subject: [Wikipedia-l] mail WikiSpecies

body:
The wiki is there to allow discussion to take place and to evolve what
features are needed. Like the Wikimedia Commons, the software does not
yet match what the project needs, but we felt it would be beneficial
to start with a wiki for discussion on the project until the time that
the needed features can be implemented.

This is most definitely not a fork of Wikipedia. Wikispecies is more
about collecting data than writing articles. This data will be saved
in a way that allows all Wikipedias, not just the English one, to use
the data. As a project, Wikispecies has different aims to Wikipedia.
It is aimed at the needs of scientific users rather than general
users. Integrating Wikispecies into Wikimedia prevents a fork.

We believe the project may have a good impact on the way we are
perceived by academics, which according to another thread on this list
right now, a lot of people seem to think would be a good thing.

The board met at the start of this month, and the notes from this
meeting are on Meta and the Foundation wiki. Four members voted to
support the following points:

1.	We set up the WikiSpecies wiki for biologists to begin organizing
the project.
2.	We ask that Benedikt transfer the domain name to Wikimedia.
3.	We propose that as the software is developed, it should work to
strongly support integration with wikipedia, to help avoid duplication
of effort.
4.	We ask the participants on wikispecies to particularly think about
how their work should differ from a generalist encyclopedia

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Board_meetings/5_September_2004

I apologize to those who had not seen the above report already.
Perhaps we need to find a way of ensuring that people who do not
follow either of those wikis are aware of meetings that take place
such as this one.

Angela


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Benedikt Mandl

subject: [Wikipedia-l] mail WikiSpecies

body:
WikiSpecies in currently in the process of being launched as an official
wikimedia project with an initial interface and basic functions at
www.wikispecies.org/

A big thank you to everybody who contributed to the project so far, from the
constructive discussion to the technical support. I hope that the interest
in wikispecies will remain as high as it seems to be right now.

In order to allow an efficient communication between all those who are
interested in wikispecies, a mainling list was created. To register at this
mailing list, please go to:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikispecies-l

I hope many of you register and want to become part of an evolving
wikispecies! Best,

Benedikt

--
NEU: GMX ProMail mit bestem Virenschutz http://www.gmx.net/de/go/mail
+++ Empfehlung der Redaktion +++ Internet Professionell 10/04 +++


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: wikispecies

body:
--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> ...
> If wikispecies is not set up, it may be that the wiki is set up
> somewhere else and it may be that part of its information is included in
> wikipedia from that free ressource.

Nobody I know of is saying that we should not have it Anthere. I, for example,
want a general solution by having this on the Commons.

Wikispecies would then be a Wikimedia Commons data project; along with Wikiwar,
Wikichemistry, and anything else that would benefit from Commons technology.

I still strongly feel the board way overstepped its authority by authorizing
this when there was far from a consensus to proceed.

The concerns should have be addressed first in order *try* to find a mutually
acceptable solution. I did not see a good effort to do that.

Leadership by fiat is no leadership at all.

-- mav

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


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jens Frank

subject:
[Wikitech-l] I am really tired of registering an account for each
	MetaWiki site I found

body:
On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 05:13:48PM +0100, Angela wrote:
> See bug 57 at http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57. The
> code is available for this, but there are social issues involved in
> deciding who gets to keep their name when more than one person is
> using that name on different wikis.

I'd rather say "The code is currently undergoing some testing". It's
not yet "available", but in CVS HEAD. There are bugs in CVS HEAD that
we don't want to see on the production site.

Regards,

JeLuF


list: wikien-l

from_name: Dan Drake

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: RE: no more PD satellite photos?

body:
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 00:35:40 UTC, Ray Saintonge
<saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

>...
> >Yes, people have rights even when organized into corportations. (Almost
> >said that corporations have rights--a serious slip of the keyboard!)
> >
> Legally a corporation IS a person, and does have rights.

Indeed, it was a seeming endorsement of that doctrine -- a wholly
unwarrranted bit of judicial legslation by an activist judge, to use the
conservatives' terminology where it applies -- that I needed to avoid.

Apologies for the OT digression.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Wouldn't it be better to store Most of values in
	LocalSettings.php into database?

body:
On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 07:57:06AM +0200, Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> Lo JeLuF,

Salut,

> Probably better to get one row per setting, that will allow us to sort
> settings per categories and define the type of data.
>
> Ex:
> category | setting    |  value      | type
> ---------------------------------------------
> General  | ScriptPath |             | string
> General  | UploadDir  | /mnt/upload | string
> Tidy     | UseTidy    |           0 | boolean
> ---------------------------------------------
>
> Then we can get different administrations pages.

I already have different pages, much like the User Preferences page.
Also grouping and sorting them in the single pages, I think hardcoding
this in PHP is fine, no real need to get the layout of the forms from
the DB.

> For older versions, we probably just want to diff changes and saves them
> directly in the new log system.

Good idea. Visible to sysops and developers only.
Special:Sitesettings for developers only.

Draft is at
http://mediawiki.mormo.org/index.php/Special:Sitesettings

Not all messages are defined yet. Prototype. Save not implemented.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] mail WikiSpecies

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Benedikt Mandl <benedikt.mandl at gmx.at> wrote:
>
>
>
>>WikiSpecies in currently in the process of being launched as an official
>>wikimedia project with an initial interface and basic functions at
>>www.wikispecies.org/
>>
>>A big thank you to everybody who contributed to the project so far, from the
>>constructive discussion to the technical support. I hope that the interest
>>in wikispecies will remain as high as it seems to be right now.
>>
>>In order to allow an efficient communication between all those who are
>>interested in wikispecies, a mainling list was created. To register at this
>>mailing list, please go to:
>>
>>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikispecies-l
>>
>>I hope many of you register and want to become part of an evolving
>>wikispecies! Best,
>>
>>
>
>What the hell is this? There was a lot of opposition to setting up a separate
>project. Who the hell authorized this?
>
>This is NOT the way to set up a new project.
>
>-- mav
>
>
>
>_______________________________
>Do you Yahoo!?
>Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
>http://vote.yahoo.com
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>
>
Yes, you opposed it. The wikimedia board approved it; all votes were in
favour. There was discussion, the arguments were weighed. What is your
problem ?

Wikispecies is not a fork. It is not intended as a fork, it will prove
not to be a fork.. Encyclopedic information is in the Wikipedias,
Wikispecies will refer to the other projects as much as the other
projects may refer to Wikispecies.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Portal namespace

body:
Jens-
> He can add the namespace using InitialiseSettings.php, but this won't help
> his case of special treatment of these pages except for not counting as
> articles. No special handling in sorting, no list of portals, etc.

For some reason I was under the impression that the namespace text was
ignored during category sorting. That does not appear to be the case.
However, the namespace code *is* inserted into the CSS of every page, and
that also applies to extra namespaces, allowing for stylic.

Regarding the category pages, the correct solution to me seems to be this:
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=450

Regarding the "list of all portals", a generic solution would probably be
best. Namespace filters would make sense on many pages - Special:Allpages,
Special:Newpages, Special:Recentchanges, Special:Most wanted ..

So, still some work for Aoineko to do if he wants to :-)

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Timwi

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: An urgent Proposal: A fair,
 effective and free rewarding system for WikiPedia volunteers

body:
Krzysztof Kowalczyk wrote:

> On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 12:06:14 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
>
>>Not surprisingly, the first time I heard of this
>>"scientific evidence" was on a page on the server of the Free Software
>>Foundation, and in general you hardly ever hear of it outside of
>>free-software or open-source communities.
>
> Which is most likely due to your limited exposure.
[etc. Additional polemics snipped.]

Your emotional response shows, in my mind, two things:

* You are subject to the same sort of wishful thinking. You are so
   convinced of the validity of the supposed result that you will not
   hesitate to resort to personal attacks to defend it.

* You didn't really understand what I was trying to say. (I might not
   have been clear enough, in which case I apologise, but personally it
   seems more likely to me that you just overreacted because you read my
   message as a challenge to the scientific result.)

To make this absolutely clear: I am not challenging the validity of any
of the researchers' work. Nor am I suggesting that the study was in any
way flawed or that any important factors had been overlooked or ignored.

What I *am* saying is that people in general are over-interpreting the
result. I don't think any of the researchers involved in the study
seriously think that they have dug up rock-solid evidence that proves,
as a hard fact, that people will definitely produce less-quality work
for money. It's the sort of people who would just *love* for that to be
true who tend to put more interpretation into the results than the
people who produced them.

Timwi


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Rewarding volunteers

body:
Jens-
> Some sysops and developers ARE getting more power

Aside from the fact that new people always advance within the existing
hierarchies - a good thing, I'm sure you will agree -, I see no evidence
that privileges have actually been extended in any significant manner. Not
on the projects I've worked on. What are you talking about?

> some Wikipedians DID
> repeatedly float the (IMHO inane) idea of blocking anon editing

If people provide logical arguments, then we should discuss them and try
to refine our reasoning and our conclusions. I for one remain unconvinced
that the larger Wikimedia projects benefit from anonymous editing, and
there's little empirical evidence either way. Putting the account creation
form on the edit screen would probably filter out many random vandals and
spammers while still assuring near-instant participation.

"IMHO inane" is quite dismissive - especially given the fact that people
have actually provided very coherent arguments here.

> However, for you to categorically state that "the trend is the exact
> opposite of what you claim it is"

I only "categorically state" things when they are obvious, or when I've
provided a line of reasoning to do so, as I have here. You have provided
no evidence for your above assertion and nor has the original poster.

I refuse to pretend that I see insight where I see fear, but I acknowledge
that the sarcasm was slightly over the top and apologize for any hurt
feelings. Please let's have discussions based on sound arguments rather
than on emotional themes from George Orwell books. That is more productive
and more respectful towards everyone involved in this project.

