from_name: Zoney

body:
On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 13:25:10 -0000 (GMT), Tony Sidaway
<minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> Nicholas Knight said:
> >
> > No one, NO ONE, has said any sort of filtering must take place by
> > default.
>
> All these arguments about appeasing those who will attack us for not
> filtering, are meaningless if a non-logged-in user approaching the site
> for the first time will see the images that it is proposed should be
> filtered on the grounds that most people may be upset to see them.  So
> what's the point of filtering if we only do it for people who are
> motivated enough to either create a user and log in, or fill in a form
> saying what kinds of image they want to have filtered?
>

Of course some form of filtering has to be on by default (if we are to
have certain content). Insisting on anything else is based on a
crusade to broaden unwilling conservative/conventional minds. It isn't
our place to do that, and if we wish to continue to be widely accepted
(which *is* necessary to acheive Wikipedia's aim, a free encyclopaedia
for all), we need to recognise the sensitivies of a large swathe of
anonymous readers/editors (yes, for signed up users we can count on
them setting their own preferences).

I could almost guarantee that were someone to submit a particular list
of Wikipedia articles/images for review by popular media outlets, they
could destroy Wikipedia's reputation for ever. Afterward mostly only
that section of the public that doesn't have concerns about such
content would use Wikipedia.

I should point out, that I am not convinced that a majority of
Wikipedians most active editors don't disagree with all this. Were we
to put it to a vote, it is quite possible that people here would
insist on no filtering at all (or at least not on by default for
anons). I do not think we can rely on the majority judgement here, as
it is perhaps the case that particular liberal positions are held by a
majority at Wikipedia. If that is the case, such a systemic bias must
be borne in mind in forming new policies.

Zoney

--
~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] NPOV and category-based image filtering

body:
On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 08:37:55 -0000 (GMT), Tony Sidaway
<minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> Fastfission said:
> > Ah yes, but now you are making a claim that it is better to be
> > offensive to some than silly to others. Which is worth interrogating a
> > bit further. ;-)
>
> In this particular case I don't think it's wrong to risk offending people.
>  Someone who complains about the Pioneer plaque on grounds of offense
> taken at the nudity, well it's a bit extreme.  Even if there are fifty
> million of them, we shouldn't cave in to such excessive prudery.

Well of course not 50 million is hardly a significant number of people

> In my opinion, people wwho are easily shocked by visual images of nudity
> or sex should not use their web browsers on the default setting.

Why? for the most part it is pretty easy to avoid these days

>We would
> be doing them a big favor if we advised them to consult their browser
> documentation, because if they took that advice they would never be unduly
> shocked by pictorial web content again.

When you can perswade them to stop clicking on email atchments to stop
answering spam and to run decent firewalls I will listen to you untill
the I'm going for the realism option.

> For those who favor cost-benefit
> analysis (I don't, I'm just a pragmatist who has arrived at the conclusion
> that server-based presentation management is broken) this seems like the
> optimal path.

How can it be broken? We haven't tried it yet.

Anyway cost benefit (to us which is what we are worried about)

Cost to get people to learn to use all the functions on their
browsers; say ?50 a time. Cost of getting people to use this knowlage;
democracy

--
geni


list: foundation-l

from_name: Christiaan Briggs

subject: [Foundation-l] Conflict resolution on meta Wikimedia

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> In a library all the books are there. I am opposed to libraries not
> stocking on books that are encyclopedic in their outlook.

Precisely. And what is currently happening on Wikipedia is that many
editors are pushing for certain images be suppressed or even removed
based on their ability to cause offence (i.e. self-censorship).

This scheme would mean that such images do not need to be removed from
the server, instead letting the end-user choose to hide them.

Christiaan


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Don't push POV into the Wikipedia software and policies

body:
Zoney said:
>
> Of course some form of filtering has to be on by default (if we are to
> have certain content). Insisting on anything else is based on a
> crusade to broaden unwilling conservative/conventional minds.

That is absolutely false.  It is based on our *current practise*, which
seems to work quite well and demonstrably enjoys very strong support.  The
following proposal on the "Graphic and potentially disturbing images"
survey got 33 votes for and only 5 votes against:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Graphic_and_potentially_disturbing_images
"Do nothing now, as there's not really a problem now. Revist this if it
ever becomes a widespread problem that can't adequately be handled on a
case by case basis on individual article talk pages as it is now. Policy
should only ever be developed on an as needed basis, as excessive policy
is both wasteful and harmful."
Please do not misrepresent our current practise as some new crusade.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Felix Wan

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Quenya language request,
	and Chinese Wikipedia again

body:
Pablo:

Thank you very much for your information.  Where can I find the technical
details about setting up the mediawiki software?

I also remember that somewhere on the list someone mentioned they started
something on Wikicities to test out the feasibility of a new language
Wikipedia and then apply to move to the main Wikipedia.  What is the
policy of Wikicities and how possible is it to test out a project over
there?  Can anyone help?

Felix Wan

On Thu, February 24, 2005 5:54 am, Pablo Saratxaga said:
> Kaixo!
>
> On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 06:24:44PM -0800, Felix Wan wrote:
>
>> Mark, once again I appreciate your support.  I don't think we will get
>> the blessing of the community to start a Cantonese Wikipedia soon, but it
>> does not mean that it cannot be done later.
>
> My advice will be that you (or someone else interested in a Cantonese
> wikipedia) just get the mediawiki software and install it on a server
> somewhere to try out, so it can be seen if the project is viable or not;
> if it is, then moving it to wikipedia servers would be no problem, if it
> is not, at least we will know.
>
> That is how Min-nan and Walloon wikipedias started; for the Walloon one,
> I wasn't myself sure it would work or not, that was actually the reason
> why I tried it on my own machine first; and I had almost given up after
> 2-3 months, when someone else appeared and revived it. When there were
> some 1.000 articles moving it to wikipedia was no problem (even in the
> extreme case were the database couldn't be imported, copying the articles
> by hand wouldn't be an impossible task either). Yes, the Walloon
> wikipedia is still small, and will continue to be small, as the total
> population of speakers is small (about 600.000) and there is absolutely
> no official support for the language nor any presence on mass media;
> however, with some 1.000 articles a year it is a valuable source of
> information, particularly about Walloon and Wallonia related topics
> (articles about language grammar, personalities, villages, rivers,
> existing and past litterature, etc), and the number of  users is still
> growing, slowly, but growing, which means there is interest in it.
>
> What I mean is, for a first try, when only limited traffic will happen,
> even hosting it on a private adsl connection is enough, a small computer
> with a standard GNU/Linux distribution is able to run the software; so
> while there is need of some consensus and approval to be hosted by the
> wikimedia foundation and use its infrastructure; anybody can start its
> own wikipedia-like server at home. And then, depending on the results,
> an official merging with wikipedia could be asked.
>
> --
> Ki ?a vos v?ye b?n,
> Pablo Saratxaga
>
> http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/  PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
> [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or
> Esperanto]
> [min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]


from_name: notafish

subject: [Foundation-l] fr.wikinews logo

body:
> That is a route you do not want to go. The fr:wikinews is controversial,
> there has been a lot of agro about it being started in the first place.
> The Wikinews project as a whole is not beta anymore so consequently the
> French wikinews is not BETA either.

Agreed.. in theory. If the project goes live, the whole project goes
live. But I *so* agree with Ryo on that BETA thing... Maybe again we
should adapt the rules (the more we go, the more we learn), and make
sure a specific language project is viable before it goes off BETA?

> Your point is that the news coverage is not great.
Not great is the least we can say. The last story written is an
editorial (and I mean the word) on a very controversial subject ie.
music download., without references and definitely defending a POV.

> What you are really after is something different: "what is the minimum
> level of activity to have the continued existence of a wikinews." No
> news in 14 days might qualify. Then again, how do you treat the request
> for a restart ? Again five known editors promissing to give it a go ??
> It is a Pandora's box, but please let hope leave her box.. :)

I am not so much in favor of a closing down of the thing, but a BETA
thing would be grand. And if it stays BETA for another year...well...

Delphine


subject: [Foundation-l] fr.wikinews logo


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Christiaan Briggs wrote:

> I've come back for more advice. Although the outlining of and
> discussion about the desirability of [[End-user image suppression]]
> has been moved to [[Desirability of End-user image suppression]], and
> this is made clear in the opening paragraph of [[End-user image
> suppression]], User:GerardM is still insisting on posting desirability
> discussion to [[End-user image suppression]]. What to do?
>
> Christiaan

Christiaan,
It is one thing to split articles into two, it is another to castrate
the talk pages and move all things that are not to your liking
elsewhere. Your right to ask for a method to have mechanisms into the
mediawiki software is equal to my right to have an angst of this first
step of introducing censorship into our projects.

*Your proposal will make it mandatory to allow for tags/categorisations
so that censorship will work.
*Your original article title was End-user content suppression and
decided that this was not "good" renamed it to image suppression
*There has already been one anonymous coward asking for using your
censoring mechanism for content.
*You have repeatedly removed all things you thing are detrimental to
your proposal from the article and its talk page
*Basically you ask for censorship and find people who oppose it.

As to your question, withdraw your proposal or allow for criticism.

Thanks,
as to your proposal: No thanks !
    GerardM


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Foundation-l] Day 6 Fund Drive Report (minor error)

body:
Minor error (not worth a full repost)

In the second paragraph I mistakingly gave the grand total minus mail
donations. That figure should be $46,549.53 *not* $46,474.53

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - Sign up for Fantasy Baseball.
http://baseball.fantasysports.yahoo.com/


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Day 6 Fund Drive Report (minor
	error)


body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

> Nicholas Knight said:
>>
>> there are already proposals to use a cookie-based system and present
>> anonymous users with a disclaimer page permitting to  make exactly
>> that choice.
>
> Then there *is* a proposal to filter by default.

The proposal clearly states (for newly registered users) that this
decision will need to be made. It doesn't propose what that default
should be. And that anonymous users would be presented with a choice
before they go to such a page.

Christiaan


body:
Fred Bauder said:
> This is true, O'Reilly can do just as good a job on Wikipedia as he did
> on Ward Churchill. He's not going to discuss our article on Canada, or
> Abraham Lincoln, he's going to go straight for the jugular, our
> carefully considered articles on "sex moves" and autofellatio.

