from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikitech-l] 1.5/HEAD schema finalised?

body:
I understand the 1.5 database schema is considerably changed from that
of 1.4. Is it finalised? Still susceptible to minor tweaks? Still
susceptible to complete revision?

(I want to play with tools to do things with the SQL database, which
would need the schema written into them.)

- d.


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Putting Wikipedia on a CD or DVD

body:
[cc to wikipedia-l]

Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> Will Wikipedia fit on a CD or DVD?
> How big is the "current article" database? (Excluding the text
> of all previous versions, because some articles have been
> modified over 500 times!)

The en: SQL dump is over 500MB compressed (.bz2) - that'd be well
over a gig uncompressed.

> What are Wikipedia's plans to move toward 1.0 and issue a Disk,
> Book, or Multi-volume set?

So far my plan [[User:David Gerard/1.0]] appears to be the closest
to a coherent plan. It relies on [[m:Article validation feature]],
which Magnus has decided will be polished up for inclusion in
MediaWiki 1.5.

This plan is so far a way to produce a 1.0-ready distribution.
We have a paper publisher who might be interested, but it would
have to be a CONSIDERABLY cut down version - think single-volume
encyclopedia, because the current en: text would be bigger than
Britannica if printed in full ...

> How far has anyone looked into delivering copies of Wikipedia
> (in any medium) to third-world schools, as in Africa or
> Indonesia? (To show my level of ignorance: Are there even any
> public libraries in Africa?)
> If Wikipedia received a donation of $100,000 - specifically earmarked
> for CD distribution to Africa, COULD it do anything?

We can do a dump to DVD very easily ;-) en: and fr: would at least
make a start on covering Africa. We could probably include *all* the
local languages with that, as their Wikipedias are much smaller.

(There are small considerations like copyright liability in an
environment where you can't just remove violations from the online
history ... but never mind that for the moment.)

I have no idea if anyone's investigated the practicalities of
distribution in Africa. However, I can guess that Africa is blanketed
in minute detail by other charities, and I have no doubt we could
hitch a ride with several, which would get a DVD into every school.
Possibly even something to run the DVD on, and something to power the
thing to run the DVD on ;-) (Or just a cheap PC with a hard disk
full of Wikipedia and a DVD for backup.)

- d.


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [WikiEN-l] Re: Putting Wikipedia on a CD or DVD


subject: [WikiEN-l] Putting Wikipedia on a CD or DVD

body:
Tom Haws wrote:

> Of course we have to get Wikipedia ready with a working Wiki
> rating/tagging/validation system.  That is really our whole job.
> I work with a help-Africa charity called Care For Life that is based in
> Mozambique, and I think if Wikipedia could provide reliable, selectable
> content, that humanitarian organizations like Care For Life could
> creatively solve the problem of distribution.  I could ask the board of
> Care For Life, but it seems it would be a small matter to create a
> Wikipedia Appliance that was optimized for price and utility in a given
> area.  For example, Care For Life could purchase or receive donations of
> cheap computers and provide them with Wikipedia 1.0 loaded at their
> Literacy Centers.

You can hardly *buy* a hard disk smaller than 20GB these days. Heck, with
40GB disks we could just dump the whole of Wikimedia on each one.

Of course, tagging/metadata on good article versions would be a good thing
to have ;-)

- d.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jaroslaw Fedevych (UALUG

subject: [Wikitech-l] Caveats with v1.4

body:
On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 05:51:19PM +0100, Tels wrote:
> PS: Is somebody working on a project to make the Mediawiki interface more
> easily customizable, e.g. removing the logo, adding/renaming menu entries
> etc by editing a local settings file or even via GUI? The current way in
> either changing the equivalent of "Special::AllMessages" or hacking the
> source is not very nice and it breaks with each revision of Mediawiki
> again - causing me work on updates :)
>

I think I will do something like that for my site... Because I'm greatly
disappointed by the way things are done, but what disappoints me more is
that there is _no_ better alternative.

In 1.4.0, as far as I can see, lots of work was done to make customization
possible to the maximum extent. Yet I see another couple of shortcomings:
I have enabled editing user CSS/JS, and it doesn't work at all (preview
shows garbled stuff -- it is based on static version of CSS, and not, say,
Mediawiki:Monobook.css (which is used in rendering the site), and after saving
there is no effect). Moreover, I have removed my user CSS and cannot get rid
of it... It appears from nowhere. Adding new stuff does not work, either.
This is both in 1.3.11 and 1.4.0.

If there is another "magic variable" besides $wgAllowUserCSS, it must be
documented. Otherwise it is a pain to use.

--
X windows: Built to take on the world... and lose!


from_name: Charles Matthews

body:
David Gerard wrote

> You can hardly *buy* a hard disk smaller than 20GB these days. Heck, with
> 40GB disks we could just dump the whole of Wikimedia on each one.

Well, in the context, planning on using second-hand/obsolescent PCs makes
sense.

Charles


list: foundation-l

from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Do we have a partnership with Ourmedia?

body:
http://www.podcastingnews.com/archives/2005/03/ourmedia_offers.html

A story on the Podcasting News website describes Wikipedia as one of the
"partners in the effort" to launch the Ourmedia project. Is this true? I
realize that Angela is one of their advisors, but I hadn't heard that
there was any kind of official partnership. Is there some kind of
ongoing discussion that the community doesn't know about, or are people
just being sloppy about the nature of the connection?

--Michael Snow


list: wikimedia-l


from_name: Matt R

subject:
Wikipedia on handhelds in schools (was Re: [WikiEN-l] Putting
	Wikipedia on a CD or DVD)

body:
-- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> How far has anyone looked into delivering copies of Wikipedia
> (in any medium) to third-world schools, as in Africa or
> Indonesia? (To show my level of ignorance: Are there even any
> public libraries in Africa?)

Another medium could be handheld computers. This is used by an organisation
called EduVision to distribute content in schools in Kenya:

   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4304375.stm

Quotes:
"It is a pilot project run by EduVision, which is looking at ways to use low
cost computer systems to get up-to-date information to students who are
currently stuck with ancient textbooks."

"...uses a combination of satellite radio and handheld computers called
E-slates. The E-slates connect via a wireless connection to a base station in
the school. This in turn is connected to a satellite radio receiver. The data
is transmitted alongside audio signals."

"The system is cheaper than installing and maintaining an internet connection
and conventional computer network...We plan to put a solar panel at the school
with the base station, have the E-slates charge during the day when the
children are in school, then they can take them home at night and continue
working."

Matt R
-- [[User:Matt Crypto]]

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
Michael Snow wrote:
> http://www.podcastingnews.com/archives/2005/03/ourmedia_offers.html
>
> A story on the Podcasting News website describes Wikipedia as one of the
> "partners in the effort" to launch the Ourmedia project. Is this true? I
> realize that Angela is one of their advisors, but I hadn't heard that
> there was any kind of official partnership. Is there some kind of
> ongoing discussion that the community doesn't know about, or are people
> just being sloppy about the nature of the connection?

Well, I've never heard of them, but the ourmedia.org site has a little
Wikipedia logo and link under 'Sponsors and partners' on every page of
their site.

http://ourmedia.org/mission/partners says:
"Wikipedia is the people's encyclopedia. The free content encyclopedia ?
where anyone can write or edit an entry ? produced more than 1 million
articles in less than four years. Wikipedia is already larger than any
other English-language encyclopedia, including the Encyclop?dia
Britannica. What's most remarkable is that every word is written by
volunteers and no one gets paid for a submission. Wikipedia and Ourmedia
members are committed to creating sharing and sharing works of personal
media."

It sounds more like 'some similarities in mission' than a 'partnership',
and linking to Wikipedia instead of Wikimedia seems kind of odd if it
really is official and nobody's bothered to tell us.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Michael Snow wrote:
> http://www.podcastingnews.com/archives/2005/03/ourmedia_offers.html
>
> A story on the Podcasting News website describes Wikipedia as one of the
> "partners in the effort" to launch the Ourmedia project. Is this true? I
> realize that Angela is one of their advisors, but I hadn't heard that
> there was any kind of official partnership. Is there some kind of
> ongoing discussion that the community doesn't know about, or are people
> just being sloppy about the nature of the connection?

Well, I've never heard of them, but the ourmedia.org site has a little
Wikipedia logo and link under 'Sponsors and partners' on every page of
their site.

http://ourmedia.org/mission/partners says:
"Wikipedia is the people's encyclopedia. The free content encyclopedia ?
where anyone can write or edit an entry ? produced more than 1 million
articles in less than four years. Wikipedia is already larger than any
other English-language encyclopedia, including the Encyclop?dia
Britannica. What's most remarkable is that every word is written by
volunteers and no one gets paid for a submission. Wikipedia and Ourmedia
members are committed to creating sharing and sharing works of personal
media."

It sounds more like 'some similarities in mission' than a 'partnership',
and linking to Wikipedia instead of Wikimedia seems kind of odd if it
really is official and nobody's bothered to tell us.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Michael Snow wrote:
> http://www.podcastingnews.com/archives/2005/03/ourmedia_offers.html
>
> A story on the Podcasting News website describes Wikipedia as one of the
> "partners in the effort" to launch the Ourmedia project. Is this true? I
> realize that Angela is one of their advisors, but I hadn't heard that
> there was any kind of official partnership. Is there some kind of
> ongoing discussion that the community doesn't know about, or are people
> just being sloppy about the nature of the connection?

Well, I've never heard of them, but the ourmedia.org site has a little
Wikipedia logo and link under 'Sponsors and partners' on every page of
their site.

http://ourmedia.org/mission/partners says:
"Wikipedia is the people's encyclopedia. The free content encyclopedia ?
where anyone can write or edit an entry ? produced more than 1 million
articles in less than four years. Wikipedia is already larger than any
other English-language encyclopedia, including the Encyclop?dia
Britannica. What's most remarkable is that every word is written by
volunteers and no one gets paid for a submission. Wikipedia and Ourmedia
members are committed to creating sharing and sharing works of personal
media."

