from_name: Kat Walsh

body:
On 11/15/05, Joseph Reagle <reagle at mit.edu> wrote:

>  But what of
> when the edit is of merit? Are the most qualified primary sources
> disqualified from editing the Wikipedia article? Need a primary source
> published her first person claim elsewhere before it can bear upon the
> Wikipedia article?

I've never liked [[WP:AUTO]] myself. I would be inclined to let
article subjects edit the articles about themselves in the same way
that anyone else is, perhaps held to a higher standard on attributing
every assertion to a verifiable outside source and writing neutrally.

Sure, they can leave notes on the talk page. Which for a major
celebrity is great, as plenty of people will be watching or otherwise
interested in the page. But for some of these minor figures who
stumble across their entries, this may be the only attention the
article gets for a long while. It may also be one of the only sources
of information about them on the web, and probably the most prominent
-- first Google hit on their names, etc. -- and to say "no, you can't
edit this article, you have to let wrong information sit there until
someone bothers to come by to fix it" doesn't seem quite right, and
doesn't seem like the way to establish goodwill.

As Matt posted, the nutcases aren't the norm, and they can be dealt
with for the misbehaviors that make them come off as batshit crazy
rather than writing about themselves. Most are reasonable people who
happen to quite reasonably not want falsehoods spread about them on a
top-40 website (or anywhere, really), and are just not familiar with
the way Wikipedia works enough to realize that everything must be
cited and NPOV. I don't see much harm in letting them edit on
themselves with a little guidance, some strong prodding to cite
sources, and a caution that they don't have any more authority over
the content of the article than any other editor. Still vastly
preferred for others to edit instead, of course, but sometimes no one
else really takes enough interest.

-Kat
[[User:Mindspillage]]

--
"There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily
escaped the chronicler's mind."  --Douglas Adams


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Milos Rancic

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Assumptions about westerners

body:
On 11/14/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> OK, now you're just spewing anti-Western rubbish. I am an opponent of
> colonialism. End of discussion.

Mark, I think that I wrote:

> > (To be clear: A lot of other cultures are also aggressive such Western
> > is. But, I am not now talking to Aztecks nor to Hutus nor to
> > Balkanians. I am talking now on the list where Westerners are great
> > majority for sure.)

So, I am anti-*? ;)

I have one suggestion/ask for you: May you start to talk with people
from Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian communities and to try to
understand all of us? We need one Westerner to talk with us about
problems related to our past and, of course, in hope that we would be
able to make NPOV pages about our near and far past not only on
English Wikipedia, but on Wikipedias in our languages.

Just keep in mind that it is very important to understand all of us.
Also, we don't need solution for tomorrow; this is a long time work.

If you need any help while you are doing this, feel free to ask me.


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] sr.wiki has been waiting for months!

body:
Mark, thank you for asking this.

On 11/15/05, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> Where's the patch to LanguageSr.php and the conversion library to make
> this happen?

It can be found at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:BraneJ/Serbian_Variants with the
hole explanation. I can send the whole files, too.

But, it would be very helpful that some of us have CVS access for that
purpose. This, first variant, which is just read-only for Latin and
Iyekavian should be changed through the time and to include write
version, too.


list: wikien-l

from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
<snip>
> Unless we're adopting an extremely exclusionist approach to Wikipedia
> entries, such articles don't really belong on AfD at all.  They seem
> to be a symptom of simple laziness on the part of the nominators.
>

Yeah, it's all these damn kids who think that if they've never heard of
something, it can't be important, but OH NOES! DON"T DELETE MY HIGH
SCHOOL! :-P

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias (was How
	didthis happen (comixpedia??))

body:
geni wrote:

>If popular culture/Trivia are so important why does [[Hurricane
>Katrina]] (to chose a random example) not include either word?
>
>
Maybe it's too recent a subject to have any material out there in pop
culture to warrant such a section? Maybe there's enough material, but no
editors have thought of adding it yet? Or they did, and it's scattered
elsewhere in the article rather than being gathered into a section?
Maybe it was already split off, or is in some more generic "major
hurricanes in pop culture" article somewhere?

More important, though, is the question of why the absence of a pop
culture section in any particular article is a reason why there
shouldn't be one in any _other_ particular article. Once upon a time
Wikipedia didn't have any articles about hurricanes at all but nobody
objected on that basis when the first one got added (or if they did,
they obviously had no effect).

>Lets consdir the situation:
>
>The problem: This article is to big and there is no obvious split
>Solution. Remove stuff while doing the minium posible damage to the article.
>
>That tends to result in the popular culture/trivia section being the
>first to go.
>
>
If there's such a big "pop culture" section in the article, how can you
claim that there's no obvious split solution? Take the text you've just
highlighted for deletion and copy and paste it into a new article
instead. Easy and obvious. Deleting it may not "damage" the article
itself any worse than splitting it off would, but it does damage
Wikipedia as a whole more.

I suppose I must be a rabid inclusionist or something because I simply
can't understand why you'd rather delete a section like this than split
it off into a child article.


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: How did this happen (comixpedia??)

body:
On 11/15/05, Brown, Darin <Darin.Brown at enmu.edu> wrote:
> And that was just my point. The nature of verifiability may change depending
> on the topic. Having the same expectations for math or physics, which have
> hundreds of professional journals, vs. webcomix, which does have some
> professional journals, but where a lot of the community operates outside
> this, doesn't seem right. This is what I meant by, it raises issues about
> verifiability. Not that it doesn't exist, but that you can't always apply
> norms from one area to another.
>

Well establish some core criteria. At the moment there is nothing I
can work from.

even a list of things that should be cheaked to see if they estabilish
notability

(traffic, Author profile, firsts, influence would be a start along
with ways to cheack this)

> This is getting at what I was getting at with regard to proofs in math
> articles earlier -- sometimes, you're just not going to be able to find a
> "smoking gun" to establish notability or verify something. Verifying a
> calculation, or making judgments about whether a particular topic or person
> is notable in spite of raw numbers is a subtle issue and in any particular
> case, I would defer to experts.

Should not be too hard Web of knowlage gives the number of cites a
paper has recived. It doesn't appear to cover maths but I assume there
is an equiverlent.

> Ok, clearly there's a lot of confusion on my part (and maybe in general)
> what exactly a fork is. Does a fork really have to "take all of wikipedia's
> content?"
>

In theory that would what would be required of a true fork. A true
fork works be defineing a point in time up untill which the projects
are the same and then going seperate ways.

>
> My original point stands. If Comixpedia had simply developed harmoniously as
> a place to promote non-notable webcomics, that would be one thing. But there
> was some hostility and the creators said the site was created not just as a
> place to promote non-notables, but because they were frustrated with
> processes at AfD.
>

That is unfortunet. I would like to see forks founded under better conditions.

> You don't seem to understand my point. I'm saying that you are never going
> to be able to write down and make formal policy about every type of decision
> regarding deletion or inclusion or articles. Just like the Constitution
> requires interpretation by judges in practice, policies require
> interpretation in practice. This requires good faith, a certain deference to
> people who know more, and a certain flexibility. Saying these can be
> replaced by just writing more and more policies is folly. And it allows
> people to turn interpretation into policy.
>

However a complete lack of policy only makes things worse.

> I went there, it's all aimed toward popular music. There is nothing to stop
> someone from knocking down a relatively obscure piano concerto because
> they've never heard of it or the composer. Notability would come from the
> reputation of the concerto in the music community and things that had been
> written about it. But there could be very little written about it and still
> be notable. You have to rely on judgment. And you can never formalize this
> by writing more and more policies.
>

However since this doesn't seem to happen there is no reason to come
up with a general aggrement at this time.

> Are you suggesting they should?
>

Haven't a clue. I waiting for that project to make the articles human
readerble finishes. In the meantime fear prevernts friverlous AFDs
very nicely

> I have no idea what SEP is. And yes, the ERA stats are better than google
> rankings. They tell you more.
>

Someone else's problem field. Mentioned in Life, the Universe and Everything.

> And that makes them experts? I drink coffee most days, but I don't think I'm
> a coffee expert. I read newspapers, but don't think I'm a journalism expert.
>

No but it makes you part of the coffee drinking community. How do you
deffine a memeber of the webcomic community?

>
> Exactly my point -- you are admitting that decisions on deletion or
> notability are made on superficial appearances rather than real knowledge --
> "there are more trolls, vanity seekers in area X than Y, so I'll be a lot
> harsher on deleting articles in area X than Y". This works for some of the
> anonymous new articles, since a lot of them *are* speedy deletes. But I'm
> saying these decisions should be based on knowledge, not presumptions about
> the "odds" that the contributors are in bad faith contributing vanity.

Everything is an odds game.

>
> I was simply stating that if many of the arguments from other areas were
> applied to math, without fear, countless legitimate articles would be in AfD
> purgatory for a long time.
>
> darin

Not really. The relivant wikiprojects could probably come up with
stardards pretty fast which would cover most cases. The fact is that
the vast majority of cases go along the same lines with the same
issues.

--
geni


from_name: Arbeo M

body:
Hi Mark!

> These are problems with YOUR interpretation, NOT with me.

Throughout the past months, it has happened quite a number of times that people
have totally misinterpreted your contributions.

On the other hand, the mails written by most other participants are usually
interpreted correctly.

Now, my personal opinion is that if one is misunderstood quite often, he should
not react to that by saying: "that's not my problem" but rather try to write in a
less mistakable manner.