Why should I care about this person's opinion?


body:
This is getting out of hand, now GerardM is resorting to vandalism:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=End-
user_image_suppression&curid=15602&diff=0&oldid=0

Christiaan


body:
Nicholas Knight wrote:

> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> Christiaan,
>> It is one thing to split articles into two, it is another to castrate
>> the talk pages and move all things that are not to your liking
>> elsewhere. Your right to ask for a method to have mechanisms into the
>> mediawiki software is equal to my right to have an angst of this
>> first step of introducing censorship into our projects.
>
>
> THERE. IS. NO. CENSORSHIP.
>
No need to shout and yes we disagree on that one. The way you lot have
been trampling on my views on this has the hallmarks of censorship. Yes,
in my opinion this proposal is about censorship.

>> *Your proposal will make it mandatory to allow for
>> tags/categorisations so that censorship will work.
>
>
> Our proposal will make it POSSIBLE for categories to be used by
> END-USERS to CHOOSE what they wish to see.

We disagree on this one. For it is not only end users that will choose.
Read your own proposal point 4.

>
>> *Your original article title was End-user content suppression and
>> decided that this was not "good" renamed it to image suppression
>
>
> Because the focus was and has always been on images. Whether like
> measures need to be taken for text is a different discussion.

Technically it is not different so why should it be a different discussion ?

>
>> *There has already been one anonymous coward asking for using your
>> censoring mechanism for content.
>
>
> What?

Right, it is a straw mans argument that one thing leads to the next.
Read the history if you can still find what was said. It is there.

>
>> *You have repeatedly removed all things you thing are detrimental to
>> your proposal from the article and its talk page
>
>
> The article was intended for a discussion of the technical side of it.
> Policy can be dealt with elsewhere.

It may have been intended by you for this. On Meta no case has been made
why we should want such an abomination.

>
>> *Basically you ask for censorship and find people who oppose it.
>
>
> You really need to read the wikien-l archives. Christiaan was one of
> the most vocal opponents of linking images instead of inlining them.

I do not need to read the wikien-l archives. They have no bearing upon
META. If you want to propose something on META put your case forward on
META. I would not ask you to read the wikpedia-nl mailing list either.
Either put your case forward or you do not have a case.

>
>> As to your question, withdraw your proposal or allow for criticism.
>
>
> Constructive criticism is always welcome. Blanket false statements are
> not.
>
Your idea of what is true and false is coloured by where you stand,
where you are from. Your truth is just that. Making me out for a liar
and being not constructive is well, not friendly to say the least.

Thanks,
    No thanks !
       GerardM


body:
Angela:

Thank you very much for the quick response.  I will go ahead
and read the links.

Felix Wan

On Thu, February 24, 2005 2:15 pm, Angela said:
> On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 13:50:33 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan
> <felixwiki at earthsphere.org> wrote:
>
>> Thank you very much for your information.  Where can I find the
>> technical details about setting up the mediawiki software?
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_FAQ
>
>> I also remember that somewhere on the list someone mentioned they
>> started something on Wikicities to test out the feasibility of a new
>> language Wikipedia and then apply to move to the main Wikipedia.  What
>> is the policy of Wikicities and how possible is it to test out a project
>> over there?
>
> Content in, or about, constructed languages can be added to
> http://conlang.wikicities.com
>
> Please see http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Category:Policy first;
> especially the terms of use at http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Terms_of_use
>
> Alternatively, there is the scratchpad for trialing potential
> projects: http://scratchpad.wikicities.com/wiki/Mini_wikis
>
> Angela


body:
Nicholas Knight wrote:

> David Gerard wrote:
>
>> Capitals or no, it appears at the very least this is a mechanism to
>> enable
>> and encourage it. I doubt you would claim there is no wish from
>> anyone to
>> censor Wikipedia per se, or to do something that could reasonably be
>> tagged
>> censorship.
>
>
> No one has yet explained how the proposed mechanism could be used for
> censorship. All we have is Gerard on some sort of holy crusade
> shouting "censorship!".
>
Have tags, can select and filter. Censorship abc

PS Holy crusade ?? nah,  shouting .. MOST DEFINETLY IF THAT IS WHAT IT
TAKES !!   :)

Thanks,
    No thanks !
       GerardM


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] running wiki on command line

body:
Edward Peschko wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 11:22:59PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>>If you want to run the web output from a command line, you should use a
>>PHP CGI executable and set up the CGI environment variables.
>
> so I get these environmental variables from what - the $_ENV and
> $_SERVER globals? Php seems to have sliced the environmental variables
> into these two associative arrays.. What if I need the variables
> in $_COOKIE and $_GET and $_POST?

If you google I'm sure you can find lots of documentation on how CGI
works. CGI (Common Gateway Protocol) is the classic standard way for web
servers to send request information to programs, which then return some
HTTP header lines, a blank, and the resulting data to send back to the
client. The web server gives request information to the CGI program by
means of environment variables.

PHP can operate in a web server either as a built-in module (eg mod_php
in Apache) or as a CGI program, in which case it will interpret the CGI
environment variables and present data to the script in $_GET, $_POST,
$_COOKIE, $_SERVER, etc.

>>There are numerous command-line entry points in the maintenance
>>subdirectory, mostly special-purpose. eval.php provides a somewhat
>>primitive interactive PHP interpreter within the active MediaWiki code
>>environment. (You really, really want PHP compiled with readline support
>>or this will be painful. :)
>
>
> I'll give it a whirl, but I'm skeptical. I just tried it, got a '>'
> as a prompt, hit one question mark (to get help) and it seemed to spawn
> an infinite loop of '>' prompts.

"?" is not a valid PHP statement.

[snip]
>     statement inside of my httpd.conf, but this is just too whacked out.
>     They've bifurcated the php code base whether or not your in a command
>     line world or a CGI world??

No, there's a single code base; they just chose some unfortunate naming
for the front-end executables.

>     Just curious, but why was php chosen in the first place? The more
>     I look, the more php seems to be tied together with little
>     bits of string and glue.. why not python or mod_perl, or ruby?
>     Or, even c/C++, or *shudder* java?

Why anything? You have to pick something, and somebody's going to bitch
about it whatever it is. Perl in particular is twice as ugly as PHP. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] fr.wikinews logo

body:
I suggest editing MediaWiki:Tagline and putting the "beta" there. That
might be done for any Wikinews editions which does not yet have a
sufficient level of activity. This is better than defacing the logo, in
my opinion.

It turns out that it is very difficult to predict that activity, and I
don't think the current process on Meta is really anywhere close to
doing that. The Swedish Wikinews is very active, for example, thanks in
large part to a handful of dedicated editors -- but that might change
any day. Of course, all the editions are suffering from the current
slowness, and recent downtime.

One notable difference in Wikinews to other projects is that a quick
glance at the frontpage gives you an impression of the level of
activity: if you only see old news, obviously the project is not very
active. This is good if it is seen as an incentive to work on it, bad if
it frustrates people and makes them give up on the project. Wikipedia,
Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wiktionary in the different languages all have
their phases of activity and inactivity, but nowhere are those phases
more visible than on Wikinews.

Switching the project into read-only whenever it enters such a phase
seems like a bad and un-wiki idea; perhaps you could create a template
like this for the frontpage instead:

    The French edition of Wikinews is currently not very active. Please
    participate in building this website into a useful resource! Ideas
    for increasing activity are collected at [[Wikinews:Building Wikinews]].

Here are a few suggestions to increase activity:

1) Translate. It is much easier to translate a well-written article than
to write a new one from scratch. Wikinews articles have to grow to
publishable quality very fast, "stubs" aren't helpful, and references
are a strict requirement. As such, writing them takes a lot of effort.
But the English Wikinews, for example, is now publishing articles at a
reasonable rate. As an author of that edition, I also get great
satisfaction out of knowing that my work is going to be translated into
languages I do not speak.

2) Prominently link the equivalent of
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Submit_a_story - this helps to
attract people who do not know about the Wikinews process and just want
to get their feet wet.

3) Have brief news items on the frontpage which aren't fully developed
stories yet. This should only be done until real stories are being
published regularly, so as to not conflict with the [[Current events]]
pages on Wikipedia.

4) Edit MediaWiki:Sitenotice and point people to the IRC channel,
mailing list and Village Pump. Building a community helps to create a
feeling of identity and the desire to protect that community, which is
an incentive to do work on the site.

5) Organize and participate in events like the design contest or the
Wikinews chats. Point people on Wikipedia to these events to get them
interested in the project.

6) If you are a software developer, help us to implement MediaWiki
features like category RSS feeds and dynamic article display.
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1411 is the only code
currently being actively worked on, to my knowledge.

Please also join the international Wikinews channel at #wikinews -- a
lot of good people are hanging out there who may help you to answer
questions with the project.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Foundation-l] fr.wikinews logo


body:
Fred Bauder said:
> It is not safe to ignore anyone's opinion, but to bring you up to
> speed, check out [[The O'Reilly Factor]].

I know of this guy.  Fox News are the idiots who threatened to sue Fox
Broadcast Network because a Fox show, the Simpsons, mimicked their
braindead scrolling news ticker.  Bill O'Reilly is the chap whose lawsuit
against Al Franken was thrown out of court, and only succeeded in boosting
sales of Franken's book.
Why should I care what these buffoons think?


body:
Nicholas Knight wrote:

> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> Have tags, can select and filter. Censorship abc
>
>
> So you oppose libraries creating separate sections of separate
> categories of books and letting users browse the sections they want to
> and not browse the sections they don't?

In a library all the books are there. I am opposed to libraries not
stocking on books that are encyclopedic in their outlook. So, I do not
need to see Hustler in my local "bieb". For that I could go to a book shop.

Your remark is not friendly nor constructive, you asked for an
explanation how your proposal can be used by a censor. I explained. And
your reply has nothing to do with the information given.