Sysops and developers fulfill many thankless duties. There's no need to
constantly praise them, and they are obviously not beyond reproach. But
criticism should be constructive ("actionable") and have a clear,
empirically demonstrated basis in reality.

Erik


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Rewarding volunteers


from_name: Mathias Schindler

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Interview

body:
Stirling Newberry schrieb:

> I'm looking to interview various wikipedians for bopnews.com, if anyone
> is interested drop me an email.

Hi,

why don't you open a page on meta.wikipedia.org and ask your questions.
That's how we did once in the past for a newspaper article and it did work.

Mathias


from_name: Marco Krohn

subject: [Wikipedia-l] mail WikiSpecies

body:
On Tuesday 14 September 2004 19:47, Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> Yes, you opposed it.

as others did as well

> The wikimedia board approved it; all votes were in
> favour. There was discussion, the arguments were weighed.

> What is your problem ?

Almost everyone agreed that there will be huge overlap between the projects
which is a bad thing IMHO.

I did not know up to now that there was a wikimedia board decision and others
probably also read this for the first time now. Asking who authorized this
new project therefore is a good and valid question. Or have you any problem
with that? ;-)

Personally I do not like the way the whole thing was handled, but of course
some decision had to be made. I'm a bit afraid that the proposed solution for
wikispecies project within Wikipedia was not investigated sufficently, on the
other hand the boards members hopefully know what they are doing.

> Wikispecies is not a fork. It is not intended as a fork,

good to hear

> it will prove not to be a fork..

this still is disputed, and I don't think you are right. Of course I hope you
are. Good luck with attracting new experts and

best regards,
  Marco


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: An urgent Proposal: A fair,
 effective and   free rewarding system for WikiPedia volunteers

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

> On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 19:57:40 -0400 Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>> I don't think many people will argue that psychology has a very good
>> track record.  Up until just 30 years ago, psychologists and
>> psychiatrists nearly uniformly agreed that homosexuality was,
>> scientifically speaking, a mental illness, a finding they finally
>> retracted only after people _outside_ the field attacked them
>> continuously over a period of many years.
>
> I think that that's a very bad thing to compare with, since the question
> whether homosexuality is an illness is a matter of definition more than
> something one could expect to get from research in the best of
> circumstances.  It is not that there used to be research concluding that
> homosexuality is an illness and that now that research has been
> invalidated. It is that one used to define homosexuality as an illness
> and now one doesn't.

The reason homosexuality was considered an "illness" is because
psychologists believed they could cure it.

Today there is conclusive evidence to show that it is not something you
can "cure". You can only force these people to fit into society by
denying their own identity.

Timwi


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] nn (Norw. Nynorsk) wikipedia

body:
Is ?lvdalm?l significantly different from Nynorsk and Bokm?l (and for
that matter any other languages) that it should have its own Wikipedia
too?

--Mark/Jin Junshu

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 23:04:38 +0200 (CEST), Lars Aronsson
<lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> Olve Utne wrote:
> > But this has no bearing in itself on the nature of Scots -- which is a
> > language or (set of) dialect(s) (depending on your poitical as well as
> > linguistic reasons...), rather than an accent of standard English.
>
> Nynorsk and Scots are similar in that both are languages without an
> army of their own (this would make them a dialect in one definition),
> but still not frowned upon as some uneducated peasant jargon. Both
> countries were ruled from a distance (London and Copenhagen), but the
> languages of the rulers were intelligible without translation.  I have
> the impression that both Nynorsk and Scots are now minority languages
> in their own country although they might have the potential of being
> the single official language.
>
> The difference between Swedish and Danish is a political consequence
> of Sweden's leaving the Kalmar Union in 1523.  For example, spelling
> was changed from the Danish soft G/D to harder consonants K/T in many
> places.  It is natural (if nationalism is natural) that Norway sought
> similar changes (in both Bokmaal and Nynorsk) after 1905.
>
> > (There is also, of course, the separate lineage of Dalm?l -- which
>
> This should be ?lvdalm?l.  Only a small part of western Dalecarlia
> has this most remarkable dialect.
>
>
> Lars Aronsson, lars at aronsson.se
> --
>   Aronsson Datateknik
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
Krzysztof Kowalczyk wrote:

> On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 17:17:26 -0400, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> You're just repeating this extremely faulty argument "some research
> has been found invalid therefore all research is invalid".

You're just repeating your faulty assumption that anyone is trying to
declare the research as "invalid".

If all you know is "valid" and "invalid", then I'm afraid your thinking
is a bit too black and white.

Timwi


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Customizing navigation bar (FAQ?)

body:
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 09:37:55 -0700 (PDT), andrew fabbro
<andrew at fabbro.org> wrote:
> If I want to add/change/delete entries in the navigation menu, where do
> I go?  Thanks,

I believe the file to edit is called something like xhtml_slim.pt
I may be completely wrong though.
Furthermore, it looks like we really could do with a nice on-wiki
customisation system for that, because it is indeed becoming a bit of
a FAQ.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Interview

body:
If I can be of any help, drop me a word at anthere7 at yahoo.com.

ant

Stirling Newberry a ?crit:
>
> On Sep 14, 2004, at 2:01 PM, Mathias Schindler wrote:
>
>> Stirling Newberry schrieb:
>>
>>> I'm looking to interview various wikipedians for bopnews.com, if
>>> anyone is interested drop me an email.
>>
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> why don't you open a page on meta.wikipedia.org and ask your
>> questions. That's how we did once in the past for a newspaper article
>> and it did work.
>>
>> Mathias
>>
>
> I may try the experiment at some point, but not at the present time.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
OK, I have a proposal here which I think may solve the problem (I'm
not 100% sure about software implementation though).

It is a mixed solution, but I think it shares the good parts of both solutions.

There would be two separate subdomains, http://zh-tw.wikipedia.org/
and http://zh-cn.wikipedia.org/. If you visit the first, you will see
the UI in Traditional, and if you visit the latter the UI will be in
Simplified.

Both of these can share the same database, with automatic conversion occuring.

I propose to store all text in Traditional but convert it to
Simplified (perhaps with some sort of caching so articles do not have
to be re-generated each time) because TC>SC conversion is less
ambiguous than SC>TC conversion. If somebody adds text to an article
but they are typing in SC, it will be converted to TC when it adds it
to the database. In the edit window even though, text will appear as
whichever domain you are at. Titles of articles should be converted
too. If a mistake is made in conversion when a Simplified text is
added to the database, eventually somebody browsing at
http://zh-tw.wikipedia.org/ will notice this error and hopefully fix
it. In the mean time this error won't cause any problems on zh-cn
because it will convert back the same way.

Would it be extremely difficult to have two separate Wikipedias use
the same database but use conversion before displaying on the
client-side and before new text is added to the database?

Of course, there would be a link on the sidebar that always gave you
the option to switch to the other variety, except it would be
displayed separately from normal Interwiki links.

--???/Mark

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 17:09:43 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> The "dialect" question is a very difficult one to answer and the
> creation of zh-min-nan: has already made ripples in the zh: community.
> The difference between Minnan and other "dialects" though is that, as
> far as I'm aware, none of the other Chinese dialects/Sinitic languages
> has a large movement to switch to a different writing system.
>
> First and foremost this problem could be looked at in terms of Cantonese.
>
> Modern Cantonese actually has two different versions, one that is just
> reading text written for Mandarin speakers but with Cantonese
> readings, the other being using Cantonese grammar and vocabulary words
> that Cantonese has but Mandarin doesn't.
>
> Until very recently the latter had the higher status in Hong Kong and
> Macau, however upon reunification the former gained the higher status.
>
> Most Cantonese speakers, even if they don't know Mandarin, can read
> texts written by a Mandarin speaker with little difficulty, but much
> of the sentences are not how they would say them in everyday speech.
>
> Then there is also an issue with Classical Chinese which is very
> different from modern Mandarin. Until very recently any sort of
> reference work like an encyclopedia would've been written in Classical
> Chinese which was the literary language.
>
> There may be some movement to start a Classical Chinese Wikipedia but
> if there is it must be very small.
>
> However Classical Chinese sentences often seem more natural in
> Cantonese or Hakka or other Southern dialects than do the equivalents
> in written Mandarin.
>
> Also if you were to convert zh-min-nan: into Chinese characters it
> would become apparent very quickly that it wasn't Mandarin, especially
> because Mandarin uses such words as ? (de) which many people say is
> "bastardized classical Chinese" because originally ? was created
> exclusively for writing Mandarin, the character properly used for
> Taiwanese and Classical Chinese is ? (as you can see ? is a basic
> character, but ? has two different parts).
>
> --???/Mark
>
> On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 20:43:29 +0100, Rowan Collins
>
>
> <rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Just a question out of curiosity about how you handle this: what's the
> > > base language, or is there one?  Is the primary version of a document in
> > > Simplified, and then there are annotations for how to correctly
> > > translate it to Traditional (i.e. [simplified character|proper
> > > traditional character]), or is it the other way around, or are both
> > > Simplified and Traditional equally base languages?
> >
> > Glancing at the current test implementation, I gather that neither has
> > 'precedence': to put a manual translation, you say {-zh-cn one version
> > zh-tw the other-}. Wether the mappings are one-to-many in one
> > direction, the other, or both, is not a problem: you simply define
> > what you want displayed, in that particular case, in both versions.
> >
> > What I'm not clear on, having not looked in any depth, is how the
> > article is actually *stored*. The explanation seems to imply that the
> > characters are simply recognised as being either:
> > a) in the desired writing system; no action needed
> > b) in the non-desired writing system; automatic translation required
> > or c) marked up as a special case; version chosen to match preference
> > as per special syntax
> >
> > I may be wrong, but if I'm right this obviously no use to the more
> > general case of languages/dialects. For that, you'd probably need to
> > store which language the 'original' was in in the database, and then
> > convert based on that. Although then you'd have the problem of changes
> > that weren't easily translatable back to that base, wouldn't you? i.e.
> > base is LangA, a LangB user makes a change, but that change is
> > ambiguous in LangA; how is that change recorded? Similarly, if a naive
> > LangB user "corrects" the automated translation, they may end up
> > creating an error in the LangA document, because they overwrote the
> > original rather than adding special syntax. Ouch. It's more
> > complicated than I expected, unless that's just cos I'm hungry... ;)
> >
> > --
> > Rowan Collins BSc
> > [IMSoP]
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: questions about complying with the GFDL

body:
Delirium wrote:

> Now, the GFDL requires that if you distribute more than 100 copies of
> a document, you must also distribute the source (i.e. wikitext)
> version of the document, and the text of the GFDL itself.  I don't see
> a good way to do this on a smallish pamphlet (say, 5 pages): the text
> of the GFDL itself would nearly double the size of the pamphlet.  The
> wikitext version is permitted to be distributed electronically (i.e.
> "see http://blah/ for a source version of this document"), but even
> that is somewhat onerous, as a small organization may not have the
> resources or interest in maintaining a mirror of the documents it
> distributes for the required year.  Notably, pointing to wikipedia.org
> is not sufficient---the GFDL requires that the person doing the
> distribution maintain an exact source mirror of the document exactly
> as distributed, "free of added material", and including any changes,
> so "derived from the Wikipedia article [here]" would not be enough.

