body:
Servien Ilaino wrote:
> BTW: looked up the word "consensus", it says: "a generally accepted
> opinion or decision among a group of people". This of course meaning
> the MAJority's vote is accepted and not the MINority....
>
> Serv
>
>
Hoi,
People who misunderstand majority rule for consensus are just wrong.
Consensus is as much as anything the majority accommodating the minority
by giving concessions in order to get to a situation that is acceptable
to all involved. Just agreeing that a majority has decided is NOT having
reached a consensus. Now this is not to say that always a consensus can
be reached it is about making the effort to reach a consensus. It is
exactly for this reason why reaching for the "vote" is so destructive.
Once a vote is under way, people stop talking and are no longer
interested in the others point of view and are no longer willing to
accommodate the others.
Thanks,
   Gerard
> 2005/10/8, Servien Ilaino <servien at gmail.com>:
>
>> Please let me know if I should continue with this almost impossible
>> battle or if I should just stop here and just let the project go. I
>> initially requested the wiki for people in the Netherlands to be able
>> to write in their own language, since nds is far from even being
>> comprehensible with DLS, and since most/if not all DLS dialects are
>> mutually comprehensible I decided to create a nds wiki with a Dutch
>> orientated writing style and grammar (which most/if not all DLS
>> dialects have). If people only want a German version of this than
>> that's fine (discrimination; but who cares) but personally I'd like to
>> see a Dutch version of this as well.
>>
>> Servien
>>
>>
>> 2005/10/8, Servien Ilaino <servien at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> Well since people are being so fussy, but there is no reason to be
>>> because if people only knew the cultural point and the details about
>>> DLS they'd know it's necessary. People agree there should be one but
>>> other don't (which are supprisingly people who are not gonna
>>> participate and don't know DLS nor do they speak Dutch or German Low
>>> Saxon) I have given up on this wiki, it's REALLY irritating, I'm sick
>>> of answering dumb questions from non-native speaker who vote against
>>> the wiki for "problems" which can be solved by letting the community
>>> decide on the writing system. People who want to start another dialect
>>> Nds wiki, which I really don't recommend, are gonna have a hard time.
>>> Same really goes for any wiki!
>>>
>>> Servien
>>>
>>> 2005/10/8, Arbeo M <arbeo_m at yahoo.de>:
>>>
>>>> --- Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> schrieb:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> It seems very clumsy to have the "binomial"
>>>>> subdomains, as in roa-rup:
>>>>> (which now has its own ISO code, rup), fiu-vro:...
>>>>> so I think it's
>>>>> best to search for possible alternatives. Samogitian
>>>>> and Banyumasan
>>>>> may not have good alternatives, but I would imagine
>>>>> that there's an
>>>>> ISO/DIS 639-3 code for Riparian, which I hope we
>>>>> could use.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> Good point, the binomal codes are very clumsy indeed
>>>> and most people not familiar with the standard they
>>>> are based upon will probably wonder why're choosing
>>>> them.
>>>>
>>>> A possible alternative has just crossed my mind: why
>>>> not use four-lettered codes for languages that don't
>>>> have an iso code (yet)? That would allow us to pick
>>>> abbreviations that users can memorize more easily
>>>> while not interfering with any existing or potential
>>>> future iso codes. (e. g. "samo" for Samogitian, "bany"
>>>> or maybe "wjav" - to include all Western Javanese
>>>> dialects - for Banyumsan, "ripu" for Ripuarian and so
>>>> forth)
>>>>
>>>> Arbeo


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: I demand a daily spot for great writing

body:
Writing can be stunning, but encyclopedias should put being informative first.
If you think FA's are not well-written then, spend more time on FAC
giving constructive criticism that makes the author improve the
writing, or better yet {{sofixit}}.

--Mgm

On 10/8/05, fallout at lexx.eu.org <fallout at lexx.eu.org> wrote:
> > No. An article can make FA even if the writing is pretty rubbish,
>
> But it shouldn't.
>
> > good writing doesn't guarantee FA status. From a recent featured
> > article:
>
> {{sofixit}}.
>
> Ausir
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Uwe Brauer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: wikipedia local for testing

body:
>>>>> "Jeremy" == Jeremy Dunck  writes:

   >> I apologise for this elementary question I searched
   >> meta.wikipedia for an answer without success: how could I
   >> download a certain page, edit it and see the result locally
   >> before submitting it?

   Jeremy> Is the preview button not sufficient?

Well how can I work offline with it?

Uwe


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Merge vs. Keep/Delete

body:
On 10/8/05, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
> >On 10/8/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>So history merges are useful only for cut-and-paste moves?
> >>
> >>
> >Yes, pretty much. The problem with history merges is that the software
> >provides no means of unmerging elements from the history. One they're there,
> >there's no way to get them out again.
> >
> >
> There are other circumstances that call for a history merge, but the
> general principle here is important. Whether it's a cut-and-paste move,
> or duplicate articles created independently (I've done several recently
> where this happened due to variant spellings), a history merge should
> generally be done only if the articles are about the exact same topic,
> and will never need to be taken apart again.
>
> Furthermore, with articles nominated for deletion, we're generally
> talking about a short article being merged into a larger one about a
> broader topic. As was pointed out, merging history produces disjointed
> and mostly useless diffs. Also, merging by cut-and-paste is not
> necessarily desirable anyway, and if you rewrite the basic material
> you're merging from, then you're using the merged article as a resource
> rather than creating a derivative work, so concerns about GFDL
> compliance can be eliminated.
>
> --Michael Snow
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
Well-said Michael. You covered everything I didn't know how to say.
I'll save this message for further reference.


from_name: Ivan Krstic

references:
<874q7ti0zu.fsf@mat.ucm.es>	<2545a92c0510071312y4a9f57f3x959cc7f516f12ac5@mail.gmail.com>
	<87zmpjan8a.fsf@mat.ucm.es>

body:
Uwe Brauer wrote:
>    Jeremy> Is the preview button not sufficient?

He wants a client-side parser.

> Well how can I work offline with it?

MediaWiki offers relatively rich transclusion abilities in pages, and
the functionality is widely used on Wikipedia. Even if you can parse and
preview pages offline, such previews will obviously not perform
transclusions, so you need to understand that all you'll be able to
preview is the transformation of style markup (text attributes, tables,
etc) to HTML. Images will, likewise, not work.

That said, two MediaWiki markup parsers in Javascript are available:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pilaf/Live_Preview
 http://81.5.150.113/wysi/

Cheers,

--
Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> | 0x147C722D


from_name: Jtkiefer

subject: [WikiEN-l] New mailing list for newbies?

body:
>>If anyone would like to be the list admin, please let me know.
>>
>>Angela
>>
>>

I'll volunteer to do it, though I think that we should have more than
one listadmin so that there's someone around even if one person takes a
vacation or becomes inactive, or something of that sort.  Btw, any idea
what to name this list?

-Jtkiefer


body:
Jtkiefer wrote:

> I'll volunteer to do it, though I think that we should have more than
> one listadmin so that there's someone around even if one person takes
> a vacation or becomes inactive, or something of that sort.  Btw, any
> idea what to name this list?
>
> -Jtkiefer

It looks like you already found some but I'm still more than willing to
volunteer my services in being a listadmin.

-Jtkiefer


from_name: Chris Lüer

subject: [WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>I think you've put your finger on the problem there. The mechanisms by which
>Wikipedia articles improve and degrade are not fully understood, and there
>may well be some complex factors that we don't consider seriously enough.
>
>But we can make a stab at guessing the main factor: entropy. An article that
>is edited frequently by many people will probably degrade quickly. An
>article that doesn't start out with a firm structure will not improve until
>a single person or a tightly organized group imposes such a structure. An
>article that is part of a series of similar articles that are edited by the
>same group of people will tend to have a structure similar to the others in
>the series.

Another factor is the tension between information and style. On the
one hand we want to have lots of accurate information, on the other
hand we want to have well-written, readable articles, and those two
things aren't easy to bring in agreement. If you add facts, you'll
likely ruin the style, and if you improve the style, you'll likely
remove information. In popular articles, people care more about
information, so the style is going to suffer.

What can be done about that? Reorganizing the facts while being
careful not to remove any. And this is really hard, because you need
to be familiar with all of the facts before you can successfully
reorganize them, or you'll distort them.

         Chris
         [[User:Chl]]


list: foundation-l

from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject:
[Foundation-l] Authoring on wikijunior : providing
	private	information.

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:

>Robert Scott Horning wrote:
>
>
>
>>In addition, one of the reasons I asked for this information is
>>that I intend to do a formal copyright registration on
>>Wikijunior books when I send them into print format.
>>
>>
>
>To avoid further confusion, it should be pointed out that this
>"copyright registration" is something that only exists in the
>United States.  Earlier (before 1978) the U.S. had a copyright
>law that required copyrights to be registered, much like patents
>work in other countries.  If you didn't register, anybody could
>claim copyright to your text.  The registration was not made at
>the patent office, but at the U.S. Copyright Office, which is a
>part of the Library of Congress, www.copyright.gov
>
>

As a bit of history and as a U.S. Citizen, I think the policy to not
compel registration for copyright enforcement is a bad policy and
contrary to the intents and wishes of the authors of the founding
documents of the American Republic.  More over, when something was
registered, you at least had an address to look up to try and trace
authorship of a given piece of copyrighted material.  As it is now, you
have no clue if something is copyrighted unless it is very old, and even
then you have some serious doubts.  For those of us who try in good
faith to preserve older texts or are using materials from public
sources, this can get to be a real mess.  I understand other countries
have different policies and customs, but in this case it was a custom
from outside of America that was forced on the American courts by well
thinking but short-sighted people.  Of course, that is just my opinion
and a rather small voice at that.

The other motivation for requiring registration back elsewhen was to
establish a library for the members of the U.S. Congress.  It was
started with a donation of books from Thomas Jefferson, but most
subsequent volumes in the library were from this registration system.
 As a result, a significant portion of American and world history has
been preserved in this library, which is arguably one of the primier
libraries of the world.  Most mass-market volumes are still registered
for additional copyright protections that are not available from the
defacto copyright.