It sounds more like 'some similarities in mission' than a 'partnership',
and linking to Wikipedia instead of Wikimedia seems kind of odd if it
really is official and nobody's bothered to tell us.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
Michael Snow wrote:
> http://www.podcastingnews.com/archives/2005/03/ourmedia_offers.html
>
> A story on the Podcasting News website describes Wikipedia as one of the
> "partners in the effort" to launch the Ourmedia project. Is this true? I
> realize that Angela is one of their advisors, but I hadn't heard that
> there was any kind of official partnership. Is there some kind of
> ongoing discussion that the community doesn't know about, or are people
> just being sloppy about the nature of the connection?

Well, I've never heard of them, but the ourmedia.org site has a little
Wikipedia logo and link under 'Sponsors and partners' on every page of
their site.

http://ourmedia.org/mission/partners says:
"Wikipedia is the people's encyclopedia. The free content encyclopedia ?
where anyone can write or edit an entry ? produced more than 1 million
articles in less than four years. Wikipedia is already larger than any
other English-language encyclopedia, including the Encyclop?dia
Britannica. What's most remarkable is that every word is written by
volunteers and no one gets paid for a submission. Wikipedia and Ourmedia
members are committed to creating sharing and sharing works of personal
media."

It sounds more like 'some similarities in mission' than a 'partnership',
and linking to Wikipedia instead of Wikimedia seems kind of odd if it
really is official and nobody's bothered to tell us.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Kurt Roeckx

subject: [Wikitech-l] 1.5/HEAD schema finalised?

body:
On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 06:50:51PM +0000, David Gerard wrote:
> I understand the 1.5 database schema is considerably changed from that
> of 1.4. Is it finalised? Still susceptible to minor tweaks? Still
> susceptible to complete revision?
>
> (I want to play with tools to do things with the SQL database, which
> would need the schema written into them.)

There are some schema changes I'd still like to see happen.  One
thing I had in mind was changing some tables who have a namespace
and title now and change it into a page_id.  For instance
watchlist now has has:
  wl_namespace tinyint(2) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
  wl_title varchar(255) binary NOT NULL default '',

That to could be changed to:
  wl_page int(8) unsigned NOT NULL,

Same goes for archive, recentchanges, querycache, logging.

Kurt


from_name: Nathan Wong

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

>The DVD contains de.wikipedia in a special format for the DirectMedia
>Reader (Windows, Linux, Mac?), XML, and several PDA formats
>(TomeRaider), AFAIK. It also is filled up with images.
>
I think that that's a good format, which accounts for most circumstances
imaginable; it's unlikely then the the english wikipedia would be able
to fit on in this format then - being about twice the size of the German
one.


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] SVG uploading

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

Andrew Archibald schrieb:
> This is easily remedied by allowing SVG upload, which is why I am asking
> what would be needed for it to be re-enabled.

Since SVG is "just" XML, and we "only" want static images (at the
moment), can't we just filter all the evil parts out? Have a whitelist
for tags and attributes, parse the SVG as XML, remove everything not on
the whitelist, and save the result?

This could be expanded gradually as the need arises (clickable objects
etc.).

Magnus
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body:
Nathan Wong wrote:
> Magnus Manske wrote:

>> The DVD contains de.wikipedia in a special format for the DirectMedia
>> Reader (Windows, Linux, Mac?), XML, and several PDA formats
>> (TomeRaider), AFAIK. It also is filled up with images.

> I think that that's a good format, which accounts for most circumstances
> imaginable; it's unlikely then the the english wikipedia would be able
> to fit on in this format then - being about twice the size of the German
> one.

The English current text is still just under CD size as one big SQL dump
bzipped. Presumably some sort of inelegant hackery could be performed to
cram it all onto a CD of gzipped/bzipped articles and a viewer app for
several OSes (since modern web browsers will accept gzipped HTTP but won't
gunzip files by default).

Are there compression algorithms good for text that go smaller than bzip2
and are fast to uncompress even though they may be slow to compress?

- d.


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

I would like to remind everyone that the German Wikipedia has just been
published on a combined CD-DVD-set, at a price of about 10 Euros.

The DVD contains de.wikipedia in a special format for the DirectMedia
Reader (Windows, Linux, Mac?), XML, and several PDA formats
(TomeRaider), AFAIK. It also is filled up with images.

The CD contains just text and a special bootable Linux, thought to be
useful for a quick lookup when the computer is turned off (Linux-CD
boots faster than Windows).

Magnus

Poor, Edmund W schrieb:
> Will Wikipedia fit on a CD or DVD?
>
> How big is the "current article" database? (Excluding the text
> of all previous versions, because some articles have been
> modified over 500 times!)
>
> What are Wikipedia's plans to move toward 1.0 and issue a Disk,
> Book, or Multi-volume set?
>
> How far has anyone looked into delivering copies of Wikipedia
> (in any medium) to third-world schools, as in Africa or
> Indonesia? (To show my level of ignorance: Are there even any
> public libraries in Africa?)
>
> If Wikipedia received a donation of $100,000 - specifically earmarked
> for CD distribution to Africa, COULD it do anything?
>
> Uncle Ed
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Do we have a partnership with Ourmedia?

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> Michael Snow wrote:
>
>> http://www.podcastingnews.com/archives/2005/03/ourmedia_offers.html
>>
>> A story on the Podcasting News website describes Wikipedia as one of the
>> "partners in the effort" to launch the Ourmedia project. Is this true? I
>> realize that Angela is one of their advisors, but I hadn't heard that
>> there was any kind of official partnership. Is there some kind of
>> ongoing discussion that the community doesn't know about, or are people
>> just being sloppy about the nature of the connection?
>
> Well, I've never heard of them, but the ourmedia.org site has a little
> Wikipedia logo and link under 'Sponsors and partners' on every page of
> their site.

Ah, I didn't scroll down far enough to see that. I did check the story,
which was pretty obviously a regurgitated press release, against
Ourmedia's version, which didn't list Wikipedia as a partner, so I
couldn't figure out if Podcasting News was jumping to conclusions or if
Ourmedia was giving this impression themselves.

> It sounds more like 'some similarities in mission' than a 'partnership'

Yes, that's about how I would describe it.

Angela wrote:

>I did speak to Jimbo about this a few weeks ago
>when I first saw this on the Ourmedia site, since I wasn't sure if
>this should be seen as a problem. He said he didn't care for it, but
>when I suggested I could have it removed, he just said he had
>complained a bit (I don't know who to), and also said that it was not
>a ridiculous statement.
>
No, it's not ridiculous, just a little confusing.

Anthere wrote:

> The only thing I know... is that other associations started listing
> themselves as being partners with wikipedia. I raised the topic on the
> french mailing list about what could be a partner and how to decide
> who was a partner and who was not.

Oh, what other non-partner partners do we have?

In the particular case of Ourmedia, the similarities mean that it's not
something to get too worked up about. I don't mind if they want to do a
little name-dropping - it's nice that our name is worth dropping - but
it would be good to have an indication that the relationship basically
amounts to moral support and advice. If our fundraiser donors got the
mistaken impression that we're funneling money to outside projects,
rather than spending it to address our well-known needs, it would not be
a good situation. And we do need to be careful that people aren't
misrepresenting the position of Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, or
any other project of the Foundation.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Geoff Burling

subject: [WikiEN-l] [Ticket#: 115103-FW] Just wondering

body:
On Tue, 22 Mar 2005, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> For some the recognition and ownership of their efforts is important.
> I've remarked how on some user pages there is a very long list of the
> articles on which they have worked.  They are often dilligent about
> keeping it up to date.  When they stop keeping it up the list it's a
> good sign that they have begun learning to submerge their ego.
>
While I agree with you, Ray, that it's a function of ego, I think at least
some editors keep a list of articles on their Talk page to prove that
they are making credible contributions to Wikipedia. Not in the sense
that Rick described in another post, but to seek validation for their
efforts. Wikipedia can be a very intimidating place for bookish people --
ironically, the same types we are attracted here.

> Most of us can't be bothered to go through somebody else's list unless
> we are trying to track down POV warrioring.
>
I don't know. In the past when I've had the time, I would sometimes review
the list of contributions of other editors whose work or erudition I
admired. It was by far more interesting than sifting thru [[Recent changes]]
or [[New articles]].

Geoff


body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> Ultimately though, en.wikipedia will grow beyond any compression
> algorithm's capability. Maybe we should go ahead to DVD, waste an
> additional half a gig or so on an uncompressed sqlite file, and have a
> fulltext index and some pretty images.

That's probably more sensible. Hopefully en: won't outgrow a DVD before
Blu-Ray or HD-DVD win ;-)

- d.


body:
Tom Haws wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:

>> The English current text ....

> Hang on.  Let me make sure I understand this.  We are not ready for 1.0
> right now, but we are talking about starting making early distributions
> so we can get the mechanics down right?  So now we are saying, Toward
> 0.1?  There's not much downside to that, anyone who mocks a version 0.1
> distribution for vandalism won't get much sympathy.  But will there be
> any real demand for a 0.1 version from the people we are hoping to
> serve, and does it serve our reputation to foist early versions on
> unsuspecting customers?

I assume ISOs and so on will be used!

I'd see what the reaction to de: is like. Possibly we should be publicising
quite a bit that de: is now available and being sold.

- d.


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

David Gerard schrieb:
> Are there compression algorithms good for text that go smaller than bzip2
> and are fast to uncompress even though they may be slow to compress?

There's a commercial variant of the public domain sqlite engine
(database in a single file, "server" as a linkable library, understands
most of SQL) which can store fields in the sqlite database as zipped BLOBs.

