from_name: Anthony

subject: [Foundation-l] Database dumps

references:
<ereiq6$462$1@sea.gmane.org> <45DB2F17.3060901@hackish.org>
	<erh44s$lu0$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On 2/21/07, Annabel <annabel at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> It's not high priority, that's right, but you should also look at it
> from the users point of view. If a large  download breaks at 85%, then
> you have to redownload the whole file. I know that there download
> managers, but with bitorrent you have extra certainty for the validity
> of your file: every 1 MB or so, you have a MD5 hash, so corrupt
> downloads can not happen.
> Lowering the bandwith on the download server is just an extra advantage.
>
Agreed, which brings me back to my question.  Does anyone know of a
stable site which
will host the tracker server for us (for free)?

Anyone can host a bittorrent file - it doesn't have to be the WMF.  I
imagine there must be a site out there which hosts tracker servers for
free, but I actually can't find one that isn't geared toward piracy
(and therefore likely unstable).

If someone just goes ahead and sets one up, and gives the WMF the url
to link to, then no one can complain about priorities, cause it takes
5 seconds to add the url :).

Anthony


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [Foundation-l] Database dumps


list: wikien-l

from_name: Rich Holton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Moderation on this mailing list

body:
Ron Ritzman wrote:
> On 2/21/07, Rich Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Perhaps I'm misconstruing your point. Is your question rhetorical, or
>> actually seeking information? Are you suggesting that, if a "newbie
>> editor" were to simply walk away, there would be no problem?
>
> If the newbie's (or anybody else's) change to an article is reverted
> and he can't make his case in the "talk" phase then yes "walk
> away"[1]. There's no consensus for his change. A "dick" phase is not
> going to change that. If he strongly feels that. If he strongly feels
> that the article is being defended in a state that violates policy
> then there are "non dick" paths he can follow such as rfcs or arbcom.
> If he can't get satisfaction there then hey that's life. You can't win
> them all.
>
> 1. "Go play elsewhere" is a better way of putting this. There are
> plenty of "undefended" and abandoned articles that need attention.
>

Perhaps you're using the idea of "defending" an article differently than
I am. From the context of Parker Peter's original post that you were
replying to, we're talking about someone who is, in good faith, trying
to improve the article, and an admin "whacking" them for doing it.

As I see it, one can legitimately defend an article against vandalism,
against overall POV, against the addition of questionable and
unreferenced "facts", and against unintelligible incoherence. There may
be others I'm not thinking of right now, but these are specifically
defined violations of policy (except perhaps for the last one), and we
all want to defend articles against these.

But one can not legitimately "defend" an article against a newbie being
bold in a good faith effort to fix an article. A newbie being bold is
not, in and of itself, a violation of any policy. Quite the contrary, we
encourage it. If a change to an article does not violate policy but is
reverted, and then the change stonewalled on the talk page, the
"defender" is violating policy ([[Wikipedia:Ownership of articles]]),
and this is particularly damaging when the "defender" is an admin.

-Rich Holton


from_name: Flame Viper

subject: [WikiEN-l] I got the diffs

body:
To start of my evidence-fueled tour da force, here's a quote from Yanksox.

"I'm guessing this guy is a failed /b/tard. He's spitting out 4chan memes like a total newbie. I don't have an issue with this guy's being a 4channer, but his actual contribution to the encyclopedic aspect of this site has been minimal and barely marginal at best. Most of the time, he's just testing our patience. I'm really leaning towards a permaban. Yanksox 18:24, 10 February 2007 (UTC)"

And now, my retort. I had never even heard of Yanksox until several days earlier, so his insinuation that "I'm sooooo tired of Flameviper, I've had to deal with him, like, FOREVAR" is complete bull. For second, his claim of "barely marginal" is "barely legitimate" at best. [[Five themes of geography]] made DYK. My editcount is 3000+ (that should give you ideas), see [[User:Flameviper/edits]] for more. For last, I have never been on 4chan, and that accusation is simply an ad hominem personal attack. "Like a newbie"? This kind of shit, coming from a normal user, would warrant a block (or at least serious warning via WP:NPA). But from High Lord Sysop, it's just another drop in the bucket.

And now I will give you some actual URLs to substantiate myself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Flameviper&action=history

I wanted to take a 30-day Wikivacation on account of being blocked. Perhaps obstinate, but not grounds for revert+protect. The net result would be the same; me not editing for 30 days. BUT NOOOOO!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Flameviper

Rather self-explanatory. I had conceived an idea (Wikipedia:Informal checkuser) of a practice that could potentially be put to bad use. Instead of seeing it for what it was (a cautionary warning), High Lord Sysop and Friends decided that it was my claim of being targeted. Which it wasn't. My IP address is 69.81.50.1, and another one is 216.11.222.21. I'm not hiding anything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Flameviper

Self-explanatory. My edit summaries are somewhat immature, but you should get the gist of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/HUNGY_MAN

A small-scale account that I created back in May 06 for no apparent reason. Not as a sock. I can't remember why. Anyway, I used it to make very small edits to my Flameviper userpage and got infiinitely banned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Flameviper&action=history

Revert war between myself and High Lord Sysop and Friends.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive74#User:Flameviper_needs_a_coach

WP:AN thread where I have been grossly misrepresented, abused, and generally thrashed. I'm not able to defend myself because I'm banned.

So there, you have it. An archive of an abused snake.

---------------------------------
Have a burning question? Go to Yahoo! Answers and get answers from real people who know.


from_name: Ron Ritzman

body:
On 2/21/07, Rich Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:

> Perhaps I'm misconstruing your point. Is your question rhetorical, or
> actually seeking information? Are you suggesting that, if a "newbie
> editor" were to simply walk away, there would be no problem?

If the newbie's (or anybody else's) change to an article is reverted
and he can't make his case in the "talk" phase then yes "walk
away"[1]. There's no consensus for his change. A "dick" phase is not
going to change that. If he strongly feels that. If he strongly feels
that the article is being defended in a state that violates policy
then there are "non dick" paths he can follow such as rfcs or arbcom.
If he can't get satisfaction there then hey that's life. You can't win
them all.

1. "Go play elsewhere" is a better way of putting this. There are
plenty of "undefended" and abandoned articles that need attention.


from_name: Sean Barrett

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Oskar Sigvardsson stated for the record:
> On 2/22/07, Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:
>> CheckUser queries are logged. The only administrator to look at the
>> CheckUser data of all three users you mention is Jpgordon, the very
>> administrator whose CheckUser actions/results you criticise.
>>
>> So, unless you're in bed with a developer, I think it's safe to assume
>> you're lying.
>>
>> ~Mark Ryan
>
> When do we get to the point that we don't allow this shit anymore on
> wikien? Putting up with all of this makes it way more tiresome than it
> should be to be to read the list.
>
> --Oskar

I gotta disagree, Oskar.  Watching Peter's increasing loony lies pile up
is one of more amusing parts of reading this list.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | In America, anyone can be President.
 sean at epoptic.com | That's one of the risks you take.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFF3ced/SVOiq2uhHMRAuJ+AKDIDFL6OBSgIVbzO83YXIaLkhi5BACfSGcl
3mQC6kS+Tcw2nicSQTFTIJ4=
=c/pf
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


list: foundation-l

subject: [Foundation-l] Database dumps

body:
On 2/22/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> Anyone can host a bittorrent file - it doesn't have to be the WMF.

Well, here's a test.  Let me know if this works.  It's going to be
incredibly slow, of course:
http://torrents.brightercomputing.com/torrents-details.php?id=62

If someone with a fast connection wants to act as a seed, the original
file is at http://download.wikimedia.org/eowiki/20070209/eowiki-20070209-pages-meta-current.xml.bz2

And while you're at it, if you've got a fast connection, even if you
don't want to be a seed, try making a .torrent file to get us started.
 I'm not downloading the English Wikipedia right now...

Anthony


subject: [Foundation-l] Database dumps


subject: [Foundation-l] Database dumps

body:
On 2/22/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> http://torrents.brightercomputing.com/torrents-details.php?id=62
>
No login url: http://www.mcfly.org/tracker/eowiki-20070209-pages-meta-current.xml.bz2.torrent


subject: [Foundation-l] Database dumps


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] Announcing UsenetSyntax Extension

body:
On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 04:24:23PM -0600, Jim Wilson wrote:
>     A sentence spanning *two lines
>     where the second delimiter* occurs on the second line.

Or, to use the more common terminology in a MediaWiki environment:

A sentence spanning *two paragraphs
where a hard CR separates them* and the second delimiter occurs not in
the same paragraph.

Since that's uncommon in the CR's-break-paragraphs-not-lines world of
MediaWiki, it doesn't seem bothersome, to me at least.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274


from_name: Matthew Flaschen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Live mirrors

body:
Pill wrote:
> Some Wikipedias have special pages where users can report abuse via live
> mirrors. Unfortunately, the procedure of dealing with them is not really
> clear, so that on German Wikipedia e.g. there are lots of reports but
> nobody does anything against the mirrors because there is no suitable
> place where to request blocking them. The mailing list is quite a bad
> place and reporting them to the server admins individually is not very
> nice, also. Tim Starling proposed to make a Meta page about that and
> I've created one, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Live_mirrors. I
> think it would be a bit easier for the responsible people if people
> reported all live mirrors there than on single Wikis.

I know there was such a meta page before.  It may still exist, but I
have no idea where.  There are probably still links so if this stays
active, redirects should be created.

Matthew Flaschen

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 254 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20070222/e04f5a62/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Parker Peters

body:
On 2/22/07, Ron Ritzman <ritzman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/22/07, Rich Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > But one can not legitimately "defend" an article against a newbie being
> > bold in a good faith effort to fix an article.
>
> But what if previous consensus has determined that it "ain't broke"?

Previous "consensus" as defined by who? An organized POV clique?

One of the biggest problems for Wikipedia is that "Consensus" morphs into
"Ownership" and "Groupthink" too darned easily. A group of editors forming
"consensus" see anyone who comes in to challenge that as a "vandal" and a
threat to their control of the article, and are likely to attack and abuse
anyone who thinks differently.

