off, preferably in
> >a fased way?
> >*Are there ways to help out with programs?
> >*How long are we going to discuss this issue before
> >coming to a workable decision. NB not only for the
> >wiktionaries but also the system maintenance?
> >
> >Thanks,
> >    GerardM
> >
> >
> I would also like to see things moving regarding
> capitalisation. Most of the regular contributors on
> the English Wiktionary are in favor of switching off
> the first letter capitalisation for the
> Wiktionaries. As far as the contributors of the
> English Wiktionary are concerned, they cannot make
> decisions that impact other Wiktionaries, or at
> least it shouldn't be this way. It is unfortunate
> that it does.
>
> So let's finally get things right and switch off
> capitalisation. The people that have contributed to
> the English Wiktionary from the beginning have been
> wanting to ask this from the beginning as well. We
> were told that we were going to have to make do with
> software as it was written for the encyclopedia
> though, so we did. Now that it became possible, it
> should also be done.

I and a couple of the real developers discussed the
various issues and proposed techniques for improving
the capitalisation of Wiki titles as requested by the
various "factions" (: including what non-English
Wiktionaries or at least some of their vocal users
would like.

I have already experimented with the codebase to come
at this problem in various ways, and Jamesday posted a
summary of what we talked about on IRC at
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/case-sensitivity_vote

We would like to hear feedback and clarifications
from everybody with your various viewpoints in this
talk page please.

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

> Jo
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>

=====
http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl    http://www.abisource.com

___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun!  http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


list: wiktionary-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: cookfire

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] Adding a botanical glossary and first
	letter	capitalisation

body:
Gerard.Meijssen schreef:

>Hoi,
>I have a 8878 big botanical glossary that I want to add to the wiktionary. I already have asked Andre Engels to help me out with preparing the upload and helping me out with doing things more easily aided by programs.
>
>However some words are capitalised and some are not as they should be. I do not want to upload all these words before the capitalisation has been turned off for nl:wiktionary. It is just to much work to have it corrected at a later date.
>
>At this moment the slim majority that prevents en:wiktionary to forego first letter capitalisation are some IP-numbers that have it for the Nayes. This "democratic" process prevents both nl:wiktionary and de:wiktionary from having the requested capitalisation turned off. In the discussions on en: it is stated that each project has the choise to decide on this issue. This is however not the case as the programmers want to have all wiktionaries the same way.
>
>In order to have some more discussion on the subject, I send this message both to the wiktionary and wikitech list. I also send it to Jimbo Wales as he does not monitor the wiktionary list afaik. (I spoke with him on sunday..). Please, let us discuss this issue. The nl:wiktionary is on 3123 words, we will already have a big job to get things working again after the transfer. With time this will only increase and again, I will not upload the glossary and have to do these eventually as well.
>
>Questions:
>*How are we goint to resolve this issue?
>*How can we turn capitalisation off, preferably in a fased way?
>*Are there ways to help out with programs?
>*How long are we going to discuss this issue before coming to a workable decision. NB not only for the wiktionaries but also the system maintenance?
>
>Thanks,
>    GerardM
>
>
I would also like to see things moving regarding capitalisation. Most of
the regular contributors on the English Wiktionary are in favor of
switching off the first letter capitalisation for the Wiktionaries. As
far as the contributors of the English Wiktionary are concerned, they
cannot make decisions that impact other Wiktionaries, or at least it
shouldn't be this way. It is unfortunate that it does.

So let's finally get things right and switch off capitalisation. The
people that have contributed to the English Wiktionary from the
beginning have been wanting to ask this from the beginning as well. We
were told that we were going to have to make do with software as it was
written for the encyclopedia though, so we did. Now that it became
possible, it should also be done.

Jo


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Edward Peschko

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: new sister project (off of home page) redux

body:
>
> Firstly, with regards to objections to using Wikipedia for your project, see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Replies

well, you've got to realize that they primarily aren't my objections, but
objections of researchers that I've talked to in sounding out about doing this.
Since they have been working in research and publishing pretty much all their
lives, I thought it wise to give them credence.

I think that we can have two possible attitudes to this. One, we can say -
'no, you're wrong, look it up here'.

Two, we can say - 'hey look you've got a point. Wiki's never been used for
collaborative research and publishing before. why not acknowlege this,
set up a new separate forum to try it and you can give us feedback on
what works and what doesn't.'

Personally, what I'm aiming for is two. If they find out that they're fears were
really unfounded, we'll find that out too. But I doubt that'll be the case - just
looking at mediawiki I don't see it being completely suited to the task for the
reasons I mentioned in the last email, as well as those below.

> #1 - Just copy and paste the text of a page you think is good enough

... and go through the headaches of taking yet another input source and merging
it on an ongoing basis with the already revision addled manuscript that they have when
passing it around to other collaborators? That's pretty much the last thing they want
to do.

I think you assume that its easy to get text out of a proprietary document that has
revisions turned on and format it for the web and submit it there via wiki. This isn't so.
They have their hands full just dealing with bugs in word.

The one chance that wiki has is to make it far simpler to collaborate online than it
is to collaborate via email. Its strength is to *replace* the current bug-ridden system
with something new. And that's where people would listen.

> #2 - you can linkto/reference old versions of a page, which are guaranteed not
>      to change.

good point - what's the syntax for this?

> What do you mean by #4?

    1) no way to input data for graphs

    2) no set way to see how close a page is to publication (rating/editorial system)

    3) no way to specify 'questions' - topics plus hints on how the topic
       should be answered.

    4) no simple way to guarantee that you have your own namespace and hence
       don't collide with other topics.

In addition, the ability to poll and collect information by form would be helpful,
as well as the ability to moderate submissions.

Anyway, like I said IMO the best way to do this would be to make a new sister project,
where we were free to experiment.

And the best, best thing possible would be if mediawiki was modular enough that
more than one frontend for editing/publishing could be written in terms of it -
that would save a lot of headaches when it comes to writing the wiki that is a word
replacement and actually turns wiki content into publishing material (PDFS, etc).

Ed


list: wikien-l

from_name: Rick

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Dartmouth follies

body:
Please don't post ad hominem attacks on the mailing list.

RickK

Chris Wood <standsongrace at hotmail.com> wrote:
"Andrew Lih" wrote in
message news:2ed171fb040824224727bf7e0c at mail.gmail.com...

> Pessimistic deletionist - may be good sometime, but delete it now, and
> keep only when good
> Absolute deletionist - it's not "encyclopediac", get rid of it

The deletionist attitudes are pretty dumb - they don't give articles the
chance to become good.

--
- Chris Wood
http://grace.2ya.com/
New Zealand

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

---------------------------------
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Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now.


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Dartmouth follies

body:
Rick stated for the record:

> Please don't post ad hominem attacks on the mailing list.
>
> RickK
>
> Chris Wood <standsongrace at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> The deletionist attitudes are pretty dumb - they don't give articles the
> chance to become good.

He's very specifically attacking an attitude, not a person.

--
  Sean Barrett     | The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes
  sean at epoptic.com | crowds, thrives on crossbreeding and grows
                   | better for being stepped on. --Ursula K. LeGuin


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Access to the Internet (was: Articles like "Violence
	against Israelis")

body:
Christiaan claimed:

> I don't know about lists, but what you mention is an interesting
> problem, and not just for Wikipedia, but for all societies in
> regard to
> the internet. Our economic system, and the plight of people
> such as the
> Palestinians, means that access too and creation of
> information on the
> internet is an extremely unequal affair.

This is incorrect, as far as societies that don't censor Internet access
go. Now, maybe in Islamic countries it's hard to get online due to
national restrictions. But in every part of the English-speaking world
that is not a problem.

Also, the cost barrier is much lower than you may realize: 4 hours of
minimum wage labor will pay for one month of Internet service, in the
US, for example. If someone has 30 hours a week of free time, okay,
maybe if he's wealthy it only costs him 30 to 60 minutes of labor time
to pay for Internet, and he can spend the other 29 hours surfing or
(better yet) writing Wikipedia articles; while the other guy has only 26
hours. That's only a 12% advantage: admittedly unequal, but not
extremely so. More like moderately or slightly...

If people have plights, and you want to write about it for Wikipedia,
please do so. Not having a homeland is a plight, so you can write about
Kurds as well as Palestinians. Not having a safe place to live is a
plight, so you can write about any of 2 or 3 dozen insurgencies and/or
civil wars dragging in recent decades. Not having a country that's free
from the threat of foreign invasion is a plight, so you can write about
Taiwan and Israel, et al. Not having freedom of religion or the right to
emigrate is a plight, so you can write about Cuba, North Korea, et al.

There are lots of plights, and Wikipedia has LOTS of disk space. Go to
it!

Ed Poor
Crotchety old middle-aged Wikipedian


subject:
[WikiEN-l] So write an article about it (was: Anent Dartmouth,
	Again)

body:
Christiaan complained:

> Just to clarify, I never argued that these people died and suffered
> _because_ of these ideals. My argument is that our culture has
> extensively used and abused such ideals simply to make its membership
> feel good about itself when collectively implementing the opposite
> (imperialism, intolerance of other economic models, war, etc.).
> Cognitive dissonance often being the outcome when actuality comes to
> light.

If you think Western Civilization has not lived up to its ideals, please
write a Wikipedia article comparing and contrasting Western ideals with
Western actions. I am not suggesting you do original research, but that
you summarize the extensive body of writings on this very topic. You
could start with Chomsky, easily the best known critic of the West. But
don't forget Toynbee (you wouldn't want to write a biased, unbalanced
article, would you?)