As an author, copyright registration also gives legal proof that you
wrote the content.  The fact that you filed it with the Library of
Congress is legal proof that the stuff is indeed yours and not somebody
elses, or they have to provide legal proof that they wrote it prior to
the date that you filed.  For things like books this isn't so big of a
deal, but computer software can be a little tricky in that regard and a
copyright filing can be used in part to invalidate a software patent,
for example.

--
Robert Scott Horning


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

body:
On 10/8/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> It disappoints me to hear a Wikipedian take this attitude towards
> quality.  "So what?"  So -- we're trying to be better than this, that's
> what.

Well, I'm all for aspiration, but I think in practice we cannot
honestly suspect that people will not be able to find spotty articles
when they want to. Even in publications with professionally trained,
full-time editors this is a major problem (I say this as someone who
in a previous life worked in a number of publishing and fact-checking
jobs). In a situation where one is relying upon the volunteer and
usually amateur labor of thousands of editors... it seems unavoidable.
But of course that is just my gut sense of it.

I don't mean this to sound pessimistic. I think Wikipedia will always
have a great many articles of very high quality. But I also think it
will also have a great many articles of poor quality. This in no means
should sound either discouraging or discouraged. I just think it's a
fact of how a project of this sort will work in practice and I think
it will be a constant tension. But let's not forget that tensions can
be productive! The reason many editors (myself being one of them) got
hooked on Wikipedia in the first place was discovering a sub-par
article on something they knew about and, instead of writing off the
whole idea, said "I can fix this!" and just never stopped.

> I don't think this is what our general response to this sort of
> complaint should be.  I think our response should be: hey, you know
> what, he's right!  These articles ought to be pretty decent, but they
> aren't.  Why?  What can we do to improve?
>
> If we study it up one side and down the other and conclude that there is
> nothing to be done about it, then fine.  But we should not just accept
> the current state of affairs if there are sensible proposals for
> improvement.

Well, I admit to making two major assumptions: 1. that the reason
there will be spotty places like this is because of the wiki model
itself and 2. that the wiki model has many other benefits and I
wouldn't want to change it very much. You might be right in
questioning my assumptions in the first case -- that this isn't
something inherent to the model. It may of course be that my version
of "the wiki model" is different than yours but I suspect it is not
that different.

> I don't have a problem with eventualism -- but 'eventualism' is not the
> same as saying "so what?" to quality problems.

Okay, I agree with that. My "so what?" was only to the fact that
Wikipedia sometimes has spotty content. I do somewhat suspect this is
going to be inherent to the project -- at any given moment, there
might be things which need work. But I could be very wrong on that, of
course, and hopefully I am!

I don't think there's a massive "quality" problem that isn't to be
expected from a system of this sort. I think the fact that there is
some very high-quality work is proof enough that this system doesn't
*necessarily* lead to poor or spotty content, which is what most of
these critics generally seem to be implying.

It would be interesting, as a fact-finding exercise, for someone to
sit down with the histories of these two articles as well as the
histories of two featured articles and look at what the patterns of
editing were and see if any generalizable conclusions could be drawn.
I'm not sure if it would give any actionable policy, but could at
least reduce the armchair philosophizing (which I'm of course always
happy to take part in, being somewhat of a pedant).

FF


from_name: actionforum at comcast.net

subject: [WikiEN-l] The 3RR is an electric fence, not an entitlement.

body:
-------------- Original message --------------

> On 10/8/05, actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
> >
> >
> > Those who edit war are still entitled to a fair assessment of the alleged
> > 3RR violation evidence, and to a fair implementation of the block based
> > upon that assessment, and to complain if there were problems with
> > either of these.
> >
>
> Possibly. I think opinion is divided on this. My personal opinion is that
> edit warring should be deprecated to the point where those who edit war
> should have no expectation of a strict interpretation of the rules. In
> general a block on a party that is seen as edit warring tends to attract
> popular support, so IAR applies well here.

This may merely mean you've given up on rules or are expressing
an inability to codify the set of principles you believe in,
or that you are going to implement your own standards
despite the rules.

The 3RR is probably an improvement over the earlier chaos.
Even a zero revert rule probably wouldn't prevent edit waring,
but at least it would favor tolerance.  Those, who voluntarily
limit themselves to one or two reverts per day, must refrain
from editing certain pages, or return to those pages with
persistance over a long period of time.
                   -- Silverback


body:
-------------- Original message --------------
> On 10/8/05, steve v wrote:
> >
> >
> > 2) that your (or other's) implied or stated assumption
> > that tag-teaming an issue is simply an aspect of
> > consensus is false down to its toe fungus.
>
>
>
> I'm sorry that's simply incorrect. Your use of the term "tag teaming" here
> is prejudicial and misrepresents what is happening: one person tries to
> impose his will on an article while two or more oppose him. This is an
> informal consensus, and the solo editor is ignoring that consensus.

No, the solo editor may well be responding to that "consensus" on both
the talk page and the edit summaries.  That "consensus" on a backwater
article may have repeatedly beaten of editors trying to bring the same
kind of balance to an article.    That "consensus" may not therefore
even be the true "consensus" of that article if we integrated over
time.

It may not be the true "consensus" that wikipedia would
have arrived at if the article had received the broader attention
of the wikipedia community.    Even, if the true consensus
of the wikipedia community agreed with the local consensus
on a particular issue, they may not agree with the local consensus
that a minor point was one worth a revert war over.

Even, the true consensus of the wikipedia community may
be so biased by the over-representation of a certain POV,
that it is not the consensus a broader community would
have reached.

Your use of the term "consensus" is prejudicial and
misrepresents what is happening, there is a common
misperception that consensus decisions are more
likely to be correct or find the truth than individual
ones.  History has shown us that consensus decisions
need to be limited and checked as they can tend towards
the intelligence, fairness and justice of the mob.

         -- Silverback


from_name: Jeremy Dunck

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Uncompressed en xml size?

body:
On 10/8/05, Evan Martin <evanm at google.com> wrote:
> In http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/19674
> , Brion  found 4.74x compression for similar data with gzip.
>
> 32171234059 * 4.74 = 152.49g

Yes, thanks very much.


from_name: Alphax

subject: [WikiEN-l] Merge vs. Keep/Delete

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Tony Sidaway wrote:
> On 10/8/05, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>>Tony Sidaway wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I wonder if we could agree to change policy to permit an administrator to
>>>"speedy redirect" a merge candidate and close an AfD where notability is
>>
>>the
>>
>>>sole or principal reason given for deletion, or no reason is given.
>>>
>>
>>I endorse that, although I don't see why the authority to
>>merge-and-redirect should be limited to administrators.
>
>
>
> I agree. I don't know why I thought it should be limited to administrators.
> A non-administrator can close a clear non-delete debate (indeed I believe
> some adventurous non-administrators may have closed delete debates by
> putting a delete-because tag on the article).
>

Yes, I'm one of them :) I did it for a few more-than-week-old debates
where there was near-unanimous support to delete the article; of course,
I would hope that any admin coming across an article tagged with
{{db|per [[Wikipedia:Articles for Deletion/{{PAGENAME}}]]}} would
actually check the outcome of the AfD...

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iQEVAwUBQ0fPNrMAAH8MeUlWAQgqMgf/f025qQxOFe228l9VbMEVVltXIIyrXVZm
GGzOpTziCbglEMKmok7QrwS/WDPD1sDJZNmxQgBxqf47NSxfRsMHw42WmN0keqKs
62UcUp/dK/PjdJA2CPvwBBFAi78o4sy95xqibsxp9RiEviWvf14racw0ADSTMWwn
dO/jmBgVR6eDwDCjNDkM8r/TxCwQRkMhdJewM9Z5fQHT7C8STWXXClXTFYXkDGrm
3+mYDq3keYKPFfJYQFH5aWoeQ90wCuGa8n+UYW69+6INO46nUebTLyu/Zqdk7hGI
cIw5/XJjkMY1hufZC0P/EAcixx4XiGkBMdmyVHrWwOwWycuqD8OUJQ==
=GvER
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject: [WikiEN-l] Merge vs. Keep/Delete

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Tony Sidaway wrote:
> On 10/8/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>Merge-and-redirect often *does* require admin attention, because the
>>"proper procedure" is to perform a history merge, isn't it?
>>
>
> Absolutely not. A history merge should be limited to situations such as
> those where a fork has been created. A proper merge is one that would permit
> the merge to be reversed at some time in the future, and this would require
> the use of a redirect, not a history merge.
>

Ah, my mistake. Whoops.

So history merges are useful only for cut-and-paste moves?

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iQEVAwUBQ0fPebMAAH8MeUlWAQiiQggAi2CzEiJHHsn6ApuOm4YwZ+YgmfoC6Dhg
uW13A+/IYVQxDz8fXzjblWXNL0yqo9XCgVRhC2YeradN5K5gD1Z61QWlUgGS5udK
6J9WVKqvqTf1Jkrw5hdgvUJl9x7aJoMTcyNMyBStvn8cUgQJanTUkUzz7enbs80V
tZVtucMvI+5DOx13RYP9ioLEb4mXR03EGwDCs9z9qkJJrn2+awxH571L17lBB0Na
dbLiGUN3H26pgRn8Z7zrczmz3WRnJjNvDca79VfFMlGcQHG4yl2X8rJfdgvzg7ru
qkjRTkDvZwMuUsZJ96/+D1+Z4CKdBcYF8lDkXzCBTE/dV8J57265TA==
=8aXD
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Kirk Abbott

body:
What's involved?

>
>If anyone would like to be the list admin, please let me know.
>
>Angela


subject: [WikiEN-l] Response to Nick Carr on Wikipedia and Web 2.0

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Michael Turley wrote:
> On 10/7/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>>Michael Turley wrote:
>>
>>>On 10/7/05, JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
<snip>
>>>
>>>For example, someone cut out the links to Bill Gates' home from the
>>>Bill Gates article.  Details of his home are trivial in the Bill
>>>Gates article so cutting them out was probably the right thing to do,
>>>but adding them back into Wikipedia elsewhere, in article about his
>>>home, would be completely appropriate.
>>>
>>
>>I think NPOV comes into it here. It's possible that a lot of what might
>>be described as "trivia" is difficult to write about from a neutral
>>point of view.
>
>
> Perhaps you meant third party verifiable?  NPOV isn't any more
> difficult for smaller subjects.
>

Yes, that's possible.