Thanks,
    No thanks !
       GerardM


list: textbook-l

from_name: Sanford Forte

subject: [Textbook-l] GMail invites

body:
I'd like one - thanks, Karl
----- Original Message -----
From: "Karl Wick" <karlwick at yahoo.com>
To: <textbook-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 9:36 AM
Subject: [Textbook-l] GMail invites

> If anyone is as desperate as I was to get a GMail email
> account, let me know, and the first fifteen or so I'll send
> you an invite so you can get started.
>
> Have a great day!
> Karl
>
> (I sent this same email from my new address, but forgot the
> filter probably won't let it go thru, sorry if you get it
> twice ...)
>
> =====
> Email me at my new address, karlwick at gmail.com
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> _______________________________________________
> Textbook-l mailing list
> Textbook-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l
>


subject: [Foundation-l] fr.wikinews logo

body:
> I suggest editing MediaWiki:Tagline and putting the "beta" there. That
> might be done for any Wikinews editions which does not yet have a
> sufficient level of activity. This is better than defacing the logo, in
> my opinion.

Since there are no sysops on fr:, thus the sitenotice can't be changed, I suggest you do it :)

> One notable difference in Wikinews to other projects is that a quick
> glance at the frontpage gives you an impression of the level of
<snip>

Except you can't be sure people will go to the front page. But that's beside the point regarding the beta status.

> Regards,
>
> Erik

Nicolas

Acc?dez au courrier ?lectronique de La Poste : www.laposte.net ;
3615 LAPOSTENET (0,34?/mn) ; t?l : 08 92 68 13 50 (0,34?/mn)


subject: [Foundation-l] fr.wikinews logo


subject: [Foundation-l] fr.wikinews logo

body:
> > That is a route you do not want to go. The fr:wikinews is controversial,
> > there has been a lot of agro about it being started in the first place.
> > The Wikinews project as a whole is not beta anymore so consequently the
> > French wikinews is not BETA either.

So when chinese wikinews opens, it won't be beta either, he...
I for one favor the beta-per-language discrimination - because you can *never* know the level of activity.

Nicolas

Acc?dez au courrier ?lectronique de La Poste : www.laposte.net ;
3615 LAPOSTENET (0,34?/mn) ; t?l : 08 92 68 13 50 (0,34?/mn)


subject: [Foundation-l] fr.wikinews logo


from_name: Edward Peschko

body:
> works. CGI (Common Gateway Protocol) is the classic standard way for web
> servers to send request information to programs, which then return some
> HTTP header lines, a blank, and the resulting data to send back to the
> client. The web server gives request information to the CGI program by
> means of environment variables.
>
> PHP can operate in a web server either as a built-in module (eg mod_php
> in Apache) or as a CGI program, in which case it will interpret the CGI
> environment variables and present data to the script in $_GET, $_POST,
> $_COOKIE, $_SERVER, etc.

let me rephrase the question - is there a particular point inside of
index.php that I could snapshot, which would have all the variables
needed for a given index.php query, and could I take these variables,
set the appropriate CGI environment up, and then run it seamlessly?

Or is there going to be extra-environment information that I'm going
to have to acquire (and massage) in order to make this work? I'm
primarily thinking cookies here..

> >I'll give it a whirl, but I'm skeptical. I just tried it, got a '>'
> >as a prompt, hit one question mark (to get help) and it seemed to spawn
> >an infinite loop of '>' prompts.
>
> "?" is not a valid PHP statement.

of course, but I would think that the appropriate response would be
to emit a syntax error, not an infinite loop of '>'s .  This just leads
me to think that it might be not the most 'well-traveled' debugging
environment.

> No, there's a single code base; they just chose some unfortunate naming
> for the front-end executables.

... and made it rather difficult to have both flavors resident
on your machine at the same time,

In particular (for those who google on CLI and CGI problems with php),
to get both cli and cgi, I needed to configure and compile php twice,
once --with-apxs=, and once without.

> >    Just curious, but why was php chosen in the first place? The more
> >    I look, the more php seems to be tied together with little
> >    bits of string and glue.. why not python or mod_perl, or ruby?
> >    Or, even c/C++, or *shudder* java?
>
> Why anything? You have to pick something, and somebody's going to bitch
> about it whatever it is. Perl in particular is twice as ugly as PHP. ;)

;) ok, lets just say that we respectfully disagree here.
AFAICT, php is one huge winnebago class, which survives by quick access
to a bunch of quick-to-use functionality without needing to import
various modules. (perl is a winnebago too, but about 5 times smaller,
and perl has much more powerful data manipulation methods.

Ed


from_name: Pablo Saratxaga

body:
Kaixo!

On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 06:24:44PM -0800, Felix Wan wrote:

> Mark, once again I appreciate your support.  I don't think we will get
> the blessing of the community to start a Cantonese Wikipedia soon, but
> it does not mean that it cannot be done later.

My advice will be that you (or someone else interested in a Cantonese
wikipedia) just get the mediawiki software and install it on a server
somewhere to try out, so it can be seen if the project is viable or not;
if it is, then moving it to wikipedia servers would be no problem, if it
is not, at least we will know.

That is how Min-nan and Walloon wikipedias started; for the Walloon one,
I wasn't myself sure it would work or not, that was actually the reason
why I tried it on my own machine first; and I had almost given up after
2-3 months, when someone else appeared and revived it.
When there were some 1.000 articles moving it to wikipedia was no
problem (even in the extreme case were the database couldn't be
imported, copying the articles by hand wouldn't be an impossible task
either).
Yes, the Walloon wikipedia is still small, and will continue to be
small, as the total population of speakers is small (about 600.000)
and there is absolutely no official support for the language nor
any presence on mass media; however, with some 1.000 articles a year it
is a valuable source of information, particularly about Walloon and
Wallonia related topics (articles about language grammar, personalities,
villages, rivers, existing and past litterature, etc), and the number of
users is still growing, slowly, but growing, which means there is
interest in it.

What I mean is, for a first try, when only limited traffic will happen,
even hosting it on a private adsl connection is enough, a small computer
with a standard GNU/Linux distribution is able to run the software;
so while there is need of somme consensus and approval to be hosted
by the wikimedia foundation and use its infrastructure; anybody
can start its own wikipedia-like server at home.
And then, depending on the results, an official merging with wikipedia
could be asked.

--
Ki ?a vos v?ye b?n,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Africa info

body:
FYI, pertaining to this thread, the latest on Slashdot article (and
associated punditry) should be interesting reading.

Translation Software That Learns by Reading

redcone writes "New Scientist is reporting that translation software
that develops an understanding of languages by scanning through
thousands of previously translated documents has been released by U.S.
researchers. According to the article "The translated documents used
to teach the translation algorithms can be electronic, on paper, or
even audio files. The system is not only faster than other methods,
but also better suited to tackling less common languages and the
unusual vocabulary found in specialised or technical texts."

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/24/0111259

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 15:40:31 -0800, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Delirium wrote:
>
> > Sabine Cretella wrote:
> >
> >> Never ever a machine will be able to translate correctly - not now,
> >> not tomorrow, not in 100 years - it's a dream many have - sorry, I
> >> must destroy it.
> >
> > A pedantic point, but this is assuming that machines are not capable
> > of human-level intelligence.  Many in the AI community would beg to
> > differ. =]
> >
> > (Although whether it'll be 10, 20, 50, 100, or 500 years before an
> > artificial intelligence can learn things like languages with the same
> > or better aptitude as humans is a matter of debate.)
>
> I would call Sabine's comment realistic rather than pedantic. I realize
> that technophiles dream of these artificial solutions, but the best they
> can realistically hope for is competent interpretation of technical
> material.  When it comes to metaphor technophiles are playing in the
> right field of dreams. (I wonder how a machine would translate that into
> the language of people who know nothing about baseball.)
>
> Ec
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--

Andrew Lih, Assistant Professor
Journalism and Media Studies Centre
University of Hong Kong
Email: alih at hku.hk | Web: http://jmsc.hku.hk/faculty/alih
AOL IM: fuzheado | ICQ: 231894253
Yahoo Messenger: andrew_lih | MSN Messenger: andrew_lih at msn.com


from_name: El C

subject:
[WikiEN-l] When goals conflict: There is no "right" for everyoneto
	edit Wiki

body:
I urge everyone here to read my two posts in this thread carefuly
(they are not too lengthy), it a rather fitting illustration, I
challenge, as to the double-speak meaning of the passage cited bellow.
Such a lengthy polemic might be useful as a political pamphlet, but I
would hope that the other posters reading this thread can draw from
this discussion more than finding an opening for the immediate,
tactical interests of their own ideologies.

(under the pretext of assaulting, defending, and otherwise assailing
against propaganda).

>Wikipedia is not a platform for advocacy or propaganda.


from_name: Mark Williamson

body:
Unfortunately the conlang part does not apply to Cantonese, although
the miniwiki "scratchpad" may, it's not much different from what we
have already at Meta.

Mark

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 14:20:25 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan
<felixwiki at earthsphere.org> wrote:
> Angela:
>
> Thank you very much for the quick response.  I will go ahead
> and read the links.
>
> Felix Wan
>
>
> On Thu, February 24, 2005 2:15 pm, Angela said:
> > On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 13:50:33 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan
> > <felixwiki at earthsphere.org> wrote:
> >
> >> Thank you very much for your information.  Where can I find the
> >> technical details about setting up the mediawiki software?
> >
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_FAQ
> >
> >> I also remember that somewhere on the list someone mentioned they
> >> started something on Wikicities to test out the feasibility of a new
> >> language Wikipedia and then apply to move to the main Wikipedia.  What
> >> is the policy of Wikicities and how possible is it to test out a project
> >> over there?
> >
> > Content in, or about, constructed languages can be added to
> > http://conlang.wikicities.com
> >
> > Please see http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Category:Policy first;
> > especially the terms of use at http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Terms_of_use
> >
> > Alternatively, there is the scratchpad for trialing potential
> > projects: http://scratchpad.wikicities.com/wiki/Mini_wikis
> >
> > Angela
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
Edward Peschko wrote:
> let me rephrase the question - is there a particular point inside of
> index.php that I could snapshot, which would have all the variables
> needed for a given index.php query, and could I take these variables,
> set the appropriate CGI environment up, and then run it seamlessly?

At any point you could snarf data from $_GET, $_POST, $_COOKIES, and
$_SERVER and store it for later use.

> Or is there going to be extra-environment information that I'm going
> to have to acquire (and massage) in order to make this work? I'm
> primarily thinking cookies here..

