from_name: Manning Bartlett

body:
Re the recent (and excellent) efforts being made to apply consistency for naming conventions, I would like to throw a mild spanner in.

How come cities in the USA are identified simply by [[City, State]] and not [[City, State, USA]]? There would seem to be a presupposition that *everyone* will recognise US state names.

Admittedly you'd be hard pressed to find someone who hasn't heard of California. However a lot of people might not have heard of Iowa, Missouri, New Hampshire, Montana, or Louisiana, or would not know that New York, Mississippi and Washington are also states, or that New Mexico is actually in the USA.

I did a quick survey of people in my office (all of whom can be regarded as quite highly educated), and in each case I managed to find a US State they had never heard of or were confused about. By means of comparison, those US editors might try and name the 6 states of Australia, or the 9 provinces of South Africa, or the I-don't-know-how-many Provinces of Canada (with due apologies to my Canadian colleagues). And that is only considering the English-speaking world...

Manning
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikiproject

body:
Tarquin et al

I've noticed a excellent trend towards achieving consistency lately. The WikiProject was an attempt to instill some consistency back in the days when achieving that was (software-wise) far more difficult. As you pointed out it did not adequately include naming conventions.

I think a namespace for such things would be beneficial. I actually don't care what the namespace, as long as it is easy to use. A "Wikiproject" namespace has a few arguments for it - it's obviously NOT an article topic (unlike "conventions" or similar). Also a lot of work has already been done using this name so changing it would take some editing.

Manning

  _--__--

  Message: 5
  Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 16:42:06 +0100
  From: tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com>
  To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
  Subject: [Wikipedia-l] hello list; WikiProject
  Reply-To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com

  hello all.
  I'd like to volunteer for the moving of WikiProject & associated pages
  over to Wikipedia: namespace.
  before I do, though, could I ask for thoughts on a different name?
  I suggest something like "presentation schemes", to stand alongside
  "naming conventions"
  alternatively, should "naming conventions" be absorbed into
  WikiProjects? the original proposal is about naming schemes as well as
  consistent content presentation.

  Another question: is there a main page of some sort for the Wikipedia:
  namespace? Should there be?

  tarquin

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] WikiAlmanac

body:
We all know that originally the Wikipedia was "definitely an encyclopaedia" and "definitely NOT a dictionary".

However, the domain of the "Almanac" was never adequately integrated or rejected. Maveric et al have been formatting the wide variety of lists that are out there, but I can see the need for an "WikiAlmanac" namespace (or whatever) as well. Most encyclopaedias also offer an Almanac section (under a variety of alternate terms such as "Fact Book" etc)

I can think of a hundred things off the top of my head that would be useful - largest islands, countries by population density, presidents of US, Nigeria, etc PMs of UK, Australia, Academy Award/Nobel Prize/Pulitzer Prize/Booker Prize/Hugo Award/etc winners, longest rivers, etc etc etc. There is already a vast amount of stuff in the PEdia already, and I think it is time to start getting it all truly organised.

Manning
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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikitech-l] Suggested mechanism for math formulas and other on-the-fly graphics

body:
I thought I'd bring up this idea again since it might be easy to
implement with the new codebase.

If you put text such as [$\int_{x=0}^\infty x^2 dx$] in Wiki, upon
saving the article, TeX will be called and translate the formula into
an image, and store the image on the server and its name in a database
indexed with the formula text. When the Wiki page is presented, the
image is inlined (and an alt attribute containg the formula text
added). When the page is later edited and saved again, the system
first checks whether an up-to-date image of the formula already
exists; if not, TeX is called to regenerate it.

This would make mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists and
chemists happy. TeX includes a package for typesetting chemical
structure formulas and another one for quite general labeled diagrams
and trees. There's also a TeX package which allows to typeset musical
notes and another one for chess positions.

The concept could be expanded to other programs which can produce
graphics on-the-fly based on a textual description. This includes
gnuplot (graphs of functions) and maybe packages such as GD,
imagemagick or even GIMP.

Axel


from_name: Steve Callaway

body:
One small problem here. What if there are two discrete entries (I'm
struggling for an example here), one spelling of which has no diacritics and
an equivalent spelling of  the "same" word (yet with a diacritic) and a
wholly different meaning?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at nupedia.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 20, 2002 2:15 AM
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Proposed addition to wikipedia: Naming
conventions

On Wednesday 19 June 2002 12:01 pm, Lee wrote:
> > If a name has diacritics, for instance [[Jose Ramos-Horta|Jos?
> > Ramos-Horta]], avoid the diacritics when naming an article. If a
> > link has a diacritic, what page it links to depends on the
> > character set the browser is set to. A UTF-8 browser goes to what
> > looks to a Latin-1 browser as "Jos&itrema;&iques;&1/2; Ramos-
> > Horta", whereas a Latin-1 browser goes to an article whose title
> > has an invalid UTF-8 character.
>
> I think our general consensus is that there should be an article
> titled without diacritics, or otherwise Anglicized ("Goedel",
> for example), and that this article should be a redirect to an
> article with the real title, diacritics and all.

This would work in a perfect world in which the person making the
diacriticaly named article also made an ASCII redirect it, Lee. But
unfortunately this often isn't the case. Even worse is the fact that most
netcitizens don't know how to use their keyboard to make diacritics --
meaning most people searching Google won't use them and that linking
directly
to these articles is unnecessarily difficult.

However, I proposed a similar anti-diacritics query on [[talk:naming
conventions]] some time ago but soon began to realize that this is a
technical issue that can be solved by the wikiware gurus. All that is needed
is for the software to
treat the diacritic form and the ASCII equivalent the same. For example; ?
and e could be treated as the same character for searches and for linking
(the Google issue might pose a problem though....).  That way when somebody
searches for [[Jos? Ramos-Horta]] by entering in Jose Ramos-Horta in the
wikipedia search engine they won't come up empty handed if nobody made an
ASCII redirect to the diacritic name.

Is this possible? Desirable? Or should we go with the original
anti-diacritics naming convention suggestion?

maveric149
[Wikipedia-l]
To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Thu, Jun 20, 2002 at 06:44:18AM +0200, Axel Boldt wrote:
> I thought I'd bring up this idea again since it might be easy to
> implement with the new codebase.
>
> If you put text such as [$\int_{x=0}^\infty x^2 dx$] in Wiki, upon
> saving the article, TeX will be called and translate the formula into
> an image, and store the image on the server and its name in a database
> indexed with the formula text. When the Wiki page is presented, the
> image is inlined (and an alt attribute containg the formula text
> added). When the page is later edited and saved again, the system
> first checks whether an up-to-date image of the formula already
> exists; if not, TeX is called to regenerate it.
>
> This would make mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists and
> chemists happy. TeX includes a package for typesetting chemical
> structure formulas and another one for quite general labeled diagrams
> and trees. There's also a TeX package which allows to typeset musical
> notes and another one for chess positions.
>
> The concept could be expanded to other programs which can produce
> graphics on-the-fly based on a textual description. This includes
> gnuplot (graphs of functions) and maybe packages such as GD,
> imagemagick or even GIMP.

Idea is good, but there should be some option to chose what size do
you want.


body:
I agree. The corollary of this, therefore, is that everything should (in the
fullness of time) be wholly disambiguated.

----- Original Message -----
From: <lcrocker at nupedia.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at nupedia.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 20, 2002 9:36 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Proposed addition to wikipedia: Naming
conventions

> > One small problem here. What if there are two discrete entries
> > (I'm struggling for an example here), one spelling of which has
> > no diacritics and an equivalent spelling of  the "same" word
> > (yet with a diacritic) and a wholly different meaning?
>
> That's no different from any other disambiguation job.
>
>
> 0


from_name: Jason Richey

in_reply_to: <200206200444.GAA27225@linde.uni-paderborn.de>; from axel@uni-paderborn.de on Thu, Jun 20, 2002 at 06:44:18AM +0200

body:
Doesn't this leave us open to potential malice?  I don't know very
much about TeX, but it is my understanding that by blindly executing
TeX when someone edits a page, we are assuming that they haven't
included any malicious code in their TeX source.

Am I way off base here?

Jason

Axel Boldt wrote:

> I thought I'd bring up this idea again since it might be easy to
> implement with the new codebase.
>
> If you put text such as [$\int_{x=0}^\infty x^2 dx$] in Wiki, upon
> saving the article, TeX will be called and translate the formula into
> an image, and store the image on the server and its name in a database
> indexed with the formula text. When the Wiki page is presented, the
> image is inlined (and an alt attribute containg the formula text
> added). When the page is later edited and saved again, the system
> first checks whether an up-to-date image of the formula already
> exists; if not, TeX is called to regenerate it.
>
> This would make mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists and
> chemists happy. TeX includes a package for typesetting chemical
> structure formulas and another one for quite general labeled diagrams
> and trees. There's also a TeX package which allows to typeset musical
> notes and another one for chess positions.
>
> The concept could be expanded to other programs which can produce
> graphics on-the-fly based on a textual description. This includes
> gnuplot (graphs of functions) and maybe packages such as GD,
> imagemagick or even GIMP.
>
> Axel
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at ross.bomis.com
> http://ross.bomis.com/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] RE:  naming conventions for cities

body:
Magnus wrote:
>For the naming conventions of cities, IMHO the
>important thing is that the different articles can be

>told apart ("Paris, Texas"). That Texas is in
>the US can be mentioned within the article.