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iQEVAwUBQ0fhVrMAAH8MeUlWAQhzugf/TXHuqyV58AP9aiN2f2m6V2fmwSn/om+8
6xXRPEpBK1kndascZySMBm8DwMbRr5CtJQtwA8XZ8/TqZd+Y5Ajxp3vtbxLrOJ+w
8rQzi/BxdLGEOITaHBDcDYmTuXBmAquHvJZLVDpjUGnJAKyQw42+Col2IVlIFc+d
dmx0vBprMPgRyPhjBRfXFmbUp/jjtIYoI4DA9aZhYwzpMHTS3Yf0OHzYRWbymwXp
c8kUV8z1k4MIa8cRZbC2E73q+wwBzWaff/5rB+Pwc8t3ihj5fdTQ5l1bIA4tWdKR
0MT+roRMkSOK7Ywn1O3voKoIvj4TxCr5kPteu2YXZCYB4GzCXznyTg==
=3E4H
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject: [WikiEN-l] Merge vs. Keep/Delete

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Tony Sidaway wrote:
> On 10/8/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>So history merges are useful only for cut-and-paste moves?
>>
>
>
> Yes, pretty much. The problem with history merges is that the software
> provides no means of unmerging elements from the history. One they're there,
> there's no way to get them out again.

Not easily, anyway. I'm willing to try it out though :)

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iQEVAwUBQ0fj9rMAAH8MeUlWAQi/oAf+KW9Ekw8wAH+LWQL3pAfMiwXNYDXkVFpG
CjjVZqhdXISmwaSEEfeiYyb3lMfC1de2b4mRvQwdOo7vMlpxLNZNQFC4J9z8bUri
pgS9WnTvyufx7QHqPrdI0KP6+0NCuqy1zmPxaZHC8yROpnkDCM0AER/o5QeTB6JX
S1oJdrFxaSy4ndcY2BMxW+F8FeEPfRfAUrjbH8GUvS3+xCEyerCM6iORRcRDqJLl
Hffue2k0zpF3Cyfj4U96LnMPG83JSl5H3ZOJN2O2nl8WRCJ5C+igpw7gQHa08Zuf
45WCW1u/x8c2l6YV7rH5QbAAsqIsbh9V2hdOLmCBA3kdrPl8Sh2nGg==
=CH/3
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
geni wrote:

>On 10/9/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>When to parties disagree on what is consensus they should ask for
>>outside opinion rather than start an edit war.
>>
>>
>Who cares what consensus is? What matters is what is right. Edit
>waring has it's uses. For some reason it seems to be an effective way
>of increaseing the number of citations.
>
The problem with believing that being right is paramount is that it
tends to shut out other views which may be just as right.

Ec


body:
When to parties disagree on what is consensus they should ask for
outside opinion rather than start an edit war.

--Mgm


subject: [WikiEN-l] Autoblocking, reverts, and verifiability

body:
Perhaps it would be easier if there was a clear idea on when something
is a revert.


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
On 10/8/05, actionforum at comcast.net <actionforum at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Those, who voluntarily
> limit themselves to one or two reverts per day, must refrain
> from editing certain pages, or return to those pages with
> persistance over a long period of time.
>

That is simply untrue. I've edited George W. Bush, for instance, with my
customary 1RR. The Iraq war article, too. I've performed useful edits on
those articles, leaving both better than when I found them. Why would this
*not* be true?


from_name: geni

body:
On 10/9/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> When to parties disagree on what is consensus they should ask for
> outside opinion rather than start an edit war.
>
> --Mgm

Who cares what consensus is? What matters is what is right. Edit
waring has it's uses. For some reason it seems to be an effective way
of increaseing the number of citations.

--
geni


body:
On 10/9/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Perhaps it would be easier if there was a clear idea on when something
> is a revert.

Something is a revert when you can perswade a blocking admin that it
was a revert.

--
geni


body:
On 10/9/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> That is simply untrue. I've edited George W. Bush, for instance, with my
> customary 1RR. The Iraq war article, too. I've performed useful edits on
> those articles, leaving both better than when I found them. Why would this
> *not* be true?

The first of those two articles is a little odd since it appears that
MAD has been established between the two sides.

--
geni


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Milestone Announcement

body:
Hi everybody,

I would like to announce that just in the last couple days the
Serbocroatian Wikipedia crossed the 1000-article mark.

It is fast growing now -- already it is nearly 1/4 the size of the
Bosnian WP, 1/10 the size of the Croatian WP, and 1/15 the size of the
Serbian WP.

It is my hope that at some point in the future, probably when sh.wiki
reaches a bigger number of articles, that these three Wikipedias can,
by a democratic vote, unite and all use sh.wiki together although it
will take a lot of work to get there.

One reason for the fast growth is that most articles are not new
material, but rather are based on the existing articles from the
Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian WPs. This means that there are nearly
30.000 articles to draw from, although there is a certain degree of
overlap.

Cheers
Mark

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Milestone Announcement

body:
I would like to add a few of the reasons hoping for a unified Serbocroatian WP:

1) The three Yugoslav languages are all mutually intelligible at
nearly 100%. Although Serbian sometimes uses Cyrillic, lossless
Cyrillic-Latin conversion can be performed.
2) To have Bosnians, Croatians, Serbians, and Montenegrins working
together in one Wikipedia will hopefully help with a better NPOV
environment, although there might be tenseness in national issues (for
example, the current sh.wiki article about the Srebrenica massacre
contains only links to the article on the 3 other WPs due to its
controversial nature and potential POV problems)
3) More people who share a common language (or "very similar
languages", if you prefer) working together can ultimately create a
larger, more detailed, and generally higher-quality encyclopaedia.
Currently, these people are divided into 3 WPs which are all excellent
already on their own.

Also note that this is not something I expect to happen soon -- maybe
a few years off.

Mark

On 09/10/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> I would like to announce that just in the last couple days the
> Serbocroatian Wikipedia crossed the 1000-article mark.
>
> It is fast growing now -- already it is nearly 1/4 the size of the
> Bosnian WP, 1/10 the size of the Croatian WP, and 1/15 the size of the
> Serbian WP.
>
> It is my hope that at some point in the future, probably when sh.wiki
> reaches a bigger number of articles, that these three Wikipedias can,
> by a democratic vote, unite and all use sh.wiki together although it
> will take a lot of work to get there.
>
> One reason for the fast growth is that most articles are not new
> material, but rather are based on the existing articles from the
> Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian WPs. This means that there are nearly
> 30.000 articles to draw from, although there is a certain degree of
> overlap.
>
> Cheers
> Mark
>
> --
> SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
> QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
> POSSIT MATERIARI
> ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Ryan Norton

body:
> It isn't going to happen if he doesn't make it happen. The Featured
> Article
> process is tortuous and review-based, and the quality of writing it
> produces
> is at best mediocre.

Then why not go there and oppose the ones with bad writing? I'm sure
your comments would be appreciated, and will easily kill any chances of
90% of the FAs there from passing. As for review-based - what's the
alternative?

Thanks,
Ryan

[[User:RN]] at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RN
Ryan Norton at wxforum: http://wxforum.org


body:
On 10/9/05, Alphax <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:

> Having "rv" or "revert" in the edit summary is a good indicator. Having
> a null diff is another.
>

Not much use if the edit warriour is any good.
--
geni


body:
Cormac Lawler wrote:

>
>You may have already found this out, but it's called Helpdesk-l :
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/helpdesk-l
>
>Cheers,
>Cormac
>
>
Yeah, actually kinda funny.  a few days ago I subscribed to the list
before the request for list admins

-Jtkiefer


body:
On 10/9/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Who cares what consensus is? What matters is what is right. Edit
> waring has it's uses. For some reason it seems to be an effective way
> of increaseing the number of citations.
>

Well you're entitled to your opinion, but we have to work on Wikipedia,
where the arbitrators think differently:

*Edit warring is harmful to the purpose of Wikipedia and to the morale of
its editors. *

(Adopted 5-0 in the Yuber case, which is about to be closed)

And they've just warned one of their own number to stop edit warring.


body:
-------------- Original message --------------

> >>Perhaps it would be easier if there was a clear idea on when something
> >>is a revert.
> >
> > Something is a revert when you can perswade a blocking admin that it
> > was a revert.
> >
> Having "rv" or "revert" in the edit summary is a good indicator. Having
> a null diff is another.

No, it could be just the first step in getting back to a certain version
for further editing.  A rv followed by one or more new edits by the
same person, is not a revert, but should be assumed to be a good
faith edit.  i.e., a revert as part of a multipart edit is not a revert,
sometimes the rv is in the summary when there is an edit at
the same time, for instance when you revert and incorporate
corrections that had been made to the other version at the
same time.
              -- Silverback
                                 -- Silverback


body:
-------------- Original message --------------

> On 10/8/05, actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
> >
> > Those, who voluntarily
> > limit themselves to one or two reverts per day, must refrain
> > from editing certain pages, or return to those pages with
> > persistance over a long period of time.
> >
>
> That is simply untrue. I've edited George W. Bush, for instance, with my
> customary 1RR. The Iraq war article, too. I've performed useful edits on
> those articles, leaving both better than when I found them. Why would this
> *not* be true?

I've done that too, however, it does depend on what you
are trying to get in.  I'd be more impressed if you could
get fair representation for anarcho-capitalism on the anarchism
page, or if you could get Castro properly labeled as a dictator.
Or how about getting what everybody expects to be called
communism, the communist state, and criticisms of it on
the communism page.

Do you ever try the hard stuff on a page with a clique suppressing
other POVs?
                   -- Silverback


from_name: Cormac Lawler

body:
On 10/9/05, Jtkiefer <jtkiefer at wordzen.net> wrote:
>
> >>If anyone would like to be the list admin, please let me know.
> >>
> >>Angela
> >>
> >>
>
> I'll volunteer to do it, though I think that we should have more than
> one listadmin so that there's someone around even if one person takes a
> vacation or becomes inactive, or something of that sort.  Btw, any idea
> what to name this list?
>
> -Jtkiefer

You may have already found this out, but it's called Helpdesk-l :
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/helpdesk-l

Cheers,
Cormac


body:
On 10/9/05, actionforum at comcast.net <actionforum at comcast.net > wrote:

I'd be more impressed if you could
> get fair representation for anarcho-capitalism on the anarchism
> page,

Currently seems to have a pretty fair three-paragraph summary, and a link to
a full article on the subject.

or if you could get Castro properly labeled as a dictator.