That way, you'll have to spend less time on clarifications in the future!

Arbeo

---------------------------------
Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - Jetzt mit 1GB kostenlosem Speicher


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: FW: Billboard chart data licensing

body:
On 11/15/05, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> IANAL and all that, but as long as we are not replicating chunks of
> the chart verbatim, merely stating that so-and-so song reached X
> position on the chart, then there won't be any problems. We're not
> possibly infringing any copyrights by simply stating what they ranked
> the song as. However, if we had an article which listed the top forty
> for a particular week, or something, that would not be ok.

I think extensive charts or graphs of Billboard chart position would
also be dubious.  A passing mention is one thing, compiling voluminous
data of Billboard chart positions another.  I'm thinking about the
week-by-week chart positions once found in the [[Ashlee Simpson]]
article, among others.

-Matt


from_name: Sam Korn

subject: [Wikitech-l] Signature problems

body:
On 11/15/05, Brion Vibber <brion.vibber at gmail.com> wrote:
> Second, raw signatures are now more strictly checked for validity.
> Currently it's doing a check for well-formed XML, which will keep out
> the common mismatched tags problem (eg having a <sup> and forgetting
> the </sup>). This may be expanded to check for unbalanced '' and '''
> wiki tags, unbalanced [[ and ]], etc. Also we will probably change it
> to either reject or pre-expand any templates.

If it's XML parsing, is it lower-case-only tags then?

Thanks for the explaination.

Sam


subject: [WikiEN-l] Synonymous article ID replacing redirects

body:
On 11/15/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> See [[WP:LAME]]. People do have thier priorities mixed up and there is
> nothing you can do about it.

I don't disagree.

Sam


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Status of article rating feature?

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> That's because the maps are marked "ALPHA QUALITY - NOT FINAL
> PRODUCTION VERSIONS" and are written in pencil. Never mind they're in
> the top-40 maps in the world - the project has peaked way too early.
>
> Damn we need the rating feature. What's holding it up right now? List
> please, referring to current version of code. (I know the servers are
> creaking ...)

Keep in mind that the cute little survey thing doesn't have anything to
do with a system for marking particular page revisions as 'public-ready'
or 'approved' in any useful way.

That's an entirely unrelated and separate issue (and one the project
actually needs), which Special:Validate (which might, hypothetically,
produce 'interesting data' of some sort to some one) does nothing to
help directly.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Set up a PHP-Page including articles from Mediawiki

body:
thomas wrote:
> I'm trying to set up a PHP-Page including articles from my mediawiki and
> also want to submit articles to the wiki through my page.
> Because I dont like to manipulate the mediawikis database, I tried to
> implement the html form that is used while editing the mediawiki so it
> will work the same way on my page aswell and encountered some problems.
>
> What kind of possibilities do I have to insert/get data from the
> mediawiki using  an API (method calls)?
> I'm using Mediawiki 1.5.2

Sorry, but we don't have a lot of internal API documentation at this
time besides the code and the doc comments in the code.

Read through the code and see how things get called.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Markup; html

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> Maybe templates should be HTML-cleaned as independent entities before
> transclusion / substitution into the larger page? Or would that not work
> because the code doesn't work that way, or break existing uses?

That's what the non-tidy mode does, IIRC, and that's why it breaks
existing uses (which are IMHO bad to begin with) which open tags in one
chunk and close them in the next, etc.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Help: <math> not working on my wiki

body:
Jason Stubbs wrote:
> I managed to fix the problem with the <nowiki> tags mentioned below, but
> i have now discovered that I cannot parse <math> tags. I get the
> following error displayed on the page when I try to parse:

Please restore the original code and test again; we do not know what
horrors this fckeditor hack may have wrought on the code. If it's
broken, complain to the authors of that hack.

> <math>\sqrt{1-e^2}</math>
>
> *Failed to parse (unknown error): \sqrt{1-e^2}*
>
> I've checked through the all of the preference files to make sure it is
> enabled, and I think I have everything set up correctly.  Is there
> something extra I need that is not supplied in the 1.5.2 build?

Math requires several external programs, please see the FAQ and the
math/README file.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Signature problems

body:
Sam Korn wrote:
> On 11/15/05, Brion Vibber <brion.vibber at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Second, raw signatures are now more strictly checked for validity.
>> Currently it's doing a check for well-formed XML, which will keep out
>> the common mismatched tags problem (eg having a  and forgetting
>> the ). This may be expanded to check for unbalanced '' and '''
>> wiki tags, unbalanced [[ and ]], etc. Also we will probably change it
>> to either reject or pre-expand any templates.
>
> If it's XML parsing, is it lower-case-only tags then?

Since XML is case-sensitive, this check will require that you match on
both sides: ... is ok, ... will fail.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] [WikiEN-l] Status of article rating feature?

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> It's been in the MediaWiki code base for months and we've been
> screaming for it to be switched on (see wikien-l in all that time).
>
> I've directly asked on wikitech-l if there's some reason this feature
> is *never* going in and if I should just stop bothering, and been told
> that's not the case and that there are things that need fixing first.
>
> But the original developer (Magnus Manske) *still* can't get any clear
> list of what needs fixing for it to go in.

I already told Magnus, if there's anything terribly wrong with it it'll
get fixed after it's turned on (and if necessary, back off).

There's at least a half dozen people who could turn it on this very
moment, but nobody's done it in all these months, probably because
nobody on the server team thinks it's particularly important, useful, or
high-priority. (If someone does think this and has refrained from
turning it on for some other reason, they haven't told me so.)

It's a solution in search of a problem; it doesn't solve the
validated-version-display issue in any way, it's just a survey form that
might, in theory, produce data that might, in theory, be interesting or
useful to someone one day.

Will it be worth the trouble of turning it on and possibly having to
deal with fixing it when further problems become evident? Who knows.

> So. What's up with Special:Validate?

It's on my list for this week, I'll see about getting it turned on and
working.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: FxParlant

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Desperate for a linkification expert

body:
Thanks a lot Andrew,

I'm playing now to find the correct combination of these functions and
get what I want.
 (avenier, pronounced "avenir" in french. Nice :-) )

Fran?ois

Andrew Venier wrote:
> FxParlant wrote:
>
>> hi,
>>
>> I did something wrong, and now I end up with :
>>
>> src="<a href="http:
>>
>> in some links.
>>
>> I've also noticed the **class='external free'** attribute in these
>> catastrophic links. Can someone tell me in which function the 'external
>> free" attribute is set ?
>>
>>
> class 'external free' would appear to come from:
>  Parser::replaceFreeExternalLinks()
>    Linker::makeExternalLink()
>      Linker::getExternalLinkAttributes()


subject: [WikiEN-l] Of Pokemon and baseball

body:
Geoff Burling wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Nov 2005, Andrew Gray wrote:
>
>
>>Incidentally, today's rather demoralising AfD: [[Wikipedia:Articles
>>for deletion/Surviving veterans of the First World War]]. Nominated on
>>_Sunday the 13th of November_. Oh, the timing.
>>
>
> That beats my latest encounter with the AfD Zone: consider a group
> of articles cut-n-pasted from man pages that are part of the Debian
> distro of Linux, nominated for deletion. While some of the reasons
> offered for deletion were plausible, the nominator also added
> that these articles were suitable candidates because they were
> "copyright violations".
>
> Maybe I'm just dense, but at least 2 other people agreed that they
> were copyright violations, and not one bothered to explain how they
> came to this counterintuitive conclusion. When I pressed for an
> explanation, a terse reply pointed me to a section of a Wikipedia
> article where it was stated that GPL was incompatible with GFDL. (No
> explanation, just a bare statement.)
>
> Last summer when I was at OSCON, I met the guy at the Free Software
> Foundation who handles the legal questions about the GPL & GFDL.
> If I ever find his business card, I will email him to see if the
> hairs were split correctly in this case.
>

That is the most bizzare form of copyright paranoia I've ever heard of...

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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from_name: Migdejong

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: {{CURRENTSECOND}}

body:
Besides. This is probably the worst random selection method I've ever seen in
use. It only allows for the middle options to appear... Ever tried the
dice-rolling game. You'd be arrested for using it in a casino...

Mig


list: foundation-l

from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject:
[Foundation-l] Incubator Wiki for New Wikimedia Projects (was
	Vote to create Wikiversity Vote)

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>
>> The process to create a new project is far too difficult.  An
>> incubator wiki would facilitate that process.  The fact that
>> Wikicities is already doing something which you feel has overlap (but
>> then later say wouldn't have any overlap), is really irrelevant.
>>
> The process should be that difficult.  The impetus for new projects
> seems to be more often a reflection of people's inability or
> unwillingness to look for compromise solutions;  it has very little to
> do with an objective need for another project.
> One starts from Wikipedia with its set of fundamental principles.  A
> new project should first of all have a motivation based on a variance
> of one of those fundamental principles.  The first spin-off was Meta
> which when I first joined was promoted as a place where one could
> engage in POV rants that could not be allowed on Wikipedia.
> Wiktionary was a response to "Wikipedia is not a dictionary".
> Wikibooks was intended for books (not necessarily strictly
> *text*books) which required that a subject be treated with more depth
> than would be possible in an encyclopedia; I've always believed that
> the "No original research" could be a little more relaxed in a
> Wikibooks context.
>
> The answer to deletionist controversies should not always be to
> establish a new project; it should lie in an attempt to find common
> ground.  That's something which a certain cadre of people on Wikipedia
> refuses to seriously consider.  I don't know what rules the Wikijunior
> people have been violating in Wikibooks, but that is an omnous claim.
> It seems to reflect the usual dynamic conflict between those who want
> clarity and certainty, and those who treasure innovation as a primary
> value.  A project has a serious problem when either of those two gains
> dominance.
>
> Once established I believe in the autonomy of the separate projects,
> but they still need to have an understanding of where they come from.
> Autonomy should not be an excuse for excluding what might otherwise be
> allowed, but this is an extremely difficult problem which can only be
> addressed with a lot of goowill.
>
> Ec
Hoi,
The idea that "one start from Wikipedia and its fundamental principles"
is historically true and that is it. Now that there are more projects it
is better to say that the fundamental principles are the principles
associated with the Wikimedia Foundation. This implies that it should
fulfil a position in what the Wikimedia Foundation stands for. The "No
original research" is sensible for an encyclopaedia but when some
research leads to a proper Wiktionary description, nobody will complain.