I could not agree more. The whole idea of
disambiguation was to differentiate two
articles that would otherwise have the exact same name
and not to immediately give the average person
a geography lesson ? this is information overload just
for a page title. Geographical and important political
information can, and should be stated in the first
line of the article.  Technical matters such as ease
of linking and true disambiguation trump any overly
hierarchical naming scheme. Besides, there are already
hundreds of cities in wikipedia and probably thousands
of links to them and if you really wanted to give a
geography lesson you would probably want to list
section of continent too.

Our naming conventions state that names should be
chosen that have a reasonable minimum of
ambiguity. Therefore simply go up only to the level of
detail needed to differentiate one item from another
in preferably natural and mostly consistent manner
(consistancy within a particular country is
highly desirable).

For example: Americans are notorious for reusing the
same darn name for cities in several to a dozen
different states. Therefore, for the United States
[[city, state]] is fine. Most other countries don?t
have such rampant reuse of city names, so  [[city,
country]] is fine unless there is a naming conflict
(or a noted exception: see below). Australia is a
matter to consider and could also be organized as
[[city, state]] ? but only if the reuse of city names
is as bad a problem there as it is in the US states
(this goes for any other country as well).

Paris, Rome and a few dozen other cities are noted
exceptions ? although we may eventually simply just
give these cities redirect priority so that  [[Paris]]
redirects to [[Paris, France]] and the article
actually lives at [[Paris, France]] for nothing more
than consistency ? but that would require some
tweaking of the software to make the existence of
redirects more obvious.

In short: KISS and follow the general trend already
establish by many other articles. With so many city
articles already in existence, it?s too late in the
game to start such a (re)naming rule ? It might have
worked if it was started a year ago.

maveric149

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup
http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] New server, software

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from_name: Brion L. VIBBER

subject: [Wikitech-l] New server, software

body:
On ?a?, 2002-06-20 at 15:18, The Cunctator wrote:
> With this update, will it be possible to incorporate the original version's
> history (the perl version) into the article record?

Oh, that's been ready to go on the current software since, let's see...
March 21.

Make sure paths are correct in convertWiki2SQL.php, then:

  php convertWiki2SQL.php --history

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Upload page

body:
Could someone put on the upload page a note that this is not a file-sharing
system or a file storage area? I think people look for "upload files", find
our upload page, and upload things without realizing that this is an
encyclopedia.

phma


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikitech-l] New server, software

body:
On 6/20/02 6:19 PM, "lcrocker at nupedia.com" <lcrocker at nupedia.com> wrote:

> I originally thought the new server would be up long before the new
> software was ready, but it didn't work out that way.  Jim's moving
> and other things has let the server sit idle, and the new codebase is
> just a few hours away from completion.
>
With this update, will it be possible to incorporate the original version's
history (the perl version) into the article record?


subject: [Wikitech-l] New server, software

body:
On ?a?, 2002-06-20 at 16:47, The Cunctator wrote:
> > On j?au?, 2002-06-20 at 15:18, The Cunctator wrote:
> >> With this update, will it be possible to incorporate the original version's
> >> history (the perl version) into the article record?
> >
> > Oh, that's been ready to go on the current software since, let's see...
> > March 21.
> >
> > Make sure paths are correct in convertWiki2SQL.php, then:
> >
> > php convertWiki2SQL.php --history
> >
> Okay, I'll ask the dumb followup...can we do that? Is that a Jimbo-only
> ability?

It's a Jimbo-or-Jason ability on the current server. On the new server,
I believe we (or at least Lee) have enough access to do that, assuming
the data files are accessible. (Which I don't know is the case.)

Of course, it would have to be done before converting the database to
the new new format, or else the script needs some more updating.

(By the way, my 'net access is going to be limited or nil until Tuesday,
so if you need more info get it out of me fast. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] New server, software

body:
On 6/20/02 7:30 PM, "Brion L. VIBBER" <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

> On j?au?, 2002-06-20 at 15:18, The Cunctator wrote:
>> With this update, will it be possible to incorporate the original version's
>> history (the perl version) into the article record?
>
> Oh, that's been ready to go on the current software since, let's see...
> March 21.
>
> Make sure paths are correct in convertWiki2SQL.php, then:
>
> php convertWiki2SQL.php --history
>
Okay, I'll ask the dumb followup...can we do that? Is that a Jimbo-only
ability?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Gimp question

body:
On ?a?, 2002-06-20 at 17:20, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> I'll probably be finished before anyone answers, but for future reference:
>
> I downloaded the stick drawing of all amino acids and am cutting them apart.
> It is a PNG with one color set to transparent, which shows as dark gray
> checkers, which makes the writing, which is mostly black, hard to read. The
> acid group is well-nigh impossible to read. Is there a way to change the
> checkers to something lighter? I found a button at the lower left, which
> changes them to red checkers, but that's no better.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Gimp question

body:
I'll probably be finished before anyone answers, but for future reference:

I downloaded the stick drawing of all amino acids and am cutting them apart.
It is a PNG with one color set to transparent, which shows as dark gray
checkers, which makes the writing, which is mostly black, hard to read. The
acid group is well-nigh impossible to read. Is there a way to change the
checkers to something lighter? I found a button at the lower left, which
changes them to red checkers, but that's no better.

phma


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Gimp question

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from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: WikiProject

body:
At 11:52 PM 6/20/02 +0100, tarquin wrote:
>As I said on Talk:WikiProject, it seems to me that we currently have 4
>rough meta- areas which overlap somewhat:
>* naming conventions
>* WikiProjects: presentation guidelines for types
>* basic topic pages, eg "[[Music basic topics]]"

I guess this is as good a conversational opening as any. :)

For the past little while, I've been working on the
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Complete_list_of_encyclopedia_topics
pages. I laboriously removed all of the links to existing articles, and
uncovered about 400 pages that had been orphaned except for the link from
here. Since then, though, the common opinion seems to be that even after
all that these pages are still more trouble than they're worth, filled with
bad article titles and such.

So now I'd like to delete them, and I've been broaching the subject all
over the place in order to make sure nobody's got a problem with that.
These pages probably took a lot of work to make, so I don't want to dispose
of them if anyone can think of anything remotely useful to use them for.

The mailing list is probably the last place I'll mention it, though. If
nobody wants to do anything with these pages after this I'll finally get
around to deleting them.

--
"Let there be light." - Last words of Bomb #20, "Dark Star"


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Gimp question

body:
On Thursday 20 June 2002 22:54, Brion L. VIBBER wrote:
> From the menu on the tool palette/main window select File/Preferences...
> Select "Display" from list of Categories; then for "Transparency Type:"
> select "Light Checks" or "White only" or whatever you fancy.

Thanks. I'm up to 12.

phma


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: WikiProject

body:
Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>On Wednesday 19 June 2002 12:01 pm, tarquin wrote:
>
>
>>alternatively, should "naming conventions" be absorbed into
>>WikiProjects? the original proposal is about naming schemes as well as
>>consistent content presentation.
>>
>>
>
>No I don't think this would be desirable. [[Wikipedia:naming conventions]] is
>(more or less at least) a policy article and the WikiProject idea has never
>been much more than a way for wikipedians to collaborate on a certain set of
>related articles (which hasn't been used much BTW). Only part of what is
>determined in a WikiProject is what to name articles -- but those names also
>should conform to standard(ish) naming conventions.
>
>In other words the WikiProject is really more informal and only enforceable
>through bold editing and peer pressure while naming conventions are more or
>less part of policy and are enforced in this light.  Of course in a wiki the
>line between the two types of enforcement is blurred -- but a distinction
>should still be made.
>
I agree that presentation templates shouldn't be enforced on new and
casual writers; partly they're too much to take on, they make newcomers
feel constricted; also because (unlike page naming), it's very easy to
tidy up articles later.
However, they're of interest to more than the group that chooses to work
on a specific project: the many players of WikiRoulette aka Random
Weeding, for instance.

As I said on Talk:WikiProject, it seems to me that we currently have 4
rough meta- areas which overlap somewhat:
* naming conventions
* WikiProjects: presentation guidelines for types
* basic topic pages, eg "[[Music basic topics]]"
* WikiProjects: gathering wikipedians to work on a subject area

ManningBartlett's OO-style hierarchy of pages is clean and neat, and I
think it could be used for naming and style conventions. Whether that's
by seperating presentation guidelines from WikiProjects or somehow
integrating it all together, I don't know. We don't want to make
newcomers feel they're being herded, but when they want to look things
up to ensure they're being as constructive as possible, the information
should be clear and easy to find.

tarquin


from_name: Joao Mário Miranda

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Google is indexing edit pages

body:
Google is indexing edit pages. See:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&q=morley+experiment+wikipedia

Joao
http://www.nonio.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Gimp question

body:
On Friday 21 June 2002 00:50, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> I often just add a layer filled with whatever color is useful
> right underneath the transparent layer, then delete that layer
> before saving.

I thought of that, but I'd have had to delete it 20 times :(

phma


body:
> by blindly executing TeX when someone edits a page, we are assuming
> that they haven't included any malicious code in their TeX source.

TeX has two dangerous commands: shell escapes and writing to an
arbitrary file. Both can be globally disabled (and are disabled by
default in most TeX distributions). It is fairly easy however to write
TeX which eats memory like crazy (TeX allows recursion :-), so we
would have to somehow restrict the resources available to the TeX
process. But we are of course right now already wide open to all sorts
of denial-of-service attacks.

Axel


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] New server, software

in_reply_to: <200206202219.g5KMJC505532@ross.bomis.com>; from lcrocker@nupedia.com on Thu, Jun 20, 2002 at 03:19:12PM -0700

body:
lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> This gives us an opportunity, and I'd like to suggest a course of
> action here and see what the group thinks (especially Jimbo if he's
> reading, and Jason).

