subject: [WikiEN-l] administrator's status

body:
>Basically (except for Mav) this is the same tag team (Tannin and
>User:Jtdirl|??REman) who supported 172 in his efforts to protray Communist
>history from a sympathetic point of view. 172 is the one who deleted the
>reference to Tiananmen Square from the China article. All three then
>engaged
>in a protracted edit war to prevent a link to [[authoritarianism and
>totalitarianism]] from the China article by creating a sanitized article on
>the [[communist state]] which they strongly defended.
>
No. There was practically universal agreement that your additions were POV
in the extreme. On [[Communist state]] people were queuing up to revert
Fred's inarticulate, mindless POVing of an article. One person described
what was attempted to be added to the page as 'unbalanced'. Who? Fred
HIMSELF! He described his own attempted additions with that word.

Because he had been prevented from adding in his propaganda on other pages,
he sought to do it on [[Communist state]]. Just about everyone (bar of
course that week's troll visitation from the Adam stable) thought Fred's
behaviour on that page outrageous, where major changes were slipped in
marked as minor changes, or at odd hours when no-one might notice. It took
days and days and days of reversion after reversion after reversion by user
after user after user to stop Fred in his determination to turn the article
(which wasn't even on the topic that he and he alone on the planet seemed to
think it was on) into a bit of commie bashing.

>If you will look at the history of [[China]] and [[communist state]] you
>will see that their efforts at editing consist of endless reverts to their
>own point of view and minimal discussion of the issues at hand.

No. People told you over and over and over and over and over and over again
that (a) your additions were blatently unbalanced, a word you yourself used
to describe them, and (b) on [[Communist state]] people were queuing up to
tell you that even if what you were writing was balanced (and it miles from
that) it was the wrong page for that info. But you would not listen to
anyone, even Mav who suggesting pages where the stuff you wanted to add in,
if NPOVed, could be put. In the end it took nearly 20 reversions of your
blatently OTT POV nonsense by a host of people to get you to stop. And if
you hadn't stopped then, there was a queue of other users waiting to join in
and revert as often as necessary. Hardly anyone was supporting you. Everyone
was been driven mad by your fanatical determination to add in POV material
into the wrong article and to ignore everyone else, what they said, the
contents of the talk page, the constant reversions.

>Their activity is no different from those who think they can deny the
>holocaust.

How dare you make such an accusation? Your behaviour on those pages was a
disgrace and an insult to everyone on wiki who tries however unsuccessfully
on occasion, to produce NPOV stuff, not propaganda.  To compound it all you
have the balls to make the above statement. You owe me and everyone else you
libeled a public apology.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
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list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

in_reply_to: <BADE7995.8E6D%cunctator@kband.com>; from cunctator@kband.com on Wed, May 07, 2003 at 08:51:33AM -0400

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> 1. No need to subscribe/log in a second time.

In order to contribute, I guess you mean?  So, one thing that might
satisfy this would be a simple program to allow signed-in users to
fill in a form and have the result sent to the mailing list.

> 2. Ability to use wiki markup in posts.

Most particularly, you want to be able to click on [[Thomas
Jefferson]], right, and have it do the sensible thing.  Parsing code
for that should be easy enough.

> 3. Better archives.

Better in what ways?

My thinking *at the moment* is that a significant portion of the
functionality you want could be quickly added by an energetic perl or
python programmer to the mailing list software.  All that's needed is
(1) a form for logged-in-users to be able to post to the list, and
that's a very simple perl script and (2) a perl script or python code
or php to process the logs into a more wiki-clickable format.

Adding such things seems pretty simple, because if done thoughtfully,
it wouldn't interfere with anything else on the site, and it would add
the things you want without forcing email partisans to change our
ways, either.

(I mean, especially for [[Thomas Jefferson]], we do that already.)

--Jimbo


list: wikien-l

from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] Admin status: we are asking the wrong question

body:
Tannin wrote in part:

>The question to be considered here is not whether a generally
>reasonable, cooperative, and always hard-working contributor in 172
>should be given admin status. The question is why a persistently
>uncooperative, unreasonable and - let us face the facts here -
>persistently and unrepentantly dishonest contributor should retain such
>status.

I'm not a fan of Fredbauder -- and certainly 172 should become an admin --
but I don't think that it's wise to set a precedent for
taking admin status away from people because they're bad contributors.
The reason for doing that should be an *abuse* of admin *power*.
You haven't alleged this in the case of Fredbauder (in this post);
do you allege it now?

If so, that's a very serious discussion that should be separated from 172
(a case that we probably ought to decide first, to avoid conflating them).

-- Toby


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Moses ben Nachman" and NPOV

body:
I remember when Moses ben Nachman first edited. Yes, he did have a
disagreement with RK, but that hardly makes him Adam/Lir.  There are
different POVs on various articles, and it is  only inevitable that they will
come through in the writing, especially among new participants. Being NPOV is
a skill that we develop.

All that said, can we please stop suggesting that every new user with whom we
disagree is Adam/Lir. It makes it very difficult for new users to get thir
feet wet here.

Danny
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from_name: Thomas Corell

subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

body:
Bj?rn Lindqvist wrote:
> Why I prefer BBS:es:
>
> 1. Discussion is closer to content because both are webbased.

Oh, ****. I still hate it to search some hours to get a overview of all
disscussed subjects inside Wikipeda with this stupid Discussion/Talk pages.

Mails are coming full automaticly on my system at home, are sorted into
IMAP Folders and the next new message is at keystroke distance (mostly
''delete'' or 'Next Message''. An I don't have to wait for a webserver to
serve a page. I bet pressing a key to get the next message from your local
mailfolder is 1000 times faster than any BBS System.

Diskusstion don't have to be close to the content. A little bit of distance
helps to write proper messages.

The rest Erik has still written enought about. BBS are no proper (fast) way
to discuss. If you are subscribed to 20 Mailinglists, no problem to get
this managed. 20 BBS meens 20 Browser tabs, a lot of traffic (reloads to
check it somethings happend), instead the easy message drops of mailinglist.

I can say that I stopped every participation at projects switched to BBS
(webbased).

Smurf

--
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


subject: [WikiEN-l] "Moses ben Nachman" and NPOV

body:
John R. Owens wrote:

>Erik Moeller wrote:

>>Please take a look at:

>>http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Joseph_McCarthy&diff=895253&oldid=894480

>>(the URL may need to be pasted together). This edit, marked as *minor*, is
>>the work of one "Moses ben Nachman", a Wikipedia user with a very brief
>>edit history who just announced on his talk page that, "after several
>>months, I have decided to give this internet project another chance."

The discussion of Roy Cohn seems to have anti-Semitic overtones.
But golly! nothing like the ZOG conspiracies of the article that
the edit links to (on Jonathan's web site).

>>I strongly suspect that "Moses" is really the banned user Clutch. The
>>above edit is exactly his style (like changing "heavy drinking" to "social
>>drinking"), and even includes a link to a text on Clutch's homepage ("How
>>the Marxists destroyed Joe McCarthy"), reactor-core.org. Moreover, if you
>>check his user page, you will find that he was immediately welcomed by
>>Clutch -- and then complained about RK, as Clutch also did. In the
>>McCarthy edit, he removed large slabs of text without explanation.

His politics don't quite match Jonathan's, and while the linked article
is on Jonathan's site, it's not clear that you're expected to agree with it.
OTOH, Jonathan has promised to destroy Wikipedia if he can,
and I don't suppose that he'd mind violating his own political convictions
if it worked towards that goal.  Furthermore, it's not as if Jonathan is
particularly sensitive to anti-Semitism *or* red-baiting --
I just wouldn't expect him to advocate strong-arm government tactics.
Still, we should avoid rushing to conclusions without hard evidence,
like coincidences among IP numbers.

>>I'm not involved in the McCarthy article, but I suggest people keep an eye
>>on it, and on "Moses'" other edits. Yes, the McCarthy article was slightly
>>POV before the edits, but I doubt that it will be possible to make it NPOV
>>with the "help" of someone like "Moses".

>Here's an interesting point, now. If you look at
>http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=66.200.207.29
>(I hope that wraps OK, you may have to tack it together), it looks like
>this is the same person (at least, the same IP, with only the two
>contributions to date) that told Ril aka Lir/Adam/et al. to check its
>email about a week ago. Geeze, are these people in cahoots, cooperating to
>make our lives difficult? Or is it just more of Adam talking to itself to
>try to convince us it's not all just one big hydra?

The politics *definitely* don't match Adam's.
And Adam isn't nearly subtle enough to try to damage Wikipedia
by incorporating opinions that she disagrees with.
Note that 66.200.207.29 isn't the only anonymous IP defending "Moses";
209.53.16.55 was the first to make his edit to [[Joseph McCarthy]],
172.135.53.246 also restored the external that 66.200.207.29 restored,
and even you, JohnOwens, restored it at first before changing your mind.
Thus, I'd only feel confident about suspecting 209.53.16.55.

BTW, Clutch has previously used this anonymous IP 209.53.16.55.
It's edit to [[User talk:Clutch]] doesn't make much sense
unless that edit was in fact made by Jonathan,
and that IP also supported Clutch in September on [[Jehovah's Witnesses]].
But most damning is an edit by that IP to [[User talk:Stevertigo]],
signed "Clutch" and made within an hour after he was banned.