A login session will store some information using PHP's session support,
which is keyed by a cookie. By default, PHP stores session data in
temporary files. See http://www.php.net/session

>>>I'll give it a whirl, but I'm skeptical. I just tried it, got a '>'
>>>as a prompt, hit one question mark (to get help) and it seemed to spawn
>>>an infinite loop of '>' prompts.
>>
>>"?" is not a valid PHP statement.
>
>
> of course, but I would think that the appropriate response would be
> to emit a syntax error, not an infinite loop of '>'s .  This just leads
> me to think that it might be not the most 'well-traveled' debugging
> environment.

You mean like this?

brion at rdaneel:/var/www/head/maintenance $ php eval.php
 > ?

Parse error: parse error, unexpected '?' in
/var/www/head/maintenance/eval.php(24) : eval()'d code on line 1
bool(false)
 > exit
brion at rdaneel:/var/www/head/maintenance $

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Fred Bauder said:
> Because you are intelligent, knowledgable and understand how public
> relations works and have the best interests of Wikipedia at heart? And
> have common sense?
>
I've said already that I think this is something only the Board can
decide.  Either we stay the way we are--and no amount of filtering and
whatnot will disguise the fact that the operation of our existing content
policy fails to censor content in a manner which would make the whole of
Wikipedia acceptable to the general public--or the Board imposes content
restrictions.
I don't mind which is chosen--as David has suggested, any radical change
in policy would risk a fork--but playing games with image filtering is
like rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic.  Trying to appease the
likes of Bill O'Reilly (assuming he would oppose rather than welcome
Wikipedia's openness--which is a big assumption) is pointless.
Only the Board can make decisions of this kind.  The membership can't even
raise a consensus to link the autofellatio guy or to delete an article
describing a potentially lethal form of sexual assault as a "sex move."


body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

> ... no amount of filtering and whatnot will disguise the fact that the
> operation of our existing content policy fails to censor content in a
> manner which would make the whole of Wikipedia acceptable to the
> general public ...

It's not intended to disguise it. It's intended to negate it.

> ... but playing games with image filtering is like rearranging the
> deck-chairs on the Titanic ...

Bit over the top I would have said.

Christiaan


references:
<60923.194.72.110.12.1109255722.squirrel@happy.minority-report.co.uk>
	<BE433898.C42C%fredbaud@ctelco.net>
	<34314.194.72.110.12.1109262001.squirrel@happy.minority-report.co.uk>
	<104b2b49e03ffccf0a9961ded2eb5ff4@last-straw.net>

body:
Christiaan Briggs said:
> Tony Sidaway wrote:
>
>> ... no amount of filtering and whatnot will disguise the fact that the
>>  operation of our existing content policy fails to censor content in a
>>  manner which would make the whole of Wikipedia acceptable to the
>> general public ...
>
> It's not intended to disguise it. It's intended to negate it.

It will have no effect on [[Donkey punch]], which, apart from a publicity
photograph of a TV actor, is not illustrated.


body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:

> Christiaan Briggs said:
>> Tony Sidaway wrote:
>>
>>> ... no amount of filtering and whatnot will disguise the fact that
>>> the operation of our existing content policy fails to censor content
>>> in a manner which would make the whole of Wikipedia acceptable to
>>> the general public ...
>>
>> It's not intended to disguise it. It's intended to negate it.
>
> It will have no effect on [[Donkey punch]], which, apart from a
> publicity photograph of a TV actor, is not illustrated.

True enough. But filtering will negate the vast majority of complaints
that I have seen.

Christiaan


from_name: V. Ivanov

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] unless [languages] generate their own will to live...
	(was "Reputation...")

body:
On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 10:42:58 -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> It may be sad that many of these lesser known languages are on the path
> to extinction, but unless they generate their own will to live it's not
> going to happen.

Though that was not the main topic of the discussion, I feel the
necessity to point out the common mistake: it is not only the "own
will" that can save lesser used languages. It's also institutional
help that is needed: education in the language, services in the
language, useful books in the language, interesting passtimes using
the language, etc.

The ability to run Internet ecyclopedia in a lesser used language can
surely help the "own will" of its speakers. When such an encyclopedia
appears, it's no longer the fact that "there is no any useful site in
my mother language: why should I keep using it?".

There are only two articles in the Xhosa Wikipedia, but the great
thing is done. Whenever "own will" appears, they can take this site
and make it a great place, as it happens about the Tatar Wikipedia.
Once even the Russian Wikipedia has been an empty place for rather
long time!

Thank all for the great work you do.

Sl. Ivanov

--
Esperu cxiam!


from_name: Angela

body:
On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 16:20:01 -0000 (GMT), Tony Sidaway
> I've said already that I think this is something only the Board can
> decide.  Either we stay the way we are--and no amount of filtering and
> whatnot will disguise the fact that the operation of our existing content
> policy fails to censor content in a manner which would make the whole of
> Wikipedia acceptable to the general public--or the Board imposes content
> restrictions.

I disagree. The Board should not control the content. Unless the
content is actually illegal, then it is up to the community to decide
whether it is included or not, and up to the community whether we
accept whatever filtering methods the developers might create.

Angela

(This email is just my opinion, not necessarily that of the Wikimedia
Foundation.)


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [Wikitech-l] What now?

body:
So I have my little mediawiki 1.4rc1 running OK on my PB G4
(Panther at the moment, Tiger coming up), and am looking at the
bugzilla list, but it's somewhat unclear on how to choose what
to look at - priorities and criticalities seem kind of random.
I have some bigger projects in mind, but this is my first foray
into web apps, so I'd like to try some simpler hackery to begin
with. Any suggestions?

Stan


body:
Stan Shebs said:
>
> Even though we ourselves might not want a bowdlerized WP,
> it would be extraordinarily convenient to have some kind
> of subset quasi-mirror that advertised themselves as
> "child-safe".

Absolutely.  This is what I've been proposing for some time.  The
Wikipedia project is probably now mature enough, or close to being so, for
content mirrors to be produced for specific purposes such as not upsetting
parents.
One close friend of mine won't let her very bright young kids anywhere
near Wikipedia.  She's intelligent and liberal-minded but she's no fool.
Wikipedia is not suitable for young kids.  But there is inside Wikipedia
such an encyclopedia.
It doesn't need to be bleeding edge, in fact for the purposes of study and
classroom use it's actually a problem if article content changes day by
day.
Imagine you have a dozen or so trusted monitors who trawl through
K12-potential material scanning for the latest "safe and reliable" version
of each article.  They could use some kind of client interface to
special:export which enables them quickly to scan multiple versions and
follow Wikilinks.  On finding one they click a button and this information
is fed into a database table on the server.  Then for schools you have a
Wikipedia engine that operates in read-only mode and, instead of the
latest version of each article, only delivers the article if it's present
in the school table, and then only the latest version of the article that
is recorded in that table.  If an article is in the school table the user
sees a message saying that the school version of Wikipedia doesn't contain
an article on that.
This would require quite trivial software fixes, plus at least one spare
school Wikipedia engine, but it could use the same database servers the
main Wikipedia uses.
You would also need published school content guidelines and a procedure
for school Wikipedia users to notify unsuitable content.


from_name: Christiaan Briggs

body:
Aphaia wrote:

> On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 14:08:41 +0000, Christiaan Briggs
> <christiaan at last-straw.net> wrote:
>> This is getting out of hand, now GerardM is resorting to vandalism:
>
> I don't think he did vandalism around on this issue. He had just a
> different thought and idea of yours: what should be discussed, what
> are related topics and so on. And it is not good in my humble opinion
> to call someone who acted not in a way you would like to a "vandal". I
> look here only the deferences of opinions and sad misunderstandings.
> NO vandalism, I dare say. Though Gerald and I have different opinions
> sometimes, in my views he has been on a good faith since I''ve known
> him

At best it was "disruption to make a point"

> Christian, you requested for comments on this issue on EN WP. I thank
> you for your request, "Two are better than one",  but it were better
> you would have done so before you stated  Gerald made vandalism. BTW I
> can't understand why you made your request on EN WP which only ENWP
> issues would be resolve. If your concern is only related to EN WP, why
> have you discussion on meta and foundation-l?   (For your information
> meta has also RfC to resolve comunity-wide disputes)  It's not an
> accusation but a pure question. Anyway I hope you will have sufficient
> comments to resolve this issues, and all of you, to Christiaan,
> Nicholas Knight and Gerald will be satisfied with the result at last.

I couldn't find any processes on meta. Could you point me to RfC on
meta?

Christiaan


body:
David Gerard wrote:

> That's not even close to vandalism by any reasonable definition. Wht
> it has
> done is concisely outline the actual situation that you appear not to
> wish
> to acknowledge in any way at all.

At best it was "disruption to make a point".

> What Gerard actually did with the above edit was take this paragraph:
>
>   This page originated from a discussion on the WikiEN-I mailing list
> where
>   some level of consensus was reached between the free-speech and
> content
>   suppression parties that a technical solution is possible that will
> go a
>   long way towards satisfying most mainstream positions in the debate.
>
> - and add the following text:
>
>   However, it should be stressed that this page is ''not'' intended to
> imply
>   that this is a <i>fait accompli</i>, but merely an initial
> exploration of
>   the specification and feasibility of a possible solution. The
> features
>   described below are ''not'' currently under development, and will
> certainly
>   not be made live until their desirability has been firmly
> established.
>
> Are you saying that this is false, and making out that saying this is
> "vandalism"?

Yes that is false, he did not add the second bit.

Christiaan


body:
By the way what he actually did was delete the whole page and replace
it with:
"Obviously you will revert this. This is just an demonstration what
will happen if content is tagged to indicate material that is not to a
censors liking."

