from_name: David Alexander Russell

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

So you basically want a group of admins with no experience in editing
the article concerned to vote-stack any content disputes?

RFC generates plenty of interest, the problem is that it has no 'teeth'
- - there is nothing to stop the party who 'loses' an RFC from ignoring
its conclusions.

Cynical

Katefan0 wrote:

I have for a long time felt that it
> would be wise to establish a cadre of admins that form an "NPOV brigade" who
> could be called upon to look at and weigh in on content disputes as a means
> of breaking a stalemate.  It's definitely a need on Wikipedia that isn't
> being filled, as is evidenced by the amount of content RFArs getting filed
> lately.  RFC rarely works, but only because it doesn't generate enough
> interest, IMO.
>
> k
>
>
> On 4/6/06, Steve Block <steve.block at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>> Katefan0 wrote:
>>> I think this is similar to what happens sometimes at pedophilia-related
>>> articles.  For the most part, we as Wikipedians are drawn to edit
>> articles
>>> in which we have a personal interest or stake.  Naturally, then, those
>> who
>>> disagree with age of consent laws will be drawn to articles such as
>>> [[NAMBLA]].  Not only do most other Wikipedians not feel drawn there,
>> they
>>> in fact would rather purposefully avoid them because they make them feel
>>> icky.  (I can certainly attest to that personally.)  But in that manner,
>> I
>>> have found that sometimes the "consensus" on these types of articles
>> gets
>>> skewed.  And this makes issues raised on the talk page very difficult to
>>> resolve.
>> I noted a while back at the pump that the article branch of requests for
>> comment wasn't serving it's purpose anymore, and that it should get
>> moved to the pump as [[Village pump (article)]].  Sadly, and a little
>> ironically, I got no discussion at the pump, and I'm starting to wonder
>> if the community is so big it is beginning to fracture.  There needs to
>> be a high profile way of grabbing editor attention and getting a
>> reflective consensus on issues.  I'm starting to agree with the idea of
>> a parliament or maybe an article arbitration commitee.  Any thoughts?
>>
>> Steve block
>>
>>
>> --
>> No virus found in this outgoing message.
>> Checked by AVG Free Edition.
>> Version: 7.1.385 / Virus Database: 268.3.5/302 - Release Date: 05/04/06
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> WikiEN-l mailing list
>> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
>> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>

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list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Tim Starling

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Mathematical expressions and conditional
	constructs, now implemented

body:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 02:14:30AM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>>As for the syntax, might it make sense to use a double colon instead
>>of a single colon, e.g. {{if:: <condition> | <then text> | <else text>
>>}}? I'm not a big fan of the semantic overload we have with single
>>colon prefixes.
>
>
> I like that a lot; is there any reason why that would make the parser's
> head explode?

It would be easy enough to require a double colon for extension functions. A single colon would
still be required for older parser functions such as {{ns:}}, for backwards compatibility.

I've set up a vote on meta:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:ParserFunctions#Double_colons.3F

-- Tim Starling


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Delphine Ménard

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Language versions' popularity vs. number of
	articles (vs. number of speakers)

body:
On 3/29/06, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:

> The most visited Wikipedias, in order, are:
>
> 1 English (65%)
> 2 German (10%)
> 3 Japanese (6%)
> 4 Spanish (3%)
> 5 French (2%)
> 6 Polish (2%)
> 7 Chinese (2%)
> 8 Arabic (2%)
> 9 Italian (1%)
> 10 Hebrew (1%)
> 11 Turkish (1%)
> 12 Dutch (1%)
> 13 Portuguese (1%)
> (all others combined total 1% of visits)

I'm interested where you found those numbers, because I thought they
were not available anywhere. :-)

Delphine
--
~notafish


from_name: Anthere

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Language versions' popularity vs. number of
 articles (vs. number of speakers)

body:
Delphine M?nard wrote:
> On 3/29/06, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>The most visited Wikipedias, in order, are:
>>
>>1 English (65%)
>>2 German (10%)
>>3 Japanese (6%)
>>4 Spanish (3%)
>>5 French (2%)
>>6 Polish (2%)
>>7 Chinese (2%)
>>8 Arabic (2%)
>>9 Italian (1%)
>>10 Hebrew (1%)
>>11 Turkish (1%)
>>12 Dutch (1%)
>>13 Portuguese (1%)
>>(all others combined total 1% of visits)
>
>
> I'm interested where you found those numbers, because I thought they
> were not available anywhere. :-)
>
> Delphine
> --
> ~notafish

Alexa...

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=www.wikipedia.org

And as I already said, results are questionable :-)

ant


list: wikien-l

from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] request to Jimbo for out-of-process deletion of image

body:
On 4/6/06, Katefan0 <katefan0wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> lately.  RFC rarely works, but only because it doesn't generate enough
> interest, IMO.

I tried to get interested in some of the RfC issues once, but I
couldn't think of any comments other than "stop being a dick" and
"Wikipedia is big enough for both of you, find a different article".

Steve


from_name: Nicholas Moreau

subject: [WikiEN-l] Page hit counts

body:
You can get 2003 stats.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_articles_frequently_visited_through_Google

  Nick

---------------------------------
To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre.


body:
On 4/6/06, David Alexander Russell > RFC generates plenty of interest,
the problem is that it has no 'teeth'
> - - there is nothing to stop the party who 'loses' an RFC from ignoring
> its conclusions.

I don't know about practice, but there are surely means whereby the
side that can demonstrate consensus is on its side has the advantage.
Particularly in RfAr if it came to that.

Steve


subject: [Wikitech-l] emphasis vs italics, strong vs bold

body:
On 4/6/06, Omegatron <9ybf94w02 at sneakemail.com> wrote:
> Well, maybe you can point me to a previous discussion so we don't have
> to have the same discussion again, but I think it would be superior to
> use semantic markup.  I'm sure everyone's aware of this already, but
> using visual formatting tags to represent emphasis is discouraged:

In the same way that using semantic tags when all you want is
formatting is equally discouraged. Ideally (perhaps) there would be
ways of indicating both semantics, and pure formatting. If there
isn't, then either solution is really equally bad. I would say that
''italics'' are very rarely used for emphasis in our articles, and
much more commonly for simple formatting - names of albums,
symphonies, quotations etc. I could be wrong there.

What's the specific problem that <I> tags are causing?

Steve


from_name: Rob Church

references:
<e10mie$buv$1@sea.gmane.org> <4433E1DC.4080907@rotemliss.com>
	<e10pls$olh$1@sea.gmane.org> <3782426.post@talk.nabble.com>

body:
On 06/04/06, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I created {{TALKSPACE}} and its counterpart {{ARTICLESPACE}} after
> requesting the equivalent variables several times on this list.
>
> I would be more than happy to see them replaced with the equivalent
> variables now that they seem to have proven their utility.

I'm quite willing to add these magic words, but there is one question
which needs answering before this happens; what should be done with a
{{TALKSPACE}} or similar tag if the current namespace doesn't *have* a
talk namespace?

Rob Church


from_name: Jakob Voss

body:
Tim Starling wrote:

> I would like to hear comments about the syntax, before we put them live. Syntax is guided by
> consistency with existing functions such as {{localurl:}}, but if it looks too unwieldy then we can
> probably change it.

I suppose an extension is easier to read and write and you more likely
do clean programming instead of hacking around with WikiSyntax:

<conditional>
   <if test="">...</if>
   <else>...</else>
</conditional>

or

<conditional>
   <case test="">...</case>
   <case test="">...</case>
   ...
   <otherwise>...</otherwise>
</conditional>

and

<expr>...</expr>

Conditional constructs and mathematical expressions should not confuse
the normal Wiki Syntax - we also include TeX with <math>...</math> and
not with {{math:...}} or something else. <noinclude> and <includeonly>
are special cases of conditional content.

Greetings,
Jakob


body:
Omegatron wrote:

> Well, maybe you can point me to a previous discussion so we don't have
> to have the same discussion again, but I think it would be superior to
> use semantic markup.  I'm sure everyone's aware of this already, but
> using visual formatting tags to represent emphasis is discouraged:

And using semantic markup in a wrong way is even worse. There is no way
to distinguish semantic and visual markup use of ''...''

greetings,
Jakob


body:
On 06/04/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Principle of least surprise: point to it anyway?
>
> In User namespace, {{TALKSPACE}} gives "User talk:"
> In Magic namespace, {{TALKSPACE}} gives "Magic talk:" ?
>
> Would it break things any worse than would be expected for that situation?

Well, I was thinking more along the lines of providing {{TALKPAGE}}
and {{SUBJECTPAGE}} (and the corresponding "encoded" form) magic
words.

I'd be inclined to point them back to the same namespace, for cases
where the opposing namespace doesn't exist; so things *don't* break
and become confused...but herein lies the whole users-get-confused
problem.

Rob Church


subject: [Wikitech-l] TALKPAGE and SUBJECTPAGE

body:
On 06/04/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ok, so what are some real world examples where this template would be
> used? What's an example of using that example in a template which
> doesn't have an accompanying talkspace? Who is likely to be see the
> end result first?

The first example which comes to mind is use within the MediaWiki
namespace, which, when rendered could do all sorts of interesting
things. This is theoretical, of course, since I'm not sure users would
be stupid enough to use these magic words in messages which would
cause problems.

Nevertheless; just because one lot of users won't, doesn't mean
another lot won't. It could happen, and we should decide what to do in
those cases.