Now here's my cockamamie theory:  This is not Moses ben Nachmann,
but somebody that's taken over Moses' (5 month old) account.
The previous (December) incarnation of Moses strongly identified as Jewish,
and didn't use this as cover to turn around and be anti-Semitic either.
And he did nothing wrong -- just NPOVed [[Scientific method]],
told RK to calm down, and wrote a user page -- all good things generally.
Clutch's greeting may have been purely coincidental (at least then).
I suspect that 209.53.16.55, finding his McCarthy edit unwelcome,
adopted a Jewish username (in a fit of irony?) to revert it back.
The question is how he got access to this account --
Jonathan (say) would have had time to plan this,
but not the newbie that an anon ID would at first make one think.

A final note to all those constructing conspiracy theories:
Keep in mind that Clutch and Lir hate each other.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] "Moses ben Nachman" and NPOV

body:
An important point about Clutch: he's a Debian developer and as far as
I can tell, takes seriously an ethic against unwanted alteration of
things on other people's servers.  He's a "hacker", in the good sense,
not a "cracker".  It is my belief that he would not deliberately
violate the ban by using an anonymous ip or new account, even if he
hates us.

People have disappointed me before, though, so I remain open to
concrete evidence.  But, I just wanted to say: I doubt it in this
particular case.

--Jimbo


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

body:
On 5/7/03 7:33 AM, "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:

> Well, not to be too me-centric, but I know that if there's a BBS I
> will look at it sometimes, out of a sense of responsibility for the
> project, but I'm not likely to "live" there in the same way that I
> "live" on the mailing list, if you see what I mean.
>
> So if important policy discussions were to take place there, I'd miss
> them all completely.
>
> Perhaps what we need is just a better interface for the mailing list
> archives, and some means for people to post to the mailing list from
> the web?  What are the main features that the pro-BBS'ers want?

1. No need to subscribe/log in a second time.
2. Ability to use wiki markup in posts.
3. Better archives.


body:
On 5/7/03 9:28 AM, "Toby Bartels" <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:

> Tannin wrote in part:
>
>> The question to be considered here is not whether a generally
>> reasonable, cooperative, and always hard-working contributor in 172
>> should be given admin status. The question is why a persistently
>> uncooperative, unreasonable and - let us face the facts here -
>> persistently and unrepentantly dishonest contributor should retain such
>> status.
>
> I'm not a fan of Fredbauder -- and certainly 172 should become an admin --
> but I don't think that it's wise to set a precedent for
> taking admin status away from people because they're bad contributors.
> The reason for doing that should be an *abuse* of admin *power*.
> You haven't alleged this in the case of Fredbauder (in this post);
> do you allege it now?
>
> If so, that's a very serious discussion that should be separated from 172
> (a case that we probably ought to decide first, to avoid conflating them).
>
I'm just going to chime in and say that I think that the attacks on Fred are
unsubstantiated.


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Sysop Rights

body:
>From: <bedingt at dellepro.com>
>
>To Whom It May Concern:
>
>My login is NBtarheel33 and I am requesting Sysop rights.
>
>Thanks,
>
>NBtarheel33

After you've made one edit? And that one edit was changing the bold in an
intro paragraph to bold-italic, and deleting the boilerplate stub warning?
Yeah, right.

-- Tim Starling

_________________________________________________________________
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http://ninemsn.com.au/mobilecentral/hotmail_messenger.asp


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Moses ben Nachman" and NPOV

body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

> I remember when Moses ben Nachman first edited. Yes, he did have a
> disagreement with RK, but that hardly makes him Adam/Lir.  There are
> different POVs on various articles, and it is  only inevitable that
> they will come through in the writing, especially among new
> participants. Being NPOV is a skill that we develop.
>
> All that said, can we please stop suggesting that every new user with
> whom we disagree is Adam/Lir. It makes it very difficult for new users
> to get thir feet wet here.

Hmmm?  - Innocent until proven guilty.  What a radical idea!

Ec


from_name: Hunter Peress

subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es (see http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_media)

body:
Im sure by this point that no one saw one of my messages yesterday, one of the downfalls of
mailing lists (and I do discuss this fact in that message).

See: http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_media

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Well, not to be too me-centric, but I know that if there's a BBS I
>will look at it sometimes, out of a sense of responsibility for the
>project, but I'm not likely to "live" there in the same way that I
>"live" on the mailing list, if you see what I mean.
>
>So if important policy discussions were to take place there, I'd miss
>them all completely.
>
When our lives are busy most of us do the same thing.  It already takes
a fair chunk of time to go through what comes in on the mailing list.  I
have instant opinions on a lot of them but no time to respond fairly.
 Last summer Larry had sent out a few thought provoking comments, but
responding to that type of thing requires careful consideration, so I
stick them on the "to do" stack.  They're still there, but many more
things have been pushed onto the stack since then.  By the time I get to
them they will be so dated as to be meaningless to everybody else.  On
the other hand the innumerable comments about the new fashions that Lir
is wearing in the police line-up don't last very long.

Where we put things on the spectrum is a measure of importance to us.
 Active mailing list participation is a symptom of acute Wikipediholism,
but even the most addicted among us would balk at the idea of receiving
a separate eMail for every Recent Change that appears on the 'pedia :-( .

I belong to a few other mailing lists, but I've demoted them to digest
format.  I skim rapidly though them for anything really interesting, but
mostly I just delete.

Puting things on a BBS would be a further demotion, because I would only
look at them when I had a lot of time.  50 messages a day = 1,500
messages a month.  Yes a lot of lot of time!  ... and this is a list
where spam appears only rarely.

Ec


body:
I wrote in part:

>I'm not a fan of Fredbauder --

The nice thing about getting posts in digest form
is that I can look over them again with a fresh mind. ^_^

This comment is too personal, and as such is stronger than I intended.
All I mean is that I often find that I disagree with Fred
when he gets into conflict with other editors in Wikipedia
(even though I rarely get involved myself, of course),
at least in those situations that I've looked at.
So I am not his partisan in conflicts with Tannin
(who I was replying to above).

Nevertheless, it seems obvious that Wikipedia is better for him --
as it is better for every one of the people on this list --
so in that sense at least, I am of course his fan.

-- Toby


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

body:
Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> The Cunctator wrote:

> > 3. Better archives.
>
> Better in what ways?

Searchable.

Axel

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> I don't see anything that's absurd. Jtdirl deleted the following text,
> which seems pretty defensible at first glance and certainly not
> "vandalism".

I agree.  The text is highly problematic in places, and needs NPOV
work in many ways, *however* it is certainly not "vandalism" or
anything of the sort.  It needs softening and formalizing.

> Typically a communist state is characterized by grinding [[poverty]], a
> bloated [[bureaucracy]], diversion of resources into [[military]]
> assets, a general loss of [[morale]] by the general population, and
> [[political stability|instability]] marked by periodic [[rebellion]]s
> which are brutally repressed. A communist state is characterized by the
> sharp division of the population into two castes, party members and the
> rest of the population. A small group, the [[politbureau]], typically
> consisting of less than 10 people, sometimes only 1, within the party
> hold any real power or have access to accurate information. A large
> [[secret police]] apparatus closely monitors the population.
> [[Concentration camp]]s and other facilities are used to incarcerate
> those dissidents which are not liquidated.
>
> There have been two major communist states, The [[Soviet Union]] and its
> satellites and the [[People's Republic of China]]. Minor states include
> [[Yugoslavia]], [[Cuba]], [[Viet Nam]] and [[North Korea]]. The pattern
> varies in each with those clinging most closely to communist ideals
> being most characteristically totalitarian, impoverished, militaristic,
> and static. Attempts to incorporate [[democracy|democratic]] principles
> as in the case of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev,
> [[socialism|socialist]] principles as in Yugoslavia,or
> [[capitalism|capitalistic]] techniques as in China result in some
> mitigation of the negative features of the communist state but sometimes
> result in dynamic situations which may undermine the control of the
> party over the state or even lead to its collapse.
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

body:
Axel Boldt wrote:
> Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> > The Cunctator wrote:
>
> > > 3. Better archives.
> >
> > Better in what ways?
>
> Searchable.

That's good.  What else?

--Jimbo


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

subject: [Wikitech-l] sysop request

body:
> (Giskart <giskart at wikipedia.be>):
>
> This is a request and confirmation from my that according Wikipedia NL
> procedure sysop powers can be granted to the user "Rene Pijlman" for the
> Dutch Wikipedia.

Done.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

body:
The Cunctator wrote, clarifying the meaning of 'better archives':
> Easily referenceable.
>
> Accessible in the same medium as most recent posts.

I'm not sure what these mean.  By "easily referencable", do you mean
something like "a stable url that's easy to cut and paste when
writing"?  And presumably the url should be clickable in the archives.

By "accessible in the same medium as most recent posts", what do you
mean?

I know people who subscribe to mailman mailing lists, then set
themselves to 'nomail' and read the mailing list on the web.  I think
posts appear in the archives as quickly -- or quicker -- than they
appear in people's inboxes.  Is that all you meant here?

The reason I'm asking all these questions is in an attempt to find out
if there's an easy way to provide a tidbit of extra functionality to
our existing mailing list software so as to make BBS-supporters happy.

(Obviously, the BBS-supporters have no reason to want email fans such
as myself to have to change my habits.)

--Jimbo


body:
On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 10:34, Tony Wilson wrote:
<snip>
> I would have much preferred to simply let this sleeping dog lie, in the
> hope that Fred had perhaps learned to moderate his behaviour.
> Unfortunately, Fred has taken it on himself to launch a series of
> unwarranted personal attacks on perfectly decent 'pedia contributors.
> This is unacceptable.

But I guess if they were warranted, it would be acceptable.