I'm reading.  I'm here at my new residence, but all packed in boxes.  And
I'm reading on a slow modem.  I'll be back to full speed on Monday.

> days myself, but the only way to get good testing is the foist it
> upon the Wikipedia community at large.

I'm afraid you're right.  But the last time we did this to them, they
quite rightfully freaked and wanted to know why we didn't test more.
This is a dilemma, there is no good answer.

One thing we should do is make sure that the new software is a look and feel
clone of what we have now, minus a few bugs.  Ordinary active users who aren't
paying attention to technical stuff should hopefully not even realize what we've
done to them.

> If the transition fails immediately, we just abandon it and go back
> to the old server, and try again later.  If it succeeds initially,
> but after a few days we dicover something drastically wrong, we can
> still go back to the old server, updating the database with the
> changes of those few days (for which I have prepared a script).  If
> everything goes well, then after a week or two Bomis can recycle the
> old server and we're upand running.
>
> Jimbo, Jason, I also went ahead and installed MySQL/PHP/Apache on the
> new server from source (after testing all of them on my server first--
> and yes, that includes this week's Apache security fix).  My notes on
> exactly what I did are in /home/lee/src/README on the server, and the
> sources are in /usr/local/src.  Please review the installation and
> see if it's what you had in mind, or let me know what differences you
> envision.  I would also like your feedback on any details of the wiki
> software installation you have in mind (directories, etc.)

Excellent.  I'll probably make some symlinks to suit my own personal idiosyncracies,
such as /apache and /home/wiki/work-http/, etc., if you've done it differently.  I
won't ever *code* those, though, so they shouldn't affect anyone else.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Karen AKA Kajikit

in_reply_to: <20020615014603.BYON11426.rwcrmhc51.attbi.com@there>; from maveric149@yahoo.com on Fri, Jun 14, 2002 at 06:38:31PM -0700

body:
This is good!  I did not know that sysops could make other people sysops,
but this is as it should be.

Anything that removes any single person (especially me!) as a bottleneck is
almost certainly a good thing.

Daniel Mayer wrote:

> On Friday 14 June 2002 12:01 pm, Karen wrote:
> > I promise to use my powers only for good :)
> >
> > Seriously, Maveric said I should ask because it would make doing
> > maintenance easier. I've been trying to make a start on unshuffling the
> > 'country' entries from /s to proper titles but it takes forever and a
> > day!
>
> I forgot to tell Karen to also list her user name and/or user id - mea culpa.
> I went ahead and editted her status to make her a sysop so she could get to
> work. I'm sure Jimbo would have already done so himself if he knew her user
> name (which is [[user:Karen Johnson]], BTW).
>
> Hope this doesn't get me in trouble :)
>
> maveric149
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The case against "invariant sections"

in_reply_to: <200206151627.SAA29945@linde.uni-paderborn.de>; from axel@uni-paderborn.de on Sat, Jun 15, 2002 at 06:27:31PM +0200

body:
To shock the community:  I agree with this.  I am inclined to remove the invariant sections
requirement.

Are there licensing difficulties with so doing?

Axel Boldt wrote:

> Currently, we require an "invariant section", which means that anybody
> has to put a specifically formatted HTML table on every page that
> uses Wikipedia materials, asking people to contribute to Wikipedia.
> (See below (*) for the rather messy details.)
>
> Here, I want to argue that we should abandon this invariant section.
>
> The FOLDOC computing dictionary has been licenced to us under GFDL
> without invariant sections. We have incorporated many articles from
> them. Two weeks ago, somebody asked me whether the material from our
> TeX article (http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/TeX), which was originally
> based on FOLDOC's but has since grown considerably, could be
> reintegrated into FOLDOC. The answer is: only if they put our
> Wikipedia table into the FOLDOC entry, which they are unlikely to do
> because it doesn't really fit with their article formatting.
>
> There is a new, exciting and fast growing math encyclopedia at
> http://planetmath.org; everything is licensed under GFDL without
> invariant sections, and can therefore be used by us without problems
> (while acknowledging the source, as we do for FOLDOC articles). I
> haven't copied anything over yet, but I'm sure I will in the future.
> People have asked me whether they could take Wikipedia materials and
> post them on PlanetMath. For articles that I have written exclusively
> myself, and there aren't many, this is no problem. For others, the
> Wikipedia invariant table is required, which pretty much excludes them
> because of the site's particular layout.
>
> These are two examples of the fledgling open content movement that's
> growing right now. We are currently the clear leader of this movement,
> but we are not playing very nicely. If everybody required their own
> invariant sections, cooperation and exchange would become almost
> impossible. I believe that this movement is ultimately even more
> important than Wikipedia. We should do everything to foster it, if
> only out of self-interest.
>
> Even without an invariant section, the GFDL requires proper
> attribution of all materials. Rather than fretting over the possible
> evil schemes of big bad corporations, why not apply wiki principles:
> trust that people are basically good, and that the more freedoms you
> give them, the better the outcomes will be.
>
> Axel
>
> ----
> (*) The invariant section requirement is alluded to in
> http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/GNU+Free+Documentation+License, but no
> link is given. http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/wikipedia:copyright
> contains a "draft" which explicitly disputes an invariant section. The
> invariant section requirement used to be contained in the uneditable
> file http://www.wikipedia.com/license/fdl.html but that has ceased to
> exist after the software change. It can still be viewed at
> http://web.archive.org/web/20011112090138/http://www.wikipedia.com/license/fdl.html.
> The invariant sections, or "linkbacks" have been defended by Jimbo and
> Larry in several Wikipedia-l messages in October 2001:
> http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2001-October/date.html
>
>
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: The case against "invariant sections"

in_reply_to: <200206190427.GAA21254@linde.uni-paderborn.de>; from axel@uni-paderborn.de on Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 06:27:47AM +0200

body:
I approve.  However, I'd like to point out that I regard this type of
thing as part of my domain as benevolent dictator.  That is, the
invariant section policy of the wikipedia collection is something that
I think I have the authority to decide, rather than being something
that's open to any wikipedian to change at will.

As always, of course, I prefer to follow the community consensus, which
this is.  But, really, these kinds of meta-policy decisions need to be made
in a fiarly formal way.

Axel Boldt wrote:

> Since I am hearing several voices saying "invariant sections bad,
> linkbacks good" and no forceful opposition, I will go ahead and edit
> [[Wikipedia:copyrights]] and [[GFDL]] accordingly.
>
> If anything I write is disagreeable, let me know either on this list
> or in Talk:.
>
> Axel
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Robert Graham Merkel

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: City, state convention for Australian cities

body:
On Fri, 21 Jun 2002 04:43:57 Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Magnus wrote:
> >For the naming conventions of cities, IMHO the
> >important thing is that the different articles can be
>
> >told apart ("Paris, Texas"). That Texas is in
> >the US can be mentioned within the article.
>
> I could not agree more. The whole idea of
> disambiguation was to differentiate two
> articles that would otherwise have the exact same name
> and not to immediately give the average person
> a geography lesson ? this is information overload just
> for a page title. Geographical and important political
> information can, and should be stated in the first
> line of the article.  Technical matters such as ease
> of linking and true disambiguation trump any overly
> hierarchical naming scheme. Besides, there are already
> hundreds of cities in wikipedia and probably thousands
> of links to them and if you really wanted to give a
> geography lesson you would probably want to list
> section of continent too.
>
> Our naming conventions state that names should be
> chosen that have a reasonable minimum of
> ambiguity. Therefore simply go up only to the level of
> detail needed to differentiate one item from another
> in preferably natural and mostly consistent manner
> (consistancy within a particular country is
> highly desirable).
>
> For example: Americans are notorious for reusing the
> same darn name for cities in several to a dozen
> different states. Therefore, for the United States
> [[city, state]] is fine. Most other countries don?t
> have such rampant reuse of city names, so  [[city,
> country]] is fine unless there is a naming conflict
> (or a noted exception: see below). Australia is a
> matter to consider and could also be organized as
> [[city, state]] ? but only if the reuse of city names
> is as bad a problem there as it is in the US states
> (this goes for any other country as well).

As far as Australia goes, we have so few cities
that name clashes aren't really a problem.

However, the [City, State] convention works fine - it's quite
sufficient to disambiguate between Australian cities and
any from elsewhere, AFAICT, and it's not hard to identify that
the cities are Australian.  If somebody really wants to
change the entries, go ahead.

--
------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk at mira.net

Go You Big Red Fire Engine
-- Unknown Audience Member at Adam Hills standup gig
------------------------------------------------------------


body:
On Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 07:07:38AM +0200, Axel Boldt wrote:
>
> > by blindly executing TeX when someone edits a page, we are assuming
> > that they haven't included any malicious code in their TeX source.
>
> TeX has two dangerous commands: shell escapes and writing to an
> arbitrary file. Both can be globally disabled (and are disabled by
> default in most TeX distributions). It is fairly easy however to write
> TeX which eats memory like crazy (TeX allows recursion :-), so we
> would have to somehow restrict the resources available to the TeX
> process. But we are of course right now already wide open to all sorts
> of denial-of-service attacks.