The correct description is apparently "Presidente del Consejo de Estado" or
just "Presidente", or alternatively "Comandante en Jefe". Nobody seems to be
able to get those titles into the article. Instead we have squabbling over
whether to call him a "ruler" or a "dictator". Edit warring does not help
this, it makes it worse.

Now the late Shah of Iran has similar problems. Somebody keeps trying to run
off with "His Imperial Majesty " and "Aryamehr".

Or how about getting what everybody expects to be called
> communism, the communist state, and criticisms of it on
> the communism page.

I'd expect a description of an ideology, and some general history, under an
-ism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

For communist states we have an article with the completely unsurprising
title "Communist state".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_state

For the Communist International, there's an article called "Comintern".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comintern

Do you ever try the hard stuff on a page with a clique suppressing
> other POVs?

There is a dispute resolution process for the serious stuff, you know.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] IRC : change of channels and ownership of ... channels

body:
Hello;

I post it here, though it is not restricted to wikipedia. But many read
this list, so that might do.

Freenode is changing is channel naming policy.

The channel names beforehand #xx.wikipedia will be changed in #wikipedia-xx

Some people already reported that some of these channels (like the
spanish one) were already registered by unknown people... or people who
have left the projects.

If this is the case of your language channel, please do together agree
on a new owner, then please contact Fennec to make the change :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fennec

Fennec is the contact for freenode.

Thanks

Anthere


subject: [WikiEN-l] Collaboration of the week activity

body:
On Sunday, October 9, 2005, at 09:27  AM, geni wrote:

> On 10/9/05, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> I've noticed over the past few months that the number of people
>> nominating articles and voting on the collaboration of the week has
>> fallen quite considerably. I have two questions:
>>
>>   - what do you think the causes of this fall in activity are?
>
> Burnout

The article improvement drive is stagnating too. Due to people going
back to school, perhaps?

Thanks,
Ryan

[[User:RN]] at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RN
Ryan Norton at wxforum: http://wxforum.org


body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

> If editors are supposed to take great writing seriously, we must give it the
> highest possible award.
>
>
> Jimmy Wales, here's something you could make happen.
>
> I *demand* that we have a guaranteed daily place on the main page, to be
> reserved solely for articles chosen for their great writing.
>
> Anything less is a display of lack of commitment in our goal--to be as good
> as, or better than, any other encyclopaedia, free or otherwise, with
> digraphs or without.

This is totally to the community to 1) write very good articles and 2)
agree that they are very good and 3) put them on the main page.

How can Jimbo make that happen more than you ???


body:
On 10/9/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
> > If editors are supposed to take great writing seriously, we must give it
> the
> > highest possible award.
> >
> >
> > Jimmy Wales, here's something you could make happen.
> >
> > I *demand* that we have a guaranteed daily place on the main page, to be
> > reserved solely for articles chosen for their great writing.
> >
> > Anything less is a display of lack of commitment in our goal--to be as
> good
> > as, or better than, any other encyclopaedia, free or otherwise, with
> > digraphs or without.
>
> This is totally to the community to 1) write very good articles and 2)
> agree that they are very good and 3) put them on the main page.
>
> How can Jimbo make that happen more than you ???
>

It isn't going to happen if he doesn't make it happen. The Featured Article
process is tortuous and review-based, and the quality of writing it produces
is at best mediocre.

If we really are going to take great writing seriously, we should try to
identify editors who are capable of doing it and encourage them to do so.
This means that an article may lack pictures, and even be a little short of
references. The footnotes may be uneven. But the article will be a pleasure
to read and provide good coverage of the topic.


subject: [WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

body:
On Sunday, October 9, 2005, at 09:40  AM, Delirium wrote:

> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>> In the case in hand, we have "Bill Gates" and "Jane Fonda" -- they are
>> similar in that they are both living famous Americans who are
>> controversial.  The problems with the articles are similar in that the
>> problem isn't so much bias or lack of factual accuracy, as it is bad
>> writing.
>>
>> Are the biographies of other living famous Americans who are
>> controversial similarly godawful?
>>
> That makes sense.  One other thing I'd find interesting but sadly
> don't have the time to check right now is whether there are better
> versions in the history.  That is, are such articles consistently bad,
> or are they just very unstable so at any given moment they're likely
> to be bad even though good versions exist?

They've always been bad I think, LOL :).

Thanks,
Ryan

[[User:RN]] at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RN
Ryan Norton at wxforum: http://wxforum.org


body:
On Sunday, October 9, 2005, at 09:47  AM, Chris Jenkinson wrote:

> Ryan Norton wrote:
>> The article improvement drive is stagnating too. Due to people going
>> back to school, perhaps?
>
> One thing I thought of was the increasing number of topical CotW
> projects, which might have caused people to move towards topics they
> are interested in rather than the general CotW.
>

I'm sure its a factor of some kind. I have trouble keeping track of all
of them myself (fortnightly and so on). Plus you have the various
wikiprojects too and the featuring article drives they do.

> Thanks,
Ryan

[[User:RN]] at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RN
Ryan Norton at wxforum: http://wxforum.org


subject: [WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

body:
>
> They've always been bad I think, LOL :).
>

Well, writing-wise anyway. Biographies are difficult to write :\.

> Thanks,
> Ryan
>
> [[User:RN]] at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RN
> Ryan Norton at wxforum: http://wxforum.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
Thanks,
Ryan

[[User:RN]] at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RN
Ryan Norton at wxforum: http://wxforum.org


body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Ryan Delaney wrote:
> geni wrote:
>
>
>>Who cares what consensus is? What matters is what is right. Edit
>>waring has it's uses. For some reason it seems to be an effective way
>>of increaseing the number of citations.
>>
>
> This comment baffles me. There are a lot of things I find wrong with
> it, but I'll stick with this: Maybe a better way to increase the
> number of citations, rather than edit warring, would be to /add them/.
>

Not something that requires /thinking/! YOUR HEAD A SPLODE!

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iQEVAwUBQ0h2cLMAAH8MeUlWAQi/Ngf/XETJlUeu59FF/LVh7aYlTyHPY2eBMz4A
ZMOFLFZrxwjlYuAHJ+NqV0HasnyvkvsvEvVtgCP1nbbW1GP1i2Jxi9mRZXu8TosF
5qVoOYiY8ZccHCbjaxrUbZIY/8zY3wzvuqEG8TYfGTsWTn2v0Wgi2dZNZb8Xkv/m
5WjcadKuEYExISnMMV4PP3/J/Mf45Zal+SiJw3KI7WTC+mNaQOThPtvVfhZvS/Az
WrI3pjWU3q+vZvFfeBxzRT2CMeh+YWh8FFfpcqRgPF8kk5JWIVnXMR8Ndl3LqZxH
duXdxPWPlr3vcsZfa8pqxwekjtb0fM7AmGlOYor/PeDSUyIv0asyRQ==
=1Xg7
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

geni wrote:
> On 10/9/05, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Perhaps it would be easier if there was a clear idea on when something
>>is a revert.
>
>
> Something is a revert when you can perswade a blocking admin that it
> was a revert.
>

Having "rv" or "revert" in the edit summary is a good indicator. Having
a null diff is another.

- --
Alphax                      |   /"\
Encrypted Email Preferred   |   \ /     ASCII Ribbon Campaign
OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613  |    X   Against HTML email & vCards
http://tinyurl.com/cc9up    |   / \
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iQEVAwUBQ0h237MAAH8MeUlWAQiKagf/XTK+FezVbBF3SDwuZ9oLk/DB3SaBzV60
kyBWCGnUTwUY/h164brJv0WprTzW1stts7UoAkaYZY8orgznrvezLo2hq+b0zyFA
jqNHTsqRyMsGbpovLQkNZO12Afa/cRTdPWHAvSVc5tLOMptYnn3jG8SwJC0//ZXb
apXGY4m9LhqhshOdDSxGUh1Hpi2Sy1CL+zZT+2cBvVITm/QPhcJgWwEkCMI+D4kA
umfUtyTwtxPMTOri1qbC7padjfDeVTTvvSuLeDPPwD2CHVnUthkx4aecnW7HJwtk
n80FJZMJZx8jvZ0OabNTvqQmRqLl/u1siEZpFUVWwKxv5U3QWicgZw==
=WKRO
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject: [WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Fastfission wrote:
>
>
>>But clearly "obscurity" is not the factor which determines a good or
>>bad article. Plenty of articles on obscure people are very good and
>>plenty articles on very simple things can be quite bad. But still, he
>>did not, of course, give any rationale for these two articles except
>>that they exemplify the fact that Wikipedia is edited by amateurs and
>>sometimes has spotty content. So what?
>>
>>
>It disappoints me to hear a Wikipedian take this attitude towards
>quality.  "So what?"  So -- we're trying to be better than this, that's
>what.
>
There can be many intonations on "So what?" that cannot be adequately
represented.  Some are indeed offensive. I would prefer to nassume good
faith on this.

>>But nobody's making excuses here. I'm just saying that you will always
>>be able to find sore spots if you want to. If you believe in the
>>Wikipedia way, what you do is try to fix them or call them to the
>>attention to others. If you don't, then you write pissy articles about
>>them.
>>
>>
>I don't think this is what our general response to this sort of
>complaint should be.  I think our response should be: hey, you know
>what, he's right!  These articles ought to be pretty decent, but they
>aren't.  Why?  What can we do to improve?
>
>If we study it up one side and down the other and conclude that there is
>nothing to be done about it, then fine.  But we should not just accept
>the current state of affairs if there are sensible proposals for
>improvement.
>
I haven't read the two articles in question; perhaps it's better that I
don't.  I don't expect anything to be a perfect article, but we do have
some that come damn close.  The entire project has perhaps become
successful because of and despite its imperfections.  If *anyone*
complains about a particular article the {{sofixit}} comeback is always
available; if you complain about an article you must have some idea
about what needs to be done.