How about instead of speaking in generalities, we discuss specifics?
What are the specific edits and statements that Fred has made that you
have found objectionable? Links would be appreciated.


from_name: Tomos at Wikipedia

subject: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)

body:
Just answering some of the questions regarding why we are trying the BBS in
Japanese wikipedia.

Again, a long posting. (I'm sorry about it.)

(1) The current BBS

The BBS was written by a user "Hoge-", not from scratch but based on a
free-software (no-charge for nonprofits, okay to modify). It uses perl and
cgi.

It is hosted by a server s/he has control over. When I notified Jimbo's
question, if the
BBS needs to be hosted by some official(?) wikipedia server, s/he said there
are still some
works to be done, so s/he prefers to have the BBS at the current server.

Before, another user also offered to host it if necessary. And s/he said
when the current
server run out of resource for some reasons, s/he would ask and pass the
BBS.

(2) How we come to think of using the BBS

I guess this part is not so informative if your interest is just on the BBS
v. Mailing list issue.

We discussed the matter at Village_pump, and the options included mailing
list, a page inside
wikipedia (Village_pump), and a BBS. We made observations about pros and
cons, but no one
pushed nor criticized any option very hard (which is somewhat usual in
Japanese 'pedia, though I'm
not sure if this is attributable to some Japanese cultural norms like
modesty and stronger
collectivism or something else).

Since no one made a suggestion, I searched on the web and suggested a free
BBS (with ads). In
responce, Hoge- (the user) observed that it has many limitations (we cannot
customize much), and
said that s/he will try to build a BBS for us

Some time has passed, and then some of us started talking about using
Villege_pump in a better
way, (I personally didn't want to push Hoge- to build BBS ASAP for our
discussion, so I was in to
that idea.)

Sometime around that time, it became clear that some of the archived
messages of the mailing list
are not readable. Some characters are not handled properly somewhere in the
process. It wasn't
clear if immediate solution can be found. After all, the list was just
created and not used much.
(We haven't decided how to use it.)

Then, Hoge- said s/he will build the BBS soon, and indeed s/he did. Some
users celebrated
Hoge-'s work. No one voiced that we should try to find solution for the
mailing list and use it,
or stick to the Village_pump plan.

So we started.

(3) BBS v. Mailing list

First, a disclaimer: I don't know if I have reasons to defend the use of BBS
against some
of the harshest critics among you. As mentioned above, we did not chose the
BBS after a
heated debate or with the cost of transition from an existing list to the
BBS.

The main problem with the mailing list is that some archived messages become
unreadable.
(Some pointed that it should be the mailing list software. And we will ask
further help from
Jason soon.)

Additional disadvantages (as perceived and voiced by Japanese wikipedia
users):

-Reading the archived postings is a bit more difficult than reading BBS
threads. Getting a quick
overview is especially hard.

-Reading through the archived postings takes time when wikipedia is slow,
(which is quite frequent
these days.)

-Discussion on a BBS (and on pages on Wikipedia) tend to be more focused and
continuous
perhaps because they are written with the previous postings in the same
screen, rather than in
one's memory. (though this may not always be a disadvantage).

-Because the arrival of the messages are not included in the
Special:Recent_changes, discussion
seems a bit remote from the activities taking place on the web. (Though it
is okay for some
topics.)

-Harder to link to pages on wikipedia. (some clients don't support html
links)

The last two disadvantages were shared with BBS, but Hoge- solved them by
changing codes
and making the bot I mentioned in the previous email.

(4) misc.

Just for your information: one user in Japanese 'pedia also recommended the
''http://phpbb.com/'' ,
the site Hunter mentioned earlier.

cheers,

Tomos

_________________________________________________________________
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http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus


body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>I don't see anything that's absurd. Jtdirl deleted the following text,
>which seems pretty defensible at first glance and certainly not
>"vandalism".
>
I too would consider the deletion to be perfectly defensible.  Deleting
such POV text is far from "vandalism".

>Typically a communist state is characterized by grinding [[poverty]], a
>bloated [[bureaucracy]], diversion of resources into [[military]]
>assets, a general loss of [[morale]] by the general population, and
>[[political stability|instability]] marked by periodic [[rebellion]]s
>which are brutally repressed. A communist state is characterized by the
>sharp division of the population into two castes, party members and the
>rest of the population. A small group, the [[politbureau]], typically
>consisting of less than 10 people, sometimes only 1, within the party
>hold any real power or have access to accurate information. A large
>[[secret police]] apparatus closely monitors the population.
>[[Concentration camp]]s and other facilities are used to incarcerate
>those dissidents which are not liquidated.
>
>There have been two major communist states, The [[Soviet Union]] and its
>satellites and the [[People's Republic of China]]. Minor states include
>[[Yugoslavia]], [[Cuba]], [[Viet Nam]] and [[North Korea]]. The pattern
>varies in each with those clinging most closely to communist ideals
>being most characteristically totalitarian, impoverished, militaristic,
>and static. Attempts to incorporate [[democracy|democratic]] principles
>as in the case of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev,
>[[socialism|socialist]] principles as in Yugoslavia,or
>[[capitalism|capitalistic]] techniques as in China result in some
>mitigation of the negative features of the communist state but sometimes
>result in dynamic situations which may undermine the control of the
>party over the state or even lead to its collapse.
>
The problem with this text is that it contains a wide range of
unsubstantiated claims.  Any one of them could take a long article to
discuss all by itself.  It appeals to the preconceptions of established
propaganda.  The writing style of the propagandists is often such as to
make the distinction difficult between attacking unsubstantiated
comment, and defending the system that is being attacked.  I have no
problem admitting that I am on the left of the political spectrum, but I
at least like to believe that I can see the faults in the systems that I
favour and the benefits of those I oppose..

Fred's first sentence alone contains five separate assertions.  It does
not say what a communist state is, but basks in the weaselly passive,
"is characterized by".  If I consider the United States in the light of
those five criteria, I find that they can all be applied to varying
extents.  Am I to conclude from that that the United States is a
communist state?  If either the communist or non-communist state is to
be characterized by "grinding poverty", are we to take that as meaning
that this was the intent of either?  Grinding poverty was well
established in West Bengal long before the democratic election of Jyoti
Basu's Communist party in 1977, and it hasn't prevented that party from
being re-elected to power in every election since.

My point here is not about defending communism, but about opposing
Fred's attempt to wilfully mislead readers.

Ec


body:
On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 13:11, Tony Wilson wrote:
> Cunc asked:
> > instead of speaking in generalities, we discuss specifics?
> > What are the specific edits and statements that Fred has made that you
> > have found objectionable? Links would be appreciated.
>
> Huh? Well, maybe you were out of town or something.  This has already
> been detailed in previous posts to this list, and is obvious from a
> glance at the edit histories in any case.
>
> Start with:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002903.html
> Then see the bland admission of guilt without the faintest attempt at
> an apology at:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002905.html
>
> Follow it up with choice little words of Wikilove like these: "Their
> activity is no different from those who think they can deny the
> holocaust." You'll find that one at:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-May/003068.html
>
> For that long string of major changes over a period of several days,
> all dishonestly marked as minor, and despite repeated requests to Fred
> that he desist
> see:
> http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Communist_state&action=history
>
Hmm. I still don't see it. The mailing list posts just seem to be both
you and Fred engaging in slightly heated rhetoric. Nothing exciting
there.

Just pointing to the history of [[Communist state]] I see a lot of
YELLING by Jtdirl and Jtdirl attacking Fred's edits as "rubbish",
"vandalism", and "rant".

Looking at Fred's second edit, the first that Jtdirl described as "POV
vandalism"

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Communist_state&oldid=859844

I don't see anything that's absurd. Jtdirl deleted the following text,
which seems pretty defensible at first glance and certainly not
"vandalism".

Typically a communist state is characterized by grinding [[poverty]], a
bloated [[bureaucracy]], diversion of resources into [[military]]
assets, a general loss of [[morale]] by the general population, and
[[political stability|instability]] marked by periodic [[rebellion]]s
which are brutally repressed. A communist state is characterized by the
sharp division of the population into two castes, party members and the
rest of the population. A small group, the [[politbureau]], typically
consisting of less than 10 people, sometimes only 1, within the party
hold any real power or have access to accurate information. A large
[[secret police]] apparatus closely monitors the population.
[[Concentration camp]]s and other facilities are used to incarcerate
those dissidents which are not liquidated.

There have been two major communist states, The [[Soviet Union]] and its
satellites and the [[People's Republic of China]]. Minor states include
[[Yugoslavia]], [[Cuba]], [[Viet Nam]] and [[North Korea]]. The pattern
varies in each with those clinging most closely to communist ideals
being most characteristically totalitarian, impoverished, militaristic,
and static. Attempts to incorporate [[democracy|democratic]] principles
as in the case of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev,
[[socialism|socialist]] principles as in Yugoslavia,or
[[capitalism|capitalistic]] techniques as in China result in some
mitigation of the negative features of the communist state but sometimes
result in dynamic situations which may undermine the control of the
party over the state or even lead to its collapse.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
Now i've been ignored 2x in a row, and no one is even *capable* of knowing about it.

Namely,
     # [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)   Erik Moeller
HERE # [Wikipedia-l] Re: use of a bot (long).   Hunter Peress
     # [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es   =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Bj=F6rn_Lindqvist?=
     # [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es   Erik Moeller
     # [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)   The Cunctator
     # [Wikipedia-l] Re: use of a bot (long).   Erik Moeller
     # [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es   Thomas Corell
     # [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es   Jimmy Wales
     # [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es   Anthere
     # [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es   The Cunctator
     # [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long)   Tomos at Wikipedia
     # [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es   Jimmy Wales
HERE # [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es (see http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_media)   Hunter Peress
     # [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es   Ray Saintonge
     # [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es   Axel Boldt
     # [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es   Jimmy Wales
     # [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es   The Cunctator
     # [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es   Jimmy Wales
     # [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es   Giskart

Over the last 24 hours. I happen to be one of those people that only read this list over its web
interface.