Rob Church


from_name: Ilya N.

subject: [WikiEN-l] Page hit counts

body:
A lot

On 4/6/06, Tom Harrison <tfharrison at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Are any statistics available on what pages people are reading, and how
> often a given page is accessed?
> Tom Harrison
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
~Ilya N.
http://ilya.nepfamily.com (My website; DarkLordFoxx Media)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ilyanep (on Wikipedia)
http://www.wheresgeorge.com - Track your money's travels.


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] LS Studio and pro-pedophilia pov

body:
I believe that the only verifiability problem here is the name of the
organisation, which is not mentioned in any of the sources that I
checked.  That there was a major child pornography ring using child
modeling as a front in Kharkov and Kiev and other Ukrainian cities is
well sourced by references to, inter alia, Pravda and Reuters.


body:
On 4/6/06, Omegatron <9ybf94w02 at sneakemail.com> wrote:
> You can still use bold and italic tags if that's all you
> mean, though I think that is rare.

Someone would probably change them to ''' or '' respectively, assuming
ignorance on the part of the original editor. Hell, I would :)
> Ah.  It seems to me that emphasis is used more often than simple
> formatting, and I was changing ''quote marks'' to italic tags
> in the few cases where it's appropriate, based on the way I learned
> when I first started editing.  Then I was looking through the source
> code one day, and realized they were both being rendered as italics,
> so I was confused.

I'm glad you did, otherwise you and I could have been caught in an
infinite loop :)

>
> So, if I understand correctly, a bunch of people were misusing
> emphasis tags to mean italics, so someone changed the emphasis tags to
> mean italics, and now people are misusing italics tags to mean
> emphasis?  :-)

I don't know about "misuse". We have a strong need for italics, and ''
is a very convenient way of getting them.

> : Are we going to change the dictionary definition colon markup to
> render as CSS  indentation now, since many people use it for
> indentation?

:Indentation like this? Sure, that's what the colon in Wiki markup is
designed for, as far as I know. I don't think there's even a better
way of doing that?

Steve


list: foundation-l

from_name: Samuel Klein

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimania translation update

body:
[ Wikimania translation update Nr.1 / 1st week of April. ]

Hello,

Wikimania, the International Wikimedia conference, is being held in
Boston, MA, USA this August 4-6.  This is an update on its translation
and multilingual content.

== General ==
* Translation of the Wikimania website main page CfP has begun on meta.
* The deadlines have changed; so the CfP and short announcement need
to be changed.
* Translation of the CfP is continuing on on meta; some will be
released in this week.
* You are invited to help translate visa info
* Wikimania translations and their status are now listed directly on
the Wikimania website. See
http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania:Translations

Spanish, French, and Chinese translators are especially welcome.

== Main Page translation ==
* Main Page #1 of the Wikimania website is ready to translate.  Drafts
are being worked on in:  Chinese (zh),  Japanese (ja), Dutch (nl), and
Polish (pl).
* Other languages also need attention from their translators,
especially Spanish.
* Wouldn't you like to have Main Page in your own language? Create
your language version on meta or contact User:Aphaia or User:Sj on
meta.
* This main page will be a visitor's portal to
wikimania2006.wikimedia.org and will provide visitors with an overview
of what Wikimania is.

Workplace: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/Wikimania/Main_Page

== CfP translation ==
* Translation of the CfP is now in its last stage. In addition to four
languages (Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Japanese), Polish is now
waiting for proofreading. Native speakers are invited review those
versions; if you find mistakes, please fix them. If you think it is
okay, please leave your comments on talk.
* A German translation is going on. German speakers are invited to help.
* French & Chinese translators will be a great help for us; you can
start your work from which you prefer - either Main Page or CfP.

Workplace: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2006_Call_for_Participation

== Visas ==
* Some attendees to the conference will need visas from the US
government, and visa information will be helpful for them.  We have
information available in English, but it would be more helpful if
it were multilingual.
* Polish translators are working on this; this also needs for a
proofreader. If you speak Polish, please review it if improvement is
necessary. If it looks good, you are then invited to join Main Page
translation ;-)
* Chinese, French, and Arabic translations would be welcome.

Workplace: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/Wikimania/Visas

== Email distribution ==
* This update is sent not only to Wikimedia mailinglists. If you
receive extra copies, please let us know.
* If you know a translation-related mailinglist and are sure this
newsletter wouldn't violate their policies, you are welcome to post it
there. Or you may want to forward it to a friend. We will appreciate
your help greatly.

== Special note: proper names, cultural details  ==
* Sometimes proper names are a headache for translators. Especially so
when one is not sure how to transcribe a name. The difficulties can
increase when your source and target languages have different scripts
- between English and Japanese, or between Chinese and Russian ...
** One example - the letter Z is pronounced as [z] in many languages,
but in German it alone is normally [ts]. The letter S is [z] at the
top of a word in German but in many others [s]. Most German speakers
know this, and can be aware of this when they read out foreign proper
names.
* Another cause of headaches is cultural differences; sometimes
phrases, descriptions, or nicknames have special cultural
significance, and are difficult to translate.  These often require
extra explanation by a native speaker.
* If you are dealing with a difficult transcription or a cultural
issue, other translators are probably facing the same difficulty.
Please use translators-l or our noticeboard [[m:Meta:Babylon]] on meta
for discussion.

Workplace: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babylon

========
Wikimania translation update
Editors: Aphaia, Sj

Wikimania 2006 Translators' team
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_requests/Wikimania


list: wikimedia-l


references:
<e10mie$buv$1@sea.gmane.org> <4433E1DC.4080907@rotemliss.com>
	<e10pls$olh$1@sea.gmane.org> <3782426.post@talk.nabble.com>
	<e92136380604060819l16a5277epfcc389669aea57b@mail.gmail.com>

body:
Principle of least surprise: point to it anyway?

In User namespace, {{TALKSPACE}} gives "User talk:"
In Magic namespace, {{TALKSPACE}} gives "Magic talk:" ?

Would it break things any worse than would be expected for that situation?

Steve

On 4/6/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 06/04/06, Phil Boswell <phil.boswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I created {{TALKSPACE}} and its counterpart {{ARTICLESPACE}} after
> > requesting the equivalent variables several times on this list.
> >
> > I would be more than happy to see them replaced with the equivalent
> > variables now that they seem to have proven their utility.
>
> I'm quite willing to add these magic words, but there is one question
> which needs answering before this happens; what should be done with a
> {{TALKSPACE}} or similar tag if the current namespace doesn't *have* a
> talk namespace?
>
>
> Rob Church
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


body:
On 4/6/06, Sydney Poore <poore5 at adelphia.net> wrote:
> publication that is delivered to subscribers on a weekly basis? Maybe
> involvement in Rfc or informally mediating editing disputes could be
> introduced as one evaluating criteria for promotion to administrator. As
> an experiment I might start mentioning it on RFAs.

Makes a hell of a lot more sense than discriminating on the basis of %
of edit summary usage.

Steve


from_name: Sam Korn

subject: [WikiEN-l] en: CD! Well, sort of

body:
On 4/5/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk> wrote:
> 2011 articles? On CD ROM? The numbers of PCs with a CD-ROM drive but
> without an internet connection is probably not very high. Now if this
> was a _printed_ copy then it would be more useful to developing
> countries. The motives behind this are commendable, but I don't see it
> working in practice.

While recognising your point, there are countries, particularly in
west Africa and south-east Asia, where having fairly modern
generator-powerwered computers are available but a reliable telephone
connection is not.

--
Sam


from_name: SPUI

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Philip Welch wrote:
>
>>>I support the removal
>>>of the image in question, but I recognise that at least some of
>>>those who argued
>>>for it to be it kept did so out of good faith and a desire to
>>>create the best encyclopedia
>>>possible. I don't think they were trolling or motivated by a desire
>>>to supply pedophiles
>>>with child porn.
>>
>>I agree with Matt. This is not a profitable direction for discussion.
>
>
>
> Absolutely, but it is VERY important to pay attention to the fact that
> we are often trolled in this way, and that there are POV pushers
> involved.  One clever way to troll is to raise the 'censorship' red
> herring in a way that makes it difficult to talk about serious questions
> of editorial judgment, questions about which reasonable people may of
> course differ without feeling that the other side is trying to censor.

Another clever way to troll is to accuse your opponents of being
pedophiles. The alternative is to assume good faith.


body:
On 4/6/06, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd be inclined to point them back to the same namespace, for cases
> where the opposing namespace doesn't exist; so things *don't* break
> and become confused...but herein lies the whole users-get-confused
> problem.

Ok, so what are some real world examples where this template would be
used? What's an example of using that example in a template which
doesn't have an accompanying talkspace? Who is likely to be see the
end result first?

Steve


from_name: Conrad Dunkerson

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Mathematical expressions and
 conditional	constructs, now implemented

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

> But Joe User still needs to plug information into the template.

Yes, the ability to type is still required. We haven't simplified things
THAT much. :]

> Or in
> the course of ordinary editing he runs into a template which is not
> suitable to his subject, but it's beyond his technical capacity to trace
> the problem.

In which case they ALSO wouldn't have been able to figure out the markup
which the template has replaced/simplified. No, we can't anticipate
everything that every user might want to do and have a nice simple
pre-packaged way of making that happen all ready for them.... but that
strikes me as an illogical reason for not setting up utility templates at all.