Projects have their autonomy but they are not autonomous in everything;
the Wikimedia principles should govern what room there is for this
autonomy. All projects are part of the overall goal of the Wikimedia
Foundation; to bring information to people in their language. This
implies that the different project even though they have their autonomy
are part of this greater goal. It is therefore that in my opinion the
projects should support each other where applicable. Where more
information is needed than is provided in Wikipedia, it should be
possible to easily find it in either Wikibooks, Wiktionary or
Wikiwhereever. This is important because this is what brings what we do
together. It limits what a project is and it expands the potential for
finding the information that is needed.

Thanks,
   GerardM


list: wikimedia-l


references:
<813E7CE2-EDB7-4067-B670-7EDE950EA713@specialbusservice.com>
	<f3fedb0d0511141707m2fe242fau@mail.gmail.com>
	<2C7C96A3-78CF-4A96-B0A0-82798A55D9A2@specialbusservice.com>
	<f3fedb0d0511141721q3d8d07d8u@mail.gmail.com>
	<5AD37ECD-581D-406B-B1F7-FC2110EF5850@specialbusservice.com>
	<43794096.5010506@tonal.clara.co.uk> <437AABAC.7010008@pobox.com>

body:
On 11/15/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> That's what the non-tidy mode does, IIRC, and that's why it breaks
> existing uses (which are IMHO bad to begin with) which open tags in one
> chunk and close them in the next, etc.

Which I remember you telling everyone not to do early on when
templates were new.

-Matt


body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Darin Brown wrote:
>
>
>>Here we do run into an issue which esp. tricky in this particular case. By
>>its very nature, webcomics and the webcomics community are going to eschew
>>the more traditional verification mechanisms, most esp. those found in
>>print. Of course -- the entire phenomenon itself is based around the
>>internet. The entire *community* itself, its own internal verification
>>procedures, its own internal conditions upon which it deems verification
>>necessary, are non-traditional. It is disingenuous to hold it accountable to
>>similar verification procedures as say, mathematics or physics. You are not
>>going to find thousands of references to webcomix in the academic
>>literature. And it will be very difficult to find many in print. The fact
>>is, the phenomenon of webcomix itself is highly radical and raises serious
>>issues about the nature of verification itself
>
>
>
> Oh, it's much better than that. There is in fact a real genuine actual
> peer-reviewed academic journal on comics called ImageTexT
> (http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/). One of the managing editors
> is Phil Sandifer, who you will know better as Snowspinner. In a
> jawdropping assumption of bad faith (which is, of course, the reason
> why AFD is so poisonous to the Wikipedia community in its present
> form), the AFD regulars did their damnedest to get coverage in it
> excluded from the webcomics guidelines *because* Snowspinner was the
> editor. The excuse was that he was too involved or too close or knew
> too much or something.
>
> This was after they'd driven off a previous comics expert for knowing
> more than them on the topic, leading him to say "you people are
> clearly idiots" and form Comixpedia.
>
> geni will, if he reads back, agree that this is closer to the
> chronology of what actually happened in the formation of the comics
> inclusion guidelines: (1) provably bad AFD, (2) deliberate attempt to
> exclude academic expert for being an expert, (3) guidelines then
> formed such that the bad AFD would have led to a deletion.
>
> (Don't take my word for it - read the talk page, it's amazing. Note in
> particular the direct assertion that editors who confess to knowing
> *NOTHING* on a topic should have their opinions count just as much as
> an actual provable expert, for the purposes of achieving "consensus" -
> remembering that the AFD jargon meaning of "consensus" is a two-thirds
> vote. Therefore, that a two-thirds majority of editors who
> *admittedly* know nothing at all about a topic can get the topic
> excluded from Wikipedia altogether over the objections of experts on
> said topic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Webcomics/Notability_and_inclusion_guidelines
> )
>
>

Larry Sanger was right. Wikipedia is too anti-elitist. Maybe we should
bring Nupedia back.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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subject:
[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias (was How
	did	this happen (comixpedia??))

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
> On 11/15/05, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Yep. AFD is one place where Larry Sanger's claim of blatant
>>anti-expert bias is provably correct.
>>
>>So. Is Wikipedia's provable anti-expert bias here a good or bad thing?
>>If bad, what to do about it? Please discuss.
>
>
> Snowspinner, who does actually know a thing or two about webcomics,
> has been practising some interventionism in webcomic article deletion
> debates.   This kind of thing isn't for the faint of heart, because
> usually it involved convincingly facing down a bunch of ignoramuses,
> but he's had some success.
>
> I have come around to the suggestion that I formerly felt rather wary
> of: closing AfD at least for an experimental period, because of its
> function in lending leverage to attempts to exclude whole subjects
> from Wikipedia.  The current activities organised around AfD not good
> for the long term health of the project, in my opinion.
>

In addition, undelete everything closed by AFD in the last year. If
stuff needs deleting, CSD and copyvio provisions should be able to
handle it.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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body:
kosebamse at gmx.net wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote on Sun Nov 13 03:48:10 UTC 2005:
>
>
>>you took any random 20 articles and compared them to their predecessors
>>2 years ago, virtually _all_ articles would have improved.
>
>
> I agree. However, to judge a reference work, do you go by the best, or the
> worst, or the average quality? I think most readers would judge us by their
> first few impressions. As soon as they stray away from the featured article
> on the front page, or happen to run into the random pages, their impression
> will be not favorable. That's what I tried to find to out with my twenty
> random pages.
>

Here's a better idea: start from the main page.

Featured article is [[Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9]]. Description links
[[Photograph]], [[Schmidt telescope]] (which is a redirect), [[Roche
limit]] and a few others...

- [[Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9]] is featured; I'll come back to this.
- [[Photograph]] is pretty short but reasonable
- [[Schmidt camera]] is fairly technical but readable
- [[Roche limit]] is featured

Now, from the main page article we find the following "items of interest":

- [[Palomar Observatory]], also linked from the main page, is reasonable
- [[Astronomical spectroscopy]] is fairly long, reasonably technical,
but readable
- [[Hubble Space Telescope]] is featured
- [[Ulysses probe]] is short but reasonable

So, what have we found?

>From the main page, I've found 3 featured articles, and anything else of
interest wasn't bad. Maybe it's just the subject matter we're dealing
with (hard science tends to be easy to write about because you don't
need to interpret and speculate from 1000 sources); how will tommorrow's
featured article fare?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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from_name: Servien Ilaino

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Request for creation of Nedersaksisch;
	Low Saxon (NL) and Romani; Vlax Romany

body:
Hi,

I would like to request the creation of Nedersaksisch; Low Saxon (NL)
as soon as possible, it has been discussed for over 5 months now, most
things have been cleared up and most people agree the wiki should be
created soon, for the benefit of the Low Saxon community in the
Netherlands and I guess to wikipedia. There are 2 oppose votes, one
from Node ue (who deletes the request from the approved page almost
daily) and has been put on again by various users, the second user is
a non-active anonymous user at meta-wiki.

Romani; Vlax Romany has 1 "temporary against vote" which is also a
non-active anonymous user at meta-wiki. The majority however supports
the creation, and should be created as soon as possible sothat the
Romani-community can also start with their own wikipedia.

Summary:

1. Nedersaksisch
2. Romani

More info can be found at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Approved_requests_for_new_languages

or at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Requests for new
languages/nds-nl and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Requests
for new languages/Vlax Romany.

Regards,
Servien Ilaino


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias (was How
	did	this	happen (comixpedia??))

body:
Mark Gallagher wrote:
>
> G'day David,
> [AfD]
>
>> So. Is Wikipedia's provable anti-expert bias here a good or bad
>> thing? If bad, what to do about it? Please discuss.
>
>
> It depends on the expert.  On the one hand, an unbiased view on AfD is a
> very welcome thing.  Imagine if SPUI were the sole authority on what
> roadcruft we should keep, and what we should delete!  And yet, he's
> undeniably an amateur expert on transportation in the USA --- should his
> opinion count for more than the metric truckload of people who don't
> think an unnoteworthy back street encyclopaedic?
>
> On the other hand, anti-expert bias is inherently a Bad Thing. Wikipedia
> is too populist.  We take experts and say to them "well, I'm an ignorant
> moron from Power Cable, Nebraska, and my views count just as much as
> yours do.  So tell me, if you can, why Lyndon LaRouche isn't our Lord
> and Saviour?"
>
> The question is not whether we should be blanket pro- or anti-expert.
> It's how far to either extreme we should lean.
>

Additionally, it's not like we don't have experts who want to help us;
we've had a few "your article on (blah) sucks, I'm an expert on (blah),
what should I do?", to which all I can do is write out {{sofixit}}
longhand. (If you've ever bothered to read the template, instead of just
referencing it by name, you'll realise that it's actually pretty useful...)