Its also crazy that lots of the dicussion that took place after my second "HERE" email (which was
just a repeat of the first) could have benefitted from what I said 24 hours ago, where in a good
threading system like slashdot's where you know if there have been replies or not. Where you *can*
change the title of your repsonse while not worrying about its placement in the thread.

So see:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_media

Which has been up for nearly a day now.

--- Giskart <giskart at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote in
> news:20030507043336.D22848 at joey.bomis.com:
>
> [cut]
> >
> > Perhaps what we need is just a better interface for the mailing list
> > archives, and some means for people to post to the mailing list from
> > the web?
> [cut]
>
> Now there the mailing lists. Also all postings are send to the gmane.org
> news server. So you read & post all messages like it where a usenet group
> if you like that.
>
> Is a web-to-usenet interfase not to the most easy option to provide
> webbased reading and posting acces to the lists ?
>
> Giskart
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Trademarks and user names

body:
Jens Frank wrote:

>Hello,
>
>A new user registered a few days ago using the name "Harry Potter".
>Warner Bros and JK Rowling have a trademark registered for this
>name.
>
>On the new users talk page ( http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk%3AHarry_Potter ),
>MammaBaer posted some concerns about the user name and its legal
>status. I'm not experienced in trademark law, so I post this to
>the list.
>
>Is the use of a trademarked name as a username problematic?
>
Maybe it's his real name.

Ec


body:
On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 13:49, Tony Wilson wrote:
> The point, Cunc, is not the worth of the edit (though it was (a) in the
> wrong entry, and (b) grossly one-sided - communist governments tend to
> be rather good at somethings, notably health care and education: which
> of course, Fred being Fred, he was determined to utterly ignore).

"Fred being Fred" is a fatuous ad hominem comment. Even if that's an
expression of your honest judgment of Fred's motivations, it's best
avoided.

> The point is is the dishonesty. Go look at that edit history: it was no
> accident, it was repeated 19 or 20 times, with no apology.

I see a classic edit war, in which Jtdirl and 172 repeatedly deleted
reasonable (if imperfect) text while SHOUTING THAT FRED WAS ENGAGING IN
POV VANDALISM and threatening banning and Fred reinserted that text. By
the time you got into the game Jtdirl's actions had eliminated any
semblance of civility.

After about the 10th time, Fred began marking as minor his reinsertion
of text that was being deleted without any attempt to deal with the text
in a respectful manner.

You may consider it dishonet, though others could consider it being
polite to the general Wikipedian public who don't care.

Repeatedly deleting Fred's text without attempting to incorporate it
into Wikipedia is a much more egregious abuse of Wikipedia mores than
what Fred did.

That said, Fred should not have used the minor tag. But it's certainly a
lesser offense, in my eyes.

> Then look at the wild and untrue accusations made about other
> contributors on the list.

What wild and untrue accusations, exactly? You mean, "HIS VANDALISM HAS
HAD TO BE REVERTED NEARLY 20 TIMES HERE. HE HAS DONE THE SAME
ELSEWHERE"?

> Did you see *me* yelling? So why am *I* suddenly placed in the path of
> this loose cannon on the mailing list?
>
> One rule for all. That is fair. If Fred's actions are acceptable (which
> I dispute), then what shred of an excuse does he pin his opposition to
> Abe on?
>
How would you characterize Jtdirl's comments and actions, for example,
calling Fred's contribution "vandalism" from the very start?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Trademarks and user names

body:
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:

>But Apple records can prevent you
>from selling records under that name, and Apple computer can
>prevent you from selling computers under that name, because they
>did it first and acquired name recognition in those specific
>markets.
>
And those two companies manage to co-exist without trying to shut each
other down.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
--- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> wrote:
> > (Hunter Peress <hfastjava at yahoo.com>):
> > Now i've been ignored 2x in a row, and no one is even *capable*
> > of knowing about it.
>
> Jesus, get over yourself. Your messages came through just fine,
> and I and others read them. We just didn't reply because we
> didn't feel like it. If you think you have something important
> to say, just say it. If we ignore you again, then it's probably
> because /we/ didn't think it was that important.

My point was for it to be less about me, and more about my ideas that have yet to be addressed.

This response Lee just provided, shows two of my points that I have enumerated on
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_media :

That list based emails encourage the author to make each email stand on its own , which Lee
demonstrated by actually choosing not to re-include the important information, but only enough to
mount a small point of personal criticism.

AND

That people have no idea what has been addressed by Lee's email by just looking at the list of
emails because of another point on http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_media (and which I also
stated in the previous email, but was also not reincluded) OR to whom it was addressed as changing
the title on a non-threaded system causes havoc.

Namely: "where in a good threading system like slashdot's where you know if there have been
replies or not. Where you *can*
change the title of your repsonse while not worrying about its placement in the thread."

>
> --
> Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
> are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
> for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Trademarks and user names

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>Somewhat, depending on the aggressiveness of the trademark holder. I think I
>heard that even The MacDonald, (the Lord of the Isles) had trouble with
>MacDonald's which is absolutely ridiculous. Probably it is a non-issue as it
>will fall below their radar.
>
Some of these complaints can get fairly silly.  There has been a case in
the news recently here in British Columbia.  A couple of guys (i.e.
"bucks") from the Haida first nation started up a local caf? which they
called "Haida-bucks" in their remote community in the Queen Charlotte
Islands.  When a certain well-known Seattle based coffee merchant caught
wind of this they began an action for trademark violation against these
guys.  It's much too early to know where this is going legally, but when
the news became public the guys started to receive money in the mail
from complete strangers to fund their legal defence.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

body:
On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 14:46, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Axel Boldt wrote:
> > Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> > > The Cunctator wrote:
> >
> > > > 3. Better archives.
> > >
> > > Better in what ways?
> >
> > Searchable.
>
> That's good.  What else?
>
Easily referenceable.

Accessible in the same medium as most recent posts.


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Render Unicode

body:
On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 05:07:04PM +0900, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> Hi,
> What do think about an option to render to PNG the unicode characters
> (&XXXX;) ?
> No way to render TeX according to browser text size setting ?

* Technically, there is no such thing as "browser text size setting"
* Idea is generally nice, for things like CJK, IPA, Arabic, Hebrew etc.
  * Of course settings would have to be more detailed than just
    "render everything non-Latin".
  * All Latin script characters (8859-1 or not) must be displayed
    without PNGs. Rendering them as PNGs would screw display completely.
  * To look reasonable (proper kerning, context-dependent choice of glyphs in Arabic,
    preservation of square sizes in CJK etc.) and not linebreak at random points
    it would have to render whole words not characters. Word - any string of
    characters from the same group of Unicode characters.
  * We would have all Han Unification problems here.
    Favourite fonts of Chinese and of Japanese differ,
    some fonts contain only Chinese or only Japanese fonts,
    mixing them is going to look awful etc.
    Generally, lot of mess.
* It would screw naive HTML cache, but we can do that in post-processing phase
    over already generated HTML.
* Maybe we could also add some furigana support.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] call for speech for RMLL 2003

body:
--- julien tayon <julien at tayon.net> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> This message is especially for wikipedia users that
> would be close to
> Metz in july (9/10/11)
> http://wiki.ael.be/rmll2003
> while the 3rd Libre Software Meeting will take
> place.
>
> With libroscope team, we are leading a topic on
> ? Le libre, au-del? du logiciel (Extending Free
> Software principles
> beyond the IT sphere) ?
>
>
http://wiki.ael.be/rmll2003/index.php/FreeSoftwareBeyondIT
>
> I am looking for a wikipedian speecher for this
> theme.
>
>
> As a lurker^H^H^H chaotic contributor to wikipedia
> there are a lot of
> points that makes me think wikipedia is legitimate
> on this point :
>
> - sharing the knowledge using mechanisme closed to
> libre software
> methodology (letting anyone contribute and using
> peer review)
>
> - benevolent dictatorship model (Hi jim) with
> trusted lieutenant (like
> youssefan, alvaro, aoineko, ant ... for the one I
> know) ;
>
> - focusing on user and the ease of use rather than
> technology ;
>
> - making contributor have good practice by social
> engeneering
> (discussion, NPOV..) rather than with software
> implemented rules.
>
> - web/email centric coordination (the virtual roof)
>
> - from Kaos Management to  Knowledge Management ;)
>
> - a living proof wiki technology can give large
> scale structured website
> :) : you don't need complex technology to build
> large KM database.
>
> The last point is  the one I really like :
> focusing on peopleware seems to be a far better
> approach than focusing
> on a pure technological approach to build such a
> large scale project.
>
> Anyone interested, and available ?
>
> I have missed some points I know, and I would be
> glad to discuss it with
> you.
>
>
> PS as a matter of fact, I guess that wikipedia is
> such a rich project
> that it could be appropriate to do  more than one
> speech :)
>
> As an individual I would be really interested in a
> conf on the
> architecture and the technological aspect though it
> is not the topic I
> work on.
>
> PPS je parie que ?a va se terminer ? pas d'heure au
> bistro encore :)

Ah ben vin djou, je v'nais juste de me servir une
Maredsous...(dans le verre ad'hoc, achet? ? Anvers il
y a des ann?es...)