I'll never understand the 'it might be too complex so let's not do it'
argument... setting aside that this just ISN'T complicated stuff, even if
it WERE it doesn't TAKE AWAY anything. All the older methods of doing
things are still there. Just now there are additional ways of getting
things done - and if not everyone understands those, so what? It isn't
hurting the people who don't. Indeed, it helps even those who don't
understand the logic because all they need to know is the name of the
template to call... not how it works. You don't need to know how to build
an automobile in order to drive one.

The 'we are building an encyclopedia not programming' argument is equally
unmoving to me. Ok then... get rid of all HTML font settings, colors,
tables, CSS, templates, et cetera. Oh, those are USEFUL for building an
encyclopedia? Hmmm.... imagine that. I wonder if automatic distance
conversions in articles would be useful... given that some of our readers
(and editors) use imperial and some use metric? Temperature scales?
Weights? The idea that people will turn this into an excuse to write full
fledged programs having nothing to do with an encyclopedia seems to me
silly on it's face... but suppose they would... for some unknowable
reason... how many nanoseconds do you suppose something like that would
last on 'templates for deletion'?


from_name: Gallagher Mark George

subject: [WikiEN-l] en: CD! Well, sort of

body:
G'day David,

> 2011 articles? On CD ROM? The numbers of PCs with a CD-ROM drive but
> without an internet connection is probably not very high. Now if this
> was a _printed_ copy then it would be more useful to developing
> countries. The motives behind this are commendable, but I don't
> see it
> working in practice.

I disagree.  You may be confusing "with Internet connection" with "capable of connecting to the Internet".

I have a laptop in my bedroom that has no Internet connection (it has a modem, and an ethernet card, but neither are connected to anything), but no CD-ROM ...

--
Mark Gallagher


from_name: Tels

body:
Moin,

On Thursday 06 April 2006 14:40, Stephen Forrest wrote:
> On 4/5/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 4/5/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> > > Don't blame me. I've always been against turning wikitext into a
> > > programming language.
> >
> > Why?
>
> Aside from the issue of simplicity which has already been mentioned,
> there's the issue that as the language gets bigger, user-contributed
> bugs become more numerous and subtle.

Exactly, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a distributed programming
contest, whose ouput accidentily looks like an encyclopedia :)

Best wishes,

Tels

--
 Signed on Thu Apr  6 18:42:09 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "We're looking at a future where only the very largest companies will be
 able to implement software, and it will technically be illegal for other
 people to do so." -- Bruce Perens, 2004-01-23

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body:
Moin,

On Thursday 06 April 2006 16:33, Jakob Voss wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
> > I would like to hear comments about the syntax, before we put them
> > live. Syntax is guided by consistency with existing functions such as
> > {{localurl:}}, but if it looks too unwieldy then we can probably
> > change it.
>
> I suppose an extension is easier to read and write and you more likely
> do clean programming instead of hacking around with WikiSyntax:
>
> <conditional>
>    <if test="">...</if>
>    <else>...</else>
> </conditional>

I am going to write:

	<perl>
	  print "Hello World!\n";
	</perl>

if nobody beats me to it. :D

Best wishes,

Tels

--
 Signed on Thu Apr  6 18:43:55 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "Given enough time, all legal battles in the tech industry will invoke
 the DMCA. This generally means that all constructive arguments have
 ended." NialScorva's law

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body:
Moin,

On Thursday 06 April 2006 00:52, Locke Cole wrote:
> On 4/5/06, Conrad Dunkerson <conrad.dunkerson at worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> > While people complain about the complexity which templates have taken
> > on it is worth noting that there is a direct correlation between
> > increasing template complexity/functionality and decreasing article
> > complexity. Tables no longer have to be convoluted HTML or
> > wiki-markup blocks in the article themselves... they've been replaced
> > by a short template call. And conditional logic has made it so that
> > the average user can insert one of those templates into an article
> > and fill out the parameters to produce a perfect table without
> > needing to understand the underlying table code at all. That wasn't
> > possible previously... they ''had'' to know table markup (or HTML) in
> > order to edit tables.
>
> I think this is the most important thing people need to understand
> about template complexity: by making the *template* complex, we're
> making the articles *simpler* and easier to maintain.

And it also changes the "you can edit anything" to "you can edit articles.
For most templates, please study computer science and a real programming
language for a year and then come back".

Best wishes,

Tels

--
 Signed on Thu Apr  6 18:46:39 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 " ...the Machholz Comet is named after the guy who really discovered it.
 Bob Comet." -- Zathras26 (763537) on 2005-01-01 at /.

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subject: [Wikitech-l]Mathematical expressions and conditional	constructs , now implemented

references:
<e10mie$buv$1@sea.gmane.org> <443455B0.10803@nichtich.de>
	<44345EBD.3050001@worldnet.att.net>

body:
Moin,

On Thursday 06 April 2006 02:20, Conrad Dunkerson wrote:
> Jakob Voss wrote:
> > Oh my god! Is there no common sense in the English Wikipedia? Don't
> > you have no community procedures to stop people from doing this?
> >
> > * Only activate the if-construct. You can use it for optional
> > parameters in templates. This is the only useful application that I
> > can think of.
>
> I don't understand. You are (understandably) horrified by the massive
> 'subtract' template, but also then suggest to NOT implement Tim's
> 'expr' feature which would replace (and improve upon) it with a single
> line? Why?
>
> I agree that the current add/subtract templates are overboard, but
> there are viable uses for mathematical functions. See;
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Yesterday&action=edi
>t
>
> Now, that is about as efficient as currently possible for what it does
> (generate yesterday's date - including month/year changeovers and
> leap-days), but with mathematic evaluation it could be reduced to just
> a few lines. More complex capabilities = less complex pages.
>
> That kind of 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' logic was first introduced on
> English Wikipedia only a couple of weeks ago, but is already used on
> hundreds of pages for a variety of effects (previewing 'daily' content
> in advance to verify that it is formatted correctly, going back to
> 'yesterday's main page' to find something you saw before, browsing
> forward and backward through pages arranged in date order, et cetera).
> Heavy use is fairly good indicator of 'usefullness'.

Just because someone needs yesterday's or tomorrow's date doesn't mean you
have to introduce full mathematical expressions and function logic into
templates.

Wikipedia is for content, Mediawiki for the programming logic to make it
happen. Seperation of code and data! I repeat it here for you:

	SEPERATE THE CODE AND DATA!

There, you made me finally yell.

One of the (more practical) reasons I can give is that other wikis might
want to have the same functionality (yesterday), but do not know about
the template and thus will re-invent it.

Best wishes,

Tels

--
 Signed on Thu Apr  6 18:48:48 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "MY CAUSE IS JUST... MY WILL IS STRONG... AND MY GUN IS VERY VERY
 LARGE!" - The Doom Guy

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from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Philip Welch wrote:
>
>> On Apr 5, 2006, at 10:42 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>
<snip flamewar>

Can we kindly bring discussion back on topic? The image has been
deleted. If you have anything to say about it, do so. Otherwise, can we
*please* close this thread?

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

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from_name: David Alexander Russell

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

If the report became available under Freedom of Information, then yes we
could use it. Since it hasn't been, we can't.

Cynical

Philip Welch wrote:
> On Apr 6, 2006, at 8:43 AM, Matt Brown wrote:
>
>> If an FBI report exists but is unpublished / unavailable, that is
>> equivalent to it not existing right now.
>
> Can't we use the Freedom of Information Act?
>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
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iD8DBQFENXPxg8fvtQYQevcRAjUmAKCXjrjn+9l78tTosUh5mbBx47+6zwCghzWb
UAxQafLiI71G2WM4/M5Zyx0=
=aHo4
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from_name: Robert Scott Horning

subject: [Foundation-l] Adult and Illegal content on Wikimedia projects

body:
Gavin Chait wrote:

>Take this a little further, though.  A "guide" to terrorism (or rape for
>that matter) exposes how the "trick" is performed and so allows others to
>come up with strategies to combat that act.
>
>The question, of course, is whether or not that ups the game.  Every new
>computer virus that comes out has to get through an ever more sophisticated
>set of virus scanners and so there is an evolutionary process.
>
>But the terrorist attack of September 11 already upped that game.  Surely it
>is helpful to know how terrorists and other nutcases plan their attacks so
>that we, who are not homicidal, can at least have some insight into how the
>other side thinks?
>
>Gavin
>
>
>
Thank you for expressing your opinion on this matter.  I would like to
point out, however, that it is opinions like this that seem to encourage
this type of content to remain, and is at odds with what Jimbo seems to
have been saying that this should be deleted immediately without even a
VfD vote as a form of vandalism.  This is exactly the dilemma that I'm
facing right now, to completely ignore opinions like this one above or
to take it into consideration to form a community concensus.

--
Robert Scott Horning


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

references:
<e10mie$buv$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<4433E1DC.4080907@rotemliss.com>	<e10pls$olh$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<3782426.post@talk.nabble.com>
	<e92136380604060819l16a5277epfcc389669aea57b@mail.gmail.com>

body:
Rob Church wrote:
>
> I'm quite willing to add these magic words, but there is one question
> which needs answering before this happens; what should be done with a
> {{TALKSPACE}} or similar tag if the current namespace doesn't *have* a
> talk namespace?