Christiaan

On 24 Feb 2005, at 6:17 pm, Christiaan Briggs wrote:

> David Gerard wrote:
>
>> That's not even close to vandalism by any reasonable definition. Wht
>> it has
>> done is concisely outline the actual situation that you appear not to
>> wish
>> to acknowledge in any way at all.
>
> At best it was "disruption to make a point".
>
>> What Gerard actually did with the above edit was take this paragraph:
>>
>>   This page originated from a discussion on the WikiEN-I mailing list
>> where
>>   some level of consensus was reached between the free-speech and
>> content
>>   suppression parties that a technical solution is possible that will
>> go a
>>   long way towards satisfying most mainstream positions in the debate.
>>
>> - and add the following text:
>>
>>   However, it should be stressed that this page is ''not'' intended
>> to imply
>>   that this is a <i>fait accompli</i>, but merely an initial
>> exploration of
>>   the specification and feasibility of a possible solution. The
>> features
>>   described below are ''not'' currently under development, and will
>> certainly
>>   not be made live until their desirability has been firmly
>> established.
>>
>> Are you saying that this is false, and making out that saying this is
>> "vandalism"?
>
> Yes that is false, he did not add the second bit.
>
> Christiaan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Political correctness vs NPOV

body:
Political correctness may often be used as a pejorative term but it
actually has positive connotations as well as the negative that Arno
has pointed out. Political correctness has been used for all sorts of
issues, e.g. civil rights movement, womens rights, and the environment
to name a few. In this sense it is not always something to be
"overcome" but encouraged in some instances.

Christiaan

On 24 Feb 2005, at 6:19 pm, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Arno M wrote:
>
>> Just out of curiosity - does Political correctness apply as NPOV or
>> as an ideology as described below?
>>
> Political correctness is independent of the ideology it supports.  It
> can attach to any ideology.  It will generally involve supporting the
> "right" views as they prevail in the society out of fear of being seen
> as different.  Sometimes the penalty for not being politically correct
> may be social ostracism; in other circumstances, such as in Nazi
> Germany, the penalties could be far more severe.  In the United States
> supporting the troops in Iraq is a matter of political correctness.
>
> Thus I would see political correctness as neither NPOV nor an
> ideology.  At the same time practitioners of political correctness
> have a personal need to believe that their actions express a NPOV,
> something which they can easily confirm in the positive feedback loop
> of their own community. Overcoming political correctness requires both
> insight and courage.
>
> Ec


body:
Christiaan Briggs wrote:

> Political correctness may often be used as a pejorative term but it
> actually has positive connotations as well as the negative that Arno
> has pointed out.

Sorry I meant that Ray had pointed out.

C.


from_name: petko yotov

subject: [Wikitech-l] SQL "diffs"

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:
> Would it be possible to make dumps every one or two days, so that we are
> less dependant on good fortune next time?

I am not a specialist nor a programmer so this may be stupid but isn't there a
way to make an SQL "diffs" every day? Aren't the "logs" that you spoke about
almost the same? If they can be offered for download, a complete database
dumps (very time-consuming) may be created even more rarely.

The "diffs.sql" would not be enormous in MB and if applied ("patched") one
after another to the database, everyone would have the latest complete data.
This would also save lots of bandwidth for downloads.

5ko>bg.wiki


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 05:07:57 +1100, David Gerard
<fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
> What Gerard actually did with the above edit was take this paragraph:

<snip>

This is just a non-permanent diff links problem :) The edit in
question was unquestionably vandalism.
The edit you're looking at it is me trying to be helpful; the one
Christiaan posted (or meant to) was a revert of blanking the whole
page.

For future reference, when pointing out vandalism always post:
a) the diff were the vandalism took place; or
b) the version with the vandalism in
because links to "diff between current and last version" change as
soon as there is a different "current" version.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
Oh, thanks, I thought I was going nuts for a second there!

Christiaan

On 24 Feb 2005, at 6:49 pm, Rowan Collins wrote:

> On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 05:07:57 +1100, David Gerard
> <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>> What Gerard actually did with the above edit was take this paragraph:
>
> <snip>
>
> This is just a non-permanent diff links problem :) The edit in
> question was unquestionably vandalism.
> The edit you're looking at it is me trying to be helpful; the one
> Christiaan posted (or meant to) was a revert of blanking the whole
> page.
>
> For future reference, when pointing out vandalism always post:
> a) the diff were the vandalism took place; or
> b) the version with the vandalism in
> because links to "diff between current and last version" change as
> soon as there is a different "current" version.
>
> --
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]


from_name: Walter van Kalken

body:
>
>The desirability discussion presumably needs greater notice in the
>technical discussion. Many people (myself included) consider separation of
>technical methods of implementing a highly debatable policy decision from
>debate of the desirability of that policy decision to be artificial and
>disingenuous at best. Doing so appears to make the debatable social
>decision a fait accompli. Trying to send *all* criticism off to a separate
>article is also a favourite tool of POV warriors on en: and presumably
>elsewhere; possibly this is seen as reminiscent of that.
>
>
>
>
I conquer with David Gerard, he stated very eloquently how I feel on
this subject. Before even thinking about technical implication lets
first debate if we want it or not. As I understand it the developers
have been asked already to program this? How can that be if we didn't
even agree on such a feature in the first place.

Walter van Kalken


from_name: John Lee

body:
Karl A. Krueger wrote:

>On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 08:17:56PM +0800, John Lee wrote:
>
>
>>Karl A. Krueger wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Therefore, any labeling of selected categories as "potentially
>>> offensive" is an NPOV violation and unacceptable on that regard.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>I refer you to the argument regarding disambiguation pages that has
>>already been discussed by others on this list.
>>
>>
>	[snip]
>
>
>>It's not POV and actually inconveniencing for those of us looking for
>>other articles (imagine , but it's accepted because the cost to
>>benefit ratio is not that severe.
>>
>>
>
>You're right:  disambiguation isn't an NPOV problem.  It also isn't
>terribly relevant to the issue at hand, even if you repeat that claim
>five times in one post.  I'll respond to it just once.
>
>Here's the difference:  Disambiguation doesn't involve anyone trying to
>hide away material, or "protect" me from things "for my own good".  It
>also does not involve any judgment that some material is "less suitable"
>or "offensive" -- only that it is less likely to be looked-for.
>
>
Intent means nothing. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
There is no difference between the disambiguation of pages and this
beyond their intention.

>In contrast, any kind of censorship / filtering regime necessarily
>contains within it the assumption that some material is _lesser_ than
>others, by dint of offending the protected group ... and moreover, that
>some people's offense is unimportant, while other people's offense is
>important.  It is not presented as a guess, but as a moral injunction
>("this material IS offensive, it MUST BE turned off by default") which
>it is not within Wikipedia's purview to make.
>
>
We don't judge material to be offensive; rather, we judge it to be
likely undesirable for a good portion of our readers. Filtering images
does not compromise NPOV because readers will still have the choice in
their hands. Otherwise, I suppose purposely not directly linking to
Goatse/Tubgirl is also going against NPOV and assuming that material is
lesser. Likewise with not hosting any such images at all for easy access
(surely one of the most-viewed websites on the internet is fair game for
a screencap?), even though it's very easy to obtain and upload them
under fair use.

>>However, I have also pointed out before that photographs have more
>>psychological impact than illustrations, which have more psychological
>>impact than text (just try asking a psychologist). Therefore, a good
>>deal of people offended (or at least annoyed) by the photo formerly at
>>[[autofellatio]] probably wouldn't feel the same way about text.
>>
>>
>
>I don't think we actually have sufficient evidence on that.  Again,
>consider _Ulysses_, a work of text (no images) that was once banned in
>the U.S. for obscenity.
>
>
That was then, this is now. Sure, based on this we might as well
disregard all editorial decisions regarding propriety, but Wikipedia
should progress with society, not force it ahead.

>One of the past discussions related to this issue had to do with whether
>Wikipedia should link to sexually explicit material offsite, rather than
>keeping copies of them within the database.  The idea was that people
>who are judgmental about such material would thus not be able to decry
>Wikipedia as a collection of pornography.  However, it seemed to me (and
>still does) that such folks would just as easily call Wikipedia a Web
>directory of pornography.
>
>
If it's going to be as untasteful as the autofellatio image, that would
seem a reasonable objection to me. Especially considering it's hard to
find pornographic material online without getting a package of spyware
to come with it. No, I think it's better to host such material but
filter certain things by default. That, IMO, is much fairer to our readers.

>>I have never argued for catering to the whim of extremists. That's
>>stupid. There is no reason why we shouldn't filter certain images,
>>though.
>>
>>
>
>It seems to me that when challenged, you rather readily lean on what you
>call "common sense".  I'm not sure what you mean by "common sense",
>since the some of points that we're discussing are actually pretty deep
>political ideas and not everyday issues at all.  "Common sense" usually
>means people's knowledge of the everyday, like "things fall when you
>drop them".
>
>
Common sense as in "communism is an extremely unrealistic ideal because
it presumes everyone will be honest and altruistic". That sort of thing.

>It sounds to me kind of like you're using "common sense" to mean that
>everyone reasonable must agree with your assumptions, and anyone who
>disagrees is an "extremist" and their views should be ignored.
>
>I don't think that's a very convincing mode of argument.
>
>
Extremists shouldn't be ignored since there's occasionally something
useful coming from them, but seriously, how many things can you push to
an extreme without it becoming a bad thing? Extreme freedom results in
anarchy. Extreme eating results in obesity. Extreme dieting results in
malnutrition/anorexia/bulimia. I always believe in striking a balance,
and a filtering system will strike a balance.

>>It's the cost to benefit ratio we're talking about here: You're
>>extremely far more likely to find someone damn pissed to be looking at
>>a photograph of a clitoris than to find someone damn pissed to be
>>looking at a photograph of a caterpillar.
>>
>>
>
>That position generalizes very poorly to other classes of articles,
>though.  (And generalizability is a must for rules.)  The fact that
>people get "damn pissed" about something is no reason not to keep it in
>an encyclopedia.  There are an awful lot of _historical facts_ it's
>worth being damn pissed about.
>
>
The difference is that publishing them won't give people ground to
attack you. If we had some sort of filtering system, we can always point
to it and say "We tried". That counts for something. If we let images
like the autofellatio one be, a decent number of publications will carry
the story when it breaks, quite likely with a neutral or even slight
anti-Wikipedia bent. If we have a filtering system, though, even a
rudimentary one, we can always point to it for some ass-coverage. It
won't protect us from severe right-wingers, but at least public opinion
will be sufficiently divided.