B?, merci de me lieutenatiser :-)
Fi?re je suis :-))

(tu t'y connais en ?pilation ?)

Right. It is awfully interesting...especially the
[[human capital]] perspective...though I don't see
quite well what Kaos means ? (chaos, I do).

However, I am living quite far away from Metz...and
working thoughout july. Perhaps one of the belgian
people ? Youssef is the best pick here !

Talking about Youssefsan...we very deeply regret to
announce wikipedians we have not been retained for
"Les Troph?es du Libre".

This is quite insulting :-). We simply were the best
choice. Perhaps they thought we were too good...

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http://search.yahoo.com


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Trademarks and user names

body:
> A new user registered a few days ago using the name "Harry Potter".
> Warner Bros and JK Rowling have a trademark registered for this
> name.
>
> On the new users talk page (
> http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk%3AHarry_Potter ),
> MammaBaer posted some concerns about the user name and its legal
> status. I'm not experienced in trademark law, so I post this to
> the list.
>
> Is the use of a trademarked name as a username problematic?
>

> JeLuF

Somewhat, depending on the aggressiveness of the trademark holder. I think I
heard that even The MacDonald, (the Lord of the Isles) had trouble with
MacDonald's which is absolutely ridiculous. Probably it is a non-issue as it
will fall below their radar. i named a city on a mud Redwall and have yet to
hear from Brian Jacques....

Fred


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Trademarks and user names

in_reply_to: <8lOfi1lxpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Wed, May 07, 2003 at 11:16:00PM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> (c) Remedies for dilution of famous marks

It's very possible that "Harry Potter" doesn't qualify as a "famous
mark" anyway.  A "famous mark" is special, as compared to an ordinary
trademark, a new category created, I believe, in 1995.

It's a long story, I think.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Cool stats

body:
En.wiki has already passed 50 million page views since July 20, 2002. We are
also getting close to our 1 millionth page edit!

Check out: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics

PS to developers - These numbers are getting big, any chance of adding commas?

-- mav


subject: [Wikitech-l] Possible error in Database [wiikide]

body:
Hello,

if someone can take a look at the german database, a user reported (and I
took a look) that a search for "Maori" returns two (2) pages with the title
"Maori-Sprache", one with 411 and one with 440 Bytes. Looks to me a bit
buggy. I think one of them is obsolete.

Of course some SpecialPages (LonlyPages) report some stange results, which
the user reported.

Smurf
--
-------------------------  Anthill inside! ---------------------------


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
--- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> wrote:
> > (Hunter Peress <hfastjava at yahoo.com>):
> > Now i've been ignored 2x in a row, and no one is
> even *capable*
> > of knowing about it.

Oy Hunter. Do not be so unhappy about that. This is
quite frequent messages are left unanswered.

Fortunately, or, we would drown under messages :-))

Besides, do not think a message not commented is
necessarily a proof others are ignoring you or that
your message did not go through. You may check the
archives if you have doubts. And on meta, I think the
page counter is not disabled. You can see some read
your page.

But do not necessarily expect an acknowledgment. Some
don't care, some may find nothing new,  and some
silently agree, but have nothing to add. Some disagree
but think it a minor issue. Nothing personnal here.
Don't worry :-)

Cheers Ant

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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
Hunter Peress wrote:
> Now i've been ignored 2x in a row, and no one is even *capable* of
>knowing about it.

Are you sure?  I mean, I know about it, right?

I read your Talk_media page, but I'm not sure what to make of it.

Your point about the superior threading abilities of a slashdot-style
bbs system is a good one.  It's a good point, no doubt.

But it doesn't strike me as a sufficient reason to abandon email
entirely.

What I'm thinking about and proposing is that we address whatever
problems people are having with the current mailing list setup in a
way that isn't going to force those of us who like the status quo just
fine to try to do something radically different.

And just opening up a BBS and telling people to use it if they like
isn't likely to be very successful -- it would just fracture the
existing discussions unnecessarily.  Better to add some BBS-features
somehow, for example via a Mailman-to-Usenet or Mailman-to-BBS gateway
system.

Some people -- and count me among them -- aren't even *close* to
wanting to change our ways.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
Anthere wrote:
> Don't worry :-)

An excellent motto, I think.  We have to cut each other some slack and
always assume best intentions.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

in_reply_to: <8lOfgtoCpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Wed, May 07, 2003 at 10:56:00PM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> wget http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l.mbox/wikipedia-l.mbox
> grep "Axel Boldt" wikipedia-l.mbox

While this is cute, I suppose we must concede that it may not be all
that helpful for newbies and non-Unix folks.

It would be pretty simple for me to write a quick perl/DBFile search
engine for the mailing list archives.  It wouldn't suck all that much,
and it could be linked on the archives themselves, I suppose.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] I like BBS:es

in_reply_to: <oprotpxnemzs1r4a@localhost>; from lists@dramatic.co.nz on Thu, May 08, 2003 at 10:26:01AM +1200

body:
Richard Grevers wrote:
> Its not a push medium: you can take it or leave it.
> With the ML it is all or nothing - you have to go through the mail, wait,
> confirm process each time  you want to go on or off a list.

Oh, but I can help you!  Here's what I recommend:

Subscribe
Set yourself to nomail
Read the archives via the web as you see fit
Post to the list via email as you see fit

In that way, you don't have to subscribe/unsubscribe just to post
something.

--Jimbo


from_name: Nick Reinking

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Chat about Wikipedia performance?

body:
> > (Nick Reinking <nick at twoevils.org>):
> >
> > I'm actually in the middle of a C project to reduce the wikitext
> > parser to a two-pass parser...

Just to update everybody on my progress with the C wikitext parser:

To do:
* Lists of any sort

Done:
* Ignores <math>
* Converts < > and & inside <nowiki>
* <pre> (space at beginning of line)
* <hr> (---- at beginning of line)
* Sections, subsections, and subsubsections (==, ===, and ====
  respectively)
* Emphasis, strong emphasis, and very strong emphasis ('', ''', and
  ''''')
* {{CURRENTMONTH}}, {{CURRENTDAY}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}, {{CURRENTTIME}}
* Basic links (http://, ftp://, gopher://, news://, etc.)
* Complex basic links ([http://... Blah Blah]