What worries me is that with our growing popularity, we're going to have
more experts arriving on our doorstep, trying to write articles on their
specialist areas, and leave in disgust when some 2-bit moron votes "d,
nn. cruft".

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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from_name: Mark Gallagher

subject: [WikiEN-l] Tower of Babel - Voting remains stupid as well as evil.

body:
G'day Tony,

> There's no reason why there should be two or more separate articles,
> with people squabbling about which one should be the main article and
> which the redirect, if both exist and have precisely the same article
> id.  The synonym creation would also have to operate for the
> corresponding talk namespace.

Why ... it's so crazy, it's brilliant!

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

--
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subject:
[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias (was How did
	this	happen (comixpedia??))

body:
G'day David,
[AfD]
> So. Is Wikipedia's provable anti-expert bias here a good or bad
> thing? If bad, what to do about it? Please discuss.

It depends on the expert.  On the one hand, an unbiased view on AfD is a
very welcome thing.  Imagine if SPUI were the sole authority on what
roadcruft we should keep, and what we should delete!  And yet, he's
undeniably an amateur expert on transportation in the USA --- should his
opinion count for more than the metric truckload of people who don't
think an unnoteworthy back street encyclopaedic?

On the other hand, anti-expert bias is inherently a Bad Thing.
Wikipedia is too populist.  We take experts and say to them "well, I'm
an ignorant moron from Power Cable, Nebraska, and my views count just as
much as yours do.  So tell me, if you can, why Lyndon LaRouche isn't our
Lord and Saviour?"

The question is not whether we should be blanket pro- or anti-expert.
It's how far to either extreme we should lean.

Cheers,

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

--
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from_name: Tom Cadden

subject: [WikiEN-l] People editing their own Wikipedia articles.

body:
But what if an article contains a widely believed 'fact' that actually is bullshit.

 eg,

 Michael was born in Toronto in 1956 and moved to Atlanta in 1961.

 But Michael finds the article and knows that he was born in Ottawa but his family moved to Toronto some months after his birth. Plenty of internet sites say Toronto but he knows for a fact that it is wrong. Can he correct that, or does he need to produce his birth certificate to correct an error about himself? lol

Kat Walsh <mindspillage at gmail.com> wrote: On 11/15/05, Joseph Reagle  wrote:

>  But what of
> when the edit is of merit? Are the most qualified primary sources
> disqualified from editing the Wikipedia article? Need a primary source
> published her first person claim elsewhere before it can bear upon the
> Wikipedia article?

I've never liked [[WP:AUTO]] myself. I would be inclined to let
article subjects edit the articles about themselves in the same way
that anyone else is, perhaps held to a higher standard on attributing
every assertion to a verifiable outside source and writing neutrally.

Sure, they can leave notes on the talk page. Which for a major
celebrity is great, as plenty of people will be watching or otherwise
interested in the page. But for some of these minor figures who
stumble across their entries, this may be the only attention the
article gets for a long while. It may also be one of the only sources
of information about them on the web, and probably the most prominent
-- first Google hit on their names, etc. -- and to say "no, you can't
edit this article, you have to let wrong information sit there until
someone bothers to come by to fix it" doesn't seem quite right, and
doesn't seem like the way to establish goodwill.

As Matt posted, the nutcases aren't the norm, and they can be dealt
with for the misbehaviors that make them come off as batshit crazy
rather than writing about themselves. Most are reasonable people who
happen to quite reasonably not want falsehoods spread about them on a
top-40 website (or anywhere, really), and are just not familiar with
the way Wikipedia works enough to realize that everything must be
cited and NPOV. I don't see much harm in letting them edit on
themselves with a little guidance, some strong prodding to cite
sources, and a caution that they don't have any more authority over
the content of the article than any other editor. Still vastly
preferred for others to edit instead, of course, but sometimes no one
else really takes enough interest.

-Kat
[[User:Mindspillage]]

--
"There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily
escaped the chronicler's mind."  --Douglas Adams
_______________________________________________
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To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
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body:
On 11/15/05, Tom Cadden <thomcadden at yahoo.ie> wrote:
> But what if an article contains a widely believed 'fact' that actually is bullshit.
>
>  eg,
>
>  Michael was born in Toronto in 1956 and moved to Atlanta in 1961.
>
>  But Michael finds the article and knows that he was born in Ottawa but his family moved to Toronto some months after his birth. Plenty of internet sites say Toronto but he knows for a fact that it is wrong. Can he correct that, or does he need to produce his birth certificate to correct an error about himself? lol

I suggest we say "unless there is some reason why we think he is
misleading us, believe him".  Unsourced accuracy actually is better
than sourced inaccuracy.  It's just that the wrong one conforms to
policy...

Sam


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias (was How
	did this happen (comixpedia??))

body:
kosebamse at gmx.net wrote:
> Alphax alphasigmax at gmail.com wrote at Tue Nov 15 12:15:00 UTC 2005:
>
>
>>What worries me is that with our growing popularity, we're going to have
>>more experts arriving on our doorstep, trying to write articles on their
>>specialist areas, and leave in disgust when some 2-bit moron votes "d,
>>nn. cruft".
>
>
> As far as I can say, that has always been a serious problem. It's not a
> matter of elitism. An expert who is used to discussing his views  with
> well-informed people on an academic level will not enjoy the experience of
> having to defend basic and established knowledge of his field against
> schoolkids whose only expertise is with video games. I am offering no
> opinion on the desirability of it, but the latter probably form a very
> sizable fraction of our user base.
>

Once upon a time, I was a kid who read encyclopedias... although I find
our video game articles interesting, it's the technical/Real Life
details that interest me, not the plot-related "and here we see a
detailed breakdown of all the weapons available, powerups, world
details, monsters...". Things like "although it was brought out at the
same time as (X), the (Y) feature made it more popular" *do*, because
it's factual, not descriptive fiction.

Or something.

As for the "X in popular culture" plague, I recently (well, a few weeks
ago) found one of these in one of the first article merges I did. I
understand that the information has to go *somewhere*; it's just a
matter of where... should every known appearance of railguns in ficiton
appear in the "railgun" article, or be spread out between the articles
on a dozen games, movies and books?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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subject:
[WikiEN-l] WikiProjects vs the community splitting (was "Oh,
	Yuck: The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty")

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> geni wrote:
>
>
>>Forks allow people with a common interest to work quitely on a project
>>sorounded only by those who share their interests. For some this
>>enviroment may be more productive.
>
>
>
> We have WikiProjects to create such an environment, and they have the
> added bonus of keeping the content usable within Wikipedia (so that,
> e.g., the creators of a community fork aren't so damn pissed off with
> their treatment here they pick an incompatible license as a
> "fuck-you").
>
> What is there that a community fork achieves that a WikiProject does
> not, in your view?
>

I can think of one thing: they're guaranteed that no dumb kid is going
to wander in a slap {{afd}} on everything they're working on.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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subject:
[WikiEN-l] Tower of Babel - Voting to ignore MoS, NCs for language
	reasons.

body:
charles matthews wrote:
> Justin Cormack wrote
>
>> I think it is an inevitable trend; there is
>
> no reason now not to use local names and the world is becoming more
> internationalized.
>
> My question is, what makes WP look better (more professional,
> better-informed, that sort of thing)?
>
> For example, Mumbai.  English is an official language in India, no?  So
> we can get the official English-language name by following the Indian
> government.  This should be painless, and absolutely no reason to get
> bogged down in side issues.
>

*ring ring*

"Hello?"

"Hello Ivory Coast government person, what's the name of your country in
English?"

"C?te d'Ivoire."

*click*

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: Arbitration Committee members granted checkuser
	tool

body:
G'day Chris,

> If this policy were implemented, and you refused, your access to the
> personal information would be revoked.

And who, then, would have access to the personal information?
*Somebody* must, that much is certain.  And we can't afford to pay
someone just to look up IP addresses all day.

--
Mark Gallagher
"What?  I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse

--
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from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
> I would like to request the creation of Nedersaksisch; Low Saxon (NL)
> as soon as possible, it has been discussed for over 5 months now, most
> things have been cleared up and most people agree the wiki should be

"Most things"... you have still not clearly explained many details of
the proposal and have instead chosen to ignore inquiries.

"Most people"... the vote is 17-2 currently. You were still saying it
should win when it was 16-4. How should anybody trust YOUR judgement?

And you're right, it HAS been 5 months. Since then, conditions changed
-- there is no longer the "discrimination" you talked about. After
some discussions with Arbeo, a number of new facts have come to light
which make your proposal even more ridiculous.

> created soon, for the benefit of the Low Saxon community in the
> Netherlands and I guess to wikipedia. There are 2 oppose votes, one
> from Node ue (who deletes the request from the approved page almost
> daily) and has been put on again by various users, the second user is
> a non-active anonymous user at meta-wiki.

"Removes" is a better word. "Deletes" has the connotation that I
removed it from existence. I just moved it back to the other page.
"Approved requests for new languages" has only in the past contained
languages with 1 or less oppose votes. You can't seem to get this
through your brain.

> Romani; Vlax Romany has 1 "temporary against vote" which is also a
> non-active anonymous user at meta-wiki. The majority however supports
> the creation, and should be created as soon as possible sothat the
> Romani-community can also start with their own wikipedia.