There's an internal MediaWiki function called Namespace::getTalk() that
does this.  It's used quite a lot, so I'd expect it'll continue to be
maintained in some form.  Given that, I see no reason not to expose the
same behavior to users.

By the way, now that there's apparently an easy way to add "parser
functions", how about that {{urlencode:}} function I've been asking for?
    Among other things, having it would mean we'd no longer have to
create two versions of each variable, one with an "E" suffix and one
without.

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: Anthere

subject: [WikiEN-l] en: CD! Well, sort of

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> So, [[Paramaribo]] made their "Places" list, but [[Paris]] didn't.
> Hmm, [[Oakland Cemetery]] did too.

Oooops. Strange indeed :-)

  All in all, a rather strange
> collection of information. Seems also that many places are actually in
> the "general knowledge" section, including, god bless it, [[Mount
> Osmond, South Australia]].
>
> I don't immediately see the list of authors for each article?

I rather agree with you here. It acknowledge wikipedia much more than
authors since it recommands to go see Wikipedia to find authors....
No internet connection... no authors information.

On a CD, this is rather sad. I will mention it to them for their next
version.

> But goodness I'm in a negative mood aren't I...

Yup :-)
But that's a good project no ?

Ant

> Steve
>
> On 4/5/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>http://fixedreference.org/2006-Wikipedia-CD-Selection/
>>
>>2011 articles, hand-picked and cleaned up. Only 1,000,000 to go ;-)
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 06:42:51PM +0200, Tels wrote:
> Exactly, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a distributed programming
> contest, whose ouput accidentily looks like an encyclopedia :)

But, as is frequently pointed out, Mediawiki is not *only* wikipedia,
even if you only take WMF projects into account.

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

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


from_name: Platonides

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Mathematical expressions and
	conditional	constructs, now implemented

body:
> Nick Jenkins wrote:
>>>There are two conditional functions and a mathematical expression
>>>function.
>>
>> Cool! Dibs on [[:en:Template:Factorial]] :
>> ------------------------
>> {{if: {{{1}}}=1 | 1 | {{expr: {{{1}}} * {{{{PAGENAME}} | {{expr:
>> {{{1}}} - 1}} }} }} }}
>> ------------------------
>> ... or something like that.
>
> I hate to spoil your fun, but that won't work.  We have the recursion
> detector enabled for a reason.
>--
> Ilmari Karonen

Luckily, i don't want to be standing at the "wikimedia servers have
problems" [1] message eating my nails to revert a page only because half a
dozen of children are visiting the [[first 100.000 numbers factorial]] page
some dumb created [2]

1- I subrepticiously remember http://bugs.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3944
is waiting for someone with server access to improve the translation.
2- if someone ''really'' wants that, i can easily fill its mailbox with it,
no range problem :-)


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Mathematical expressions and conditional
 constructs , now implemented

body:
Tels wrote:
>
> Wikipedia is for content, Mediawiki for the programming logic to make it
> happen. Seperation of code and data! I repeat it here for you:
>
> 	SEPERATE THE CODE AND DATA!

I see no problem here: the code is in the template namespace, the data
is in the main namespace.  Problem solved.  :-)

Seriously, you seem to be advocating MediaWiki extensions (or patches)
for nontrivial templates.  This is all very well, except that it means
anyone who wants to develop such an extension must first figure out how
to set up a local MediaWiki installation, including installing MySQL and
a webserver (usually Apache).  And configuring those to be secure, since
the default configuration for webservers tends to expose them to any
hacker or spammer that happens by.  And it means they must learn, even
for the simplest of things, a significant subset of the MediaWiki
internals, which are even worse documented than template syntax.  And it
means they must be much more careful, since a MediaWiki extension can
screw up the system in lots of ways that a template can't.

And, once they have their fancy new extension developed, they must lobby
a Wikimedia developer into installing it.  Not to mention that this has
to be repeated every time any new feature is added or a bug is fixed.

We have probably thousands of editors working on complex templates, such
as infoboxes and the like.  Only a few percent of those could develop a
MediaWiki extension if they had to.  And any extensions they did develop
would have to be approved by the handful of Wikimedia devs.  The process
simply does not scale well.  Templates do.

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: Gavin Chait

body:
Take this a little further, though.  A "guide" to terrorism (or rape for
that matter) exposes how the "trick" is performed and so allows others to
come up with strategies to combat that act.

The question, of course, is whether or not that ups the game.  Every new
computer virus that comes out has to get through an ever more sophisticated
set of virus scanners and so there is an evolutionary process.

But the terrorist attack of September 11 already upped that game.  Surely it
is helpful to know how terrorists and other nutcases plan their attacks so
that we, who are not homicidal, can at least have some insight into how the
other side thinks?

Gavin


body:
Nick Jenkins wrote:
>>There are two conditional functions and a mathematical expression function.
>
> Cool! Dibs on [[:en:Template:Factorial]] :
> ------------------------
> {{if: {{{1}}}=1 | 1 | {{expr: {{{1}}} * {{{{PAGENAME}} | {{expr:
> {{{1}}} - 1}} }} }} }}
> ------------------------
> ... or something like that.

I hate to spoil your fun, but that won't work.  We have the recursion
detector enabled for a reason.

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: XaosFluX

body:
'''Support'''.  These will have many uses!  I would support the idea of
restricting them to template: space if needed.
xaosflux

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tim Starling" <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au>
To: <wikitech-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 05, 2006 11:09 AM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Mathematical expressions and conditional
constructs,now implemented

> In response to a campaign by users of the English Wikipedia to harrass
> developers by introducing
> increasingly ugly and inefficient meta-templates to popular pages, I've
> caved in and written a few
> reasonably efficient parser functions. There are two conditional functions
> and a mathematical
> expression function. The expression function should support uses such as
> time and date deltas, as
> well as floating point applications such as unit conversion. The
> conditional functions should
> replace most uses of {{qif}}, and improve the efficiency of similar
> templates.
>
> Documentation is at:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions
>
> I would like to hear comments about the syntax, before we put them live.
> Syntax is guided by
> consistency with existing functions such as {{localurl:}}, but if it looks
> too unwieldy then we can
> probably change it.
>
> Don't blame me. I've always been against turning wikitext into a
> programming language. I'm just
> weaker than the other developers. How can I stand by and watch this sort
> of thing be inflicted on
> our articles:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ed_Poor/subtract&action=edit
>
> I had a choice between going on a deletion rampage or answering the
> persistent calls on the wiki for
> this kind of thing to be implemented.
>
> Templates, that's where it all went wrong. Or custom messages, as we
> called them back then. If only
> I understood what a Pandora's box I was opening when I implemented
> {{MSG:}}.
>
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-September/018536.html
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


body:
On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 06:44:43PM +0200, Tels wrote:
> I am going to write:
>
> 	<perl>
> 	  print "Hello World!\n";
> 	</perl>
>
> if nobody beats me to it. :D

I thought someone already had, but I can't find it.

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

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


body:
On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 06:47:32PM +0200, Tels wrote:
> > I think this is the most important thing people need to understand
> > about template complexity: by making the *template* complex, we're
> > making the articles *simpler* and easier to maintain.
>
> And it also changes the "you can edit anything" to "you can edit articles.
> For most templates, please study computer science and a real programming
> language for a year and then come back".

I believe you think that's a valid argument.

Please see my comments yesterday concerning penalizing the smart people
in favor of the stupid.

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

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Page hit counts

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 4/6/06, Tom Harrison <tfharrison at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Are any statistics available on what pages people are reading, and how
>> often a given page is accessed?
>>
>
> No.
>

More to the point: there used to be, but they were so big they broke the
servers.

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

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from_name: Carl Fûrstenberg

body:
A time ago I made an implementation for a simlar thing for mediawiki, see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:AzaToth/Logic

The syntax I choosed was {#[$]func$param$param#} where [$] defined $ as
delimiter.

On 4/5/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>
> In response to a campaign by users of the English Wikipedia to harrass
> developers by introducing
> increasingly ugly and inefficient meta-templates to popular pages, I've
> caved in and written a few
> reasonably efficient parser functions. There are two conditional functions
> and a mathematical
> expression function. The expression function should support uses such as
> time and date deltas, as
> well as floating point applications such as unit conversion. The
> conditional functions should
> replace most uses of {{qif}}, and improve the efficiency of similar
> templates.
>
> Documentation is at:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions
>
> I would like to hear comments about the syntax, before we put them live.
> Syntax is guided by
> consistency with existing functions such as {{localurl:}}, but if it looks
> too unwieldy then we can
> probably change it.
>
> Don't blame me. I've always been against turning wikitext into a
> programming language. I'm just
> weaker than the other developers. How can I stand by and watch this sort
> of thing be inflicted on
> our articles:
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ed_Poor/subtract&action=edit
>
> I had a choice between going on a deletion rampage or answering the
> persistent calls on the wiki for
> this kind of thing to be implemented.
>
> Templates, that's where it all went wrong. Or custom messages, as we
> called them back then. If only
> I understood what a Pandora's box I was opening when I implemented
> {{MSG:}}.
>
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-September/018536.html
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] en: CD! Well, sort of

body:
On 4/6/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, but to rain just once more on its parade, am I to understand they
> "clean up" the articles before dumping them on CD? Would it not be
> better to "clean up" the articles at Wikipedia, so everyone else can
> benefit too?

A lot of the cleaning up involved, as I understand, removing links to
articles not included in the project and abridging some of the
entries.  Not really stuff we need.