Possibly later:
* ISBN lookups
* Handle <math> conversion

Must be done by PHP:
* Handle links / link lookup
* Ignore links in <nowiki>
* ~~~ and ~~~~
* {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}, {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}, {{CURRENTDAYNAME}}

Couple quick questions:
When Wikitext is pulled from the database, what are the newlines?
Are they always \n?  If so, I can clean up the parsing a bit and eek a
bit more performance out (not a big deal).  Also, what format is the
wikitext stored in the database as?  UTF-8?  UTF-16?

As far as performance goes, with what I'm handling now, with all the
.txt data files in the testsuite (x256 = 492672 lines), I'm seeing
parsing speeds of about 86600 lines/sec (in an 18KB executable).

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On Wed, 7 May 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:
> Just to update everybody on my progress with the C wikitext parser:
>
> To do:
> * Lists of any sort

*shudder* :)

> * Sections, subsections, and subsubsections (==, ===, and ====
>   respectively)

Should work from = to ====== (h1 to h6).

> * Emphasis, strong emphasis, and very strong emphasis ('', ''', and
>   ''''')

Make sure the following cases work (and produce correct HTML, unlike our
current code):
''italic '''bold-italic''' italic''
'''''bold-italic''' italic''
''italic '''bold-italic'''''

'''bold ''bold-italic'' bold'''
'''''bold-italic'' bold'''
'''bold ''bold-italic'''''

> Must be done by PHP:
> * Handle links / link lookup
> * Ignore links in <nowiki>

<nowiki> and <math> sections should probably be pulled out _before_
parsing, and their contents processed and reinserted after parsing.

> When Wikitext is pulled from the database, what are the newlines?
> Are they always \n?

They sure should be...

>  Also, what format is the
> wikitext stored in the database as?  UTF-8?  UTF-16?

At the moment, ISO-8859-1 for the following languages:
English, Danish, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish

UTF-8 for everything else that's on phase 3. The remaining latin-1s will
get bumped up to UTF-8 at some point, once someone gets around to ensuring
that it won't break with browsers that are violently unfriendly to
editing UTF-8 text in forms.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Mailing list blues

body:
moving from wikipedia-l:
On Wed, 7 May 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> It would be pretty simple for me to write a quick perl/DBFile search
> engine for the mailing list archives.  It wouldn't suck all that much,
> and it could be linked on the archives themselves, I suppose.

Random thought: would it be possible to have mailman insert into the
message footer the URL for that message in the archives?

I sometimes find I want to cite a message from one of the lists on the
wiki or elsewhere and while it's trivial to look it up in my mail
archives, I need to go to the web archives and find the message all over
again in order to point other people at the same message short of just
pasting the entire text in again.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
> (julien tayon <julien at tayon.net>):
>
> This message is especially for wikipedia users that would be close to
> Metz in july (9/10/11) ...
> while the 3rd Libre Software Meeting will take place.

I don't know if any of us will be close, but I'm sure you could
find several volunteers who wou;dn't mind a short trip to France
if you sent us a ticket. :-)

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
Jimmy just made 4 replies in a row to the list. A process that makes difficult to reply to them
all. mailinglist--

An email-bbs bridge is absolutely the best of both worlds. You get structure of a threaded system
+ emailability for conservatives.

OTOH, a bit lighter is to hack up the web view of the mailman a little, I suggest something to
address this in http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_media
Under: Corollary issues  (see google groups example).

Jimmy: Please dont write perl, as this is a common feature in mailman. see:
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.011.htp

OR see a live example from some friends of mine:
http://www.scipy.org/site_content/MailList

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> Hunter Peress wrote:
> > Now i've been ignored 2x in a row, and no one is even *capable* of
> >knowing about it.
>
> Are you sure?  I mean, I know about it, right?
>
> I read your Talk_media page, but I'm not sure what to make of it.
>
> Your point about the superior threading abilities of a slashdot-style
> bbs system is a good one.  It's a good point, no doubt.
>
> But it doesn't strike me as a sufficient reason to abandon email
> entirely.
>
> What I'm thinking about and proposing is that we address whatever
> problems people are having with the current mailing list setup in a
> way that isn't going to force those of us who like the status quo just
> fine to try to do something radically different.
>
> And just opening up a BBS and telling people to use it if they like
> isn't likely to be very successful -- it would just fracture the
> existing discussions unnecessarily.  Better to add some BBS-features
> somehow, for example via a Mailman-to-Usenet or Mailman-to-BBS gateway
> system.
>
> Some people -- and count me among them -- aren't even *close* to
> wanting to change our ways.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Trademarks and user names

body:
> (Jens Frank <JeLuF at gmx.de>):
> Hello,
>
> A new user registered a few days ago using the name "Harry Potter".
> Warner Bros and JK Rowling have a trademark registered for this
> name.

If he writes a novel, or specifically portrays himself as
somehow associated with the novels (other than as simply a fan),
then there might be a problem. But trademarks are only valid
for the particular purpose for which they are used: you can't
trademark a name like "Apple", for example, and totally forbid
anyone to use it for any reason. But Apple records can prevent you
from selling records under that name, and Apple computer can
prevent you from selling computers under that name, because they
did it first and acquired name recognition in those specific
markets. But if you want to call yourself "Apple" for your own
personal reasons, that's fine.

Of course, none of that will prevent trademark owners from
/claiming/ that you are infringing when even they know you're
not, and making trouble. Until such a claim is made, I see no
reason to be paranoid about it.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
> (Hunter Peress <hfastjava at yahoo.com>):
> Now i've been ignored 2x in a row, and no one is even *capable*
> of knowing about it.

Jesus, get over yourself. Your messages came through just fine,
and I and others read them. We just didn't reply because we
didn't feel like it. If you think you have something important
to say, just say it. If we ignore you again, then it's probably
because /we/ didn't think it was that important.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikitech-l] sysop request

body:
Hi,

This is a request and confirmation from my that according Wikipedia NL
procedure sysop powers can be granted to the user "Rene Pijlman" for the
Dutch Wikipedia.

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebruiker%3ARene_Pijlman

Greetings,
Giskart

--
Contact: giskart AT wikipedia.be
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


from_name: james duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] administrator's status

body:
* sigh * Is there no end to Fred's inability to grasp facts? For the VERY
LAST TIME, the page in question was merely concerned with a political
science definition of the the term [[Communist state]], in terms of the link
between constitutional system and party in the process of governance. IT WAS
NOT ABOUT COMMUNISM. Everyone on wiki could grasp that. The entire planet
could grasp it. Fred still cannot. The stuff he wanted in was as irrelevant
to a mere 'definition' as putting details on Bill Clinton and interns would
be in a page on the definition 'Federal Republic'. Detailed discussion of
what happens IN a communist state, or IN a federal republic, belongs in a
page on  history and politics IN those states or systems, not on formal
definitions.

Fred's problem with 172, Tannin, myself and others is that we would not
allow him in effect to vandalise an article by putting in 100% irrelevant
stuff when it belonged elsewhere, and when all the wiki users on the talk
page were screaming almost in unison 'not here. Put it somewhere else'. (His
reponse was to keep plonking the badly written POV addition onto the wrong
page nearly 20 times, until people threatened to call for his banning, when
he finally stopped his bizarre behaviour, to everyone's relief.) As to the
other stuff, most of it was OTT POV. Those bits that weren't were being put
in the wrong parts of articles, and yet again no matter how many wikians
collectively screamed at Fred 'not there. Put it in a different paragraph'
he ignored them.

172 may indeed hold rather stronger left wing views than most people. But he
is also a professional historian who tries to apply academic standards to
what he works on, including such basic requirements as accuracy, relevance,
proper location and definition. On the basis of his behaviour in the last
few weeks, Fred doesn't know the meaning of the words let alone how to apply
them. Now issue closed. I am backing 172 to become an admin.

BTW Fred, you still haven't apologied for libeling people who disagree with
you by calling them the equivalent of Holocaust deniers. And if you are
going to use terms like 'Historical revision', try to understand what it
actually means.

JT

>Historical revision is not limited to Nazis. But don't put on the steel
>boot
>unless it fits. I was doing my best to write a truthful neutral point of
>view article which could have have been made more balanced by adding more
>material about the achievements of the communist state not by removing
>material about its problems. Its the repeated removal of factual negative
>material which is the issue regarding 172.
>
>Fred
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
>http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail


subject: [Wikitech-l] Mailing list blues

body:
Excellent point. I also responded to jimmy re searching on wiki-l (
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-May/010089.html )

Whoever we delegate to tackle the mailing list, will do your task as well.

I would like to tbe the person that we delegate to.

I've also added your point to http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_media

--- Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu> wrote:
> moving from wikipedia-l:
> On Wed, 7 May 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > It would be pretty simple for me to write a quick perl/DBFile search
> > engine for the mailing list archives.  It wouldn't suck all that much,
> > and it could be linked on the archives themselves, I suppose.
>
> Random thought: would it be possible to have mailman insert into the
> message footer the URL for that message in the archives?
>
> I sometimes find I want to cite a message from one of the lists on the
> wiki or elsewhere and while it's trivial to look it up in my mail
> archives, I need to go to the web archives and find the message all over
> again in order to point other people at the same message short of just
> pasting the entire text in again.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


body:
> (Nick Reinking <nick at twoevils.org>):
>
> Couple quick questions:
> When Wikitext is pulled from the database, what are the newlines?

MySQL gives back whatever you give it. We generally give it
Unix-style text with just \n, but a few browsers might add CRs.

> Are they always \n?  If so, I can clean up the parsing a bit
> and eke a bit more performance out (not a big deal).

It shouldn't hurt performance to just ignore and skip CRs.
That can be done in the lexer. You should never encounter CR-only
line ends.

> Also, what format is the wikitext stored in the database as?
> UTF-8?  UTF-16?

Some of the foreign ones use UTF-8. The English one is ISO-8859-1.

> As far as performance goes, with what I'm handling now, with all the
> .txt data files in the testsuite (x256 = 492672 lines), I'm seeing
> parsing speeds of about 86600 lines/sec (in an 18KB executable).

So on a typical page of, say, 40-50 lines, that makes half a
millisecond spent in parsing. If PHP were 100 times worse, it
would account for 1/20th of a second per page fetch. Doesn't
sound like much of a problem to me, and I doubt it's 1000 times
worse.

Just curious: what does your parser do with Quotes.txt from
the test suite?

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


body:
Nick: as Lee discusses but does not support, could you also produce php parsing results from you
machine (to keep things in a control).

tarquin: perl would not be any faster than php..

__________________________________
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http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Link tags

body:
I've been reading the new draft standard of XHTML 2.0, and in the midst
of wading through obscure tags that I was shocked to realize have been