It seems to me that it might be possible to comply with this particular
requirement by copying from, and using the link to, a previous version
of the page. For example, you might want to include the article
[[Greece]] on your most recent revision:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Greece&oldid=5864661
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Greece&oldid=5864661>

By including the full URL of a specific revision, rather than that of
the current article, you assure that the linked page will be "free of
added material".

In connection with the general discussion about flagging revisions for
use in a 1.0 print publication, this means that providing a reliable
computer-network location is not that difficult. If you rely on
Wikipedia to keep its history available for at least the required year,
then it may be possible to comply with the GFDL on a print run without
maintaining your own mirror site.

--Michael Snow


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: I am really tired of registering an account for
 each MetaWiki site I found

body:
Kiss All a ?crit:
> I found it is very tedious or even annoying for users and developers
> to register an account for each MetaWiki site they encountered.
>
> Take myself for example:
> 1. First, I got an account from wikipedia, that was my first visit to
> wiki in fact.
>
> 2.Then, I found metawiki, was asked to register. Ok, I was still happy
> to do it to be a more involved volunteer.
>
> 3.After that, I found the chinese version of eikipeida. I always
> wanted to contribute to my own people. I registered an account there
> without reluctance.
>
> 4. Today, I want to add my new feature request and bug report. You
> know what? A MediaZilla poped out  requesting me to register again!
>
> 5. I suspect if I happen to access wikidictionary, wikibook, and so
> on, I have to register again and again...
>
> I don't know how many people have the same problem as me. But wouldn't
> it be better to have a single account to access all sites within
> MetaWiki? I know there is a passport project from Microsoft dealing
> with the similar problem. It would be much easier for us to do the
> same thing within MetaWiki because we don't need to worry about the
> identify,money issue in the real world.

I think I may have an account on basically 30 projects. Maybe more.
I suspect Angela must have even more accounts.
Well, it would be nice if there is single login, but there are worse
things than that :-)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Google doesn't index thousands of pages

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

> ..even though it knows about them. Daniel Brandt explains the problem
> here:
> http://www.google-watch.org/dying.html

Has anyone investigated other search engines?

It seems that since around 2001 or so, people have begun to regard
Google as if it was the only search engine on the planet...

Timwi


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
> Just a question out of curiosity about how you handle this: what's the
> base language, or is there one?  Is the primary version of a document in
> Simplified, and then there are annotations for how to correctly
> translate it to Traditional (i.e. [simplified character|proper
> traditional character]), or is it the other way around, or are both
> Simplified and Traditional equally base languages?

Glancing at the current test implementation, I gather that neither has
'precedence': to put a manual translation, you say {-zh-cn one version
zh-tw the other-}. Wether the mappings are one-to-many in one
direction, the other, or both, is not a problem: you simply define
what you want displayed, in that particular case, in both versions.

What I'm not clear on, having not looked in any depth, is how the
article is actually *stored*. The explanation seems to imply that the
characters are simply recognised as being either:
a) in the desired writing system; no action needed
b) in the non-desired writing system; automatic translation required
or c) marked up as a special case; version chosen to match preference
as per special syntax

I may be wrong, but if I'm right this obviously no use to the more
general case of languages/dialects. For that, you'd probably need to
store which language the 'original' was in in the database, and then
convert based on that. Although then you'd have the problem of changes
that weren't easily translatable back to that base, wouldn't you? i.e.
base is LangA, a LangB user makes a change, but that change is
ambiguous in LangA; how is that change recorded? Similarly, if a naive
LangB user "corrects" the automated translation, they may end up
creating an error in the LangA document, because they overwrote the
original rather than adding special syntax. Ouch. It's more
complicated than I expected, unless that's just cos I'm hungry... ;)

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Portal namespace

body:
Jens Frank wrote:

> He can add the namespace using InitialiseSettings.php, but this won't help
> his case of special treatment of these pages except for not counting as
> articles. No special handling in sorting, no list of portals, etc.

You *can* get a "list of portals" (generally: list of articles in a
given namespace) with my rewritten Special:Allmessages that's in 1.4-CVS.


body:
Angela wrote:

> See bug 57 at http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57. The
> code is available for this, but there are social issues involved in
> deciding who gets to keep their name when more than one person is
> using that name on different wikis.

Has any effort been made to contact these people and resolve the
conflict peacefully?


from_name: Matthew Larsen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Why Academics are Useful to Wikipedia

body:
I think this is a good idea,but I have my reservations, my main concerns being:

1) If there is a stable edit of an article, people will revert from
the latest edit to a stable version

2) If something was edited again after declared stable, the article
will no longer be stable and seen as such (unless the viewer looks in
the history - assuming stable tags are put on article page)

2) People might not bother looking at unstable edits at all

3) It will probably take the review board a long time to get through a
substantial amount of articles, if they even agree

4) If something is considered stable people may not want to edit it
for fear of ruining someone elses work, being labelled disruptive or
making an otherwise 99% accurate topic non-stable (providing it is a
minor change)

5) Defining something as stable is a big step and needs ideally to be
done by proffessionals

6) As someone said earlier this isnt truely in the spirit of the project

7) People are fully aware that the content may not be fool-proof,
users take their own risks (If it is a proffessional / academic im
sure they have other places to look for information)

8) Finally, as with all systems, it is open to abuse (favouritsm,
bribing, abuse of position etc)

These are of course my views and would appreciate sensible replies (if any)

Regards,

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 17:43:13 +0100 (BST), Matt R
<matt_crypto at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> --- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> > Does anyone have any objections to that other than the ones I already
> > mentioned when I first proposed it?
>
> You mentioned electricity availability. I would add that digital distribution
> requires some IT skills by those receiving it; paper only requires literacy.
> There are financial costs with computers apart from the initial outlay, namely,
> maintenance. Computers develop faults -- books just get musty.
>
>
>
> -- Matt (User:Matt Crypto)
>
> ___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun!  http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Matthew Larsen
   > mat.larsen at gmail.com
   > 07739 785 249


references:
<E506B3FF6BC1254C9AC1B948C380BC2801FBB835@sm-nyny-xm05.nena.wdpr.disney.com>
	<41409AE3.2060501@apple.com> <41463CDC.8070604@telus.net>
	<vhIsdqY67dTD-pn2-lrFCgw1dUUXm@localhost>

body:
Dont confuse US Law with the rest of the world.

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:35:21 +0000 (UTC), Dan Drake <dd at dandrake.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 00:35:40 UTC, Ray Saintonge
> <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
> >...
> > >Yes, people have rights even when organized into corportations. (Almost
> > >said that corporations have rights--a serious slip of the keyboard!)
> > >
> > Legally a corporation IS a person, and does have rights.
>
> Indeed, it was a seeming endorsement of that doctrine -- a wholly
> unwarrranted bit of judicial legslation by an activist judge, to use the
> conservatives' terminology where it applies -- that I needed to avoid.
>
> Apologies for the OT digression.
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Matthew Larsen
   > mat.larsen at gmail.com
   > 07739 785 249


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: An urgent Proposal: A fair, effective and
	free rewarding system for WikiPedia volunteers

references:
<4144E274.90705@hackish.org> <web-101185549@freemail.nl>
	<ci7gfo$ue7$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Timwi wrote:

>> homosexuality is an illness and that now that research has been
>> invalidated. It is that one used to define homosexuality as an illness
>> and now one doesn't.
>
>The reason homosexuality was considered an "illness" is because
>psychologists believed they could cure it.
>
>Today there is conclusive evidence to show that it is not something you
>can "cure". You can only force these people to fit into society by
>denying their own identity.

Now this is going very offtopic. Wheter homosexuality is a normal
condition, an illness, a genetic feature or a genetic defect does not
really influence mediawiki development.

Alfio


from_name: Sj

subject: [Wikitech-l] [patch] blog thru User_talk and enchanced rdf feed

body:
This sounds neat.  Why not create a new user page, however?  The user
talk page already has lots of neat functionality for letting users
know when they have new messages from *others*, one of many things you
lose by protecting it and making it a space for a blog.   You could
then add another sidebar link for adding a blog entry.