Along the same lines, if you interested in non-Western civilizations,
you might want to do a similar compare and contrast for East Asian,
Hindu, Islamic or other great civilizations. How well do these live up
to their own ideals (or compare to Western ideals, for that matter?)

This project ought to keep you busy, and I'd be happy to help.

Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] Definition of ad hominem

body:
Rick answered Chris:

> > The deletionist attitudes are pretty dumb - they don't give
> > articles the chance to become good.
>
> Please don't post ad hominem attacks on the mailing list.

But Chris was not making an ad hominem argument, nor was he making a
personal remark. He was calling an idea or practice "dumb", and that is
permitted by the rules of this mailing list.

Now, if he had said that trolls like Michael or Wik advocate
deletionism, so it must be dumb -- that would be an ad hominem argument,
and therefore fallacious (although not against the list rules).

Or, if he had said that Chris or I was dumb, because we advocate
deletionism, that would be a personal remark -- and not permitted on
this list.

Pedantically,

Ed Poor
List Admin Emeritus     <-------- and keeper of the Flame


from_name: Timwi

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: bugs: after actions such as "E-mail this user" :
 wiki should return to last relevant page, not to Main_Page

body:
Thomas Gries wrote:

> * after having sent an "E-Mail this user" an acknowledgment page appears
> and returns to Main_page
> * However, it is proposed to automatically return to last relevant page
> (i.e. the page of User_X) instead

This should be easy to do.

> * After deleting a page (as Admin), the wiki returns to the Main_Page
> * It is suggested to return to the previous relevant page (in this case,
> the page visited _before_ the now-deleted page)

This, however, is pretty much impossible, except perhaps by relying on
the HTTP referer header, and passing its contents to the delete screen.
That would be horrendous (IMHO).

Timwi


from_name: Christiaan Briggs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Articles like "Violence against Israelis"

body:
On 30 Aug 2004, at 2:14 pm, zero 0000 wrote:

> The reason these are not listed in Wikipedia is that there is nobody
> with the dedication and time to match the efforts of Lance6Wins and
> MathKnight.
> (Actually, such a person or persons would need several times as much
> dedication because several times as many Palestinians are killed as
> Israelis.)

I don't know about lists, but what you mention is an interesting
problem, and not just for Wikipedia, but for all societies in regard to
the internet. Our economic system, and the plight of people such as the
Palestinians, means that access too and creation of information on the
internet is an extremely unequal affair.

Christiaan


from_name: Tim Starling

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Questions: How to bulk-copy/clone
 MediaWiki:namespace pages from Wiki A to Wiki B (same server)

body:
Thomas Gries wrote:
> (1) Is there a simple way to bulk copy (clone) the whole
> MediaWiki:namespace from one wiki to another wiki (on the same server) ?

Yes, there's maintenance/dumpMessages.php. Pass the resulting file as a
parameter to maintenance/rebuildMessages.php. The other option is to use
SQL, e.g. SELECT INTO OUTFILE.

> (2) Is there a simply way to extract let's say five MediaWiki:pages so
> that I can put it together with a patch into the CVS ?
> In my case, the coming e-mail notification patch for 1.3.2 (see my
> recent (pre)documentation pages on the MetaWiki) uses  a couple of
> MediaWiki:namespace pages for composing the notification mails and other
> purposes and I want to publish these important pages together with the
> program patch in one "package".
>
> But I don't know, how.

Language.php is the canonical location for message text, not the
MediaWiki namespace. The namespace will be automatically initialised
from the language file by the installer, for new wikis. Copy your
default message text into Language.php and create a patch in the usual way.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [WikiEN-l] Anet Dartmouth, Again

body:
On 28 Aug 2004, at 1:20 am, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Christiaan Briggs wrote:
>
>> On 27 Aug 2004, at 10:40 pm, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>
>>> Western Civilization to me really relates to Western Europe plus key
>>> members of its former colonial empires.  It does promote certain
>>> ideals, but that does not mean that it has been uniformly successful
>>> in implementing those ideals.  This distinction is difficult for the
>>> person who has not yet grasped the concept of irony.
>>
>> Actually this distinction was part of my argument. You seem to miss
>> the point that the evidence (the millions who have died and suffered)
>> suggests these ideals to be not much more than propaganda in a system
>> that has historically implemented the opposite of such ideals.
>
> This argument is based on a distorted time scale.  I would give those
> who developed the ideals the benefit of the doubt.  You are committing
> the logical fallacy of "post hoc ergo propter hoc".  Those millions
> did not die and suffer because of the ideals, but because of the
> actions of people who purported to support them.  Engaging in a
> propaganda campaign that claims to be founded on those ideals does not
> imply that our propagandists believe and practise them.

Just to clarify, I never argued that these people died and suffered
_because_ of these ideals. My argument is that our culture has
extensively used and abused such ideals simply to make its membership
feel good about itself when collectively implementing the opposite
(imperialism, intolerance of other economic models, war, etc.).
Cognitive dissonance often being the outcome when actuality comes to
light.

Christiaan


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [WikiEN-l] Calling attention to "broken" articles

body:
It's a nice idea.

On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:44:44 -0700, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> At 12:32 PM 8/25/2004 -0400, Delirium wrote:
> >I think this is definitely true, and not just because people misperceive
> >that they have to act now.  Things get caught on recent changes and new
> >articles, but if they don't get caught there, they often essentially never
> >get caught.  When using the "random pages" feature (as I do quite a bit),
> >I've run into complete junk, sometimes outright vandalism (like "bob is
> >gay") that has been there since _2002_.
> >
> >Cleanup is supposed to address some of this problem, but I'm not qualified
> >to say whether it's worked or not.
>
> Here's an idea; how about adding a "summon editor attention" link or button
> that places the article into a page similar to recentchanges? This way
> people who can't or won't fix an article's problems can still very easily
> get it noticed by others who might, without all the hassle of going to the
> Cleanup page and editing it. This'd be a really quick and dirty way of
> saying "hey, I found something that looks broken!", and if it's easy enough
> it might even get used by anonymous browsers who otherwise wouldn't bother
> to contribute to Wikipedia at all. One shouldn't even need to type in a
> reason why attention is being called, since in theory this is for pointing
> out obvious stuff.
>
> I suppose it could be abused by spamming the "recentattention" queue with
> articles that don't actually need it, but it'd take a pretty dedicated
> abuser to make recentattention flood faster than recentchanges does. :)
> Since clicking the link doesn't actually do anything to the article, and
> stuff on recentattention would drop off on its own after a few days anyway,
> I don't see how spamming would do any lasting harm.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>


list: foundation-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] New MediaWiki documentation effort

body:
-> PLEASE TRANSLATE THIS MESSAGE INTO YOUR LANGUAGE AND SEND A COPY TO
YOUR LOCAL PROJECT MAILING LIST. THANK YOU!

MediaWiki is a great software package, but in one department it is
lacking: documentation. In spite of the collaborative power of wiki, so
far there exists no single user documentation. Instead, each project
maintains its own fork, and the Meta pages are one big mess (although the
English documentation has become a bit better with the introduction of the
Help: namespace).

I have just taken live some code changes which allow us to finally
systematically document MediaWiki. I have added code to allow custom
namespaces, so that any wiki can have any number of namespaces beyond the
ordinary ones. Using this, I have then created namespaces in the largest
languages (for which I had translations of "Help" and "Help talk") on
http://meta.wikimedia.org . See
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents
for a list of available namespaces.

That means you can now edit Hilfe:Inhalt or Aide:Aide like the English
users have been editing Help:Contents. Why is that important? Because it
allows us to easily export all the help files in one language, and import
them into another wiki.

Any wiki may want to make custom changes to the help pages. This is best
done using custom header and footer templates. Interlanguage links should
also be passed to a template as a parameter, so that users who only import
one translation can hide them easily (by removing the parameter).

I have laid out some basic editorial guidelines for working on pages in
the Help: namespace of your language:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents

This also includes a modified Template:Hc which shows how interlanguage
links can work.

The gist of it is that we must make sure that the pages in the namespace
can be imported by *any project*, Wikimedia or not, without changes
(except to a handful of templates).

Once the pages have stabilized, we should clean out the Help: namespaces
of all Wikimedia projects and import the meta pages instead. We can then
upgrade them regularly (even daily) and automatically on all wikis.

The project namespace ("Wikipedia:", "Wikisource:" etc.) should then be
used strictly for policy.

I propose that the Help: namespace be used both for user and
administration documentation (installation guidelines etc.), so we can
move towards a single neatly integrated handbook.

I invite all interested parties to participate in consolidating our
documentation.

Regards,

Erik


list: wikimedia-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] New MediaWiki documentation effort


from_name: Muke Tever

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] Adding a botanical glossary and first
	letter	capitalisation]

body:
On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 22:47:07 +0200, Gerard Meijssen <gerardm at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> I think the second option would be a nice to have while the first is a
> must have. I am convinced there are errors in nl:wiktionary because I
> just do not see the difference between some capital and undercase
> letters, the difference does not register. I can live with the second
> coming life after the first.

What kind of fonts are you using that use the same glyphs for majuscules and minuscules?

	*Muke!
--
website:     http://frath.net/
LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/
deviantArt:  http://kohath.deviantart.com/

FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki:
http://wiki.frath.net/


from_name: andrew fabbro

subject: [Wikitech-l] Updating Wiki From a Script

body:
I'm curious if there is any documentation on the "rules" for updating a
mediawiki SQL database.  Specifically, something like "if you want to
delete a page, modify these tables and fields" or "here are the steps to
insert a page into the database".

I ask because I have a need to dump some dynamically created content into
a mediawiki database on a regular basis (e.g., a script called out of
cron).  I'm a perl hacker, not a php man, and so most of the includes
directory if Greek to me...but on the other hand, that shouldn't really
matter, since all I'm doing is updating the MySQL database.