-Matt


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-04-07

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test Magic Word: {{NUMBEROFFILES}}... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!

Passed 298 of 301 tests (99%) FAILED!


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:

>Gavin Chait wrote:
>
>
>>Take this a little further, though.  A "guide" to terrorism (or rape for
>>that matter) exposes how the "trick" is performed and so allows others to
>>come up with strategies to combat that act.
>>
>>The question, of course, is whether or not that ups the game.  Every new
>>computer virus that comes out has to get through an ever more sophisticated
>>set of virus scanners and so there is an evolutionary process.
>>
>>But the terrorist attack of September 11 already upped that game.  Surely it
>>is helpful to know how terrorists and other nutcases plan their attacks so
>>that we, who are not homicidal, can at least have some insight into how the
>>other side thinks?
>>
>>
>Thank you for expressing your opinion on this matter.  I would like to
>point out, however, that it is opinions like this that seem to encourage
>this type of content to remain, and is at odds with what Jimbo seems to
>have been saying that this should be deleted immediately without even a
>VfD vote as a form of vandalism.  This is exactly the dilemma that I'm
>facing right now, to completely ignore opinions like this one above or
>to take it into consideration to form a community concensus.
>
As I understand the US law it is not illegal to tell people how to make
bombs; it is only illegal to tell them thst those bombs can be used for
terrorist activities.  (As if that would be tough for a terrorist to
figure out!)  It would be perfectly legal  to tell readers that they
could use those bombs to blow up a stump in their own back yards; it's
up to the person wanting to do that to find out about lacal ordinances
that forbid loud noises at 2:00 a.m.  Approaches to this kind of issue
should be consistent both before and after a spectacular success for
terrorism.  A lot of the activity following 9/11 is consistent with
closing the barn door after the horses have escaped.  Those who are good
at terrorism will have the gift of imagination and surprise; they are
unlikely to try the same trick twice; they don't need bomb making
lessons from the Wiki.

The problems with such an article is more likely to be in its effect on
the copycats and other unprofessional idiots.  They are the last ones to
whom we would want to give ideas; some of them were so busy pushing
their issues that they flunked their chemistry class.

I am not personally involved in Wikibooks, so I'm not about to push my
policy views there, but I would be inclined to exclude such material on
the basis that it does more harm than good.  At the same time I believe
in the importance of the community to Wikis.  A community leader (and
Robert's regular comments in this mailing list suggest that he is such a
leader in Wikibooks) needs to exercise skills at building consensus, and
also needs to be able to override community opinion when he feels that
there is an important enough matter of principle at stake.  When he does
that he needs to face the inevitable flak.

Calling on Jimbo to decide on something is a cop-out.  It's a sad
admission that the community isn't strong enough to settle its own
problems.  It is strategically unsound for a general to micromanage
local battles.

Ec


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Mathematical expressions and conditional
	constructs , now implemented

body:
Moin,

On Thursday 06 April 2006 21:35, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
> Tels wrote:
> > Wikipedia is for content, Mediawiki for the programming logic to make
> > it happen. Seperation of code and data! I repeat it here for you:
> >
> > 	SEPERATE THE CODE AND DATA!
>
> I see no problem here: the code is in the template namespace, the data
> is in the main namespace.  Problem solved.  :-)

That still means yo do put the code in the data (aka the article space)
and keep it out of the code (aka the CVS).

This totally reverses what we have learnt about software development in
the past decades.

Putting software into a repository means you can cheack it out, test it,
patch it, etc etc. You can also secure it. Well, you can even syntax
check it.

Put the code in to the template system, and you suddenly loose all that.

Plus anybody who wants to use the same features also has to copy the code
(aka the templates).

You seem still to think that if the template switch (f.i.) is added to
Wikipedia, than thats enough. What about other people who also want to
use that? How do you "install" the template switch into other wikis?
Upgrade them? Even version them? Or compare them? What if there is a
security problem? How do you notify "users" of the code you create?

I say it again: Code to code, data to data. You do no mix them, or you
will have to clean up the mess you create today.

gee, I sound so old now :-(

> Seriously, you seem to be advocating MediaWiki extensions (or patches)
> for nontrivial templates.

But wasn't the consens that the ideas behin this are trivial, but the
templates are non-trivial because they are no proper code but hacks?

And yes, I advocate putting up extensions or patches for often requested
features.

Either the people hacking on these templates have enough knowledge and
time to work with real code, then they can create proper patches. Or they
don't, and then they shouldn't maintain code. (or neither create code
that has to be maintained in the future by somebody else).

> This is all very well, except that it means
> anyone who wants to develop such an extension must first figure out how
> to set up a local MediaWiki installation, including installing MySQL
> and a webserver (usually Apache).  And configuring those to be secure,
> since the default configuration for webservers tends to expose them to
> any hacker or spammer that happens by.

Nonsense, to hack or develop for wikipedia you do not need a public wiki.
(my test wiki isn't public and yet I created an extension)

> And it means they must learn,
> even for the simplest of things, a significant subset of the MediaWiki
> internals, which are even worse documented than template syntax.

Or they could ask a developer.

> And it means they must be much more careful, since a MediaWiki extension
> can screw up the system in lots of ways that a template can't.

I do think you are in for a surprise here, because templates that
"compute" can be far more dangerous than you think.

In addition, other people who want then to use the same feature could just
download the newest mediawiki, which includes a feature they want.

Or in your scenary, they could go to wikipedia, hunt down all the little
templates, and input them into their own wiki.

> And, once they have their fancy new extension developed, they must
> lobby a Wikimedia developer into installing it.  Not to mention that
> this has to be repeated every time any new feature is added or a bug is
> fixed.
>
> We have probably thousands of editors working on complex templates,
> such as infoboxes and the like.  Only a few percent of those could
> develop a MediaWiki extension if they had to.  And any extensions they
> did develop would have to be approved by the handful of Wikimedia devs.
>  The process simply does not scale well.  Templates do.

But there are only a few really usefull features, like you said,
infoboxes. You can put the co,mon ones into an extension or mediawiki
feature, and real software developers will care for them, they will write
testcases for them, they will be secured etc etc, e.g. everything that is
done with code today.

Or you can create a big mess of little templates, all intermingled and
mixed and have numerous users edit them, and easily break them.

Best wishes,

Tels

--
 Signed on Fri Apr  7 01:27:56 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "My other computer is your Windows box." -- Dr. Brad (19034) on
 2004-08-13 at /.

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body:
Moin,

On Thursday 06 April 2006 23:49, Conrad Dunkerson wrote:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
> > But Joe User still needs to plug information into the template.
>
> Yes, the ability to type is still required. We haven't simplified
> things THAT much. :]
>
> > Or in
> > the course of ordinary editing he runs into a template which is not
> > suitable to his subject, but it's beyond his technical capacity to
> > trace the problem.
>
> In which case they ALSO wouldn't have been able to figure out the
> markup which the template has replaced/simplified. No, we can't
> anticipate everything that every user might want to do and have a nice
> simple pre-packaged way of making that happen all ready for them....
> but that strikes me as an illogical reason for not setting up utility
> templates at all.
>
> I'll never understand the 'it might be too complex so let's not do it'
> argument... setting aside that this just ISN'T complicated stuff, even
> if it WERE it doesn't TAKE AWAY anything. All the older methods of
> doing things are still there. Just now there are additional ways of
> getting things done - and if not everyone understands those, so what?
> It isn't hurting the people who don't. Indeed, it helps even those who
> don't understand the logic because all they need to know is the name of
> the template to call... not how it works.

> You don't need to know how to
> build an automobile in order to drive one.

Software is not an automobile. That confusion is why we have so many
broken and buggy programs, invalid webpages etc.

>
> The 'we are building an encyclopedia not programming' argument is
> equally unmoving to me. Ok then... get rid of all HTML font settings,
> colors, tables, CSS, templates, et cetera. Oh, those are USEFUL for
> building an encyclopedia? Hmmm.... imagine that. I wonder if automatic
> distance conversions in articles would be useful... given that some of
> our readers (and editors) use imperial and some use metric? Temperature
> scales? Weights?

But do you really need to:

* invent yet-another-language, poorly
* create yet-another-interpreter for it
* create yet-another-lets-mix-data-and-code environemnt (think PHP, think
javasript) for it?

I am not that against these functions. I just don't want horder of
unexperienced people who think they can program because they know how to
add two numbers up inject hundred or thousands little "programs" into the
wikipedia. Wikipedia is a data collection. Do not turn it into a code
repository.

Now I think I have said everything there is to say on that topic, about
three times. So I shut up now. You have been warned :D

Best wishes,

Tels

--
 Signed on Fri Apr  7 01:42:27 2006 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "Ok, a shiny copper piece to the first person who can tell me why Elan
 is running around naked." - "Giant moth attack?" - "Maybe a bad guy
 casted 'Dispel clothes'?" - The Order of the Stick issue #26

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from_name: Locke Cole

body:
On 4/7/06, Tels <nospam-abuse at bloodgate.com> wrote:

> Yes, that was my point, too. How do you intent to distribute all the
> wonderfull little "code-snippets" written on wikipedia to other wikis?

If they're working from a database dump, they'll be in the dump. If
you meant more generally, I suppose they could be copied to meta and
categorized if really useful.