On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 17:18:34 -0400, Joel Reed <jreed at ddiworld.com> wrote:
> A relatively small set of changes allows users to use all
> of mediawiki's great formatting and hyperlinking capabilities
> to blog thru their User talk page.
>
> The following patch provides the capability to blog through
> Mediawiki's user talk page by providing a simple option to
> post new sections to the top of the user talk page, and
> providing a SpecialTalkfeed.php page, based on SpecialRecentchanges.php
> which includes the section content in the RDF feed so that
> the blog may be nicely aggregrated by tools like PlanetPlanet.
> (See http://www.planetplanet.org/)
>
> Changes in patch
> --------------------------------------------------------
> 1) Adds a new special page, SpecialTalkfeed.php
> 2) Adds new preference, "Add all new sections to the top
> of the page by default"
> 3) When adding a new section, and only then, adds option
> to "Add this new section to the top of the page".
> 4) Adds a "rdf feed" hyperlink when on a user talk page.
>
> How do you run a blog out of the User Talk page?
> --------------------------------------------------------
> 1) Under editing preferences, turn on "Add all new sections
> to the top of the page by default".
> 2) If a Sysop, protect the page. (It would be nice if non-sysops
> could protect their User_talk pages)
> 3) To make a new blog post, click "+" for "add new section".
> NOTE: If you didn't change your preferences above, be sure to
> select "Add this new section to the top of the page" at the
> bottom of the page before saving.
> 4) Thats it! The "rdf feed" option at the top of the User talk
> page gives a link to a feed that should be used for aggregators.

--
+sj+


from_name: Wil Mahan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Stripping HTML comments

body:
Hi,

MediaWiki uses the following line (in Parser.php) to strip comments
when outputting HTML:

$text = preg_replace( '/(\\n *<!--.*--> *(?=\\n)|<!--.*-->)/sU', '$2',
$text );

The first alternative in the regexp, '\\n *<!--.*--> *(?=\\n)', is
wrong when one comment comes at the beginning of the line and is
immediately followed by some text, and another comment later in the
page is followed by a newline; everything between the comments is
incorrectly removed. I put an example at
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/487 .

I have an idea of how to fix the bug, but I was wondering if someone
could explain exactly what this regexp is supposed to do.

Unless I'm missing something, the '$2' replacement string never
actually expands to anything, because there is only one capturing
grouping, the parentheses surrounding the whole expression. My
understanding is that the lookahead assertion '(?=\\n)' is
non-capturing; lookahead assertions in perl are non-capturing because
they are zero-width, and I'm pretty sure that PHP's implementation
follows perl.

Thus if anyone could shed any light on this code, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks,
Wil

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


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] How to get more cooperation between wikipedia and
	wiktionary

body:
On the nl:wikipedia, there were many articles that contained the names
of the subject in different languages. There was opposition to this, as
this is something you expect in a dictionary and not in an encyclopedia.
There were some itterations before we came up with our current solution.

On nl:Wiktionary we refer to articles in wikipedia and use the template
{{-info-}} to produce a text with an interlink to the wikipedia article.
On Wikipedia we now refer to articles in wiktionary and use the template
{{wikt}} to produce a text with an interlink to the wiktionary article.

The benefits are:
*There are more articles in nl:wiktionary as a result
*We did not lose the information that was on nl:wikipedia
*We have richer information overall
*The best bit is: more people contribute to nl:wiktionary.

Everybody is happy with this solution. :)

Thanks,
    GerardM


list: wiktionary-l

subject:
[Wiktionary-l] How to get more cooperation between wikipedia and
	wiktionary


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 09/14/04 20:18, Matthew Larsen wrote:

> 1) If there is a stable edit of an article, people will revert from
> the latest edit to a stable version

Considering how much some people do this with favoured versions ...

> 3) It will probably take the review board a long time to get through a
> substantial amount of articles, if they even agree

That's a big worry. Mav compared the process to WP:FAC ... which is getting
through more articles lately, but there's NO DAMN WAY it can be considered
a model of scaling.

The review process I think would need to be more naturally a wiki or wikilike
process to scale to any significant percentage of the articles.

> 6) As someone said earlier this isnt truely in the spirit of the project

More specifically, it seems to directly repudiate the wiki concept.

- d.


from_name: Daniel Kinzler

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Portal namespace

body:
Hello

Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> Hi all,
> I saw the German Wikipedia create WikiProject's "portals" [1] into the
> encyclopaedia's namespace (ns=0).
> What do you think about create a new namespace just for those pages
> (already 103 on de:) ?

Just last night, I had a discussion about this with a few other people
from the german WP. The idea is to move pseudo-articles like portals,
lists and timelines out of the main namespace. We came up with a
proposal to create at least one new namespace, called "Navigation", or,
alternatively, several called "Portal", "List" and so on. The proposal
(in german) can be found here:
<http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verbesserungsvorschl%C3%A4ge#Mittelfristig_einen_neuen_Namensraum_NAVIGATION_schaffen.3F>

If you are interresed, I could put a translation of the proposal to the
meta-wiki and maybe move the discussion there - that may however
discurage some people that do not speak english so well.

I'm aware that this is mainly an administrative change - however, I
would like to know what would have to be done to allow a few more features:

* an option to search in that namespace from the search page.
* list all pages in that namespace.
* set a namespace to "noindex" (if this would be a good idea is a
different question - i just want to know how hard it would be)
* Have the skin produce a special color-sceme for that namespace.

Theank you all for your participation, an especially Guillaume for
mentioning this here.

Daniel
(aka [[de:Benutzer:Duesentrieb]] aka [[en:User:Gearloose]])

PS: I did not receive any answers to some proposals about categories I
posted here over the last few weeks. Did they even get through?


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Categories (was Portal namespace)

body:
On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 10:11:45PM +0200, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
>
> PS: I did not receive any answers to some proposals about categories I
> posted here over the last few weeks. Did they even get through?

Yes, they got through. But as long as nobody has an idea, how to
efficiently compute all pages that are direct or indirect members
of a category, there's no sense in discussing how nice this would
be.

JeLuF


body:
On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 08:29:38PM +0100, Rowan Collins wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 09:37:55 -0700 (PDT), andrew fabbro
> <andrew at fabbro.org> wrote:
> > If I want to add/change/delete entries in the navigation menu, where do
> > I go?  Thanks,
>
> I believe the file to edit is called something like xhtml_slim.pt
> I may be completely wrong though.
> Furthermore, it looks like we really could do with a nice on-wiki
> customisation system for that, because it is indeed becoming a bit of
> a FAQ.

http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=419
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Installation_FAQ#How_do_I_change_the_items_in_the_sidebar.3F

Regards,

JeLuF


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: create new function; domain name administrator

body:
On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 22:11:47 +0200, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Yo. Fully agree with you on this Walter.
>
> Well, I have been seeing you taking care of such matters for perhaps 2
> years now, as well as setting portal pages for country domain name.
>
> I would be personnally delighted that you be this person responsible of
> domain names.
>
< What do other people think ?

Support.

This is not at all an easy job; work will need to be done to scale the
paperwork and synchronize regular deadlines.  I am glad that Walter is
even considering doing this.

--
+sj+


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Olve Utne wrote:
> But this has no bearing in itself on the nature of Scots -- which is a
> language or (set of) dialect(s) (depending on your poitical as well as
> linguistic reasons...), rather than an accent of standard English.

Nynorsk and Scots are similar in that both are languages without an
army of their own (this would make them a dialect in one definition),
but still not frowned upon as some uneducated peasant jargon. Both
countries were ruled from a distance (London and Copenhagen), but the
languages of the rulers were intelligible without translation.  I have
the impression that both Nynorsk and Scots are now minority languages
in their own country although they might have the potential of being
the single official language.

The difference between Swedish and Danish is a political consequence
of Sweden's leaving the Kalmar Union in 1523.  For example, spelling
was changed from the Danish soft G/D to harder consonants K/T in many
places.  It is natural (if nationalism is natural) that Norway sought
similar changes (in both Bokmaal and Nynorsk) after 1905.

> (There is also, of course, the separate lineage of Dalm?l -- which

This should be ?lvdalm?l.  Only a small part of western Dalecarlia
has this most remarkable dialect.

Lars Aronsson, lars at aronsson.se
--
  Aronsson Datateknik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Not a fork! (was: mail WikiSpecies)

body:
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Then what the hell is this:
>
>http://species.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification
>
>Looks like a fork of the English Wikipedia's article on scientific
>classification to me.
>
>-- mav

I wasn't opposed to wikispecies' creation, but I am with Mav with this. As
long as wikispecies is nothing more than a data repository it's ok, but if
it starts to have detailed articles about classification and such that's
clearly fork.

Of course an article like this is useful for wikispecies, if anything to
clearly explain what's this wiki about. But it should redirect readers to
the relevant Wikipedia article (english or otherwise).

Alfio


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Alfio Puglisi wrote:

>On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
>
>
>>Then what the hell is this:
>>
>>http://species.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification
>>
>>Looks like a fork of the English Wikipedia's article on scientific
>>classification to me.
>>
>>-- mav
>>
>>
>
>I wasn't opposed to wikispecies' creation, but I am with Mav with this. As
>long as wikispecies is nothing more than a data repository it's ok, but if
>it starts to have detailed articles about classification and such that's
>clearly fork.
>
>Of course an article like this is useful for wikispecies, if anything to
>clearly explain what's this wiki about. But it should redirect readers to
>the relevant Wikipedia article (english or otherwise).
>
>Alfio
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>
>
My hope is that the Wikispecies will eventually have all taxonomic
systems available to it. The result will be that when a wikipedia wants
to have a taxobox based on the Cronquist systematics,  all relating
taxons will be in accordance with Cronquist. When it is then later
decided on that wikipedia to follow a later system, the update will take
into account *all* relevant changes. At this stage it is pie in the sky.

One thing that I think will be really important is to have interwiki
links available between Commons, Wikipedia and Wikispecies. I really do
want Wikispecies to refer for encyclopedic information to the
wikipedias. With these interlinks, cooperation will prove possible and
fruitfull.

Thanks,
    Gerard


from_name: Benedikt Mandl

body:
Hi Alfio!

You are of course right. I am sorry about this incident, I don't know who
set up that link but I guess it was meant to fill just something on the
interface. I changed the article to an external link to wikipedia. Please be
patient and give wikispecies a chance. Things like that will settle in the
very near future.