We would all like better production from the crop of articles in our
collective farm..  We do have some Stakhanovs among us, but it would be
wrong to expect as much output from the rest of the volunteers.

>>We're not making software, here -- just because some parts of it are
>>spotty doesn't mean the entire package won't work. In that way we're a
>>lot less restrained than the open source software projects and can
>>afford to have a philosophy of eventualism.
>>
>>
>I don't have a problem with eventualism -- but 'eventualism' is not the
>same as saying "so what?" to quality problems.
>
Some of the best practices that inspired the growth of Wikipedia do not
scale well at all.  We all believe in the ideal that the articles should
improve in quality.  But is the poison pill of impatient perfectionism
the appropriate prescription, or does it leave us drugged out in
illusions that we are accomplishing something?  We will always have
articles that can best be described as a piece of shit, and those are
far more apparent in an environment filled superior work.  Sometimes if
the duchess sees the problem, and the hired help is not immediately
available she may just have to get down on her hands and knees to scrub
the bathroom floor.

Quality is a concern for all of us.  However, when quality becomes a
mantra it can easily bring us to a tipping point where that urge
overwhelms the values that were responsible for the growth.

Ec


body:
Cormac Lawler wrote:

>Hm? Angela's announcement of the list and request for admins was on
>September 4th!
>
>C
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
Well it looks like I missed my chance then unless Angela still needs
more people, I haven't seen her around in a few days so I haven't gotten
the chance to ask her

-Jtkiefer


body:
------------- Original message --------------
> On 10/9/05, actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
>
> I'd be more impressed if you could
> > get fair representation for anarcho-capitalism on the anarchism
> > page,

>
> Currently seems to have a pretty fair three-paragraph summary, and a link to
> a full article on the subject.

That is not the point, that is after a long edit war, that you seem to
think isn't necessary.  It is still not up in the introduction as one of
the major branches of anarchism.  Review the history.

> or if you could get Castro properly labeled as a dictator.
>
>
> The correct description is apparently "Presidente del Consejo de Estado" or
> just "Presidente", or alternatively "Comandante en Jefe". Nobody seems to be
> able to get those titles into the article. Instead we have squabbling over
> whether to call him a "ruler" or a "dictator". Edit warring does not help
> this, it makes it worse.

Wrong, it hasn't gotten worse, at least Batista is no longer
called a dictator, as he once was.  That is how much the clique, did
not want Castro labeled a dictator.  Note that Batista still has a regime,
which has been regarded as POV on other pages.   Batista did not shoot
people trying to escape Cuba, Castro does.  The spanish title and a
literal translation probably deserves mention in the english version, although
probably not in the intro.

> Now the late Shah of Iran has similar problems. Somebody keeps trying to run
> off with "His Imperial Majesty " and "Aryamehr".

> Or how about getting what everybody expects to be called
> > communism, the communist state, and criticisms of it on
> > the communism page.
>
> I'd expect a description of an ideology, and some general history, under an
> -ism.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
>
> For communist states we have an article with the completely unsurprising
> title "Communist state".
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_state
>
> For the Communist International, there's an article called "Comintern".
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comintern

In the english speaking world the cold war was fought against
communism, not a stateless, classless system where all property
is held communally.  It is anarcho-communism not state communism
that should be the subsidiary page.

> Do you ever try the hard stuff on a page with a clique suppressing
> > other POVs?
>
> There is a dispute resolution process for the serious stuff, you know.

We would end up having to abjudicate every edit.
                -- Silverback


from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] a valid criticism

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>In the case in hand, we have "Bill Gates" and "Jane Fonda" -- they are
>similar in that they are both living famous Americans who are
>controversial.  The problems with the articles are similar in that the
>problem isn't so much bias or lack of factual accuracy, as it is bad
>writing.
>
>Are the biographies of other living famous Americans who are
>controversial similarly godawful?
>
>
That makes sense.  One other thing I'd find interesting but sadly don't
have the time to check right now is whether there are better versions in
the history.  That is, are such articles consistently bad, or are they
just very unstable so at any given moment they're likely to be bad even
though good versions exist?

-Mark


body:
-------------- Original message --------------
> >Who cares what consensus is? What matters is what is right. Edit
> >waring has it's uses. For some reason it seems to be an effective way
> >of increaseing the number of citations.
> >
> The problem with believing that being right is paramount is that it
> tends to shut out other views which may be just as right.

No, that is the problem with being wrong.  It is those who are
wrong that want to shut out the views that may be right.
That is how you get gulags, political prisoners, censorship,
whole nations that are gulags of cheap captive labor where
emigation and escape are prohibitted.

                                         -- Silverback


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

body:
Hi guys,

I've noticed over the past few months that the number of people
nominating articles and voting on the collaboration of the week has
fallen quite considerably. I have two questions:

  - what do you think the causes of this fall in activity are?

  - what ideas do people have to reinvigorate activity in this project
which used to turn out a featured-quality article pretty much every week?

Chris


from_name: Jamie Bliss

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Two patches that would make things much easier for
 bots and scripts

body:
Timwi wrote:
>
>> I propose two small changes to MediaWiki, which would allow scripts
>> and bots to parse the HTML output of MediaWiki more easily. (I'm
>> crossposting this to wikitech-l and pywikipediabot-users, because it's
>> relevant to both).
>
>
> This sounds horribly redundant to me. I don't know how far the bot API
> effort has got (has any work on it been done at all?), but what you're
> proposing doesn't help it; it only adds bulk to the software.

I am, slowly. I'm focussing more on a client-side reader/editor rather
than bots.

My effort includes things like Special:Getimage (redirects to the URL of
the given image) and giving other special pages and XML output (so the
data is easily parsed).

>> The second proposal is a pseudo-language, called "bot" or "none", that
>> would cause MediaWiki to return system messages untranslated, in the
>> form {@[key]@}.
>
>
> I wrote such a feature before, but with the parameter &debugmsg=1 rather
> than as a "pseudo-language". It was live at some point, but apparently
> it's not anymore. Someone must have reverted it.

That is a feature I don't quite understand. Why would a bot want it? To
simplify screen-scraping?

What about messages like [[MediaWiki:Sidebar]], which are not litterally
pasted?

-- Jamie
-------------------------------------------------------------------
http://endeavour.zapto.org/astro73/
Thank you to JosephM for inviting me to Gmail!
Have lots of invites. Gmail now has 2GB.


body:
On 10/9/05, Jtkiefer <jtkiefer at wordzen.net> wrote:
> Cormac Lawler wrote:
>
> >
> >You may have already found this out, but it's called Helpdesk-l :
> >http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/helpdesk-l
> >
> >Cheers,
> >Cormac
> >
> >
> Yeah, actually kinda funny.  a few days ago I subscribed to the list
> before the request for list admins
>
> -Jtkiefer

Hm? Angela's announcement of the list and request for admins was on
September 4th!

C


from_name: Guettarda

body:
> Then why not go there and oppose the ones with bad writing? I'm sure
> your comments would be appreciated, and will easily kill any chances of
> 90% of the FAs there from passing. As for review-based - what's the
> alternative?

I think Tony's point is that we need to recognise well written work entirely
apart from the FA process. I think of FAs as Wikipedia 1.0 articles. It
makes sense to recognise and reward good writing. Bringing an article up to
FA status is something that people are willing to inves time and effort in.
Improving the writing is something that people may be willing to do, but
without a specific end-goal to work towards, it's likely to be one of the
things that just gets put off. If I had to make a guess at the things that
get my attention it would be

1. Vandalism
2. Content-related discussion on pages that I watch (think [[Evolution]],
etc.)
3. AN/I and other disputes including RFAr, RFCs
4. Articles that I am expanding
5. Articles that I would like to bring to FA status
6. Everything else

The first three, the boring and mundane stuff, tends to consume most of my
time. Which encyclopaedia-related tasks get done depends on how easy they
are to do, and whether I am working towards some goal or other. Stylistic
improvements just aren't a goal - they're something you do when you find
something that's so horribly written that it makes you wince. If it were a
goal, if I were to say "I want to bring [[An Article]] to "Great Writing"
staus", then it might get done. As is, it will get done the day after I
finish writing featured articles on every village in Trinidad :)

Ian


from_name: slimvirgin at gmail.com

body:
On 10/9/05, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think Tony's point is that we need to recognise well written work entirely
> apart from the FA process.
>
It's a good idea, Ian. Good writing is given too little attention, and
yet it's the thing most likely to get us respected and read. No matter
how accurate and neutral an article is, if it's badly written, we look
silly. The greater the number of people editing an article, the faster
the writing declines, which means our most popular articles are often
not well written.

I've also noticed that many editors are quite happy to revert a copy
edit if there's just one or two things in it they don't like, without
realizing that a good copy edit is a lot of work and involves making
changes all the way through the article, and is therefore a hard thing
to go back and do again.

I'd welcome anything that brings the issue of good writing to people's
attention and makes editors respect it more.

Sarah


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: approved requests for new wikipedias

body:
> The problem with Low Saxon is that some people have high jacked the Low
> Saxon Wikipedia by insisting on a German dominated orthography. Because
> of the incompatibility that this creates with the Dutch Low Saxon, there
> is this need for a separate wikipedia. To make matters even more weird,
> one of the persons insisting on this Sass orthography is not even a
> Lower Saxon speaker but is one who does contribute to the nds.wikipedia
> for a hobby.

So you are contributing to Wikipedia for a profession?

Let's be realistic, all those dialects are all just a "hobby" for
everyone. My favourite nds article is [[nds:Nokieksel]]; not because
it's a well-written, serious, informative article or anything, but
because it's hilarious. It is obviously written by someone trying (and
by all means succeeding) to be funny rather than to spread knowledge.

Timwi


body:
> I propose two small changes to MediaWiki, which would allow scripts and
> bots to parse the HTML output of MediaWiki more easily. (I'm
> crossposting this to wikitech-l and pywikipediabot-users, because it's
> relevant to both).

This sounds horribly redundant to me. I don't know how far the bot API
effort has got (has any work on it been done at all?), but what you're
proposing doesn't help it; it only adds bulk to the software.