What Romani community? The two inactive users who have made no edits
for weeks? I do support that request, but I understand if a developer
won't create it. Why not wait until there is at least one real article
on the test-wiki? If there is really a community, that should be easy.

> Summary:
>
> 1. Nedersaksisch
> 2. Romani

No, the summary is: VLAX Romani. Not Romani and Nedersaksisch. We
already have a Nedersaksisch Wikipedia. The proper name is probably
"Nedersaksisch van Keuninkryk Nederlaand" or whatever, since you
insist that nobody can use any English name.

No book mentions such a language. It is not a real language, it exists
only in your mind. No website mentions it except for Wikimedia. To
create such a WP would be original research.

There are 5 major dialects of Low Saxon language. "Dutch Low Saxon" is
not one of them -- all of the dialects of the Netherlands are the same
group as Hamburg dialect.

You continue attempts to mislead people.

Mark

--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin


body:
> Mark,
> I think you do not know the situation on the ground or you misrepresent
> this situation in a magnificent way. The nds wikipedia has been
> high-jacked by a majority who insist on a particular orthography who is
> German oriented. An orthography that is foreign to the nds as spoken in

No -- it was hijacked by Heiko Evermann. He has recently become
inactive. REcently, most articles posted in Dutch spelling have been
allowed to remain unchanged.

http://nds.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noord-Veluws
http://nds.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrees_spraak

> the Netherlands. Your assertion that there should be only one nds is
> fine but the majority who does nds does differently. The factoid that
> the Dutch dialects are considered to be part of the "Hamburg dialect"
> has nothing to do with the orthography used.

Wikipedias in the past have not been divided by orthography.

> There are two solutions to this; either there is no compulsory
> orthography on the nds.wikipedia or a second wikipedia is allowed. I do

. . .

Servien seems to think otherwise. He insists that his language is
different, not just spelling, but otherwise. Experts on LS that I
consulted told me this is not true.

> think that it is not up to you to be in judgement on the creation of new
> Wikipedias. You behave like if it is your right, the fact that you have

When did I say this should be delayed because I voted against it? I
think it should not be created because Servien never answered many of
the questions that were asked, there is still significant opposition
to the proposal, and he has shown an anti-wiki attitude on the
test-wp. I also think it should be delayed because the situation has
changed (namely, Dutch-spelt articles have been allowed to stay now).

> a lot of bookish knowledge does not count for much. With the skills that

Oh?

> you have, it would be better if you helped fledgling projects in the way
> that grows the Neapolitan wikipedia. It has already some 3700 articles.

Well, then, why waste your time writing e-mails? Why don't you go help
fledgling projects? Since, I don't spend any time doing that,
obviously.

> works where and why. It does not suit you to be negative. Certainly not
> when you have your facts wrong.

Which facts do I have wrong? I have been told this over and over by
Servien. He has offered nothing I don't already know.

> And do not trash talk other people. If you want to have people think
> that you mean well, you should at least assume their good faith.

Google "talking trash", and you'll see that I'm not talking trash.
After all that I have been through with Servien, I don't think it's
possible anymore to assume good faith.

Even when the total vote was 16-4, he kept moving it to the Approved
requests page.

> Thanks,
>     GerardM

I always thought it was funny that you ended even the rudest and most
blunt e-mails with such a polite phrase.

Cheers,
Mark

--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin


from_name: Justin Cormack

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: FW: Billboard chart data licensing

body:
On 16 Nov 2005, at 02:33, Stephen Bain wrote:
>
> IANAL and all that, but as long as we are not replicating chunks of
> the chart verbatim, merely stating that so-and-so song reached X
> position on the chart, then there won't be any problems. We're not
> possibly infringing any copyrights by simply stating what they ranked
> the song as. However, if we had an article which listed the top forty
> for a particular week, or something, that would not be ok.

In US law it probably is ok to copy the whole thing verbatim, as
compilations of facts (eg telephone directories) are not protected
by copyright law. Charts might be different (we all know there is
some creativity in their compilation...) but the question is
whether it is worth defending with real money in court. One can
presume that Jimbo's position is based on a legal consultation
and reflects what the lawyers think it is worth defending, though
if anyone thinks it is worth having the lists it is defensible I
believe, despite Bilboard's claims. (I dont think it is worth
having them).

Justinc


body:
On 16 Nov 2005, at 03:21, Stephen Bain wrote:

> On 11/16/05, Justin Cormack <justin at specialbusservice.com> wrote:
>>
>> In US law it probably is ok to copy the whole thing verbatim, as
>> compilations of facts (eg telephone directories) are not protected
>> by copyright law. Charts might be different (we all know there is
>> some creativity in their compilation...)
>
> According to this page:
> http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/about_us/bbmethodology.jsp
> the Hot 100 (for example) is compiled using formulas combining sales
> data and airplay data. I think that makes it more than a compilation
> of facts.

I suspect a weighted average of facts is still a fact. It is hard for
them to argue as it is supposed to be an unbiased estimate of audience.
What they might argue in court is a different matter.

Justinc


from_name: Keith Old

body:
That seems sensible to me. In the articles, they are facts about an artists
career. We might also want to put this information on the WP:MUSIC page so
as to develop a policy.

You could claim that they are US chart hits and leave it at that although
that raises verifiabuility problems. For old charts, you could possibly look
at using Cashbox charts as an alternative. Top 40 charts has a US chart
listing as well for more modern times. see (http://top40-charts.com/)

The other problem is what happens in other countries if their charts do the
same using Billboard as a precedent.

Regards

Keith Old

User:Capitalistroadster

On 11/16/05, Brandon Cordy <b.touch at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> As far as legal issues go, I was always told it was better to be safe than
> sorry.
>
> Be that as it may, I emailed Jimbo, and he says that we should keep the
> BIllboard info in the artist/song/album articles, and delete articles
> dedicated to re-listing, for example, the Hot 100 #1 hits and such.
>
> On 11/15/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 11/15/05, Brandon Cordy <b.touch at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > (we should probably move this discussion back to the mail list,
> but...)
> > >
> > > "A lesson to me?" I don't really care either way whether or not
> > Wikipedia
> > > lists Billboard information; the legality of the issue was something
> > that
> > > peopel felt should be inquired about (the question has been o nthe
> table
> > for
> > > quite some time), and so it was. It's better to research something
> than
> > to
> > > turn a blind eye to what very well could be an unallowable use of
> > > propriatery information.
> > >
> >
> >
> > Not from a legal standpoint.
> >
> > --
> > geni
> > _______________________________________________
> > WikiEN-l mailing list
> > WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikitech-l] sr.wiki has been waiting for months!

body:
On 11/15/05, Milos Rancic <millosh at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> Mark, thank you for asking this.
>
> On 11/15/05, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Where's the patch to LanguageSr.php and the conversion library to make
> > this happen?
>
> It can be found at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:BraneJ/Serbian_Variants with the
> hole explanation. I can send the whole files, too.

Please open a bug in bugzilla for this and attach the files (and
unified diffs where appropriate) to it.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Main Page under a namespace

body:
On 11/16/05, Puzzlet Chung <puzzlet at gmail.com> wrote:
> Korean Wikipedia is seeking for new name for the Main Page, for
> ambiguity of the term we've chosen. Some support to put it under a
> namespace like Wikipedia: or Portal:(which hasn't been created yet),
> but I haven't seen any other Wikipedia had done it before. Is it OK to
> put Main Page under a namespace?

Currently the name of the main page and its url are the same, so this
would require a change in the software (split them into visible text &
url).


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> The answer to deletionist controversies should not always be to
> establish a new project; it should lie in an attempt to find common
> ground.  That's something which a certain cadre of people on Wikipedia
> refuses to seriously consider.  I don't know what rules the Wikijunior
> people have been violating in Wikibooks, but that is an omnous claim.
> It seems to reflect the usual dynamic conflict between those who want
> clarity and certainty, and those who treasure innovation as a primary
> value.  A project has a serious problem when either of those two gains
> dominance.
>
The issue I have with Wikijunior is not that it is necessarily violating
Wikibooks policies, but that it exists in its own seperate domain in
many ways with its own set of policies, governed by groups of people
that otherwise have nothing to do with Wikibooks, or at least are not
actively participating in the larger Wikibooks community.  Policy
decisions being made on Meta are being applied to Wikibooks, which IMHO
is especially difficult to deal with, especially when users and even
admins on Wikibooks are not even aware that these decisions are even
being made.  I'm not talking general policies that apply to all
projects, but decisions about just the Wikijunior pages on Wikibooks.
 This is especially difficult when long-term policy discussions are
taking place that a new contributor to Wikijunior has almost no way to
learn about unless they are already very well versed with Wikimedia
politics.  There already is a small but growing community that is
working on just Wikijunior pages and very little else on any other
Wikimedia project.  I don't know of any other comparable situation like
this for any other Wikimedia project.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
What I saw, and based my vote to accept the case on, is the posting
of derogatory material on the talk page of the article which has
minimal or no relationship to the subject of the article. Chip is a
member of the Lawyer's Guild and someone else was or he signed a
petition and someone else did, a lot of guilt by association,
material that could not have been put into the article, but laid out
in full on the talk page. Nob, who did this, is trying to make the
point that this is what Chip does in his work. That criticism might
belong in the article, but Nob is "disrupting Wikipedia to make a
point."