I hope for your support of the project, best wishes,

Benedikt

--
NEU: GMX ProMail mit bestem Virenschutz http://www.gmx.net/de/go/mail
+++ Empfehlung der Redaktion +++ Internet Professionell 10/04 +++


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Portal namespace

body:
Hi,

I am interested by this.
Yes please, can you put a translation to meta?

I think that portals belong the encyclopaedia's namespace. They exist to
present the whole of a subject with a nice design. That would attract many
contributors who feel lost in a general encyclopedia. Wikispecies ? ;o)

Regards,
Yann

Le Tuesday 14 September 2004 22:11, Daniel Kinzler a ?crit :
> Hello
>
> Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > I saw the German Wikipedia create WikiProject's "portals" [1] into the
> > encyclopaedia's namespace (ns=0).
> > What do you think about create a new namespace just for those pages
> > (already 103 on de:) ?
>
> Just last night, I had a discussion about this with a few other people
> from the german WP. The idea is to move pseudo-articles like portals,
> lists and timelines out of the main namespace. We came up with a
> proposal to create at least one new namespace, called "Navigation", or,
> alternatively, several called "Portal", "List" and so on. The proposal
> (in german) can be found here:
> <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verbesserungsvorschl%C3%A4ge#Mittel
>fristig_einen_neuen_Namensraum_NAVIGATION_schaffen.3F>
>
> If you are interresed, I could put a translation of the proposal to the
> meta-wiki and maybe move the discussion there - that may however
> discurage some people that do not speak english so well.
>
> I'm aware that this is mainly an administrative change - however, I
> would like to know what would have to be done to allow a few more features:
>
> * an option to search in that namespace from the search page.
> * list all pages in that namespace.
> * set a namespace to "noindex" (if this would be a good idea is a
> different question - i just want to know how hard it would be)
> * Have the skin produce a special color-sceme for that namespace.
>
> Theank you all for your participation, an especially Guillaume for
> mentioning this here.
>
> Daniel
> (aka [[de:Benutzer:Duesentrieb]] aka [[en:User:Gearloose]])
>
> PS: I did not receive any answers to some proposals about categories I
> posted here over the last few weeks. Did they even get through?

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


body:
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Benedikt Mandl wrote:

>Hi Alfio!
>
>You are of course right. I am sorry about this incident, I don't know who
>set up that link but I guess it was meant to fill just something on the
>interface. I changed the article to an external link to wikipedia. Please be
>patient and give wikispecies a chance. Things like that will settle in the
>very near future.

No problem, it just seems that wikispecies gets a lot of surveillance
after all the discussion on the mailing list :-)

Alfio


from_name: Kiss All

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: An urgent Proposal: A fair,
	effective and free rewarding system for WikiPedia volunteers

body:
Wow! You guys are really talkative! I cannot see any connection
between homosexuality and my proposal :-)

So, finally, May I ask:  what are your opinions about setting up a
page/volunteer grading system in WikiPedia?

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 21:35:53 +0200 (MEST), Alfio Puglisi
<puglisi at arcetri.astro.it> wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Timwi wrote:
>
> >> homosexuality is an illness and that now that research has been
> >> invalidated. It is that one used to define homosexuality as an illness
> >> and now one doesn't.
> >
> >The reason homosexuality was considered an "illness" is because
> >psychologists believed they could cure it.
> >
> >Today there is conclusive evidence to show that it is not something you
> >can "cure". You can only force these people to fit into society by
> >denying their own identity.
>
> Now this is going very offtopic. Wheter homosexuality is a normal
> condition, an illness, a genetic feature or a genetic defect does not
> really influence mediawiki development.
>
> Alfio
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
Be good....


subject:
[Wikitech-l] How does MediaWiki decide where to store an uploaded
	file within the images directory?

body:
  I am just curious:  Is it possible for admins to upload files into
images directory by Linux's copy command and establish MediaWiki links
later?
  I guess I have to know the rule about where to put them and the
table in MySQL storing the information about a file name and its path
before doing this.
  We have lots of files to be uploaded.

--
Be good....


subject: [WikiEN-l] A great, free encyclopedia

body:
> Ed Poor wrote
> >Let's not confuse goal with method (or ends with means): I don't agree
> >that the goal is "a great, neutral encyclopedia".
< >Rather, the goal is a "a great, free encyclopedia"

Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Well, I rather thought it was.  Perhaps those who want a great, partisan
> encyclopedia would be kind enough to fork off, before introducing the
> partisan stuff.

I think Ed is exactly right here.  The primary goals are to be great
and free, each of these adjectives in as many senses as possible.
However, it is not even possible to be "free" in every possible sense
at one time.

Neutrality, and 'no original research', are both very scalable ways to
help make such a shared resource great.  But I think that you would
agree, Charles, that en:
as a community are somewhat partisan when it comes to (for instance)
freedom, openness, and tolerance of minority opinions...

+sj+
 _ _ :-------.-.--------.--.--------.-.--------.--.--------[...]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: One Chinese Wikipedia

body:
On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 13:31:56 +0800, Lorenzarius <lorenzarius at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am no opinion on zh-min-nan but I have a few things to say about your message.
>
> On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 17:09:43 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > First and foremost this problem could be looked at in terms of Cantonese.
> >
> > Modern Cantonese actually has two different versions, one that is just
> > reading text written for Mandarin speakers but with Cantonese
> > readings, the other being using Cantonese grammar and vocabulary words
> > that Cantonese has but Mandarin doesn't.
> >
> > Until very recently the latter had the higher status in Hong Kong and
> > Macau, however upon reunification the former gained the higher status.
> >
> > Most Cantonese speakers, even if they don't know Mandarin, can read
> > texts written by a Mandarin speaker with little difficulty, but much
> > of the sentences are not how they would say them in everyday speech.
>
> I am a Hongkonger and I speak Cantonese. And I think what you're
> talking is really messed up. We write "written Chinese" (???) not what
> you called "reading text written for Mandarin speakers". And this
> "written Chinese" is the same "written Chinese" in Beijing or in
> Shanghai or in any part of China. Chinese people write Chinese in its
> common form: before the New Written Language Movement (AD 192x - 193x)
> this common form is "wenyian" (or Classical Chinese), and after the
> movement this common form is "baihua" (Modern Chinese).

Exactly. And Baihua is based on Mandarin.

> It is true that what we speak is not what we write. But no one
> actually write "Cantonese" except in very vulgar or very casual
> occasions, like when I'm IM-ing with my friends. We don't teach how to
> write Cantonese in school, and I think that not much people really
> know how to write correct Cantonese.
>
> > Then there is also an issue with Classical Chinese which is very
> > different from modern Mandarin. Until very recently any sort of
> > reference work like an encyclopedia would've been written in Classical
> > Chinese which was the literary language.
>
> Perhaps you're right if "until very recently" means several decades ago.
>
> <snip>

Yes, that could be considered "very recently".

--Jin Junshu/Mark


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: I am really tired of registering an account for
	each MetaWiki site I found

body:
The socially easy solution here is to globally merge the 99.9% of
accounts for which there is no conflict, and provide for some unmerged
accounts which can then be merged by hand / via mediation.  This would
at least prevent any *new* users from having to worry about this.

--Sj

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 20:56:00 +0100, Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> Angela wrote:
>
> > See bug 57 at http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57. The
> > code is available for this, but there are social issues involved in
> > deciding who gets to keep their name when more than one person is
> > using that name on different wikis.
>
> Has any effort been made to contact these people and resolve the
> conflict peacefully?
>


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: wikispecies

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> Well, I can remember that I have tried my darndest to get the
> en:wikipedia resource "Three of Life" to consider working towards a
> unified Taxobox that is acceptable to *all* Wikipedia. I was basically
> ignored with the argument, "see our arguments in the archives it was a
> hard slug to get this far we do not want any more of this". I have
> presented arguments about things that were wrong for
> internationalisation eg [[Animal]]ia in stead of [[Animalia]], I
> stated that the mentioning of "Bionominal name" does not add anything
> as it is inherent in "Scientific classification". The only result was
> "we have voted on this, this is our consensus".
>
> One other function I expect Wikispecies will bring is opening up this
> data for all who want it. By publishing content and changes in a
> format like XML, people and organisations can benefit from the work
> done on Wikispecies. I also expect Wikispecies to be open to changes
> from trusted institutions. So when an institution like IPNI for
> instance publishes a researched update on specific content we apply
> this change and we will attribute this change to IPNI.

Changes from trusted institutions would be acceptable as long as they
understand that their comments can be openly edited.  I am prepared to
sympathise with your experience with Mav over the taxoboxes, and would
hope that your experience will lead you to be open to comparable
suggestion when Wikispecies is fully functioning.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: domain name administrator--> Trust level

body:
On Tue, 14 Sep 19:02 -0700 (PDT), <chris_mahan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > Technical and financial decisions are two different things imho.
> > Technical responsability Walter is mentionning is currently typically
> > one some developers are trusted to do I think.
> > However, the financial responsability mentionned is right now only
> > limited to Jimbo and perhaps to our treasurer.

The bulk of financial decisions (regular renewals) could be planned
far in advance
and cleared, en masse, with a financial officer.  A small emergency fund as mav
mentioned should suffice for unexpected needs.

> > A few questions are
> > * Do we have a problem with our domain names handling ?
yes.

> > * Is there a need to have one person in charge of this ?
no; let every eager person you can find help; but one point-person at
any given moment.  See my stock reply below. :-)

Chris Mahan:
> I peronally think that the job is highly critical, and should not be
> left to a volunteer. You should either hire someone who does this
> already for a living, as a professional, or jimbo should handpick

Motivated volunteers can do an excellent job with highly critical tasks.
It is nevertheless important to avoid single points of failure.  While I
support Walter wholeheartedly as someone to manage domain issues,
the primary work of such a manager would be to make sure the relevant
information was organized and available to others, so that they could take
up slack as needed.