It's even worse when we have a known group of editors with severe POV
problems that are obviously apparent (members of X political party/grouping,
members of X wacked-out cultish religion, etc), but who stick around and
exercise de-facto Ownership of articles while claiming it's "Consensus."

> A newbie being bold is
> > not, in and of itself, a violation of any policy.
>
> No it's not. And if the newbie is being whacked by an admin acting as
> the article's pit bull after a bold or two then yes, the admin himself
> should be whacked.
>
> This should never happen...
>
> bold/revert/bold/whack
>
> However, this is what we see in too many of these cases...
>
> bold/revert/bold/revert/dick/whack

No, what we see more often is:

bold/revert/bold/ (revert+argue/bold+argue repeatedly)
/revert+ownership+admin+dick+revert=whack.

> Quite the contrary, we
> > encourage it. If a change to an article does not violate policy but is
> > reverted, and then the change stonewalled on the talk page, the
> > "defender" is violating policy ([[Wikipedia:Ownership of articles]]),
>
> And this can be responded too by the dispute resolution procedures.
> This is mentioned in WP:OWN. If the "newbie editor" responds with
> "dickery" then whether or not he's right or wrong he will get whacked,
> not for the bold but for the dickery and I don't believe you can argue
> that he was goaded into being a dick (uncivil, personal attacks etc.)
> or somehow magically made to act like a dick by the article's "gang".

If wikipedians act like dicks, a new user coming in will see that Wikipedia
is a place for people to be dicks. It's the normal course of procedure, and
they are GOING to respond in kind.

Dickery is goading, plain and simple. The so-called "experienced"
wikipedians and admins goad and provoke people all the time, knowing they
can get away with it since their friends will protect them.

As I stated earlier, the "dispute resolution" process is a joke, because
it's laid out in a byzantine fashion, and set up so that any new editor
coming in who actually successfully navigates it can be accused of being a
sockpuppet/returned vandal/whatever the fuck new BS charge has been created,
because they "know too much about the system."

Look at past cases. I know it's going to be met with groans, but it's a case
in hand, and it readily illustrates the point - User:RunedChozo. The problem
for RunedChozo on the PSP pages was that he felt User:ZakuSage was violating
WP:OWN. He posted to this effect in multiple places.

ZakuSage then responded by wikistalking RunedChozo, and engaging in
deliberate provocation and harassment. ZakuSage, however, had friends to
protect him, while RunedChozo didn't - he got a one-week block, "extended"
to two weeks by the blocking admin for blowing up on his talk page in
response, reduced back to 1 week when it was pointed out that this was out
of process and invalid

End result? ZakuSage got off with a verbal "warning" and his friends waited
around to harass RunedChozo when he returned. And we know how that's gone
now and we can see the collateral damage as ZakuSage's friends went
ballistic trying to harass other users based on the case, and defending the
admins who abused RunedChozo.

Do I think RunedChozo deserved blocking? Hell yes. He crossed the line.

Did it deserve to be indefinite? He was deliberately provoked by
administrators abusing their power and authority, so a "Hell no" is in order
there. It didn't deserve to be any more than 24 hours, but our admins have a
history of out of process, ever longer blocks for the purpose of
antagonizing and provoking people and just being downright vindictive.

Instead of converting RunedChozo - who proved he could make constructive
edits, learned to create workspaces so that he didn't get into a fight while
trying to make something look right, and showed that his edits could be
valid when other people took his suggestion and created the portion of the
article he'd suggested in the first place - into a good editor, Wikipedia's
abusive admin culture turned him into an enemy, and likely now a vandal.

That's why Wikipedia fails.

Parker
====
Parker Peters
http://parkerpeters.livejournal.com


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposed: Topical archiving of talk

body:
On 22/02/07, Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On every page, that sounds like an awful lot of work; on the very busy
> pages, that sounds like it could be useful. I'd agree with the ordered
> archives being the "archives of record," more or less (less refactoring =
> more authentic, if perhaps a little less useful).

The main problem with any form of archiving is that it's the busiest
pages that need it, and the busiest pages tend to be controversial. So
picking how to archive them is not so much a technical matter as
politics. Date-based archiving is generally tolerable to most.

- d.


subject: [Foundation-l] RfC: Draft licensing policy resolution

body:
On 22/02/07, Kat Walsh <kwalsh at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> I am afraid of misconceptions and misinterpretations spreading too far
> about what is to be allowed and what isn't, and I've been hearing
> misinterpretations both on the too-inclusive and too-exclusive side...

I fear it's a case where either side will seize on anything that could
possibly support their obviously correct view rather than the
obviously misguided opposing view.

- d.


body:
On 2/22/07, Rich Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:

> But one can not legitimately "defend" an article against a newbie being
> bold in a good faith effort to fix an article.

But what if previous consensus has determined that it "ain't broke"?

> A newbie being bold is
> not, in and of itself, a violation of any policy.

No it's not. And if the newbie is being whacked by an admin acting as
the article's pit bull after a bold or two then yes, the admin himself
should be whacked.

This should never happen...

bold/revert/bold/whack

However, this is what we see in too many of these cases...

bold/revert/bold/revert/dick/whack

> Quite the contrary, we
> encourage it. If a change to an article does not violate policy but is
> reverted, and then the change stonewalled on the talk page, the
> "defender" is violating policy ([[Wikipedia:Ownership of articles]]),

And this can be responded too by the dispute resolution procedures.
This is mentioned in WP:OWN. If the "newbie editor" responds with
"dickery" then whether or not he's right or wrong he will get whacked,
not for the bold but for the dickery and I don't believe you can argue
that he was goaded into being a dick (uncivil, personal attacks etc.)
or somehow magically made to act like a dick by the article's "gang".


subject: [WikiEN-l] Australian Wikipedians in the news

body:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/fast-facts-found-online/2007/02/21/1171733770530.html

(Is there a wikimedia-au list yet?)

- d.


from_name: William Pietri

body:
Rob wrote:
> The fact that a block gets someone MAD does not justify further abuse,
> and the talk page should not be used to give a troll a soapbox to
> attack people.

I'd agree with that. On the other hand, there's this pattern I'm worried
about that goes something like this:

   1. A new user tries to do something that seems reasonable to them,
      but is annoying to us -- e.g., adding their friend's band to
      Wikipedia.
   2. Almost instantly they receive a boilerplate negative reaction from
      us -- e.g., their article is speedied.
   3. They struggle to understand what the hell is going on and do
      something they think is reasonable -- let's say they replace the
      speedy template with {{hangon}} and go on editing their article.
   4. They get another instant boilerplate negative reaction and
      experience more frustration -- perhaps they get the template back,
      a user page warning for removing speedies, and an edit conflict to
      boot.
   5. After repeatedly being frustrated in trying to do something they
      think is useful, they express their frustration with less than
      perfect politeness.
   6. The cycle of negative interactions spirals until they end up blocked.

And then from here, I'm sure a most of those people just go away,
nursing their burnt fingers and telling their pals what jerks those
Wikipedians are. A few of them take it as a great injustice and turn
into long-term enemies.

For this to happen, I don't think there need to be malice on either
side, just ordinary human nature. My mother, who lives in a town with
one stop light, would occasionally drive to Chicago to visit me. She was
convinced that all Chicago drivers were either vicious or insane. Most
of them weren't, but they were used to moving at such a pace and with
such a focus on throughput that she took it as hostility and madness.
They in turn saw her as hopelessly clueless and inconsiderate, and a
great barrier to progress.

I would rather we took more time with these people, as I think we
currently create more enemies than we need, and discourage potential
contributors.

William


body:
On 2/22/07, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/21/07, Rich Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > However, the more I think about the way interactions take place on
> > Wikipedia, the more I am convinced that the asymmetry in power and
> > experience between an admin and a typical editor results in vastly
> > different perspectives on the same actions. What seems (and in fact is)
> > reasonable to an admin or an experienced user, can seem to be (and in
> > fact is) a demonstration of admin "dickism" to a newbie.
>
> This is pretty much the problem.  To many newbies, admins represent
> the power elite, The Man, and not individual volunteers, thus they
> think nothing of subjecting them to abuse.  Any response is seen as an
> abuse of power, even when the incident is relatively innocuous.
>

Not true.

There are any number of admin actions I do not have any problem with.
Blocking of actual vandals, or even whole vandal IP ranges when there's
something like a GNAA assault going on, I understand and agree with.

What I have problems with are admins who are (A) stuck up, (B) over-egoed,
(C) dickish, or (D) abusive. Admins who insult users, or who fail to
properly sanction other users who are insulting someone, or go over the top
blocking/banning one person while excusing horrid behavior on the part of
others towards that person.

Again, to use a recent example, I'll pull up RunedChozo's block list (
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/block&page=User:RunedChozo).

Perhaps this will help you understand what I'm getting at:

Block #1 - Blocked by Aecis for 24 hours, for getting involved in a pagemove
problem. Related to Israel/Palestine and an ongoing news item at that time,
so unsurprising that new users would show up to the article. Seemed to be a
good faith move, and Aecis admits as much on talk page. No major
controversy, though later users have claimed he had a "fight" with Aecis,
which is a quite overblown way to characterize it.

Block # 2/3 - By William M. Connolley. Block for 24 hours, Connolley
accidentally hit "indef", then fixed it. Later admins being abusive would
construe this as two different blocks in their "summaries" of how many
blocks RC had.

Block # 4: By Future Perfect at Sunrise. Block at the "urging" of a POV
editor, looks like FP has connections to. Block done for a full three days,
well beyond anything stated in process and policy.

Block # 5: William M. Connolley, another 3-day (far too long by policy)
block for 3RR. By this point, RC is dealing with a major POV clique that has
caused repeated problems for Wikipedia and regularly start fights on
articles they think they "own", but only RC is being blocked, because said
POV clique has the support of admins who are members of the clique.