part of HTML for a decade without ever being used but are still there, was
reminded of a couple things we could do:

Interlanguage links should produce <link> tags to go in the <head>
section, such as:
<link title="This article in Swahili"
      rel="alternate"
      lang="sw"
      href="http://sw.wikipedia.org/..." />

And also:
<link title="Printable version"
      rel="alternate"
      media="print"
      href="http://....?printable=yes" />

and perhaps:
<link title="Wikipedia copyright"
      rel="copyright"
      href="http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights" />

Will it have any practical results? I dunno. But it sounds exciting and
standards-compliant!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikitech-l] Render Unicode

body:
Hi,
What do think about an option to render to PNG the unicode characters
(&XXXX;) ?
No way to render TeX according to browser text size setting ?

Aoineko


from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] administrator's status

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Erik Moeller wrote:
>
>
>>now that you've got an idea how things work around here, how about
>>signing up with a new name? "172" isn't really a username anyway,
>>and people will probably be more accomodating when they do not get
>>the feeling that they are dealing with a number.
>>
>Actually, I think that's a really good idea, but it's up to him, of
>course.
>
Yup, a text-based name is a good idea rather than a number. Even if it's
a nickname.

>
>
>


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] administrator's status

body:
Perhaps One-seventy-two?

Zoe

--- tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:
>
>
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> >Erik Moeller wrote:
> >
> >
> >>now that you've got an idea how things work around
> here, how about
> >>signing up with a new name? "172" isn't really a
> username anyway,
> >>and people will probably be more accomodating when
> they do not get
> >>the feeling that they are dealing with a number.
> >>
> >Actually, I think that's a really good idea, but
> it's up to him, of
> >course.
> >
> Yup, a text-based name is a good idea rather than a
> number. Even if it's
> a nickname.
>
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Link tags

body:
On Wed, 7 May 2003, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> > (Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu>):
> > Interlanguage links should produce <link> tags to go in the <head>
> > ...
>
> Well yes, that would be a nice way to encode them, but then they'd
> only be available to browsers that allowed access to page-level
> links. Few do, and even those don't make it easy. We already use
> typed links to point to the page's stylesheet and icon, which some
> browsers will use and the rest safely ignore; but most other types
> of links don't have any browser support at all.

...which means they're safely ignored. So, no change from the present
behavior in 99% of cases, and potentially useful support where it is
supported.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Trademarks and user names

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

Jens Frank wrote:
| A new user registered a few days ago using the name "Harry Potter".
| Warner Bros and JK Rowling have a trademark registered for this
| name.
|
| On the new users talk page (
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk%3AHarry_Potter ),
| MammaBaer posted some concerns about the user name and its legal
| status. I'm not experienced in trademark law, so I post this to
| the list.
|
| Is the use of a trademarked name as a username problematic?
|
| 	Best regards,
|
| 	    JeLuF

Why are you assuming that th new user's real name is not Harold Potter?

- --
~ Sean Barrett     | Modern art is what happens when painters stop
~ sean at epoptic.com | looking at girls and persuade themselves that
~                  | they have a better idea. --John Ciardi

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQE+uaw7v/8xpnvE6M8RAoF7AKCBgqIM/rflBGpU4PCOagw5YpGlyQCaA9HS
d27QlQwGxPJuwTH+s7xrWv4=
=sGOk
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject: [Wikitech-l] Link tags

body:
On Thu, 8 May 2003, Richard Grevers wrote:
> > <link title="Printable version"
> > rel="alternate"
> > media="print"
> > href="http://....?printable=yes" />
>
> why waste precious capacity generating a different version of the page for
> printing? A print stylesheet (or an @media section in the main stylesheet)
> is much more efficient.

Because we want the poor saps who use real browsers to have a clean,
printable version too? :)  Of course, if they can use the <link> tag,
their mythical browser probably supports @media sections as well.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
Great. I'll get to work right away on researching to see if there are options already out there,
and if not, begin a hacking strategy.

The two paths to take right now are:
  --hack in (of find some patches for) to mailman some better functionality for the webbased view.
(see examples at the zesty or google groups link provided on
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_media)

  OR
  --hack in full and secure email responding into an already existing bbs like phpbb (which
already supports email notification per topic AND which I am already comfortable with, as I've
shown this list a patch that I made for it  see phpbb-hpmods.sf.net)

As I have requested many times now, could I please be granted an admin account so I can start this
work in a most transparent way. I have already shown that I've been a member of wikipedia for
3/4's of a year now, and have been on the most active list throughout that time).

AND btw, just for redudancy purposes, here is a link to a response I provided to BRION on the tech
list to a discussion that popped up there concurrently to this one:
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-May/003699.html

FINALLY, we have to address tomos i18n concerns as this is how this whole thread got started.

--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hunter-
> > An email-bbs bridge is absolutely the best of both worlds. You get structure
> > of a threaded system + emailability for conservatives.
>
> There is already a fairly convenient web interface for *reading* the
> mailing list at gmane.org. However, we need to have some protection
> against posting to it from a web interface, so as not to be drowned by
> spam. If we want to provide such a gateway, it has to use the same or a
> similar authentication procedure as the mailing list -- just being
> authenticated by your Wikipedia account would not suffice, because the
> Wikipedia account itself is not authenticated.
>
> If you wish to provide, or are familiar with a web interface that allows
> *posting* to a mailman-based lists with authentication, then yes, that
> would be an option.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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from_name: John R. Owens

subject: [WikiEN-l] "Moses ben Nachman" and NPOV

body:
On Wed, 7 May 2003 daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

> Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 06:30:43 EDT
> From: daniwo59 at aol.com
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] "Moses ben Nachman" and NPOV
>
> I remember when Moses ben Nachman first edited. Yes, he did have a
> disagreement with RK, but that hardly makes him Adam/Lir.  There are
> different POVs on various articles, and it is  only inevitable that they will
> come through in the writing, especially among new participants. Being NPOV is
> a skill that we develop.
>
> All that said, can we please stop suggesting that every new user with whom we
> disagree is Adam/Lir. It makes it very difficult for new users to get thir
> feet wet here.

For the record, while I was composing that email, my main thought was that
they were different people but in some degree of cahoots together. The
possibility that it was just one person talking to itself came to me while
I was composing, making sure I'd covered all the reasonable possibilities.
I don't think it's very likely.

--
John R. Owens http://www.ghiapet.homeip.net/
You know what I wish?  I wish all the scum of the Earth had one throat
and I had my hands about it.
		-- Rorschach, "Watchmen"


subject: [Wikitech-l] Link tags

body:
> (Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu>):
>
> Interlanguage links should produce <link> tags to go in the <head>
> ...

Well yes, that would be a nice way to encode them, but then they'd
only be available to browsers that allowed access to page-level
links. Few do, and even those don't make it easy. We already use
typed links to point to the page's stylesheet and icon, which some
browsers will use and the rest safely ignore; but most other types
of links don't have any browser support at all.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Hunter Peress

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hunter-
> >   OR
> >   --hack in full and secure email responding into an already existing bbs
> > like phpbb (which already supports email notification per topic AND which I
> > am already comfortable with, as I've shown this list a patch that I made for
> > it  see phpbb-hpmods.sf.net)
>
> The complexity of mailman/PHPBB interaction seems too high, and so would
> be the replication of the entire mailman functionality in PHPBB. Keep in
> mind that comments should only be plaintext, quotes need to be done email
> style (">foo"), linebreaks should be inserted automatically, message
> references need to be retained, messages sent to the mailing list need to
> appear in the PHPBB etc.

Nono, when i said:
>The two paths to take right now are:
>  --hack in (of find some patches for) to mailman some better functionality for the webbased
view.
>(see examples at the zesty or google groups link provided on
>http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_media)
>
>  OR
>  --hack in full and secure email responding into an already existing bbs like phpbb (which
>already supports email notification per topic AND which I am already comfortable with, as I've
>shown this list a patch that I made for it  see phpbb-hpmods.sf.net)

Each of those steps would be to make one act more like other. This implies developing one of the
paths to the point where an acceptable system is achieved. As I have shown, there are no worries
to be had about this potentially precarious process as I have already hacked through phpbb, and I
am a pythoneer, thus am very comfortable with the internals of mailman.

>
> I suggest taking a look at ways to improve the mailman web interface to
> allow members to post through it. I have not seen posting functionality at
> the Scipy example site you linked to, but it did have search functionality
> -- perhaps you could send the patches for that to wikitech-l and ask for
> the functionality to be added to our installed mailman package.

Noted
>
> > As I have requested many times now, could I please be granted an admin
> > account so I can start this work in a most transparent way.
>
> Please be specific in what kind of access you want. A shell account on the
> Wikipedia server? Why? If you patch mailman to support the above, it would
> be perfectly reasonable to do so by sending a patch. I don't have a shell
> account either and have never needed one.

I have already presented why:specifically to conduct my research and development on the wikipedia
machine in a completely open fashion. I have monitered the lists here over time, and there has
even been a thread about granting everyone on wikipedia shell access. Were this idea fact by this
point, I would have had a shell account 7 months ago.

__________________________________
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body:
nick, you did not reply to my request that you perform php tests of the same materials on your
computer as it the control environment.

__________________________________
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The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: I like BBS:es

body:
Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote in
news:20030507043336.D22848 at joey.bomis.com:

[cut]
>
> Perhaps what we need is just a better interface for the mailing list
> archives, and some means for people to post to the mailing list from
> the web?
[cut]

Now there the mailing lists. Also all postings are send to the gmane.org
news server. So you read & post all messages like it where a usenet group
if you like that.

Is a web-to-usenet interfase not to the most easy option to provide
webbased reading and posting acces to the lists ?

Giskart


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Transliteration

body:
Hi

I've recently begun working on some articles about past prime ministers of
Iraq, to put a little historical perspective into the conflict. The problem I
have come across is that the names are transliterated in countless different
names in the texts I have and, as a result, in existing articles in
Wikipedia. It can get very confusing, especially with links.

Is there anyone else here with some background in Arabic, so that we can
develop some kind of standard transliteration system?

Shukran

Danny
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Tomos: mailman i18n issues