We don't need real TeX - we only need something that can parse limited
TeX math mode and renders that.


subject: [Wikitech-l] New server, software

body:
On Thu, Jun 20, 2002 at 03:19:12PM -0700, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> I originally thought the new server would be up long before the new
> software was ready, but it didn't work out that way.  Jim's moving
> and other things has let the server sit idle, and the new codebase is
> just a few hours away from completion.
>
> This gives us an opportunity, and I'd like to suggest a course of
> action here and see what the group thinks (especially Jimbo if he's
> reading, and Jason).  One thing that has become clear to me that
> despite all my pleas, QA testing for the new software has been
> woefully inadequate. I'll make another pass, and give it a few more
> days myself, but the only way to get good testing is the foist it
> upon the Wikipedia community at large.
>
> The new server gives us an opportunity to do that in a way that gives
> us an emergency fallback--the old server.  So here's what I suggest:
> I'll create the transition plan and scripts, and test them out on the
> new server.  We'll have one round of QA for people to test the new
> software in situ, but during which the old server will still be the
> active site.  Then we clean it up and do the transition for real,
> making the new server live.  New code, new server all at once.  My
> best estimate is that transition time, during which the old Wikipedia
> will be accessible but read-only, should be 2-3 hours, so we should
> pick a low-demand time for it.
>
> If the transition fails immediately, we just abandon it and go back
> to the old server, and try again later.  If it succeeds initially,
> but after a few days we dicover something drastically wrong, we can
> still go back to the old server, updating the database with the
> changes of those few days (for which I have prepared a script).  If
> everything goes well, then after a week or two Bomis can recycle the
> old server and we're upand running.
>
> Jimbo, Jason, I also went ahead and installed MySQL/PHP/Apache on the
> new server from source (after testing all of them on my server first--
> and yes, that includes this week's Apache security fix).  My notes on
> exactly what I did are in /home/lee/src/README on the server, and the
> sources are in /usr/local/src.  Please review the installation and
> see if it's what you had in mind, or let me know what differences you
> envision.  I would also like your feedback on any details of the wiki
> software installation you have in mind (directories, etc.)
> 0

Uhm ... You want Wikipedia to switch to completely untested and
not-i18ned new codebase now ?


body:
might Google also be following "pages that link here", "random" and
"history"?
Wikipedia freezes almost every day around 3pm UK time, which is odd as
it's during the pediod with the fewest edits. Could that be when google
comes a-crawling?
we had problems on UnrealWiki with downloading robots calling too many
diff links & oveerloading the server.

tarquin

Joao M?rio Miranda wrote:

>Google is indexing edit pages. See:
>
>http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&q=morley+experiment+wikipedia
>
>Joao
>http://www.nonio.com
>[Wikipedia-l]
>To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
>http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Place Names in Britain and the United States

body:
If you examine a postage stamp from the United Kingdom you will note that
the name of the country is missing. This is a commonplace of philately.

Likewise I believe it is a supportable convention to abbreviate topic
titles such as Paris, Texas or Saguache County, Colorado or even simply
Dorset or Yorkshire. There is a slight objective problem for those who have
some English but are not throughly familiar with English language popular
culture.  Somehow adding USA or England on to the examples seems quite
awkward.

The convention for the reader is that if no country is mentioned the United
States or Britain can be assumed.

Fred Bauder


body:
On 6/21/02 11:20 AM, "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:

> To shock the community:  I agree with this.  I am inclined to remove the
> invariant sections
> requirement.
>
> Are there licensing difficulties with so doing?
>
No, since Wikipedia has never been formally compliant. If anyone were picky
enough to complain that we're changing the requirements, they'd be picky
enough to complain about our implementation of the licensing in the first
place.


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Illegal Orphans and Orphans with Parents

body:
Two pages are listed as Orphans that have illegal names:
[[What_is_Mathematics,_Really?|What is Mathematics, Really?]]
and [[Wikipedia:|Wikipedia:]].  Can someone with powers that surpass
those of us mere sysops either blow those pages away or rename to some
that can be accessed for editing?

Secondly, the years 803 through 809 continue to be listed as orphans
despite having numerous incoming links.  Why is that?

--
 Sean Barrett     | Any time you skip a commercial you're stealing
 sean at epoptic.com | the programming.  I guess there's a certain
                  | amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom.
                  | --Jamie Kellner, CEO of Turner Broadcasting


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: WikiProject

body:
At 09:38 PM 6/21/02 +0200, Magnus Manske wrote:
> > For the past little while, I've been working on the
> > http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Complete_list_of_encyclopedia_topics

>So, no complaint from me if you delete them; we *do* have a working history
>mechanism, just in case...

Yay! Alrighty, I'll go and finally do that. I'll leave the pages in place
without administratively deleting them so they can be reverted if the need
ever arises.

--
"Let there be light." - Last words of Bomb #20, "Dark Star"


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in_reply_to: <3D12EA5C.4030109@planetunreal.com>; from tarquin@planetunreal.com on Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 09:57:00AM +0100

body:
On Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 09:57:00AM +0100, tarquin wrote:
> might Google also be following "pages that link here", "random" and
> "history"?

Er, don't we have a robots.txt in place yet?

For the interested: http://www.google.com/webmasters/3.html#B3

-- Jan Hidders


in_reply_to: <200206210507.HAA03376@linde.uni-paderborn.de>; from axel@uni-paderborn.de on Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 07:07:38AM +0200

body:
On Fri, Jun 21, 2002 at 07:07:38AM +0200, Axel Boldt wrote:
>
> > by blindly executing TeX when someone edits a page, we are assuming
> > that they haven't included any malicious code in their TeX source.
>
> TeX has two dangerous commands: shell escapes and writing to an
> arbitrary file. Both can be globally disabled (and are disabled by
> default in most TeX distributions). It is fairly easy however to write
> TeX which eats memory like crazy (TeX allows recursion :-), so we
> would have to somehow restrict the resources available to the TeX
> process. But we are of course right now already wide open to all sorts
> of denial-of-service attacks.

FWIW I'd like to remark that I would also like to have a LaTeX in Wikipedia.
If only to avoid that we would lose Alex to mathplanet.org. :-) But
seriously, it would make writing math in Wikipedia a lot more fun, and the
people at planetmath.org are probably more than willing to help us. In fact
I think that it is important for both Wiki's that the transfer of material
between Wikipedia and Planetmath should be as painless as possible.

-- Jan Hidders


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Google is indexing edit pages

body:
On Friday 21 June 2002 09:02 am, tarquin wrote:
> might Google also be following "pages that link here", "random" and
> "history"?
> Wikipedia freezes almost every day around 3pm UK time, which is odd as
> it's during the pediod with the fewest edits. Could that be when google
> comes a-crawling?
> we had problems on UnrealWiki with downloading robots calling too many
> diff links & oveerloading the server.
>
> tarquin

Is this fixed in the new code? I thought we decided not to allow Google to
index edit links (along with older versions of articles in History, log pages
and special pages other than maybe RecentChanges)? I don't see a problem with
allowing Google to follow links through "pages that link here" though -- so
long as this doesn't cause undue hardship on the server (if anything, this
should decrease the amount of time it take Googlebot to do its thing).

maveric149


body:
On Friday 21 June 2002 09:02 am, Robert wrote:
> However, the [City, State] convention works fine - it's quite
> sufficient to disambiguate between Australian cities and
> any from elsewhere, AFAICT, and it's not hard to identify that
> the cities are Australian. ?If somebody really wants to
> change the entries, go ahead.

Opps! Sorry, I seemed to have given the wrong impression: I wasn't advocating
moving Australian city articles to the [[city, state]] format, but was just
asking if Australians reused city names as often as Americans and only
<i>if</i> they did, then the [[city, state]] format would need to be used --
which you indicate isn't the case.

So then, why don't we just take the path of least resistance and use whatever
format is the dominant one? Oh drat, I just checked and found out that that
path is to not disambiguate at all.....

If city names in Australia are unique within that country (or any country for
that matter) why not simply have [[Perth]] or [[Sydney]] live at [[Perth,
Australia]] or [[Sydney, Australia]] giving these notable examples redirect
priority over their one word names (only since they are the most famous
cities by those names -- in the same way as [[Los Angles]] redirects to [[Los
Angeles, California]])? Side note: It would be nice for the existance of
redirects to be made more obvious -- at least in "pages that link here".

Again, either way, we should name city articles consistently within
countries. However, [[Sydney, New South Wales]] sounds like an unnecessary
amount of information to my American ears and I would wager that most
netcitizens wouldn't know which Australian state Sydney is in (and therefore
wouldn't be likely to either link to or search for it by that name -- What
netcitizens search for on Google and how Google ranks pages is also important
to consider). So the format of [[city, country]] would appear to be the best
choice for Australia after all.

But then what I think is worthless if the Aussies disagree. Please take the
above as a somewhat well-reasoned suggestion. :-)

maveric149


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Upload page

body:
On Friday 21 June 2002 09:02 am, Pierre wrote:
> Could someone put on the upload page a note that this is not a file-sharing
> system or a file storage area? I think people look for "upload files", find
> our upload page, and upload things without realizing that this is an
> encyclopedia.

Here is an excellent candidate to <i>not</i> allow Google to index.

BTW, now that we have Jimbo back, can we revisit the idea to limit use of the
upload utility? There must be several dozen user accounts that were created
for the sole purpose of using our upload utility to store files. I like
Koyaanis Qatsi's idea:

On Sunday 16 June 2002 12:01 pm, Koyaanis Qatsi wrote:
> Speaking of which, the old software used to have a function where you
> could hover over a username and the IP address would show up (.xxx at
> the end for most, but I imagine sysops would see the full thing).
> That's bring that back, mmmmkay?

That way if a logged-in user where consistently uploading illegal stuff then
that person's IP could be blocked. BTW, I recently had a nightmare about a
group of vandals creating accounts to perform a systemic assault on
wikipedia. And of course, since it is not possible for mere sysops to block
logged-in users I was pretty much helpless -- protecting pages isn't
practical because it is not possible to predict which pages will be hit. I'm
glad that was just a dream (yeah I know - I should get out more often :-).