> The second proposal is a pseudo-language, called "bot" or "none", that
> would cause MediaWiki to return system messages untranslated, in the
> form {@[key]@}.

I wrote such a feature before, but with the parameter &debugmsg=1 rather
than as a "pseudo-language". It was live at some point, but apparently
it's not anymore. Someone must have reverted it.

Timwi


from_name: elephantus

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia - a policy question?

body:
The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia was reopened in June
after a request from a single user of the Serbian
Wikipedia - [[sr:User:Покрајац|Pokrajac]]. This was
not announced beforehand in any way on the three Wikipedias that
are most affected by this issue – Serbian,
Croatian and Bosnian, there was no public discussion or
a vote. The idea was supported here by people
who weren't part of the growing communities of the
three Wikipedias.

The "phenomenal growth" (1,019 articles) of the Serbo-Croatian
is mostly a result of people (some of them with little or no
knowledge of the three languages)
copy-pasting articles from Serbian (converting those to Latin
alphabet), Croatian or Bosnian Wikipedias. The sole
exception has been an anonymous user 213.202.x.x who wrote
several longer articles in almost perfect Croatian and
posted them to the Serbo-Croatian wiki.

My question is this: Why aren't Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian
Wikipedias provided the same treatment as e.g. Danish and
Bokmal (Norwegian) which are also mutually intelligible
in the written form? There is no common Dano-Bokmal
Wikipedia with well-wishing but mostly misguided non-native-
speakers copying articles to it.

Serbo-Croatian has been dead as a political collection of
standard languages for 15 years now (30 years in Croatia),
it is slowly disappearing, except as a historical footnote,
even in international linguistic circles because the name
itself is insulting to most Bosniaks and Croats and not
used by most Serbs (who prefer the term Serbian).

I'd like to propose a relocking of this Wikipedia or at least a
name change (Serbian - Latin, as a temporary bridge to
the Latin conversion system now being tested for the Serbian
Wikipedia).

Elephantus (from Croatian Wikipedia, 10.042 articles
and growing!) :-)

--
Odaberite XXLadsl i iskoristite 60 dana neograni?enog surfanja za samo 1 kn!
Uz svaki XXLadsl poklanjamo Iskonov glazbeni CD. http://www.iskon.biz/xxladsl


from_name: Dominik Bach

subject: [Wikitech-l] Approved Languages, Ripuarian

body:
I like Arbeo's idea with the four-letter codes especially in order to avoid future conflicts: the "frp" I proposed for Ripuarian has just been taken by franco-provencal. So may I ask for the creation of the Ripuarian Wikipedia with either rip.wikipedia.org or ripu.wikipedia.org and an English language interface (since the Ripuarian Interface is not yet ready, and we do not want a German interface, as Ripuarian is spoken in Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium)?

Thanks!
Dominik

>A possible alternative has just crossed my mind: why
>not use four-lettered codes for languages that don't
>have an iso code (yet)? That would allow us to pick
>abbreviations that users can memorize more easily
>while not interfering with any existing or potential
>future iso codes. (e. g. "samo" for Samogitian, "bany"
>or maybe "wjav" - to include all Western Javanese
>dialects - for Banyumsan, "ripu" for Ripuarian and so
>forth)
>
>Arbeo

______________________________________________________________
Verschicken Sie romantische, coole und witzige Bilder per SMS!
Jetzt bei WEB.DE FreeMail: http://f.web.de/?mc=021193


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: New mailing list for newbies?

body:
> You may have already found this out, but it's called Helpdesk-l :
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/helpdesk-l

Does that mailing list have a gmane newsgroup equivalent?


from_name: Jakob Voss

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: New Wikimediach-l for Wikimedia CH

body:
Stephan Walter wrote:

> I have submitted the list to gmane.org, so the we'll be able to read the
> list on the gmane.org usenet server. If you don't now about gmane: this
> mail-to-news gateway is really useful, because you won't have thousands
> of email each day if you're subscribed to a lot of mailinglists. See
> http://gmane.org/ for more information.
>
> The hierarchy currently is a mess:
>
> gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation.uk
> gmane.org.wikimedia.france
> gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.verein
>
> I have now asked for wikimediach-l to be
> gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation.switzerland, but maybe they'll change the
> hierarchy.

How about asking Gmane to change

gmane.org.wikimedia.france to
gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation.france
and gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.verein
to gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation.germany

You can discuss whether each chapter is part of the foundation or not
but regarding the hierarchy it's much better to have each chapter's list
at gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation.*

Changing gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.* to
gmane.org.wikimedia.wikipedia.* would be logical too but it would break
too many links so we have to live with it as long as there is nothing
like a "group redirect".

What's you opinion? May I ask them to change the names?

Greetings,
Jakob

P.S.: By the way Lars Magne does a good job with gmane and we profit
from it - any ideas how to support him? Maybe We could tell people to
donate to Gmane (http://gmane.org/donate.php)? If it was a private
company we could just spend an amount for hosting and archiving our
mailing lists but donating money that was donated to Wikimedia or one of
it's chapters it a bit tricky I think.


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Is Wikip/media politic?

body:
Jakob Voss wrote:

> A friend of mine is searching for a quote of Jimbo meantioning that
> Wikipedia or Wikimedia is not political. Maybe Jimbo said something
> like this during the Politics of Wikimedia panel at Wikimania or
> related to comparing Wikimedia with the Red Cross or it's because
> something with tax in the US. Does anybody has a quote with a source?

I have no idea what may have been said. However, as a legal matter the
Wikimedia Foundation is limited by the rules that govern charitable
organizations. In the US, these laws severely restrict the extent to
which a charity can engage in political activity. Basically, I believe
we should keep to those political issues that relate directly to our
mission, such as possible changes in copyright laws.

Also to be considered in everything we do is the general commitment to a
neutral point of view. So far people have had concerns even about
promoting ideas that are fairly close in spirit to our projects. Things
like promoting other charities (like the Red Cross) or other open source
projects (such as Firefox) have not gone over well.

--Michael Snow


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Collaboration of the week activity

body:
Chris Jenkinson wrote:

> Ryan Norton wrote:
>
>> The article improvement drive is stagnating too. Due to people going
>> back to school, perhaps?
>
> One thing I thought of was the increasing number of topical CotW
> projects, which might have caused people to move towards topics they
> are interested in rather than the general CotW.

Sometimes this is a product of people wanting to start projects
themselves, rather than help with projects others have started. The same
phenomenon among programmers explains many of the Linux distributions
out there. In both situations, it would often be more useful to the
community for people to improve the stuff that's already there.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Arne Klempert

subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: [VereinDE-l] Re: New Wikimediach-l for Wikimedia
	CH

body:
On 10/9/05, Jakob Voss <jakob.voss at nichtich.de> wrote:
> Stephan Walter wrote:
>
> > I have submitted the list to gmane.org, so the we'll be able to read the
> > list on the gmane.org usenet server. If you don't now about gmane: this
> > mail-to-news gateway is really useful, because you won't have thousands
> > of email each day if you're subscribed to a lot of mailinglists. See
> > http://gmane.org/ for more information.
> >
> > The hierarchy currently is a mess:
> >
> > gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation.uk
> > gmane.org.wikimedia.france
> > gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.verein
> >
> > I have now asked for wikimediach-l to be
> > gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation.switzerland, but maybe they'll change the
> > hierarchy.
>
> How about asking Gmane to change
>
> gmane.org.wikimedia.france to
> gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation.france
> and gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.verein
> to gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation.germany

Please, Wikimedia Deutschland (as all other chapters) should not be
called "foundation", even not in the gmane hierarchy.

If there is a request for changing the current hierarchy it should
look like this:
* gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation
* gmane.org.wikimedia.france
* gmane.org.wikimedia.germany

-- Arne (akl)


from_name: Arbeo M

subject: Ant:  [Wikipedia-l] Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia - a policy question?

body:
Hi Elephantus!

Let me just try to answer a few of your points here:

> The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia was reopened in June
> after a request from a single user of the Serbian
> Wikipedia -
>
[[sr:User:Покрајац|Pokrajac]].
> This was
> not announced beforehand in any way on the three
> Wikipedias that
> are most affected by this issue ? Serbian,
> Croatian and Bosnian, there was no public discussion
> or
> a vote. The idea was supported here by people
> who weren't part of the growing communities of the
> three Wikipedias.

Generally speaking, only opening all-new Wikipedias
requires public discussion, prior announcement, voting
or the like. Reopening a previously locked wiki is not
a comparable process. Locking a wiki is only a
temporary measure because of some specific reason, e.
g. vandalism and it can be upheld only as long as that
reason persists to exist. SH had been locked because
of inactivity. As soon as there were people willing to
edit it there was no alternative but to unlock it.

> The "phenomenal growth" (1,019 articles) of the
> Serbo-Croatian
> is mostly a result of people (some of them with
> little or no
> knowledge of the three languages)
> copy-pasting articles from Serbian (converting those
> to Latin
> alphabet), Croatian or Bosnian Wikipedias.

I wasn't aware that most of the editing at SH is done
by non-native speakers. Hmm ... you have any idea were
they come from? But there is one fact that one must
admit: the Wikipedia is active now, no matter where
that activity comes from.

> My question is this: Why aren't Serbian, Bosnian and
> Croatian
> Wikipedias provided the same treatment as e.g.
> Danish and
> Bokmal (Norwegian) which are also mutually
> intelligible
> in the written form? There is no common Dano-Bokmal
> Wikipedia with well-wishing but mostly misguided
> non-native-
> speakers copying articles to it.
>
Well, this type of comparison is always a little bold.
But I'm getting your point. I guess the main reason is
because a "Dano-Bokmal" WP was never requested by
anyone. Interestingly though, there seems to be some
kind of common Scandinavian project going on.

> Serbo-Croatian has been dead as a political
> collection of
> standard languages for 15 years now (30 years in
> Croatia),
> it is slowly disappearing, except as a historical
> footnote

I must admit I'm not competent to evaluate the current
situation of Serbo-Croatian and it's future is even
harder to predict. All I can see is that there seems
to be some kind of interest in it here at WP
(actually, even more than in 130 other languages).