body:
Tomos, obviously, the most immediate solution is to try to address things in a conservative way.
The changes that I have discussed on this board will take months (probably) to implement and test.

Anyway, your issue is a smaller one, and I am chatting with the mailman developers right now on :

irc.freenode.net #mailman

--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hunter-
> > Each of those steps would be to make one act more like other. This implies
> > developing one of the paths to the point where an acceptable system is
> > achieved. As I have shown, there are no worries to be had about this
> > potentially precarious process as I have already hacked through phpbb, and I
> > am a pythoneer, thus am very comfortable with the internals of mailman.
>
> That's fine. Just keep in mind that the mailing list functionality needs
> to continue to operate as it does now.
>
> > I have already presented why:specifically to conduct my research and
> > development on the wikipedia machine in a completely open fashion. I have
> > monitered the lists here over time, and there has even been a thread about
> > granting everyone on wikipedia shell access. Were this idea fact by this
> > point, I would have had a shell account 7 months ago.
>
> Wikipedia is not a shell account provider. If you beg long enough, you
> will probably get access, but you have to understand that this is a
> significantly bigger issue than sysop access. I would not be surprised if
> shell users could read LocalSettings.php and read the database server
> access settings, for example.
>
> There's nothing stopping you from going to
>
> http://sourceforge.net/
> http://developer.berlios.de/
> http://savannah.gnu.org/
>
> and setting up a new project for whatever you're trying to do. These all
> provide free hosting and CVS for open source projects. BerliOS also
> provides a MySQL database. So you can develop all the code openly if you
> want to. You can install mailman locally and use the Wikipedia archives
> for experimenting. I really don't see why you would need shell access to
> accomplish anything you are trying to accomplish.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


body:
Tomos, obviously, the most immediate solution is to try to address things in a conservative way.
The changes that I have discussed on this board will take months (probably) to implement and test.

Anyway, your issue is a smaller one, and I am chatting with the mailman developers right now on :

irc.freenode.net #mailman

WHOOPS, here is what i also meant to say:

Could you show us (via png) a mailman page where the japanese is dealt with poorly, and then could
you be so kind as to show us what it should look like?

And finally. could you provide *any* insight as to what might be causing this problem inside
mailman (even a wild guess is better than nothing). If you want to help hack through this issue
come to #mailman and #wikipedia, i am known as skimpIzu on both. If i am not there, please wait
around for as long as it takes for me to be there, i online everyday.

--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hunter-
> > Each of those steps would be to make one act more like other. This implies
> > developing one of the paths to the point where an acceptable system is
> > achieved. As I have shown, there are no worries to be had about this
> > potentially precarious process as I have already hacked through phpbb, and I
> > am a pythoneer, thus am very comfortable with the internals of mailman.
>
> That's fine. Just keep in mind that the mailing list functionality needs
> to continue to operate as it does now.
>
> > I have already presented why:specifically to conduct my research and
> > development on the wikipedia machine in a completely open fashion. I have
> > monitered the lists here over time, and there has even been a thread about
> > granting everyone on wikipedia shell access. Were this idea fact by this
> > point, I would have had a shell account 7 months ago.
>
> Wikipedia is not a shell account provider. If you beg long enough, you
> will probably get access, but you have to understand that this is a
> significantly bigger issue than sysop access. I would not be surprised if
> shell users could read LocalSettings.php and read the database server
> access settings, for example.
>
> There's nothing stopping you from going to
>
> http://sourceforge.net/
> http://developer.berlios.de/
> http://savannah.gnu.org/
>
> and setting up a new project for whatever you're trying to do. These all
> provide free hosting and CVS for open source projects. BerliOS also
> provides a MySQL database. So you can develop all the code openly if you
> want to. You can install mailman locally and use the Wikipedia archives
> for experimenting. I really don't see why you would need shell access to
> accomplish anything you are trying to accomplish.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com


body:
On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 04:07:05PM -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Wed, 7 May 2003, Nick Reinking wrote:
> > Just to update everybody on my progress with the C wikitext parser:
> >
> > To do:
> > * Lists of any sort
>
> *shudder* :)
>

Yep, that's why I've put it off for last.

> > * Sections, subsections, and subsubsections (==, ===, and ====
> >   respectively)
>
> Should work from = to ====== (h1 to h6).

Okay, I didn't know that.  Easy enough to add, though.  :)

> > * Emphasis, strong emphasis, and very strong emphasis ('', ''', and
> >   ''''')
>
> Make sure the following cases work (and produce correct HTML, unlike our
> current code):
> ''italic '''bold-italic''' italic''
> '''''bold-italic''' italic''
> ''italic '''bold-italic'''''
>
> '''bold ''bold-italic'' bold'''
> '''''bold-italic'' bold'''
> '''bold ''bold-italic'''''

That produces:

italic bold-italic italic
bold-italic italic
italic bold-italic

bold bold-italic bold
bold-italic bold
bold bold-italic

> > Must be done by PHP:
> > * Handle links / link lookup
> > * Ignore links in <nowiki>
>
> <nowiki> and <math> sections should probably be pulled out _before_
> parsing, and their contents processed and reinserted after parsing.

Don't worry, it is very easy and cheap for me to ignore them, and do the
converstion inside of <nowiki>.

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


body:
On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 11:46:59PM +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 04:07:00PM -0500, Nick Reinking wrote:
> > Also, what format is the
> > wikitext stored in the database as?  UTF-8?  UTF-16?
>
> Most in UTF-8. Some in ISO-8859-1 but they should move to UTF-8 at
> some point.
>
> > As far as performance goes, with what I'm handling now, with all the
> > .txt data files in the testsuite (x256 = 492672 lines), I'm seeing
> > parsing speeds of about 86600 lines/sec (in an 18KB executable).
>
> On what hardware ?
> What test suite ?
> kB/sec would be more useful estimate than line/sec.

Hardware: P4 1.8Ghz 512MB RAM
The files are from CVS under phase3/testsuite/data/*.txt

The file is 28650KB, so 5036KB/sec.

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


body:
On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 04:48:03PM -0500, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> So on a typical page of, say, 40-50 lines, that makes half a
> millisecond spent in parsing. If PHP were 100 times worse, it
> would account for 1/20th of a second per page fetch. Doesn't
> sound like much of a problem to me, and I doubt it's 1000 times
> worse.
>
> Just curious: what does your parser do with Quotes.txt from
> the test suite?

Well, I suspect it is about 100 times (or more slower).  I don't
understand the architecture of the parser perfectly, but a similiar
project using a lexical parser (as opposed to progressive pattern
matches) was about 200 time slower.  At the very least, it'll make  the
PHP code considerably cleaner.

As far as Quotes.txt goes, ignoring the
s, we get:

Wikipedia quoting tests:
(1) normal bold normal
(2) normal italic normal
(3) normal bold italic normal
(4) normal bold bold italic bold normal
(5) normal italic bold italic italic normal
(6) normal bold italic bold normal
(7) normal bold italic italic normal
(8) normal italic bold italic normal
(9) normal bold bold italic normal
(10) normal bold's normal
(11) normal italic's normal
(12) normal italic's bold's italic italic's normal
(13) normal bold's italic bold's normal
(14) normal italic normal
(15) normal 'bold normal
(16) normal italic normal italic normal
(17) normal italic normal bold normal
(18) normal bold normal bold normal
(19) normal bold normal italic normal

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


from_name: Toby Bartels

body:
Nick Reinking wrote:

>* Converts < > and & inside <nowiki>

& shouldn't be treated specially inside <nowiki>.
Character entities aren't wiki markup;
they're bona fide HTML character entities.
(And if you don't buy that argument --
it will change the behaviour of several pages,
not least [[en:Wikipedia:How to edit a page]].)

-- Toby


from_name: Tony Wilson

body:
The question to be considered here is not whether a generally
reasonable, cooperative, and always hard-working contributor in 172
should be given admin status. The question is why a persistently
uncooperative, unreasonable and - let us face the facts here -
persistently and unrepentantly dishonest contributor should retain such
status.

It is a very simple matter: if a regular contributor in good standing
like Abe is *not* considered worthy of trust, then it is clearly absurd
to *maintain* that same trust in an admin who has repeatedly
demonstrated a gross lack of respect both for others here and for
balance in reporting. Anyone who has not made themselves familiar with
the history of this user should do so: there is an ample number of
examples. One need only read Fred's recent comments in this list, and
then comare them to his *actual edit record* in "Communist state" to
see very clearly that the standard he is asking Abe to live up to is
one that Abe generally maintains but Fred himself does not attain, nor
even (it seems) aspire to.

As a general rule, being trusted with admin responsibility makes people
*more* careful, *more* cooperative with others: it sets them on their
honour. Fred's recent behaviour is an exception to this, however we
should not let that conspicuous exception blind us to the general rule.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Admin status: we are asking the wrong question

body:
I am sorry to have brought this matter up on the list. To Jimbo in
particular I express my regret:

Alas, it is a matter that needs consideration. Sometimes, you have to
lance boils. This is one of those times.

Tony Wilson
(Tannin)


from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

body:
> (Nick Reinking <nick at twoevils.org>):
>
> As far as Quotes.txt goes, ignoring the
s, we get:
>  [...]

Well that's broken in very different ways from the current code and
older versions. For one thing, \n should close all open phrase-level
markup; i.e., '' and ''' should not span lines.

On the other hand, ... IS valid and legal (if
somewhat redundant) HTML.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: julien tayon

body:
Hello,

This message is especially for wikipedia users that would be close to
Metz in july (9/10/11)
http://wiki.ael.be/rmll2003
while the 3rd Libre Software Meeting will take place.

With libroscope team, we are leading a topic on
? Le libre, au-del? du logiciel (Extending Free Software principles
beyond the IT sphere) ?

http://wiki.ael.be/rmll2003/index.php/FreeSoftwareBeyondIT

I am looking for a wikipedian speecher for this theme.

As a lurker^H^H^H chaotic contributor to wikipedia there are a lot of
points that makes me think wikipedia is legitimate on this point :

- sharing the knowledge using mechanisme closed to libre software
methodology (letting anyone contribute and using peer review)

- benevolent dictatorship model (Hi jim) with trusted lieutenant (like
youssefan, alvaro, aoineko, ant ... for the one I know) ;

- focusing on user and the ease of use rather than technology ;

- making contributor have good practice by social engeneering
(discussion, NPOV..) rather than with software implemented rules.

- web/email centric coordination (the virtual roof)

- from Kaos Management to  Knowledge Management ;)

- a living proof wiki technology can give large scale structured website
:) : you don't need complex technology to build large KM database.

The last point is  the one I really like :
focusing on peopleware seems to be a far better approach than focusing
on a pure technological approach to build such a large scale project.

Anyone interested, and available ?

I have missed some points I know, and I would be glad to discuss it with
you.

PS as a matter of fact, I guess that wikipedia is such a rich project
that it could be appropriate to do  more than one speech :)

As an individual I would be really interested in a conf on the
architecture and the technological aspect though it is not the topic I
work on.

PPS je parie que ?a va se terminer ? pas d'heure au bistro encore :)

--
Julien Tayon
http://www.tayon.net/			       http://libroscope.org/
Si la v?rit? est une femme, essayons de la s?duire avant de la saisir.