-L


from_name: michael_irwin at verizon.net

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:

>I am not personally involved in Wikibooks, so I'm not about to push my
>policy views there, but I would be inclined to exclude such material on
>the basis that it does more harm than good.  At the same time I believe
>in the importance of the community to Wikis.  A community leader (and
>Robert's regular comments in this mailing list suggest that he is such a
>leader in Wikibooks) needs to exercise skills at building consensus, and
>also needs to be able to override community opinion when he feels that
>there is an important enough matter of principle at stake.  When he does
>that he needs to face the inevitable flak.
>
>Calling on Jimbo to decide on something is a cop-out.  It's a sad
>admission that the community isn't strong enough to settle its own
>problems.  It is strategically unsound for a general to micromanage
>local battles.
>
>
>
It is strategically unsound to design and implement a political machine
around micromanagement and then refuse to manage.  Unless of course
one's strategy is to divert web traffic elsewhere.

Rather than implying Roberth is an ineffectual leader after placing any
emergent leadership in an ineffectual position subject to Jimmy says
grams; perhaps you should call on Jimbo to go assist the Wikibooks
community in their discussions regarding how editorial policy might be
established, maintained and how an effective board capable of enforcing
that policy with community support might be initiated.

The statement "Calling on Jimbo to decide on something is a cop-out." is
as intellectually dishonest statement as I have personally witnessed on
the internet given the fact that you or someone signing as you has been
present while Wikipedia and Wikimedia evolved through the owner,
founder, "Jimbo says ...", god king, stacked board sequence to its
current state.

The fact is that the sole established factor deciding editorial policy
in all Wikimedia projects is Jimmy's opinion regarding the "NPOV" policy
which he mandates and which reduces in the case of controversy to his
opinion or the opinion of his hand picked delegates and probably his
legal liability as a publisher as per his  lawyer's opinions regarding
Florida and U.S. federal law which are not always made public to the
"community".

How exactly would you propose that Roberth or any other emergent
leadership "override community opinion" when an important prinicple is
at stake?  In the final analysis the Wikimedia Foundation controls the
hard drives and servers and it is controlled by expressed intent and
design by one person.  The only way to override or implement "community
opinion" is to be in concurrence with "Jimmy says ...."

I suggest if the Wikimedia Foundation is serious in its pitch for cash
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising
it should be giving some serious thought to an authentic editorial
policy and  a board actually deriving legitimacy from its "community" of
diverse stakeholders rather than a single founder and his personal
financial interests and philisophical opinions or fallacies.

Once that overall policy has been articulated and ratified by
stakeholders in a form that does not require a final judgement from the
godking, or the stacked Board, or their selected trusted minions every
two controversial kilobytes then perhaps you can chide "community
leaders" for the failure of their "communities" to establish and manage
their own policies consistent with the mandates of the Wikimedia
Foundation in exchange for bandwidth, servers, and administrative support.

regards,
lazyquasar


from_name: Birgitte Arco

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> Robert Scott Horning wrote:
>
> >Gavin Chait wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Take this a little further, though.  A "guide" to
> terrorism (or rape for
> >>that matter) exposes how the "trick" is performed
> and so allows others to
> >>come up with strategies to combat that act.
> >>
> >>The question, of course, is whether or not that
> ups the game.  Every new
> >>computer virus that comes out has to get through
> an ever more sophisticated
> >>set of virus scanners and so there is an
> evolutionary process.
> >>
> >>But the terrorist attack of September 11 already
> upped that game.  Surely it
> >>is helpful to know how terrorists and other
> nutcases plan their attacks so
> >>that we, who are not homicidal, can at least have
> some insight into how the
> >>other side thinks?
> >>
> >>
> >Thank you for expressing your opinion on this
> matter.  I would like to
> >point out, however, that it is opinions like this
> that seem to encourage
> >this type of content to remain, and is at odds with
> what Jimbo seems to
> >have been saying that this should be deleted
> immediately without even a
> >VfD vote as a form of vandalism.  This is exactly
> the dilemma that I'm
> >facing right now, to completely ignore opinions
> like this one above or
> >to take it into consideration to form a community
> concensus.
> >

Perhaps another way to approach this is with
requirements on verifiablity.  If Wikibooks poclicy
would limit itself to information that is verifiable
by reputable sources (of course that would need to be
defined)and not just randomly found on the internet
that would cut out alot of this material.  I also
think that policy would have very little collteral
damage on the information you do want, although I am
not familar enough with the scope of Wikibooks to be
sure of that.

Birgitte SB

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com


from_name: Ryan Delaney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
On 4/7/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Some of us feel that even if the image had been free, it still should
> never have been included in Wikipedia. Concentrating on its copyright
> status is ignoring the real debate, rather than deciding once and for
> all how to deal with images that would be perceived by the public to
> be child porn.
>

It's not even that the public would perceive that image to be child porn. It
is
child porn. It's an image of a child created for the sole purpose of
producing
pleasurable sexual excitation in the viewer. Child + porn = child porn.
Process
isn't relevant when it comes to stuff like this. Whether we should host
child
porn on WMF servers is not something that is up for a vote.

Ryan


from_name: Sydney Poore

subject: [WikiEN-l] Illegal sources

body:
That was my argument for LS Studio article.

Sydney aka FloNight

Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
> Keith Old wrote:
>
>> On 4/7/06, Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Here's a problem: what happens when the contents of an article can
>>> only be verified by relying on sources which are illegal to view?
>>>
>>> The issue has arisen in the context of the article currently known as
>>> [[2004 Ukranian child pornography raids]]
>>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Ukranian_child_pornography_raids>.
>>>
>>> The article has changed now, but much of the content (describing the
>>> pornography-producing organisation, aswell as describing the actual
>>> material produced) was based on the assertions of those who had viewed
>>> the content. On a couple of occasions, when sources were asked for in
>>> relation to particular claims in the article, users provided links to
>>> the Internet Archive's stored copy of the pornographic website.
>>>
>>> Based on the descriptions given in the news sources, it would be
>>> illegal for me (and for most others) to view this content, and thus it
>>> would be illegal for me to verify the article. Thus, from my
>>> perspective, the article is unverifiable.
>>>
>>> I think it would be very much a matter of common sense to alter
>>> [[WP:V]] and [[WP:RS]] to prohibit the use of illegal sources to
>>> verify articles. But the question is where should the line of
>>> definition be drawn? Laws vary substantially across jurisdictions.
>>> Should we prohibit reliance on sources which are illegal to view in
>>> Florida? Laws are much stricter in other countries: New Zealand
>>> springs to mind as an example, but there are other countries where I
>>> am sure the laws are even stricter.
>>>
>>>
>> I think that content that cannot be verified other than by accessing illegal
>> materials is unverifiable. As well, our policy on sourcing requires reliable
>> third-party sources. Thus a Reuters report for example on the raids would be
>> deemed to be a reliable source. A cached copy of the material is not a
>> reliable third party source quite apart from its illegality.
>>
>>
>
> Wouldn't it also count as Original Research?
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Sydney Poore

Go Bengals!


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Illegal sources

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

Alphax (Wikipedia email) stated for the record:

> Wouldn't it also count as Original Research?

There is (or at least should be) a difference between Original Research
and extensive, in-depth research.

Some articles require sources more difficult to obtain than simply
googling the Web.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | We completely deny the allegations, and
 sean at epoptic.org | we're trying to identify the alligators.
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia broken

body:
Serious encyclopedia means leaving out material that is not encyclopedic.  Too many editors are stretching the meaning of encyclopedic to include anything that can be sourced. During Afd, it is very common for editors to cite tabloids, forums or publicly written dictionaries such as Urban Dictionary. http://www.urbandictionary.com/. Since it takes a super majority to delete, often the outcome is no consensus and the material stays.

Sydney

Sam Korn wrote:
> On 4/7/06, Steve Block <steve.block at myrealbox.com> wrote:
>
>> No, I think what's being asked for is a group of people who will apply
>> policy in a neutral way.  The votes are already stacked, that's the
>> purpose of having policy; policy is the vote stacking tool, not the
>> group of editors. RFC provides no comment, at least not at articles I've
>> listed on it.  Actually, if I'm honest, I'm finding more and more that
>> Wikipedia is imply broken.  We've got clear guidance at [[WP:RS]] that
>> message boards aren't acceptable sources, and yet we've got thousands of
>> articles that are relying on just that.  Either we need to rewrite our
>> policies and have an anything goes policy, or we need to get a lot
>> tougher in enforcing the key policies.
>>
>
> And if we want to be a serious encyclopaedia, it must be the latter.
>
> --
> Sam
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>
>
>

--
Sydney Poore

Go Bengals!


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] Illegal sources

body:
Verification (for Wikipedia purposes) involves verification that the
information was published in a reliable source. It does not require
verification in the various other senses which might require actual
proof of the matter.

Thus we can truthfully say that it was reported in the New York Times
or by BBC (or some other source generally considered reliable) that
something occurred. We do not need to do original research to confirm
it.

In the matter of child pornography there is no need to view the
pictures to fulfill Wikipedia verification. One can imagine some sort
of classified, obscene or extraordinarily inflammatory document which
might be illegal, but generally such information cannot be considered
a reliable published source. Classified documents are by their nature
not published. Obscene or inflammatory documents are subject to
suppression and thus not generally circulated.

It all goes back to the nature of an encyclopedia, a summary of
generally accepted knowledge. That leaves plenty of room for projects
which move beyond generally accepted knowledge but those are other
projects.