Does this documentation exist?

Does anyone have any scripts for inserting a page or deleting a page from
the database?

Thanks,

andrew fabbro                                            [andrew at fabbro.org]
------------------------------[ quote-o-matic] -----------------------------
Q: If I am traveling at the speed of light and turn on a flashlight, what
    happens?
A: You become internationally famous and everyone wants to know how you
    managed to travel at the speed of light.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Re: new sister project (off of home page) redux

body:
On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 09:17:43AM +1200, Chris Wood wrote:
> Good points, all. Clearly I didn't think much before sending my reply ;/
>
> > > #2 - you can linkto/reference old versions of a page, which are
> guaranteed not
> > >      to change.
> >
> > good point - what's the syntax for this?
>
> http://serveraddy.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=pagename&oldid=xxxxx
>
> Unfortunately, the "oldid" isn't human readable, and current versions are
> not given IDs - the latter is bug 181
> (http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=181)

> > And the best, best thing possible would be if mediawiki was modular enough
> that
> > more than one frontend for editing/publishing could be written in terms of
> it -
> > that would save a lot of headaches when it comes to writing the wiki that
> is a word
> > replacement and actually turns wiki content into publishing material
> (PDFS, etc).
>
> Would be nice... good luck finding someone to do the work...

well, I'm assuming by your response that mediawiki isn't that modularized..
ah well, it'll be harder. Getting someone to do the work won't be difficult
since I'll probably be the one ending up doing most of the up front stuff.

Ed

(
    ps - but getting wikipedia to host the new sister project, and link
    it off the homepage might be something else. I have a static IP,
    but it unfortunately is not very stable, so I'd ultimately want to move
    it to a central location
)


from_name: Brion Vibber

references:
<9FwlXwlxpVB@erik_moeller> <4134F3A9.6080903@nichtich.de>
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408311511300.26440@hallofjustice.fabbro.org>

body:
andrew fabbro wrote:
> I'm curious if there is any documentation on the "rules" for updating a
> mediawiki SQL database.  Specifically, something like "if you want to
> delete a page, modify these tables and fields" or "here are the steps to
> insert a page into the database".

Not really; there's just the code. In brief, to add a new page:

* Insert a complete record into the cur table. (cur_id is
auto_increment, do not assign a value to it!)

* Insert a summary record into the recentchanges table.

* Update links, brokenlinks, imagelinks, and categorylinks with the
pages that your new page links to.

* Move links from brokenlinks to links if there are existing broken
links to this page.

* Update the cur_touched field of any pages affected by the last step.

* Insert an appropriate record into the searchindex table.

* Update the article count in site_stats if and only if the new article
passes the article count criteria (is in namespace 0, is not a redirect,
and contains at least one instance of the string "[[")

To delete a page:
* Copy the cur and old records into the archive table so it can be
restored if need be

* Delete the records from cur and old.

* Delete the searchindex row.

* Delete summary rows from recentchanges.

* Remove outgoing links from links, brokenlinks, imagelinks, and
categorylinks.

* Move any incoming links from links to brokenlinks.

* Update cur_touched field of any page affected by the last step.

* Add a note to the deletion log page (creating it if necessary)

* Add a recentchanges summary row for the deletion log update

* Update site_stats as for new page, decrementing rather than incrementing.

Updating all these things correctly might be a bit tricky, and you'll
have to update your scripts when the database format changes. You might
consider using a client-side bot to avoid duplicating the whole of
MediaWiki's backend. ;)  There's an actively maintained python-based bot
family at http://pywikipediabot.sf.net

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Anthony DiPierro

subject: [WikiEN-l] {{fairuse}} tag

body:
> You could ask the uploader about it, or you could decide that the
> image is {{fairuse}} following the guidelines at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_description_page#Fair_use_rationale.

>  Angela.

The {{fairuse}} message currently says: "The individual who uploaded this
work and first used it in an article, and subsequent persons who place it
into articles, assert that this qualifies as fair use ..."  As that is
something impossible for a third party to determine, this message should be
changed.  Personally I use {{fairusein}}, which says: "This work is
copyrighted. The person who added this tag asserts that the use of this work
in {{{1}}} qualified as fair use of the material under United States
copyright law."

Anthony


from_name: gracefool

body:
"Edward Peschko" <esp5 at pge.com> wrote in message
news:20040827044829.GA6979 at mdssdev05...
> well, I'm not sure if wikiprojects would work for what I had in mind.
> I want to get some heavy-hitters in on this, and I've talked to a
> few of them (Freeman Dyson, Lynn Margulis, Jared Diamond) as well as
> some of the more popular writers like Richard Heinberg and
> Colin Campbell, some EIA energy analysts, the IEA, etc.)
> to ask them for advice. One of the things I asked them about is
> their opinion on wiki.
>
> And they aren't too keen on it as it stands. Aggregating what I've heard,
in
> particular, they have 5 major issues with it:
>
>     1 - no ready road to publishing. Its very hard to get a cohesive
>         physical paper out of wiki.
>
>     2 - no editorial control. Since anyone can edit the page,
>         the background is constantly shifting and not able to be given
>         as a reference. Plus they think it is 'impermanent'.
>
>     3 - No guarantee of attribution.
>
>     4 - lack of features for research collaboration.
>
>     5 - work in progress unable to be kept private amongst a group of
>         researchers until publication.

Firstly, with regards to objections to using Wikipedia for your project, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Replies

#1 - Just copy and paste the text of a page you think is good enough

#2 - You can link to / reference old versions of a page, which are
guaranteed to not change.

What do you mean by #4?

- gracefool


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] Adding a botanical glossary and
	first	letter	capitalisation]

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> I am happy to read that things have been discussed with the
> developpers. However, I find it hard to find what is discussed as the
> link that is referred to is an already old thread on en:wiktionary. As
> a consequence it is not clear and obvious what has been discussed.

Agreed, but we're all responsible for that, myself included.  The right
thing for me to do would be to refactor my own old comments into my new
ones. :-)

> An other problem is that as this is not an en:wiktionary only issue,
> meta would be a more obvious choise to host this discussion.

Not really.  Many of us who are interested in the Wiktionaries may not
check into Meta that often.  I would because I'm familiar with the
issue, but I guarantee that there will be some who will complain that
they were not warned about the change.  Although I passively support the
change on the other languages my vote there would mean as much as the
votes by IP numbers that now appear in English.  It comes down to a
matter of process.  In what languages would the knowledgeable people
generally oppose this?  Probably the only languages where this might not
be such a big issue are those that do not use capitals in the first place,

> To me, there are two issues.
> *Having correct content, this can be better assured without
> capitalisation of the first character.
> *How to find stuff, this may mean that the search may have to be blind
> for capitalisation.
>
> I think the second option would be a nice to have while the first is a
> must have. I am convinced there are errors in nl:wiktionary because I
> just do not see the difference between some capital and undercase
> letters, the difference does not register. I can live with the second
> coming life after the first.

I find it hard to conceive how the first would work effectively, without
the second being in place.

Ec


from_name: Malcolm Lawrence

subject: [Wikitech-l] Slash Wiki

body:
Greetings all,

I understand that there is a wiki plug in for Slash and I was wondering if there are any Wiki developers who know enough about Slash to point me to one which works because I'm having a hard time trying to find an example of one.

Malcolm Lawrence
Editor-in-Chief
Babel: The multilingual, multicultural
online journal and community of arts and ideas.
http://www.towerofbabel.com
------------------------------------------------------------
Babel wonders: The Rev. Jerry Falwell called the prophet Muhammad a terrorist during an interview aired on 60 Minutes. And exactly why does the media feel like his opinion is noteworthy?
------------------------------------------------------------


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Austin Hair

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] new wikipedias: extremaduran and
	galaico-extremaduran

body:
Please forgive the delay in response; this message was inadvertently
directed to my spam folder.  Also, please accept my apologies for
misspelling "Extremaduran" in my previous e-mail -- the brain thinks,
but the hands type otherwise.

You've clarified your position well.  I'm aware of the politically
motivated movements in Spain which seek to "disintigrate" the language,
as you say, hence my initial skepticism; I now see that you are not one
of such people.

As I have already stated, I fully support efforts to preserve historic
and regional minority languages, as does the project (albeit in a more
passive way).  Your candidate appears to be just such a language, and
one I believe justifies its own Wiki.  While I don't speak with any
authority on the matter, I'm inclined to support its creation.

--
Austin D. Hair <austin at austinhair.org>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Callidus
http://www.austinhair.org/
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from_name: Kurt Jansson

body:
Christiaan Briggs schrieb:

> Our economic system, and the plight of people such as the
> Palestinians, means that access too and creation of information on the
> internet is an extremely unequal affair.

"Extremely unequal" compared to which other mass medium?

Kurt


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
 >I and a couple of the real developers discussed the

>various issues and proposed techniques for improving
>the capitalisation of Wiki titles as requested by the
>various "factions" (: including what non-English
>Wiktionaries or at least some of their vocal users
>would like.
>
>I have already experimented with the codebase to come
>at this problem in various ways, and Jamesday posted a
>summary of what we talked about on IRC at
>http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/case-sensitivity_vote
>
>We would like to hear feedback and clarifications
>from everybody with your various viewpoints in this
>talk page please.
>
>Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
>
>
>
I am happy to read that things have been discussed with the developpers.
However, I find it hard to find what is discussed as the link that is
referred to is an already old thread on en:wiktionary. As a consequence
it is not clear and obvious what has been discussed.

An other problem is that as this is not an en:wiktionary only issue,
meta would be a more obvious choise to host this discussion.