Why they do this, I think, is so the material will show up on Google.
We might consider shielding our talk pages from Google as folks are
gaming us in this way.

Fred

On Nov 15, 2005, at 3:33 PM, Chip Berlet wrote:

> For those interested in the complexity of the issues involved when a
> Wiki editor is discouraged from editing their own Wikipedia
> article, but
> is facing a concerted effort to fill that article with negative and
> dubious material, see the arbitration case I just filed:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration#Nobs01_a
> nd_others_acting_in_concert
>
> And feel free to jump in with discussion denouncing me, supporting me,
> or whatever.  It is complicated and messy.
>
> :-)
>
> Cberlet
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: {{CURRENTSECOND}}

body:
On 11/15/05, Migdejong <Migdejong at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Besides. This is probably the worst random selection method I've ever seen in
> use. It only allows for the middle options to appear... Ever tried the
> dice-rolling game. You'd be arrested for using it in a casino...

I don't think that's true considering I just tried it and rolled a 1
followed by a 6, which are not the middle options. If there really is
a problem with the extension, which I'm not convinced there is, please
make comments on that at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Algorithm/RandomSelection

Angela.


subject: [WikiEN-l] AfD suggestions

body:
Some of those suggestions have merits. The Australian Deletion Project
sorting is working out quite well because we have editors who make sure that
relevant notices are listed when appropriate.

It is often quite useful to list articles at the appropriate discussion
point to get the viewpoint of those people who know more about the subject.
The other day I listed Britlist, a website with a lot of Google results but
with an article written by an employee of the company, on the British
Wikipedian noticeboard. I wanted to determine whether it was a notable
company or just someone trying to get free advertising. As an Australian, I
didn't know this. After contributions from 4 or 5 British Wikipedians, it
was determined that it was a non-notable website with just 39 unique Google
hits and listed on AfD. This sort of prediscussion amongst interested people
can be useful.

As to expertise, the best way is to show that you know what you are talking
about is to demonstrate by casting considered votes. It is easy to claim
expertise over the web but more difficult to show it.

Regards

Keith Old

On 11/16/05, Brown, Darin <Darin.Brown at enmu.edu> wrote:
>
> > Message: 4
> > Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 12:49:12 -0000
> > From: "charles matthews" <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
> > Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's provable anti-expertise bias (was
> > How did thishappen (comixpedia??))
> > To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> > Message-ID: <005f01c5e9e2$fc09d270$7cac0656 at NorthParade>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
> > reply-type=original
> >
> > Filtering: make a 24 hour wait before nominations go public at AfD, so
> > that
> > admins can do speedy deletes and keeps.
> >
> > Mediated: sort noms with admin sponsors to delete from those which are
> not
> > speedied but have no support either way.
> >
> > Sort: by relevant WikiProject for example. Nominator's responsibility.
> > Make
> > sorted noms a crisper process.
> >
> > Categorise: why this nomination?
>
> All excellent suggestions! Have these ideas been raised before? It seems
> these *could* go a long way to smoothing things out at AfD.
>
> > All this is without Sangerising and having people arguing that other
> > people
> > don't know what they're talking about.
>
> Sangerising is one thing. I'm certainly not in favor of worshipping
> expertise, credentials, degrees, or elitism. But it's one thing to be
> anti-credentialist and anti-elitist, where you're throwing out the
> *requirement* that people have credentials to voice an opinion. It's quite
> another to *boast* about how ignorant you are on a subject, and still make
> decisions based on the ignorance you just declared. I don't consider being
> against *that* behaviour to be Sangerising.
>
> Put it this way: I guess I'm "elitist" in the sense that I'm willing (I
> hope) to listen to and possibly defer to people on subjects, when they
> know
> more about them or are better informed about them. Where I'd like to think
> I'm "anti-elitist" is that I don't hold formal credentials as the only way
> to establish expertise. There are many roads to Rome. If someone
> demonstrates, by repeated contributions, discussions, and comments, that
> they're knowledgeable and informed, then I will listen and tend to defer
> to
> them on that subject. I know I'm not perfect and I don't always hold to
> this
> in practice, but it's what I aim for.
>
> When someone openly boasts their ignorance on a particular subject, but
> still insists their voice should carry equal weight on that subject, it
> seems to me their not just being anti-credentialist, they're eschewing any
> kind of expertise at all, whether it's based on credentials or community
> reputation or individual worthiness. So, I don't see being *against* that
> kind of behaviour as being pro-credentialist or elitist.
>
> darin
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Craig Schiller

subject: [WikiEN-l] the GNAA thing

body:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Timecop/The_war_on_blogs

I can't *seriously* be the only person on all of Wikipedia who has a
major problem with the idea of letting the GNAA (yes, really, *that*
GNAA) unilaterally decide whether Wikipedia can or can't have articles
about blogs, can I?

Craig, who sure as hell hopes not


body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

>  As for the guidelines being
>decided on meta rather than Wikibooks, I don't see why that really
>matters, but at the same time it probably wouldn't be hard to convince
>people to move the discussions.
>
>>From my understanding Wikibooks doesn't have all that big of an active
>community in the first place, sans Wikijunior.  If that's true maybe
>that's part of the problem.
>
>Anthony
>
>
I have asked for the discussions to be moved to Wikibooks and was
shouted down as being out of order and the discussions continued anyway
on Meta.  Notices of votes about Wikijunior were on the Meta Goings-on
instead of the Wikibooks staff lounge.  This is a problem.

As far as Wikibooks not having that active of a community, I think you
need to go back to Wikibooks and check again.  There are daily changes
on the Staff Lounge, and some rather involved arguments that go on with
the VfD page as well.  Wikijunior is hardly that large of a part of
Wikibook and is only one little corner of the whole thing there as well.
 That is precisely the problem in some ways and one of the arguments to
move Wikijunior to Wikibooks:  That it was percieved that Wikibooks was
a dead project and nobody was around to bother and look at what was
being done.  We are averaging about two to three new admins per month
now, and some significant cleanup of previous deadwood is also
happening.  I don't know how else to decribe an active project besides
this.  I mention the growth in the number of new admins in part because
it also shows general user growth as well, of which there have been plenty.

Wikibooks can exists and grow without Wikijunior.  It doesn't need it,
and is only a very small portion of the items for recent changes on
Wikibooks.  I'll admit that Wikibooks isn't as active as Wikipedia, but
en.wikibooks is a larger community than most of the language domains for
Wikipedia.  Some very interesting and very non-controversial things are
happening on Wikibooks that are very positive, and some very interesting
Wikibooks are developing that are worthy of note even now.  That there
is room for improvement, I don't deny either.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

subject: [WikiEN-l] AfD suggestions

body:
> Filtering: make a 24 hour wait before nominations go public at AfD, so
> that
> admins can do speedy deletes and keeps.
>
> Mediated: sort noms with admin sponsors to delete from those which are not
> speedied but have no support either way.
>
> Sort: by relevant WikiProject for example. Nominator's responsibility.
> Make
> sorted noms a crisper process.
>
> Categorise: why this nomination?

All excellent suggestions! Have these ideas been raised before? It seems
these *could* go a long way to smoothing things out at AfD.

All excellent suggestions, but keep in mind that nominating something
for deletion is already a strenuous process for a lot of people. We
have to make sure it's still manageable to do so for a newbie.

--Mgm


subject: [WikiEN-l] Totally unscientific investigation...

body:
On 11/15/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/14/05, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Most
> > stuff that lands on afd is not implicetly verifiable.
> >
>
> Oh I dunno.   Looking at (randomly chosen recent day log) November 8,
> we have the following entries:
>
> Verifiable: 50-cent word, A. Y. Jackson Secondary School, Abdul Samad
> Maharuddin, Alan lennon, AMUST Registry cleaner, Andkon, Anphillia,
> Anvert, Appalachian State University Student Government Association,
> Arcanime, Archos Gmini XS202
>
> Unverifiable: A. Willis Abraham, Aadam Nasir, Afskum, Apples, Guns and
> Greed, Archipel
>
> I stopped after this, but I think you'll see my point.  Lots of
> entries on AfD are  verifiable.
>
> Incidentally I find one or two of the deletion nominations somewhat
> disturbing.  The "Archos Gmini XS202" nomination was accompanied by
> the statement "I've never heard of this mp3 player"  The only problem
> with the article was some unencyclopedic language.  The Alan lennon
> entry was apparently deleted merely because the performer has no entry
> on Allmusic.com, but this Kilkenny musician has played on a Kim Fowley
> album and recorded his own well received 2003 album and achieved
> endorsements by several musical instrument companies.
>
> Unless we're adopting an extremely exclusionist approach to Wikipedia
> entries, such articles don't really belong on AfD at all.  They seem
> to be a symptom of simple laziness on the part of the nominators.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

Born Febuary 8th, 1977 in Dublin Ireland, Alan Lennon is an
instrumental guitarist. Playing since the age of 16 and after
attending the Ballyfermot Rock College in Dublin, Alan Lennon released
his first ablum, "Heaven's Call" in 2003. With the musical styles of
Jason Becker and Shawn Lane, while completely maintaining his own,
Alan Lennon creates vast amounts of energy and emotion in his first
album.

Currently Alan Lennon is in the studio working on his next album.

Alan Lennon's website

Neither the article, nor the AFD discussion stated much of the
reasoning you followed for this to be kept (only that the album
existed). If no one speaks up about things like this, how are we
supposed to know it's keepable. Not because it was referenced, that's
for sure...