Fred

On Apr 7, 2006, at 3:07 AM, Stephen Bain wrote:

> Here's a problem: what happens when the contents of an article can
> only be verified by relying on sources which are illegal to view?
>
> The issue has arisen in the context of the article currently known as
> [[2004 Ukranian child pornography raids]]
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Ukranian_child_pornography_raids>.
>
> The article has changed now, but much of the content (describing the
> pornography-producing organisation, aswell as describing the actual
> material produced) was based on the assertions of those who had viewed
> the content. On a couple of occasions, when sources were asked for in
> relation to particular claims in the article, users provided links to
> the Internet Archive's stored copy of the pornographic website.
>
> Based on the descriptions given in the news sources, it would be
> illegal for me (and for most others) to view this content, and thus it
> would be illegal for me to verify the article. Thus, from my
> perspective, the article is unverifiable.
>
> I think it would be very much a matter of common sense to alter
> [[WP:V]] and [[WP:RS]] to prohibit the use of illegal sources to
> verify articles. But the question is where should the line of
> definition be drawn? Laws vary substantially across jurisdictions.
> Should we prohibit reliance on sources which are illegal to view in
> Florida? Laws are much stricter in other countries: New Zealand
> springs to mind as an example, but there are other countries where I
> am sure the laws are even stricter.
>
> --
> Stephen Bain
> stephen.bain at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: BJörn Lindqvist

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
On 4/3/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have just deleted Image:Hikari Hayashibara Manga.jpg.

>  This image is extremely harmful to Wikipedia's progression to build an
> encyclopaedia.
> ...
> This image is harmful to Wikipedia's progression as a free encyclopaedia.
> ...
> the potential it has to harm Wikipedia?  Undoubtedly no.

Would you please mind telling a curious reader how this image either
is harmful to Wikipedia or has the potential to harm Wikipedia?

> The image deletion process has shown itself incapable of removing this
> image.  The process is demonstrably broken when there is a hint of
> controversy.  I don't take stepping outside accepted policy and
> process lightly.  Here, however, it is absolutely right and absolutely
> necessary.

This seem to indicate that people disagree with you, why do they do that?

> I apologise to any who see my actions as outrageously rogue-ish.  I
> wish there were an alternative, less radical way.

No. When you take the "my way or the highway" approach, people
naturally tend to get irritated.

--
mvh Bj?rn


subject: [WikiEN-l] Illegal sources

body:
The exact language in the protocol is that the following activities
ought to be prohibited:

(c) Producing, distributing, disseminating, importing, exporting,
offering, selling or possessing for the above purposes child
pornography as defined in article 2.

Article 2:

(c) Child pornography means any representation, by whatever means, of
a child engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual activities or
any representation of the sexual parts of a child for primarily
sexual purposes.

The claim that one is just researching pornography can only go so
far, but viewing is not listed. I think the duty of the viewer is to
recognize it "when they see it" and then refrain from doing such bad
things as publishing it, disseminating it or downloading it.

Fred

On Apr 7, 2006, at 3:34 AM, Keith Old wrote:

> I think that content that cannot be verified other than by
> accessing illegal
> materials is unverifiable. As well, our policy on sourcing requires
> reliable
> third-party sources. Thus a Reuters report for example on the raids
> would be
> deemed to be a reliable source. A cached copy of the material is not a
> reliable third party source quite apart from its illegality.
>
> Of course, there are materials that are illegal to view in one
> country that
> are perfectly legal in another. It is probably illegal to view neutral
> accounts of the Tianenmen Square protests in 1989. It is not in
> most other
> countries and would obviously considered as verifiable material.
>
> However, I understand that there is an Optional Protocol to the
> International Convention on the Rights of the Child see (
> http://www.law-ref.org/CHILDPROTOCOL2/index.html ).
>
> Perhaps it should be considered a banning offence to provide links to
> materials that contravene this protocol or to upload images that
> contravene
> it. As it is an international agreement, it might be considered as
> more of
> an international standard. Such materials should certainly not be
> considered
> to be verifiable and editors should be encouraged to remove it on
> sight.
>
> Regards
>
>
> Keith Old


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
The most common argument against your point - child pornography is
illegal  because real child are harmed while making it. Most Western
nations allow drawings of child porn but disallow photographs for this
reason.

I think all drawing that depict adults having sex with children or
children engaged in age inappropriate sex acts should be banned from
Wikipedia. My reasoning is that it depicts and condones the sexual
exploitation of children. These drawing shock the consciousness of
people that are otherwise strong free speech advocates.
Sydney

Ryan Delaney wrote:
> On 4/7/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Some of us feel that even if the image had been free, it still should
>> never have been included in Wikipedia. Concentrating on its copyright
>> status is ignoring the real debate, rather than deciding once and for
>> all how to deal with images that would be perceived by the public to
>> be child porn.
>>
>>
>
> It's not even that the public would perceive that image to be child porn. It
> is
> child porn. It's an image of a child created for the sole purpose of
> producing
> pleasurable sexual excitation in the viewer. Child + porn = child porn.
> Process
> isn't relevant when it comes to stuff like this. Whether we should host
> child
> porn on WMF servers is not something that is up for a vote.
>
> Ryan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
> I think this meta-debate is not doing anything constructive. It's pretty
> clear that the image is staying deleted at this point. Arguing about who
> said what to whom isn't going to accomplish anything for us besides
> toxifying the evironment even further. I think it's time we walked away from
> this one.

Something I feel have been missed is Sam Korn's original assertion
that "[The image deletion] process is demonstrably broken" because
this image was not deleted by it. I believe the process is not broken
at all, but that Sam's approach to it was wrong. If he had stuck with
the 100% demonstrably true facts; 1. the image is not free, 2. there
is a free replacement, then I believe the image could have been
deleted without much fuss. But when you use emotional arguments ("This
image is extremely harmful to Wikipedia..."), expect a filibuster.

--
mvh Bj?rn


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] en: CD! Well, sort of

body:
On 4/6/06, Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> But that's a good project no ?

Yes, but to rain just once more on its parade, am I to understand they
"clean up" the articles before dumping them on CD? Would it not be
better to "clean up" the articles at Wikipedia, so everyone else can
benefit too?

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Illegal sources

body:
Definitely, and if you regularly search on Google for it....

Fred

On Apr 7, 2006, at 7:58 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:

> I think if you went to the website specifically with the intention of
> viewing this material, you would be in an iffy position with regards
> to "posessing". If it's in your browser cache, do you not "possess"
> it?
>
> Steve
>
> On 4/7/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
>
>> The exact language in the protocol is that the following activities
>> ought to be prohibited:
>>
>> (c) Producing, distributing, disseminating, importing, exporting,
>> offering, selling or possessing for the above purposes child
>> pornography as defined in article 2.
>>
>> Article 2:
>>
>> (c) Child pornography means any representation, by whatever means, of
>> a child engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual activities or
>> any representation of the sexual parts of a child for primarily
>> sexual purposes.
>>
>> The claim that one is just researching pornography can only go so
>> far, but viewing is not listed. I think the duty of the viewer is to
>> recognize it "when they see it" and then refrain from doing such bad
>> things as publishing it, disseminating it or downloading it.
>>
>> Fred
>>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Illegal sources

body:
This material has been used before in Wikipedia. Especially the
Venona decrypts.

Fred

On Apr 7, 2006, at 8:25 AM, Andrew Gray wrote:

> On 07/04/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 4/7/06, David Alexander Russell <webmaster at davidarussell.co.uk>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Yeah, the fact that you obtained the document yourself (e.g. by
>>> siccing
>>> FOIA on the FBI) does not IMHO make it original research - any
>>> more than
>>> going to the library and finding a book to read about the
>>> subject, and
>>> then citing that book as a source.
>>>
>>
>> But... it doesn't pass WP:V because it has not been published in a
>> reliable source.
>>
>
> The FBI puts most of its released FOIA material online; much more is
> held by places like the National Security Archive and, again,
> accessible to the public. Wouldn't this class as publication by a
> reputable source?
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
>   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Violet/Riga

subject: [WikiEN-l] Page hit counts

body:
There should be more stats available to the people that helped write the
thing - what better way of getting feedback that people are reading what
you've worked hard to contribute?


from_name: Robert Scott Horning

body:
Birgitte Arco wrote:

>
>Perhaps another way to approach this is with
>requirements on verifiablity.  If Wikibooks poclicy
>would limit itself to information that is verifiable
>by reputable sources (of course that would need to be
>defined)and not just randomly found on the internet
>that would cut out alot of this material.  I also
>think that policy would have very little collteral
>damage on the information you do want, although I am
>not familar enough with the scope of Wikibooks to be
>sure of that.
>
>Birgitte SB
>
>
>
While this does raise the bar somewhat at making content on projects
overall to be better (and verifiability ought to be a common standard on
all Wikimedia projects), it still doesn't get away from the issue that
some kinds of content should not be on Wikibooks because of the nature
of the content.  A book called "How to fly airplanes into buildings" can
be verified with factual information, including engineering reports and
news articles from the effects of damage to both the Empire State
Building and the World Trade Center in New York City.  That doesn't mean
that such a book should be on Wikibooks.