I will repost my previous (slightly edited) email about another idea to
combat upload abuse for further comment in a different post.

maveric149


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Junk uploads, bogus user accounts and "trusted hand" status

body:
----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Junk uploads, bogus user accounts and "trusted hand" status
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2002 15:48:28 -0700
From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com

I'm sure many of you have noticed that recently there has been a growing
problem of people creating user accounts for the sole purpose of using
wikipedia's upload utility to place copyrighted and otherwise inappropriate
material on the server.

We might want to discuss further limiting the use of this utility
because it's abuse is beginning to be a maintenance issue for the syops and
the presence of these bogus user accounts is also over-reporting the number of
true (as in contributing) users we have.

I know the "trusted hand" status is in the database already so it might be
easy to limit upload ability to "trusted hand" or greater status users. It
would also be nice to have this status granted automatically if say two
conditions are met: 1) a user account is at least 30 days old and 2) this
user has edited a certain number of articles (I would be liberal and set this
at 30, but I wouldn't mind having it set at up to 100).

And while we are at it we might also want to grant trusted hands the ability
to do things that currently only sysops can do -- like move pages or edit
certain protected pages (those set to "is_trusted" perhaps? "is_sysop" would
then only be used to protect certain established policy pages and for
emergencies -- if a "trusted hand" went on a rampage it would be simple to
just change the user's status). I wonder if a script could be written to
change the status of all current users that have edited a certain number of
articles? The sysops could always do this by hand if need be.

Oh, and if something like this were established we should encourage sysops to
manually promote new users that are able to understand the wikipedia concept
and its policies early to "trusted hand" status before the 30day&30article
requirement is met.

Just a thought....

maveric149

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 30day&30edit

body:
On Friday 21 June 2002 08:29 pm, I wrote:
> Oh, and if something like this were established we should encourage sysops
> to manually promote new users that are able to understand the wikipedia
> concept and its policies early to "trusted hand" status before the
> 30day&30article requirement is met.

I should have said "30day&30edit".

maveric149


subject: [Wikipedia-l]  Google is indexing edit pages

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subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Junk uploads, bogus user accounts and
    "trusted  hand" status

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from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: WikiProject

body:
> For the past little while, I've been working on the
> http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Complete_list_of_encyclopedia_topics
> pages. I laboriously removed all of the links to existing articles, and
> uncovered about 400 pages that had been orphaned except for the link from
> here. Since then, though, the common opinion seems to be that even after
> all that these pages are still more trouble than they're worth,
> filled with
> bad article titles and such.
>
> So now I'd like to delete them, and I've been broaching the subject all
> over the place in order to make sure nobody's got a problem with that.
> These pages probably took a lot of work to make, so I don't want
> to dispose
> of them if anyone can think of anything remotely useful to use them for.

99% of these were compiled by me, taking some public-domain word lists,
auto-sorting and -wikifying them (which explains the bad titles, plurals
etc.). The idea was to have a list of both "what we have" and "what we still
need", ultimately aiming for the 100.000 articles:)

"What we have" is now solved with the search function, orphans, etc.
(including the deactivated "all pages" function; we should get this up
again, some way). "What we need" is solved even better with the "Most
Wanted".

So, no complaint from me if you delete them; we *do* have a working history
mechanism, just in case...

Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] [[city, state]] & [[city, nation]]

body:
On Friday 21 June 2002 08:50 pm, Karen wrote:
> I would think that the best policy is consistency... no, Australian
> placenames do not repeat from state to state (much). Not to the extent
> that it would interfere with entries... but at the same time I think
> that if the policy for other countries is city,state then we should
> stick to that. I know that whenever I refer to an Australian city in
> writing an entry I refer to it with that format because I've seen it
> elsewhere. But then I generally link to them as [[Sydney]], [[New South
> Wales]] rather than as a single phrase because there IS only one Sydney
> (and one Melbourne, one Darwin etc)!

Unfortunately, there is a Sydney in Canada, Florida, and Virginia; a
Melbourne in Florida, Arkansas, and Iowa; and a Darwin in Minnesota,
California, Nevada and Illinois (there are probably several more of each). In
all these examples there was only one non-American city and in my search I
couldn't find a single additional Australian city by any of these names.

The reuse of city names in the US is just too big an ambiguity issue to
ignore and therefore city names in the US should be treated differently than
city names for other nations.  The general trend for US cities in wikipedia
is to name them in the format of [[city, state]] (which is what they are
actually specifically referred to within the US and abroad). I agree with and
encourage this trend because of the need to differentiate between US cities
and to have predictable names for them.

Consistency in city naming should be <i>within</i> a nation and not for all
nations in my opinion. But since most other nations don't have internal
ambiguity issues that even begin to compare with the United States, I propose
that those cities should be in the form [[city, nation]]  (as most non-US
cities are specifically referred to -- at least according to a sampling on
Google and my own experience) or just [[city]] for noted exceptions (there
are important consistency and minor ambiguity issues with the [[city]]
format though....). There might be some nations other than the US that are
exceptions to this proposed naming convention, but these can be explored on a
case-by-case basis.

BTW, before we revisit it, [[Melbourne, Florida, United States of America]]
and [[Melbourne, Arkansas, United States of America]] are both WAY too
tedious and would hardly ever be directly linked to because the long form
(even with USA or US) is not really used much at all ("United States of
America", USA or US not being needed to disambiguate). Likewise, [[Melbourne,
Victoria, Australia]] is probably just as bad ("Victoria" not being needed to
disambiguate). In short, "simplify, simplify" - but be internally consistant.

Technical fixes such as redirects are just that -- technical fixes that skirt
the main issue (in my experience, users who prefer needlessly long article
names are notorious for not providing redirects and if we encourage long
names these users will soon outnumber more sane individuals wanting to
preserve easy and natural linking).

maveric149


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Are <Preview>s stored anywhere?

body:
Suppose I'm editing an article and my browser crashes.
Were my <Preview>s stored anywhere? If so, how can I find them?

-- Toby Bartels
   toby at math.ucr.edu

PS: Is this the correct forum for this, or should I ask on <wikitech-l>?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Upload page

body:
On Friday 21 June 2002 23:16, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> That way if a logged-in user where consistently uploading illegal stuff
> then that person's IP could be blocked.

That assumes that he has a consistent IP address. If he is a Road Runner user
and disconnects from the Net when he's finished, next time he'll get a
different address and all you can be sure of is that it begins with 24.
Trying to block him would be a pain in the geococcyx.

phma


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Kuro5hin becomes non profit

body:
It Takes a Village to Save a Site
By Paul Boutin

2:00 a.m. June 21, 2002 PDT
Begging for funds to keep your bankrupt site afloat rarely works. Unless
you're Rusty Foster, whose tech community site Kuro5hin just raised
$35,000 -- and a few eyebrows -- in less than a week.

"I gotta say, I'm quite impressed at what they've pulled off," said
Slashdot.org founder Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda.

Slashdot's site, along with its free source code, inspired Foster to
found Kuro5hin in December 1999 as a similar forum for "technology and
culture from the trenches."

But a string of disappointing ad models led Foster to post a long
missive on Monday titled "We're Broke: The Economics of a Web
Community." Enumerating his income and expenses, Foster asked readers to
help him meet the site's $70,000 annual operating budget.

"This has been coming for a while. We didn't have any money coming in,"
Foster said by phone from Peaks Island, Maine, where he and his wife
relocated from San Francisco last year.

"I spent a lot of time asking myself: Are we a magazine, are we a media
company?" Foster said. "We're a community; that's why the whole
advertising thing doesn't work for us. Advertising works in media
because the company showing you advertising is providing you value by
writing the articles. On a site like mine, the transaction breaks down
because the visitors are writing the articles themselves."

Such introspection and analysis are standard fare on Kuro5hin, whose
tech-savvy members discuss everything from software license details to
the U.S. government's failure points in design, specification, and
implementation. There are few places you can have an intelligent
discussion like that.

"Rusty doesn't interfere with the way the site evolves," said Robin
Bandy, one of Kuro5hin's most prolific participants who contributes
under the name "Arkady."

But Foster's announcement shook up members, who realized their reluctant
leader might have to give up the site for a paying job.

"Kuro5hin is about Rusty Foster the same way Slashdot is about Rob
Malda," said writer Doc Searls, an early booster of the site. "He's a
wise young man in the literal sense of the word. He's a programmer, but
from a different variety -- more intellectual, and less focused on
technology."

"I asked the community what I should do, because that's always worked
before," Foster said.

Bandy agreed, "Rusty honestly wants the site to be a community. A year
ago he tried to give the site over to the readers. The overwhelming
reaction was, 'Nah, you're doing a good job, keep it up.'"

This time, though, Foster's financial bind helped him find a way to
bring others on board without selling the site. "We're talking to
accountants and lawyers," he said about converting his one-man company
to not-for-profit status under Section 501c of the Federal Internal
Revenue Code.

Besides the tax breaks, 501c status would enable Foster to bring in
other Kuro5hin members as trustees to oversee the site.

There should be no lack of volunteers: Foster said the largest donation
received by mid-Wednesday was $240, as the turnout came from hundreds of
small donors rather than a single sugar daddy.

Leslie Nakajima, a vice president at PR agency Bite Communications in
San Francisco, explained the pledge drive's surprise success as proof
that, unlike many sites, Kuro5hin's worth is apparent to its fans. "They
have an obvious value proposition," she said.