A better alternative might be to write a wrapper around sqlite that can
read a bzip2ed sqlite file.

Ultimately though, en.wikipedia will grow beyond any compression
algorithm's capability. Maybe we should go ahead to DVD, waste an
additional half a gig or so on an uncompressed sqlite file, and have a
fulltext index and some pretty images.

Magnus
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from_name: Jakob Voss

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: New Wikistats

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Jakob Voss wrote:
>
>> Unfourtenately the csv-download is still disabled (not your fault).
>> Could *please* someone provide a way to download the raw data generated
>> by Wikistat?
>
>
> If Erik uploaded the files, they should be there and accessible. Can you
> be more specific about the problem?

There is no permission to access /wikistats/csv/ on the server via HTTP.

I wonder why - single files are only some kilobytes and only a small
number of people is interested in the data but you can extract some
interesting statistics out of it without downloading all the SQL-dump.

Jakob Vo?


from_name: Sj

subject: [Wikipedia-l] New Wikistats

body:
On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 06:25:08 +0100, Erik Zachte <e.p.zachte at chello.nl> wrote:
> Finally, new wikistats.

My hiero!   Looks fantaastic.

> It took a couple of weekends to get the scripts up to date for the new
> database format.

I hope you're preparing in advance for 1.5.  ;-)

> Hierarchical category trees per Wikipedia (some are huge!):
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/CategoryOverviewIndex.htm

Yes, huge... we need to find a better way of displaying these.   There
are some interesting tree-mapping packages out there...

> Keeping everything within reasonable memory boundaries was more difficult,
> wherever possible data are written to disk in several bins (e.g. one
> intermediate file per month history), sorted per bin, then merged before
> readback.
>
> Erik Zachte

How long does calculation take now?  If there were a machine dedicated
to stats of various kinds, with its own mirror of the db, could this
be done more efficiently as a running-total, updated whenever the db
was updated?

--
+sj+


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] New Wikistats


from_name: Tels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Caveats with v1.4

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Moin,

On Wednesday 23 March 2005 22:21, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Tels wrote:
> > It would have been usefull for me to have a more detailed UPGRADE
> > file which mentions some of these issues, so maybe this info can be
> > incorporated by someone :)
>
> "If you hacked up your source code you may have to change it."? :)

:o)

Well, something like:

* if you changed the menu, the code for that is now in foo.php
* if you changed the skin, it is now in bar.php

etc :) That would especially usefull if you unzip 1.4 over 1.3, because
all the now unused files (with your changes) are still around.

I know, I know, I should send a patch instead of wishlists. :o)

> > PS: Is somebody working on a project to make the Mediawiki interface
> > more easily customizable, e.g. removing the logo, adding/renaming
> > menu entries etc by editing a local settings file or even via GUI?
>
> There was some partial work on this at some point but I don't think
> it's anywhere near ready, if it works at all.
>
> MediaWiki is primarily aimed at Wikimedia's wikis, where we're running
> several hundred wikis off of a single central source set with a complex
> centralized configuration.

I know, but MediaWiki is really usefull for (often internal) documentation
colloberation projects - and for these the "standard" mediawiki menu and
look&feel are not always ideal :-)

Best wishes,

Tels

- --
 Signed on Wed Mar 23 23:06:59 2005 with key 0x93B84C15.
 Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/
 PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email.

 "The Palmer proposal. What ever happened to that?"

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from_name: Till Westermayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wiktionary Search Link

body:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .

Hi,

to whom it may concern:

I think this isn't the right list, but the only one I'm subscribed to:
the http://www.wiktionary.org search field links to wikipedia.org
entries, not to the wiktionary.org ones.

Till


from_name: Chuck MATTSEN

body:
On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 06:38:40 +0100
Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> typed:

> ...We are in relationship with a firm called MandrakeSoft to do such
> a distribution. They distribute a version of Linux and wanted to add
> Wikipedia to their distribution last christmas. It was reported.
> There was recently another meeting, where they mentionned they would
> prefer an individual release (rather than a common release with other
> software). I am not sure a deal will be possible though.

Mandrake's currently embarking on a new release schedule for their
products, along with a new versioning scheme, to a degree in response
to their recent acquisition of Connectiva Linux.  That may be part of
the reason for any perceived change of focus on their part; indeed,
such decision making may still be in somewhat of a state of flux.

See http://www.mandrakesoft.com/company/press/pr?n=/pr/products/2546

--
Chuck MATTSEN / mattsen at arvig dot net / Mahnomen, MN, USA
Mandrakelinux release 10.2 (Cooker) for i586 kernel 2.6.10-3.mm.5mdk
RLU #346519 / MT Lookup: http://eot.com/~mattsen/mtsearch.htm

Random Thought/Quote for this Message:
     "Liberty is the prevention of control by others."
		-Lord John Acton


from_name: Frederik Eaton

subject: [Wikitech-l] looking for way to convert mediawiki markup to html

body:
Has somebody written a script to convert mediawiki markup to html? I'd
need something which works with embedded latex. Looking at the
mediawiki source it doesn't seem like it should be *that* hard but I
haven't tried yet.

Frederik

--
http://ofb.net/~frederik/


from_name: Reinhardt Wiewe

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Recent changes - Hide minor edits | Show bots |
	Hidelogged in users

body:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges
>> includes
>> Hide minor edits | Show bots | Hide logged in users
>>
>> http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges and
>> http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges does not.
>>
>> How this can be changed?
>
> You have to fix the translation of [[MediaWiki:Rclinks]]
> (or LanguageXx.php for a generic solution), see
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-February/027406.html
>
> -- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]

Thanks Petr,

I saw I must change also http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Showhideminor .
See also: http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1741

Best regards Reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Caveats with v1.4

body:
On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 01:19:43PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> Cleared browser cache?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Of course I did. More than that: I've tried to load it up
on a PC from which I have never logged in before :) Still
the same. I have no slightest idea where does it resurrect
from.

--
X windows: A software disaster of Biblical proportions.


from_name: Andrew Archibald

subject: [Wikitech-l] SVG uploading

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> Andrew Archibald schrieb:
>
>>This is easily remedied by allowing SVG upload, which is why I am asking
>>what would be needed for it to be re-enabled.
>
>
> Since SVG is "just" XML, and we "only" want static images (at the
> moment), can't we just filter all the evil parts out? Have a whitelist
> for tags and attributes, parse the SVG as XML, remove everything not on
> the whitelist, and save the result?
>
> This could be expanded gradually as the need arises (clickable objects
> etc.).
>
> Magnus

Well, yes, one could write such a program.  I did.  A version is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Aarchiba/SVG_sanitizer

What I'm trying to do now is get someone to tell me what else needs to be
done to get SVG uploads enabled.

Andrew


from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikitech-l] Fwd: [Wikipedia-l] Wiktionary Search Link

body:
I'm forwarding this from Wikipedia-l.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Www.wiktionary.org_template contains
<form action="search-redirect.php"> which doesn't seem to have a
Wiktionary version.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Till Westermayer <till at tillwe.de>
Date: 23 Mar 2005 23:40:00 +0100
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wiktionary Search Link
To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org

Hi,

to whom it may concern:

I think this isn't the right list, but the only one I'm subscribed to:
the http://www.wiktionary.org search field links to wikipedia.org
entries, not to the wiktionary.org ones.

Till
_______________________________________________


body:
Hmm. Looks like wiki2static requires a database, it seems like it
should be possible to to interface directly with the parser and have
something that reads and writes single files. Except for page
inclusion and linking... Well, I've gotten 'deplate' to work for me so
now I'm using that. Thanks,

Frederik

On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 08:54:22AM +0000, David Gerard wrote:
> Frederik Eaton wrote:
>
> >Has somebody written a script to convert mediawiki markup to html? I'd
> >need something which works with embedded latex. Looking at the
> >mediawiki source it doesn't seem like it should be *that* hard but I
> >haven't tried yet.
>
>
> There's lots of scripts that go most of the way. Alfio Puglisi's wiki2static
> script (written in Perl) calls texvc to render TeX.
>
>
> - d.
>
>

--
http://ofb.net/~frederik/


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Minor changes to upload form

body:
I've checked in two minor changes to the upload form to the live code
(after they've been tested in HEAD):

1) The upload description is now multiline. It has always accepted long
input, it was just very cumbersome to enter. This is not meant to be a
substitute for a proper redesign of the upload form, just a quick hack
to encourage people to add proper summaries.

2) The issue where [[Category:]] tags and the like inserted in the
description would not be added to the database properly has been fixed
(by backporting the existing fix from HEAD).

Please report any problems in Bugzilla.

Erik


body:
On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 19:25:45 -0800, Michael Snow
<wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> A story on the Podcasting News website describes Wikipedia as one of the
> "partners in the effort" to launch the Ourmedia project. Is this true?

I'm not entirely sure what it means for Wikipedia to be listed as a
"partner", but my assumption was that it was a reflection of potential
collaboration or shared goals between the projects, rather than
anything more formal. I did speak to Jimbo about this a few weeks ago
when I first saw this on the Ourmedia site, since I wasn't sure if
this should be seen as a problem. He said he didn't care for it, but
when I suggested I could have it removed, he just said he had
complained a bit (I don't know who to), and also said that it was not
a ridiculous statement. He's met with Marc Canter (one of the founders
of Ourmedia) since then, but I don't know if they discussed this
point.

As far as I know, the "partnership" means no more than the people
involved in the projects they list as partners (including the Creative
Commons) are also involved with Ourmedia, which is possibly why they
list Wikipedia rather than the Wikimedia Foundation (though that could
just be an error). Certainly, no formal partnership has been
discussed. The only link between the two projects comes from the fact
that I, and other Wikipedians, have been involved with creating some
of the project's initial policies etc, and that ideas for potential
collaboration have been discussed on the Wikimedia Commons since last
August (when the page was still at Meta). See
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Collaboration_with_Ourmedia>

Angela.