As I hinted to earlier, my main issue is if content on Wikibooks would
damage the greater mission of the project, which is to provide
educational textbooks for schools.  I'm not prepared to make a blanket
statement that only textbooks which can be used in a classroom are the
only thing allowed on Wikibooks, however, even if that seems like the
only realistic solution.  There are some editor/users on Wikibooks that
have this opinion and school of thought, and are very strict in the
interpretation.  The big problem with a policy of this nature is that it
is very subjective and difficult to pin down, as well as something that
shifts over time due to changes in the user community.

A hard textbooks-only view would also remove things like biographies,
how-to books, video game guides, and annotated texts, and potentially
other content as well that has tradtionally been on Wikibooks for some
time.  And yes, there is movement to remove some of these things because
they are not textbooks in a strict sense.

--
Robert Scott Horning


body:
On 4/6/06, Tels <nospam-abuse at bloodgate.com> wrote:
> And it also changes the "you can edit anything" to "you can edit articles.
> For most templates, please study computer science and a real programming
> language for a year and then come back".

That would be ok. Some of the more complex existing templates
(notably, that babel one that lists all languages and their language
codes or something) require you to have spent 6 months meditating in a
Tibetan monastery and achieving inner peace.

Seriously, I don't understand the argument against a more advanced
template language.
1. We currently have evilly complex templates that no one in their
right mind would go poking at. These would become simpler.
2. Anyone who wants to write a userbox template is not going to be
discouraged by the existence of more advanced commands (ok, that's an
argument against it).
3. Anyone who has the misfortune to see the inner workings of a
complex template may actually survive the experience if it uses sane
code with real expressions, rather than ways of tricking the parser
into doing things it really, really doesn't want to do. And that
person may actually be able to maintain or improve that template!

Steve


body:
On 4/7/06, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Which currently returns this HTML:
> -----------------------
>
Failed to parse (syntax error):
> \\&2/x[]

> -----------------------

Yes, what an evil message that one is :( Is there any way it could
provide more feedback? Or can someone tell me how to embed double
quotes in <math> tags? :)

Steve


from_name: Daniel R. Tobias

subject: [WikiEN-l] Illegal sources

body:
On 7 Apr 2006 at 11:45, Mikkerpikker <mikkerpikker at gmail.com> wrote:

> Excellent idea! I have just looked at the protocol, and can see no
> reason why Wikipedia can't adopt it for this specific (and very
> serious and potentially damaging) issue of child porn.

But would the picture under recent debate count as "child porn" under
that protocol?  The definition there is:

  (c) Child pornography means any representation, by whatever means,
  of a child engaged in real or simulated explicit sexual activities
  or any representation of the sexual parts of a child for primarily
  sexual purposes.

The picture was a cartoon.  This was clearly not "real".  Maybe it
can be argued to be "simulated", but only in a cartoony manner, not
anything approximating a realistic simulation.  The girl in question
was pulling down her pants, but no "explicit sexual activities" were
actually shown.  Is her bare (cartoon) butt a "sexual part"?

In the trailer for the SpongeBob SquarePants movie (approved for
general audiences by the MPAA), SpongeBob drops his SquarePants, and
you see a brief image of his cartoon butt.  Is that pornographic?

If you start defining things based on what the viewers of the picture
think about (are they sexually aroused, or do they just find it
humorous?) then you get in the territory of "Thought Crime".  If
enough people get aroused by the Sears lingerie catalog, should that
be classified as pornographic too?

--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips: http://webtips.dan.info/
Dan's Domain Site: http://domains.dan.info/


from_name: Gordon Joly

subject: [WikiEN-l] BBC English, Simple English Wikipedia and the news.

body:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/

I did a little research by asking somebody with who I worked with at
BBC Worldservice between 1995 and 1998. I was in BBC Wordlservice for
short period in 1998, starting in "BBC Networking Club" in 1995. He
said that the BBC News in Simple English was produced between 1988
(or 1989) and 1994. The news in Simple English (Basic English) was
stopped since it was very difficult to take news, translate into
Basic English and the transmit before the news became "stale". The
aims and objectives of BBC Worldservice allowed the translation, but
resources allowed were strictly limited: specialists in Basic English
had to be employed on this news service.

In relation to the Simple English Wikipedia
http://simple.wikipedia.org/ similar considerations apply. How many
Basic English experts are able to spend time translating 1,000,000
pages (1,000,000,000 words) or start from scratch?

--
Gordo (aka LoopZilla)
gordon.joly at pobox.com
http://pobox.com/~gordo/
http://www.loopzilla.org/


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
Philip Welch wrote:

>On Apr 6, 2006, at 1:27 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>
>>Now, in a pretence of innocence, you admonish those
>>who would say "nice" things about controversial political ideologies,
>>but do not apply the same standards to those who wouild say offensive
>>things about the same ideologies.
>>
>>
>Ideally we should drop the subject entirely.
>
Yes, I can drop it.  I'm not interested in pursuing this ad nauseam.

>>Then you want to drop the issue when
>>you feel that you are ahead in the damage.  The historical fact that
>>some communists have committed large-scale mass murder does not
>>justify
>>your innuendo that all supporters of a communistic economy have
>>done so.
>>
>>
>We could say the same thing about fascism, but you don't find anyone
>playing apologist for *that* ideology.
>
Yes, we could say the same thing about some fascist regimes, and someone
thus interested would have been perfectly justified in raising such a
defence once that term was secondarily introduced.

It's perfectly obvious to absolutely everyone that no-one was being an
apologist in this thread by setting the record straight.

Ec


from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] Illegal sources

body:
On 4/7/06, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.org> wrote:
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Alphax (Wikipedia email) stated for the record:
>
> > Wouldn't it also count as Original Research?
>
> There is (or at least should be) a difference between Original Research
> and extensive, in-depth research.
>
> Some articles require sources more difficult to obtain than simply
> googling the Web.

The impression I got was that the issue that required looking at the images
was a description of the "quality" and nature of the material.  To judge the
quality of the material is OR.  To describe the nature of the material is
technically OR as well, but in my opinion to that that "the picture was
taken against such-and-such a background" is one of those places where OR is
less of a problem.  Of course, if a description of the images is notable
enough for inclusion in an encyclopaedia article, then one would hope that
someone else has described them...


from_name: Matt Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia broken

body:
On 4/7/06, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> We require not only verifiability, but notability. I can create
> something today and document it today, but - save in rare
> circumstances - I cannot prove its importance today.

I might note that notability is not official policy, even though it is
/de facto/, and furthermore there is serious disagreement over where
any line should be drawn, even among those who back a notability bar.

-Matt


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 10:43:33AM +0200, Tels wrote:
> Moin,

Huh?  Excuse me: "Moin is the name of another wiki software,
occasionally considered to be competitive with MediaWiki.  Are you
using it's name here repeatedly as a form of address to be
provocative?"

> On Friday 07 April 2006 04:27, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 06:42:51PM +0200, Tels wrote:
> > > Exactly, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a distributed programming
> > > contest, whose ouput accidentily looks like an encyclopedia :)
> >
> > But, as is frequently pointed out, Mediawiki is not *only* wikipedia,
> > even if you only take WMF projects into account.
>
> Yes, that was my point, too. How do you intent to distribute all the
> wonderfull little "code-snippets" written on wikipedia to other wikis?

I'm becoming more and more certain that you're merely trolling; this
question is completely orthogonal to the issue at hand, and appears to
be merely intended to be provocative as well.

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

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


body:
On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 11:12:22AM +0200, Tels wrote:
> If the feature is really so usefull as claimed, than we will see thousand
> little usefull computing templates littered all over the place. That will
> be messy and I don't want neither to maintain it, nor take blame when it
> blows up (e.g. becomes unmanageble).

Luckily, you won't be responsible for that.

Not that it's actually an issue in the first place.

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

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] new features for exention developers

body:
Tels wrote:
> as an extension developer I'd like to have two new features. I looked at
> the doc, the code the FAQ etc but I couldn't find out if it is not
> already possible to achive that:

$wgOut->addScript( "<style>....</style>" );

Note that this applies only to the current HTTP invocation. At this time there's
not a clean way to attach headers or external style sheets to a *parser hook*
extension other than adding it to every page invocation in your setup function.

> Likewise, I would like something along the lines of:
>
> 	__NOCATEGORIES__	(or __NOCAT__
> 	__NOMENU__
> 	__NOTOOLBOX__
> 	__NOSEARCH__
> 	__NOFOOTER__

Vandals would love this! However it would not be generally useful on a wiki, so
I'd recommend against.

(You could make a custom skin which works this way.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Nick Jenkins

body:
On 06/04/06, Rob Church wrote:
> > I created {{TALKSPACE}} and its counterpart {{ARTICLESPACE}} after
> > requesting the equivalent variables several times on this list.
> >
> > I would be more than happy to see them replaced with the equivalent
> > variables now that they seem to have proven their utility.
>
> I'm quite willing to add these magic words, but there is one question
> which needs answering before this happens; what should be done with a
> {{TALKSPACE}} or similar tag if the current namespace doesn't *have* a
> talk namespace?

How about returning the string:
-----------------------

Error: Talkspace of namespace:123 does not
exist.

-----------------------
I.e. Fail fast, and fail loud.

There is some precedent for this - consider the wiki text:
-----------------------
<math>\\&2/x[]</math>
-----------------------

Which currently returns this HTML:
-----------------------

Failed to parse (syntax error):
\\&2/x[]

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

All the best,
Nick.