--Mgm


body:
It's been said before and I'll say it again. Just because it's
verifiable doesn't mean it deserves an entry.

Anyone visiting my website would be able to write a very verifiable
article about it, but the fact remains that it receives very little
visitors and simply doesn't warrant an entry in an encyclopedia.

Now, Alexa may be somewhat biased to a certain group of American users
but that doesn't mean it's entirely useless in determining traffic,
especially in combination with Google hits and mentions in press and
webzines and activity on a webcomics forum. If most or all of those
criteria are lacking, it's just another website one of the
approximately 4,000,000,000 on the net.

We can't have an article on all of them, just because they are verifiable.

And even if something warrants inclusion, it doesn't mean a 2 sentence
stub on a character needs its own article. Merge it into a parent
article and provide it with loads more context.

--Mgm


from_name: Anthony DiPierro

body:
On 11/16/05, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
> > The answer to deletionist controversies should not always be to
> > establish a new project; it should lie in an attempt to find common
> > ground.  That's something which a certain cadre of people on Wikipedia
> > refuses to seriously consider.  I don't know what rules the Wikijunior
> > people have been violating in Wikibooks, but that is an omnous claim.
> > It seems to reflect the usual dynamic conflict between those who want
> > clarity and certainty, and those who treasure innovation as a primary
> > value.  A project has a serious problem when either of those two gains
> > dominance.
> >
> The issue I have with Wikijunior is not that it is necessarily violating
> Wikibooks policies, but that it exists in its own seperate domain in
> many ways with its own set of policies, governed by groups of people
> that otherwise have nothing to do with Wikibooks, or at least are not
> actively participating in the larger Wikibooks community.  Policy
> decisions being made on Meta are being applied to Wikibooks, which IMHO
> is especially difficult to deal with, especially when users and even
> admins on Wikibooks are not even aware that these decisions are even
> being made.  I'm not talking general policies that apply to all
> projects, but decisions about just the Wikijunior pages on Wikibooks.
>  This is especially difficult when long-term policy discussions are
> taking place that a new contributor to Wikijunior has almost no way to
> learn about unless they are already very well versed with Wikimedia
> politics.  There already is a small but growing community that is
> working on just Wikijunior pages and very little else on any other
> Wikimedia project.  I don't know of any other comparable situation like
> this for any other Wikimedia project.
>
> --
> Robert Scott Horning

There are Wikiprojects within Wikipedia, complete with their own style
guides and rules for the pages within the the project.  Now those
rules don't override the general Wikipedia rules, in fact they're only
really suggestions - Wikipedia, like Wikibooks, is a wiki.  The only
people on Wikipedia who have any real authority over top of being able
to argue their case and get people to follow them is the arb com.  On
Wikibooks there isn't even that, afaik.  As for the guidelines being
decided on meta rather than Wikibooks, I don't see why that really
matters, but at the same time it probably wouldn't be hard to convince
people to move the discussions.

>From my understanding Wikibooks doesn't have all that big of an active
community in the first place, sans Wikijunior.  If that's true maybe
that's part of the problem.

Anthony


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] re: Billboard charts

body:
Not sure how far they can take this.  Surely we can say "X reached
number 4 in the Billboard Hot 100 in November, 2002".  Some of those
lovingly crafted chronological tabulations are going to have to go.


from_name: JAY JG

subject: [WikiEN-l] AfD suggestions

body:
>From: "charles matthews" <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
>
>Certainly one of the current problems with AfD is what to make of users who
>have been on WP for all of, say, 48 hours, and reckon that they have an eye
>for articles they think should not be in the encyclopedia.

And one the main problems AfD is meant to address is how to handle the
articles created by users who have been on WP for all of 10 minutes and
reckon that they have an eye for articles they think *should* be in the
encyclopedia.

Jay.


from_name: charles matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] AfD suggestions

body:
"MacGyverMagic/Mgm" wrote

>All excellent suggestions, but keep in mind that nominating something
for deletion is already a strenuous process for a lot of people. We
have to make sure it's still manageable to do so for a newbie.

I'd like to see a form to fill in for that.  Radio buttons, check boxes, all
that.  No too many compulsory fields.

So that anyone can cope with making a nomination, because it is clear _how
to submit_ a page to AfD.  But such that those who have a clear idea that
page X is vanity can quickly submit it: just by doing radio button 'I'm
logged in', copying the page name into a box, pull-down menu to click on
'Vanity page', put tag on the page itself, you're done.

Charles


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Request for creation of Nedersaksisch;	Low Saxon
	(NL) and Romani; Vlax Romany

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:
>> I would like to request the creation of Nedersaksisch; Low Saxon (NL)
>> as soon as possible, it has been discussed for over 5 months now, most
>> things have been cleared up and most people agree the wiki should be
>>
>
> "Most things"... you have still not clearly explained many details of
> the proposal and have instead chosen to ignore inquiries.
>
> "Most people"... the vote is 17-2 currently. You were still saying it
> should win when it was 16-4. How should anybody trust YOUR judgement?
>
> And you're right, it HAS been 5 months. Since then, conditions changed
> -- there is no longer the "discrimination" you talked about. After
> some discussions with Arbeo, a number of new facts have come to light
> which make your proposal even more ridiculous.
>
>
>> created soon, for the benefit of the Low Saxon community in the
>> Netherlands and I guess to wikipedia. There are 2 oppose votes, one
>> from Node ue (who deletes the request from the approved page almost
>> daily) and has been put on again by various users, the second user is
>> a non-active anonymous user at meta-wiki.
>>
>
> "Removes" is a better word. "Deletes" has the connotation that I
> removed it from existence. I just moved it back to the other page.
> "Approved requests for new languages" has only in the past contained
> languages with 1 or less oppose votes. You can't seem to get this
> through your brain.
>
>
>> Romani; Vlax Romany has 1 "temporary against vote" which is also a
>> non-active anonymous user at meta-wiki. The majority however supports
>> the creation, and should be created as soon as possible sothat the
>> Romani-community can also start with their own wikipedia.
>>
>
> What Romani community? The two inactive users who have made no edits
> for weeks? I do support that request, but I understand if a developer
> won't create it. Why not wait until there is at least one real article
> on the test-wiki? If there is really a community, that should be easy.
>
>
>> Summary:
>>
>> 1. Nedersaksisch
>> 2. Romani
>>
>
> No, the summary is: VLAX Romani. Not Romani and Nedersaksisch. We
> already have a Nedersaksisch Wikipedia. The proper name is probably
> "Nedersaksisch van Keuninkryk Nederlaand" or whatever, since you
> insist that nobody can use any English name.
>
> No book mentions such a language. It is not a real language, it exists
> only in your mind. No website mentions it except for Wikimedia. To
> create such a WP would be original research.
>
> There are 5 major dialects of Low Saxon language. "Dutch Low Saxon" is
> not one of them -- all of the dialects of the Netherlands are the same
> group as Hamburg dialect.
>
> You continue attempts to mislead people.
>
> Mark
>
Mark,
I think you do not know the situation on the ground or you misrepresent
this situation in a magnificent way. The nds wikipedia has been
high-jacked by a majority who insist on a particular orthography who is
German oriented. An orthography that is foreign to the nds as spoken in
the Netherlands. Your assertion that there should be only one nds is
fine but the majority who does nds does differently. The factoid that
the Dutch dialects are considered to be part of the "Hamburg dialect"
has nothing to do with the orthography used.

There are two solutions to this; either there is no compulsory
orthography on the nds.wikipedia or a second wikipedia is allowed. I do
think that it is not up to you to be in judgement on the creation of new
Wikipedias. You behave like if it is your right, the fact that you have
a lot of bookish knowledge does not count for much. With the skills that
you have, it would be better if you helped fledgling projects in the way
that grows the Neapolitan wikipedia. It has already some 3700 articles.
Yes, they are mostly stubs but they help in building a structure where
people can build on. Another thing you could do is write a newsletter
for the small projects and explain how they are doing and inform on what
works where and why. It does not suit you to be negative. Certainly not
when you have your facts wrong.

And do not trash talk other people. If you want to have people think
that you mean well, you should at least assume their good faith.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Ilia Alshanetsky

subject: [Wikitech-l] PHP 5.1.0RC5 testing

body:
Hello!

You are receiving this email because your project has been select to
take part in a new effort by the PHP QA Team to make sure that your
project still works with PHP versions to-be-released. With this we hope
to make sure that you are either aware of things that might break, or to
make sure we don't introduce any strange regressions. With this effort
we hope to build a better relation between the PHP Team and the major
projects.

If you do not want to receive these heads-up emails, please reply to me
personally and I will remove you from the list; but, we hope that you
want to actively help us making PHP a better and more stable tool.

The fifth and hopefully the final RC of PHP 5.1.0 has released today,
it can be downloaded from http://downloads.php.net/ilia/. Since this is
the final release, we ask you to test it extensively with your software
to ensure that no regressions have occurred. If you discover any (we
hope not) please notify PHP's QA team at "php-qa at lists.php.net".

In case you think that other projects should also receive this kinds of
emails, please let me know privately, and I will add them to the list of
projects to contact.

regards,

Ilia Alshanetsky
5.1 Release Master


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] AfD suggestions

body:
"MacGyverMagic/Mgm" wrote

>All excellent suggestions, but keep in mind that nominating something
>for deletion is already a strenuous process for a lot of people. We
>have to make sure it's still manageable to do so for a newbie.