Block # 6/7/8/9: by Tariqabjotu (member of the POV clique) and Tom Harrison
(friend of Tariq). Tag-teaming multiple extensions of block, based on some
rantings by other members of the POV clique. This would later be construed
as four different blocks by users trying to attack RC.

Block # 10/11/12 by Asterion: this is where ZakuSage incident was going on,
ZakuSage was caught wikistalking (record of report is still in history at
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3AZakuSage&diff=103257547&oldid=103088642and
concurred by Asterion. Blocked for 1 week (which was already
overkill),
extended to 2, then back to 1 when Asterion was caught abusively extending
the block out of process. Later assailants would again claim this as "three"
blocks.

Final series, # 13/14/15: Steel359, after insulting the user for reporting
Sean Barrett/The_Epopt's abusive locking of user page, sits around haunting
his edits all day until he can come up with an excuse. Yamla then extends
the block when RC lashes out against Steel359's abuse: Steel359 then
finishes off by slapping an abusive infinite block and for good measure,
locks the talk page and abusively removes the unblock request from it.

Now, let's make a few things perfectly clear here:

FACT #1: I do not disagree that RunedChozo deserved to be blocked in any of
these incidents.

FACT #2: HOWEVER, RunedChozo was not the only one at fault in any of these
incidents. In each case of 3RR, or worse in the case of ZakuSage, there was
another party who received no sanction. ZakuSage was caught wikistalking,
and in normal cases a user targeted by a wikistalker is allowed a chance to
calm down and treated fairly, but in RunedChozo's case there were admins
with an agenda waiting to target him when he returned.

Likewise in the rest: meatpuppetry and POV cliques who regularly try to
exercise ownership of articles related to Israel/Palestine and the Middle
East do this sort of thing to new users regularly, but they for some reason
get defended, because there are admins in their ranks, and that's not right.
When RC was blocked for 3RR, there were other users playing edit-war games
who should have been blocked for edit warring, yet this was not done, which
taught them that they can get away with organized edit warring.

And the end result? You've made an enemy of RunedChozo, because it wasn't
just Israel/Palestine articles where he was attacked, but the moment he
tried to improve ANY portion of wikipedia, he was attacked.

--
====
Parker Peters
http://parkerpeters.livejournal.com


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Fwd: I have a problem with CheckUser as administered
	by JPGordon

body:
Given that The_Epopt/Sean Barrett is an arbcom member? Not bloody likely.

Parker

On 2/22/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I have CC'ed an arbcom member with regard to this, as well as sending
> > private emails urging him to get into contact with the user in question,
> > repeatedly.
>
> That's the wrong way round. The user in question should get in contact
> with the ArbCom member. I'm sure if the user in question emails a
> member of ArbCom and specifically says they wish to request
> arbitration, their case would be considered as any other.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
====
Parker Peters
http://parkerpeters.livejournal.com


from_name: Luna

subject: [WikiEN-l] Proposal: increased bot edit rates on en:wp

body:
On 2/21/07, Parker Peters <parkerpeters1002 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Bots are problematic enough as is, we have any number that malfunction or
> do
> things based on an ill-considered script already.
>
> The faster you allow them to edit, the faster two bots could conceivably
> get
> into a war as well.

I'd agree we should be careful about this -- bots have the potential to be
very helpful, but rogue or malfunctioning bots likewise have a potential to
do some pretty nasty damage. Not so much to pages; sure, it'll be a chore,
but we can revert all of that easily enough. I'd be especially concerned
about bots that deal with newer users, and how a buggy bot can influence
their first experiences on the wiki.

Always good to watch the bots. Some of them have been going for some time
with only a few problems, and could do more with more freedom to edit.
Giving out this freedom blindly is probably bad, and I didn't see people
proposing we should do that (I think) -- the bots we trust and know, and
which could obviously benefit from the boost, though, not sure if I see the
harm.

HagermanBot would be my specific example of a bot that doesn't need an
artificial limit. Some people have suggested it should wait a little longer
before signing (no idea where overall consensus on this is, just pointing
out), but even "wait x seconds before signing" is just a delay for each
edit, rather than a limit on the overall editing rate.

Bots getting into edit wars? Merf. That'd be bad, but a responsible botop
will avoid that problem with a few extra lines of code. It really wouldn't
be too difficult. Long-term things like the interwiki bots arguing, that's a
little trickier, but a high-speed end-of-the-world botwar isn't something I
expect to see any time soon.

Just my take, probably a bit of a ramble.
-Luna


body:
On 2/22/07, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/21/07, Parker Peters <parkerpeters1002 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Ideally? I'd like for administrators not to do the things that cause
> > problems. But that's not likely.
>
> Ideally, you would stop viewing every administrative action as
> resulting from a malicious abuse of power.  But that's not likely.
>

I don't view "every" administrative action as resulting from a malicious
abuse of power, Rob, and I'll thank you to take that little flame back right
now and actually read my statements. Particularly the previous email I just
sent.

> If Adminship were not a big deal, then losing adminship would not be a big
> > deal. However, the bar for losing adminship is nearly impossibly high.
> > If Adminship were not a big deal, the ever-growing requirements for it
> would
> > not be ever-growing. But they are.
>
> I agree that we should probably treat adminship as a more of a big
> deal.  But I don't worry about "abusive" admins, not to protect my own
> "power" ("you'll have to pry my mop from my cold dead fingers!") but
> because we already have ArbCom to deal with the worst offenders.
> Given that I don't see nearly every admin as malicious and abusive, I
> think that this is a sufficent remedy. No malicious admin can prevent
> an abused user from bringing a matter before them.

Lol. An abusive administrator only has to indefinitely block a user, lock
their talkpage, and then start "reverting sockpuppets" and they'll be
defended to the hilt by the other abusive administrators. And any case
brought before Arbcom will either be laughed out for "not following process"
or otherwise they'll find a technicality by which to let the abusive admin
get away with it.

> here is the biggest problem with wikipedia today. Administrators are free
> to
> > do whatever they want
>
> This is, of course, news to me.  Had I been aware of this, I would
> have blocked the other users I've been in conflicts with instead of
> dealing with tedious ArbCom proceedings.
>
> > (A) "Scarlet Letter" abuse. Users clearing/archiving warnings that
> they've
> > already seen, or clearing off bad-faith tagging such as "suspected
> > sockpuppet" tags or "warning" templates placed by abusive users trying
> to
> > harass another user (usually claiming that a difference of opinion on a
> > content matter is "vandalism), are routinely targeted by administrators.
> The
> > goal of both abusive users and administrators is to rile the editor up.
> This
> > is deliberate provocation, completely incivil, and all too common - yet
> it
> > is regularly given a free pass by the administrator community.
>
> If I put a warning tag on a user talk page, it's because that user has
> done something meriting a warning, not to "rile the editor up".  They
> should not be removed because they serve as a notice to other
> administrators that this user has a history of negative behavior.
>
> Tags placed in bad faith can be dealt with like any other abuse.
>
> > Administrators need to understand: BLOCKING SOMEONE IS GOING TO GET THEM
> > MAD. It is an action that is agressive and adversarial. No matter what
> the
> > temperament of the user, they will feel angry over this. They are likely
> to
> > leave a message that lashes out in anger at whoever did it, PARTICULARLY
> if
> > it is not justified within the rules or they already feel picked-upon by
> the
> > admin or his/her cronies.
>
> The fact that a block gets someone MAD does not justify further abuse,
> and the talk page should not be used to give a troll a soapbox to
> attack people.
>

If they're mad, they're mad. PEOPLE VENT WHEN THEY ARE MAD.

If you can't understand this, you've got serious socioaffective issues to
get through, and those alone probably should disqualify you from adminship.

Is a talk page "giving a troll a soapbox"? It's not part of the article
space, and the only people likely to go there are admins reviewing the
block, or people responding to something they said elsewhere.

Instead of instantly extending the block and being vindictive, an admin who
sees something like that ought to post a message understanding that they are
angry, but INVITING THEM TO TAKE IT BACK THEMSELVES.

You know, give someone a chance to calm down and then take back something
said in the heat of anger.

Instead, the admins on wikipedia see it as a chance to kick someone with
steel-toed boots while they're lying on the sidewalk bleeding, and get some
vicious thrill out of doing so, because then they can put another notch on
their blocked-users cane.

I see this garbage written all the time about how "admins have a tough job"
and have to be "cut some slack", have to be "given some time to respond",
yadda yadda yadda. Well, regular users deserve the same consideration,
deserve the time to take back something they said when angry, deserve to be
treated respectfully by the administrators. And that just doesn't happen on
Wikipedia. Admins are free to get as mad as they want, but if someone an
admin's mistreating doesn't instantly calm down and start kissing ass, the
whole admin community decides it's free playtime to engage in a collective
beating.

Parker

--
====
Parker Peters
http://parkerpeters.livejournal.com


body:
On 22/02/07, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/22/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/fast-facts-found-online/2007/02/21/1171733770530.html
> > (Is there a wikimedia-au list yet?)

> Way ahead of you Dave.
> There is a list:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l

/me goes to join up straight away

- d.


body:
On 2/22/07, James Forrester <jdforrester at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 21/02/07, Parker Peters <parkerpeters1002 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If Adminship were not a big deal, then losing adminship would not be a
> big
> > deal.
>
> Nonsense. It's amazing (and, frankly, mystifying) to me how often this
> awfully poor logical conclusion comes up.
>
> "Being a sysop is not a big thing, anyone can become one" is
> equivalent to saying "If you are judged unable to become a sysop,
> then, wow, you really must be two nuts short of a bolt".
>
> The corollary is that if you do have your sysop bit removed, you are
> now being accused of, indeed, having a shortage of bolt-fasteners.
>
> If we did hold sysops to some impossibly high standard - and, it
> should be pointed out, I personally see nothing wrong, and a great
> deal right, with holding Arbitrators and Stewards to this level, for
> instance - then, yes, being desysoped would not be such a big thing
> because people would fail the test all the time. But we don't, so it
> is, because they don't. See?
>
> [Sorry for being annoyed at yet another faulty repetition of illogic.]