>Moreover, it isn't clear to me that we can do a cost-benefit analysis of
>the principles on which Wikipedia was founded, such as NPOV.  Neutrality
>is not just a benefit, but a basic ground-rule of Wikipedia.
>
>
Of course. The problem is, taking it to an extreme is a bad idea. An
extreme definition of NPOV means we could never use weasel words (even
in the lead section). An extreme definition of NPOV means all sorts of
weird extrapolations, i.e. that letting an article contain charting data
but not another do the same is POV, or that not giving an equal share to
all sides of an argument is POV. Like most Wikipedia policies so far,
NPOV can easily be broken down to "Don't let any bias show in the
writing of the article".

>(NPOV for Wikipedia is not just a "benefit", but rather a "boundary".
>We don't ask, "Is this violation of NPOV worth what it gets us?"
>Rather, we take it as read that any violation of NPOV is a bad thing,
>and we try to avoid such violations wherever possible rather than making
>excuses for them.  We don't always _succeed_, but we don't give up.)
>
>
Since filtering images does not violate NPOV, I don't see what this has
to do with it.

>>Besides, it's not really an imposition of someone's POV as to what is
>>offensive. It's an editorial decision about what images would be
>>potentially offensive or greatly distractive to a substantial amount of
>>people.
>>
>>
>
>Sure, and I'll just go make an "editorial decision" that homeopathy is
>bunkum, and put that all over the article [[Homeopathy]].  When someone
>accuses me of an NPOV violation, I'll just tell them it was nothing of
>the sort, it was an "editorial decision".  :)
>
>
But it is an NPOV violation. That cannot be compared to filtering
images, since all it takes is one click to view them, and no more
technical expertise is required than knowing how to move and click a mouse.

>Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one.  An NPOV violation is still
>against Wikipedia policy, even if you call it "editorial decision".
>
>
Yes, not using disambiguation pages on [[Hey Jude]] is an NPOV
violation. We shouldn't be disenfranchising the 1% of visitors who might
want the album instead of the song.

>>>1. All images are treated equally by default -- either displayed, or not
>>> displayed.  Thus, the system does not incorporate any POV biases such
>>> as the idea that nudity is "offensive" and caterpillars are not.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>I do not entertain the idea of such extremist pandering to NPOV. By
>>virtue of that logic, we might as well host a disambiguation page at
>>[[Chicago]] even though almost everyone will be looking for [[Chicago,
>>Illinois]].
>>
>>
>
>If you think NPOV is "extremist" and that that's bad, you're on the
>wrong project.  This is Wikipedia, where NPOV is a basic ground-rule.
>
>
NPOV isn't extremist, but giving it an extremist bent like I pointed out
above is bad.

>Or, in another sense, there's nothing wrong with being extreme about
>NPOV.  It's what we do here.  Wikipedia _is_, in this sense, an
>extremist project; that's why there are so people from Britannica,
>mainstream media, and other "normal" "middle-of-the-road" publications
>who can't figure us out, and assume that we're doomed to failure.
>
>
If Wikipedia were extremist, it would have no editorial policies, no
arbcom, no administrators, no page protection. It'd be a giant
free-for-all. After all, that's what an extreme interpretation of a wiki
is, isn't it?

>>The trouble is as Wikipedia grows, we seem to have a penchant for
>>relying on legalistic issues. Instead of having a general policy of
>>"reverting except for vandalism is bad" we need to have the 3RR which
>>is easily gamed. Instead of having a policy on personal attacks, we
>>have to go through the whole merry-go-round of RFC, RFM and RFAr.
>>
>>
>
>Sounds to me like your proposal would be more of this, rather than less.
>
>It would end up with nasty, unresolvable arguments over what should go
>in the "off by default" categories, because of what those categories
>would really mean:
>
>If the category "Nudity" is off by default, then the meaning of that
>category would really be not just "these images contain nudity" but
>rather "these images contain nudity AND Wikipedia believes nudity is
>offensive".
>
>
No, it would imply "these images contain nudity, and the style of their
depiction has convinced Wikipedia's editors that they would be
unsuitable for the general viewing public, although if you want to view
this image, there's nothing stopping you". Basically, it's giving
readers a choice. The difference is that the default choice is to hide
for images we know _will_ offend a good number of people.

>And that is a judgment that Wikipedia still has no business making; and
>it is a judgment that would cause endless dispute.  Just as Wikipedia
>does not have an opinion on the issue of whether homeopathy is bunkum,
>Wikipedia does not have an opinion on whether nudity is offensive.
>
>
Of course, it doesn't. It just hides it by default because a great deal
of readers _do_ find it offensive. For those who don't, it's easy to
remove the filtering system.

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


from_name: Tomer Chachamu

subject: [Wikitech-l] SQL "diffs"

body:
On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 18:35:28 +0100, petko yotov <5ko at free.fr> wrote:
> Erik Zachte wrote:
> > Would it be possible to make dumps every one or two days, so that we are
> > less dependant on good fortune next time?
>
> I am not a specialist nor a programmer so this may be stupid but isn't there a
> way to make an SQL "diffs" every day? Aren't the "logs" that you spoke about
> almost the same? If they can be offered for download, a complete database
> dumps (very time-consuming) may be created even more rarely.
>
> The "diffs.sql" would not be enormous in MB and if applied ("patched") one
> after another to the database, everyone would have the latest complete data.
> This would also save lots of bandwidth for downloads.

Well, there's exporting only articles with a cur version later than
the last backup. That would work for the current versions. Actually,
the old versions can work in a similar manner (although ten article
texts are compressed into one entry nowadays so it's a little more
complicated).


body:
On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 21:04:40 +0100, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
> First of all, The current version is not sufficient. It does not address
> any of the concerns that I have about this thing.

No, but it does state *why* it doesn't address them, and point to
another page reserved specifically *for* addressing them.

> This whole proposal is about introducing censorship into the wikimedia
> projects and it should be introduced into the Mediawiki software itself.

"...should be introduced"? I see only a discussion of how it *could*
be implemented. That is what my extra sentence was trying to make
clear.

> [...] The arguments about this are
> hiden in a discussion that was held on the en:wikipedia mailing list.
> All stuff that is in opposition to this proposal is moved away to a
> place that does not even discuss why this idea would be proper.

Your second sentence contradicts your first (they're not hidden away,
they've been moved to a page you're not satisfied with). *So use that
place to discuss those issues.* Christiaan et al have stated that the
particular page in question is not intended to cover those issues, and
I don't think the fact that one debate is separated into 2 pages, each
covering a well-defined aspect, is "hiding" or "denying" anything;
it's separating it.

Clearly, both sides have strong opinions on this, but if people want
to explore the technical possibilities *at the same time as* the
desirability, then who are you to stop them?

The statement I added, making clear that this was *not* a "fait
accompli", and was *not* actively in development, and would *not* be
carried through without discussion of its desirability, seems to be
approved by the authors/backers of that page, and so presumably
reflects their own claim.

Do you not believe them? Because if you *do* believe them, then you
should be able to carry on making the case for the undesirability, and
ignore their technical musings in the hope [or, indeed, belief] that
such will have been a waste of time once you have presented a
well-argued and coherent case why it would be a bad idea to try.

> On a different subject. Angela has rightfully complained that this
> subject is not what the Foundation mailing list is for.

Yes, apologies to those who are annoyed by this traffic; moving
threads to a better forum is not something that mailing lists are good
at. :( In fact, I should probably have refrained from being drawn so
far into this debate anyway...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Zend Optimiser

body:
On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 08:50:40 +0200, Domas Mituzas
<Domas.Mituzas at microlink.lt> wrote:
> Well, here again NSK wrote:
> > Wikipedia/WikiCommons/Wikibooks are all dangerously slow. I recently installed
> > the Zend Optimiser 2.5.7 on my site www.wikinerds.org . Zend Optimiser speeds
> > up php by 40%. I think you should install it too if you haven't done so already.
>
> Have you tried Turck? It's on all pages you may find about MediaWiki performance tuning.
> http://turck-mmcache.sourceforge.net/. And yes, wikimedia sites sure run bytecode cache.
> You may try other caching facilities (memcached, squid, ...) as well, then you could tell
> that wikineds.org is running xxx% faster ;-)
>
> Domas

We are already using Turck, but see:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-February/020252.htm
Is this authentic?


body:
James D. Forrester wrote:

>On Thursday, February 24, 2005 5:36 PM, Tony Sidaway
><minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Stan Shebs said:
>>
>>
>>>Even though we ourselves might not want a bowdlerized WP,
>>>it would be extraordinarily convenient to have some kind
>>>of subset quasi-mirror that advertised themselves as
>>>"child-safe".
>>>
>>Absolutely.  This is what I've been proposing for some time.
>>
>
>Indeed. It's called "Wikipedia 1.0", and /that/ can have filtering and
>whathaveyou as much as you want, with a "child-friendly" default (whatever
>that is).
>
Actually, I don't think the filtering is something that a Foundation
sponsored organization can be involved with. As the discussion here
has demonstrated, there isn't a single global standard of decency
and propriety, so any single filtered "1.0" is going to be a problem
for somebody, and probably lots of somebodies. A 1.0 that seems good
for the UK will likely be treated with horror in Jesusland, and vice
versa.

To abuse the Linux analogy some more, Linus just works on his kernel,
and he doesn't try to tell people that, say, Red Hat is the *real*
Linux distro. WP trying to come out with a single encyclopedia deemed
suitable for all schools is just going to open up the mother of all
edit wars, as each community feels compelled to enforce its standard
on every other one in the world. Better to let independent groups
develop their own postprocessing rules, while WP itself expresses no
position favoring one over the other. If parents and schools in
Missouri want a fully-clothed WP, then they should be willing to do
the work - or contract it out - rather than forcing people on the
other side of the world to follow their norms.

There really is a significant business opportunity here, and it
can be accomplished perfectly without disrupting any of WP's
ongoing operations or making editors do things they think are
wrong.

Stan


body:
Yes, an ambiguous term, like "discrimination." Many terms that are
equated mostly with negative connotations (mostly for political
reasons) are in fact neutral terms. Hence we have negative and positive
discrimination for instance.