--
Angela Beesley
Ourmedia.org


subject: [Wikitech-l] usage of {{ns:foo}} in localurl

body:
Dear friends,

some weeks ago I noticed broken links at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_messages/All#General
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Template_messages/General&action=edit

{{ns:foo}} in localurl will generate broken links.

Some other examples you can find at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gangleri/tests/localurl_Special_Allpages .

Sorry to tell you about this only now.

I think it sould be the best to make a database querry searching

{{lovalurl:{{ns:

provide me the result and / or fix all thouse pages manualy.

Another posibility is to use a bot.

Kve?ja / Gru? / Salutas / Best regards / Salutari cordiale

Reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]


from_name: Szuy and Joe Scuderi

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Neutrality NPOV/Abuse of Administrator Power

body:
On the Terri Schiavo page Neutrality repeatedly deletes items that are cited
without comment on the talk page.  When I complained about this Neutrality
blocked me for vandalism.  This is out of hand.

Powerline and Jim Geraghty have raised allegations about the Republican
"talking points memorandum" about the poltical ramifications of the Schiavo
case possibly being a fake. This is sourced and should not be deleted.

This is why I have been accused of vandalism.  Apparently Neutrality did not
like what I wrote and blocked me.  Here's the note I left on the talk page
of "Politics and Pundits" in the Schiavo article and User: SanPaulo 1
comment in response:

Powerline (blog), Jim Geraghty of National Review Online, and Michelle
Malkin have raised allegations of the talking memo being a potential
forgery. So has Mickey Kaus at Slate (Magazine). For some reason
User:Neutrality keeps deleting it without comment. It may or may not be
true, but the allegations have been made and are newsworthy.

I've changed it back after the Powerline passage was deleted. I agree with
the memo, BUT I want to be neutral. Saopaulo1 08:12, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)


body:
On the Terri Schiavo page Neutrality repeatedly deletes items that are cited
without comment on the talk page.  When I complained about this Neutrality
blocked me for vandalism.  This is out of hand.

Powerline and Jim Geraghty have raised allegations about the Republican
"talking points memorandum" about the poltical ramifications of the Schiavo
case possibly being a fake. This is sourced and should not be deleted.

This is why I have been accused of vandalism.  Apparently Neutrality did not
like what I wrote and blocked me.  Here's the note I left on the talk page
of "Politics and Pundits" in the Schiavo article and User: SanPaulo 1
comment in response:

Powerline (blog), Jim Geraghty of National Review Online, and Michelle
Malkin have raised allegations of the talking memo being a potential
forgery. So has Mickey Kaus at Slate (Magazine). For some reason
User:Neutrality keeps deleting it without comment. It may or may not be
true, but the allegations have been made and are newsworthy.

I've changed it back after the Powerline passage was deleted. I agree with
the memo, BUT I want to be neutral. Saopaulo1 08:12, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)

This is what Neutrality did:

User is blocked
>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
You have attempted to edit a page, either by clicking the "edit this page"
tab or by following a red link.

Your user name or IP address has been blocked by Neutrality.

The reason given is this:
Vandalism

You can email Neutrality or one of the other administrators to discuss the
block. If you believe that our blocking policy was violated, you may discuss
the block publicly on the WikiEN-L mailing list
(http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l). Note that you may not
use the "email this user" feature unless you have a Wikipedia account and a
valid email address registered in your user preferences.

Your IP address is 24.18.59.229. Please include this address in any queries
you make.


from_name: Anthere

body:
Poor, Edmund W a ?crit:
 > Will Wikipedia fit on a CD or DVD?
 >
 > How big is the "current article" database? (Excluding the text
 > of all previous versions, because some articles have been
 > modified over 500 times!)

The French Wikipedia has been looking to do such a cd/dvd in the past 6
months (hence the drive launched by Yann Forget to tag all images,
included in the english wikipedia).
Last time I heard, a cd was necessary for fr and a dvd for en.
We are in relationship with a firm called MandrakeSoft to do such a
distribution. They distribute a version of Linux and wanted to add
Wikipedia to their distribution last christmas. It was reported. There
was recently another meeting, where they mentionned they would prefer an
individual release (rather than a common release with other software).
I am not sure a deal will be possible though.

Amongst problems raised is the one of responsability of the editors.

 > What are Wikipedia's plans to move toward 1.0 and issue a Disk,
 > Book, or Multi-volume set?
 >
 > How far has anyone looked into delivering copies of Wikipedia
 > (in any medium) to third-world schools, as in Africa or
 > Indonesia? (To show my level of ignorance: Are there even any
 > public libraries in Africa?)

I started looking into it quite seriously early 2005, with contacts in
several french speaking countries. Most contacts were related with young
children schools and the equivalent of libraries. One with a university.
Generally, there was interest (if not huge interest) but naturally, as
expected, the issue raised was the one of computer and internet line.

You'll tell me, why internet line if on a cd ?

This is a big point : we have to admit that a big part of our content
does not necessarily fit the needs of some of the target people in these
countries. And what the associations I went in contact with insisted
that they did not want to just be handled a cd from west to use. They
wanted the resource provided to strongly participate to local
development. In short, if wikipedia is made available, they want it for
real, with net lines, and participate to the building of the resource
themselves. With the needs, come the features. So, the justification of
the install of computers and net lines in a village THROUGH wikipedia,
allow the village to get access to outside world and join it. Not be
nourrished by it. With the internet line, all the uses of the net come
along and stimulate development.

In short, a DVD, why not, but the desire was for the full product.
Note that it was then mentionned a neat feature could be a system so
that they could post articles through mail, or a system where they could
work offline and have their content synchronised from time to time.

I had to unfortunately put aside all this research (or nearly all of it)
due to reallocating my priorities. Most of the associations we could
work with are located either in Paris (where I do not have time to go),
or in Africa (where I do not have either time or money to go). And I
think at some point in the discussion, it is necessary to meet people.
And I had to cut some big branches in my activity recently. However, I
intend to proceed in that direction when I have more time again.

Waerth and Danny were working on setting up an organisation in Thailand
some time ago. I do not know what is the current state of this project.

 > If Wikipedia received a donation of $100,000 - specifically earmarked
 > for CD distribution to Africa, COULD it do anything?
 >
 > Uncle Ed

I think there would be two big issues at hand.
How to handle the responsability of the editor ? (who ?)
Where would be the volunteers to help ?

To which I will add
It is easy to start an article, and just stop if we do not feel like it
anymore.
When getting involved in a probably long lasting and time consuming
operation, such as finding a school interested in CD, finding old
computers, setting up computers, shipping them, helping with install,
checking its usefulness etc... is far less easy than just starting an
article. What I mean is that to start such a thing, we need a real team
of people to get involved, and we need this people to feel really
committed to it. And I think this is the highest difficulty.


body:
Note that I am not aware of any partnership with OurMedia myself, nor
was ever informed we could be or were.

The only thing I know... is that other associations started listing
themselves as being partners with wikipedia. I raised the topic on the
french mailing list about what could be a partner and how to decide who
was a partner and who was not.

The discussion was inconclusive and in spite of me saying to the
association representative we were actually not partners, they still
sort of more or less claim it.

After thought, I decided that
1) I could not do much if someone claimed himself partner of Wikipedia
2) As long as it was written nowhere on our project that we were (no
special page, no logo, no statement), well... we were not.

...

Anthere

Angela a ?crit:
> On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 19:25:45 -0800, Michael Snow
> <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>>A story on the Podcasting News website describes Wikipedia as one of the
>>"partners in the effort" to launch the Ourmedia project. Is this true?
>
>
> I'm not entirely sure what it means for Wikipedia to be listed as a
> "partner", but my assumption was that it was a reflection of potential
> collaboration or shared goals between the projects, rather than
> anything more formal. I did speak to Jimbo about this a few weeks ago
> when I first saw this on the Ourmedia site, since I wasn't sure if
> this should be seen as a problem. He said he didn't care for it, but
> when I suggested I could have it removed, he just said he had
> complained a bit (I don't know who to), and also said that it was not
> a ridiculous statement. He's met with Marc Canter (one of the founders
> of Ourmedia) since then, but I don't know if they discussed this
> point.
>
> As far as I know, the "partnership" means no more than the people
> involved in the projects they list as partners (including the Creative
> Commons) are also involved with Ourmedia, which is possibly why they
> list Wikipedia rather than the Wikimedia Foundation (though that could
> just be an error). Certainly, no formal partnership has been
> discussed. The only link between the two projects comes from the fact
> that I, and other Wikipedians, have been involved with creating some
> of the project's initial policies etc, and that ideas for potential
> collaboration have been discussed on the Wikimedia Commons since last
> August (when the page was still at Meta). See
> <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Collaboration_with_Ourmedia>
>
> Angela.
>
> --
> Angela Beesley
> Ourmedia.org


body:
On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 06:46:53 +0100, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> The only thing I know... is that other associations started listing
> themselves as being partners with wikipedia. I raised the topic on the
> french mailing list about what could be a partner and how to decide who
> was a partner and who was not.

Related to this is that the Open Directory Project claims Wikipedia is
their sister project. See the end of <http://dmoz.org/Reference/>, for
example. This was mentioned at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:External_links#More_restrictive_policy_on_external_linking
but not really discussed on Wikipedia as far as I know. There is (or
at least used to be) a "Wikipedia now a Sister site?" thread at Dmoz
<http://forums.dmoz.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=908066> (you need to be
an editor there to read it, and my login has expired so I can't
guarantee that link still works).

Angela.


subject: [Foundation-l] what is partnership ?

body:
Hmmmm.