A small group of interested people, one of whom at any given time is
the point person for any sudden decisions, is definitely needed.  A
one-person group is better than none; larger would be better still.

--
+sj+


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Wouldn't it be better to store Most of values in
	LocalSettings.php into database?

body:
Jens-
> Draft is at
> http://mediawiki.mormo.org/index.php/Special:Sitesettings

Do you intend to port the existing explanations of what each option does
into this interface? If so, it would probably make sense to have separate
messages for these so we can experiment with different layouts for the
help.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The board has overstepped its mandate and authority

body:
Daniel-
>> This is most definitely not a fork of Wikipedia. Wikispecies is more
>> about collecting data than writing articles. This data will be saved
>> in a way that allows all Wikipedias, not just the English one, to use
>> the data. As a project, Wikispecies has different aims to Wikipedia.
>> It is aimed at the needs of scientific users rather than general
>> users. Integrating Wikispecies into Wikimedia prevents a fork.

> *That* is what the Commons is for. Fork.

Mav is correct, in my opinion. It doesn't make much sense to have separate
"data projects". Instead, we should pursue developing the Commons into a
single such repository from which other projects can dynamically
transclude their content. With one such project, it is very clear to every
participant that the sole purpose is to store data. With many specialized
projects, we risk that people come across something like Wikispecies and
start treating it like it is Wikipedia.

I suggest supending species.wikimedia.org until it is clearer what
direction this project needs to take. If no consensus can be found, a vote
on Meta seems like a good idea (apologies if there already was one and I
missed it).

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Wed, Sep 15, 2004 at 03:17:00AM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Daniel-
> >> This is most definitely not a fork of Wikipedia. Wikispecies is more
> >> about collecting data than writing articles. This data will be saved
> >> in a way that allows all Wikipedias, not just the English one, to use
> >> the data. As a project, Wikispecies has different aims to Wikipedia.
> >> It is aimed at the needs of scientific users rather than general
> >> users. Integrating Wikispecies into Wikimedia prevents a fork.
>
> > *That* is what the Commons is for. Fork.
>
> Mav is correct, in my opinion. It doesn't make much sense to have separate
> "data projects". Instead, we should pursue developing the Commons into a
> single such repository from which other projects can dynamically
> transclude their content. With one such project, it is very clear to every
> participant that the sole purpose is to store data. With many specialized
> projects, we risk that people come across something like Wikispecies and
> start treating it like it is Wikipedia.
>
> I suggest supending species.wikimedia.org until it is clearer what
> direction this project needs to take. If no consensus can be found, a vote
> on Meta seems like a good idea (apologies if there already was one and I
> missed it).

Think-first act-later is the wrong order of actions. Every (and I mean literally
every) successful project was act-first think-later. Wikipedia started this way too.

And what do you need consensus (or even worse - voting) for ? The Wikispecies
is not interfering with other projects. If you don't want to work on it, you can ignore it.


from_name: Anthere

body:
Christopher Mahan a ?crit:
> --- Walter Vermeir <walter at wikipedia.be> wrote:
>
>
>>I am willing to do it. But i am not very much in favor of the light
>>version
>>because you can not really do anything.
>
>
>
> I agree with Walter. The person who takes care of this needs to have
> complete power to make any technical decisions immediately. I
> personally manage 15+ domains and it's a PITA when something needs to
> be done ASAP and I have to ask for permission.

Technical and financial decisions are two different things imho.
Technical responsability Walter is mentionning is currently typically
one some developers are trusted to do I think.
However, the financial responsability mentionned is right now only
limited to Jimbo and perhaps to our treasurer.

> As far as who to trust, I suggest Jimbo put a name or two in a hat
> and have the board pull one of those out.  I also suggest that this
> should be a paid function (as, say, $100/month) because it is such a nightmare.

Hmmmm.
I disagree.
It is not Jimbo's job to name people. And I am not sure he would like to
do that. The proposal should come from the person himself. Not from
Jimbo, nor from the board. But from people.

A few questions are

* Do we have a problem with our domain names handling ?

* Is there a need to have one person in charge of this ?

* What could the job recover ?

Walter gave us his opinion on these three questions. Are there other
opinions ?

If the first ones are fixed, next questions become

* What will the job recover ?

* Who else is interested in doing this ?


body:
On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 06:47:15PM -0700, Christopher Mahan wrote:
>
> --- Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sf.net> wrote:
>
> > Think-first act-later is the wrong order of actions. Every (and I
> > mean literally
> > every) successful project was act-first think-later. Wikipedia
> > started this way too.
>
> There was a lot of thinking done before wikipedia started. (lookup
> GNUpedia on google).

No, you got it wrong - what they came up with was completely unworkable Nupedia.
Wikipedia started as a quick hack.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: wikispecies

body:
Erik Moeller a ?crit:
> Daniel-
>
>>>This is most definitely not a fork of Wikipedia. Wikispecies is more
>>>about collecting data than writing articles. This data will be saved
>>>in a way that allows all Wikipedias, not just the English one, to use
>>>the data. As a project, Wikispecies has different aims to Wikipedia.
>>>It is aimed at the needs of scientific users rather than general
>>>users. Integrating Wikispecies into Wikimedia prevents a fork.
>>
>
>>*That* is what the Commons is for. Fork.
>
>
> Mav is correct, in my opinion. It doesn't make much sense to have separate
> "data projects". Instead, we should pursue developing the Commons into a
> single such repository from which other projects can dynamically
> transclude their content. With one such project, it is very clear to every
> participant that the sole purpose is to store data. With many specialized
> projects, we risk that people come across something like Wikispecies and
> start treating it like it is Wikipedia.
>
> I suggest supending species.wikimedia.org until it is clearer what
> direction this project needs to take. If no consensus can be found, a vote
> on Meta seems like a good idea (apologies if there already was one and I
> missed it).
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

The point is, most people have not followed what wikispecies project was
about, so it is not certain whether they would do an informed vote. This
might be well one of these cases where voting is not a good idea Erik :-)

Another point would be this one. There are many people very interested
in doing wikispecies.

If wikispecies is set up, it may be that part of its information is
included in wikipedia, or it may be that the wiki is a wikimedia project.

If wikispecies is not set up, it may be that the wiki is set up
somewhere else and it may be that part of its information is included in
wikipedia from that free ressource.


subject: [WikiEN-l] A great, free encyclopedia

body:
On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 07:57:53 +0100, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Sj wrote
>
> Well, I think we know what the shared values of WP are.  We also know that
> they are shared by many people who disagree about other things, but can
> rally around NPOV as expressing 'agree to disagree' in a constructive form.
> So I'm concerned that NPOV could be seen as something disposable.  It is
> always under pressure from tendentious contributions, as it is.

Fair enough.  Far from being disposable, NPOV seems essential to WP's
success.  And yet this is because it turns out to produce an excellent
encyclopedia, not because it was the goal all along, and the excellence
just a by-product.

--
+sj+
 _ _ :-------.-.--------.--.--------.-.--------.--.--------[...]


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: --> Trust level

body:
Christopher Mahan a ?crit:

> I peronally think that the job is highly critical, and should not be
> left to a volunteer. You should either hire someone who does this
> already for a living, as a professional, or jimbo should handpick
> someone he trusts explicitely. I think Jimbo does the DNS stuff now,
> and probably will in the future.
> So the point is probably moot.

Okay.
Well, let's wait for Jimbo's opinion on the matter then.
I do not have any strong opinion on the matter either way :-)


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: --> Trust level


body:
On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 07:26:53PM -0700, Christopher Mahan wrote:
> Anyways, if someone wants to ge start their own project somewhere,
> there's freshmeat and soursceforge waiting with arms wide open. They
> don't have to use wikimedia resources.

Usage of resources is almost directly proportional to amount of content made.
The only way they can significantly increase the load is by creating
significantly more content than would be made without the Wikispecies.
I don't think it would be a serious problem if they did.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: wikispecies

body:
Daniel Mayer a ?crit:
> --- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>...
>>If wikispecies is not set up, it may be that the wiki is set up
>>somewhere else and it may be that part of its information is included in
>>wikipedia from that free ressource.
>
>
> Nobody I know of is saying that we should not have it Anthere. I, for example,
> want a general solution by having this on the Commons.
>
> Wikispecies would then be a Wikimedia Commons data project; along with Wikiwar,
> Wikichemistry, and anything else that would benefit from Commons technology.

It is true that no one has said we should not have it Mav. But I think
it is also true that if those very willing to have a wikispecies project
*really* want to have a wikispecies project and it does not happen,
those are not bound to join wikimedia, but might just move their
business another place.
I do not think they would have done this, but this is also part of the
discussion.
The internet is very free and very large. There is room for free-content
wikis in other places. I sure prefer that wikispecies is part of us all
:-) That will make it quite easier to fully integrate wikipedia and
wikispecies together, so that wikispecies is a specialized database and
wikipedia the generalist encyclopedia.

> I still strongly feel the board way overstepped its authority by authorizing
> this when there was far from a consensus to proceed.

I noticed something today, which I may provide all of you for further
thoughts.

When there is a decision to take (such as the decision of hiring/paying
someone to do a critical job, such as the administrator of domain
names), one may read "Jimbo should handpick someone he trusts explicitely".

When a decision was taken (such as the decision of starting a new
wikimedia project) and someone does not like it, one my hear "the board
has overstepped his mandate and authority".

I think that perhaps the community is not clear on what the board role
should be.

Angela and I are meant to represent you all, and frankly this is not
easy when "you" (collectively) do not agree. The three of us acted in
good faith, aware that this decision would cause you sadness, but with
the feeling that there was rough consensus and that your concerns would
be adressed with some specific guidelines and software improvement. In
particular, we insisted that duplication of effort should be avoided and
both projects should be heavily interconnected, and that this would have
to be a very important point in the development of wikispecies.
We also think that the content will be presented in such a way that it
will first be a reference work, and as such will have slightly different
software requirements from Wikipedia.