Christiaan

On 24 Feb 2005, at 7:48 pm, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> That effectively converts the term into an ambiguous one.  We may
> easily agree that the three issues that you list have more positive
> than negative connotations, but the person who believes that trees
> cause pollution will see the political correctness of the
> environmentalist as a negative.  This does not bode well for any
> menaingful use of the term.
> Ec
>
> Christiaan Briggs wrote:
>
>> Political correctness may often be used as a pejorative term but it
>> actually has positive connotations as well as the negative that Ray
>> has pointed out. Political correctness has been used for all sorts of
>> issues, e.g. civil rights movement, womens rights, and the
>> environment to name a few. In this sense it is not always something
>> to be "overcome" but encouraged in some instances.
>>
>> Christiaan
>>
>> On 24 Feb 2005, at 6:19 pm, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>
>>> Arno M wrote:
>>>
>>>> Just out of curiosity - does Political correctness apply as NPOV or
>>>> as an ideology as described below?
>>>
>>> Political correctness is independent of the ideology it supports.
>>> It can attach to any ideology.  It will generally involve supporting
>>> the "right" views as they prevail in the society out of fear of
>>> being seen as different.  Sometimes the penalty for not being
>>> politically correct may be social ostracism; in other circumstances,
>>> such as in Nazi Germany, the penalties could be far more severe.  In
>>> the United States supporting the troops in Iraq is a matter of
>>> political correctness.
>>>
>>> Thus I would see political correctness as neither NPOV nor an
>>> ideology.  At the same time practitioners of political correctness
>>> have a personal need to believe that their actions express a NPOV,
>>> something which they can easily confirm in the positive feedback
>>> loop of their own community. Overcoming political correctness
>>> requires both insight and courage.


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
David Gerard wrote:

>Christiaan Briggs christiaan at last-straw.net:
>:On 24 Feb 2005, at 6:49 pm, Rowan Collins wrote:
>:> On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 05:07:57 +1100, David Gerard
>:> <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
>
>:>> What Gerard actually did with the above edit was take this paragraph:
>
>:> This is just a non-permanent diff links problem :) The edit in
>:> question was unquestionably vandalism.
>:> The edit you're looking at it is me trying to be helpful; the one
>:> Christiaan posted (or meant to) was a revert of blanking the whole
>:> page.
>
>:Oh, thanks, I thought I was going nuts for a second there!
>
>
>You're right - looking at the history, that would be disrupting to make a
>point.  This is probably not a helpful thing to do in a hot debate.
>
>Is the present version sufficient for you? It's pretty much OK by me.
>GerardM?
>
>
>- d.
>
Hoi,
First of all, The current version is not sufficient. It does not address
any of the concerns that I have about this thing. My point has been
consistently been reverted and if it wasn't such an important issue I
would have found it a rediculous issue. All the comments that I had
added have been moved away and it now gives the impression that it is a
squaky clean suggestion and that it is not controversial at all.

Secondly, you state that it was vandalism. Fine, then what label does
the manner that my contributions were treated with deserve ?

This whole proposal is about introducing censorship into the wikimedia
projects and it should be introduced into the Mediawiki software itself.
Images are only to be used after carefull consideration. Default
settings have to be found to prevent the public from seeing "offensive"
material. What offensive material is, is not specified. It is denied
that it has anything to do with censorship. The arguments about this are
hiden in a discussion that was held on the en:wikipedia mailing list.
All stuff that is in opposition to this proposal is moved away to a
place that does not even discuss why this idea would be proper. Now you
ask me if the current version is sufficient ?

On a different subject. Angela has rightfully complained that this
subject is not what the Foundation mailing list is for. This is the
reason why I have stopped responding on this list. But as it has not
stopped and I have been asked a direct question

Thanks,
    No thanks !
       Gerard


body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> Rowan Collins wrote:
>
>> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>>
>>> Hoi,
>>> First of all, The current version is not sufficient. It does not
>>> address any of the concerns that I have about this thing.
>>
>> No, but it does state *why* it doesn't address them, and point to
>> another page reserved specifically *for* addressing them.
>>
> Which is where they do not justify their own proposal. So in essence
> it is just a move to rid themselves of what they see as off topic.

I would suggest a little patience Gerard. I hope to post some pros and
cons in the next couple of days. I've spent a lot of my time dealing
with vandalism etc., so you'll have to excuse me for not having the
time for more constructive things.

Christiaan


body:
Rowan Collins wrote:

>On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 21:04:40 +0100, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>
>>Hoi,
>>First of all, The current version is not sufficient. It does not address
>>any of the concerns that I have about this thing.
>>
>>
>
>No, but it does state *why* it doesn't address them, and point to
>another page reserved specifically *for* addressing them.
>
>
Which is where they do not justify their own proposal. So in essence it
is just a move to rid themselves of what they see as off topic.

>
>
>>This whole proposal is about introducing censorship into the wikimedia
>>projects and it should be introduced into the Mediawiki software itself.
>>
>>
>
>"...should be introduced"? I see only a discussion of how it *could*
>be implemented. That is what my extra sentence was trying to make
>clear.
>
>
>
My mistake, it is not my mother language :)

>>[...] The arguments about this are
>>hiden in a discussion that was held on the en:wikipedia mailing list.
>>All stuff that is in opposition to this proposal is moved away to a
>>place that does not even discuss why this idea would be proper.
>>
>>
>
>Your second sentence contradicts your first (they're not hidden away,
>they've been moved to a page you're not satisfied with). *So use that
>place to discuss those issues.* Christiaan et al have stated that the
>particular page in question is not intended to cover those issues, and
>I don't think the fact that one debate is separated into 2 pages, each
>covering a well-defined aspect, is "hiding" or "denying" anything;
>it's separating it.
>
>
The discussion was moved from the talk page. It is now out of contex as
the stuff it reacts to is not there. The argument is, that this reflects
what was discussed on the en:wikipedia mailing list. They have not given
the arguments in there and use it as justification for their proposal
for this censoring mechanism.

>Clearly, both sides have strong opinions on this, but if people want
>to explore the technical possibilities *at the same time as* the
>desirability, then who are you to stop them?
>
>The statement I added, making clear that this was *not* a "fait
>accompli", and was *not* actively in development, and would *not* be
>carried through without discussion of its desirability, seems to be
>approved by the authors/backers of that page, and so presumably
>reflects their own claim.
>
>Do you not believe them? Because if you *do* believe them, then you
>should be able to carry on making the case for the undesirability, and
>ignore their technical musings in the hope [or, indeed, belief] that
>such will have been a waste of time once you have presented a
>well-argued and coherent case why it would be a bad idea to try.
>
What is there to believe. I can believe that they assume that this will
be all the censorship we will have. I do believe that this is the
beginning of the end of a free encyclopeida that aims tp contain all
knowledge. They will say that this is a straw mans argument. :(

So what is there but frustration. Frustration for seeing that censorship
is being pushed. The worst thing is that I can see them get this
censorship thing into Mediawiki because there is always someone capable
and willing of coding this.

Thanks,
    No thanks !
        GerardM


from_name: David Gerard

subject:
[WikiEN-l] When goals conflict: There is no "right" for
	everyoneto edit Wiki

body:
Zoney (zoney.ie at gmail.com) [050224 12:43]:
> On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:08:32 -0700, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:

> > Certain religions and ideologies systematically devalue most of humanity.
> > Wikipedia policies are a sustained assault against that frame of mind.

> Language such as "a sustained assault" is out of place.

It's a sustained defense. They see it as a sustained assault, however.

- d.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] What now?

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> Stan Shebs (shebs at apple.com) [050225 12:12]:
>>So I have my little mediawiki 1.4rc1 running OK on my PB G4
>>(Panther at the moment, Tiger coming up), and am looking at the
>>bugzilla list, but it's somewhat unclear on how to choose what
>>to look at - priorities and criticalities seem kind of random.
>>I have some bigger projects in mind, but this is my first foray
>>into web apps, so I'd like to try some simpler hackery to begin
>>with. Any suggestions?
>
> Seconded (almost got it up on FreeBSD). Is there any categorisation of bugs
> that count as small things no-one's gotten around to for those unfamiliar
> with the codebase, or something like that?

Hm, a few things off the top of my head...

Adding test cases for reported parser bugs to parserTest.txt would be
super nice, and should be really easy. If you can come up with fixes for
them too that would be even better of course. :)

Also nice would be looking for bugs marked with the 'patch' keyword,
where there's a posted patch which hasn't been applied. If it looks
good, and you can confirm it works (or fix it / improve it) and give us
a reminder, that would be helpful.

[1478, 1334, 1120, 1403, 1423, 1479, 1539, 1455] There are several open
bugs for language file updates; these need cleanup and testing.
Hardcoded 'Wikipedia' names need to be removed from some files, and some
older HTML formatting needs to be changed to wiki or plaintext. This is
mostly some search-and-replace and testing that things look ok.

[1037, 1023] Many UI messages are not properly sanitized for HTML
output, or are explicitly done in HTML; moving on to new versions these
need to be appropriately fixed to plaintext (wrapped in
htmlspecialchars()) or wiki text (output with $wgOut->addWikiText()). At
the least, HTML should be valid.

If someone can manage to reproduce and fix the 'cannot redefine class'
errors that some people have on installation, that would be great! It's
probably something to do with include paths and/or path normalization,
but I've never been able to reproduce it and nobody experiencing the
problem has been able to debug it. After the PHPTAL temp file problems
(now gone in 1.4) this is probably the most common installation complaint.

Every now and then people complain that Special:Whatlinkshere cuts off
after 500 items. (Some pages have over 30,000 backlinks; showing them
all at once is *not* an option.) The links are unsorted, and the display
is additionally complicated by it showing subtrees for redirects. Your
mission: find a sensible, performant way of displaying and paging
through this list.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Thomas Gries

subject: [Wikitech-l] More frequent dumps possible for contingency?

body:
Hi Erik,

Erik Zachte schrieb:

>Would it be possible to make dumps every one or two days, so that we are
>less dependant on good fortune next time?
>
as far as I understood from another mail (which I cannot find anymore),
due to Tim Starling's compression run since December - -> in order to
reserve a maximum of CPU resources for the so-urgently needed
compression, the dumps have been put to a lower priority than the
compression.

This meant: no dumps for a while.


body:
On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 13:50:33 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan
<felixwiki at earthsphere.org> wrote:
> Thank you very much for your information.  Where can I find the technical
> details about setting up the mediawiki software?