To me, there are two issues.
*Having correct content, this can be better assured without
capitalisation of the first character.
*How to find stuff, this may mean that the search may have to be blind
for capitalisation.

I think the second option would be a nice to have while the first is a
must have. I am convinced there are errors in nl:wiktionary because I
just do not see the difference between some capital and undercase
letters, the difference does not register. I can live with the second
coming life after the first.

Thanks.
 Gerard


subject: [WikiEN-l] Delete bad articles?

body:
> If all search results were always 100% accurate, well then... I'd agree
> with you Pete.
> However:
> In this imperfect world with imperfect Google search results, people
> *will* run across such "rubbish" or "not up to our standards" articles
> pretty quickly on Google the longer said articles stay online here.
> It's not exactly like we're situated at the a*se end of domain space
> that Google bots warely visit.
>
> So Rick has a fair point there.
>
> - Jens

However, when searching for "George Washington", the proper article is going
to appear *much* higher on the list that "George Washington's underwear".
People are only likely to come across "bad" articles when they search for
them. Also, Google's pagerank system means that good articles are going to
appear much higher in search results.

I'd also like to point that many stubs and "bad" articles have become very
good or even featured articles.

--
- gracefool


from_name: Chris Wood

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Dartmouth follies

body:
"Andrew Lih" <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote in
message news:2ed171fb040824224727bf7e0c at mail.gmail.com...

> Pessimistic deletionist - may be good sometime, but delete it now, and
> keep only when good
> Absolute deletionist - it's not "encyclopediac", get rid of it

The deletionist attitudes are pretty dumb - they don't give articles the
chance to become good.

--
- Chris Wood
http://grace.2ya.com/
New Zealand


from_name: Jakob Voss

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: New MediaWiki documentation effort

body:
Hi,

Thanks for your effort, Erik - but I cannot imagine how to get to a
multilingual MediaWiki documentation soon. Not only MediaWiki but also
Wikipedia (at least the German one) lacks a clean documentation. How do
you want to seperate both?

You wrote:

> That means you can now edit Hilfe:Inhalt or Aide:Aide like the English
> users have been editing Help:Contents. Why is that important? Because it
> allows us to easily export all the help files in one language, and import
> them into another wiki.

Import how? Do you want to make the Help:-Namespace on local Wikipedia
read-only and dynamically mirror the localised pages from meta? What
does happen to the (indeed messy) documentation at each Wikipedia?

> Once the pages have stabilized, we should clean out the Help: namespaces
> of all Wikimedia projects and import the meta pages instead. We can then
> upgrade them regularly (even daily) and automatically on all wikis.

Seems like a hen and egg problem.

I just doubt you get Wikipedia users writing documentation at meta, because:

1. There is no single log-in (and with this a single watchlist!)
2. You better document the Wikipedia you are working on. This includes
documenting MediaWiki but there is no sense to seperate for a Wikipedian

I tried to integrate MediaWiki and Wikipedia documentation at
  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hilfe:Inhalt
but I better do it within the German Wikipedia in the Help-Namespace.

Once the pages have stabilized, we should clean out the meta:Hilfe
namespaces and import the de:Hilfe pages instead. We can then
upgrade them regularly (even daily) and automatically on all wikis.

Greetings,
   Jakob


from_name: Steven Melenchuk

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Voting begins on [[Wikipedia:Administrator
	Accountability Policy]]

body:
Voting has begun on this policy and will carry on until the 8th. Please
read the policy cast your votes.

~Grunt (Steven Melenchuk)


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Voting begins on [[Wikipedia:Administrator
	Accountability Policy]]


body:
Jakob-
>> That means you can now edit Hilfe:Inhalt or Aide:Aide like the English
>> users have been editing Help:Contents. Why is that important? Because it
>> allows us to easily export all the help files in one language, and import
>> them into another wiki.

> Import how? Do you want to make the Help:-Namespace on local Wikipedia
> read-only and dynamically mirror the localised pages from meta?

Yes, that would be one option.

> Seems like a hen and egg problem.

> I just doubt you get Wikipedia users writing documentation at meta, because:

> 1. There is no single log-in (and with this a single watchlist!)

A single login does not get you a single watchlist. There is currently
code for single signon in CVS (don't get too excited - we have no
migration code yet), but that will "only" allow you to re-use your user
data and session across all Wikimedia projects. A combined watchlist is a
project of its own.

Meta *is* our cross-project wiki. If we keep working around its
deficiencies we have less of an incentive to fix them. The more we use it
the larger the pressure will be to have things like single sign-on and a
proper internationalized interface. With the developer funding trial
starting soon, this could be not too far in the future.

> 2. You better document the Wikipedia you are working on. This includes
> documenting MediaWiki but there is no sense to seperate for a Wikipedian

What is Wikipedia documentation and what is MediaWiki documentation? To
me, Wikipedia "documentation" is mostly policies, community pages and the
like. These really belong uniformly in the Wikipedia: namespace and not on
Meta. (We may at some point try to develop a set of importable policies on
meta as well, but to me this is a project for a later stage.) None of this
belongs in Help:.

How do we get people involved in working on the Meta documentation? E.g.
on Wikipedia:
1) Remove all MediaWiki documentation from the Wikipedia: namespace
2) Redirect and link to local Help: pages where needed.
3) Add a [[Template:Obsolete]] to all local Help: pages:

"The documentation is currently being consolidated on
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myhelpnamespace:Contents - please do not
edit these pages anymore and edit directly on meta instead."

4) Protect all Help: pages.

So, essentially, by locking people out from doing it locally ;-). It will
be a bit ugly in the transition phase but it's certainly workable.

> I tried to integrate MediaWiki and Wikipedia documentation at
>   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hilfe:Inhalt
> but I better do it within the German Wikipedia in the Help-Namespace.

The Help: namespace of individual projects should not be used for editing
but for importing only (maybe some custom Help: pages and some header/
footer changes, but that's it). The Project: namespace is for project-
specific information.

> Once the pages have stabilized, we should clean out the meta:Hilfe
> namespaces and import the de:Hilfe pages instead. We can then
> upgrade them regularly (even daily) and automatically on all wikis.

Wikimedia is more than just Wikipedia. That's the whole point of putting
it on meta - not giving preference to any individual project in
maintaining the documentation. For a Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote or
Wikisource user, editing pages on Wikipedia is no easier than editing them
on Meta.

Wikipedia is a bad foundation to build cross-project documentation on. As
projects like Wikibooks grow and new ones like Wikinews are started, its
prominence in the Wikimedia world will decline. To a Wikinews editor of
2005, Wikipedia may be what Wikisource is to most Wikipedians - an
interesting project but not their primary point of interest.

Furthermore, the best way to educate our editors that this is a cross-
project documentation is to put it on Meta:. As long as editors have a
feeling that they are editing on Wikipedia, they will write specifically
*about* Wikipedia.

Regards,

Erik


body:
I apologise for the typo. The real link is
[[Wikipedia:Administrators/Administrator_Accountability_Policy]].

~Grunt (Steven Melenchuk)

Steven Melenchuk wrote:

> Voting has begun on this policy and will carry on until the 8th.
> Please read the policy cast your votes.
>
> ~Grunt (Steven Melenchuk)
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Voting begins on
	[[Wikipedia:Administrator Accountability Policy]]


from_name: Kent Wang

subject: [Wikitech-l] Where is this CSS class defined?

body:
I particularly like how the default skin has a horizontal line below each H1,
H2, etc element. I wanted to emulate it for my own site and saw that it uses the
class "firstHeading". Try as I might though, I could not actually find where
"firstHeading" was defined. Could someone please help me with this?

Thanks,
Kent Wang


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Updating Wiki From a Script

body:
andrew fabbro wrote:
> I'm curious if there is any documentation on the "rules" for updating a
> mediawiki SQL database.  Specifically, something like "if you want to
> delete a page, modify these tables and fields" or "here are the steps to
> insert a page into the database".

Such a documentation would be nice to have (and brion has already
provided a good start), but I fear it will be hard to keep up to date.
Changes in the code can often affect these procedures.

It would probably be nice if there was a single function in our PHP
code, createPage() or something, that does everything. But even with
that, you'd have to write your own stuff in PHP.

If I were you I'd instead go for Brion's latter suggestion. Don't
manipulate the DB directly; send an HTTP request to the wiki and let it
do it. It's probably easier for you to code, and it's also less prone to
requiring future maintenance whenever small things change.

Timwi


from_name: Sj

body:
I would vastly prefer this to manually listing an article at cleanup.
I rarely list articles for cleanup, though I see candidates (that I
don't have time to fix) every week.

Since cleanup is effectively supposed to be a list of  entries of the form :

  == Date ==
      [[Article title]]  -  short comment
      [[Article title 2]]  -  short comment

it should be easy to implement a special page with the same page
display. Perhaps we could
  1. create an "auto-cleanup" page which has a list of pages which
have had the "summon editor attention" [SAE] button clicked.
  2. provide "remove from list" and "send to Cleanup" buttons next to
each item there

The former button would just remove an item; the latter would insert
the item at the top of the manual Cleanup page, for more complicated
cases...