It is entirely possible that we missed some of your concerns, however we
tried to take the best decision possible. I think that the opposite
decision would have cause much unhappiness to other people as well.

> The concerns should have be addressed first in order *try* to find a mutually
> acceptable solution. I did not see a good effort to do that.
>
> Leadership by fiat is no leadership at all.
>
> -- mav

I find that comment offensive Mav, but I will consider that you say it
only because very very much unhappy. I do think that Angela and I have
really tried in the past trimester not to take any decisions by fiat,
but to ask and listen in length to opinions voiced. I know not for
Angela, but I think just asking and listening to what people think is
what is taking me most of my active time. I do think we really tried
hard to be careful and really tried to avoid practicing dictatorship, to
the point of sometimes taking some decisions which we think are not the
best, only because they are the most supported ones.
However, some decisions will always lead some people to be unhappy and
we can not avoid this. The best we can propose is to go again through
all your concerns and try to see how best to alleviate them.


from_name: Shantanu Oak

subject: [Wikitech-l] New line to break

body:
Hi,
I have installed the mediawiki software that I
downloaded from...
http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/
There is one drawback that prevents me from using it
extensively.
When I copy and paste text from Microsoft Word to
wiki, it ignores the paragraph brakes. I remember
using NL to br (New line to Break) command in php. Is
there similar command/ option that can be used?

Shantanu Oak
shantanuo at yahoo.com

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Approval marking (was: Why Academics are Useful to
	Wikipedia)

body:
For more than 90% of articles, there have been no reversion wars. The
latest version is accurate, uncontroversial and fairly well
spell-checked & copy-edited.

Of the remaining 10% of articles, there are some subjects which would
benefit from some sort of approval marking system. Still, I hope for
these that we will include the 'development version' along with any
'approved' versions in Wikipedia 1.0 print or DVD publications.

For that fraction of 1% which are highly controversial, approval marking
is not really an issue. No academic or cleric has sufficient authority
to settle the hottest disputes of our times.

So let's concentrate on putting into effect a system which will boost
consumer acceptance of 90% to 99% of our articles. Librarians aren't
warning students against our global warming or Invasion of Iraq articles
-- or at least we don't care much if they do. But it would be nice if
our math and physics articles, as well as our non-controversial history
and biology articles, could get some respect.

Ed Poor
Who has thought about this a lot, while reading Snow, Mayer, et al.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Snow [mailto:wikipedia at earthlink.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2004 1:29 AM
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Why Academics are Useful to Wikipedia
>
>
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
> >--- Geoff Burling <llywrch at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Last time I ventured my two cents concerning the print
> Wikipedia, the
> >>response I got led me to conlcude that there was no support for
> >>forking Wikipedia even in the slightest to make the content more
> >>acceptible -- which is what any approval board would end up doing.
> >>Then the project seemed to go into hibernation. Then it
> seemed that a
> >>group was working on it. Now it appears we are back to
> discussing what
> >>should be done.
> >>
> >>
> >What? How do you come to that conclusion? There *will* be no fork at
> >*all* - the only thing that will be done is selecting one
> version of an
> >article that is approved in some way. Any future approved
> version would
> >be based on the development version (that is, a regular Wikipedia
> >article which would be in perpetual development), not the
> last stable
> >version.
> >
> If we adopt a formal approval system, the idea that all
> future approved
> versions will be based on development versions, rather than the last
> approved "stable" version, sounds naively idealistic to me.
> Even without
> an approval system, this is already not the case on some of our more
> contentious articles. When changes are not agreed on quickly,
> one side
> or the other, and sometimes both, may adopt the tactic of
> reverting back
> to an earlier version of which it "approves". However, since
> the sides
> generally do not approve of the same version, the dispute
> continues and
> often results in a revert war.
>
> Any system that marks a particular revision as "approved" or "stable"
> will inherently increase the temptation to blindly revert
> changes back
> to the "stable" revision, instead of trying to work with
> those changes
> and improve the article. This is already a problem in some places and
> among some editors (no names, this is not an invitation for
> finger-pointing). If we want to implement a system that lets
> people flag
> specific article revisions, let's at least be aware of the possible
> downsides to this as well.
>
> --Michael Snow
>
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: wikispecies

body:
Anthere-
> The point is, most people have not followed what wikispecies project was
> about, so it is not certain whether they would do an informed vote. This
> might be well one of these cases where voting is not a good idea Erik :-)

I see voting useful as a way to gauge where people stand, but perhaps,
when we only want to do that, we should not call it voting. Instead,  we
could have an "opinion matrix":

users     opinion summary                 arguments
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Mav       opposed to separate             - leads to fragmentation,
Erik      project, support                  duplication
          Wikimedia Commons               - bad precedent
          [[/Detailed proposal]]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anthere   support Wikispecies,            - otherwise, risk of external
Angela    at least for now                  forks
                                          - features can be added later
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

This way we can easily get an overview of the different points of view,
and better try to find solutions that satisfy everyone involved. That
would also help outside people to understand more quickly what a
discussion is about.

Regards,

Erik


body:
On Wed, Sep 15, 2004 at 03:08:00AM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
> Jens-
> > Draft is at
> > http://mediawiki.mormo.org/index.php/Special:Sitesettings
>
> Do you intend to port the existing explanations of what each option does
> into this interface? If so, it would probably make sense to have separate
> messages for these so we can experiment with different layouts for the
> help.

The existing explanations, if they are good, are to verbose for the admin
interface. I thought about having a help button per page or even per option.

Per page would allow having an introduction providing some overall picture,
e.g. for memcached, there has to be a discussion in the help explaining what
memcached is for and who should use it and where to get it. This I wouldn't
want to see as part of the site settings page itself, but in a help page.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Board -> Mav's disgust

body:
John Lee wrote:
> The sentiment is dittoed here. I don't have a clue what all this
> hoo-ha is about, but that fact alone seems to suggest that something
> clandestine occurred.

Whatever may have happened here, it is not right to say that anything
"clandestine" occurred.  There was a large public discussion right
here on this list, and the decision which was taken was carefully
crafted (I thought) to carefully take into account each of the major
concerns that were raised, including most specifically Mav's.

There are two separate issues here, I suppose.  First, there's the
specific "content" question of the appropriate answer to the
wikispecies issue.  I think it fairly clear that the correct decision
was made _from the point of view of maximal accomodation to the
community_.  Mav's perspective has been accomodated to the maximal
extent possible, and there is sufficient flexibility moving forward
that Mav's input would be valuable in avoiding some of the bad
consequences that he fears.

The second issue here has to do with how the decision was made, and
clearly if Mav is upset, and if other people take mav's upset to be
valid out of respect for him, then the decision should have been
reached in a slightly different way.  In particular, I should have
reached out to mav privately to gain his support for the compromise
proposal, and he should have been notified in advance and given an
opportunity to give specific feedback.

What can't happen, because it makes everything impossible, is that a
single person who is clearly out of step with the consensus of the
community simply digs in his heels and stops forward progress.

--Jimbo


body:
Andrew Lih wrote:
> However, when it comes to major extra-wiki decisions, such as creation
> of new projects, or board level decisions, process should be defined
> and followed. We're all breaking new ground here with the board and
> its role, so let's learn from this and "reboot" in an appropriate
> manner,

I agree completely.  I'm more or less flabbergasted at Mav's outcry,
and it tells me that we have to do these things differently in the
future.

--Jimbo


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] A great, free encyclopedia

body:
Sj wrote

>But I think that you would
> agree, Charles, that en:
> as a community are somewhat partisan when it comes to (for instance)
> freedom, openness, and tolerance of minority opinions...

Well, I think we know what the shared values of WP are.  We also know that
they are shared by many people who disagree about other things, but can
rally around NPOV as expressing 'agree to disagree' in a constructive form.
So I'm concerned that NPOV could be seen as something disposable.  It is
always under pressure from tendentious contributions, as it is.

Charles


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: --> Trust level

body:
Anthere wrote:
> Christopher Mahan a ?crit:
> >I peronally think that the job is highly critical, and should not be
> >left to a volunteer. You should either hire someone who does this
> >already for a living, as a professional, or jimbo should handpick
> >someone he trusts explicitely. I think Jimbo does the DNS stuff now,
> >and probably will in the future.
> >So the point is probably moot.
>
> Okay.
> Well, let's wait for Jimbo's opinion on the matter then.
> I do not have any strong opinion on the matter either way :-)

Right now, Jason handles it, but not in any organized fashion.  I can
easily assign him a project to make a report on all the domains,
expiry dates, current ownership, etc. so that at least as a first pass
we have a firm understanding of the current situation.