James,

Not the case.

If we held the standard for entry fairly low, we'd have more sysops. Some of
them, just like too many today, would probably get drunk on the power and
start abusing it.

If it were taken away, BUT it hadn't been so hard to achieve in the first
place, it would not be so much of a letdown. It's not an insult to say to
someone, "Sorry, but this was an inappropriate usage; you're being stepped
down. Feel free to reapply later when you feel you've corrected whatever
caused this overstep."

Instead, being de-adminned right now is considered a huge deal. An admin has
to go SO batshit over-insane to get de-sysopped that flagrant abuses,
incivility, deliberate provocation of users, are seen as "alright" because
there is a "shortage", we have "too few" admins, yadda yadda.

I'd much prefer the secondary case, where if an admin didn't make the cut,
it was no big deal, because they could always apply later when they correct
whatever's wrong and we didn't have to worry about needing to give that bit
to someone, or worse keep the admin bit in the hands of someone who doesn't
deserve it, "or things will be left undone."

Right now, with the bar set so high for entry, that's not the case;
returning RFA members have been kept de-sysopped for such "crimes" as doing
something over 6 months previous that another admin with an axe to grind
disagreed with... which is also a problem of the cronyism inherent in the
system.

Parker
--
====
Parker Peters
http://parkerpeters.livejournal.com


from_name: Samuel L Bronkowitz

body:
Ok fine, who is the arbcom and I'll email to demand the case.

On 2/22/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I have CC'ed an arbcom member with regard to this, as well as sending
> > private emails urging him to get into contact with the user in question,
> > repeatedly.
>
> That's the wrong way round. The user in question should get in contact
> with the ArbCom member. I'm sure if the user in question emails a
> member of ArbCom and specifically says they wish to request
> arbitration, their case would be considered as any other.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 22/02/07, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/21/07, Parker Peters <parkerpeters1002 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > The faster you allow them to edit, the faster two bots could conceivably get
> > into a war as well.
>
> I don't know what freaky bots you work with, but as far as I know,
> Skynet does not edit wikipedia (yet...)

I think I've seen interwiki bots warring, though over a long and
diffuse timescale; one rationalises a dozen links and drops one; the
other adds it back in and resorts; repeat.

Actual edit-warring, though, between bots shouldn't be too hard to
prevent with a bit of code, surely? "If you have edited this page in
the last n hours, don't".

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: Rob

body:
On 2/21/07, Rich Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> However, the more I think about the way interactions take place on
> Wikipedia, the more I am convinced that the asymmetry in power and
> experience between an admin and a typical editor results in vastly
> different perspectives on the same actions. What seems (and in fact is)
> reasonable to an admin or an experienced user, can seem to be (and in
> fact is) a demonstration of admin "dickism" to a newbie.

This is pretty much the problem.  To many newbies, admins represent
the power elite, The Man, and not individual volunteers, thus they
think nothing of subjecting them to abuse.  Any response is seen as an
abuse of power, even when the incident is relatively innocuous.


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:UBX

body:
On 2/22/07, Jeremy Cushman <mets501wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I created the User:UBX account solely to host userboxes migrated via the
> Userbox Migration (formerly called The German Solution).  I have been
> using
> my bot, User:MetsBot, to migrate many useboxes to a subpage of
> User:UBX.  I
> started by migrating only clearly controversial userboxes, but then moved
> into userboxes about interests, etc, which was met by opposition from
> some.
> Just to be clear, isn't the consensus that we're migrating basically all
> userboxes which cannot directly help the project, and keeping ones such as
> languages, education level and expertise, WikiProject affiliations, time
> zones, locations, and a few others?  Should a userbox like "This user was
> a
> boy scout" really not be migrated?
> Thanks.
> --Mets501

Where there's a consensus to move the userboxes, I don't see any harm in
keeping a central library. Even if you don't move them into that userspace,
you could have redirects pointing out *from* User:UBX to the actual
template/userpages involved.

As far as where the consensus is, I haven't touched or looked at anything
involving the userbox wars for quite some time. I suppose, if everything is
located in or pointed at from the userspace of User:UBX, then you might be
able to make a template which accepts userbox names as a parameter and calls
the relevant subpages.

But not sure if other people will think that's a good idea. ;)

-Luna


from_name: Mark Ryan

body:
On 22/02/07, Parker Peters <parkerpeters1002 at gmail.com> wrote:
> - Regarding Jpgordon and the Checkuser, one of the few nice things about
> being an old admin is that I still have a few contacts (who will remain
> nameless for reasons you know well), and I've got the checkuser data myself.

CheckUser queries are logged. The only administrator to look at the
CheckUser data of all three users you mention is Jpgordon, the very
administrator whose CheckUser actions/results you criticise.

So, unless you're in bed with a developer, I think it's safe to assume
you're lying.

~Mark Ryan


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Parker Conrad

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Intellectuals relationship visualization

body:
Hi -- someone posted a link to a neat tool a while back, and I'm
trying to track it down again. It was a webapp that used wikipedia to
visualize influence relationships between different intellectuals --
so you could, for example, trace the paths of influence from Plato to
Kant. Is there anyone who could email with the link to this
application?

Thanks,

/prc


body:
On 2/21/07, Parker Peters <parkerpeters1002 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ideally? I'd like for administrators not to do the things that cause
> problems. But that's not likely.

Ideally, you would stop viewing every administrative action as
resulting from a malicious abuse of power.  But that's not likely.

> If Adminship were not a big deal, then losing adminship would not be a big
> deal. However, the bar for losing adminship is nearly impossibly high.
> If Adminship were not a big deal, the ever-growing requirements for it would
> not be ever-growing. But they are.

I agree that we should probably treat adminship as a more of a big
deal.  But I don't worry about "abusive" admins, not to protect my own
"power" ("you'll have to pry my mop from my cold dead fingers!") but
because we already have ArbCom to deal with the worst offenders.
Given that I don't see nearly every admin as malicious and abusive, I
think that this is a sufficent remedy. No malicious admin can prevent
an abused user from bringing a matter before them.

> here is the biggest problem with wikipedia today. Administrators are free to
> do whatever they want

This is, of course, news to me.  Had I been aware of this, I would
have blocked the other users I've been in conflicts with instead of
dealing with tedious ArbCom proceedings.

> (A) "Scarlet Letter" abuse. Users clearing/archiving warnings that they've
> already seen, or clearing off bad-faith tagging such as "suspected
> sockpuppet" tags or "warning" templates placed by abusive users trying to
> harass another user (usually claiming that a difference of opinion on a
> content matter is "vandalism), are routinely targeted by administrators. The
> goal of both abusive users and administrators is to rile the editor up. This
> is deliberate provocation, completely incivil, and all too common - yet it
> is regularly given a free pass by the administrator community.

If I put a warning tag on a user talk page, it's because that user has
done something meriting a warning, not to "rile the editor up".  They
should not be removed because they serve as a notice to other
administrators that this user has a history of negative behavior.

Tags placed in bad faith can be dealt with like any other abuse.

> Administrators need to understand: BLOCKING SOMEONE IS GOING TO GET THEM
> MAD. It is an action that is agressive and adversarial. No matter what the
> temperament of the user, they will feel angry over this. They are likely to
> leave a message that lashes out in anger at whoever did it, PARTICULARLY if
> it is not justified within the rules or they already feel picked-upon by the
> admin or his/her cronies.

The fact that a block gets someone MAD does not justify further abuse,
and the talk page should not be used to give a troll a soapbox to
attack people.


from_name: Tietew

subject: [Foundation-l] Request for OTRS account

body:
On Wed, 21 Feb 2007 14:49:23 +0100
In article <453b6e50702210549t3947e62bm62215be7cd995ed9 at mail.gmail.com>
[Re: [Foundation-l] Request for OTRS account]
"Delphine M?nard" <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:

> Can you please send me at dmenard AT wikimedia PUNTO org:
>

Thanks. Sent.

--
[[User:Tietew]] <tietew at tietew.net>
Blog: http://www.tietew.jp/
Wiki: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tietew
PGP/GPG: 26CB 71BB B595 09C4 0153  81C4 773C 963A D51B 8CAA
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/attachments/20070222/773ca32a/attachment.pgp>


subject: [Foundation-l] Request for OTRS account

body:
On Wed, 21 Feb 2007 14:49:23 +0100
In article <453b6e50702210549t3947e62bm62215be7cd995ed9 at mail.gmail.com>
[Re: [Foundation-l] Request for OTRS account]
"Delphine M?nard" <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:

> Can you please send me at dmenard AT wikimedia PUNTO org:
>

Thanks. Sent.

--
[[User:Tietew]] <tietew at tietew.net>
Blog: http://www.tietew.jp/
Wiki: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tietew
PGP/GPG: 26CB 71BB B595 09C4 0153  81C4 773C 963A D51B 8CAA
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/attachments/20070222/773ca32a/attachment-0001.pgp>


from_name: Jeremy Cushman

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:UBX

body:
I created the User:UBX account solely to host userboxes migrated via the
Userbox Migration (formerly called The German Solution).  I have been using
my bot, User:MetsBot, to migrate many useboxes to a subpage of User:UBX.  I
started by migrating only clearly controversial userboxes, but then moved
into userboxes about interests, etc, which was met by opposition from some.
Just to be clear, isn't the consensus that we're migrating basically all
userboxes which cannot directly help the project, and keeping ones such as
languages, education level and expertise, WikiProject affiliations, time
zones, locations, and a few others?  Should a userbox like "This user was a
boy scout" really not be migrated?
Thanks.
--Mets501


list: commons-l

from_name: GerardM

subject: [Commons-l] Commons-l Digest, Vol 21, Issue 26

body:
Hoi,
There have been problems in the past with people replacing png with svg
where the actual content was said to be the same but wasn't. The consequence
is that the automatic replacement of any content is something that will not
be trusted by many. It is a matter of trust... lack of trust based on past
performance.
Thanks,
     GerardM

On 2/22/07, commons-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org <
commons-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> Send Commons-l mailing list submissions to
>         commons-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
>         http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
>         commons-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
>         commons-l-owner at lists.wikimedia.org
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of Commons-l digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. Re: [Foundation-l] Commons request for input: policy
>       onautomatic image replacement (bawolff)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2007 20:19:21 -0700
> From: bawolff <bawolff+wn at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Commons-l] [Foundation-l] Commons request for input:
>         policy  onautomatic image replacement
> To: "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List"
>         <Commons-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
>         <c9d967260702211919l38aefadesd6492abc991cc58b at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 12:07:02 +0100
> From: " Artur Fija?kowski " <wiki.warx at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Commons-l] [Foundation-l] Commons request for input:
>        policy  onautomatic image replacement
> To: "Wikimedia Commons Discussion List"
>        <commons-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <ea8e5e7f0702200307j61ad19fdx1d0104493672a9b0 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> 2007/2/20, peter green <plugwash at p10link.net>:
> >
> >> personally i think such svg gnomes should be blocked on sight but thats
> a
> >> descision for individual projects to make.
> >
>
> >So come and ban me for changing bitmap COAs to SVG versions, and I will
> >delete them without changing to SVG on your project:P
>
> >You have axe so nobody can forbid you to cut  off your head!
>
> >AJF/WarX
>
>
> Posts on this subject are really confusing. what's the problem with
> linking to svg's?
>
> -bawolff
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Commons-l mailing list
> Commons-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
>
>
> End of Commons-l Digest, Vol 21, Issue 26
> *****************************************
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/attachments/20070222/76e744c2/attachment.htm


body:
<snip>

> > Administrators need to understand: BLOCKING SOMEONE IS GOING TO GET THEM
> > > MAD. It is an action that is agressive and adversarial. No matter what
> the
> > > temperament of the user, they will feel angry over this. They are
> likely to
> > > leave a message that lashes out in anger at whoever did it,
> PARTICULARLY if
> > > it is not justified within the rules or they already feel picked-upon
> by the
> > > admin or his/her cronies.
>
> > The fact that a block gets someone MAD does not justify further abuse,
> > and the talk page should not be used to give a troll a soapbox to
> > attack people.
>
>
> In an ideal world, it would be better to calm things down before a
> block if possible.
>
> That said, if someone is clearly being a dick, that's of course a
> different matter.
>
> Every admin doing something abusive will claim they are dealing with a
"dick." Doesn't mean they are, nor does it mean the admin isn't just as
guilty of being one.

--
====
Parker Peters
http://parkerpeters.livejournal.com


from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject: [Foundation-l] The Chinese New Year Wikipedia Logo

body:
On 2/17/07, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> ?ukasz Garczewski wrote:

> > We DO NOT need that. We are a living, thriving community. And the
> > community doesn't have to be reminded that it's [insert your favourite
> > holiday], does it?
>
> But still... it happens !
>
> 'cause we are humans ;-)

Are we? H?h?.

> ant (running away before the wave hits her)

c'est l? que le dauphin dit ? la fourmi...

"Jump on my back, little ant, and let's ride that wave.Woooooosh!"

Je...

;-)

Delphine
--
~notafish


body:
On 2/22/07, Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/21/07, Parker Peters <parkerpeters1002 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Bots are problematic enough as is, we have any number that malfunction
> or
> > do
> > things based on an ill-considered script already.
> >
> > The faster you allow them to edit, the faster two bots could conceivably
> > get
> > into a war as well.
>
>
> I'd agree we should be careful about this -- bots have the potential to be
> very helpful, but rogue or malfunctioning bots likewise have a potential
> to
> do some pretty nasty damage. Not so much to pages; sure, it'll be a chore,
> but we can revert all of that easily enough. I'd be especially concerned
> about bots that deal with newer users, and how a buggy bot can influence
> their first experiences on the wiki.

That's one of my concerns, but I'm also concerned about what happens when
two bots start making the same change in slightly different ways; say
someone writes a bot to make all date codes uniform, for example, and
another bot starts thinking it's vandalizing something or it starts
"datecoding" things that are in external links?

Always good to watch the bots. Some of them have been going for some time
> with only a few problems, and could do more with more freedom to edit.
> Giving out this freedom blindly is probably bad, and I didn't see people
> proposing we should do that (I think) -- the bots we trust and know, and
> which could obviously benefit from the boost, though, not sure if I see
> the
> harm.

The potential harm is there... a bot with a specifically limited purpose is
fine, but even so, letting it run a bit slower doesn't hurt anything.

HagermanBot would be my specific example of a bot that doesn't need an
> artificial limit. Some people have suggested it should wait a little
> longer
> before signing (no idea where overall consensus on this is, just pointing
> out), but even "wait x seconds before signing" is just a delay for each
> edit, rather than a limit on the overall editing rate.

HagermanBot is a special case because its usage is overly specialized. It
still makes mistakes sometimes (such as when someone "signs" but then adds a
P.S. or something after, or manually signs rather than using tildes).

Having it wait X seconds before an edit - I'd suggest 60, to allow for time
for a user to realize, go back, sign it themselves, then make the bot
re-check - is a good thing.

Bots getting into edit wars? Merf. That'd be bad, but a responsible botop
> will avoid that problem with a few extra lines of code. It really wouldn't
> be too difficult.

That's relying on everyone to be "responsible" from the get-go; without a
limiter on bots, someone fixing a bot or tweaking code could easily goof up
and cause a major issue.

Long-term things like the interwiki bots arguing, that's a
> little trickier, but a high-speed end-of-the-world botwar isn't something
> I
> expect to see any time soon.
>
> Just my take, probably a bit of a ramble.
> -Luna

I agree it's not a high-high likelihood, but the danger it poses warrants
some serious consideration and conservativeness.

--
====
Parker Peters
http://parkerpeters.livejournal.com


body:
On 2/22/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Actual edit-warring, though, between bots shouldn't be too hard to
> prevent with a bit of code, surely? "If you have edited this page in
> the last n hours, don't".
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk

Bot edit warring would not increase by this raise in edit rate.  The bots
that are going to be editing faster are the bots who have 1500 articles to
tag, or something of that sort; those that run through a predetermined
list.  Bots who edit in reaction to events on-wiki, such as anti-vandal
bots, HangermanBot, etc, will be editing at the same rate anyway (already
they mostly just edit when they need to, which varies greatly from
minute-to-minute).

Asking bots who respond to events to wait a few seconds before making an
edit is a different story than allowing a running bot to edit 6 or 15 times
a minute.
--Mets501


from_name: Peter van Londen

body:
I politely disagree,

This will be the case when you leave too much room for interpretations.
By using an EDP approach, you leave all possibilities open for
non-conforming material to the freedomdefined definition. You might close
the gap of too far off EDP's with a control by anyone, any committee
(although there seems to be a disagreement between Kat and Eric about that),
but allowing images within an EDP conflicting with the freedomdefined
definition, like Fair Use, opens up in principle all possibilities for
communities to do whatever they want, conflicting with the original
definition.

I asked you to explain me how you can use fair use images for commercial
exploitation and for derivative works: you could not David. But I am not
opposed to using Fair Use, as long as there are no juristic detrimental
implications for the Wikimedia projects, but then be clear about it. The
draft can be adjusted, so that interpretations can be minimized.

Forget about an EDP: use the freedomdefined definition, with two exceptions:
Fair use images for the EN:WP and another exception for the Polish Wikinews.
Any other exception should have to be approved by the board/GC.

Kind regards, Londenp

2007/2/22, David Gerard <dgerard op gmail.com>:
>
> On 22/02/07, Kat Walsh <kwalsh op wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > I am afraid of misconceptions and misinterpretations spreading too far
> > about what is to be allowed and what isn't, and I've been hearing
> > misinterpretations both on the too-inclusive and too-exclusive side...
>
>
> I fear it's a case where either side will seize on anything that could
> possibly support their obviously correct view rather than the
> obviously misguided opposing view.
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l op lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


body:
I politely disagree,

This will be the case when you leave too much room for interpretations.
By using an EDP approach, you leave all possibilities open for
non-conforming material to the freedomdefined definition. You might close
the gap of too far off EDP's with a control by anyone, any committee
(although there seems to be a disagreement between Kat and Eric about that),
but allowing images within an EDP conflicting with the freedomdefined
definition, like Fair Use, opens up in principle all possibilities for
communities to do whatever they want, conflicting with the original
definition.

I asked you to explain me how you can use fair use images for commercial
exploitation and for derivative works: you could not David. But I am not
opposed to using Fair Use, as long as there are no juristic detrimental
implications for the Wikimedia projects, but then be clear about it. The
draft can be adjusted, so that interpretations can be minimized.

Forget about an EDP: use the freedomdefined definition, with two exceptions:
Fair use images for the EN:WP and another exception for the Polish Wikinews.
Any other exception should have to be approved by the board/GC.

Kind regards, Londenp

2007/2/22, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
>
> On 22/02/07, Kat Walsh <kwalsh at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > I am afraid of misconceptions and misinterpretations spreading too far
> > about what is to be allowed and what isn't, and I've been hearing
> > misinterpretations both on the too-inclusive and too-exclusive side...
>
>
> I fear it's a case where either side will seize on anything that could
> possibly support their obviously correct view rather than the
> obviously misguided opposing view.
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Marc Riddell

body:
on 2/22/07 2:07 PM, David Gerard at dgerard at gmail.com wrote:

> Put it this way: more than me has thought he's more than one of the
> recent posters with a remarkably low evidence:invective ratio.
>
> The poster in question is no longer completely useless to the list. I
> think we're slowly training him to write things that are relevant
> talking points concerning the project.
>
> I fear that's all we can really do. The fundamental problem is that,
> as long as email addresses are free, it's impossible to keep someone
> entirely off the list without getting really drastic and screening
> just about all messages. And that would in fact make a
> conceptually-moderated list, which would be a failure as a list.
> wikien-l has to be open, as Wikipedia has to be open.
>
> Heck, I don't want that job as a listmod. I just want to clear the
> spam and help people who can't work the Mailman interface and so
> forth, and boot out troublemakers only as needed.
>
> As the mailing list for a wiki, readers have to have some of the
> tolerance to stupidity they need to have to work on the wiki itself.
> Just as working productively with *complete idiots* is pretty much
> mandatory on the wiki, putting up with this shit to some degree is
> hard to avoid here.

David,

Extremely well put! You helped me a great deal when I first came to the
List. It was my first experience posting to any such list, and I didn't even
know where to place, or how to format, my messages. Now, to some people's
annoyance, I can focus on the substance ;-). You are a part of the chemo
that will hold back the cancer in the culture.

Marc Riddell


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject: [Wikitech-l] Live mirrors

references:
<45DDAF3A.1080606@gmail.com> <45DDCF26.3070703@altern.org>
	<erkst7$k3g$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 08:01:04PM +0000, Tim Starling wrote:
> New remote loaders are set up every day. I was thinking that it would be
> better to have a list of pending remote loaders that we can block in a
> batch, once a week or so. A bug report for each one seems a bit excessive.

Is it possible to identify such machines by their pattern of
transaction activity, using something akin to an IDB, and set blocking
/32 rules in the edge router?

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274


body:
on 2/22/07 1:44 PM, William Pietri at william at scissor.com wrote:

> I would rather we took more time with these people

Before I reply to your entire message I need to know this: how many new
persons sign on to become Community Members in Wikipedia in a given month.
The answer will pretty much determine whether my idea is workable or not.

Marc Riddell


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] Hooks inside extensions

body:
On Wed, 2007-21-02 at 20:55 -0500, Simetrical wrote:
> Well, the good old-fashioned way to reduce the likelihood of
> collisions is just to name it using some prefix convention like
> "MyExtensionName_" (assuming your extension name isn't some common
> English word).  That should be effective.

There simply aren't enough extensions out there that this could be a
problem.

If someone's concerned, using a page on the MediaWiki wiki like
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hooks_Registry to maintain a list of hooks
in extensions would probably be more than adequate.

~Evan

________________________________________________________________________
Evan Prodromou <evan at prodromou.name>
http://evan.prodromou.name/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20070222/58a9a173/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Berto 'd Sera

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Admins blocking each other

body:
Hi!

I do not know this guy personally, I have spoken with you (Mark) only here
and quite casually, so all I can say is based on what I see/read/guess.
IMHO, you either have a simple personal problem OR you have different
conceptions of what should be done with the wiki.

Pls stop unblocking yourself asap and only ask for external intervention (as
you are already doing, I seem to understand). I know that asking something
is easy, but getting WMF to make ANY decision (even the most elementary
ones) is actually harder than changing Earth's Orbit with your bare hands,
so one can easily be tempted by a "Do It Yourself" solution. After all it's
what wikies are about, isn't it? Yet when it gets to conflict it's the wrong
way, believe me.

I'd really welcome an external "sort of U.N." ArbCom for things like these.
I know it's not nice when we have to deal with annoying petty quarrels but
someone must do the job, because no job gets done by leaving it on the table
until the paper on which its specs are written gets destroyed by time.

Many people will probably rate it a waste of time since it's about a 2
people community. But if you cannot ensure that things go smooth and
everybody's rights are respected when it's a small community.... then the
winner will start to ban every newcomer who is not "politically correct" and
there you go. It doesn't really matter whether the choice is made based on
politics, religion, sexual orientation or just personal sympathy.

The result is but one anyway: only those who comply with "the rules" stay in
and the community grows as a sect. Once it's not going to be just 2 guys but
a full 300 people monolithically structured around some implicit "belief" of
theirs... then you bet you're going to have a hard time in making that wiki
behave like a wiki should.

B?rto ?d S?ra
Personagi dl?ann 2006 p?r l?arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti voj?otri)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Hoi,
When material is used with a "Fair Use" argumentation, the license that
this material would otherwise be available under is irrelevant. The
material could even have a commercial license. The claim of Fair Use
trumps any license restriction. When someone wants to re-publish
Wikipedia, the same claim of Fair Use should apply. This is why it has
to conform to the laws of the US and the local law(s).

It is therefore really simple. On its own ND and NC will not be
permitted. Within the limits of the law, there may be an EDP.

Thanks,
    GerardM

Peter van Londen schreef:
> I politely disagree,
>
> This will be the case when you leave too much room for interpretations.
> By using an EDP approach, you leave all possibilities open for
> non-conforming material to the freedomdefined definition. You might close
> the gap of too far off EDP's with a control by anyone, any committee
> (although there seems to be a disagreement between Kat and Eric about that),
> but allowing images within an EDP conflicting with the freedomdefined
> definition, like Fair Use, opens up in principle all possibilities for
> communities to do whatever they want, conflicting with the original
> definition.
>
> I asked you to explain me how you can use fair use images for commercial
> exploitation and for derivative works: you could not David. But I am not
> opposed to using Fair Use, as long as there are no juristic detrimental
> implications for the Wikimedia projects, but then be clear about it. The
> draft can be adjusted, so that interpretations can be minimized.
>
> Forget about an EDP: use the freedomdefined definition, with two exceptions:
> Fair use images for the EN:WP and another exception for the Polish Wikinews.
> Any other exception should have to be approved by the board/GC.
>
> Kind regards, Londenp
>
> 2007/2/22, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
>
>> On 22/02/07, Kat Walsh <kwalsh at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I am afraid of misconceptions and misinterpretations spreading too far
>>> about what is to be allowed and what isn't, and I've been hearing
>>> misinterpretations both on the too-inclusive and too-exclusive side...
>>>
>> I fear it's a case where either side will seize on anything that could
>> possibly support their obviously correct view rather than the
>> obviously misguided opposing view.
>>
>>
>> - d.


from_name: James Forrester

body:
On 22/02/07, Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 22/02/07, Parker Peters <parkerpeters1002 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > - Regarding Jpgordon and the Checkuser, one of the few nice things about
> > being an old admin is that I still have a few contacts (who will remain
> > nameless for reasons you know well), and I've got the checkuser data myself.
>
> CheckUser queries are logged. The only administrator to look at the
> CheckUser data of all three users you mention is Jpgordon, the very
> administrator whose CheckUser actions/results you criticise.
>
> So, unless you're in bed with a developer, I think it's safe to assume
> you're lying.

You know, Mark, I find that it's far more fun to let people tie
themselves up in their increasingly-convoluted lies before calling
them on them. Tsk, tsk. ;-)

Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
jdforrester at wikimedia.org | james at jdforrester.org | jdforrester at gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]


from_name: Pill

subject: [Wikitech-l] Live mirrors

body:
Some Wikipedias have special pages where users can report abuse via live
mirrors. Unfortunately, the procedure of dealing with them is not really
clear, so that on German Wikipedia e.g. there are lots of reports but
nobody does anything against the mirrors because there is no suitable
place where to request blocking them. The mailing list is quite a bad
place and reporting them to the server admins individually is not very
nice, also. Tim Starling proposed to make a Meta page about that and
I've created one, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Live_mirrors. I
think it would be a bit easier for the responsible people if people
reported all live mirrors there than on single Wikis.

Greetings,

    Pill (wiki.pill @ gmail.com)

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/attachments/20070222/2465b555/attachment.pgp>


from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikitech-l] Live mirrors

body:
On 2/22/07, Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu> wrote:
> I know there was such a meta page before.  It may still exist, but I
> have no idea where.  There are probably still links so if this stays
> active, redirects should be created.

There was this one which mixed live mirrors and sites which are
violating the GFDL but aren't live mirrors:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Non-compliant_site_coordination#To_block

Angela


body:
On 2/22/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> When material is used with a "Fair Use" argumentation, the license that
> this material would otherwise be available under is irrelevant.

Well, not if it's a free license. (yeah, I know... ;-))

>The
> material could even have a commercial license. The claim of Fair Use
> trumps any license restriction. When someone wants to re-publish
> Wikipedia, the same claim of Fair Use should apply. This is why it has
> to conform to the laws of the US and the local law(s).

I'm sorry, I do not understand what you are trying to say here.

What local laws? When? How?

Delphine
(confused)
--
~notafish
NB. This address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to
this address will probably get lost.
NB. Cette adresse est utilis?e pour les listes de diffusion. Tout
email personnel envoy? ? cette adresse sera probablement perdu.


from_name: geni

body:
> Geniice told me on IRC, if I understand correctly,
> that you might change a copyrighted image (fair use or not) if it is a very
> small part of the original, like for a parody (under USA-law). But album
> covers are not part of this.
>

Not quite. Those were the first examples I could come up with. It is
not say there are not others but since en.wikipedia does not allow
modification of fair use images it  isn't a subject I worry about very
much.

--
geni


from_name: Jim Hu

subject: [Wikitech-l] Inheritance problem for CategoryPage.php

body:
FWIW, Count may be slow, but the slow step in generating the Category
page is probably a combination of sorting the return in mysql and
stepping through the query results in php.  On my outdated Mac OSX
dual G5 server, I get the following with my pre-beta extension, using
a category with 124,520 articles and 3 subcategories

Count the articles: 5 sec
Do the query method: 16-24 sec
n = 3

For a category with 74945 articles
Count the articles: 2-3 sec
Do the query method: 9-10 sec
n = 3

this is by putting time() calls in the code and subtracting.  This is
right on the edge of not working at all, and sometimes when I load
the page it fails.  Of course, I ran the tests while some spammer was
trying to flood my server on another application. The query numbers
are much higher than one would get for the real CategoryPage.php,
since I the query to collect all the subcategories has to traverse
the whole list of categorylinks.

I'm hoping faster hardware will help. Or at some point, perhaps I
should just show the count and write a message to the screen like:

"You really don't want to click through all the pages of articles.
Try a subcategory instead!"
;)
More seriously, I wonder if it would be worth having a cron job
periodically generate denormalized tables for the articles and
subcategories in general.

Oh, and I'm still wondering about the inheritance problem.

Jim

=====================================
Jim Hu
Associate Professor
Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
2128 TAMU
Texas A&M Univ.
College Station, TX 77843-2128
979-862-4054

On Feb 20, 2007, at 2:04 PM, Jim Hu wrote:

> Yeah, I'm using COUNT(*)...and it is slow.  But for some uses on low
> traffic sites like mine, it's a tradeoff some sysadmins will be
> willing to take.  I don't see this getting used on wikipedia for
> performance reasons, as you note.
>
> I was thinking about how one might cache the count, but then it seems
> to me that you need all kinds of triggers for whenever the category
> links change... I'm much too much of a newbie to dive that far into
> the code...at least so far, and I don't know if this can even be done
> as an extension without a lot of new hooks.
>
> I'm sure the rest of you have given this much more thought than I
> have.
> =====================================
> Jim Hu
> Associate Professor
> Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
> 2128 TAMU
> Texas A&M Univ.
> College Station, TX 77843-2128
> 979-862-4054
>
>
> On Feb 20, 2007, at 1:14 PM, Simetrical wrote:
>
>> On 2/20/07, Jim Hu <jimhu at tamu.edu> wrote:
>>> I'm developing the extension for 1.8.3.  I have now gotten the basic
>>> version working with the minor hack to CategoryPage.php.
>>>
>>> So far, it improves on CategoryPage.php in two ways:
>>> Shows the subcategories no matter how many articles are shown
>>> Shows the real counts for articles when the number is >200.
>>>
>>> I'm hoping to make it more like Special:Allpages next...I'm using it
>>> on a wiki where there are categories with >100K articles in the
>>> biggest categories:
>>>
>>> http://gowiki.tamu.edu/GO/wiki/index.php/Category:Eukaryota
>>>
>>> Paging through 200 at a time gets old fast!!
>>
>> Are you using COUNT(*)?  That's O(N) on InnoDB, which is why we don't
>> use it: too slow for large categories.  If you have an extra field in
>> the database somewhere rather than COUNT(*), maybe it would be good
>> for trunk (although that's for Tim, Domas, etc. to decide).
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikitech-l mailing list
>> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


body:
2007/2/22, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen op gmail.com>:
>
> Hoi,
> When material is used with a "Fair Use" argumentation, the license that
> this material would otherwise be available under is irrelevant. The
> material could even have a commercial license. The claim of Fair Use
> trumps any license restriction. When someone wants to re-publish
> Wikipedia, the same claim of Fair Use should apply. This is why it has
> to conform to the laws of the US and the local law(s).

You are probably right for republishing, but I don't believe that this is
true for making derivative works of Wikipedia. The GFDL-licence of
wikipedia, allows to change the material. Well with a fair use image, when
it is copyrighted (and not free-licensed), you would not be able to change
the material, so therefore the fair use image is not compatible to the GFDL
of Wikimedia-projects. Geniice told me on IRC, if I understand correctly,
that you might change a copyrighted image (fair use or not) if it is a very
small part of the original, like for a parody (under USA-law). But album
covers are not part of this.

It is therefore really simple. On its own ND and NC will not be
> permitted. Within the limits of the law, there may be an EDP.

So in fact you wouldn't need an EDP at all in my opinion.

Thanks,
>     GerardM

 Thanks as well
   Londenp


body:
2007/2/22, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
>
> Hoi,
> When material is used with a "Fair Use" argumentation, the license that
> this material would otherwise be available under is irrelevant. The
> material could even have a commercial license. The claim of Fair Use
> trumps any license restriction. When someone wants to re-publish
> Wikipedia, the same claim of Fair Use should apply. This is why it has
> to conform to the laws of the US and the local law(s).

You are probably right for republishing, but I don't believe that this is
true for making derivative works of Wikipedia. The GFDL-licence of
wikipedia, allows to change the material. Well with a fair use image, when
it is copyrighted (and not free-licensed), you would not be able to change
the material, so therefore the fair use image is not compatible to the GFDL
of Wikimedia-projects. Geniice told me on IRC, if I understand correctly,
that you might change a copyrighted image (fair use or not) if it is a very
small part of the original, like for a parody (under USA-law). But album
covers are not part of this.

It is therefore really simple. On its own ND and NC will not be
> permitted. Within the limits of the law, there may be an EDP.

So in fact you wouldn't need an EDP at all in my opinion.

Thanks,
>     GerardM

 Thanks as well
   Londenp


body:
> On 22/02/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> Extremely well put! You helped me a great deal when I first came to the
>> List. It was my first experience posting to any such list, and I didn't even
>> know where to place, or how to format, my messages. Now, to some people's
>> annoyance, I can focus on the substance ;-). You are a part of the chemo
>> that will hold back the cancer in the culture.
>
> on 2/22/07 4:11 PM, David Gerard at dgerard at gmail.com wrote:

> You mean, I make people horribly sick and their hair fall out, but
> IT'S ALL FOR THEIR OWN GOOD?
>
> Exxxxxxxxxxxxcellent!

I couldn't say cure for the cancer (which is, of course, what I meant)
because someone would chastise me for not sighting my sources.

Marc


from_name: Thomas Dalton

body:
> I have CC'ed an arbcom member with regard to this, as well as sending
> private emails urging him to get into contact with the user in question,
> repeatedly.

That's the wrong way round. The user in question should get in contact
with the ArbCom member. I'm sure if the user in question emails a
member of ArbCom and specifically says they wish to request
arbitration, their case would be considered as any other.


body:
on 2/22/07 4:28 PM, Marc Riddell at michaeldavid86 at comcast.net wrote:

> sighting my sources.

"sighting" my sources!?!

This is an excellent example of why a writer needs an editor!

Marc


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

body:
On 2/22/07, Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:
> CheckUser queries are logged. The only administrator to look at the
> CheckUser data of all three users you mention is Jpgordon, the very
> administrator whose CheckUser actions/results you criticise.
>
> So, unless you're in bed with a developer, I think it's safe to assume
> you're lying.
>
> ~Mark Ryan

When do we get to the point that we don't allow this shit anymore on
wikien? Putting up with all of this makes it way more tiresome than it
should be to be to read the list.

--Oskar


body:
On 21/02/07, Parker Peters <parkerpeters1002 at gmail.com> wrote:
> If Adminship were not a big deal, then losing adminship would not be a big
> deal.

Nonsense. It's amazing (and, frankly, mystifying) to me how often this
awfully poor logical conclusion comes up.

"Being a sysop is not a big thing, anyone can become one" is
equivalent to saying "If you are judged unable to become a sysop,
then, wow, you really must be two nuts short of a bolt".

The corollary is that if you do have your sysop bit removed, you are
now being accused of, indeed, having a shortage of bolt-fasteners.

If we did hold sysops to some impossibly high standard - and, it
should be pointed out, I personally see nothing wrong, and a great
deal right, with holding Arbitrators and Stewards to this level, for
instance - then, yes, being desysoped would not be such a big thing
because people would fail the test all the time. But we don't, so it
is, because they don't. See?

[Sorry for being annoyed at yet another faulty repetition of illogic.]

Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
jdforrester at wikimedia.org | james at jdforrester.org | jdforrester at gmail.com
[[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]


body:
Hoi,
When as part of an EDP the option of "Fair use" is kept open, the
specifics of this have to comply with the US law and with the laws that
are prevalent for the country/countries that use the language. This
means for instance that for French, not only the French but also the
Belgian law has to be considered for the EDP.
Thanks,
   GerardM

Delphine M?nard schreef:
> On 2/22/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hoi,
>> When material is used with a "Fair Use" argumentation, the license that
>> this material would otherwise be available under is irrelevant.
>>
>
> Well, not if it's a free license. (yeah, I know... ;-))
>
>
>> The
>> material could even have a commercial license. The claim of Fair Use
>> trumps any license restriction. When someone wants to re-publish
>> Wikipedia, the same claim of Fair Use should apply. This is why it has
>> to conform to the laws of the US and the local law(s).
>>
>
> I'm sorry, I do not understand what you are trying to say here.
>
> What local laws? When? How?
>
> Delphine
> (confused)
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:UBX

body:
On 2/22/07, Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/22/07, Jeremy Cushman <mets501wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I created the User:UBX account solely to host userboxes migrated via the
> > Userbox Migration (formerly called The German Solution).  I have been
> > using
> > my bot, User:MetsBot, to migrate many useboxes to a subpage of
> > User:UBX.  I
> > started by migrating only clearly controversial userboxes, but then
> moved
> > into userboxes about interests, etc, which was met by opposition from
> > some.
> > Just to be clear, isn't the consensus that we're migrating basically all
> > userboxes which cannot directly help the project, and keeping ones such
> as
> > languages, education level and expertise, WikiProject affiliations, time
> > zones, locations, and a few others?  Should a userbox like "This user
> was
> > a
> > boy scout" really not be migrated?
> > Thanks.
> > --Mets501
>
>
> Where there's a consensus to move the userboxes, I don't see any harm in
> keeping a central library. Even if you don't move them into that
> userspace,
> you could have redirects pointing out *from* User:UBX to the actual
> template/userpages involved.
>
> As far as where the consensus is, I haven't touched or looked at anything
> involving the userbox wars for quite some time. I suppose, if everything
> is
> located in or pointed at from the userspace of User:UBX, then you might be
> able to make a template which accepts userbox names as a parameter and
> calls
> the relevant subpages.
>
> But not sure if other people will think that's a good idea. ;)
>
> -Luna

That's not really what I was thinking.  I was just migrating them into
userspace, just as Scepia, Rfrisbie, Xaosflux, and many others have done.
My main question was if I was correct in my views of which templates remain
in template space, and which remain in user space.  I think the name
User:UBX was confusing people; it wasn't meant to be a quasi-namespace or
anything, just a location where Userboxes could be stored.
--Mets501


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:UBX

body:
On 2/22/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It's probably a good idea for your bot to get approval to do that.
> Basically, they're already listed in a central place through the
> Wikipedia:userboxes page.
> Are you doing this to make the typing easier?
>
> Mgm

Like I said in the previous message, I wasn't meaning to create a
quasi-namespace or anything.  I was just migrating userboxes from template
space to user space.  The first part of the email, wasn't a question, it was
a statement :-) The only question I had was whether I had the right views on
which templates should remain in template space.

And I know a fair bit about the bot approvals process being in the Bot
Approvals Group myself, but I did still seek the opinion of other BAG
members, who were OK with the task (which I think there's some confusion
about in this thread anyway). :-)

--Mets501


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Live mirrors

body:
Pill wrote:
> Some Wikipedias have special pages where users can report abuse via live
> mirrors. Unfortunately, the procedure of dealing with them is not really
> clear, so that on German Wikipedia e.g. there are lots of reports but
> nobody does anything against the mirrors because there is no suitable
> place where to request blocking them. The mailing list is quite a bad
> place and reporting them to the server admins individually is not very
> nice, also. Tim Starling proposed to make a Meta page about that and
> I've created one, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Live_mirrors. I
> think it would be a bit easier for the responsible people if people
> reported all live mirrors there than on single Wikis.
>
> Greetings,
>
>     Pill (wiki.pill @ gmail.com)

Something even better would be to report them in bugzilla. We could
create a "live mirror" component to the "Wikimedia" product. Then admins
will be able to handle them properly (since most of them already use
bugzilla for MediaWiki).

--
Ashar Voultoiz - WP++++
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hashar
http://www.livejournal.com/community/wikitech/
IM: hashar at jabber.org  ICQ: 15325080


from_name: Mark Ryan

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Golfer Fuzzy Zoeller sues law firm over allegation
	of malicious edit to his article on Wikipedia

body:
The article is still badly in need of citations. Anyone with free time
care to clean it up?

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

~Mark Ryan

On 22/02/07, Keith Old <keithold at gmail.com> wrote:
> G'day folks,
>
> Please see attached a Miami Herald article about golfer Fuzzy Zoeller
> launching a legal action against a law firm for a defamatory edit to his
> Wikipedia article.
>
> http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/sports/golf/16752834.htm
>
> Regards
>
> Keith Old
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Berto 'd Sera wrote:

>Pls stop unblocking yourself asap and only ask for external intervention (as
>you are already doing, I seem to understand). I know that asking something
>is easy, but getting WMF to make ANY decision (even the most elementary
>ones) is actually harder than changing Earth's Orbit with your bare hands,
>so one can easily be tempted by a "Do It Yourself" solution. After all it's
>what wikies are about, isn't it? Yet when it gets to conflict it's the wrong
>way, believe me.
>
I don't think we should expect the WMF to solve this kind of problem.
This may be the kind of situation where a steward should step in to help
them find a solution.

>I'd really welcome an external "sort of U.N." ArbCom for things like these.
>I know it's not nice when we have to deal with annoying petty quarrels but
>someone must do the job, because no job gets done by leaving it on the table
>until the paper on which its specs are written gets destroyed by time.
>
In the current dispute both parties are fluent English speakers so it
could probably work.  In some cases like wikis in other First Nations
languages there may be nobody else available who is capable of
understanding the language.  At least attempting mediation would only
need one person to look into the problem, and the disputants would need
to provide a summary of the situation.

>The result is but one anyway: only those who comply with "the rules" stay in
>and the community grows as a sect. Once it's not going to be just 2 guys but
>a full 300 people monolithically structured around some implicit "belief" of
>theirs... then you bet you're going to have a hard time in making that wiki
>behave like a wiki should.
>
Except for broad Wiki-wide principles rules in a 2-person wiki can be
fairly meaningless.  Either can propose a rule, and have the other half
of the membership opposed to that rule.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Hooks inside extensions

body:
OK, on the "Be bold" principle, I created a page on mediawiki.org

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_Hooks_Registry

This is a slight variation on the page name suggested by Evan.  I
linked to it from

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions
=====================================
Jim Hu
Associate Professor
Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
2128 TAMU
Texas A&M Univ.
College Station, TX 77843-2128
979-862-4054

On Feb 22, 2007, at 3:17 PM, Evan Prodromou wrote:

> On Wed, 2007-21-02 at 20:55 -0500, Simetrical wrote:
>> Well, the good old-fashioned way to reduce the likelihood of
>> collisions is just to name it using some prefix convention like
>> "MyExtensionName_" (assuming your extension name isn't some common
>> English word).  That should be effective.
>
> There simply aren't enough extensions out there that this could be a
> problem.
>
> If someone's concerned, using a page on the MediaWiki wiki like
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hooks_Registry to maintain a list of
> hooks
> in extensions would probably be more than adequate.
>
> ~Evan
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________________
> __
> Evan Prodromou <evan at prodromou.name>
> http://evan.prodromou.name/
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [WikiEN-l] Now we're ready for prime time...

body:
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:

>Wikipedia isn't "Not Ready for Prime Time" any more... we were
>recently mentioned in a U.S. prime time broadcast network television
>program.  At the end of this past Sunday's episode of "American Dad",
>which concerned exposing a historical conspiracy, a character asks
>the rhetorical question of where he can publish his expose of the
>"true facts" he has uncovered so that people will believe it in
>absence of actual proof... then answers it by creating an article on
>Wikipedia.  (This actually violates several policies, including No
>Original Research and Verifiability / References.)
>
I prefer not to believe everything I hear on an American sitcoms.
Writers of fiction in particular can be allowed certain licence on the
road to making their stories work.

Ec


from_name: David Olivier

body:
James Forrester wrote:
> On 21/02/07, Parker Peters <parkerpeters1002 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If Adminship were not a big deal, then losing adminship would not be a big
>> deal.
>>
>
> Nonsense. It's amazing (and, frankly, mystifying) to me how often this
> awfully poor logical conclusion comes up.
>
> "Being a sysop is not a big thing, anyone can become one" is
> equivalent to saying "If you are judged unable to become a sysop,
> then, wow, you really must be two nuts short of a bolt".
>
> The corollary is that if you do have your sysop bit removed, you are
> now being accused of, indeed, having a shortage of bolt-fasteners.
>
> If we did hold sysops to some impossibly high standard - and, it
> should be pointed out, I personally see nothing wrong, and a great
> deal right, with holding Arbitrators and Stewards to this level, for
> instance - then, yes, being desysoped would not be such a big thing
> because people would fail the test all the time. But we don't, so it
> is, because they don't. See?
>
> [Sorry for being annoyed at yet another faulty repetition of illogic.]
>
> Yours,
>
It's not quite that simple. It looks like your logic is true, but then
that Parker's is true too.

Your logic: Having a Nobel prize is a big deal (hardly anyone has it);
not having it is not a big deal. Being able to hear is not a big deal
(almost everyone can); not being able to hear is a big deal.

Parker's logic: Being able to shape your tongue in a u-shape is not a
big deal; not being able to do it is not a big deal either (it doesn't
matter either way). Being happy in love is a big deal; being unhappy in
love is a big deal too (it matters a lot, either way).

Your logic is based on how high the standard for X is. Parker's is based
on how much X matters.

David


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 22/02/07, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/22/07, Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:

> > CheckUser queries are logged. The only administrator to look at the
> > CheckUser data of all three users you mention is Jpgordon, the very
> > administrator whose CheckUser actions/results you criticise.
> > So, unless you're in bed with a developer, I think it's safe to assume
> > you're lying.

> When do we get to the point that we don't allow this shit anymore on
> wikien? Putting up with all of this makes it way more tiresome than it
> should be to be to read the list.

Put it this way: more than me has thought he's more than one of the
recent posters with a remarkably low evidence:invective ratio.

The poster in question is no longer completely useless to the list. I
think we're slowly training him to write things that are relevant
talking points concerning the project.

I fear that's all we can really do. The fundamental problem is that,
as long as email addresses are free, it's impossible to keep someone
entirely off the list without getting really drastic and screening
just about all messages. And that would in fact make a
conceptually-moderated list, which would be a failure as a list.
wikien-l has to be open, as Wikipedia has to be open.

Heck, I don't want that job as a listmod. I just want to clear the
spam and help people who can't work the Mailman interface and so
forth, and boot out troublemakers only as needed.

As the mailing list for a wiki, readers have to have some of the
tolerance to stupidity they need to have to work on the wiki itself.
Just as working productively with *complete idiots* is pretty much
mandatory on the wiki, putting up with this shit to some degree is
hard to avoid here.

- d.


body:
On 22/02/07, Ron Ritzman <ritzman at gmail.com> wrote:

> This should never happen...
> bold/revert/bold/whack
> However, this is what we see in too many of these cases...
> bold/revert/bold/revert/dick/whack

More patience is needed in such cases, I agree.

(I tend to avoid that level of article watching if I can avoid it. My
wikistress went WAY down the day I stopped even looking at my
watchlist.)

- d.


body:
On 22/02/07, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/21/07, Rich Holton <richholton at gmail.com> wrote:

> > However, the more I think about the way interactions take place on
> > Wikipedia, the more I am convinced that the asymmetry in power and
> > experience between an admin and a typical editor results in vastly
> > different perspectives on the same actions. What seems (and in fact is)
> > reasonable to an admin or an experienced user, can seem to be (and in
> > fact is) a demonstration of admin "dickism" to a newbie.

> This is pretty much the problem.  To many newbies, admins represent
> the power elite, The Man, and not individual volunteers, thus they
> think nothing of subjecting them to abuse.  Any response is seen as an
> abuse of power, even when the incident is relatively innocuous.

Yeah. Being an admin is to some degree a public relations role and can
in fact require the patience of a saint on-call. (I am myself highly
imperfect at this.)

- d.