Let's see.
I could cite you two examples which were recently discussed.
Early february, I was invited to a meeting in France, TIC21. Regular fee was a couple of hundred euros, nothing I was ready to pay by myself. Finally, one of the organiser invited me for free and told me my leaflets could be welcome on his booth. He considered us partners (his website and Wikipedia). I explained that we could not really be. First because being partner with wikipedia meant the community agrees with the partnership and second because his site, though giving free content, and though sharing some principles with us, is also a very biaised one (planetecologie.org).
Still, when I went to the meeting, I discovered wikipedia logo on its poster, and on its CD.
A bit as if, all organisations inviting Jimbo for a speech considered themselves partners with us from the moment they paid for him to come.
Still, the "partnership" is for now limited but for the fact there are attempts to push us to get involved in things I do not wish us to get involved to. No big deal.

Another example which was abundantly discussed on fr, is the issue of telebotanica, a network of botanists making a free and free site of botanical species. Several of us met his director (I did at TIC21 myself). Very straight guy. Goals exactly fitting ours. The perfect partner.
Still... the question left was "what is a partnership here", "what would it encompass" and "who should agree with it".
For example, some mentionned we could put his association logo on our main page. Hmmm, no, I do not think we can do this.
Also, there was some discussions to have an official contract (the idea was that the most general content could be worked on wikipedia, which would link, for each botanical article, to their specialised file). Still, why would an association have the authority to say "from now on, all botanical articles have a back link to botanica" ? There could be a declaration of intent such as "we share common goals, we share information, and we try to redirect to each other", but imposing to the community the content of the article on forcing a link, is just not an option.

>From this, I can just propose a collection of thoughts.

What is partnership, what does that exactly mean ? For each of us ?

This terms seem to be very much in use now, but I think it recovers different realities. I think that as soon as we are doing something with someone, we are partners with him. If I work with you on wikipedia, we both are partners (please, consider that with straight ideas... do not let this comment put you to wander in some strange areas).

A partnership may be a sort of moral agreement, each partner abilities being complementary of the other ones.
There is a difference between financial or technical partners. It may be privately owned firms, foundations, public or private organisations, governments...And professional partners may just create something different, depending on their implication (just bringing a little bit of immediate knowledge or help, or maybe much much more...)

It is certainly a bit strange that we should use the same word to define very different realities. I think Lost Oasis is a partner. A private firm giving funds for Wikimania will be a partner. Using google search right now, is a partnership. Us using MediaWiki is a partnership. People like JoiIto or Sunir Shah, are partners as well. Kennisnet might be a partnership. Telebotanica might be a partnership. And BBC doing things with Angela is also a partnership. Should we display all these logos ? How to measure value of each ? Often, it just mean : we share some values.

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!


subject: [Foundation-l] what is partnership ?


subject: [Foundation-l] what is partnership ?

body:
Forgot...

We can not currently be "partners" with Telebotanica, because we do not share same license.
Some of their editors agree with ours, but others insist to stick to a non commercial one.

Ant

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we.


subject: [Foundation-l] what is partnership ?


from_name: Tom Haws

body:
Anthere wrote:

> we have to admit that a big part of our content does not necessarily
> fit the needs of some of the target people in these countries. And
> what the associations I went in contact with insisted that they did
> not want to just be handled a cd from west to use.

Excellent post, Anthere.  And the above is right on.  I for one am not
prepared to account for the consequences of distributing autofella...,
etc. to school children.  I know this is a variation on an unpopular
theme, but Mangus's Wikiratings need to come before a CD/DVD.

Tom Haws


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Foundation-l] what is partnership ?

body:
--- Neil Harris <usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> I agree: there can be many partners, and there's no reason not to
> be
> partners with many people and organizations. But with the Wikipedia
>
> brand becoming more and more valuable, and official trademark
> recognition in the offing, there needs to be an official process
> for
> registration of Wikipedia/Wikimedia partners. In particular, I
> believe
> that the Foundation will have a legal requirement to defend its
> trademarks Real Soon Now, and not doing so risks losing the rights
> over
> that trademark and becoming a [[genericized trademark]].

Any value the wikipedia brand has comes from the content of the
wikipedia. The content itself does not "belong" to the Wikimedia
Foundation. The brand, well, I could not care less. Be careful that
you recognize value where it really is.

> The Foundation urgently needs an official policy before anything
> damaging occurs to the Wikipedia/Wikimedia brand. An official
> partner
> list page would be a good idea: so the Foundation can say "if
> you're not
> on this page, you're not an official partner, and here's how to
> apply to
> be a Wikimedia partner, dear Bill/Melinda [delete as applicable]"

Do we? Is it so important that we "recognize" our "partners"?

I say the opposite is true. We should have a policy that says: "It
does not matter how much money, content, or goodwill you send our
way, we are not putting your logo or anything else in the wikipedia.
Our NPOV policy would prohibit that, now that I think about it.

It would be kind of like saying "This unbiased beverage report
brought to you by our Partner: Pepsi"

Chris Mahan
818.943.1850 cell
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
chris.mahan at gmail.com
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses.
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subject: [Foundation-l] what is partnership ?


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Michael Snow wrote:

> Oh, what other non-partner partners do we have?

Our name is obviously worth something. What was the trademark status
again?

- d.


body:
To the list,

I will be assisting this person in private with his or her grievance.

Tom Haws

Szuy and Joe Scuderi wrote:

>On the Terri Schiavo page Neutrality repeatedly deletes items that are cited
>without comment on the talk page.  When I complained about this Neutrality
>blocked me for vandalism.  This is out of hand.
>
>Powerline and Jim Geraghty have raised allegations about the Republican
>"talking points memorandum" about the poltical ramifications of the Schiavo
>case possibly being a fake. This is sourced and should not be deleted.
>
>This is why I have been accused of vandalism.  Apparently Neutrality did not
>like what I wrote and blocked me.  Here's the note I left on the talk page
>of "Politics and Pundits" in the Schiavo article and User: SanPaulo 1
>comment in response:
>
>Powerline (blog), Jim Geraghty of National Review Online, and Michelle
>Malkin have raised allegations of the talking memo being a potential
>forgery. So has Mickey Kaus at Slate (Magazine). For some reason
>User:Neutrality keeps deleting it without comment. It may or may not be
>true, but the allegations have been made and are newsworthy.
>
>I've changed it back after the Powerline passage was deleted. I agree with
>the memo, BUT I want to be neutral. Saopaulo1 08:12, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)
>


body:
Frederik Eaton wrote:

> Has somebody written a script to convert mediawiki markup to html? I'd
> need something which works with embedded latex. Looking at the
> mediawiki source it doesn't seem like it should be *that* hard but I
> haven't tried yet.

There's lots of scripts that go most of the way. Alfio Puglisi's wiki2static
script (written in Perl) calls texvc to render TeX.

- d.


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On 3/24/05 1:18 AM, "Angela" <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 06:46:53 +0100, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> The only thing I know... is that other associations started listing
>> themselves as being partners with wikipedia. I raised the topic on the
>> french mailing list about what could be a partner and how to decide who
>> was a partner and who was not.
>
> Related to this is that the Open Directory Project claims Wikipedia is
> their sister project. See the end of <http://dmoz.org/Reference/>, for
> example. This was mentioned at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:External_links#More_restrictive_po
> licy_on_external_linking
> but not really discussed on Wikipedia as far as I know. There is (or
> at least used to be) a "Wikipedia now a Sister site?" thread at Dmoz
> <http://forums.dmoz.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=908066> (you need to be
> an editor there to read it, and my login has expired so I can't
> guarantee that link still works).

And this torques me off, because Dmoz is a frighteningly corrupt and
autocratic community and their licensing and copyright policy is diametrical
to Wikipedia's. Maybe if they were willing to admit to being our evil
stepsister.


body:
Anthere wrote:

> I am not sure a deal will be possible though.
> Amongst problems raised is the one of responsability of the editors.

How are the makers of the de: CD dealing with these issues?

- d.


from_name: Alphax

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia on handhelds in schools

body:
Matt R wrote:

>-- "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
>
>
>>How far has anyone looked into delivering copies of Wikipedia
>>(in any medium) to third-world schools, as in Africa or
>>Indonesia? (To show my level of ignorance: Are there even any
>>public libraries in Africa?)
>>
>>
>
>Another medium could be handheld computers. This is used by an organisation
>called EduVision to distribute content in schools in Kenya:
>
>   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4304375.stm
>
Ah yes, the [[PADD]]. You never need to worry about what you do with it,
because you can always get another one.

[[en:User:Alphax]]


from_name: Charles Matthews

body:
Geoff Burling wrote

> On Tue, 22 Mar 2005, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> For some the recognition and ownership of their efforts is important.
>> I've remarked how on some user pages there is a very long list of the
>> articles on which they have worked.  They are often dilligent about
>> keeping it up to date.  When they stop keeping it up the list it's a
>> good sign that they have begun learning to submerge their ego.

> While I agree with you, Ray, that it's a function of ego, I think at least
> some editors keep a list of articles on their Talk page to prove that
> they are making credible contributions to Wikipedia.

Ray's comments are pretty good nonsense.  One can perfectly well 'submerge
ego' - edit as an anon, for example - without thereby contributing much to
the community.  One can also have a personality, without making a cult of
it, let's say.  Mutual recognition mostly helps rather than hinders.

> I don't know. In the past when I've had the time, I would sometimes review
> the list of contributions of other editors whose work or erudition I
> admired.

Me too.  There are editors whose brag-lists I check, to see what has been
created in an area of interest.  This is a perfectly valid reason for those
lists being there.

Charles


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Congratulations are in order (an overlooked
	milestone)

body:
Is it better now?