--Jimbo


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: --> Trust level


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: wikispecies

body:
Erik Moeller a ?crit:
> Anthere-
>
>>The point is, most people have not followed what wikispecies project was
>>about, so it is not certain whether they would do an informed vote. This
>>might be well one of these cases where voting is not a good idea Erik :-)
>
>
> I see voting useful as a way to gauge where people stand, but perhaps,
> when we only want to do that, we should not call it voting. Instead,  we
> could have an "opinion matrix":
>
> users     opinion summary                 arguments
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Mav       opposed to separate             - leads to fragmentation,
> Erik      project, support                  duplication
>           Wikimedia Commons               - bad precedent
>           [[/Detailed proposal]]
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Anthere   support Wikispecies,            - otherwise, risk of external
> Angela    at least for now                  forks
>                                           - features can be added later
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> This way we can easily get an overview of the different points of view,
> and better try to find solutions that satisfy everyone involved. That
> would also help outside people to understand more quickly what a
> discussion is about.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik

Correct :-)
We can probably agree here Erik, to call this a poll rather than a vote.
A poll is to jauge people opinion, after which a decision is taken.
A vote is a system to take the decision.
The developer poll for the payment issue was definitly a poll :-)


body:
Sj a ?crit:
> On Tue, 14 Sep 19:02 -0700 (PDT), <chris_mahan at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>>Technical and financial decisions are two different things imho.
>>>Technical responsability Walter is mentionning is currently typically
>>>one some developers are trusted to do I think.
>>>However, the financial responsability mentionned is right now only
>>>limited to Jimbo and perhaps to our treasurer.
>>
>
> The bulk of financial decisions (regular renewals) could be planned
> far in advance
> and cleared, en masse, with a financial officer.  A small emergency fund as mav
> mentioned should suffice for unexpected needs.
>
>
>>>A few questions are
>>>* Do we have a problem with our domain names handling ?
>>
> yes.
>
>
>>>* Is there a need to have one person in charge of this ?
>>
> no; let every eager person you can find help; but one point-person at
> any given moment.  See my stock reply below. :-)
>
>
> Chris Mahan:
>
>>I peronally think that the job is highly critical, and should not be
>>left to a volunteer. You should either hire someone who does this
>>already for a living, as a professional, or jimbo should handpick
>
>
> Motivated volunteers can do an excellent job with highly critical tasks.
> It is nevertheless important to avoid single points of failure.  While I
> support Walter wholeheartedly as someone to manage domain issues,
> the primary work of such a manager would be to make sure the relevant
> information was organized and available to others, so that they could take
> up slack as needed.
>
> A small group of interested people, one of whom at any given time is
> the point person for any sudden decisions, is definitely needed.  A
> one-person group is better than none; larger would be better still.

Nod, I agree with all this and Mav proposal for an amount to be set
aside in advance strike me as being the solution.

Other opinions ?

ant


subject: [Foundation-l] Re: questions about complying with the GFDL

body:
Delirium wrote:
>Now, the GFDL requires that if you distribute more than 100 copies of
>a document, you must also distribute the source (i.e. wikitext)
>version of the document,

This is not accurate.  What has to be distributed is a "Transparent"
copy, not "the source".

"Examples of suitable formats for Transparent copies include plain
ASCII without markup, Texinfo input format, LaTeX input format, SGML
or XML using a publicly available DTD, and standard-conforming simple
HTML, PostScript or PDF designed for human modification. Examples of
transparent image formats include PNG, XCF and JPG. Opaque formats
include proprietary formats that can be read and edited only by
proprietary word processors, SGML or XML for which the DTD and/or
processing tools are not generally available, and the
machine-generated HTML, PostScript or PDF produced by some word
processors for output purposes only."

Even so, I'm only making a minor point here -- Delerium's more general
point is valid, and is precisely the sort of issue that is being worked
on (I am told) with respect to FDL 2.0.

--Jimbo


from_name: andrew fabbro

subject: [Wikitech-l] Customizing navigation bar (FAQ?)

body:
On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Rowan Collins wrote:

> I believe the file to edit is called something like xhtml_slim.pt
> I may be completely wrong though.
> Furthermore, it looks like we really could do with a nice on-wiki
> customisation system for that, because it is indeed becoming a bit of
> a FAQ.

Also, that file is completely unintelligible ;)

I mean, if you look at it, it's something about Leonardo da Vinci.  So
I assume it's an example...yet, if you delete it, the system complains,
so obviously it's in production use.  However, there are no bread
crumbs to editing it or how it's used, or why only some of it is used,
so I'm quite confused.

andrew fabbro                                            [andrew at fabbro.org]
------------------------------[ quote-o-matic] -----------------------------
"Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant."
    -- Cary Grant


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: wikispecies

body:
I have read all this huha about Wikispecies and there is one thing that
may also be considered about the democratic merits of wikimedia. Mav
acts ever so angy, he may even be angry. He says that it is autocratic
and that there should first be a consensus.

Well, I can remember that I have tried my darndest to get the
en:wikipedia resource "Three of Life" to consider working towards a
unified Taxobox that is acceptable to *all* Wikipedia. I was basically
ignored with the argument, "see our arguments in the archives it was a
hard slug to get this far we do not want any more of this". I have
presented arguments about things that were wrong for
internationalisation eg [[Animal]]ia in stead of [[Animalia]], I stated
that the mentioning of "Bionominal name" does not add anything as it is
inherent in "Scientific classification". The only result was "we have
voted on this, this is our consensus".

I have been constructive and introduced templates with [[en:Ruffe]] that
were developped at [[nl:Pos]] and I was really happy to see them adopted
in the ToL. It was possible to get adopted as there was not already
voted on. When I had taxonomic or other questions, I am happy to say
there were always great people willing and able to help me out. So it is
not all doom and gloom. The point I am making is, the en:ToL has proven
to not really being open to cooperation and willing to make changes to
its current practices in order to achieve better cooperation. As they
say in Holland "past performance is no guarantee for the future". ;)

So what is WikiSpecies going to contain: the aim is to have all
scientific taxonomic information about all species/taxons. Consider
this: my database only about succulents is 80Mb of relational data.
There are plants in my database that have more than 10 valid names all
with authors, publications etc. This is not content that you want to
have in wikipedia as it would bore people to death. Having Wikispecies
in the Commons is not a good idea as there is a need to have software
made for Wikispecies that will make it for the forseeable future an
experimental resource. Commons is an experimental resource at this time
as well, but it will be a cornerstone to all Wikimedia projects and it
is not a good idea to burden it will all kinds of extra stuff.

When having all taxonomic information in Wikispecies, references to
encyclopedic information can be added with the usual hyperlinks. This
means that the Wikipedia will be a resource to Wikispecies. The idea
that all the taxonomic information should be in the Commons has no
technical merit either. The essence is that we will be able to link to
it and use it as an available resource. The location of data is
technical, not really a concern to me as a user and with universal login
promissed for Mediawiki 1.4 soon not to be relevant either.

One of the resources I hope Wikispecies will bring is a taxobox that
looks the way a wikipedia wants it to look with all taxonomic
information relevant to the applicable system (eg sensu Cronquist) with
pictures stored in the Commons. This will mean that de:wikipedia will
not show "regnum" information, en:wikipedia will have their "Binominal
name" tag and nl:wikipedia will have the tag for the taxon involved in
stead of the "Binominal name" tag.

One other function I expect Wikispecies will bring is opening up this
data for all who want it. By publishing content and changes in a format
like XML, people and organisations can benefit from the work done on
Wikispecies. I also expect Wikispecies to be open to changes from
trusted institutions. So when an institution like IPNI for instance
publishes a researched update on specific content we apply this change
and we will attribute this change to IPNI.

For the record and I repeat what I have said on many occasions: The
en:ToL is a wonderfull resource many great people have contributed to
it. I have much admiration for it and the effort involved.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Alfio Puglisi

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: I am really tired of registering an account
	for each MetaWiki site I found

body:
On Wed, 15 Sep 2004, Sj wrote:

>The socially easy solution here is to globally merge the 99.9% of
>accounts for which there is no conflict, and provide for some unmerged
>accounts which can then be merged by hand / via mediation.  This would
>at least prevent any *new* users from having to worry about this.

Are there any hard numbers on the conflicting usernames? Is it even
technically possible to know in advance which login names are in conflict?

Alfio


from_name: Mirko Thiessen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Not a fork!

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Then what the hell is this:

> http://species.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification

> Looks like a fork of the English Wikipedia's article on scientific
> classification to me.

Of course things like that may happen as everyone is allowed to edit
there. I guess the author of that article just was not aware of what the
page should be about. When wikispecies is finally set up things like that
are likely to be deleted.

My interest in such a project is setting up a species directory linking to
all the language editions of the Wikipedia. Jimbo formulated a non-forking
policy guideline and I have a great interest as well that the project
won't have any overlapping with Wikipedia. I am active in the German
Wikipedia and worked on several hundred animal articles there, and that
will remain my main activity. If I would suspect the project of becoming a
Bio-Wikipedia or something like that I would immediately vote to suspend
the project. But now it is intended to work within Wikispecies on a
concept for the project in order to not become a fork. Until then, I
wouldn't take articles by single individuals (like the "Classification"
article) seriously.

Benedikt Mandl is not a Wikipedian, but there are many long-time
contributors to Wikipedia interested in the Wikispecies project. Do you
think that they all want to damage Wikipedia? I believe that Wikispecies
could work for the benefit of Wikipedia if it is done right. Otherwise I
would never consider working on it.

Mirko


from_name: Fredrik Adevåg

subject: [Wikipedia-l] A proposal for a new language in wikipedia

body:
I'd like to be responsible for the creation of a wikipediaversion in
gothic.

Full name: gothic

Language code: got

Number of speakers: 0

Number of people which has knowledge about gothic: at least 400, probably
much more.

_________________________________________________________________
Auktioner: Tj?na en hacka p? gamla prylar http://tradera.msn.se


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: I am really tired of registering an account
	for	each MetaWiki site I found

body:
?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason wrote:

>It is of course technically possible, just query the database of each
>project, get all the login names into a big file and run uniq -c on it
>( or something like that ).
>
>Anyway this is a very big annoyance, especially if one is going to
>maintain preferences across multiple wikipedias and projects.
>
>
As much as I support the idea of a single log-in it should not imply
that a person will want the same preferences in all projects.  A default
set of preferences would be fine in a seldom visited project, but one
may want special settings in his more frequently visited ones.

Ec


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] It looks like we weren't jumping the gun
	with	tlh.wikipedia ...

body:
Arwel Parry wrote:

> Just noted this article:
> http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1304952,00.html?gusrc=tick
> er-103704
>
> "German 'World Service' boldly goes for Klingon news"
>
> Deutsche Welle is starting to broadcast in Klingon....

If I may quote the article: "This should help users from other galaxies
get an impression of Germany"  :-)

Ec