> I'd like to propose a relocking of this Wikipedia

I am well aware that the whole situation is not
perfectly ideal yet. But all things considered, I
think the current solution is a fairly just and
neutral one. There is a minority that wishes to write
in Serbo-Croatian. Even if you don't like their
standpoint, why exclude them? "Live and let live!"

> or at least a
> name change (Serbian - Latin, as a temporary bridge
> to
> the Latin conversion system now being tested for the
> Serbian Wikipedia).

As a total outsider I could imagine that naming it
"Serbian-Latin" would not really be helpful because
that name makes reference to one nation and one
ethnicity exclusively. "Yugoslav(ian)" has just
crossed my mind - would that be an option?

Best regards,

Arbeo

P.S.: My congratulations for your 10,000th article at hr!

___________________________________________________________
Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - Jetzt mit 1GB Speicher kostenlos - Hier anmelden: http://mail.yahoo.de


from_name: geni

body:
On 10/9/05, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I've noticed over the past few months that the number of people
> nominating articles and voting on the collaboration of the week has
> fallen quite considerably. I have two questions:
>
>   - what do you think the causes of this fall in activity are?

Burnout

>   - what ideas do people have to reinvigorate activity in this project
> which used to turn out a featured-quality article pretty much every week?
>
> Chris

It really never did that. Try featuring it on the main page.

--
geni


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: I demand a daily spot for great writing

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

>Both version suffer from overwikification-nearly all of the sentences
>contain wikilinked words. I've spoken to a few people about Wikipedia and
>most of them report that a sentence with wikilinks is much harder to read
>than a sentence without. This matches my own experience.
>
>
I've actually found the opposite, so long as the wikilinks are
judiciously placed, and not just on all words.  I tend to use wikilinks
to help me skim sentences for the important subjects they refer to.
They are particularly useful for that purpose in mathematical articles,
where they usually mark technical terms being used in their technical
sense (and the link is useful to quickly look up the definition if I'm
unfamiliar with it).

-Mark


body:
Ryan Norton wrote:
> The article improvement drive is stagnating too. Due to people going
> back to school, perhaps?

One thing I thought of was the increasing number of topical CotW
projects, which might have caused people to move towards topics they are
interested in rather than the general CotW.

Chris


from_name: Dori

subject: [Foundation-l] Is Wikip/media politic?

body:
On 10/9/05, Jakob Voss <jakob.voss at nichtich.de> wrote:
> There is several distinct questions:
> 1. Is Wikipedia politic?

Yes it's political, and the policy is to spread free knowledge.

> 2. Does the community think that Wikipedia is politic

Yes, see one

> 3. Is Wikimedia Foundation a politic organisation?

Yes, see one


subject: [Foundation-l] Is Wikip/media politic?


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikitech-l] ko moved to kr

body:
Wow -- at reading your subject, I panicked, thinking that you'd
perhaps moved ko.wiki to the kr: subdomain.

But anyhow, yes, the news is good.

Mark

On 09/10/05, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Cross-posted to wikitech-l and wikipedia-l because I thought there might
> be wider interest.
>
> The master database server for the Korean Wikipedia has now been moved
> to our cluster in Korea. The switch went quite well, with no downtime
> and only half an hour of read-only time, most of that due to me mucking
> around with the configuration and fixing bugs. All Apache processing for
> that wiki is now done in Korea, including serving images. Only commons
> images are drawn from Florida.
>
> This is a pilot for full utilisation of the Yahoo cluster, eventually
> we'll move ja and the other East Asian wikis there. For now, the Koreans
> have a big cluster all to themselves, so they should expect to get pages
> back faster than you can blink at any time of the day or night. A life
> of sheer bliss that the rest of us can only dream of :)
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] The 3RR is an electric fence, not an entitlement.

body:
On 10/9/05, actionforum at comcast.net <actionforum at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> ------------- Original message --------------
> > On 10/9/05, actionforum at comcast.net wrote:
> >
> > It is still not up in the introduction as one of
> the major branches of anarchism. Review the history.

It's hardly a *major* branch. But it gets three paragraphs compared to the
much better established anarcho-syndicalism which gets seven. But how the
anarcho-syndicalism article manages to get by without mentioning the Spanish
Civil War and the CNT is beyond me, so I agree that the anarchism articles
are a mess.

> Wrong, it hasn't gotten worse, at least Batista is no longer
> called a dictator, as he once was. That is how much the clique, did
> not want Castro labeled a dictator. Note that Batista still has a regime,
> which has been regarded as POV on other pages. Batista did not shoot
> people trying to escape Cuba, Castro does.

Well, do you not see that all you're talking about is a tit-for-tat affair?
What does the issue of killing people trying to escape Cuba have to do with
the question of whether we call Batista or Castro dictators? Both of them
instituted a government by force of arms, so they would both fit the
traditional standard. Shah Pahlavi, for that matter, when dismissed by
Massadeq, was reinstalled by military force, so I guess we could call him a
dictator too. But the editors of the Pahlavi article, for whatever reason,
are not squabbling.

The spanish title and a
> literal translation probably deserves mention in the english version,
> although
> probably not in the intro.

Hmm, let's see:

"Adolf Hitler (April 20 1889--April 30 1945) was Chancellor of Germany from
1933 and F?hrer und Reichskanzler (Leader and Chancellor) of Germany from
1934 to his death. He was leader of the National Socialist German Workers
Party (NSDAP), better known as the Nazi Party."

That wasn't difficult, was it? And here's a familiar chap:

His Imperial Majesty Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (in [[Persian]]: ??????? ???
?????) (October 26 1919--July 27, 1980), was the last reigning Shah of Iran
to date, ruling from 1941 until 1979. He is also known by the deferential
title Aryamehr (meaning Light of the Aryans).

Very controversial fellows, but no problem calling them by their formal
titles. Presumably the fellows writing those articles realise that they're
writing an encyclopedia, not a poxy little political pamphlet.

> In the english speaking world the cold war was fought against
> communism, not a stateless, classless system where all property
> is held communally.

I see. Your objection is that the article doesn't employ the same shorthand
as the political leaders of your own country (and please, don't try to lump
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain and Ireland in with the USA. We
don't like it when you do that).

> >
> > There is a dispute resolution process for the serious stuff, you know.
>
> We would end up having to abjudicate every edit.
>

Two determined sets of edit warriors face each other across the wasteland of
Khmer Rouge, which until recently had been protected from editing for ninety
days out of one hundred. Adjudicating *anything* in those circumstances
would be recognised by all involved as a great advance.


subject: Ant: [Wikipedia-l] Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia - a policy question?

body:
Well, Elephantus apparently hasn't been monitoring the growth of the
Serbocroatian WP.

The top contributors recently are:

OC Ripper,
Dejvid,
Myself,
Pokrajac,
Belirac,
anonymous user.

Now, of all these people, the ONLY ONE who is not a native speaker is ME.

Now, if anybody wants to accuse me of spelling and grammatical errors,
there are a number of other people they should blame first: 1) The
people who wrote the original article, since I have only been copying
articles from other Wikipedias; 2) The people who wrote the Serbian,
Croatian, and Bosnian spellcheckers for MS Word since I often use them
to make sure the source-article has no glaring errors.

Now, perhaps you're referring to the fact that the majority of the
articles I copy are using Ekavski, which is not used in Croatia. Well,
as a form of Serbocroatian, it would hardly be considered incorrect.
To be fair, some of the articles I make use Ijekavski, and a couple
dozen use a mix of the two. Terms which are obviously split between
Serbia and Croatia, like Spanija/Spanjolska (spain), or
Jevreju/Hebreju (jewish person), I try to be careful with as well.

As regards your wish to lock the Serbocroatian WP:

According to you, Serbocroatian was an artificial political construct.
That is true to a certain extent, but it is undeniable that Stokavian
dialects of Croatian, and all dialects of Bosnian and Serbian are all
over 99% mutually intelligible when spoken, but especially when
written.

These are the only "languages" for which that is the case, with the
exception of Moldovan and Romanian, and Dari and Farsi (The Moldovan
WP redirects users wanting content in Latin alphabet to the Romanian
WP, the Farsi WP includes Dari as well).

I recall something about a Croatian law requiring all Serbian movies
to be subtitled (or vice-versa?). Rather than reacting with
nationalistic pride when seeing these subtitles for a language that is
basically identical to their own, moviegoers generally laughed at the
attempts of "translation".

Now, if the majority of Croatian WPdians do not want a united
Wikipedia, that's fine. I think it should be everybody's choice. If
you want to work at the Croatian WP and keep pretending that your
language is somehow extremely differentiated from Serbian and Bosnian
(and the emerging Montenegrin), I have no problem with that, although
I think it is counter-constructive.

Already, there are Croatians at the SH.wiki, I think...

Now, perhaps a good example is Macedonian.

Although Macedonian (FYROM, that is, just so we don't offend any
Greeks) is very similar to Serbo-Croatian, and it would take little
effort to make a unified language, since Macedonian is a bit further
from Serbocroatian, I don't hold a hope of Macedonian WP being united
to Serbocroatian WP.

With Croatian, it seems that people try hard to make it a different
language from Serbian, but it isn't really except in a sociolinguistic
sense (and even then, not all Croatians perpetuate the idea of a
separate Croatian language). Macedonian, on the other hand, has truly
different words and spellings, rather than artificial divisions
created by linguists for political purposes.