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_FAQ

> I also remember that somewhere on the list someone mentioned they started
> something on Wikicities to test out the feasibility of a new language
> Wikipedia and then apply to move to the main Wikipedia.  What is the
> policy of Wikicities and how possible is it to test out a project over
> there?

Content in, or about, constructed languages can be added to
http://conlang.wikicities.com

Please see http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Category:Policy first;
especially the terms of use at
http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Terms_of_use

Alternatively, there is the scratchpad for trialing potential
projects: http://scratchpad.wikicities.com/wiki/Mini_wikis

Angela


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikitech-l] SQL "diffs"

references:
<NMENLBGDKAFGBDHEPOBNEEELCMAA.e.p.zachte@chello.nl>
	<200502241835.28374.5ko@free.fr>
	<9a878c4405022412039fcbe22@mail.gmail.com>

body:
Tomer Chachamu wrote:
> Well, there's exporting only articles with a cur version later than

How much data (megabytes) are in the cur table for en.wikipedia, and
how much are in the old table?  I understand these numbers grow all
the time, but does anybody have rough estimates?  And perhaps some
numbers for where we were a year ago?

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Proxy scanning: a suggestion

body:
Neil Harris wrote:

> I've noticed increasing levels of vandalism via anonymizing proxies.
> We turned off the automatic proxy-scanning some time ago because of
> complaints by the clue-deficient who saw this as potential attacks.
> However, it might be a good idea to do the following:
>
> * whenever an admin _blocks_ a user, the IP they were editing from
> should be automatically proxy-scanned, and blocked indefinitely if it
> is an open proxy (_in addition to_ the username/IP block that would
> have been applied)
>
> By restricting proxy scans to proven vandals, this will reduce the
> rate of proxy scans to a few dozen a day (from tens of thousands
> before), and result in a proportionately trivial level of complaints
> which can safely be auto-replied or ignored. It will also allow the
> reply to be very clear: "we detected abuse from your user, verified
> that it was coming from an unsecured proxy on your network, and took
> appropriate action".
>
> 99% of the code for this already exists, so it should be trivial to
> put in place -- however, I'm aware that our heroic developers are
> somewhat busy...
>
> -- Neil

Hoi,
We have had some problems with proxy scans before Waerth, a wikimedian
who is really active, has no choise but use a proxy. He is living in
Thailand.

It would be much better to change the working of the banning process.
When an IP range is known to be a proxy, we could disallow anonymous
cowards from editing. As we can be aware that traffic is from a proxy,
we could allow known users from editing from these proxies. In this
manner we prevent vandalism by anonymous cowards while providing a
service to the known good. :)

Thanks,
    GerardM


body:
John Lee (johnleemk at gawab.com) [050224 23:02]:
> Karl A. Krueger wrote:

> >(NPOV for Wikipedia is not just a "benefit", but rather a "boundary".
> >We don't ask, "Is this violation of NPOV worth what it gets us?"
> >Rather, we take it as read that any violation of NPOV is a bad thing,
> >and we try to avoid such violations wherever possible rather than making
> >excuses for them.  We don't always _succeed_, but we don't give up.)

> Since filtering images does not violate NPOV, I don't see what this has
> to do with it.

You state this flatly, but it appears this is considered a highly
contentious point in itself. It also appears that policies are being
constructed to this aim as an apparent end-run around NPOV, using pieces
that don't in themselves necessarily violate NPOV.

A filter applied by default filters by a point of view, however
non-violating the pieces going into that filter might be.

- d.


body:
Christiaan Briggs (christiaan at last-straw.net) [050224 23:36]:

> I've come back for more advice. Although the outlining of and
> discussion about the desirability of [[End-user image suppression]] has
> been moved to [[Desirability of End-user image suppression]], and this
> is made clear in the opening paragraph of [[End-user image
> suppression]], User:GerardM is still insisting on posting desirability
> discussion to [[End-user image suppression]]. What to do?

The desirability discussion presumably needs greater notice in the
technical discussion. Many people (myself included) consider separation of
technical methods of implementing a highly debatable policy decision from
debate of the desirability of that policy decision to be artificial and
disingenuous at best. Doing so appears to make the debatable social
decision a fait accompli. Trying to send *all* criticism off to a separate
article is also a favourite tool of POV warriors on en: and presumably
elsewhere; possibly this is seen as reminiscent of that.

- d.


body:
Nicholas Knight (nknight at runawaynet.com) [050225 00:04]:
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> >It is one thing to split articles into two, it is another to castrate
> >the talk pages and move all things that are not to your liking
> >elsewhere. Your right to ask for a method to have mechanisms into the
> >mediawiki software is equal to my right to have an angst of this first
> >step of introducing censorship into our projects.

> THERE. IS. NO. CENSORSHIP.

Capitals or no, it appears at the very least this is a mechanism to enable
and encourage it. I doubt you would claim there is no wish from anyone to
censor Wikipedia per se, or to do something that could reasonably be tagged
censorship.

- d.


body:
Christiaan Briggs (christiaan at last-straw.net) [050224 23:56]:
> David Gerard wrote:

> >The desirability discussion presumably needs greater notice in the
> >technical discussion.

> You're not seriously suggesting that Gerard did not know about it are
> you?

As I explained in the bit you snipped, dividing the technical discussion of
how to implement a feature from the desirability of that feature in the
first place may be seen as artificial and disingenuous. And it certainly
appears that this is being seen that way.

Further (to say again the thing you snipped), continuing to discuss the
implementation of a feature while purging note of the fact that its
esirability is *strongly* contentious closely resembles an attempt to make
it a fait accompli.

Also, you should note that - although I am certainly not saying this is
your intention at all - trying to shift *all* criticism off to a separate
page is a favourite tactic of POV warriors on en: and in other places. As
such, your actions may be seen as highly reminiscent of that.

I suggest you not try so hard to purge this technical page of all mention
of the highly contentious social debate it's concerned with implementing
one side of. i.e. "It hurts when I do this!" "Don't do that, then."

- d.


body:
Christiaan Briggs (christiaan at last-straw.net) [050225 00:15]:
> David Gerard wrote:

> >I doubt you would claim there is no wish from anyone to censor
> >Wikipedia per se, or to do something that could reasonably be tagged
> >censorship.

> Except that self-censorship (i.e. suppression of images) already takes
> place on Wikipedia due to some people taking offence at being presented
> with certain images of the clitoris, torture and autofellatio.

This appears to be saying just what I said, but is phrased as a
disagreement. Please clarify.

- d.


body:
Nicholas Knight (nknight at runawaynet.com) [050225 00:00]:
> David Gerard wrote:

> >A filter applied by default filters by a point of view, however
> >non-violating the pieces going into that filter might be.

> No one, NO ONE, has said any sort of filtering must take place by default.

This is not the case - John Lee has, for example, at length. It appears you
are not keeping track of what people are actually advocating.

- d.


body:
Christiaan Briggs (christiaan at last-straw.net) [050225 00:24]:

> You didn't answer my question. You're not seriously suggesting that
> Gerard did not know about it are you?

No, nor did I at any time suggest it. If you can point at the message in
which I did so, I would welcome this so as to improve the clarity of my
communicaiton.

> The rest of your email didn't make sense to me.

Even the bits about how continuing technical discussion of implementing a
feature when the very need for it is highly contentious can be considered
artificial and disingenuous, and come across as an intention to implement
the debatable policy as a fait accompli?

(Note that this concerns appearances, not necessarily what you were thinking
at the time.)

> How does one purge
> debate while at the same announcing where it is in the opening
> paragraph?

Evidently he feels it is profoundly lacking in prominence.

> Purge, in case you were unaware, means to remove. The only thing that
> has happened, on the advice of, Rowan Collins, is that it has been
> _moved_ so as discussion about technical implications is not drowned by
> Gerard's shrill.

Are you assuming bad faith on Gerard's part?

- d.


body:
Nicholas Knight (nknight at runawaynet.com) [050225 00:26]:

> I don't feel very friendly toward someone that can't articulate
> themselves but insists they're right.

PERHAPS HE COULD WRITE ALL IN CAPS. SHOUTING USUALLY WORKS, DOESN'T IT?

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Release of E-mail notification EN 2.02 for MW 1.3.11

body:
Release of ENotif 2.02 for Mediawiki 1.3.11 .

Full code mediawiki 1.3.11 incl. ENotif 2.02 can be downloaded as
http://www.tgries.de/mw/mw1311+en202.tgz .

It installs into a subdirectory /testwiki .
No new features.

Pls. read previous comment for details of installation on
http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454 .

Accompanying documentation on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Enotif

Hotline: mailto:mail at wikinaut.de (mention your phone number, if you
wish. I'll call you back.)

Tom
Remember: ENotif plus EAuthent (E-mail address authentication) is
already in CVS HEAD, both fully optional and including install.php code.
screenshots of it are on http://meta.wikipedia.org/Enotif .


body:
Nicholas Knight (nknight at runawaynet.com) [050225 00:32]:
> David Gerard wrote:
> >Nicholas Knight (nknight at runawaynet.com) [050225 00:00]:

> >>No one, NO ONE, has said any sort of filtering must take place by default.

> >This is not the case - John Lee has, for example, at length. It appears you
> >are not keeping track of what people are actually advocating.

> Please note my words carefully. Specifically, note that the word
> "should" is not the same as the word "must".

Whilst at no time doubting your good intentions, I must point out that in
censorship^Wcontent-filtering debates, "should" has a historical tendency
to become "must" just like that.

- d.


from_name: Peter Danenberg

body:
> Or, even c/C++, or *shudder* java?

     Some cavaliers (Timwi, Magnus, Manfred) have made oeil-
lades in that direction, Ed; and a C engine would enable  us
to dish out pages, say, as a native Apache handler.

     It's  a  big project, however; and the .php, being just
functional enough, engenders a fatal inertia.

--
Peter Danenberg                                           .
wikisophia.org                                           ..:


body:
On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 15:43:03 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Unfortunately the conlang part does not apply to Cantonese, although
> the miniwiki "scratchpad" may, it's not much different from what we
> have already at Meta.

I only meant this for Quenya. I don't think there would be any
advantage to starting a Cantonese encyclopedia at Wikicities.

Angela.