I would say that we do not have to make it manageable for a newbie. If
they're that much of a newbie they have no business putting forward
things to be deleted. If you feel otherwise, then why?

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Synonymous article ID replacing redirects

body:
On 11/15/05, jkelly at fas.harvard.edu <jkelly at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>   Perhaps I am missing something, but wouldn't organizing articles in this
> fashion simply push the argument back upon every article that links to the one
> with the contentious name?
>
>   Right now we have a situation in which these debates can be more-or-less
> solved by knowing what the subject's "Wikipedia article name" is, and informing
> people to not link through a redirect.  If Ivory Coast/Cote d'Ivoire become
> equivalent at the backend level, won't the same argument then erupt in the
> "List of African countries" article, the "List of UN members" article, and the
> "List of places with Ivory in their name" article?

Maybe it's me who's missing something, but isn't that the kind of
thing that can be solved by normal editing and dispute resolution?

The only reason we have a debate on this kind of issue is because
sometimes moves *cannot*  be performed by a normal editor, due to the
redirect in the desired target of the move having history.

Moreover the concept of an "official wikipedia name" doesn't exist.
It doesn't really matter to Wikipedia what the article is called; if
you want to refer to it by another name, use the piped link feature
[[Article name|preferred name]].

So all we'd be doing here is providing a facility to give an article a
number of different names.  Using the redirect method, currently if
you type in Ivory Coast you see somethiing like this:

C?te d'Ivoire
>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from Ivory Coast)

The Republic of C?te d'Ivoire (IPA /kot divwa/); commonly called Ivory
Coast in English; see below about the name) is a country in West
Africa.

With synonyms, you'd see something like the following:

Ivory Coast
>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Republic of C?te d'Ivoire (IPA /kot divwa/); commonly called Ivory
Coast in English; see below about the name) is a country in West
Africa.


subject: [Wikitech-l] [WikiEN-l] Status of article rating feature?

body:
Brion Vibber brion at pobox.com wrote:

>I already told Magnus, if there's anything terribly wrong with it it'll
>get fixed after it's turned on (and if necessary, back off).

Indeed :-)

>It's a solution in search of a problem; it doesn't solve the
>validated-version-display issue in any way, it's just a survey form that
>might, in theory, produce data that might, in theory, be interesting or
>useful to someone one day.

We (or I) have a plan to apply it. Call it a medium-term solution,
trying to go straight to the deep answer :-)

(I could be completely wrong and the results could be complete
rubbish, of course.)

>Will it be worth the trouble of turning it on and possibly having to
>deal with fixing it when further problems become evident? Who knows.

>> So. What's up with Special:Validate?

>It's on my list for this week, I'll see about getting it turned on and
>working.

:-D

Please let me know when you do, as I have a profound interest in this
and will be watching it closely!

Thanks, Brion :-)

- d.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Using page property fields in Wiki Pages or
	templates, e.g. the page title - is this possible?

body:
> I am trying to make every page on my Wiki site link to a corresponding page
> title on another Wiki (I have interwiki links set-up fine). Ideally I'd like
> to use something like this in a template to link to the corresponding page
> in the OtherWiki that has the same page title:
>
> [[OtherWiki:{{{Page_Title}}}]]

Wikitech-l is for technical issues on the Wikimedia sites (Wikipedia,
Wikibooks etc). I think you meant to send this to the MediaWiki list
at <http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l>

There is a {{PAGENAME}} variable that might help with what you're trying to do.

[[OtherWiki:{{PAGENAME}}]] for example. If you put this at
[[MediaWiki:Sitenotice]], it will appear on every page without needing
to add it manually each time.

Angela.


from_name: Juraj Bednar

subject: [Wikitech-l] mediawiki dump html fix and few questions

body:
Hello,

>    The fix is easy (borrowed from getHashedFilename). Just adding
>
>    $chars[$i] = strtr( $chars[$i], '/\\*?"<>|~.', '__________' );
>
>    to the else part of if in the for cycle fixes the problem.

also : needs replacing, since it is illegal directory name under
windows. This would make it:

$chars[$i] = strtr( $chars[$i], '/\\*?"<>|~.:', '___________' );

   Juraj.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Why thanks :)

body:
Hoi,

Mark Williamson wrote:
> I always thought it was funny that you ended even the rudest and most
> blunt e-mails with such a polite phrase.
>
> Cheers,
> Mark
Hoi,
When I end my e-mails with a "Thanks", I thank the readers for the time
they spend on what I wanted to say. Particularly on mailing lists, it is
a given that much of what is written is not read by all the subscribers.
Even when I have something blunt to say, I appreciate it when what I
have to say gets its consideration. The point of me thanking a reader is
because I do not assume that I am due the attention that I get. I hope
that I deserve some credit; this may have led to the reading of much of
my contributions to the mailing lists. Assuming that I have, I have yet
another reason to thank my "public".

As to being rude, I try not to be. But if by being blunt I am considered
rude, I consider it is an unfortunate side effect. I prefer to be
understood in what I intend to express. I do not think the English that
I use is bad but I know how easy it is to be misunderstood.

Thanks,
   GerardM


from_name: jkelly at fas.harvard.edu

subject: [WikiEN-l] re: Billboard charts

body:
  I think that this is exactly right, and also implies that we may want to be
proactive about other long lists of data or magazine rankings that we are
keeping on Wikipedia at the moment.  I believe there is some conversation at
the Village Pump about the larger magazine-published list concern.

       Jkelly

Quoting Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com>:

> Not sure how far they can take this.  Surely we can say "X reached
> number 4 in the Billboard Hot 100 in November, 2002".  Some of those
> lovingly crafted chronological tabulations are going to have to go.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Incubator Wiki for New Wikimedia Projects

body:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:

> I brought that up earlier, and I'm really not sure what to make of it,
>
>because Wikipedia certainly shouldn't be made a part of Wikibooks.  I
>can think of two possible reasons:
>
>1) Wikibooks is for textbooks, and this should be narrowly construed
>to mean classical textbooks, not to include any learning resources
>such as encyclopedias.
>
>2) Wikipedia is too big for Wikibooks (combined perhaps with the fact
>that Mediawiki is not sophisticated enough to handle both of them
>under a single project).
>
>I actually favor the latter argument, though Jimbo has just recently
>suggested that the former is (also?) true.  Also, the latter argument
>would lead to Wikibooks being used as an incubator wiki, as big
>projects would eventually outgrow Wikibooks.  (Maybe Mediawiki can be
>developed in a way to better integrate all the projects, but that's
>somewhat of a separate issue).
>
Having Wikibooks absorb Wikipedia sounds like some kind of reverse
takeover.  It doesn't make sense.

I tend to interpret the role of Wikibooks very broadly, certainly to go
beyond the idea of the classical textbook.  In some ways the classical
textbook is antithetical to good education because it tends to mould its
users into the same series of learning experiences.  A single Wikibook
should begin with a subject that can be included in Wikipedia but which
requires expansion into a book that in theory could be published as a
stand alone entity.  The Cookbook was a good example of this.  There was
a great debate at one time about the inclusion of recipes in Wikipedia.
Some were accepted as proper to Wikipedia, but the bulk ended up in
Wikibooks where NPOV could also be approached with a more relaxed
interpretation.

As long as Wikijunior and Wikiversity were only producing books
(including study guides) they were within the mandate.  What brings them
beyond that mandate are the additional educational functions that go
beyond books.  Maybe that is one way to interpret the term incubator,
but that will only apply to some projects.  Others may be incubated in a
sister project, and still others may be sufficiently different to not be
incubatable in any existing project.

I agree that there needs to be some kind of integration or overview of
all the projects.  Without that big picture turf wars over what belongs
in which project are inevitable.

Ec

Ec


from_name: Arbeo M

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: Request for creation of Nedersaksisch;
	Low Saxon (NL) and Romani; Vlax Romany

body:
Hi everybody!

 I don't want to discuss any of the details regarding the two requested new Wikipedias here, because both have been discussed very thouroughly in the appropriate places and can be considered approved by the community now - if they weren't we would certainly not request their creation here.

 Beyond all personal opinions, there are two very simple facts:

 * both proposals have been discussed exhaustively and have gained support by a vast majority of users (actually, they are supported by more people than some of the new Wikipedias created recently)

 * both proposals have only minimal opposition against them (one anonymous user in one case, one anonymus plus one registered user in the other case) and meet all formal requirements

 Hence, allowing them at Wikipedia is simply a question of fairness.

 In my opinion, the ongoing attempts of discrediting them are plainly anti-social and contradict basic principles of the Wikipedia community ("Assume Good Faith", "Wiki-Love" ...). Everybody has the right to dislike certain ideas but such destructive behaviour is not acceptable here.

 Having said that, I would like to support the petition made by our fellow Wikipedians Servien and Gerard, and kindly ask for the creation of the two wikis mentioned above (ISO codes are "rmy" and "nds-NL").

 Thank you very much for your consideration!

 Arbeo

---------------------------------
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subject: [WikiEN-l] AfD suggestions

body:
"David Gerard" wrote

>I would say that we do not have to make it manageable for a newbie. If
they're that much of a newbie they have no business putting forward
things to be deleted.

Certainly one of the current problems with AfD is what to make of users who
have been on WP for all of, say, 48 hours, and reckon that they have an eye
for articles they think should not be in the encyclopedia.

I would, however, prefer that the method be user-friendly.  It should just
test a little whether someone has a clue.  See other posts of mine.

Charles