~sj~

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 07:59:17 -0700 (PDT), Christopher Mahan
<chris_mahan at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> > On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:44:44 -0700, Bryan Derksen
> > <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
>>> Here's an idea; how about adding a "summon editor >>> attention"
link or button that
>>> places the article into a page similar to recentchanges?
>
> I agree, could work well.
>
> =====
> Chris Mahan

--
+sj+


from_name: Anthere

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Voting begins on
 [[Wikipedia:Administrator Accountability Policy]]

body:
I think you wrote to the wrong list :-)

Anthere

Steven Melenchuk a ?crit:
> I apologise for the typo. The real link is
> [[Wikipedia:Administrators/Administrator_Accountability_Policy]].
>
> ~Grunt (Steven Melenchuk)
>
> Steven Melenchuk wrote:
>
>> Voting has begun on this policy and will carry on until the 8th.
>> Please read the policy cast your votes.
>>
>> ~Grunt (Steven Melenchuk)
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Access to the Internet (was: Articles like
	"Violence against Israelis")

body:
Yes information on the internet is distorted due to censorship, political
and religious suppression and intimidation, and poverty. Major holes in
coverage include Cuba and North Korea, with extremely limited access and
poverty; the People Republic of China, poverty and political intimidation;
Saudi Arabia, religious intimidation, Palestine, poverty and political and
religious intimidation; and most of Africa, India and Indonesia, poverty.

Wikipedia has revolutionary consequences but is not a revolutionary
organization.

Fred

> From: Christiaan Briggs <christiaan at yurkycross.co.uk>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 13:50:32 +0100
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Access to the Internet (was: Articles like "Violence
> against Israelis")
>
> Economics and oppression create extremely unequal access
> to and creation of information on the net (and for instance Wikipedia).


from_name: Muke Tever

subject:
[Fwd: Re: [Wiktionary-l] Adding a botanical glossary and
	first	letter capitalisation]]

body:
On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 09:47:41 +0200, Gerard Meijssen <gerardm at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> However, the problem is with me; I do not know these characters. I do
> not have these characters easily available to me and the result is wrong
> articles. Only compulive capitalised words should have a capital all the
> others should not. This is where mistakes creep in.

I should think mistakes creep in more likely by working with material one is unable to read?

	*Muke!
--
website:     http://frath.net/
LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/
deviantArt:  http://kohath.deviantart.com/

FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki:
http://wiki.frath.net/


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Calling attention to "broken" articles

body:
At 03:39 AM 9/1/2004 -0400, Sj wrote:
>I would vastly prefer this to manually listing an article at cleanup.
>I rarely list articles for cleanup, though I see candidates (that I
>don't have time to fix) every week.

In my original proposal I suggested that the cleanup page should stay, and
that this mechanism would be purely complementary to the existing system.
Clicking the "summon editor attention" button would just wave a little
temporary flag saying "look at me!" to editors that happened to be paying
attention that day, and if one of them felt that extensive work was
required they could manually list the article on cleanup to ensure it
didn't get "lost" before someone got around to tidying it up.

>Since cleanup is effectively supposed to be a list of  entries of the form :
>
>   == Date ==
>       [[Article title]]  -  short comment
>       [[Article title 2]]  -  short comment
>
>it should be easy to implement a special page with the same page
>display. Perhaps we could
>   1. create an "auto-cleanup" page which has a list of pages which
>have had the "summon editor attention" [SAE] button clicked.
>   2. provide "remove from list" and "send to Cleanup" buttons next to
>each item there
>
>The former button would just remove an item; the latter would insert
>the item at the top of the manual Cleanup page, for more complicated
>cases...

This is pretty similar to my recentchanges-like idea, I think we're
fundamentally in agreement on the mechanism. I think that an automated
removal from the list after a certain time period would be necessary to
avoid the risk of spamming, though. As long as it takes a little more
effort to put items onto the list than to take them off we should be fine,
but I also want it to be as easy as humanly possible to put an item on the
list so that we can get assistance from users who wouldn't otherwise do any
editing.


from_name: Thomas Gries

subject:
[Wikitech-l] bug: left, center positioning of images fail
	[[Image:ZZZ|thumb|center]]

body:
I found (sorry if I overlooked something), that the positioning of
thumbnail images is not yet perfectly solved,
see for example http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sandbox/Thumbs and its
wiki source code; it is probably related to a not correctly interpreted
or coded css.

The text of many contributors under "Layout of tables, images"  on page
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.3_comments_and_bug_reports
was of no help: the problem of misaligned pictures appears to be
independent from the presence of categorie links on that page.

Main question:
How can one position a thumb image left or center or right aligned
(appears to be the default) ?
It's not possible for me, I am using Netscape 7.1; the same effect under
InternetExplorer 5.5 and 6.0, Classic Skin.

Could someone of the developers please check and perhaps solve this
problem in a next version. The thumbnail function is a very powerful
tool of MW - thanks for inventing it.

Tom


body:
Good points, all. Clearly I didn't think much before sending my reply ;/

> > #2 - you can linkto/reference old versions of a page, which are
guaranteed not
> >      to change.
>
> good point - what's the syntax for this?

http://serveraddy.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=pagename&oldid=xxxxx

Unfortunately, the "oldid" isn't human readable, and current versions are
not given IDs - the latter is bug 181
(http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=181)

> And the best, best thing possible would be if mediawiki was modular enough
that
> more than one frontend for editing/publishing could be written in terms of
it -
> that would save a lot of headaches when it comes to writing the wiki that
is a word
> replacement and actually turns wiki content into publishing material
(PDFS, etc).

Would be nice... good luck finding someone to do the work...

- Chris Wood
http://grace.2ya.com/
New Zealand


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: {{fairuse}} tag

body:
Added to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_messages#Image_description_n
amespace

--
Chris Wood


body:
Although all articles should be fully referenced at creation and upon any
modification they are not. This project promises to remedy that deficiency.
I suspect I will not like its effect on some of my more creative edits but I
like its general direction.

Fred

> From: Shaun MacPherson <shaun_macpherson2001 at yahoo.ca>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 11:11:45 -0400 (EDT)
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Community Input for WikiProject - Fact and Reference Check
>
> Hello!
>
> First time post, glad to be here.  I would like to
> announce a new Fact and Reference WikiProject (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check
> ) and am writing this email to get community input.
>
> This project's goal is very ambitious - having facts
> in Wikipedia verified by multiple independent sources
> to make it the most authoritative source of
> information in the world.  Even if this goal is never
> reached, the project is still useful in having facts
> referenced will help deflect one of the largest
> criticisms of Wikipedia - that it is not a reputable
> source of knowledge.
>
> Any community input is welcome but some questions you
> might consider commenting is: Do you think its a good
> idea?  Do you have suggestions or recommendations?  Do
> you have a plan of action on how to best fact check
> wikipedia?  All input is welcome, excellent criticisms
> have already been very helpful.
>
> As well, if you have any knowledge about designing
> wikimedia that would be very useful.  This project and
> these ideas likely could not be implemented without a
> programmer contributing his or her time to code an
> automatic referencing system.  Programmers who are
> interested in helping are very much encouraged to have
> a look.
>
> It would likely be easiest for people to review your
> ideas and comments if you write in the project
> discussion page here (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Che
> ck
> ). If you want to write me personally I welcome your
> comments (shaun_macpherson2001 [-a-t-] yahoo.ca).
>
> Thanks for your time,
>
> ShaunMacPherson
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
> Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject:
[Fwd: Re: [Wiktionary-l] Adding a botanical glossary and first	letter
	capitalisation]]

body:
Muke Tever wrote:

> On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 22:47:07 +0200, Gerard Meijssen
> <gerardm at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
>> I think the second option would be a nice to have while the first is a
>> must have. I am convinced there are errors in nl:wiktionary because I
>> just do not see the difference between some capital and undercase
>> letters, the difference does not register. I can live with the second
>> coming life after the first.
>
>
> What kind of fonts are you using that use the same glyphs for
> majuscules and minuscules?
>
>
>     *Muke!

I had to look up the word "majuscule" (it is not in en:wiktionary but in
en:wikipedia :)  ) to know it means hoofdletter. Anyway, there is
nothing wrong with my fonts they do present all characters properly.
However, the problem is with me; I do not know these characters. I do
not have these characters easily available to me and the result is wrong
articles. Only compulive capitalised words should have a capital all the
others should not. This is where mistakes creep in.

Thanks,
  Gerard


subject:
[Fwd: Re: [Wiktionary-l] Adding a botanical glossary and	first	letter
	capitalisation]]

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> I am happy to read that things have been discussed with the
>> developpers. However, I find it hard to find what is discussed as the
>> link that is referred to is an already old thread on en:wiktionary.
>> As a consequence it is not clear and obvious what has been discussed.
>
>
> Agreed, but we're all responsible for that, myself included.  The
> right thing for me to do would be to refactor my own old comments into
> my new ones. :-)
>
>> An other problem is that as this is not an en:wiktionary only issue,
>> meta would be a more obvious choise to host this discussion.
>
>
> Not really.  Many of us who are interested in the Wiktionaries may not
> check into Meta that often.  I would because I'm familiar with the
> issue, but I guarantee that there will be some who will complain that
> they were not warned about the change.  Although I passively support
> the change on the other languages my vote there would mean as much as
> the votes by IP numbers that now appear in English.  It comes down to
> a matter of process.  In what languages would the knowledgeable people
> generally oppose this?  Probably the only languages where this might
> not be such a big issue are those that do not use capitals in the
> first place,
>
>> To me, there are two issues.
>> *Having correct content, this can be better assured without
>> capitalisation of the first character.
>> *How to find stuff, this may mean that the search may have to be
>> blind for capitalisation.
>>
>> I think the second option would be a nice to have while the first is
>> a must have. I am convinced there are errors in nl:wiktionary because
>> I just do not see the difference between some capital and undercase
>> letters, the difference does not register. I can live with the second
>> coming life after the first.
>
>
> I find it hard to conceive how the first would work effectively,
> without the second being in place.
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>
>
The argument against hosting the discussion on meta is equally valid
against hosting the discussion on en:wiktionary. People who are at home
in another wiktionary and who are intrested in this discussion may not
check into en:wiktionary that often. This list is the multi:wiktionary
list by its definition and may therefore reach other wiktionaries. Meta
is also by design available to host multi:wiktionary discussions. There
is no reason not to have a login on Meta, just create your own with your
own nick.