Mark

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 07:36:13 +0000, Tomer Chachamu <the.r3m0t at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Mar 2005 18:59:52 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Www.wikipedia.org_template/temp
> > (preview of actual appearance:
> > http://portal-test.mediawiki.org/extract2.php?template=Www.wikipedia.org_template/temp
> > )
> >
> > I have received mostly positive feedback for the minor design
> > modifications I made. A comment regarding the Cyrillic version of the
> > name used in the background: it is intentionally based on the
> > Ukrainian version rather than the Russian version because at the
> > moment Ukrainian is higher in the list of largest Wikipedias. For the
> > same reason, the Hebrew name instead of the Yiddish name, the Arabic
> > name instead of the Farsi or Urdu names, etc.
>
> The background is far too heavy. Lighten it a bit, maybe leaving blank
> space around the circle of languages.
>


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

body:
Magnus Manske schrieb:

> I would like to remind everyone that the German Wikipedia has
> just been published on a combined CD-DVD-set, at a price of
> about 10 Euros.

Where can I order a copy? I don't know German, but some of my colleagues
probably do.

And did you do the programming and configuration for that DVD? You are
certainly keeping busy; how do you find the time?

Gratefully,

Ed Poor


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Nathan Wong wrote:

> Tom Haws wrote:
>
>> They are going to get it anyway.  They may as well get it from me?
>> Is that the reasoning?
>
>
> No, merely that you would no more be 'responsible' for a school age
> child accessing that information from a Wikipedia CD/DVD than you are
> for it being on Wikipedia atm, or a teacher/headmaster would be for
> providing access to it (there's no reason not to have a sign that says
> "Warning: this is an encyclopedia and there may be some articles that
> you find objectionable".
> On the other hand, if we were to initiate a review system there is no
> reason that it cannot have some form of content warning/aging anyway
> (though I think that just a "mature content notice" would be best).
> From this, you could produce two version of Wikipedia - one which is
> censored (if you see fit - though it could be argued that this is
> against the "wiki-way").

Please please please let's not start this all over again.

If you have a specific proposal, post it on meta, otherwise
1) yes, we know it's an issue for many people,
2) no, there is still no consensus as to what to do about it.

Stan


body:
Nathan Wong wrote:

>
>> I for one am not prepared to account for the consequences of
>> distributing autofella..., etc. to school children.
>
>
> Many millions of school children can probably access all of
> Wikipedia's articles on pretty much anything online anyway, and some
> schools / colleges have a EB / Encarta subscription that would contain
> similar information.

They are going to get it anyway.  They may as well get it from me?  Is
that the reasoning?

Tom Haws


body:
Matt R wrote:

> Hang on...isn't this discussion in the context of shipping CDs out to parts of
> the world without easy Internet access? In which case, the aforementioned
> schoolchildren would not be able to access these things online.

And I guess this points out that Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation and we editors) are not really responsible for granting anybody access to anything.  What we are responsible for is making our data easy to use and palatable to the guardians of schoolchildren.

Nathan Wong wrote:

> Tom Haws wrote:
>
>> They are going to get it anyway.  They may as well get it from me?
>> Is that the reasoning?
>
>
> No, merely that you would no more be 'responsible' for a school age
> child accessing that information from a Wikipedia CD/DVD than you are
> for it being on Wikipedia atm, or a teacher/headmaster would be for
> providing access to it (there's no reason not to have a sign that says
> "Warning: this is an encyclopedia and there may be some articles that
> you find objectionable".
> On the other hand, if we were to initiate a review system there is no
> reason that it cannot have some form of content warning/aging anyway
> (though I think that just a "mature content notice" would be best).
> From this, you could produce two version of Wikipedia - one which is
> censored (if you see fit - though it could be argued that this is
> against the "wiki-way").

Right, Estel.  It really is not our choice who reads our stuff.  Other
than our responsibility to be honest about the nethermost recesses of
Wikipedia and what they may containt, it kind of boils down to a market
decision regarding what we have to do or want to do to be relevant in
the world.  If we want headmasters to use us for their schools, we
probably are going to have to give those headmasters the tools to
select/filter our database (enter Mangus's Wikitag system again).


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] what is partnership ?

body:
Neil Harris wrote:

> Christopher Mahan wrote:
>
>> --- Neil Harris <usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> I agree: there can be many partners, and there's no reason not to
>>> be partners with many people and organizations. But with the Wikipedia
>>> brand becoming more and more valuable, and official trademark
>>> recognition in the offing, there needs to be an official process
>>> for registration of Wikipedia/Wikimedia partners. In particular, I
>>> believe that the Foundation will have a legal requirement to defend
>>> its trademarks Real Soon Now, and not doing so risks losing the
>>> rights over that trademark and becoming a [[genericized trademark]].
>>
>> Any value the wikipedia brand has comes from the content of the
>> wikipedia. The content itself does not "belong" to the Wikimedia
>> Foundation. The brand, well, I could not care less. Be careful that
>> you recognize value where it really is.
>
> The content belongs to its original copyright owners, and
> increasingly, the Wikimedia Foundation is their official copyright
> agent. The community is deeply tied up with the Wikipedia name and
> reputation; if there's no community,  there will be no encyclopedia.
> The name (and logo) are a banner for everyone to unite around.
>
> Trust me, the brand is worth a great deal, in both moral and monetary
> terms: people want to contribute to "the" Wikipedia, not a fork, for
> example, and donors want to fund the "real" Wikipedia project, not one
> of the hundreds of knockoffs. The brand symbolically holds the
> community and initiative together, and symbols have great power. Even
> the strongest Free Software advocates like Richard Stallman and Linus
> Torvalds jealously protect the GNU and Linux brands; and for good reason.
>
> If things were to fall apart, the community _could_ realign around a
> different organization, with a different name: consider x.org vs.
> xfree86 -- however, that would be an option of last resort, after some
> assumed failure of the current Wikimedia initiative, which is what the
> Foundation exists to prevent. Hence the important of good branding and
> trademark policies.
>
>>> The Foundation urgently needs an official policy before anything
>>> damaging occurs to the Wikipedia/Wikimedia brand. An official
>>> partner list page would be a good idea: so the Foundation can say "if
>>> you're not on this page, you're not an official partner, and here's
>>> how to
>>> apply to be a Wikimedia partner, dear Bill/Melinda [delete as
>>> applicable]"
>>
>> Do we? Is it so important that we "recognize" our "partners"?
>
> Yes it is. Partnership implies two-way consent. On the other hand, the
> GFDL makes all the content available to anyone, without any need for
> recognition or permission save that explicitly given in the GFDL. And
> letting self-designated "partners" use the trademarks without explicit
> permission leads down the slippery path to genericization, which has
> the potential to severely damage the project.
>
>> I say the opposite is true. We should have a policy that says: "It
>> does not matter how much money, content, or goodwill you send our
>> way, we are not putting your logo or anything else in the wikipedia.
>> Our NPOV policy would prohibit that, now that I think about it.
>>
>> It would be kind of like saying "This unbiased beverage report
>> brought to you by our Partner: Pepsi"
>>
>> Chris Mahan
>
> I agree with you on this. Partner recognition should be kept well
> clear of the content. Which is why I recommend having partnership info
> on the Wikimedia Foundation site, not in the project content.

There are some very important points here in the matter of intellectual
property law.  I have long believed that in terms of copyrights the big
argument will not come over the inclusion of copyvio material in some
Wikipedia article, but over the willingness of Wikimedia to defend the
collective rights of its multitude of licensors.  The collective has a
history of removing copyvio material when it is found, often to an
extent that far exceeds what may be required by law.  We only need to be
aware of the copyvio material before we act.

So far, I believe that those who have used the Wikipedia material have
been reasonably willing to be compliant when advised of the GFDL.  What
happens if someone bluntly and stubbornly refuses?  What tools do we
have that we are willing to use to enforce compliance?  Who has the
personal responsibility to take the necessary legal steps?  Prosecuting
cases can be more difficult than defending them.  The fact that our
collective rights are primarily not fiscal ones makes protecting them
more difficult in a judicial system that reduces all disputes to dollar
values as the lowest common denominator.  A lawyer working on
contingency fees knows how to calculate 30% of nothing.

I remember well the first "24" who was chased away when I arrived three
years ago.  (He should not be confused with the more recent and now more
familiar one who really was a PIA.)  Anyways, the first 24 was concerned
with a set of ideas in economic theory based on different kinds of
capital.  He considered such things as social capital, educational
capital and environmental capital, all of which should appear on some
kind of balance sheet.  IIRC he was mostly criticized for presenting
original research, but some of which I had heard already heard about in
other sources.  The point in raising this is that we need to look at
capital in other than monetary terms, because that may be the one common
idea that underpins all movements for the free distribution of knowledge.

In the matter of partnerships being big has certain advantages; it
allows us to be in the driver's seat.  We can, for example, charge a fee
for the right to call oneself a Wikipedia partner while doing very
little else in return.  A single page which shows the logos of all our
partners would be enough.  That would only be there as verification that
someone that calls himself a partner really is.

Picture this:  We have, by volunteer effort alone, created a
half-billion dollar gorilla that can't be sold (though not for a lack of
willing buyers).  Its physical assets are a tiny depreciating server
farm, and a little pocket change in the bank.  Enron could only wish to
have done so much with so little?  That's the ultimate futures trade by
the libertarian capitalist king of a socialist monarchy.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] what is partnership ?


from_name: Egil Kvaleberg

subject: [Wikitech-l] Extensions for handling geographical coordinates

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

>> 2. Should extensions be put in the extensions module or in the
>> phase3/extensions directory?
>
>
> Extensions that go into our main CVS should go in the extensions module.

OK, I did that. One caveat is that I could not get an include into
"../extensions/gis/geo.php" to work (some security concern?), so I
wrote in the instructions that extensions/gis needs to be moved into
phase3/extensions/gis before use. Seems like a hack; there is probably
something I didn't understand.

I have now included support for the geo database, and included
support for finding neighboring articles as well as support for
generating points for Wikimaps. The database table is defined as follows:

CREATE TABLE wikipedia_gis (
        gis_id int(8) unsigned NOT NULL,
        gis_latitude_min real NOT NULL,
        gis_latitude_max real NOT NULL,
        gis_longitude_min real NOT NULL,
        gis_longitude_max real NOT NULL,
        gis_region char(2) binary default '',
        gis_type char(12) binary default '',
        gis_type_arg char(12) binary default '',

        KEY gis_id (gis_id),
        INDEX gis_latitude_min (gis_latitude_min),
        INDEX gis_latitude_max (gis_latitude_max),
        INDEX gis_longitude_min (gis_longitude_min),
        INDEX gis_longitude_max (gis_longitude_max)
);

Comments invited, I am totally stupid wrt databases.
I added the table manually, but I believe there must be a fancy way
in the maintenance module to do this without shell access. If
anyone can tell me how, that would be appreciated.

Database entry is implemented as ArticleSaveComplete and
ArticleDelete hooks. The hook will first delete all entries belonging to
the article ID, and then, based on Parser::extractTags( 'geo',...), add
new entries as required.

I have used article ID instead of title as key, because I believe
that is more efficient. The downside is that I have to look up the title
from the ID upon retrieval. This is currently done locally by:

                $name_dbkey = $this->db->selectField( 'page',
                                      'page_title',
                                       array( 'page_id' => $id),
                                       $fname );
                return str_replace( '_', ' ', $name_dbkey );

This creates an unnecessary version dependency, I believe.
So any suggestions for a better approach are highly welcome.

 I am running a test on a private server with a couple of thousand
points which seem to work fine, but if it is possible with a more
public test, that would be highly appreciated.

I will update the documentation, but here is a couple of sample
requests. To get a list of all Wikipedia articles within a radius of 5 km
from the White House in Washington:

http:/phase3/extensions/gis/index.php?near=38.8954_N_-77.0366_E&dist=5

My sample implementation gives a list of 7 locations for the above request.
(For the time being, I'm embedding this link as the first in "Map sources".
It should probably appear in the 'navigation' box instead/also)

For a Wikimap style list of all airports in the world:

http:/phase3/extensions/gis/index.php?maparea=90_N_180_E_to_90_S_180_W_type:airport

The Wikimap lists are of course meant to be used indirectly in
Wikimaps, but I believe the format should also be suitable as a
basis for export also, e.g. to World Wind.

en:User:Egil


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Putting Wikipedia on a CD or DVD

body:
Nathan Wong wrote:

>> I for one am not prepared to account for the consequences of
>> distributing autofella..., etc. to school children.
>
> Many millions of school children can probably access all of
> Wikipedia's articles on pretty much anything online anyway, and some
> schools / colleges have a EB / Encarta subscription that would contain
> similar information.

But only if you  believe that:
    EB + Enc > WP :-)

Ec


body:
Matt R wrote:

>--- Nathan Wong <estel at f2s.com> wrote:
>
>
>>>>we have to admit that a big part of our content does not necessarily
>>>>fit the needs of some of the target people in these countries. And
>>>>what the associations I went in contact with insisted that they did
>>>>not want to just be handled a cd from west to use.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>I for one am not prepared to account for the consequences of
>>>distributing autofella..., etc. to school children.
>>>
>>>
>>Many millions of school children can probably access all of Wikipedia's
>>articles on pretty much anything online anyway, and some schools /
>>colleges have a EB / Encarta subscription that would contain similar
>>information.
>>
>>
>Hang on...isn't this discussion in the context of shipping CDs out to parts of
>the world without easy Internet access? In which case, the aforementioned
>schoolchildren would not be able to access these things online.
>
Yep!  It's hard for a person who has grown up in a fully wired society
to imagine 3rd world conditions.

In some places the best use for a CD is as a substitute for hard-to-get
frisbees.

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] Open questions

body:
There are a lot of unanswered questions and issues currently facing
the board, and I would appreciate your help with these.

If you have any thoughts on the following topics, please see
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_agenda/Open_questions> and give
your answers and suggestions, either on that page, or by email to me
if you would prefer to reply privately.

1 Hosting
2 Trademarks
3 Membership
4 Money
5 Developers
6 Communication

If you feel there are further questions that need to be addressed,
please add those to the page.

Thank you.

Angela.

--
Angela Beesley
Not necessarily reflecting the views of the Wikimedia Foundation.


subject: [Foundation-l] Open questions


subject: [WikiEN-l] RE: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 20, Issue 125

body:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikien-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of
> wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org
> Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2005 1:59 PM
> To: wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
> Subject: WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 20, Issue 125
>
>
> Send WikiEN-l mailing list submissions to
> 	wikien-l at Wikipedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> 	http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> 	wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> 	wikien-l-owner at Wikipedia.org
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more
> specific than "Re: Contents of WikiEN-l digest..."
>


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
I've sent Ourmedia a note through their contact form asking for
clarification.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
I've sent Ourmedia a note through their contact form asking for
clarification.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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clarification.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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clarification.

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from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

body:
Hiho,

David Gerard wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>> I am not sure a deal will be possible though.
>> Amongst problems raised is the one of responsability of the editors.
>
> How are the makers of the de: CD dealing with these issues?

Directmedia, the publisher of the CD and now the DVD, took the legal
responsability for the content of the CD. They produced a certain
quantity (40000) they distributed themselves and then waited a bit if
there would be any legal complaints before selling distribution rights
to some magazines which distributed the CD in a higher number (I think
about 500000).

greetings,
elian


from_name: Neil Harris

subject:
[Wikitech-l] You have lots of money to spend ;	time to get to
	it! :-)

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005
>
>I?d really like to have a general idea on what we want to buy soon and if that
>can be bought before the end of the quarter in 2 weeks, then that?d make
>accounting a bit easier for me :).
>
>
>So, what do we want to buy?
>
>
>
One more consideration: if Wikimedia is going to have lots of
third-party squid sites popping up in the near future, it will make
sense to ensure that all new machines are appropriate for Apache
operation, as the relative need for local squid servers may actually
reduce as a proportion of overall Florida operations, and at the same
time third-party squids will put ever more load on central Apache
operations, until the overall system can be made more full distributed.

I'm assuming the plan goes something like this:

1 add 3rd party offsite squids around the world

2 start doing offsite Apache rendering, too

3 start doing offsite read-only DB mirrors, with the central writable DB
still in Florida

4 global distributed everything...

with stage 1 coming real soon now (already there, in Paris), and stages
2/3 following by the end of the year? Stage 4 is probably a far future
thing, as it will probably require big architectural advances in open
source DBs, as well as concerns about jurisdiction over the data. (eg
Florida law applies at the moment).

Oh, it also might make sense to consider purchasing some (inexpensive)
Netscreen or similar high-speed hardware-based crypto VPN boxes for use
in stage 2 or beyond, so you can basically just extend your core
internal VPN to offsite farms whilst still keeping your internal
services network separate from the public Internet. I know some people
who are experts in doing this who might be able to volunteer some advice.

-- Neil


from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

subject: [Wikipedia-l] [WikiEN-l] Re: Putting Wikipedia on a CD or DVD

body:
Well, we are now having meetings with MandrakeSoft to develop a
standalone dvd version of wikipedia.

I met them 2 weeks ago and I will provide them with a demo version next
week.

Cordialement,

Jean-Baptiste Soufron, Doctorant
CERSA - CNRS, Paris 2
http://soufron.free.fr

Le 23 mars 05, ? 20:04, David Gerard a ?crit :

> [cc to wikipedia-l]
>
> Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>
>> Will Wikipedia fit on a CD or DVD?
>> How big is the "current article" database? (Excluding the text of all
>> previous versions, because some articles have been modified over 500
>> times!)
>
>
> The en: SQL dump is over 500MB compressed (.bz2) - that'd be well
> over a gig uncompressed.
>
>
>> What are Wikipedia's plans to move toward 1.0 and issue a Disk,
>> Book, or Multi-volume set?
>
>
> So far my plan [[User:David Gerard/1.0]] appears to be the closest
> to a coherent plan. It relies on [[m:Article validation feature]],
> which Magnus has decided will be polished up for inclusion in
> MediaWiki 1.5.
>
> This plan is so far a way to produce a 1.0-ready distribution.
> We have a paper publisher who might be interested, but it would
> have to be a CONSIDERABLY cut down version - think single-volume
> encyclopedia, because the current en: text would be bigger than
> Britannica if printed in full ...
>
>
>> How far has anyone looked into delivering copies of Wikipedia (in any
>> medium) to third-world schools, as in Africa or Indonesia? (To show
>> my level of ignorance: Are there even any public libraries in
>> Africa?)
>> If Wikipedia received a donation of $100,000 - specifically earmarked
>> for CD distribution to Africa, COULD it do anything?
>
>
> We can do a dump to DVD very easily ;-) en: and fr: would at least
> make a start on covering Africa. We could probably include *all* the
> local languages with that, as their Wikipedias are much smaller.
>
> (There are small considerations like copyright liability in an
> environment where you can't just remove violations from the online
> history ... but never mind that for the moment.)
>
> I have no idea if anyone's investigated the practicalities of
> distribution in Africa. However, I can guess that Africa is blanketed
> in minute detail by other charities, and I have no doubt we could
> hitch a ride with several, which would get a DVD into every school.
> Possibly even something to run the DVD on, and something to power the
> thing to run the DVD on ;-) (Or just a cheap PC with a hard disk
> full of Wikipedia and a DVD for backup.)
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] add worldwind URL scheme?

body:
John Fader wrote:

>  Would it be possible to add the worldwind URL scheme to the list of
>acceptable URL schemes that en.wikipedia accepts as valid for external
>links?
>
>
This is a very nice feature for the gis "Map sources" extension.

For the proof-of-concept demo I simple added to the definition already
in Parser.php, thus:

    define( 'URL_PROTOCOLS',
'http|https|ftp|irc|gopher|news|mailto|worldwind' );

Perhaps it would be more clean to do it in the extension proper? Is
there a clean way one could cleanly add to URL_PROTOCOLS from an
extension (I have a suspiscion there is not).

If  there is not, would there be any problem just adding it?

Egil


body:
Frederik Eaton wrote:
> Has somebody written a script to convert mediawiki markup to html? I'd
> need something which works with embedded latex. Looking at the
> mediawiki source it doesn't seem like it should be *that* hard but I
> haven't tried yet.

Yes, we've written one; it's called "MediaWiki". It's written in PHP,
and uses a helper program 'texvc' to handle LaTeX fragments and pass
them to the renderer.

If you can't or don't want to try to use MediaWiki's parser, there are a
huge number of more or less somewhat-implemented clone parsers in
various languages: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: phase3/extensions/ee - New directory

body:
Ashar Voultoiz wrote:
> Wrong place for the extension. The "extensions" directory in module
> phase3 is just a place holder. Extensions should be commited to the
> "extensions" module.

I've moved it.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [WikiEN-l] A friendly Wired Article

body:
-----Original Message-----
From: TL at pipeline.com [mailto:TL at pipeline.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2005 2:22 PM
To: Poor, Edmund W
Subject: article of interest

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki_pr.html

I'm sure EVERYONE has seen this article but me, by now. I feel like I
just got a big pat on the back for my 3 1/2 years of work! This writer
is very friendly and has captured the essence of Wikipedia much, MUCH
better than anyone else heretofore. I just wish his article was GFDL'd
so I could incorporate all his descriptions.

Uncle Ed

P.S. A non-Wikipedian sent me the URL


subject: [Foundation-l] what is partnership ?

body:
Anthere wrote:

>Hmmmm.
>
>
[...]

>
>It is certainly a bit strange that we should use the same word to define very different realities. I think Lost Oasis is a partner. A private firm giving funds for Wikimania will be a partner. Using google search right now, is a partnership. Us using MediaWiki is a partnership. People like JoiIto or Sunir Shah, are partners as well. Kennisnet might be a partnership. Telebotanica might be a partnership. And BBC doing things with Angela is also a partnership. Should we display all these logos ? How to measure value of each ? Often, it just mean : we share some values.
>
>
>
>
I agree: there can be many partners, and there's no reason not to be
partners with many people and organizations. But with the Wikipedia
brand becoming more and more valuable, and official trademark
recognition in the offing, there needs to be an official process for
registration of Wikipedia/Wikimedia partners. In particular, I believe
that the Foundation will have a legal requirement to defend its
trademarks Real Soon Now, and not doing so risks losing the rights over
that trademark and becoming a [[genericized trademark]].

The Foundation urgently needs an official policy before anything
damaging occurs to the Wikipedia/Wikimedia brand. An official partner
list page would be a good idea: so the Foundation can say "if you're not
on this page, you're not an official partner, and here's how to apply to
be a Wikimedia partner, dear Bill/Melinda [delete as applicable]"

-- Neil


subject: [Foundation-l] what is partnership ?


from_name: Karthik Gopalakrishnan

subject:
[Wikitech-l] How to remove the writing "From Wikipedia,
	the free encyclopedia." from all articles

body:
Hi,
I'm relatively new to Mediawiki and PHP.

I installed Mediawiki in my local computer running
Fedora Core 3
PHP 4.3.10
MySQL 4.0.24.

I also loaded the current english wikipedia dump onto the MySQL.

On all articles just  below the Article Name there is a writing
"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia."  and in the Edit Page too.

I was wondering is there anyway to remove this writing and add another writing.

Please Help !!!
Karthik.G


subject: [Foundation-l] what is partnership ?

body:
Christopher Mahan wrote:

>--- Neil Harris <usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
>>I agree: there can be many partners, and there's no reason not to
>>be
>>partners with many people and organizations. But with the Wikipedia
>>
>>brand becoming more and more valuable, and official trademark
>>recognition in the offing, there needs to be an official process
>>for
>>registration of Wikipedia/Wikimedia partners. In particular, I
>>believe
>>that the Foundation will have a legal requirement to defend its
>>trademarks Real Soon Now, and not doing so risks losing the rights
>>over
>>that trademark and becoming a [[genericized trademark]].
>>
>>
>
>Any value the wikipedia brand has comes from the content of the
>wikipedia. The content itself does not "belong" to the Wikimedia
>Foundation. The brand, well, I could not care less. Be careful that
>you recognize value where it really is.
>
>
>
The content belongs to its original copyright owners, and increasingly,
the Wikimedia Foundation is their official copyright agent. The
community is deeply tied up with the Wikipedia name and reputation; if
there's no community,  there will be no encyclopedia. The name (and
logo) are a banner for everyone to unite around.

Trust me, the brand is worth a great deal, in both moral and monetary
terms: people want to contribute to "the" Wikipedia, not a fork, for
example, and donors want to fund the "real" Wikipedia project, not one
of the hundreds of knockoffs. The brand symbolically holds the community
and initiative together, and symbols have great power. Even the
strongest Free Software advocates like Richard Stallman and Linus
Torvalds jealously protect the GNU and Linux brands; and for good reason.

If things were to fall apart, the community _could_ realign around a
different organization, with a different name: consider x.org vs.
xfree86 -- however, that would be an option of last resort, after some
assumed failure of the current Wikimedia initiative, which is what the
Foundation exists to prevent. Hence the important of good branding and
trademark policies.

>>The Foundation urgently needs an official policy before anything
>>damaging occurs to the Wikipedia/Wikimedia brand. An official
>>partner
>>list page would be a good idea: so the Foundation can say "if
>>you're not
>>on this page, you're not an official partner, and here's how to
>>apply to
>>be a Wikimedia partner, dear Bill/Melinda [delete as applicable]"
>>
>>
>
>Do we? Is it so important that we "recognize" our "partners"?
>
>
>
Yes it is. Partnership implies two-way consent. On the other hand, the
GFDL makes all the content available to anyone, without any need for
recognition or permission save that explicitly given in the GFDL. And
letting self-designated "partners" use the trademarks without explicit
permission leads down the slippery path to genericization, which has the
potential to severely damage the project.

>I say the opposite is true. We should have a policy that says: "It
>does not matter how much money, content, or goodwill you send our
>way, we are not putting your logo or anything else in the wikipedia.
>Our NPOV policy would prohibit that, now that I think about it.
>
>
>It would be kind of like saying "This unbiased beverage report
>brought to you by our Partner: Pepsi"
>
>Chris Mahan
>
>
I agree with you on this. Partner recognition should be kept well clear
of the content. Which is why I recommend having partnership info on the
Wikimedia Foundation site, not in the project content.

-- Neil


subject: [Foundation-l] what is partnership ?


from_name: Andrew Cranwell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Putting Wikipedia on a CD or DVD

body:
David Gerard wrote:

> I'd see what the reaction to de: is like. Possibly we should be
> publicising
> quite a bit that de: is now available and being sold.

What about the inclusion in Mandrakelinux? Is that still going ahead?

[[en:User:Alphax]]


from_name: Nathan Wong

body:
> I for one am not prepared to account for the consequences of
> distributing autofella..., etc. to school children.

Many millions of school children can probably access all of Wikipedia's
articles on pretty much anything online anyway, and some schools /
colleges have a EB / Encarta subscription that would contain similar
information.


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Congratulations are in order (an
	overlooked	milestone)

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:

>Is it better now?
>
>Mark
>

Well, it is better, but please try lightening it again. I think the
effect should be at most like a watermark, if there at all. At the
moment, the effect of "text on text" is highly distracting, and worse
than the current appearance.

-- Neil


from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [Foundation-l] Re: what is partnership ?

body:
Neil Harris wrote:

> I agree: there can be many partners, and there's no reason not to be
> partners with many people and organizations. But with the Wikipedia
> brand becoming more and more valuable, and official trademark
> recognition in the offing, there needs to be an official process for
> registration of Wikipedia/Wikimedia partners. In particular, I believe
> that the Foundation will have a legal requirement to defend its
> trademarks Real Soon Now, and not doing so risks losing the rights
> over that trademark and becoming a [[genericized trademark]].

Other organizations identifying us as their partners is not that great
of a threat to trademark status, although it does create some potential
for brand confusion. The scenario in which our trademarks would become
genericized is if, for example, we allow anybody to call some wiki, or
even a non-wiki reference site, a "wikipedia". That's the kind of
situation that would really call for action.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Matt R

body:
--- Nathan Wong <estel at f2s.com> wrote:
> > > we have to admit that a big part of our content does not necessarily
> > > fit the needs of some of the target people in these countries. And
> > > what the associations I went in contact with insisted that they did
> > > not want to just be handled a cd from west to use.
> >
> > I for one am not prepared to account for the consequences of
> > distributing autofella..., etc. to school children.
>
> Many millions of school children can probably access all of Wikipedia's
> articles on pretty much anything online anyway, and some schools /
> colleges have a EB / Encarta subscription that would contain similar
> information.

Hang on...isn't this discussion in the context of shipping CDs out to parts of
the world without easy Internet access? In which case, the aforementioned
schoolchildren would not be able to access these things online.

Matt

Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com


body:
Tom Haws wrote:

> They are going to get it anyway.  They may as well get it from me?  Is
> that the reasoning?

No, merely that you would no more be 'responsible' for a school age
child accessing that information from a Wikipedia CD/DVD than you are
for it being on Wikipedia atm, or a teacher/headmaster would be for
providing access to it (there's no reason not to have a sign that says
"Warning: this is an encyclopedia and there may be some articles that
you find objectionable".
On the other hand, if we were to initiate a review system there is no
reason that it cannot have some form of content warning/aging anyway
(though I think that just a "mature content notice" would be best). From
this, you could produce two version of Wikipedia - one which is censored
(if you see fit - though it could be argued that this is against the
"wiki-way").

Estel