Less so for the site's name. "'Corrosion.' It's a pun on my name,"
Foster said. "Rusty ... corrosion ... get it? Don't worry, nobody else
ever got it, either."


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from_name: mllnzeyclymq at spammotel.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Upload page

body:
>
>
>From: Pierre Abbat <phma at webjockey.net>
>Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 16:40:39 -0400
>Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Upload page
>
>Could someone put on the upload page a note that this is not a file-sharing
>system or a file storage area? I think people look for "upload files", find
>our upload page, and upload things without realizing that this is an
>encyclopedia.
>
When i look whit google for "upload files" the wikipedia upload-page is
hit number 2.
http://www.google.be/search?hl=nl&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF8&q=upload+files&btnG=Google+zoeken&meta=
That is not good.
Mayby include this on that page;

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
and why not also do this whit all non-current pages ? -- giskart,WikiNL


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body:
At 08:49 PM 6/21/02 -0700, you wrote:
>pages.  There are a few specially-set ones; for example the
>SpecialPages page is set to not follow, because it only links to
>things we don't want robots in, and "orphans" is no follow because it
>only links to edit forms.

You mean "Most Wanted" rather than "Orphans", right? Just making sure. :)

--
"Let there be light." - Last words of Bomb #20, "Dark Star"


from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
> On Friday 21 June 2002 09:02 am, Robert wrote:
> > However, the [City, State] convention works fine - it's quite
> > sufficient to disambiguate between Australian cities and
> > any from elsewhere, AFAICT, and it's not hard to identify that
> > the cities are Australian.  If somebody really wants to
> > change the entries, go ahead.
>
> Opps! Sorry, I seemed to have given the wrong impression: I wasn't advocating
> moving Australian city articles to the [[city, state]] format, but was just
> asking if Australians reused city names as often as Americans and only
> <i>if</i> they did, then the [[city, state]] format would need to be used --
> which you indicate isn't the case.
>
> So then, why don't we just take the path of least resistance and use whatever
> format is the dominant one? Oh drat, I just checked and found out that that
> path is to not disambiguate at all.....
>
> If city names in Australia are unique within that country (or any country for
> that matter) why not simply have [[Perth]] or [[Sydney]] live at [[Perth,
> Australia]] or [[Sydney, Australia]] giving these notable examples redirect
> priority over their one word names (only since they are the most famous
> cities by those names -- in the same way as [[Los Angles]] redirects to [[Los
> Angeles, California]])? Side note: It would be nice for the existance of
> redirects to be made more obvious -- at least in "pages that link here".
>
> Again, either way, we should name city articles consistently within
> countries. However, [[Sydney, New South Wales]] sounds like an unnecessary
> amount of information to my American ears and I would wager that most
> netcitizens wouldn't know which Australian state Sydney is in (and therefore
> wouldn't be likely to either link to or search for it by that name -- What
> netcitizens search for on Google and how Google ranks pages is also important
> to consider). So the format of [[city, country]] would appear to be the best
> choice for Australia after all.
>
> But then what I think is worthless if the Aussies disagree. Please take the
> above as a somewhat well-reasoned suggestion. :-)

I would think that the best policy is consistency... no, Australian
placenames do not repeat from state to state (much). Not to the extent
that it would interfere with entries... but at the same time I think
that if the policy for other countries is city,state then we should
stick to that. I know that whenever I refer to an Australian city in
writing an entry I refer to it with that format because I've seen it
elsewhere. But then I generally link to them as [[Sydney]], [[New South
Wales]] rather than as a single phrase because there IS only one Sydney
(and one Melbourne, one Darwin etc)!

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

You can take the dragon out of Alfandra, but you can never take Alfandra
out of the dragon (or the Kitty)...

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating

Love and huggles to all!


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Fwd: Junk uploads, bogus user accounts and "trusted
 hand" status

body:
The trusted hand requirement sounds quite reasonable to me. The fact is
that there are people using the upload facility as storage space for
their own personal junk and there just isn't enough room for it. People
like that do NOT sign up and stick around for a month to load their
stuff up - they see the opportunity and go for it on the spot. Just
delaying it would probably cut the amount of junk in half at least. And
if you add the requirememt for contributing to articles beforehand, well
then that gets rid of even more of them!

When they gave users the ability to link to graphics in their diaries on
the open diary site they made the requirement that you had had a diary
for more than 30 days and/or made more than 30 entries into it, to
prevent people starting new diaries just to upload pr0n pics to shock
people... they took the requirement off again about six months later,
but it had been there long enough that most people realised that they
couldn't do that any more.

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

You can take the dragon out of Alfandra, but you can never take Alfandra
out of the dragon (or the Kitty)...

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating

Love and huggles to all!


from_name: Ian

body:
Mozilla has a form-saving function. Haven't used it yet, so I'm not quite
sure how it works. It's a feature that I've often wondered why it did not
exist after having lost my work a few times before (though I don't think
with Wikipedia).

Ian Monroe
http://www.monroe.nu

On Fri, 21 Jun 2002, Toby Bartels toby at math.ucr.edu XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX wrote:

> Suppose I'm editing an article and my browser crashes.
> Were my <Preview>s stored anywhere? If so, how can I find them?
>
>
> -- Toby Bartels
>    toby at math.ucr.edu
>
>
> PS: Is this the correct forum for this, or should I ask on <wikitech-l>?
> [Wikipedia-l]
> To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
> http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipediatrician

body:
Anyone have an idea what a wikipediatrician might be?

phma


subject: [Wikipedia-l] WikiProject Tree of Life

body:
I just wrote a WikiProject Tree of Life page. Anyone interested in taxonomy,
please look at it.

phma


from_name: Kurt Jansson

subject: [Wikitech-l] RecentChanges in Mozilla's sidebar

body:
I just found something that we defintively need: RecentChanges in
Mozilla's/Netscape's sidebar. See it at the DebianWiki:

http://wiki.debian.net/DebianWiki/RecentChangesSidebar

It is cool, and I want to have it. Things can be so easy :-)

Kurt

P.S.: You don't need to hurry. I can wait till all the bugs in test-de
have been solved ;-)
P.P.S.: Seriously: I hope that at least one of our busy developers likes
this feature.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipediatrician

body:
On Sun, 23 Jun 2002 08:20:10 Pierre Abbat wrote:
> Anyone have an idea what a wikipediatrician might be?
>

Well, a pediatrician is a doctor who treats childhood
diseases, so by analogy, I suppose a wikipediatrician
would be somebody who treats immature Wikipedia articles
and makes them "healthy".  Possibly it could be somebody
who makes the whole Wikipedia (which is still immature)
"healthy" (in the sense that an electrician fixes electrical
things that are broken).

It's a new term as far as I can recall :)

--
------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk at mira.net

Go You Big Red Fire Engine
-- Unknown Audience Member at Adam Hills standup gig
------------------------------------------------------------


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] OGG file upload

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] buggy delete function?

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] OGG file upload

body:
On Sunday 23 June 2002 15:38, tarquin wrote:
> I'm trying to upload examples of phonemes for the SAMPA page as OGG
> files, but when I test what I've uploaded, my browser (Mozilla 1.0)
> displays the contents of the file as text.
> Does anyone have any advice? I've now tried this from two different
> systems with the same result. The files play fine in my Winamp.

Can you tell me the exact filename you are uploading? I tried the command

lynx -source -head "http://www.wikipedia.com/upload/SAMPA [Q] dot bomb wasp English RP.ogg"

and got a 404:

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sun, 23 Jun 2002 20:47:41 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.23 (Unix) PHP/4.0.6 mod_fastcgi/2.2.12
Last-Modified: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 21:49:12 GMT
ETag: "10d1e7-83-3c51d2d8"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 131
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

It might help to upload it with a filename that doesn't have a bracket, as the
Wikipedia software mangles it (but I don't think that's the problem).

phma


subject: [Wikipedia-l] buggy delete function?

body:
On Sunday 23 June 2002 16:35, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> Recently I was trying to delete a file called "zbuffy" but the screen
> appeared to be hung up.  When I clicked again on zbuffy, the screen I was
> taken to said that I deleted fr-map.jpg.  any ideas what might have
> happened?  I've reuploaded the file, but I'm curious if anyone else has
> experienced bugginess in the delete file function.

I have. It doesn't log everything, and it refuses to delete a file with an
ampersand in its name. How did you reupload it, since it was Taw who uploaded
it in the first place?

Your browser may have been in the process of redrawing the window when you
clicked, and it put the link for deleting fr-map where the link for deleting
zbuffy had been.

phma


subject: [Wikipedia-l] buggy delete function?

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] OGG file upload

body:
I'm trying to upload examples of phonemes for the SAMPA page as OGG
files, but when I test what I've uploaded, my browser (Mozilla 1.0)
displays the contents of the file as text.
Does anyone have any advice? I've now tried this from two different
systems with the same result. The files play fine in my Winamp.

tarquin


from_name: j.heijmans at stud.tue.nl

subject: [Wikipedia-l] On city naming conventions

body:
After just discovering the wikipedia-l mailinglist, I'd immediately like to join in with some remarks on the topic of naming conventions for cities. I've tried to read most of the message posted before, sorry if I've missed anything. I'll not address the point of disambiguating cities, I think that issue is pretty clear.

The major point with naming cities and the like is that there's not one standard in the world, not even in the English-speaking world. Americans tend to name all cities as (city, state) (in the US) and as (city, country) for those outside the US. This is far from common outside the US, where things as San Francisco, CA seem weird. In Europe (as far as I can judge), the extra information (state, province, whatever) is only used when really necessary, which it is in two cases: (1) disambiguation - there are two cities with the same (or almost the same name) in the country (2) the national public cannot be expected to know where the town is located. Other countries will have their own policies, usually depending on the size of the country.