Mark

On 09/10/05, Arbeo M <arbeo_m at yahoo.de> wrote:
> Hi Elephantus!
>
> Let me just try to answer a few of your points here:
>
> > The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia was reopened in June
> > after a request from a single user of the Serbian
> > Wikipedia -
> >
> [[sr:User:Покрајац|Pokrajac]].
> > This was
> > not announced beforehand in any way on the three
> > Wikipedias that
> > are most affected by this issue ? Serbian,
> > Croatian and Bosnian, there was no public discussion
> > or
> > a vote. The idea was supported here by people
> > who weren't part of the growing communities of the
> > three Wikipedias.
>
> Generally speaking, only opening all-new Wikipedias
> requires public discussion, prior announcement, voting
> or the like. Reopening a previously locked wiki is not
> a comparable process. Locking a wiki is only a
> temporary measure because of some specific reason, e.
> g. vandalism and it can be upheld only as long as that
> reason persists to exist. SH had been locked because
> of inactivity. As soon as there were people willing to
> edit it there was no alternative but to unlock it.
>
> > The "phenomenal growth" (1,019 articles) of the
> > Serbo-Croatian
> > is mostly a result of people (some of them with
> > little or no
> > knowledge of the three languages)
> > copy-pasting articles from Serbian (converting those
> > to Latin
> > alphabet), Croatian or Bosnian Wikipedias.
>
> I wasn't aware that most of the editing at SH is done
> by non-native speakers. Hmm ... you have any idea were
> they come from? But there is one fact that one must
> admit: the Wikipedia is active now, no matter where
> that activity comes from.
>
> > My question is this: Why aren't Serbian, Bosnian and
> > Croatian
> > Wikipedias provided the same treatment as e.g.
> > Danish and
> > Bokmal (Norwegian) which are also mutually
> > intelligible
> > in the written form? There is no common Dano-Bokmal
> > Wikipedia with well-wishing but mostly misguided
> > non-native-
> > speakers copying articles to it.
> >
> Well, this type of comparison is always a little bold.
> But I'm getting your point. I guess the main reason is
> because a "Dano-Bokmal" WP was never requested by
> anyone. Interestingly though, there seems to be some
> kind of common Scandinavian project going on.
>
> > Serbo-Croatian has been dead as a political
> > collection of
> > standard languages for 15 years now (30 years in
> > Croatia),
> > it is slowly disappearing, except as a historical
> > footnote
>
> I must admit I'm not competent to evaluate the current
> situation of Serbo-Croatian and it's future is even
> harder to predict. All I can see is that there seems
> to be some kind of interest in it here at WP
> (actually, even more than in 130 other languages).
>
> > I'd like to propose a relocking of this Wikipedia
>
> I am well aware that the whole situation is not
> perfectly ideal yet. But all things considered, I
> think the current solution is a fairly just and
> neutral one. There is a minority that wishes to write
> in Serbo-Croatian. Even if you don't like their
> standpoint, why exclude them? "Live and let live!"
>
> > or at least a
> > name change (Serbian - Latin, as a temporary bridge
> > to
> > the Latin conversion system now being tested for the
> > Serbian Wikipedia).
>
> As a total outsider I could imagine that naming it
> "Serbian-Latin" would not really be helpful because
> that name makes reference to one nation and one
> ethnicity exclusively. "Yugoslav(ian)" has just
> crossed my mind - would that be an option?
>
> Best regards,
>
> Arbeo
>
> P.S.: My congratulations for your 10,000th article at hr!
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________________________________
> Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - Jetzt mit 1GB Speicher kostenlos - Hier anmelden: http://mail.yahoo.de
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE


body:
Ahh, and I'd like to add a little bit of advice for Elephantus:

Rather than letting politics blind you, why not try to look at things
from the point of view of "What will be best for the Wikipedia in my
language?". I think that the answer to this, is a merger of these 3
Wikipedias, because it will result in a much larger workforce and much
more power and capability.

Currently, Croatian WP has just over 10000 articles, Serbian WP has
just over 14000 articles, and Bosnian WP has almost 5000 articles.
Now, imagine, if all people from all 3 Wikipedias had been working
together from the start, maybe we'd have 30000 articles in a unified
Serbocroatian WP already.

Mark

On 09/10/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, Elephantus apparently hasn't been monitoring the growth of the
> Serbocroatian WP.
>
> The top contributors recently are:
>
> OC Ripper,
> Dejvid,
> Myself,
> Pokrajac,
> Belirac,
> anonymous user.
>
> Now, of all these people, the ONLY ONE who is not a native speaker is ME.
>
> Now, if anybody wants to accuse me of spelling and grammatical errors,
> there are a number of other people they should blame first: 1) The
> people who wrote the original article, since I have only been copying
> articles from other Wikipedias; 2) The people who wrote the Serbian,
> Croatian, and Bosnian spellcheckers for MS Word since I often use them
> to make sure the source-article has no glaring errors.
>
> Now, perhaps you're referring to the fact that the majority of the
> articles I copy are using Ekavski, which is not used in Croatia. Well,
> as a form of Serbocroatian, it would hardly be considered incorrect.
> To be fair, some of the articles I make use Ijekavski, and a couple
> dozen use a mix of the two. Terms which are obviously split between
> Serbia and Croatia, like Spanija/Spanjolska (spain), or
> Jevreju/Hebreju (jewish person), I try to be careful with as well.
>
> As regards your wish to lock the Serbocroatian WP:
>
> According to you, Serbocroatian was an artificial political construct.
> That is true to a certain extent, but it is undeniable that Stokavian
> dialects of Croatian, and all dialects of Bosnian and Serbian are all
> over 99% mutually intelligible when spoken, but especially when
> written.
>
> These are the only "languages" for which that is the case, with the
> exception of Moldovan and Romanian, and Dari and Farsi (The Moldovan
> WP redirects users wanting content in Latin alphabet to the Romanian
> WP, the Farsi WP includes Dari as well).
>
> I recall something about a Croatian law requiring all Serbian movies
> to be subtitled (or vice-versa?). Rather than reacting with
> nationalistic pride when seeing these subtitles for a language that is
> basically identical to their own, moviegoers generally laughed at the
> attempts of "translation".
>
> Now, if the majority of Croatian WPdians do not want a united
> Wikipedia, that's fine. I think it should be everybody's choice. If
> you want to work at the Croatian WP and keep pretending that your
> language is somehow extremely differentiated from Serbian and Bosnian
> (and the emerging Montenegrin), I have no problem with that, although
> I think it is counter-constructive.
>
> Already, there are Croatians at the SH.wiki, I think...
>
> Now, perhaps a good example is Macedonian.
>
> Although Macedonian (FYROM, that is, just so we don't offend any
> Greeks) is very similar to Serbo-Croatian, and it would take little
> effort to make a unified language, since Macedonian is a bit further
> from Serbocroatian, I don't hold a hope of Macedonian WP being united
> to Serbocroatian WP.
>
> With Croatian, it seems that people try hard to make it a different
> language from Serbian, but it isn't really except in a sociolinguistic
> sense (and even then, not all Croatians perpetuate the idea of a
> separate Croatian language). Macedonian, on the other hand, has truly
> different words and spellings, rather than artificial divisions
> created by linguists for political purposes.
>
> Mark
>
> On 09/10/05, Arbeo M <arbeo_m at yahoo.de> wrote:
> > Hi Elephantus!
> >
> > Let me just try to answer a few of your points here:
> >
> > > The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia was reopened in June
> > > after a request from a single user of the Serbian
> > > Wikipedia -
> > >
> > [[sr:User:Покрајац|Pokrajac]].
> > > This was
> > > not announced beforehand in any way on the three
> > > Wikipedias that
> > > are most affected by this issue ? Serbian,
> > > Croatian and Bosnian, there was no public discussion
> > > or
> > > a vote. The idea was supported here by people
> > > who weren't part of the growing communities of the
> > > three Wikipedias.
> >
> > Generally speaking, only opening all-new Wikipedias
> > requires public discussion, prior announcement, voting
> > or the like. Reopening a previously locked wiki is not
> > a comparable process. Locking a wiki is only a
> > temporary measure because of some specific reason, e.
> > g. vandalism and it can be upheld only as long as that
> > reason persists to exist. SH had been locked because
> > of inactivity. As soon as there were people willing to
> > edit it there was no alternative but to unlock it.
> >
> > > The "phenomenal growth" (1,019 articles) of the
> > > Serbo-Croatian
> > > is mostly a result of people (some of them with
> > > little or no
> > > knowledge of the three languages)
> > > copy-pasting articles from Serbian (converting those
> > > to Latin
> > > alphabet), Croatian or Bosnian Wikipedias.
> >
> > I wasn't aware that most of the editing at SH is done
> > by non-native speakers. Hmm ... you have any idea were
> > they come from? But there is one fact that one must
> > admit: the Wikipedia is active now, no matter where
> > that activity comes from.
> >
> > > My question is this: Why aren't Serbian, Bosnian and
> > > Croatian
> > > Wikipedias provided the same treatment as e.g.
> > > Danish and
> > > Bokmal (Norwegian) which are also mutually
> > > intelligible
> > > in the written form? There is no common Dano-Bokmal
> > > Wikipedia with well-wishing but mostly misguided
> > > non-native-
> > > speakers copying articles to it.
> > >
> > Well, this type of comparison is always a little bold.
> > But I'm getting your point. I guess the main reason is
> > because a "Dano-Bokmal" WP was never requested by
> > anyone. Interestingly though, there seems to be some
> > kind of common Scandinavian project going on.
> >
> > > Serbo-Croatian has been dead as a political
> > > collection of
> > > standard languages for 15 years now (30 years in
> > > Croatia),
> > > it is slowly disappearing, except as a historical
> > > footnote
> >
> > I must admit I'm not competent to evaluate the current
> > situation of Serbo-Croatian and it's future is even
> > harder to predict. All I can see is that there seems
> > to be some kind of interest in it here at WP
> > (actually, even more than in 130 other languages).
> >
> > > I'd like to propose a relocking of this Wikipedia
> >
> > I am well aware that the whole situation is not
> > perfectly ideal yet. But all things considered, I
> > think the current solution is a fairly just and
> > neutral one. There is a minority that wishes to write
> > in Serbo-Croatian. Even if you don't like their
> > standpoint, why exclude them? "Live and let live!"
> >
> > > or at least a
> > > name change (Serbian - Latin, as a temporary bridge
> > > to
> > > the Latin conversion system now being tested for the
> > > Serbian Wikipedia).
> >
> > As a total outsider I could imagine that naming it
> > "Serbian-Latin" would not really be helpful because
> > that name makes reference to one nation and one
> > ethnicity exclusively. "Yugoslav(ian)" has just
> > crossed my mind - would that be an option?
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > Arbeo
> >
> > P.S.: My congratulations for your 10,000th article at hr!
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ___________________________________________________________
> > Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - Jetzt mit 1GB Speicher kostenlos - Hier anmelden: http://mail.yahoo.de
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> --
> SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
> QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
> POSSIT MATERIARI
> ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE
>

--
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE