from_name: K Forstner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Watchlist

body:
Time for the silly question(s). Wasn't the watchlist feature disabled some
time ago? Also, who might profit from being able to access my "watchlist"
(see below)? Thirdly, do some regular contributors automatically click
"Watch this page" whenever they think it *might* be useful for them at some
point in the future while others are much more careful which pages they
select? (For example, why on earth is Ericd's talk page on my watchlist?)

I agree with Mr Oak (don't remember the exact name now) that it's basically
only my business which pages I watch; and there *is* a difference between
watching and editing pages: You may have all kinds of interests but unable
and/or unwilling to contribute in many of those fields.

KF

My watchlist
(for user "KF")
(1917 pages watched not counting talk pages; 219 total pages edited since
cutoff; checking recent edits for watched pages... show and edit complete
list.)

Below are the last changes in the last 1 hours.

Show last 1 | 2 | 6 | 12 hours 1 | 3 | 7 days all
21 Oct 2003

(diff) (hist) . . Defensive wall; 17:24 . . Lir (Talk)

(diff) (hist) . . Wikipedia:Requested articles; 17:23 . . Kingturtle (Talk)
(spot edits and alphabetizing. also removed: [[SCAP]])

(diff) (hist) . . Wikipedia:Votes for deletion; 17:21 . . 217.206.44.122
(Talk?) (Pi day.)

(diff) (hist) . . User talk:Ericd; 17:19 . . Ericd (Talk) (to Ed)

(diff) (hist) . . Wikipedia:Village pump; 17:18 . . Kingturtle (Talk) (re:
NPOV autobiography?)

(diff) (hist) . . Wikipedia:Sandbox; 17:18 . . 64.80.80.230 (Talk?)

(diff) (hist) . . M Sherlock Holmes; 17:16 . . Zoicon5 (Talk)

(diff) (hist) . . Wikipedia:Links to disambiguating pages; 17:05 . .
Jimbreed (Talk?) (Legolas is not a disambiguating page)

(diff) (hist) . . Talk:List of people known by initials; 17:04 . . Calieber
(Talk)

(diff) (hist) . . M User talk:Chris K; 17:03 . . Morven (Talk) (quoting fix)

(diff) (hist) . . Current events; 16:57 . . King brosby (Talk)

(diff) (hist) . . American and British English Differences; 16:50 . .
144.177.0.6 (Talk?) (People in the UK do not say "sport page" or "drugs
dealer". They say "sports page" and "drug dealer", as in the US. Deleting
that paragraph.)

(diff) (hist) . . M Wikipedia:Brilliant prose candidates; 16:42 . . JDG
(Talk) (Moved Race to B. Prose after month with no objections)

(diff) (hist) . . M Wikipedia:Brilliant prose; 16:37 . . JDG (Talk) (added
Race article)


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: MT and pro-Catholic bias

body:
Gareth-
>> Then why don't you do it?

> Because, as far as I was aware, the article is protected.

It is not. I unprotected it to allow people like yourself to make changes
while Jtdirl and I refrained from editing it.

> And people who change Erik's edits, get threatened with banning.

That is incorrect.

> Because life is too short to step into an edit war between competing
> zealots?

I am not a zealot. Personal attacks are unacceptable. Please desist.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Gareth Owen

body:
erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller) writes:

> > Because life is too short to step into an edit war between competing
> > zealots?
>
> I am not a zealot. Personal attacks are unacceptable. Please desist.

Allow to rephrase:
"Because life is too short to step into an edit war between two competing
 factions whose writing reads, to me, like the writing of zealots."

We are not trying Mother Theresa, so there's no need to write like a lawyer.
If you don't think of yourself as "the case for the prosecution", you're
writing might got give of the unjustified aura of zealotry.
--
Gareth Owen
"It's not a human or civic right to edit wikipedia."
                                 -- kq cuts to the core of the banning debate


list: wikien-l

from_name: Stevertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Article ban: Erik and James

body:
--- Louis Kyu Won Ryu <lazolla at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 1.  Talk is talk, and you created your article in
> the encyclopedia space.

Whoops -- why not move it to the talkspace?

> 2.  It is longstanding policy that we discuss before
> we vote.

In case you hadnt noticed about a full days worth of
mail list discussion, and a talk page with a full
archive in the same time.
Putting a discussion about blocking two polar views is
separate from discussing the article.

On a side note-- it might be proper to use your proper
personae when involed in disputes.

> 3.  I moved the text, rather than merely making a
> redirect out of it.

That was at least thoughtful.

> 4.  I would appreciate your help and support, since
> I think we are both
> on the same side.

We are.  Go with the flow next time.

~S~

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


from_name: Louis Kyu Won Ryu

body:
Stevertigo wrote:
> Louis, dont take it upon yourself to simply make a
> redirect out of a new article which I just started,
> for an apparently necessary reason. Thanks.

1.  Talk is talk, and you created your article in the encyclopedia space.
2.  It is longstanding policy that we discuss before we vote.
3.  I moved the text, rather than merely making a redirect out of it.
4.  I would appreciate your help and support, since I think we are both
on the same side.

Best regards

Louis


from_name: Toby Bartels

body:
[This is being posted to the mailing list only once!  Wow!!!]

Erik Moeller wrote:

>Gareth Owen wrote:

>>Really?  If I had verifiable facts (from a published Diary, say) that Tony
>>Benn had toast and marmalade for breakfast on the 3rd of March, 1967, and
>>added it to the article, that would be OK and -- how wiki is this --
>>*irremovable*.

>That depends on whether the fact that he had toast and marmelade on that
>particular date is out of the ordinary. Compare previous discussions about
>verifiability, expandability, relevance. Whether an NPOV'd diary of Tony
>Benn with no selective omissions might find its way into Wikipedia is an
>interesting question of its own.

Actually, if Gareth wants to write [[List of meals eaten by Tony Bennett]],
using Bennett's diary as a primary source, then that's just fine with me.
I won't waste my time to work on it, but neither would I try to delete it.
The datum probably shouldn't be on the main [[Tony Bennett]] page,
but if the list were really short, then it might fit in there still.

-- Toby


from_name: The Cunctator

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Dammit! Post to the right list or don't post at
	all.(was Re: MT and pro-Catholic bias)

body:
> From: Daniel Mayer
>
> It is really so difficult to make sure that
> en.Wikipedia stuff like article disputes and
> allegations of abuse of power goes to WikiEN-L while
> discussion about controversial new features goes to
> Wikipedia-L?
>
It's about as difficult as it is to construct grammatically correct
sentences.

Don't blame the participants--blame the flawed interface of using
multiple mailing lists for discussing Wikipedia issues.


from_name: Modemac

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Big brother...

body:
The the hit counter was removed in order to conserve bandwidth; it was
producing a serious drain on the server.  (Or so I understand.)  I
suppose that when the new Web Server Monster is installed (what is it
going to be named, anyways?), there's a chance that the hit counter
may be restored.  But personally, I don't think it's much of a loss.

--
                       First Online Church of "Bob"
                         http://www.modemac.com/


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Re: ALERT: Idea for new feature: "Who's watching
	this	page?"

body:
Ececticology wrote:

>The proposal to watch who's watching which page is the kind of thing
>that's worthy of an aspiring KGB or CIA agent.  The potential for
>mischief is too high.  I want to be on the record as absolutely against it.

Not at all!  Secret agents are useful only for information
that is /not/ publicly available.  If watchlists were public,
then all of the CIA agents presently employed in ferreting them out
would lose their jobs.

For a real-life example, the USA PATRIOT Act
allows the FBI to look at US library records --
but it does /not/ make those records public to everybody!
John Ashcroft wouldn't like that hypothetical situation at all;
because if terrorists/dissidents knew what was available,
then they would take care to make sure that it was harmless.

-- Toby


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: ALERT: Idea for new feature: "Who's watching
	this	page?"


subject:
[WikiEN-l] ALERT: Idea for new feature: "Who's watching this
	page?"

body:
>Actually, it's a good idea. In no way is it a invasion of privacy. Anyone
>who wants to get some idea of a contributor's interests can look at his edit
>record. There's no good reason not to have watchlists be public.

>If you don't want people to know what your watchlist is, then don't have
>one.

>Wikipedia benefits the more open the actions and behavior of its
>participants are to each other and to the outside world.

>Qui custodiet custodies? Omnia mundi in Wikipediam.

"Who watches the guards?  The entire world in Wikipedia."

>Don't confuse this with actual invasions of privacy.

Before watchlists, people kept lists of links on their userpages
and used [[Special:Recentchangeslinked]] to watch their pages.
This was open to public view; if somebody wanted a private watchlist,
then I suppose that they just kept their list somewhere else
(and were deprived of the convenience of [[Special:Recentchangeslinked]]).
It's not clear to me whether, in creating [[Special:Watchlist]],
the fact that the lists became private was intended or a side effect.

If I had the option to make my watchlist public, then I would,
in the interests of the openness that The Cunctator mentions here.
At the same time, I don't want to remove the convenience
that [[Special:Watchlist]] brings to watchlist management,
simply because somebody prefers to keep a private watchlist.
A user preference would avoid this, and that preference's justification
would be if there were people that would insist upon using it.
There seem to be some!

As for the justification of having possibly public watchlists at all,
well, I think that /I/ would only care about knowing /how many/ people
are watching a given page.  But if other people want more,
and they can convince a developer to program it, then I won't complain. ^_^

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Jtdirl ban

body:
RickK wrote:

>Are you [Eloquence] saying you are prepared to ban a user because you are
>having an edit war with him?  That is MOST DEFINITELY an abuse of your sysop
>powers, and should cause YOU to be instantly banned.

No, he is not.

That's what Ed thought that he meant,
which is why Ed said that he wasn't serious about it.
But that's not what he meant at all, it seems.

In any case, he is now talking about bringing it before Jimbo,
under the charge of being an uncooperative fellow editor.
Whether or not that charge is valid, it's not an abuse of any power.
In fact, it doesn't use adminstrator power; anybody could do it.

-- Toby


from_name: Eric Demolli

subject: [WikiEN-l] possible plagiarism

body:
BTW could www.nationmaster.com use a larger font for wikipedia license info ?
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: steven l. rubenstein
  To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
  Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2003 7:43 PM
  Subject: [WikiEN-l] possible plagiarism

  I have been removing text to talk, generally concerning the Ottoman Empire (articles on the Ottoman Triumvirate, Suleiman the Magnificent, Ormus, etc.).  These seem to be plagiarized from  WWW.nationmaster.com, which

    holds copyright on all aspects of this site (including but not limited to content and layout), with the exception of the text from articles taken from Wikipedia and where copyrights are held by our sources
  Before I remove any more text to talk, I'd appreciate it if someone can check this for me.  As far as I can tell, the text in the nationmaster encyclopedia is not attributed to Wikipedia, so I have assumed that one of our contributors has been copying from them, rather than vice versa.  But I'd appreciate it if someone else can look into this further before I make any more changes,

  Thanks,

  Steve

  Steven L. Rubenstein
  Associate Professor
  Department of Sociology and Anthropology
  Bentley Annex
  Ohio University
  Athens, Ohio 45701

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

  ---
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  Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Wikitext to HTML translator and Wikitext language
	specification

body:
On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 11:16:19AM +1300, Richard Grevers wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 17:21:15 -0400, David Friedland <david at nohat.net> gave
> utterance to the following:
>
> >There seems to be a lot of disjoint discussion on Meta about this. Viz:
> >
> >* There is work that has been done by Taw on an OCAML lexer at
> >   <http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_lexer>
>
> My suggestions would be "the broken wikitext language", or the "invalid
> wikitext language".
> Because of its UseMod ancestry, the current parser produces some very bad
> HTML code*, and in particular handles lists and nesting of blocks really
> badly.
> * not so bad if HTML 3.2 or 4 is our target, but it would be nice to be
> able to produce clean XHTML.
> A few months back I started work on a ValidWiki parser, which has a much
> stronger concept of block and line elements, and uses both block and line
> stacks to open and close all elements correctly.
> I think I'm about 2/3 of the way through the block parser, and hadn't yet
> written the line parser. I have no idea how the code would comapre for
> efficiency.
> Unfortunately the only language I know how to code in is MivaScript, so it
> would need porting. (Miva performs okay for your mid-level merchant
> application, but doesn't have the efficiency for something with the
> workload of Wikipedia.

Uhm, my parser has block stack + line stack architecture too.
But the sources at http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_lexer aren't
the most recent.

Newer sources attached.

It's not complete but it wasn't really meant to be.
It was meant to be a proof of concept that a mix of wiki markup and HTML can
be parsed in a XHTML-correct and DWIM way extremely efficiently.
Concept proven, but integrating the parser with the rest of Wikipedia would
take much more time than I'm willing to spend right now.
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list: textbook-l

from_name: Sanford Forte

subject: [Textbook-l] high textbook prices article - follow up (long)

body:
Here are just two comments from a long thread on www.slashdot.org that was
triggered by the NYT article that Karl pointed to.
Here's the URL for the entire thread.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/22/0010203&mode=thread&tid=146&tid=188&tid=192&tid=98&tid=99

Below find two long comments form the Slashdot thread. (note that the second
comment has one or two paragraphs that end without resolution...no doubt an
omisssion by the author, who was trandposing to slashdot from an article he
had written on the subjecy). In any case, both are informative, and fully
corroborate some my experiences in the academic textbook industry.

Sanford
*******
Here are the above-mentioned comments (from Slashdot), in toto.
Comment #1 -
Speaking as a professor (Score:5, Insightful)
by kurisuto (165784)  on Tuesday October 21, @07:00PM (#7277507)
(http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto)
I sure don't get any kickbacks for "forcing my classes to use 'upgraded'
textbooks". I've never heard of such a practice. These days, I'm lucky if I
can even get the publishers to follow the traditional practice of sending me
a free desk copy for evaluation purposes; more and more often, publishers
want me to pay for the text before I consider creating a captive market of
40 student customers for them.

I share your anger about the problem of publishers charging unreasonable
prices for textbooks. If I could find a low-priced textbook which is a
reasonably academically sound choice, I'd choose it. Unfortunately, for
every course I've ever taught, all of my choices have been overpriced. So
what I'm forced to do is to make the best tradeoff I can between picking the
most academically suitable text vs. saving my students as much money as I
can.

The only other option I see is to create my own inexpensive in-house
textbook, but this is a huge amount of effort; it's much easier for me to
simply use a prepackaged text. Producing my own text would be easier is if
someone in my field would organize a single, well-ordered, referreed online
repository of open-source chapters, exercises, etc. If such a thing existed,
and if the college infrastructure existed so that I could just hand off my
camera-ready pages and have the bound text effortlessly appear on the
bookstore shelf without my having to rassle with copying, binding, and
pricing details, then I'd consider putting the extra time into doing this.

However, unrefereed course packs don't count as publications, and if you
don't have enough publications, you don't get tenure--simple as that. If I
spend time creating a cheap alternative for my students instead of writing
research articles for peer-reviewed journals, then I'm significantly
reducing my propects for my own survival. Those are the pressures I'm
responding to.

It would be nice if students organized and lobbied the administration to
change their tenure evaluation criteria on this point. If it helped us to
get tenure by creating inexpensive in-house texts, more of us would be doing
it. Unfortunately, I don't foresee students doing this; the point is
probably too abstruse from the perspective of students who never come into
contact with the tenure process.

Comment #2 (a few paragraphs don't resolve).
This is hardly just Britain. (Score:4, Insightful)
by neko the frog (94213)  on Tuesday October 21, @05:59PM (#7277094)
This is a rather long essay I wrote a while back on the subject, so bear
with me on this.

        Deep within downtown Seoul, on the bottom floor of one of the city's
innumerable high-rises, is the Kyobo Bookstore, the largest of its kind in
Asia. Along the West wall of this 2.3 million title shopping center is a
selection of English books, and a selection of college textbooks larger than
that many American campus stores. A visiting American student majoring in
for example mathematics would be astounded upon browsing the selection, not
because of the wide variety of books available, but because the exact same
book which he or she spent over $120 on for the previous semester is
available here for $30.

        Many of the business practices of the textbook industry are well
known, if only subconsciously, to all college students. The nearly
oligarchical cartel in the textbook industry drives the price of schoolbooks
to unreasonable levels, between three to five times fair market value for
equivalent non-scholastic texts in North American school bookstores (even
though they can be purchased cheaply overseas), by means of a captive
student population who does not have a choice in which textbooks they much
purchase and price-control mechanisms such as frequent yet marginal
revisions to short-circuit any used book market and "value-added" features
such as subscription-based Internet site access, partly so as to satiate an
expectation of high profits by textbook authors in an over-saturated
industry.

        The fact that textbooks are extremely expensive is difficult to
debate. A quick browse in Amazon.com's textbook section shows that the
average price for the top five books in each of their categories, is
currently $89.47. Only one book in their top Mathematics section is sold for
less than $99--and that book is only available used (Amazon). Since it is
not uncommon for professors to require more than one book for a class, the
financial burden on students can easy top five hundred dollars per semester.
Furthermore, the cost of textbooks severely outpaces inflation: the United
States Department of Labor indicates that the wholesale price of textbooks
has increased 65 percent in the past decade, nearly six times the average
increase in producer prices on the whole (Hubbard). In contrast, it is quite
rare to find a hardcover book online or at a physical bookstore, even
technical in nature, that retails for over $45.

        The traditional method for students to offset these costs is the
used book market, usually also facilitated by the campus bookstore. However,
the industry has several methods of short-circuting this market. Most
obvious is the frequent revisioning of textbooks, with as little as six
months between versions, make previous versions economically worthless
because even if the changes are as mundane as rearranged exercises (not
uncommon in math and physics texts), publishers will stop printing the older
edition, forcing professors to switch to ordering the new editions or risk
alienating students who cannot find used copies of previous editions. or
adding in "value-added" items such as CD-ROMs, magazines, or Internet Web
Site access which are rarely used by instructors but serve to prevent used
book sales.

        In an effort to get instructors, departments and school boards to
adopt a text, publishers go to great lengths to entice faculty. Perhaps one
of the most ridiculous instances of textbook publishers trying to win
instructor favor was an attempt to woo Richard Feynman, one of the most
prominent physicists of the 20th century and a professor at the California
Institute of Technology. Mr. Feynman was offered some 300 pounds of
textbooks to review and recommend, and the promise that "We'll get someone
to help you read them." One book he was asked to review was blank ("We just
need a recommendation"), and when he delayed for several days (allowing a
bidding war which cost the publisher two million dollars), Feynman was
offered gifts ranging from fruit baskets to an all-expense-paid tour of San
Francisco--including escort service (Feynman, 288-302).

        It is clear that there is little motivation for the textbook
industry to change within--textbooks are now a $7.8 billion industry (NCAS),
and it is unlikely that monumental changes in the way that textbook
publishers treat their primary consumers will come from the students.
Furthermore, it is equally unlikely that startup companies can gain the
capital necessary to enter the textbook market; as such, three publishers,
McGraw-Hill, Pearson PLC and Thomson, control 65% of the textbook market
(Canterbery), while about half a dozen other companies such as, Houghton
Mifflin, Prentice Hall, Holt and Harcourt control most of the rest of what
students read in the classroom (Paulson). The professors themselves need to
let publishers know that high prices for student's textbooks should not be
tolerated, and be cost-conscious when choosing required textbooks.

        One of the ways concerned professors can relieve textbook financial
burdens on students is also one of the Internet's best kept secrets. In
1971, almost a decade before the invention of what would become the
Internet, Michael S. Hart was given $100 million of computer time by the
University of Illinois on a Xerox mainframe. One idea he had for the use of
computers was the storage and distribution of electronic texts. The idea
grew into what today is known as Project Gutenberg, an electronic book
depository where over nine thousand public domain works, mostly classic
novels now out of copyright, are available for free. Professors who require
for their course Darwin's "Origin of the Species," Albert Einstein's
treatises on the Theory of Relativity, or even the complete works of
Shakespeare (with a multitude of scholarly interperetations) need no longer
require students to buy texts from the campus bookstore, and students who
insist on a hard copy of the material can likely purchase one inexpensively
at an off-campus bookstore.

        The Internet provides a second way for students to obtain used
books, when they haven't been obsolestetized. Students at George Washington
University, for instance, have established VarsityText.com, a site to
facillitate students selling books to each other, for a ninety-nine cent
transaction fee (Wilen). While it is a step in the right direction, there
are still some problems with this system, as students must rely on other,
perhaps less reliable students for texts that may be necessary very swiftly;
furthermore, there are no communication channels to compare one version of a
textbook with another, to determine what changes there are in various
editions so that students can feel confident using older editions of
textbooks for a class.

        The final alternative is less eloquent: student revolt, in the form
of litigation if need be. This year, formal complaints have been issued by
several groups to the top University of California and California State
University systems allege that

        Be that as it may, it is unlikely that the textbook industry will
stop gouging students anytime soon. However, the Internet provides another,
less legal means of distribution: peer-to-peer networks such as Gnutella
could concievably carry illegally scanned textbooks, much like MP3s And
those cheaper textbooks available overseas? They are still available at the
Kyobo Bookstore, even online, and still much cheaper than Stateside prices
(Kyobo, Amazon)--with a stern disclaimer in Korean warning that these
cheaper books are not to be exported to the United States.

-- the opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. in fact, they're
probably not even my own. you know what, just don't even bother reading it.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Karl Wick" <karlwick at yahoo.com>
To: "text" <textbook-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2003 1:43 PM
Subject: [Textbook-l] high textbook prices article

> Link to a NYTimes article:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/education/21BOOK.html
>
> Also, perhaps the book on Theology that is on the site will
> be a test of NPOV.
>
> Karl
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
> http://shopping.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> Textbook-l mailing list
> Textbook-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l


from_name: James Duffy

body:
>From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net>
>Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: MT and pro-Catholic bias
>Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 15:39:08 -0600
>
> >~S~
> >How would Internet-Encyclopedia handle this
> >controversy?
>
>The main article would be postive point of view, but note that there are
>criticisms and set them forth briefly. Criticisms, if set forth in detail,
>would be in an article entitled Mother Teresa:A critical view. That article
>would be required to note her beatification and probable sainthood and the
>basis therefore
>
>Fred
>

What I tried to achieve was a biographical article on MT that covered both
her positive and negative image and reputations, with the massive detail
added in by Eloquence put in a separate page called [[Criticisms of Mother
Teresa]], it being replaced by a short summary in the main article, with a
link to the other article. That would allow a balanced, fair article on MT
and a detailed linked article that could be linked to other pages also.
Eloquence simply deleted and reverted. Instead of a balanced readable
article, he insisted on captioning photos with long long text lines to
repeat claims already covered in the main article. For example,

/Mother Teresa with Charles Keating, convicted of fraud in the Savings and
Loan scandal and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Mother Teresa received
over a million dollars in donations from him, which she did not return after
the conviction. She did, however, send a plea for clemency to Keating's
trial judge/

All this was already covered, but was repeated in a 5 line caption that
could have been summarised in 10 words, any attempt to make standard short
captions was met with revertions and cries of censorship.

The scale of accuracy in the article on occasions was reflected by the
statement:

Her (MT's) view that abortion is immoral even in cases of rape and incest is
rigid even by Catholic standards

As anyone who knows anything about the teachings of various religions on
abortion, or who has followed the abortion debates for longer than 5 minutes
knows, the above view is the /standard/ RC view, not a right wing fringe
view.

The article needs major work in terms of
- structure
- layout
- editing
- factual accuracy
- NPOV
- encyclop?dic standards.

Yet attempts to do so have been met by Eloquence by reversions and by
demands now that I be banned, all for trying to turn an embarrassing POV
mess (the criticism section of the article covers 70% of the text, 90% of
the headlines, most of the pictures and most of the reading list!) into a
standard encyclop?dic article that covers the positive and negative
perspectives on MT, that avoids POV language (from the pro-MT 'revered' to
the anti-MT editorialising about one of the book Eric based his 20K text on
- "probably the most comprehensive critical analysis of Mother Teresa's life
and work to date") and produces a standard encyclop?dia article. The result
has been Eric attacks on some people on the reading list, on Dante when he
tried to act as mediator and on me for an imagined 'pro-catholic bias'. The
irony was I only went to the page in the first place to add /in/ criticism
of MT, because I presumed the article would be a one sided glorification of
her.

JT

PS: Thank you, everyone, for the emails. I appreciate them.

_________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
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subject: [Textbook-l] high textbook prices article #3 (addendum)

body:
Following are references from the second (long) comment from Slashdot
(posted just prior).

References, in case you're interested. (Score:1)
by neko the frog (94213)  on Tuesday October 21, @06:03PM (#7277119)
Amazon.com. Introductory Linear Algebra with Applications (7th Edition).
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/013 0182656/>

Canterbery, Ray. CW Resource.
<http://myphlip.pearsoncmg.com/cw/mpviewce.cfm?vce id=3073&vbcid=1409>.

Feynman, Richard P. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., 1985.

Hubbard, Kristen. Group Files Complaint Against Cost of Books.
<http://www.ucsdguardian.org/cgi-bin/news?art=2003 _02_10_05>.

Kyobo Bookstore. Introductory Linear Algebra, 7/E
<http://www.kyobobook.co.kr/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfin
ity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/PL_BookInfo-Start?Click=Cc&; barcode=6100130182653

National Association of College Stores. Collegiate Retailing Industry:
Higher Education Retail Market.
<http://www.nacs.org/public/research/higher_ed_ret ail.asp>.

Paulson, Tim. Textbooks Publishers Profiting From Students' Loss.
<http://www.corporatemofo.com/stories/020519textbo oks.htm>.

Wilen, John. GW Students Network, Take On College Textbook Industry.
Washington Business Journal 16 Dec. 2002, 34-36.
-- the opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. in fact, they're
probably not even my own. you know what, just don't even bother reading it.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Karl Wick" <karlwick at yahoo.com>
To: "text" <textbook-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2003 1:43 PM
Subject: [Textbook-l] high textbook prices article

> Link to a NYTimes article:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/education/21BOOK.html
>
> Also, perhaps the book on Theology that is on the site will
> be a test of NPOV.
>
> Karl
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
> http://shopping.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> Textbook-l mailing list
> Textbook-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Redhat [was: Server purchase plan - advice needed
	quickly]

body:
On Sat, Oct 11, 2003 at 10:13:58PM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Thomas Luft wrote:
> > >SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 for AMD64 Preload
> > >
> > I dunno, but for security and upgrade reasons I would prefer Debian (or
> > is this not available for the Opteron yet?!
>
> I would prefer Redhat just for compatibility with everything else I
> have.  At least at Penguin, SuSE is the only option, and I'm under the
> vague impression that SuSE is the first-to-market with a GNU/Linux
> system optimized for Opteron.
>
> I am mostly indifferent between SuSE and Redhat and willing to try
> Debian if the main developers want it, but SuSE is what will ship on
> the machine, so we might just accept that and go.

I'd like to add that we're having some problems because of using RedHat.
RedHat's TeX doesn't include CJK support, so the math mode on Wikipedia
can't render CJK characters, in spite of this being possible on my home
Debian machine. Recompiling TeX by hand would of course be the other option.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Make Math Error

body:
On Wed, Oct 15, 2003 at 07:03:45AM -0600, Fred Bauder wrote:
> While trying to install Phase 3 using mediawiki-20030829 I had the
> following error while making math:
>
> [colorado at tribal math]$ ls
> CVS       html.ml    mathml.mli       tex.mli      texvc_cgi.ml
> Makefile  html.mli   parser.mly       texutil.ml   texvc_test.ml
> README    lexer.mll  render.ml        texutil.mli  util.ml
> TODO      mathml.ml  render_info.mli  texvc.ml
>
> [colorado at tribal math]$ make
> ocamlopt -c util.ml
> ocamlc -c render_info.mli
> ocamlc -c tex.mli
> ocamlyacc parser.mly
> ocamlc -c parser.mli
> ocamlopt -c parser.ml
> ocamlc -c html.mli
> ocamlopt -c html.ml
> ocamlc -c mathml.mli
> ocamlopt -c mathml.ml
> ocamlc -c texutil.mli
> ocamlopt -c texutil.ml
> ocamlopt -c render.ml
> ocamllex lexer.mll
> 187 states, 3221 transitions, table size 14006 bytes
> ocamlopt -c lexer.ml
> ocamlopt -c texvc.ml
> ocamlopt -o texvc unix.cmxa util.cmx parser.cmx html.cmx mathml.cmx
> texutil.cmx render.cmx lexer.cmx texvc.cmx
> ocamlopt -c texvc_test.ml
> ocamlopt -o texvc_test util.cmx parser.cmx html.cmx mathml.cmx texutil.cmx
> lexer.cmx texvc_test.cmx
> ocamlopt -o texvc_tex util.cmx parser.cmx html.cmx mathml.cmx texutil.cmx
> lexer.cmx texvc_tex.cmx
> Cannot find file texvc_tex.cmx
> make: *** [texvc_tex] Error 2
> rm parser.ml lexer.ml
> [colorado at tribal math]$
>
> [colorado at tribal math]$ ls
> CVS        lexer.mll   parser.o         texutil.ml      texvc_test.cmx
> Makefile   lexer.o     render.cmi       texutil.mli     texvc_test.ml
> README     mathml.cmi  render.cmx       texutil.o       texvc_test.o
> TODO       mathml.cmx  render.ml        texvc           util.cmi
> html.cmi   mathml.ml   render.o         texvc.cmi       util.cmx
> html.cmx   mathml.mli  render_info.cmi  texvc.cmx       util.ml
> html.ml    mathml.o    render_info.mli  texvc.ml        util.o
> html.mli   parser.cmi  tex.cmi          texvc.o
> html.o     parser.cmx  tex.mli          texvc_cgi.ml
> lexer.cmi  parser.mli  texutil.cmi      texvc_test
> lexer.cmx  parser.mly  texutil.cmx      texvc_test.cmi
>
> [colorado at tribal phase3]$ php install.php
> Directory "/public/html/colorado/dev" exists.
> Directory "/public/html/colorado/dev/upload" created.
> Directory "/public/html/colorado/dev/style" created.
> Directory "/public/html/colorado/dev/upload/tmp" created.
> Copying files...
> Directory "/public/html/colorado/dev/math" created.
> Directory "/public/html/colorado/dev/upload/math" created.
>
> Warning: copy(./math/texvc_tex): failed to open stream: No such file or
> directory in
> /public/html/colorado/dev/mediawiki-20030829/phase3/install.php on line 157
> Failed to copy file "texvc_tex" to "/public/html/colorado/dev/math"
>
> [colorado at tribal math]$ make
> ocamlopt -o texvc_tex util.cmx parser.cmx html.cmx mathml.cmx texutil.cmx
> lexer.cmx texvc_tex.cmx
> Cannot find file texvc_tex.cmx
> make: *** [texvc_tex] Error 2
>
> Any ideas?

Sorry for answering so late but:
* texvc_tex is completely unnecessary for Wikipedia
* so is texvc_test
* only "texvc" binary is used for anything
* but I have no idea why it disappeared


body:
James-

> What I tried to achieve was a biographical article on MT that covered both
> her positive and negative image and reputations, with the massive detail
> added in by Eloquence put in a separate page called [[Criticisms of Mother
> Teresa]]

That was a clear violation of NPOV. We do not split away criticisms just
because the person is question is considered a "saint" by some. You did
not bother to write as much as an edit comment for your massive changes,
let alone announce them in advance. I tried repeatedly to reach consensus
with you on this, you refused and insulted me instead (and still do).

> /Mother Teresa with Charles Keating, convicted of fraud in the Savings and
> Loan scandal and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Mother Teresa received
> over a million dollars in donations from him, which she did not return after
> the conviction. She did, however, send a plea for clemency to Keating's
> trial judge/

That is a perfectly neutral description of what happened. There are plenty
of precedents for having comprehensive image captions that do more than
just say "Mother Teresa, left, with Charles Keating, right", e.g. [[Donald
Rumsfeld]]. It should be possible for a casual reader to get the necessary
information what an image is about and why it is reproduced by reading the
caption. Take a look at any electronic encyclopedia that has space for
captions, and you will notice that the exact same style is used.

> Her (MT's) view that abortion is immoral even in cases of rape and incest is
> rigid even by Catholic standards

> As anyone who knows anything about the teachings of various religions on
> abortion, or who has followed the abortion debates for longer than 5 minutes
> knows, the above view is the /standard/ RC view, not a right wing fringe
> view.

You keep repeating this, but it does not become any more true when you do
so-- of course opposition to abortion and contraception is the official
line of the Roman Catholic Church. Obviously, however, not every Roman
Catholic in a position of power and influence shares that position. MT
would have been in a perfect position to challenge papal authority on
these matters, instead she contributed to this deadly campaign that is
taking a toll among millions of people -- often by lobbying various
governments for harsher laws against both abortion and artificial
contraception. That is what the critics complain about, and that view of
course needs to represented in an article about MT.

> Yet attempts to do so have been met by Eloquence by reversions

Wrong. I tried whenever there was a difference of opinion to reason with
you, explained my reasons in the edit comments and on the talk page. You
did not write any edit comments, did not bother to respond much on the
talk page (and when you did, always with personal attacks), and did not
follow through on arguments to reach consensus. When I offered compromises
you again simply reverted without comment.

> and by
> demands now that I be banned,

Yes, for your repeated and gross violations of Wikipedia's behavioral
standards, which makes any productive cooperation impossible. You do not
discuss, you do not seek consensus, you resort to vile personal attacks
and false accusations, you revert without comment. This must stop.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] wfMsg() ready, is_array() is slow!

body:
I hereby declare that $wgDatabaseMessages can be safely set to true. As
long as memcached is enabled.

I rolled all the messages into one memcached entry. At first it didn't
seem to make much difference. I was confused as to why it seemed to be
taking much longer to load from a cache than from Language::getMessage,
even though they were both doing the same thing. The reason, when I
eventually discovered it, was quite surprising: is_array() is quite fast
when it returns false, but painfully slow when it returns true. Like, a
millisecond. I rearranged my code so that it doesn't use that function.

-- Tim Starling.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Stupid database tricks: images?

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> It might be the simplest thing to just store uploads directly as blobs
> in the database. When a request comes to serve an uploaded file, we can
> cache it in the local filesystem (or memory) if we like to speed access
> and allow read-only access with the db server down. This allows
> resynchronization by checking cache time validity, and lets images be
> backed up along with the rest of the db.

Like you say, it's certainly convenient. It wouldn't be too hard to do a
small-scale speed test. I guess we try it and see what happens.

-- Tim Starling


body:
>James-
>
> > What I tried to achieve was a biographical article on MT that covered
>both
> > her positive and negative image and reputations, with the massive detail
> > added in by Eloquence put in a separate page called [[Criticisms of
>Mother
> > Teresa]]
>
>That was a clear violation of NPOV. We do not split away criticisms just
>because the person is question is considered a "saint" by some.

No-one ever proposed doing that, Eric. All that was done was that proper
professional editing was done, with the detailed text that went into
discussions that weren't about MT but about Christopher Hitchens' opinions,
medical procedures, comments by an ex-nun from the Bronx being placed where
it belongs, in a special article that can explore the topic without drowning
a biographical article in minut? that aren't specifically about the person
the biography is supposed to be about.

Not that there is much point explaining that, as you have no interest in
listening. But everyone else needs to know the truth.

>I tried repeatedly to reach consensus
>with you on this, you refused and insulted me instead (and still do).

So reverting edits to put things into the wrong tense again and again,
deleting attempts to correctly centre text in captions, accusing everyone
who disagreed with your 20K 'criticism' of censorship is your understanding
of what 'consensus' is; 'put up with my 20K or I'll revert any edits you
make!'
>
> > /Mother Teresa with Charles Keating, convicted of fraud in the Savings
>and
> > Loan scandal and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Mother Teresa received
> > over a million dollars in donations from him, which she did not return
>after
> > the conviction. She did, however, send a plea for clemency to Keating's
> > trial judge/
>
>That is a perfectly neutral description of what happened. There are plenty
>of precedents for having comprehensive image captions that do more than
>just say "Mother Teresa, left, with Charles Keating, right", e.g. [[Donald
>Rumsfeld]]. It should be possible for a casual reader to get the necessary
>information what an image is about and why it is reproduced by reading the
>caption. Take a look at any electronic encyclopedia that has space for
>captions, and you will notice that the exact same style is used.

There is this strange tendency when writing in a text that has an
accompanying photo, to write in the text (See photo opposite). For some
strange reason the rest of the planet tends to do that and doesn't feel the
need to write half a book as a caption under every photo, all of it from one
side of the argument.
>
> > Her (MT's) view that abortion is immoral even in cases of rape and
>incest is
> > rigid even by Catholic standards
>
> > As anyone who knows anything about the teachings of various religions on
> > abortion, or who has followed the abortion debates for longer than 5
>minutes
> > knows, the above view is the /standard/ RC view, not a right wing fringe
> > view.
>
>You keep repeating this, but it does not become any more true when you do
>so-- of course opposition to abortion and contraception is the official
>line of the Roman Catholic Church. Obviously, however, not every Roman
>Catholic in a position of power and influence shares that position. MT
>would have been in a perfect position to challenge papal authority on
>these matters, instead she contributed to this deadly campaign that is
>taking a toll among millions of people -- often by lobbying various
>governments for harsher laws against both abortion and artificial
>contraception. That is what the critics complain about, and that view of
>course needs to represented in an article about MT.

If you really believe that you know even less about Catholicism than your
contributions to articles on the topic already suggest. Do you really thing
70 and 80 year old cardinals would suddenly abandon their (IMHO)
questionable theological views on sex because a woman, even MT, urged them
to. And the more you write Eric, the more you come across, as one wikipedian
put it, as someone presenting the case for the prosecution. That is not what
anyone supposedly providing NPOV copy in an encyclop?dia article is supposed
to be doing. NPOV means Neutral Point of View. It isn't IGGMOI - I'm Gonna
Get My Opinions In.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


body:
>From: Anthere <anthere6 at yahoo.com>
>Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
>To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>CC: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Could we swap list names please ?
>Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 16:08:42 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Could the whole discussion on Erik issues over Mother
>Teresa MOVE to the english list where it is relevant
>
>WHILE
>
>The whole discussion on watch list issues move from
>the english list to the general list, where it is
>relevant
>
>OR
>
>could we just swap mailing list names since
>discussions relevant on english matter are on the
>general list, while discussions relevant to the whole
>community are on the english list ?

For some reason some weeks ago I was knocked off the wikien-L and ended up
on the Wikipedia-l. Now I am on both and messages seem to go to either or
both even when I think it is going just to the english one.

Mea culpa, Anthere.

lol

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Could we swap list names please ?


from_name: Nikola Smolenski

subject: [WikiEN-l] Who's Watching My Watchlist?

body:
On Tuesday 21 October 2003 06:39, Dante Alighieri wrote:
> P.S. Will there also be a feature "Which Users Have Viewed My Watchlist"?
> ;)

I'd like to be able to add some watchlists to my watchlist so that I could see
when they change ;)


from_name: Dante Alighieri

subject: [WikiEN-l] Kudos to Eloquence

body:
At 09:57 PM 10/21/2003, Erik wrote:
>I have made a peace offer to James on [[User talk:Jtdirl]]. I publicly
>apologize for calling James a bully, that was not justified by his recent
>actions, as what I perceived as bully-like behavior seems to be more of a
>personal conflict between the two of us over several different matters,
>whereas both of us get along fine with other users. I guess that's what
>happens when large egos collide ;-)
>
>I will not bring up the idea of initiating a ban procedure again provided
>there will be no further personal attacks on either part. I have also made
>a suggestion for cooperating on the [[Mother Teresa]] article.
>
>I hope this will cool down this flamewar somewhat.

This is exactly the sort of classy and eloquent (sorry, couldn't resist an
easy pun) reaction that I would expect from someone so mature and invested
in the project. If everyone involved in disputes behaved this way, I'm sure
things would go a lot smoother. Kudos, Erik, kudos.

-----
Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 11:31:49PM +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> >It might be the simplest thing to just store uploads directly as blobs
> >in the database. When a request comes to serve an uploaded file, we can
> >cache it in the local filesystem (or memory) if we like to speed access
> >and allow read-only access with the db server down. This allows
> >resynchronization by checking cache time validity, and lets images be
> >backed up along with the rest of the db.
>
> Like you say, it's certainly convenient. It wouldn't be too hard to do a
> small-scale speed test. I guess we try it and see what happens.

The images could also be saved to a filesystem served by the new db box
(what's its name anyway?). FS access, even remote, should always be faster
than a db access.

JeLuF


from_name: Matt M.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Saints

body:
> Starting an article as follows: "Saint Bernard of Clairvaux" will offend
> many a lot human beings who are not members of the Roman church.

That's absurd. We don't start articles "Elizabeth Windsor, whom some
monarchists consider Queen Elizabeth II...", no matter how much this might
irritate republicans. The article on Quebec begins, "Quebec is a province of
Canada," no matter how much that irritates sovereignists. We don't hide
facts just because they irritate some people.

Saint has a certain definition: one who has been canonized. It doesn't
matter what people outside the church have to say about it.  And I say this
as a Wiccan.

Matt


from_name: Graham Burnett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Watchlist Re: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 3, Issue 97

body:
> Also a note:
> THERE WILL BE NO FEATURE BY WHICH ARBITRARY PEOPLE CAN VIEW ANYONE
> ELSE'S WATCHLIST WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT. The idea is very unpopular, and
> for good reason.
>
 thank you for that assurance. It's somethingbI've been nervous about since
the idea was mooted.

Graham (Quercus robur)

---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.525 / Virus Database: 322 - Release Date: 10/10/2003


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> That was a clear violation of NPOV. We do not split away criticisms just
> because the person is question is considered a "saint" by some. You did

Erik, that is not "by some", but "by many".  You fail to apply a
quantitative analysis to this case.  It's the criticism against her
that is in small minority.  Only "some" consider that to be relevant.

There is a billion people in India and *three* have become world
famous, in this order: 1) Gandhi, 2) Mother Teresa, 3) Indira Gandhi.
We remember Gandhi because he led India to independence, not because
he had bad breath.  There are millions of Indians who have bad breath,
and this does not help them to enter the Wikipedia.

Of all fights and causes, its obvious that you've decided to spend
your energy on this one.  Mother Teresa must really have hurt you.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Lars-
> Erik, that is not "by some", but "by many".  You fail to apply a
> quantitative analysis to this case.  It's the criticism against her
> that is in small minority.  Only "some" consider that to be relevant.

I doubt that you have done a headcount, but it does not matter. The
criticism is held by reasonable people, published in mainstream sources,
logical and clear. That is reason enough to include it.

> There is a billion people in India and *three* have become world
> famous, in this order: 1) Gandhi, 2) Mother Teresa, 3) Indira Gandhi.

Certainly, and many people in India despise 2). As Aroup Chatterjee
explains, they consider the myth of the European woman who teaches the
ignorant Indian natives how to care for each other a quite racist one,
especially when the gulf between what MT claimed she had done and what she
really did was so large.

> Of all fights and causes, its obvious that you've decided to spend
> your energy on this one.  Mother Teresa must really have hurt you.

Yet more personal attacks. I guess that's all OK when dealing with such a
saintly, wonderful person.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Delirium

subject: titles (was Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: MT and pro-Catholic bias)

body:
Karl Eichwalder wrote:

>"James Duffy" <jtdire at hotmail.com> writes:
>
>
>
>>When someone is beatified, wikipedia articles start with the
>>beatification name, eg, 'Blessed John XXIII'.
>>
>>
>
>This must be changed.  Wikipedia is not a catholic encyclopedia.  First
>of all, these are human beings and later on other human beings said
>they are blessed.  Within the article, don't use "St" as a predicate;
>instead write "saint" (if necessary at all).
>
>Starting an article as follows: "Saint Bernard of Clairvaux" will offend
>many a lot human beings who are not members of the Roman church.
>
>
I partially agree, and partially disagree.  "Saint Bernard of Clairvaux"
is perfectly fine, as people who have been beatified are often referred
to as such, both by those who recognize the sainthood and those who do
not (there are plenty of atheists who debate the viewpoints of Saint
Peter, for example).  I do think "Blessed ..." is inappropriate though,
and frankly a little ridiculous.  If we do this, to be consistent, we
need to start off other articles as follows:

[[Patriarch Bartholomew]] -- '''His All Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew'''

[[Tom Delay]] - '''The Honorable Tom DeLay'''

[[Clarence Thomas]] -- '''The Honorable Clarence Thomas'''

And so on.  I personally vote to do away with all of these.  If they are
used at all, it should be later in the article, and specifically noted
as an honorific (as in, "Tom DeLay's official title as Congressman is
''The Honorable Tom DeLay''", or "Upon beatification, Mother Theresa's
is now officially known as ''The Blessed Mother Theresa''".

But it should be clear it is not *us* who is referring to the assorted
Blessed, Honorable, or All Holinesses by those titles.

Titles I think we should use are those that are in common usage:
President, King, Pope, Saint, Representative, Congressperson, Senator,
Prime Minister, etc.

-Mark


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>>There is a billion people in India and *three* have become world
>>famous, in this order: 1) Gandhi, 2) Mother Teresa, 3) Indira Gandhi.
>>
>>
>
>Certainly, and many people in India despise 2). As Aroup Chatterjee
>explains, they consider the myth of the European woman who teaches the
>ignorant Indian natives how to care for each other a quite racist one,
>especially when the gulf between what MT claimed she had done and what she
>really did was so large.
>
>
Given that she was awarded India's highest civilian honor, it must be
the case that this view is far from universal, given also that the
Indian government has essentially no Christian representatives.

As far as I can determine, most people disagree with you, both in India
and elsewhere, but there are a vocal minority who agree with you.  We
should mention this fact, but not publish or summarize their treatises
at length.  "Why Mother Theresa is a bad person: evidence" does not
belong here any more than "Evidence the Catholic Church was right to
beatify The Blessed Mother Theresa" does.  At most we should summarize
very (very!) briefly all these arguments, and point people to the
various POV books published by pro- and anti-partisans if they want to
read a more detailed account with details we cannot verify.

-Mark


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] WatchedItem.php

body:
I've consolidated some of the watchlist access code into
WatchedItem.php and added memcached support for it. This should reduce
db hits on logged-in page views; it had been checking the watchlist
table (twice!) per logged-in page render.

(Also a note: main development is currently going on in the stable
branch and is focused on speed, security, and bug fixes, not features.
A lot of fixes will need to be forward-ported to the dev branch at some
point.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Peace offer to James

body:
I have made a peace offer to James on [[User talk:Jtdirl]]. I publicly
apologize for calling James a bully, that was not justified by his recent
actions, as what I perceived as bully-like behavior seems to be more of a
personal conflict between the two of us over several different matters,
whereas both of us get along fine with other users. I guess that's what
happens when large egos collide ;-)

I will not bring up the idea of initiating a ban procedure again provided
there will be no further personal attacks on either part. I have also made
a suggestion for cooperating on the [[Mother Teresa]] article.

I hope this will cool down this flamewar somewhat.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Karl Eichwalder

in_reply_to:
<BAY1-F131c7wo95EFk2000004fe@hotmail.com> (James Duffy's
	message of "Wed, 22 Oct 2003 00:07:24 +0000")

body:
"James Duffy" <jtdire at hotmail.com> writes:

> When someone is beatified, wikipedia articles start with the
> beatification name, eg, 'Blessed John XXIII'.

This must be changed.  Wikipedia is not a catholic encyclopedia.  First
of all, these are human beings and later on other human beings said
they are blessed.  Within the article, don't use "St" as a predicate;
instead write "saint" (if necessary at all).

Starting an article as follows: "Saint Bernard of Clairvaux" will offend
many a lot human beings who are not members of the Roman church.

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


body:
On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 03:44:36PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Tuesday, Oct 21, 2003, at 15:39 US/Pacific, Jens Frank wrote:
> >The images could also be saved to a filesystem served by the new db box
> >(what's its name anyway?). FS access, even remote, should always be
> >faster
> >than a db access.
>
> Setting up an NFS share is an extra maintenance and security concern,
> moreso if we want to worry about failover when the main db box tanks.
> Just things to consider...

AFS should neither pose security concerns nor failover probs, can be
made to replicate its data. Other FS's with similar features are
available.

Regards,

JeLuF


from_name: Karl Wick

subject: [Textbook-l] emails

body:
Please, lets not include each others email addresses in the
body of any email when we respond.

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] inter-language link insanity

body:
On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Sascha Noyes wrote:

> 3) Create a unified inter-language link field (similar to what I have proposed
> for pictures/images). This would have a list of languages in which a
> particular article is available.
> Pro: No need for robot traffic that eats up man-hours, bandwidth, cpu, ram,
> disc usage. No massive waste of man-hours due to just continuing as we are.
> Con: mediawiki development of such a feature.
> Another obvious problem is that the field relating to each article will have
> to have a unique identifier which is referrenced from each different language
> version of that article. Two possible approaches:
> a) just settle on the english title, I know this is language-ism and will piss
> a bunch of people off
> b) unique identifier is a number. The problem here is obvious: If you write a
> new article you will 'have' to check that the article has not been written in
> a different language already and therefore already has a unique number.
>
> Actually, now that I think about it option (b) sounds pretty stupid.
>
> Thoughts?

I think using English is not the best way to go. The reason is the existence
of homonyms and synonyms (or, in Wikipedia language, disambiguation pages
and redirects). My proposal would be to have the unique identifier be
something internal, that normal users do not see. Just like article id's are
now.

The idea is that the user specifies one page in some other Wikipedia that
your page should link to. The software then checks whether that other page
already has an 'international id'. If so, yours gets the same id, if not,
a new id is created for the two.

However, probably it is necessary to also give an option to specify that
certain pages, while members of the same id, are not linked to eachother.
nl: has a page "Adam" and a page "Eva" (Eve), en: has a single page "Adam
and Eve". It is logical to link both nl:Adam and nl:Eva to en:Adam_and_Eve,
and en:Adam_and_Eve could be linked to either or both Dutch pages, but I
would not want nl:Adam to link to nl:Eva (or to Eve in any other language
that has the two split). Whether in such a case it would be better to have
one id ("Adam and Eve", with extra specification that some links do not
exist), two ids ("Adam" and "Eve", with some pages having two ids) or three
ids ("Adam", "Eve", "Adam and Eve", with additional information that the first
two link to the latter and the latter to the first two, but the first two
not to each other), I do not know yet, but I somewhat lean towards the last
solution.

I also want to say that already in March or so there was a system being
implemented as a demo on the test.wiki - who made that and how much needs
still be done?

Andre Engels


from_name: Toby Bartels

body:
Andre Engels wrote in part:

>However, probably it is necessary to also give an option to specify that
>certain pages, while members of the same id, are not linked to eachother.
>nl: has a page "Adam" and a page "Eva" (Eve), en: has a single page "Adam
>and Eve". It is logical to link both nl:Adam and nl:Eva to en:Adam_and_Eve,
>and en:Adam_and_Eve could be linked to either or both Dutch pages, but I
>would not want nl:Adam to link to nl:Eva (or to Eve in any other language
>that has the two split). Whether in such a case it would be better to have
>one id ("Adam and Eve", with extra specification that some links do not
>exist), two ids ("Adam" and "Eve", with some pages having two ids) or three
>ids ("Adam", "Eve", "Adam and Eve", with additional information that the first
>two link to the latter and the latter to the first two, but the first two
>not to each other), I do not know yet, but I somewhat lean towards the last
>solution.

I don't think that the first solution could be the Right Thing.
In general, ids -- like encyclopaedia articles! --
should potentially be allowed to be arbitrarily specific.
Besides [[id:Adam]] and [[id:Eve]], we may eventually also need
[[id:Adam in Judaism]], [[id:Adam in Christianity]], [[id:Adam in Islam]], etc.
If one language (say [[en:]]) doesn't have all of these while [[nl:]] does,
then the Dutch pages can all link to [[en:Adam]], but we want many ids,
simply because many titles exist on [[nl:]], however incomplete [[en:]] may be.

I would typically favour the last solution, but the middle could work
in certain situations, probably including this example.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: titles

references:
<BAY1-F131c7wo95EFk2000004fe@hotmail.com>
	<shwuaxuc4n.fsf@tux.gnu.franken.de>
	<3F965E10.9000704@rufus.d2g.com>

body:
Delirium wrote:

>Karl Eichwalder wrote:

>>Starting an article as follows: "Saint Bernard of Clairvaux" will offend
>>many a lot human beings who are not members of the Roman church.

>I partially agree, and partially disagree.  "Saint Bernard of Clairvaux"
>is perfectly fine, as people who have been beatified are often referred
>to as such, both by those who recognize the sainthood and those who do
>not (there are plenty of atheists who debate the viewpoints of Saint
>Peter, for example).

I think that Saint Peter is different from Bernard of Clairvaux.
As an atheist, I typically say, in ordinary conversation,
"Saint Peter", "Saint Paul", and the like -- or better yet,
"the Apostle Peter", "the Apostle Paul", and the like.
The reason for this is disambiguation (in natural speech);
in the context of discussing the Acts of the Apostles,
that's not necessary, but in general it is, and I do that.
But "Bernard of Clairvaux" needs no additional title.

Similarly, I say "Mother Teresa" even though "Mother" is a title
(and a violation of Matthew 23:9 in the opinion of some Protestants),
because this title is what distinguishes her from other "Teresa"s;
yet I would not add "Blessed" -- nor even "Saint" in the future --
since this is not necessary.

In short, "Saint Bernard of Clairvaux" doesn't offend me, an atheist;
yet I also find it unnecessary to use (unlike "Saint Paul", which I do use).

-- Toby


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] ESP and e-mail

body:
I wish people would stop putting words in my mouth. The last batch of
words was dusty, and this batch was sour. I'm running out of Listerine
:-)

If anyone (a) isn't sure what I mean, and (b) needs to be sure, why not
ask me? I l-o-v-e repeating myself, amplifying my meaning, waxing
prosaic, etc.

Half the time I'm not even sure what I myself am thinking. Is there
anyone so good at reading minds that they can discern what another
person is thinking? Over the Internet? Get real.

Signed, Uncle Ed (I think)


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Mailing lists (Was: Dammit! Post to the right list or
	don't post at all.)

body:
The Cunctator wrote for the most part:

>Don't blame the participants--blame the flawed interface of using
>multiple mailing lists for discussing Wikipedia issues.

Do you mean that it would be better for the French speakers
to look through all posts now on wikiEN-L /and/ wikipedia-L
to search for matters relevant to all Wikipedias?
Having general material appear on wikiEN-L from time to time,
and [[en:]]-specific material appear on wikipedia-L occasionally,
seems easier to deal with than always having to check everything.

Of course, I read both lists anyway, so I'll defer to Anth?re if I'm wrong.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: MT and pro-Catholic bias

references:
<r5i3cdmxuv8.fsf@gill.maths.keele.ac.uk> <8wHUuCtxpVB@erik_moeller>
	<20031022033817.GD19683@math-lw-n04.ucr.edu>

body:
I wrote in small part:

>[This is being posted to the mailing list only once!  Wow!!!]

Unfortunately not to the /correct/ mailing list, damn it!
(Mad at myself.)

-- Toby


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

body:
Alex Rosen wrote:

>I wasn't aware that there was any "official" policy as to whether
>something had to be important, or if it just had to be true and
>verifiable.
>
>If verifiable is the current standard, nobody seems to be following it
>- for example, look at the votes for Ellen Oshey on VfD right now. She
>is verifiable but 8 out of 10 people voted to delete her article because
>she's not very notable.
>
Wheteher someone is "notable" is more often than not a determination
based on somebody's POV.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Deletion policy needed

body:
Matthew J. Brown wrote:

>On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Alex Rosen wrote:
>
>>I wasn't aware that there was any "official" policy as to whether
>>something had to be important, or if it just had to be true and
>>verifiable.
>>
>Official or not, many people seem to use an 'important' standard when it
>comes to biographical articles.  'Wiki Is Not a Biographical Dictionary'
>(wherever that is) describes teh policy a lot seem to follow.
>
The rule is that Wikipedia is not a dictionary, biographical or
otherwise.  That is no bar to biographical articles which are an
important part of the 'pedia.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: MT and pro-Catholic bias

body:
Andre-
> On 21 Oct 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:

>> In spite of repeated charges to this effect, there has never been any
>> substantial NPOV criticism of the Mother Teresa article.

> That depends on what you call NPOV. It is well known that the POV of a
> newspaper is as much clear in _what_ it writes about as in _how_ it writes
> about those. And to spend more of the article about criticism on Mother
> Theresa than on the facts of her life and positive statements together is
> extremely POV.

See my earlier explanation regarding balance here:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-October/012681.html

All further discussion should take place in the appropriate forum, namely,
[[Talk:Mother Teresa]].

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Louis Kyu Won Ryu

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Process for suggesting a ban (was Re: Resolution of
	conflicts)

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> We all know the policy, or should. Because Jimbo has said it many times.
>
> The best way to resolve a conflict, is by talking it out. Sometimes,
> other users can contribute to a resolution by mediating, but this
> doesn't always work.
>
> If a party to a conflict so desires, he may request that Jimbo consider
> blocking the other user's login-name. Such a block could be temporary or
> permanent.

I believe that the procedure is supposed to be to contact Jimbo
privately.  I will admit that I myself did not do this with the matter
of User:Mediator, but that seemed a special case for a number of reasons.

In any case, asking for a ban is a weighty matter.  None of us should go
about it casually, nor in the heat of a dispute.  This is especially
true for established contributors.

Louis


subject: [WikiEN-l] Resolution of conflicts

body:
We all know the policy, or should. Because Jimbo has said it many times.

The best way to resolve a conflict, is by talking it out. Sometimes,
other users can contribute to a resolution by mediating, but this
doesn't always work.

If a party to a conflict so desires, he may request that Jimbo consider
blocking the other user's login-name. Such a block could be temporary or
permanent.

I do not consider _suggesting_ that Jimbo order a username block to be a
"threat" (as one user put it) or an "abuse of sysop powers" as a couple
of others put it. Saying, "stop reverting my changes, or I will
personally ban you" MIGHT be a threat or an abuse of authority, but that
isn't what Erik did. (He might have said he wanted to - as I did a week
or 2 ago in a similar context - but "wanting" and "threatening" and
"doing" are all different.)

Anyway, I'm hoping this will all blow over, so no one has to ring
Jimbo's cell phone in the middle of that wedding. This should be a
joyous time in his life. Let's make it so.

Uncle Ed


body:
On 21 Oct 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:

> In spite of repeated charges to this effect, there has never been any
> substantial NPOV criticism of the Mother Teresa article.

That depends on what you call NPOV. It is well known that the POV of a
newspaper is as much clear in _what_ it writes about as in _how_ it writes
about those. And to spend more of the article about criticism on Mother
Theresa than on the facts of her life and positive statements together is
extremely POV.

> Instead, some
> people have argued that 20K of criticism should be split away to a
> separate page. Fred argues that a splitup needs to be enforced to retain
> the "aura of holiness" around MT and that not doing so is "mean spirited".
> It's funny how this kind of pro-Catholic bias is considered acceptable by
> many.

No, I do not find it acceptable. That's clearly POV. Now satisfied?

> All I want is for MT to be treated like any other person on Wikipedia.

The current article is clearly NOT doing that. Wikipedia is now spending
more room on the criticism about Mother Theresa than that about Adolf Hitler,
in an otherwise much shorter article.

> It is not our duty, moral or otherwise, to uphold any kind of fiction to
> avoid disturbing our readers. We may use some articles from them, but
> Wikipedia does not use the same editorial policies as the Catholic
> Encyclopedia. Our policy is NPOV, and that policy is applicable to all
> people, places and things.

And that is what this is all about. NPOV. Apparently your NPOV is not my
NPOV, nor that of several others here. Let's talk about that. Which NPOV
are we taking?

Andre Engels


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Resolution of conflicts

body:
> From Poor, Edmund W

> I do not consider _suggesting_ that Jimbo order a username block to be
a
> "threat" (as one user put it) or an "abuse of sysop powers" as a
couple
> of others put it.

Why don't you consider it a threat?
A threat is "an expression of an intention to inflict pain, injury,
evil, or punishment." Suggesting that Jimbo order a username block is an
expression of an intention to inflict punishment. It's not as extreme a
threat as "I WILL BAN YOU" but it's a threat nonetheless.

> Saying, "stop reverting my changes, or I will
> personally ban you" MIGHT be a threat or an abuse of authority, but
that
> isn't what Erik did. (He might have said he wanted to - as I did a
week
> or 2 ago in a similar context - but "wanting" and "threatening" and
> "doing" are all different.)

Erik explicitly disambiguated this question, stating that he was serious
about issuing a banning request.

His apology put things on the right track, but let's not try to rewrite
history here.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Eureka! I've got it (was: Pages with hundreds of
	international links slow?)

body:
If checking for all the links is too slow, we should *additionally* the
Phase II method:
* Every article has a "existing links" field (MEDIUMBLOB or the like)
* It contains the links known to exist, separated by some unique string
("\n")
* It is loaded together with the article text upon display
* The (existing) link cache is filled with these values
* If any of the "broken" links turn out to exist, the field is updated
(or this is done only upon saving, that's up to you)

The only time-consuming operation is to be performed upon page deletion,
when all the fields that contain a link to the deleted page have to be
cleared (or rebuild).

In effect, most of the "does that article exist" queries will become
unnecessary.

Magnus

Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Tuesday, Oct 21, 2003, at 10:04 US/Pacific, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
>> Eureka! I've got it!!
>>
>> Give each page a "links complete" bit.
>>
>> The first time the page is loaded, we check all the links, then set the
>> bit ON.
>>
>> After that, any page change (creation, deletion, etc.) WHICH AFFECTS
>> THIS PAGE would then turn the bit OFF.
>
>
> How's this different from the cur_touched cache invalidation timestamp
> we've got now?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


body:
On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Sascha Noyes wrote:

> > The section "Improper and undisclosed use of funds" could be precis'd into
> > about 6 sentences and no useful information would be lost.  Similarly, both
> > lengthy quotations in "Secret Baptisms" could be summarised in about 40
> > words, including attributions.
> >
>
> Then why don't you do it? If you think that something is wrong with the
> article you can change it. (Remember, this is a wiki)

I would like to do it, but I already get mightily angry looking at this
edit war from the outside. How much the more if I get habitually reverted
myself?

I have no interest in getting part of an edit war. I have no interest in
solving this dispute by seeing who has the longest breath. I don't know
what I do want though...

Andre Engels


body:
4) The solution I had one implemented at the test site: A separate
database holding *only* interwiki connections. This could
semi-automatically complete links and backlinks, as well as link-groups
throughout languages (en:A and pl:B link to de:C; then links C=>A, C=>B,
A=>B, B=>A could be generated semi-automatically).

But, as so many of my implementations, it died through an utter lack of
interest by others at a time when I predicted exactly this mess...

Magnus

Sascha Noyes wrote:

> Hi
>
> I want to raise the issue that the inter-language link situation at the moment
> is a big mess:
>
> Please have a look at Rob Hooft's 5 pages listing articles on the english
> wikipedia that do not have inter-language links to corresponding articles in
> other languages.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Rob_Hooft/page1 (1 through 5).
>
> There are literally thousands of such links missing. Multiply this by roughly
> two, to factor in the missing links on all the other languages (English
> wikipedia has roughly half the total number of articles), and you can see the
> magnitude of the problem.
>
> The correct alphabetical ordering of links is also necessary, and adds more
> work.
>
> Now, there are a couple of solutions to this problem (please add your own):
>
> 1) Just continue as we have been doing. Additionally asking people to make an
> effort to add inter-language links.
> Pro: doesn't require any mediawiki changes
> Con: wastes a _massive_ amount of man-hours that needless to say could be
> better employed
>
> 2) Deploy the robot that Rob wrote (and is using on the Dutch wikipedia) on
> all wikipedias. To my knowledge this robot searches for missing links and
> automatically adds those.
> Pro: no mediawiki changes necessary
> Con: at least one person per language is needed to run/administer the robot
>
> 3) Create a unified inter-language link field (similar to what I have proposed
> for pictures/images). This would have a list of languages in which a
> particular article is available.
> Pro: No need for robot traffic that eats up man-hours, bandwidth, cpu, ram,
> disc usage. No massive waste of man-hours due to just continuing as we are.
> Con: mediawiki development of such a feature.
> Another obvious problem is that the field relating to each article will have
> to have a unique identifier which is referrenced from each different language
> version of that article. Two possible approaches:
> a) just settle on the english title, I know this is language-ism and will piss
> a bunch of people off
> b) unique identifier is a number. The problem here is obvious: If you write a
> new article you will 'have' to check that the article has not been written in
> a different language already and therefore already has a unique number.
>
> Actually, now that I think about it option (b) sounds pretty stupid.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Best,
> Sascha Noyes
> aka snoyes


from_name: Stevertigo

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: titles

body:
Hear hear!

~S~
who's listening?

--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> Delirium wrote:
>
> >Karl Eichwalder wrote:
>
> >>Starting an article as follows: "Saint Bernard of
> Clairvaux" will offend
> >>many a lot human beings who are not members of the
> Roman church.
>
> >I partially agree, and partially disagree.  "Saint
> Bernard of Clairvaux"
> >is perfectly fine, as people who have been
> beatified are often referred
> >to as such, both by those who recognize the
> sainthood and those who do
> >not (there are plenty of atheists who debate the
> viewpoints of Saint
> >Peter, for example).
>
> I think that Saint Peter is different from Bernard
> of Clairvaux.
> As an atheist, I typically say, in ordinary
> conversation,
> "Saint Peter", "Saint Paul", and the like -- or
> better yet,
> "the Apostle Peter", "the Apostle Paul", and the
> like.
> The reason for this is disambiguation (in natural
> speech);
> in the context of discussing the Acts of the
> Apostles,
> that's not necessary, but in general it is, and I do
> that.
> But "Bernard of Clairvaux" needs no additional
> title.
>
> Similarly, I say "Mother Teresa" even though
> "Mother" is a title
> (and a violation of Matthew 23:9 in the opinion of
> some Protestants),
> because this title is what distinguishes her from
> other "Teresa"s;
> yet I would not add "Blessed" -- nor even "Saint" in
> the future --
> since this is not necessary.
>
> In short, "Saint Bernard of Clairvaux" doesn't
> offend me, an atheist;
> yet I also find it unnecessary to use (unlike "Saint
> Paul", which I do use).
>
>
> -- Toby
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search
http://shopping.yahoo.com


body:
On 21 Oct 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:

> > At the third reiteration, the information ceases to be useful, or
> > interesting. How many times do you wish to cite sources stating that the
> > Missionaries Of Charity took in a lot of money and were pretty shifty about
> > where it went?
>
> Redundancy is obviously unnecessary, however, if separate incidents are
> described, that is not redundancy but strengthening of the case, as any
> lawyer knows.

But we are not trying to _make_ a case. It seems that you want to have a
trial on Mother Teresa, where you give the prosecutor's case, and someone
else is to do the defense case. We are not. We should say that there are
critics, and outline their points of criticism, but then in my opinion we
are done. There is no need to specify all kinds of proof for these criticisms.
That's not an encyclopedia's job. That's a job for a POV publication.

Andre Engels


body:
On 21 Oct 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:

> Stevertigo-
> > I would suggest removing it all -- allowing for a
> > glowing review -- and then remove the POV from that.
> > Deal with the aspect of Reverence as POV --and make
> > that article NPOV. Keep all the controversial stuff in
> > a subpage
>
> That would quite obviously be a gross violation of established neutrality
> principles. There is no reason to give undue preference to positive views
> about MT while stowing away the negative ones. Both are about the same
> person.

Nor is there reason to give undue preference to negative views about MT
whether or not mentioning the positive ones as well.

Andre Engels


body:
On 22 Oct 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:

> James-
>
> > What I tried to achieve was a biographical article on MT that covered both
> > her positive and negative image and reputations, with the massive detail
> > added in by Eloquence put in a separate page called [[Criticisms of Mother
> > Teresa]]
>
> That was a clear violation of NPOV. We do not split away criticisms just
> because the person is question is considered a "saint" by some. You did
> not bother to write as much as an edit comment for your massive changes,
> let alone announce them in advance. I tried repeatedly to reach consensus
> with you on this, you refused and insulted me instead (and still do).

It sounds like perfectly POV to me. POV is to mention the pro and the con
sides, without giving preference to either. POV is not just about mentioning
facts. It is also about which facts to mention

> > /Mother Teresa with Charles Keating, convicted of fraud in the Savings and
> > Loan scandal and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Mother Teresa received
> > over a million dollars in donations from him, which she did not return after
> > the conviction. She did, however, send a plea for clemency to Keating's
> > trial judge/
>
> That is a perfectly neutral description of what happened. There are plenty
> of precedents for having comprehensive image captions that do more than
> just say "Mother Teresa, left, with Charles Keating, right", e.g. [[Donald
> Rumsfeld]]. It should be possible for a casual reader to get the necessary
> information what an image is about and why it is reproduced by reading the
> caption. Take a look at any electronic encyclopedia that has space for
> captions, and you will notice that the exact same style is used.

To be honest, when I read this caption, my reaction would be - so what? Is
this really such an important thing that it belongs on the page at all, let
alone be repeated another time in the caption? And in my opinion it is the
Donald Rumsfeld caption that should be shortened, not the Mother Theresa one
that should not be.

> You keep repeating this, but it does not become any more true when you do
> so-- of course opposition to abortion and contraception is the official
> line of the Roman Catholic Church. Obviously, however, not every Roman
> Catholic in a position of power and influence shares that position. MT
> would have been in a perfect position to challenge papal authority on
> these matters, instead she contributed to this deadly campaign that is
> taking a toll among millions of people -- often by lobbying various
> governments for harsher laws against both abortion and artificial
> contraception. That is what the critics complain about, and that view of
> course needs to represented in an article about MT.

I disagree. Giving her view on abortion is probably on-topic, but saying
that others say she should have another opinion is not. Just like we do
not give the reasons for the American attack on Iraq in the [[Jacques
Chirac]] article.

Andre Engels


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Process for suggesting a ban (was Re: Resolution
	ofconflicts)

body:
> From: Louis Kyu Won Ryu
>
> I believe that the procedure is supposed to be to contact Jimbo
> privately.  I will admit that I myself did not do this with the matter
> of User:Mediator, but that seemed a special case for a number of
reasons.

The requests should be made publicly. Transparency in procedure is
necessary to a healthy Wikipedia community.


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Dammit! Post to the right list or don't post
	at	all.(was: MT and pro-Catholic bias)

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>>From: Daniel Mayer
>>
>>It is really so difficult to make sure that
>>en.Wikipedia stuff like article disputes and
>>allegations of abuse of power goes to WikiEN-L while
>>discussion about controversial new features goes to
>>Wikipedia-L?
>>
>It's about as difficult as it is to construct grammatically correct
>sentences.
>
>Don't blame the participants--blame the flawed interface of using
>multiple mailing lists for discussing Wikipedia issues.
>
Of course!   When I respond to an issue, I just press reply.  I need to
assume, out of humility, that the person to whom I am replying knew what
he was doing when he put it there in the first place. :-)   .... or more
correctly, I don't pay any attention whatsoever to what mailing list I
happen to be in.

If I start a thread, I confess to being somewhat more cautious.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Process for suggesting a ban

body:
You are right as usual, grandfather Louis. Which is why most of the time
I myself bow out of conflicts.

Sometimes I wait a few weeks or months until the other party loses
interest or moves on. I don't know if this is "fair" or not, but since
I'm always trying to be neutral I'm not going to kick myself too hard
for biding my time like this.

Sometimes I nibble away at the conflict slowly, as I'm doing with
articles relating to my church. Someone anonymous user "messed up" the
[[Moonies]] and [[Sun Myung Moon]] pages. Instead of reverting their
changes wholesale, I decided to correct just a few points each week.

The only case I'm going head-to-head on, is the field of climate change:
global warming and ozone depletion. That's because I think I know enough
about science and statistics to detect a flimflam campaign going on, and
I see no reason to roll over and play dead here. I'm trying to maintain
cordial relations with the chief proponent of the "wrong" POV, Dr.
William Connolley. Because he's a practicing scientist and I'm just an
amateur. In some ways, I feel we're making progress toward neutrality --
without sacrificing geniality.

Oh, one more thing: just in case anyone imagines I might suddenly block
a user who disagrees with me on global warming; rest assured, I won't be
doing this. Jimbo specifically asked me not to, and that's reason
enough. (Sunir Shah at MeatballWiki, and The Cunctator here, also have
excellent arguments which I'm still in the process of digesting).

Ed Poor


body:
On 21 Oct 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:

> Fred argues that a splitup needs to be enforced to retain
> the "aura of holiness" around MT and that not doing so is "mean spirited".
> It's funny how this kind of pro-Catholic bias is considered acceptable by
> many.

Where do you conclude that it "is considered acceptable by many". Vicky
Rosenzweig and Jake have spoken against it. Noone else has spoken in favor.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Bleesed Mother

body:
--- Delirium <delirium at rufus.d2g.com> wrote:

> Given that she was awarded India's highest civilian
> honor, it must be
> the case that this view is far from universal, given
> also that the
> Indian government has essentially no Christian
> representatives.

It may be that Hitchen's view is correct (I have yet
to read other, less polemic critiques ) but it may
also be that he is misreading the situation.  The
local perception could be that being given food
scraps, shoddy medicine, a paper napkin to wear,
shelter, a little conversation about God, are at least
a little bit more than what they would have had
otherwise.  Nobody there really cares too much about
the dogmatic political aspect.  There has been plenty
a secular humanist who cried "save the poor" but
themselves did little to do so.  When in the context
of "utterly shitty," "pretty crappy" is actually not
that bad.

So I dont buy Hitchen's anti-dogma argument -except in
the international context, where MT was used
politically.  So, untimately I dislike the desparaging
of MT, the woman for simply going with the flow of
opportunity, when Western would found in her a nice
ugly, propagandizable woman to soothe its aching moral
concience. On that point Hitchens is correct -- the
problem is, that his criticism is attached to *her,
rather than to Western culture's *use of her.  Pin the
tail on the Donkey, not the nun, in other words.  But
he was just doing some actual *reporting --the kind
that other people (like journalists) neglected to do
in the first place.

That she used her funds to advance dogmatic
Catholicism is rather expected.  She could never have
imagined how the Westernized world would come to
percieve her, let alone have anticipated being
appointed (used) in the way she was.
Could she have started an upstart church, to challenge
the ways and doctines to which she had devoted most of
her life?  One might have an easier time trying to
convince Kip Thorne that Einstein and Feinman were
Satans little helpers --or convince The Queen of
England to abolish the Monarchy as a useless little
relic of antiquated feudalism.

~S~

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Discussion on NPOV

body:
On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Jake Nelson wrote:

> Andre Engels wrote:
> > Yes, just put it back on the page. What about the basic question of
> whether
> > Wikipedia should be NPOV, and how we do that? Maybe we should finally stop
> > circumventing that question and actually discuss it. Would be useful, I'd
> > say.
>
>  ... what? NPOV is the one absolute of Wikipedia. Now, we sometimes disagree
> about what approach is most neutral (there's a tendency these days towards
> No Point of View, which is quite different), but NPOV is the keystone of
> everything here.

Sorry. I intended to put some irony in my remark, which apparently was not
understood completely.

What I meant was that JT and Eloquence both are convinced that they are
working for NPOV - and yet do exactly the opposite. To me, the question
is not in the first place what to do with the MT article. To me, the question
is in the first place is what to do with NPOV. Or rather, how to define
NPOV, and which NPOV to use.

It's a difficult subject, but also one that needs to be addressed, in my
opinion.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Discussion on NPOV


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Blessed Mother (corrections)

body:
--- Stevertigo <utilitymuffinresearch2 at yahoo.com>
wrote:
<<about 58 speeling erorrs>>

Corrected text:

It may be that Hitchens' view is correct (I have yet
to read other, less polemic critiques ) but it may
also be that he is misreading the situation.  The
local perception could be that being given food
scraps, shoddy medicine, a paper napkin to wear,
shelter, and a little conversation about God, are at
least
a little bit more than what they would have had
otherwise.  Nobody there really cares too much about
the dogmatic political aspect.  There has been plenty
a secular humanist who cried "save the poor" but
themselves did little to do so.  When in the context
of "utterly shitty," "pretty crappy" is actually not
that bad.

So I dont buy Hitchen's anti-dogma argument -except in
the international context, where MT was used
politically.  I guesss, ultimately I dislike the
desparaging
of Mother Teresa, the woman, for simply going with the
flow of opportunity, when the Western world found in
her a nice ugly, propagandizable, woman to soothe its
aching moral concience.  On that point, Hitchens is
correct --the
problem is that his criticism is attached to *her,
rather than to the Western culture's *use of her.  Pin
the
tail on the Donkey, not the nun, in other words.  But
he was just doing some actual *reporting --the kind
that other people (like journalists) neglected to do
in the first place.

That she used her funds to advance dogmatic
Catholicism is rather expected.  She could never have
imagined how the Westernized world would come to
percieve her, let alone have anticipated being
appointed (used) in the way she was.
Could she have started an upstart church to challenge
the ways and doctines to which she had devoted most of
her life?  One might have an easier time trying to
convince Kip Thorne that Einstein and Feinman were
Satans little helpers --or to convince The Queen of
England to abolish the Monarchy as a useless little
relic of antiquated feudalism.

~S~

__________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] EdSP and e-mail

body:
--- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:

> I wish people would stop putting words in my mouth.
> The last batch of
> words was dusty, and this batch was sour. I'm
> running out of Listerine
> :-)
>
> If anyone (a) isn't sure what I mean, and (b) needs
> to be sure, why not
> ask me? I l-o-v-e repeating myself, amplifying my
> meaning, waxing
> prosaic, etc.
>
> Half the time I'm not even sure what I myself am
> thinking. Is there
> anyone so good at reading minds that they can
> discern what another
> person is thinking? Over the Internet? Get real.

Its an interesting point you bring up. I will get the
UMRK on it right away.  Its funny isnt it, how much we
can tell about each other, just by the words they
write.  Its a very intimate sort of way of
communication --one who's (/?/personal posessive for a
machine process?/?/) change upon the society has yet
to be looked at qualitatively.  I remember going to
school just as computers were starting to become
useful -- no internet, not a lot of them around --slow
as hell, etc.  It may be that web communication, acts
socially, in a way that provides some validation for
some of the non-linear thinking thats gets expressed
in terms like "metaphysical" or "extra-physical"
communication.

~S~

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Resolution of conflicts

body:
--- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com>

> The best way to resolve a conflict, is by talking it
> out. Sometimes,
> other users can contribute to a resolution by
> mediating, but this
> doesn't always work.

Well, what about the case in point -- highly unusual
--where a develper and a sysop, both highly
intelligent and articulate -- who both needlessly
caused and contribute to an enourmous and unnecessary
ruckus --that the community has no interest in seeing
escalate.

Erik's threatening a ban on JT comes in part due to
his belief (mistaken) that his position with Wikipedia
is more secure than JT's --in part due to his
developer access.  Erik came to his senses quick, and
Ed, you were right to see Erik's comment as just
blowing steam... (as I was about your comment a few
weeks ago ;)

I suggested the idea that people (even devrs) can be
banned from editing a particular page.  Even if its
only a soft-security ban -- allowing sysops to revert
the page if either one of the banned polarist
prevaricators edits the page.

~S~

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from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Saints

body:
On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 12:49:05AM -0400, Matt M. wrote:
> > Starting an article as follows: "Saint Bernard of Clairvaux" will offend
> > many a lot human beings who are not members of the Roman church.
>
> That's absurd. We don't start articles "Elizabeth Windsor, whom some
> monarchists consider Queen Elizabeth II...", no matter how much this might
> irritate republicans. The article on Quebec begins, "Quebec is a province of
> Canada," no matter how much that irritates sovereignists. We don't hide
> facts just because they irritate some people.
>
> Saint has a certain definition: one who has been canonized. It doesn't
> matter what people outside the church have to say about it.  And I say this
> as a Wiccan.

Queen/President/... is a job.
Saint/Sire/... is an arbitrary title with no relation to real world.

Foo Barski (1234-1278), in 1256-1267 king of Toonland, ...

seems better than:

King Foo Barski (1234-1278)

because it could easily become:

King of X and Y, duke of Z, prince of A, B, and C, [list of 40 titles] Foo Barski (1234-1278) ...

And in some cases whether he was a king or not is controversial matter.

In case of "saints" it's just wrong to call them with such names.
Different religions have their own definition of who is "saint" and who isn't
and very often really controversial people are made "saints" by the Catholics,
especially with the latest pope.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Resolution of conflicts

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>Erik explicitly disambiguated this question, stating that he was serious
>about issuing a banning request.
>
One has to distinguish between a ban and a banning request.  Banning
someone in these circumstances would be a unilateral act, and as such
completely lacking in social grace.  "Issuing [sic!] a banning request"
suggests initiating an established process that anyone can do, though
often with very remote chances of success.

Ec