As to how having the first without the second would work? In the
nl:wiktionary typically people speak Dutch and know the Dutch spelling.
Most words created in another language are created from the translations
of a Dutch word. Therefore when Capitalisation is off, many words may go
awol. However they can be found. There will be some problems in getting
things to work again properly, that is just tough. That can be handled.
All this work needs to be done anyway in any scenario.

When a better search becomes available the search for users will become
easier, till that time we will have better information.

My main concern is that the information is correct. With forced
capitalisation is not. As to democracy when asked on nl:wiktionary,
there were no dissenting voices.

Thanks,
   Gerard


from_name: Christopher Mahan

body:
--- Steven Melenchuk <crazyr2 at shaw.ca> wrote:

> I apologise for the typo. The real link is
> [[Wikipedia:Administrators/Administrator_Accountability_Policy]].

Steven:

You do know that within my email client, I can't click on the link
you gave below.
When pointing my browser to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrators/Administrator_Accountability_Policy

I get a "This page does not exist"

and when I point my browser to

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators/Administrator_Accountability_Policy

it works.

Next time, copy the url will ya?

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: Shaun MacPherson

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Community Input for WikiProject - Fact and Reference
	Check

body:
Hello!

First time post, glad to be here.  I would like to
announce a new Fact and Reference WikiProject (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check
) and am writing this email to get community input.

This project's goal is very ambitious - having facts
in Wikipedia verified by multiple independent sources
to make it the most authoritative source of
information in the world.  Even if this goal is never
reached, the project is still useful in having facts
referenced will help deflect one of the largest
criticisms of Wikipedia - that it is not a reputable
source of knowledge.

Any community input is welcome but some questions you
might consider commenting is: Do you think its a good
idea?  Do you have suggestions or recommendations?  Do
you have a plan of action on how to best fact check
wikipedia?  All input is welcome, excellent criticisms
have already been very helpful.

As well, if you have any knowledge about designing
wikimedia that would be very useful.  This project and
these ideas likely could not be implemented without a
programmer contributing his or her time to code an
automatic referencing system.  Programmers who are
interested in helping are very much encouraged to have
a look.

It would likely be easiest for people to review your
ideas and comments if you write in the project
discussion page here (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check
). If you want to write me personally I welcome your
comments (shaun_macpherson2001 [-a-t-] yahoo.ca).

Thanks for your time,

ShaunMacPherson

______________________________________________________________________
Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca


subject: [Wiktionary-l] Re: intro to - thematic glossaries in Wictionary

body:
Stefan Jensen wrote:

>Hi Gerard,
>I have subscribed to the Wictionary mailing list but am not in depth following your discussion. I am just getting the idea that you are adding a botanical glossary.
>I have earlier on made an offer to add GEMET into Wictionary (5200 term aroun environemnt in 20+ languages). It is jsut that I cannot physically do it ...
>I take the freedom to forward you a mail >I sent earlier to you guys bur got only little reply on
>
>greetings
>
>Stefan
>++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>Stefan Jensen
>Project Manager
>Reporting processes and tools
>European Environment Agency
>TEL +45 33367232
>GSM +45 23683659
><http://eionet.eu.int>
><http://eea.eu.int>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Thanks for your mail. I am relatively recent on this list, I do not
remember to have seen your mail before.

I am exited about this possibility. By looking at the data it seems to
me that integrating the GEMET data into wiktionary is easier than
integrating the glossary that I have myself. When the glossary is
integrated into a wiktionary, there are some considerations.
# What to do with current wiktionary content.
# Do we create the content in all wiktionaries even when there is no
description for the term in the local language.
# How do we get all wiktionaries ready to easily upload the content.

I have started an article on META,
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GEneral_Multilingual_Environmental_Thesaurus
about integrating the content within wikimedia. Personally I would
rather integrate your data first than my glossary as your dat is more
relevant.

I think it will be valuable to indicate that GEMET data has GEMET as its
source. For this the category mechanism comes in handy. All words that
are in GEMET, should have a GEMET category.

To enhance the wikimedia experience, for all GEMET keywords for which a
Wikipedia article exists, should have a link to the wikipedia article..

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Eckhart Wörner

body:
Hello,

Kent Wang schrieb:
> I particularly like how the default skin has a horizontal line below each H1,
> H2, etc element. I wanted to emulate it for my own site and saw that it uses the
> class "firstHeading". Try as I might though, I could not actually find where
> "firstHeading" was defined. Could someone please help me with this?

/style/monobook/main.css:

.firstHeading { margin-bottom:0.1em; } /* (line 236) */

But I think you got there something wrong. .firstHeading is not
responsible for this line. The line is directly defined for each heading
independant of a class or id:

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { /* (line 93) */
     color: Black;
     background: none;
     font-weight: normal;
     margin: 0;
     padding-top: 0.5em;
     padding-bottom: 0.17em;
     border-bottom: 1px solid #aaaaaa;
}

h3, h4, h5, h6 { /* (line 104) */
     border-bottom: none;
     font-weight: bold;
}

It just defines this line for each heading, and then removes it for h3
... h6.

<ad>
You could use Firefox in combination with the Web Developer extension to
easily get such information. Just click /CSS/ --> /view style
information/ and click on a heading to see which CSS rules apply to it.
It works perfect!
</ad>

Eckhart


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

subject: [Wikitech-l] Slash Wiki

body:
On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 06:35:38PM -0700, Malcolm Lawrence wrote:
> Greetings all,
>
> I understand that there is a wiki plug in for Slash and I was wondering if there are any Wiki developers who know enough about Slash to point me to one which works because I'm having a hard time trying to find an example of one.

Are you sure to talk about the right wiki-software? This is (ok, actually
it's not) the mailinglist for the Mediawiki software which is used at
Wikipedia.
What do you mean with Slash? Slashcode the software behind /. ?

Maybe this helps:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2002/01/17/slash_plugin.html

ciao, tom
--
== Weblinks ==
* http://shop.wikipedia.org - WikiReader Internet zu kaufen
* http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
* http://www.hammererlehen.de - Urlaub in Berchtesgaden


from_name: Christiaan Briggs

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Access to the Internet (was: Articles like "Violence
	against Israelis")

body:
On 31 Aug 2004, at 8:27 pm, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> Christiaan claimed:
>
>> I don't know about lists, but what you mention is an interesting
>> problem, and not just for Wikipedia, but for all societies in regard
>> to the internet. Our economic system, and the plight of people such
>> as the Palestinians, means that access too and creation of
>> information on the internet is an extremely unequal affair.
>
> This is incorrect, as far as societies that don't censor Internet
> access go. Now, maybe in Islamic countries it's hard to get online due
> to national restrictions. But in every part of the English-speaking
> world that is not a problem.

I'm unsure as to why you single out Islamic countries (it's not just
Islamic countries that have restrictions), but, fine, let's add
'censorship' to this list of things that cause inequality in regard to
access to and creation of info on the net.

> Also, the cost barrier is much lower than you may realize: 4 hours of
> minimum wage labor will pay for one month of Internet service, in the
> US, for example. If someone has 30 hours a week of free time, okay,
> maybe if he's wealthy it only costs him 30 to 60 minutes of labor time
> to pay for Internet, and he can spend the other 29 hours surfing or
> (better yet) writing Wikipedia articles; while the other guy has only
> 26 hours. That's only a 12% advantage: admittedly unequal, but not
> extremely so. More like moderately or slightly...

I have some questions for you. Where do you live? What's your earning
capability? Have you traveled much of where you live and overseas,
especially to poor areas? Do you know what it's like to save every
single penny so you can pay for your next meal for years on end? Do you
know how much most of the world lives on? And have you ever been to the
Occupied Territories in Israel?

You can bandy around arbitrary statistics and argue about whether the
inequalities are extreme or moderate but the differences are there and
until you can answer the above questions you probably have no idea as
to what those differences mean in the real scheme of things.

> If people have plights, and you want to write about it for Wikipedia,
> please do so. Not having a homeland is a plight, so you can write
> about Kurds as well as Palestinians. Not having a safe place to live
> is a plight, so you can write about any of 2 or 3 dozen insurgencies
> and/or civil wars dragging in recent decades. Not having a country
> that's free from the threat of foreign invasion is a plight, so you
> can write about Taiwan and Israel, et al. Not having freedom of
> religion or the right to emigrate is a plight, so you can write about
> Cuba, North Korea, et al.

This is a straw man argument. It doesn't actually challenge my
assertion that economics and oppression create extremely unequal access
to and creation of information on the net (and for instance Wikipedia).

What you seem to be suggesting in the above paragraph is that, as a
collective, we should simply ignore such plights (inequalities) and
their possible implications in regards to information on the net and
Wikipedia, and if no one takes it on their own back to personally
promote these people's points of view, well that's just too bad.

I have no idea what a solution might be to such a problem, but treating
it as a little issue in need of little thought doesn't seem like a good
idea.

The same problem actually occurs simply with unequal numbers of people.
Would you agree that for diversity and freedom to flourish we need to
ensure that all forms of media (and especially prevalent ones) are not
dominated by one group, be it via their numbers or simply because
another group doesn't have equal access?