When writing articles on this in Wikipedia, there's two problems we need to take care of:
* ease of use for the reader
* ease of linking for the writer

The ease of use is not really a problem in any case: if the user searches for Paris, France, and finds an article with "Paris is the capital of France, blablabla", he's found the right place; same thing for the user merely searching for Paris.

For the writer, making links should be easy, and he should not have to know about dozens of naming conventions; just a few should be enough. The American linking to Oslo, Norway should get the right page, and so should the the European linking Oslo only. Redirects should do the trick here.

So, at this point, I'd say: what is the problem? The only thing to take care of is that for each article named according to convention A, there's a redirect with convention name B.

However, another issue appears to be consistency. If all articles on cities are named in the same way, this might look more authorative, or the like. However, I think there's no way city articles can ever be made consistent, while satisfying the ease of use and linking too. Consistent would be: city, administrative region, country (because city, state for one country and city, country for another isn't consistent). However, that is rather tedious for both linking and using. And it brings a lot of new problems as well. What should it be: New York, New York, United States of America/United States/USA/US? Same problem for the UK, maybe also for Russia(n Federation), etc. This can all be sorted out, but it'll be too many conventions for me.

Concluding, my proposal is: make sure each city article has appropriate redirects. That's all :-)

regards,

Jeroen Heijmans

__________________________________________________________________
Email sent from http://www.webpopmail.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipediatrician

body:
Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Jun 2002 08:20:10 Pierre Abbat wrote:
> > Anyone have an idea what a wikipediatrician might be?
> >
>
> Well, a pediatrician is a doctor who treats childhood
> diseases, so by analogy, I suppose a wikipediatrician
> would be somebody who treats immature Wikipedia articles
> and makes them "healthy".  Possibly it could be somebody
> who makes the whole Wikipedia (which is still immature)
> "healthy" (in the sense that an electrician fixes electrical
> things that are broken).

:-)  I took the analogy in a different direction.  A wikipediatrician's
office is where you take your children to be treated by random passerby.

"YOU can cure this child right now!"

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] text on upload files page . . .

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from_name: Pierre Abbat

body:
On Monday 24 June 2002 10:14, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> Is there any reason the "upload files" page doesn't say explicitly
>
> "You may upload files here for the sole purpose of using them in the
> Wikipedia, an open content online encyclopedia.  Uploading files
> for any other purpose is not permitted.  The files will be deleted,
> and persistent abusers of this facility will have their IP banned."
>
> or something to that effect?  If you go straight to the page, there's
> nothing to explicitly say "This is only for the Wikipedia".

I already agree with you. The page is *still* 2nd on Google search for
"upload files". The page should:
*be explicitly banned in both robots.txt and <meta robots>
*include the above warning
*if there is no user login cookie, show no form but direct the user to the
account creation page
*if the user has not reached trusted hand status, show no form.

Please do this at once.

phma


subject: [Wikitech-l] [giskart@linux.be: request admin powers WikiNL]

body:
I'm a little unsure how to do it on wiki nl.  Is that one still running the old
perl script?

----- Forwarded message from Giskart <giskart at linux.be> -----

From: Giskart <giskart at linux.be>
Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2002 19:23:41 +0200
To: jwales at bomis.com
Subject: request admin powers WikiNL

Can you give me administrator powers for the Dutch Wikipedia please ?

Thanks,
Giskart

----- End forwarded message -----


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] OGG file upload

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] has the move-page bug been fixed yet?

body:
Let us know when it has so we can start using it again... it's by far
the quickest and easiest way to reshuffle page titles.

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

You can take the dragon out of Alfandra, but you can never take Alfandra
out of the dragon (or the Kitty)...

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating

Love and huggles to all!


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:  text on upload files page . . .

body:
On Monday 24 June 2002 12:01 pm, Robert wrote:
> Is there any reason the "upload files" page doesn't say explicitly
>
> "You may upload files here for the sole purpose of using them in the
> Wikipedia, an open content online encyclopedia. ?Uploading files
> for any other purpose is not permitted. ?The files will be deleted,
> and persistent abusers of this facility will have their IP banned."
>
> or something to that effect? ?If you go straight to the page, there's
> nothing to explicitly say "This is only for the Wikipedia".

I second the implied vote to have this notice placed on the upload page.

--maveric149


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: On city naming conventions (part 1 -- cross-convention REDIRECTs)

body:
On Monday 24 June 2002 12:01 pm, Jeroen wrote:
> So, at this point, I'd say: what is the problem? The only thing to take
> care of is that for each article named according to convention A, there's a
> redirect with convention name B.

I don't see anything wrong with creating cross-convention redirects for the
proposed [[city, nation]] convention for most (at least) non-US nations and
the [[city, state]] convention for US ones. However, this shouldn't be any
kind of requirement or policy -- just encouraged.

One of the main reasons we have naming conventions is so that when a person
makes a naming convention compliment article, that person can be reasonably
sure that other contributors making similarly convention compliment free
links to that term will link to it without having to depend on redirects. But
then, there is no reason not to have known shortcuts for even easier linking
to often linked articles (such as the [[United States]] redirect for example
-- see my other post, "part 2 -- REDIRECT priority").

I don't think that making [[San Francisco, United States of America]] a
redirect to [[San Francisco, California]] would be particularly useful
though... But then there is no pressing reason <i>not</i> to have one that I
can think of.

Potential minor issues:
There are at least three Melbourne's in the United States -- so the person
making [[Melbourne, United States of America]] into a redirect would have to
be careful to direct it to the most famous Melbourne in the States
(Melbourne, Florida) -- giving the most famous city redirect priority (see my
other post, "part 2 -- REDIRECT priority"). Also, no one Auburn in the US can
be said to be the unambiguous "Auburn in the US", but the creation of a
disambiguation page titled [[Auburn, United States of America]] might be
redundant overkill because most entries at a disambiguation page named
[[Auburn]] would be US cities anyway.

--maveric149


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: On city naming conventions (part 2 -- REDIRECT priority)

body:
On Monday 24 June 2002 12:01 pm, Jeroen wrote:
> The major point with naming cities and the like is that there's not one
> standard in the world, not even in the English-speaking world. Americans
> tend to name all cities as (city, state) (in the US) and as (city, country)
> for those outside the US. This is far from common outside the US, where
> things as San Francisco, CA seem weird. In Europe (as far as I can judge),
> the extra information (state, province, whatever) is only used when really
> necessary, which it is in two cases: (1) disambiguation - there are two
> cities with the same (or almost the same name) in the country (2) the
> national public cannot be expected to know where the town is located. Other
> countries will have their own policies, usually depending on the size of
> the country.

OK, fair enough -- redirects from [[city]] to the the most famous  [[city,
state]] (USA) or [[city, nation]] (other) is probably in order (so that those
that know these redirects exist don't have to use pipes -- [[Oslo,
Norway|Oslo]]).

Many cities, such as the mentioned Oslo in Norway, are by far the most widely
known city by that name (even for most Americans). And I also know that in
Europe this city is mostly known simply as just "Oslo" (in the same way as
Los Angeles is simply known as just "Los Angeles" in the US). What is needed,
is a way to naturally disambiguate to a reasonable level (following the
previously mentioned [[city, state]]/[[city, nation]] setup), preserve easy
linking and be consistent within nations. Consistency/disambiguation and ease
of linking do conflict, however, but redirects can solve this problem for the
most famous (and therefore most likely to be linked) city names.

Proposal:

In cases where there is a famous city and a not so famous city with
the same name, redirect priority over the use of the [[city]] format page
should be given to the more famous city when there is an obvious choice. For
example: there are at least several cities named Moscow in the world but the
wikipedia page [[Moscow]] should <i>not</i> be a disambiguation page, but be
redirected to [[Moscow, Russia]] (the most famous Moscow by far) and at the
bottom of that article should be a few links to other not nearly as well
known Moscow's (for those VERY few individuals who actually expect to link to
an article about Moscow, Idaho by creating a link to [[Moscow]]).

There will be exceptions when there are two cities of roughly equal fame,
such as [[Memphis, Tennessee]] and [[Memphis, Egypt]] where there is a true
ambiguity as to which city should have redirect priority over the use of the
[[Memphis]] page. In this case, [[Memphis]] would have to be turned into a
disambiguation page with [[Memphis, Tennessee]] and [[Memphis, Egypt]] listed
(of course, as with the creation of all disambiguation pages, the person
making one is bound by honor to fix all the misdirected links to it so that
they point directly to the correct city's article -- another good reason to
use redirects in most cases and NOT to create disambiguation pages for
everything).

<hint> It would be nice to have redirects show up under a heading of:
"Pages that are REDIRECTs to this article" (or something similar) in "pages
that link here". </hint>

--maveric149


subject: [Wikipedia-l] conversion script (Block this IP)

body:
Why does the conversion script have a "Block this IP" link after it? What is
the IP of the conversion script?

phma


body:
Is there any reason the "upload files" page doesn't say explicitly

"You may upload files here for the sole purpose of using them in the
Wikipedia, an open content online encyclopedia.  Uploading files
for any other purpose is not permitted.  The files will be deleted,
and persistent abusers of this facility will have their IP banned."

or something to that effect?  If you go straight to the page, there's
nothing to explicitly say "This is only for the Wikipedia".

--
------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk at mira.net

Go You Big Red Fire Engine
-- Unknown Audience Member at Adam Hills standup gig
------------------------------------------------------------


from_name: nviakkxcqbnc at spammotel.com

body:
>
>
>----- Forwarded message from Giskart <giskart at linux.be> -----
>
>From: Giskart <giskart at linux.be>
>Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2002 19:23:41 +0200
>To: jwales at bomis.com
>Subject: request admin powers WikiNL
>
>Can you give me administrator powers for the Dutch Wikipedia please ?
>

Nevermind. I am opt by TK.  Have acces. -- giskart


from_name: Brion L. VIBBER

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] 2 bugs in usemod import code, 1 fixed

body:
Ahhh, catching up on mailings lists and newsgroups is _such_ fun! :)
Sorry for the delay...

On lun, 2002-06-17 at 00:51, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> Bug 1 - import script tries to import articles which start with
> lower-case letters, what might lead to clash.
>
> Fix attached.

Great, thanks! Committed to CVS.

> Bug 2 - import script has some single quotes escaping problem,
> and articles with single quotes in name are not added to "linked"
> table, and therefore are listed as not linked despite of being linked.
>
> I couldn't find where the bug is.

Uggh... I'll look at it when I get a chance...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
On lun, 2002-06-24 at 20:39, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> Why does the conversion script have a "Block this IP" link after it? What is
> the IP of the conversion script?

Hmm, that's a bug. :)

The database stores two pieces of information on the user who made an
edit: user_name is the login name (or for an anonymous user, the IP
address) and user_id is the internal index number of the user account
(or for an anonymous user, 0).

The conversion script marks the converted page with the user_name
"Conversion script" and user_id 0. It looks like the bit that checks
whether to put up a "block this IP" link just checks for user_id=0.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Nupedia error from Wikipedia request

body:
I have been trying for hours to find what two users who recently uploaded
files have contributed. Frustrated by timeouts in Konqueror, I tried Lynx and
got the following:

   Nupedia logo by milodesign.com
   home | search | newest | join the effort | member area | about Nupedia

   Sorry! 404 error!
   Probably, you should log in!

   The page you clicked on or typed in is not (currently) available.

   Why? Various possible reasons:
     * If you encountered this message while trying to get to or navigate
       the member area, then probably, you are not logged in--so please
       log in!  E.g., you might be an editor and trying to do something
       that only editors can do.  Then definitely you should log in.
     * It is possible that you are logged in, but you do not have
       permission to see the URL your browser is pointing to. If you
       believe this is in error, we'd like to know about it:
       comments at nupedia.com.
     * It is possible that we simply don't have the page on file.  This
       is always embarrassing, and we'd like to know about it:
       comments at nupedia.com.

   Whatever the problem, we sure hope it's fixed soon.  We aim to please,
   but we are overworked!

   Please hit the "back" button on your web browser, or choose a link
   from those listed above.

The command was:
time lynx
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/special:contributions\&theuser=Hellspawn
and it took about 10 minutes. The other user is Malkav.

Can you add an index on the contributor user ID in the table that logs who
contributed what? That should speed up the join in the database lookup.

phma


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Anybody know Arabic?

body:
The following message (which I'm about to delete) was uploaded by one of our
garbage uploaders:

km rbw `' 'h.db js.yb' wm'fy fh.r' m' `qbw lyl

All I recognize is the last word, which means "night". I'm keeping a copy. If
you would like to translate it, please let me know.

phma


subject: [Wikipedia-l] New code feature-complete, ready for final testing round.

body:
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subject:
[Wikipedia-l] New code feature-complete, ready for final
    testing round.

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Scanos in 1911 articles

body:
I brought up the B?b?s article and it, like several others, contains numerous
scanos, some of which I cannot figure out (foreign names). Here is an example:

Of these risings the first ([December 1848]??[July 1849]?) took place in
M?zandar?n?, at the ruined shrine of [Shaykh TabarsI]?, near Bflrfur6sh?,
where the B?bIs, led by Mull? Muhammad ?All of B?rfurfish and Mullfi Husayn
of Bushrawayh (? the first who believed ?), defied the shah?s troops for
seven months before they were finally subdued and put to death.

I think that there should be a warning against inserting text with illegible
scanos in it. Where do they come from? Does anyone have a hardcopy of the
1911 encyclopedia so that he can fix them?

phma


body:
On Wednesday 26 June 2002 17:28, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> The code running at:
>
>  http://www.piclab.com/newwiki/wiki.phtml
>
> is now in a state where I believe all the features I intended to have
> working for release are working.  I'd like to have as many
> Wikipedians as possible pound on it for a few days while I work on a
> transition plan for installing it on the new server.

I attempted to log in with my username and password from the real site and
got the message "There is no user by the name \"PierreAbbat\".". A
username/password check should not reveal whether it is the username or the
password that is wrong.

phma


in_reply_to: <200206270702.g5R72rk21300@ross.bomis.com>; from lcrocker@nupedia.com on Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 12:02:53AM -0700

body:
On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 12:02:53AM -0700, lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> > I attempted to log in with my username and password from the
> > real site and got the message "There is no user by the name
> > \"PierreAbbat\".". A username/password check should not reveal
> > whether it is the username or the password that is wrong.
>
> I'm not sure that really applies here, where anyone can get a
> complete user list anytime anyway (of course it doesn't have
> any real information like email addresses or anything).
>
> Is there any real security reason to hide our user list?0

Even if you would do that I could still find out if user X exists by trying
to create a new account for X.

-- Jan Hidders


subject: [Wikipedia-l] More notices that need to go on the upload page

body:
Whoever has access to the upload page, please add the following in addition
to the previous warnings:

Please do not upload uncompressed sound or picture formats, such as BMP or
WAV, except small (<10KB) files used as examples of the file format. All
large files in uncompressed formats will be summarily deleted.

phma


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Case sensitivity

body:
Currently, Wikipedia article names are
"case sensitive, but first character must be a capital".

This isn't optimal, because:
* very rarely two things have the same name, only different capitalization
* there is significant group of names thot should be all-lower-case,
  like many Unix programs

Fully case sensitive system also wouldn't be optimal.
While it would allow all-lower-case names, it would force many links
to be written as [[Foo|foo]], what would be an unnecessary burder.

So I propose a switch to "case insensitive but case preserving"
system at some point, just like file names on Microsoft Windows.


body:
A suggested rule: a work of art can be (but doesn't have to be) listed
on the year of its creation if it won an important award (for
sufficiently momentous values of "important").  This would limit
Heinlein to four items (none of them short stories): Double Star,
Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Moon is a Harsh
Mistress.

-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-admin at nupedia.com
[mailto:wikipedia-l-admin at nupedia.com]On Behalf Of Robert Graham Merkel
Sent: Thursday, June 27, 2002 22:05
To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Years in review and the need for editorial
judgement

A relatively new contributor, Ellmist, has been adding articles
about Robert Heinlein's novels.  This is a good thing - Heinlein
was an important sci-fi writer, and we should cover his work in
some detail.

However, they have added the publication dates of his books
to the applicable "Year In Review" articles.  Is this such a
good idea?  Probably not.  I doubt that everything Heinlein
wrote was so momentous to warrant such a listing.

This is a more general problem with the year in review listing.
Unlike virtually everything else in the 'Pedia, these articles are
space-limited by their very intention (to provide a concise overview
of what went on in the world in that year).  Therefore, if we wish
to retain them in the current form, we're
going to have to exercise editorial judgement as to the things
sufficiently important to list there.

The NPOV isn't a great help here.  It says we should resolve disputes
by by characterising the
dispute and letting the differing opinions speak for themselves.
I can't see how that helps.  Because we are space-limited, we *can't*
just list every event that somebody (or even a large group of people)
thinks is important, state why those people think it was important,
and let the reader come to their own conclusions.

Lists like this are a special case, and so I would argue that we should
make special rules to handle it.  What those special rules should be I'm
not sure.  As a "meta-rule" I think we need fairly strict section
guidelines on what can go into each section of the Year in Review
entry.

Let me play Devil's advocate for a minute. The fact that we might need
special rules for Year In Review articles makes me wonder whether
they are, indeed encyclopedia articles or something else entirely.
If not, do they really belong as part of the Wikipedia or are they
a job for another projct with different rules?  Probably not, but it's
something to think about.

Opinions?

-----------------------------------------------------------
Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk at mira.net

Go You Big Red Fire Engine
-- Unknown Audience Member at Adam Hills standup gig
------------------------------------------------------------
[Wikipedia-l]
To manage your subscription to this list, please go here:
http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 1911 text

body:
On Thursday 27 June 2002 12:01 pm, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> Of these risings the first ([December 1848]???"[July 1849]?) took place in
> M??zandar??n?, at the ruined shrine of [Shaykh TabarsI]?, near Bflrfur6sh?,
> where the B??bIs, led by Mull?? Muhammad ??~All of B??rfurfish and Mullfi
> Husayn of Bushrawayh (??? the first who believed ???), defied the shah???s
> troops for seven months before they were finally subdued and put to death.
>
> I think that there should be a warning against inserting text with
> illegible scanos in it. Where do they come from? Does anyone have a
> hardcopy of the 1911 encyclopedia so that he can fix them?

I do hate it when people just dump, unwikified, unchecked, incorrectly named
and OCR error ridden 1911 text into wikipedia expecting others to tidy things
after them. It is oftentimes far more difficult to update all this AND
modernize pedandic Victorian, often wrong and ultra-biased prose than it is
to do some research on the topic and create an article from scratch. Dumping
of unimproved 1911 text should be highly discouraged.

--maveric