Christiaan


from_name: Nathan Russell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Articles like "Violence against Israelis"

body:
On Mon, 30 Aug 2004 09:00:16 -0600, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> I don't have a problem with POV, but I do with detailed listings of each
> incident and casualty. There is violence against Israelis. An encyclopedia
> article would present the statistics, perhaps several examples, but not
> extensive lists. Corresponding lists of Palestinian grievances are also
> inappropriate, although I do think articles about Israeli locations should
> include information regarding previous names of the place.

If we start including previous names, we'll start having the same
headaches we have in those Eastern Europe articles.  There should be
some kind of standard for deciding those issues, and probably is, but
we don't need another set of authors failing to follow it.

Nathan


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Header numbers

body:
Hello,
every now and then I see rendered ==headers== with numbers. That is, the
same number scheme applied to the TOC:

1 this
2 that
2.1 the other

will appear on also on the subsequent text:

1 this
---------
(paragraph)

2 that
---------
(paragraph)

2.1 the other

(paragraph)

Before I file a bug report, is this expected behaviour during some
operations? cache updates? I noticed this on it: and don't know if it
happens on en: and other languages too.

Alfio


from_name: Stefan Jensen

subject: [Wiktionary-l] GEMET in Wiktionary

body:
Dear Gerard,

I am happy for this offer and like to share some issues with colleagues of mine involved.
I have actually promoted the idea of including GEMET into "the Wicki world" in an international meeting on environmental terminologies in April in Geneva http://ecoinfo.eionet.eu.int/ (see ECOTERM April workshop) and got very positive feedback from the colleagues.

I paste this message to the follwing colleagues active around Semantic Web, Ontologies, Thesaury, Topic Maps, XML, RDF, OASIS ...
- Bernad Vatant at Mondeca www.mondeca.com
- Thomas Bandholtz at http://www.bandholtz.info/index_en.html
- Alistair Miles http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/reports/thes/ (You find here links to GEMET in SKOS-RDF - which I guess is the terminolgy format of the sematic web)
- Miruna Badescu http://www.finsiel.ro/ is currently building a web service which allows machines to pick up GEMET content (1st  version available later in September)
- Soren Roug at EEA who has integrated some GEMET contenet into http://cr.eionet.eu.int/search_expert.jsp - a multipurpose RDF harvester

Please let us have an exchange on what to do next

kind regards

Stefan

-----Original Message-----
From: Gerard Meijssen [mailto:gerardm at myrealbox.com]
Sent: 01 September 2004 11:30
To: Stefan Jensen; wiktionary-l at Wikipedia.org; Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
Subject: Re: intro to - thematic glossaries in Wictionary

Stefan Jensen wrote:

>Hi Gerard,
>I have subscribed to the Wictionary mailing list but am not in depth following your discussion. I am just getting the idea that you are adding a botanical glossary.
>I have earlier on made an offer to add GEMET into Wictionary (5200 term aroun environemnt in 20+ languages). It is jsut that I cannot physically do it ...
>I take the freedom to forward you a mail >I sent earlier to you guys bur got only little reply on
>
>greetings
>
>Stefan
>++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>Stefan Jensen
>Project Manager
>Reporting processes and tools
>European Environment Agency
>TEL +45 33367232
>GSM +45 23683659
><http://eionet.eu.int>
><http://eea.eu.int>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Thanks for your mail. I am relatively recent on this list, I do not
remember to have seen your mail before.

I am exited about this possibility. By looking at the data it seems to
me that integrating the GEMET data into wiktionary is easier than
integrating the glossary that I have myself. When the glossary is
integrated into a wiktionary, there are some considerations.
# What to do with current wiktionary content.
# Do we create the content in all wiktionaries even when there is no
description for the term in the local language.
# How do we get all wiktionaries ready to easily upload the content.

I have started an article on META,
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GEneral_Multilingual_Environmental_Thesaurus
about integrating the content within wikimedia. Personally I would
rather integrate your data first than my glossary as your dat is more
relevant.

I think it will be valuable to indicate that GEMET data has GEMET as its
source. For this the category mechanism comes in handy. All words that
are in GEMET, should have a GEMET category.

To enhance the wikimedia experience, for all GEMET keywords for which a
Wikipedia article exists, should have a link to the wikipedia article..

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: phase3/includes Article.php, 1.154.2.14,
	1.154.2.15

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>> Modified Files:
>>       Tag: REL1_3
>>     Article.php Log Message:
>> Reverting last patch which causes "Fatal error: Call to a member
>> function on a non-object" on old page views. Please test patches prior
>> to check-in.
>
> Sorry, Brion. Yes, I know I should test it, but running REL1_3 would
> require me to create a whole new DB and everything.
>
> The error was just that I forgot a "global $wgUser;". 'Tis all ...

Please, please, *please* DO NOT commit anything to the STABLE BRANCH
THAT WE RUN OUR LIVE SITES ON without testing it. If someone were silly
enough to, say, update the live sites from the stable branch to install
a bug fix, suddenly *bam* everything would break.

Creating another database to test with is 30 seconds' work. If you're
not willing to put that time in, please don't commit to the stable branch.

Sorry for the shouting.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Matt Brown

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Community Input for WikiProject - Fact and
	Reference Check

body:
It can't hurt to go out searching for more sources and references for
articles in the meanwhile, though, can it?

-Matt (User:Morven)

On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 22:38:27 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Shaun MacPherson wrote:
>
> > First time post, glad to be here.  I would like to
> > announce a new Fact and Reference WikiProject (
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check
> > ) and am writing this email to get community input.
>
> My input would be "wait for the validation feature to go live".
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)

body:
--- VV <veryverily at myway.com> wrote:

I care not what you wrote or wrote not, yet notice you seem quite
aware of past events here. Have you not learned also about wikilove?

=====
Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


subject: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)

body:
You seem to have reverted Henry Kissenger 4 times.

Fred

> From: "VV" <veryverily at myway.com>
> Reply-To: veryverily at myway.com, English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed,  1 Sep 2004 17:52:02 -0400 (EDT)
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)
>
>
> Someone please unblock me.  ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason has gone off his rocker.
>
> VeryVerily
>
> _______________________________________________
> No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding.
> Make My Way your home on the Web - http://www.myway.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Slash Wiki

body:
Thomas-
> What do you mean with Slash? Slashcode the software behind /. ?

Contrary to popular belief, Slash is actually called Slash and not
Slashcode. Slashcode is the name of the website.

And Slash is a mess. I recommend using a clean codebase like Drupal
instead, which already has wiki-like functionality and only needs to be
expanded a bit.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: blankfaze

subject: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)

body:
Nah, VV, you could use the time off.
Maybe when your block expires you'll stop engaging in edit warfare and
POV-pushing.

! blankfaze


body:
Hey all I'm saying is that it's something to think about rather than
ignore.

Christiaan

On 1 Sep 2004, at 2:07 pm, Fred Bauder wrote:

> Yes information on the internet is distorted due to censorship,
> political
> and religious suppression and intimidation, and poverty. Major holes in
> coverage include Cuba and North Korea, with extremely limited access
> and
> poverty; the People Republic of China, poverty and political
> intimidation;
> Saudi Arabia, religious intimidation, Palestine, poverty and political
> and
> religious intimidation; and most of Africa, India and Indonesia,
> poverty.
>
> Wikipedia has revolutionary consequences but is not a revolutionary
> organization.
>
> Fred
>
>> From: Christiaan Briggs <christiaan at yurkycross.co.uk>
>> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>> Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2004 13:50:32 +0100
>> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Access to the Internet (was: Articles like
>> "Violence
>> against Israelis")
>>
>> Economics and oppression create extremely unequal access
>> to and creation of information on the net (and for instance
>> Wikipedia).
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: What is a category?

references:
<ch5gjq$i8a$1@sea.gmane.org> <ch3p7g$239$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<413629E4.90601@thingy.apana.org.au> <ch5gjq$i8a$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
At 11:06 PM 9/1/2004 +0100, Timwi wrote:
>>No, what I meant is allow any arbitrary categorization scheme - sets can,
>>after all, be inside other sets (or more than one set). A "related to"
>>scheme rather than "is a". See "Continued" below
>
>So henceforth, writers are related to people?

The solution I've occasionally suggested is to set up some sort of system
whereby the meaning of categorization could be encoded right into the
category link and understood by the software. That would allow all the
different meanings of categorization to coexist. So for example the article
[[Io (moon)]] could be [[Category:is-a:moons]] and
[[Category:related-to:Earth]]. Or Category:Writers could be
[[Category:is-a:people]]  and [[Category:related-to:writing]].

To transition over, all that needs be done is come up with some sort of
syntax that allows all the current category tags to continue working in
some default relationship type, and then just like how images have
gradually had their markup brought up to date by editors the categories
could get sorted out too.


from_name: VV

subject: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)

body:
Someone please unblock me.  ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason has gone off his rocker.

VeryVerily

_______________________________________________
No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding.
Make My Way your home on the Web - http://www.myway.com


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
Obviously I think it is accepted policy. The only question to my mind, is
can any sysop block him. As to a warning, he's an old hand.

Fred

> From: Kate <wikipedia at postoffice.intern.lythe.org.uk>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-reply at postoffice.intern.lythe.org.uk, English Wikipedia
> <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 23:30:24 +0100
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] VeryVerily's block (was: (no subject))
>
> On Wed, 2004-09-01 at 23:11, Fred Bauder wrote:
>> You seem to have reverted Henry Kissenger 4 times.
>
> Is this an accepted policy?  Was VV given suitable warning before the
> block?
>
> Kate.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikitech-l] Header numbers

body:
As far as i know it is, and its an option in preferences.

On Wed, 1 Sep 2004 15:08:01 +0200 (MEST), Alfio Puglisi
<puglisi at arcetri.astro.it> wrote:
>
> Hello,
> every now and then I see rendered ==headers== with numbers. That is, the
> same number scheme applied to the TOC:
>
> 1 this
> 2 that
> 2.1 the other
>
> will appear on also on the subsequent text:
>
> 1 this
> ---------
> (paragraph)
>
> 2 that
> ---------
> (paragraph)
>
> 2.1 the other
>
> (paragraph)
>
> Before I file a bug report, is this expected behaviour during some
> operations? cache updates? I noticed this on it: and don't know if it
> happens on en: and other languages too.
>
> Alfio
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)

body:
How come I don't feel free to revert folks over and over? Slow study?

Fred

> From: "VV" <veryverily at myway.com>
> Reply-To: veryverily at myway.com, English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed,  1 Sep 2004 18:39:52 -0400 (EDT)
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)
>
>
> That is not relevant.  The quickpolls system of temp-banning users who
> did this no longer exists, and to my knowledge no substitute system for
> doing so is in play.  The ArbCom has issued revert paroles for
> individual users such as Wik and Cantus, which were exceptional cases
> after long deliberation.
>
>
> --- On Wed 09/01, Fred Bauder < fredbaud at ctelco.net > wrote:
> From: Fred Bauder [mailto: fredbaud at ctelco.net]
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 16:11:22 -0600
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] (no subject)
>
> You seem to have reverted Henry Kissinger 4 times.
>
> Fred
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> No banners. No pop-ups. No kidding.
> Make My Way your home on the Web - http://www.myway.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Eric B. Rakim

body:
>I wasn't comparing. My interest is in Wikipedia. In any case, such
>comparisons do not make things inevitable and therefore unworthy of
>thought.
>
>The very idea of Wikipedia, it seems to me, is to avoid the dominance
>of any one group or person. That it does such a good job of this is
>actually all the more reason to keep in mind that it is not perfect and
>why.

People where saying the exact same thing a decade ago when the world wide
web was all the rage. That the "internet" would revolutionize human society,
that direct democracy would become usable and that all forms of oppression
and mass media control would magically disappear.. halleluja!

Well, it didn't and today the web is dominated by a few American giants like
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and some others. Yes you can find alternative
information on the net just like there was a lot of alternative papers that
noone read before the internet too. But the overexposure of the mainstream
(Beckhams sex life) makes it so noone but the few that actively look for
alternative stuff will ever find it.

Then if Wikipedia really is different, then why does those list report many
more Israelis killed than Palestinians when the real situation is the
complete opposite?

_________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


body:
Kurt Jansson wrote:

> Christiaan Briggs schrieb:
>
>> Our economic system, and the plight of people such as the
>> Palestinians, means that access too and creation of information on
>> the internet is an extremely unequal affair.
>
> "Extremely unequal" compared to which other mass medium?

I wasn't comparing. My interest is in Wikipedia. In any case, such
comparisons do not make things inevitable and therefore unworthy of
thought.

The very idea of Wikipedia, it seems to me, is to avoid the dominance
of any one group or person. That it does such a good job of this is
actually all the more reason to keep in mind that it is not perfect and
why.

Christiaan


from_name: Chris Wood

subject: [WikiEN-l] What is a category?

body:
This is a mini-essay on a current problem in MediaWikiland, category policy.
It's also avaiable at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gracefool/What_is_a_category, but I'd
rather have it discussed here first.

'''N.B.''' I'm aware of previous discussions at [[Wikipedia
talk:Categorization]]. This essay is a more thorough and defensible
treatment of the issue, and it highlights the fallacies of many previous
arguments.

==Introduction==
What ''is'' a category? No-one knows. There isn't consensus on what a
category is (see [[Wikipedia talk:Categorization]]). Is it a hierarchical
tree, with all categorizations representing "[[is a]]" relationships? Or is
it just a set, a group of related articles?

This is an important question - just look at [[Wikipedia:Categories for
deletion]]. Changes to categories have more widespread effects than changes
to articles, and have a greater possibly of annoying editors.

I believe that categories are, and should be, sets, not hierarchies:

==Categories are sets==
===Original purpose of categories===
What was the original purpose of the categorization system? Development of a
taxonomy of worldy knowledge? I don't think the developers are really that
stupid (I'll expand on this below). AFAIK it was as a kind of automatic
list-generator for related articles. Lists are sets, not hierarchies. Lists
of "related articles" are sets, not hierarchies.

===Current software===
The way that categories have been developed in software supports the idea
that categories are sets. There is implicit support for categories as sets
because there is nothing to stop anyone from using them that way. None of
the limits of a hierarchical system exist in the category software. Such
software is the best way to enforce the idea of hierarchical categories, and
would be easy to implement (eg. don't allow arbitrary parenting of
categories).

Until policy is decided on (and, preferably, software upgraded to support
it), categories will continue to be used as sets. Since sets include
hierarchies, while hierarchies don't include sets, the current
categorization system is one of sets.

==Categories should be sets==
===Categories are inherently POV===
A categorization system is a worldview. Therefore it is very hard for
categories to be [[WP:NPOV|NPOV]]. The following quote from
[http://www.shirky.com/writings/semantic_syllogism.html#worldviews_differ_fo
r_good_reasons Clay Shirky] expands:

<quote>:Many networked projects, including things like business-to-business
markets and Web Services, have started with the unobjectionable hypothesis
that communication would be easier if everyone described things the same
way. From there, it is a short but fatal leap to conclude that a particular
brand of unifying description will therefore be broadly and swiftly adopted
(the "this will work because it would be good if it did" fallacy.)

:Any attempt at a global ontology is doomed to fail, because meta-data
describes a worldview. The designers of the Soviet library's cataloging
system were making an assertion about the world when they made the first
category of books "Works of the classical authors of Marxism-Leninism."
Melvyl Dewey was making an assertion about the world when he lumped all
books about non-Christian religions into a single category, listed last
among books about religion. It is not possible to neatly map these two
systems onto one another, or onto other classification schemes -- they
describe different kinds of worlds.

:Because meta-data describes a worldview, incompatibility is an inevitable
by-product of vigorous argument. It would be relatively easy, for example,
to encode a description of genes in XML, but it would be impossible to get a
universal standard for such a description, because biologists are still
arguing about what a gene actually is. There are several competing standards
for describing genetic information, and the semantic divergence is an
artifact of a real conversation among biologists. You can't get a standard
til you have an agreement, and you can't force an agreement to exist where
none actually does.

:Furthermore, when we see attempts to enforce semantics on human situations,
it ends up debasing the semantics, rather then making the connection more
informative. Social networking services like Friendster and LinkedIn assume
that people will treat links to one another as external signals of deep
association, so that the social mesh as represented by the software will be
an accurate model of the real world. In fact, the concept of friend, or even
the type and depth of connection required to say you know someone, is quite
slippery, and as a result, links between people on Friendster have been
drained of much of their intended meaning. Trying to express implicit and
fuzzy relationships in ways that are explicit and sharp doesn't clarify the
meaning, it destroys it.</quote>

The whole concept of an all-encompassing hierarchical category system is
against the spirit of Wikipedia. It is an all-encompassing worldview, or
attribution of value, to the marked-up (categorized) articles.

The "categories are hierarchies" idea presumes that it is even possible for
a large group of people to agree on an all-encompassing belief-system, a
ridiculous notion totally bereft of realism, a notion that has been shown
wrong experientially in many IT metadata projects.

Categories, especially hierarchical categories, are about the followers of
one particular worldview implicitly saying "our way is right, everyone
should follow it". Note that the proportion of people who follow one
particular worldview in every aspect is very small.

===Sets are much less POV===
Categorization by set is obviously less POV. An article can belong to as
many sets as the community thinks it should belong to, whether directly or
via multiple parenthood of the article's category (or ancestors).

==Conclusion==
The benefits of hierarchical categorization
#decreased redundancy
#easier navigation (for a minority who have the "right" worldview)
are outweighed by its costs
#the community will never be in agreement over the system
#harder navigation (for the majority who don't find articles where they
expect them to be)
#decreased accuracy (the real world is not in a big hierarchy, it merely has
sets of metadata applied to it by different people)

--
Chris Wood


subject: [Wikitech-l] Header numbers

body:
On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 06:03:22PM +0200, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:
> As far as i know it is, and its an option in preferences.
>
> On Wed, 1 Sep 2004 15:08:01 +0200 (MEST), Alfio Puglisi
> <puglisi at arcetri.astro.it> wrote:
> >
> > Hello,
> > every now and then I see rendered ==headers== with numbers. That is, the
> > same number scheme applied to the TOC:

You didn't deliver a wiki-example, but it would most likly look like following.
The parser is not yet smart enough to correct this. So, correct your
wiki-syntax please.

=== 1. heading ===
== 2. heading ==
== 3. heading ==

ciao, tom
--
== Weblinks ==
* http://shop.wikipedia.org - WikiReader Internet zu kaufen
* http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
* http://www.hammererlehen.de - Urlaub in Berchtesgaden


body:
Yes, guess I'm wrong.

Fred

> From: Kate <wikipedia at postoffice.intern.lythe.org.uk>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-reply at postoffice.intern.lythe.org.uk, English Wikipedia
> <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2004 01:12:25 +0100
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] VeryVerily's block (was: (no subject))
>
> On Thu, 2004-09-02 at 00:57, Fred Bauder wrote:
>> Obviously I think it is accepted policy. The only question to my mind, is
>> can any sysop block him. As to a warning, he's an old hand.
>
> Continual problem users should be referred to arbitration, not
> unilaterally blocked.
>
> I think the fact that sie was immediately unblocked shows that it should
> not have been done in the first place without (at the very least)
> discussion.
>
> Kate.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l