subject: SPAM altert! Ignore [Textbook-l] Job Kwanta posts

body:
Sorry folks, a couple got through. PLEASE do not
respond to "[Textbook-l] Job Kwanta" posts unless you
want you inbox full of SPAM and your email account
rendered useless (set aside the fact that SPAM is part
of a scam!).

This is getting annoying - every day at least a couple
SPAM emails are sent to this list and either Brion or
I have to review and reject each one. My work email is
also exposed on the Internet as a 'mailto:' and yet I
have received only one commercial SPAM email in 2
years (office SPAM is another issue...).

--- textbook-l-owner at wikimedia.org wrote:
> As list administrator, your authorization is
> requested for the
> following mailing list posting:
>
>     List:    Textbook-l at wikimedia.org
>     From:    86mvfispx at tim.it
>     Subject: I know you get many messages like
> this!But just have a look anyway xyxk  lqy gjt xq
>     Reason:  Post by non-member to a members-only
> list
>
> At your convenience, visit:
>
>
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/admindb/textbook-l
>
> to approve or deny the request.
>

> ATTACHMENT part 2 message/rfc822
> From: "Cameron Thornton" <86mvfispx at tim.it>
> To: textbook-l at wikimedia.org
> Subject: I know you get many messages like this!But
> just have a look anyway
> 	xyxk lqy gjt xq
> Date: Mon, 01 Dec 03 06:38:46 GMT
>
> have you experienced seduction and salaciousness
> with virtual reality before?
>
> click here
> http://ns2.adweawen.biz/ph/index_mailer.html
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ig gd cyes vmnuvtgeztkeqssjwtqzgh
> ezdp
> lmn cgvljcfysxaesyql   aempgn hwwwj
>

> ATTACHMENT part 3 message/rfc822
> Subject: confirm
> e22263c3135ff391b6ee17d69da2903bca7517b5
> From: textbook-l-request at wikimedia.org
>
> If you reply to this message, keeping the Subject:
> header intact,
> Mailman will discard the held message.  Do this if
> the message is
> spam.  If you reply to this message and include an
> Approved: header
> with the list password in it, the message will be
> approved for posting
> to the list.  The Approved: header can also appear
> in the first line
> of the body of the reply.

__________________________________
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__________________________________
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list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] Clearly labeled material (was: False Colors)

body:
Fred wrote:

> The issue is whether the opinions of
> someone posing as a scientist but in
> fact pushing a position derived from
> devine revelation is to be treated as
> a legitimate divergent view from a
> scientific viewpoint. Clearly, if not
> excluded which is my preference, such
> material should be clearly labeled as
> to its nature, including references to
> the source of the revelation.

I agree, if you're talking about the [[creation science]] viewpoint
about evolution. 95% of all scientists (and 99.8% of biologists) favor
the "no divine intervention" viewpoint on evolution.

Thus, I think it's safe to say that mainstream science favors the
Darwinist position. And that Creationists' attempt to fly the flag of
religion in scientific waters need not be endorsed by Wikipedia as a
"legitimate divergent view".

I disagree, if you're painting SEPP or its founder S. Fred Singer as
pushing a position based on divine revelation. Singer actually disagrees
with the only religious viewpoint I've ever heard expressed about CFCs.
For example, Rev. Moon said,

"The development of scientific knowledge and civilization has . . .
resulted in such global problems as the destruction of nature and the
environment, global warming and the diminishing of the ozone layer."

-- http://www.tparents.org/Moon-Talks/sunmyungmoon95/SM950822.htm

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Moon's view seems to differ from Singer's.
The reverend is blaming people for global warming and ozone depletion,
if I'm not reading this quotation out of context. The retired scientist
(Singer) is much less certain that human beings are to blame, and even
questions whether the phenomena Rev. Moon expressed so much concern
about, are even occurring!

Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] The Curmudgeonator

body:
Much as the Cunctator irks me, I'd much prefer to have him around than
to have him hounded out. He supplies needed perspective and balance.

He's not destructive, he's just a curmudgeon. And we need a curmudgeon
like Cunc around here, if only to play devil's advocate.

Believe it or not, I consider him one of my top ten influences at
Wikipedia. I might not agree with everything he says, but I NEVER take
what he says lightly.

Uncle Ed


subject: [WikiEN-l] Feature suggestion: partial user blocking

body:
As Wikien-l administrator, I am forwarding this feature suggestion to
the community for comment. --Ed Poor

_______________________________________________

Hello.

Still trying to figure out, with others, how to handle vandalism on fr:
Wikipedia, I have a feature suggestion: ability to prevent someone from
editing only encyclopedia pages (namespace 0, i think?), but letting
her/him edit talk pages and such.
This way articles are protected, but still we can talk with the user
through talk pages, or meta pages, something we can't do if we totally
block the user.

It would also make it easier for a user having an ip matching a blocked
vandal's ip to ask for unblocking.

What do you think?

Nicolas 'Ryo'

_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list


from_name: Sascha Noyes

subject: [WikiEN-l] contributions of User:Mr-Natural-Health

body:
On Monday 01 December 2003 12:10, Viajero wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> A new user named Mr-Natural-Health has created a number of new articles in
> recent days which are disturbingly non-neutral -- this individual has an
> axe to grind with mainstream medicine. See:
>
>   Allopathy
>   Natural Health
>   Natural therapy
>   Heroic medicine
>   Patient empowerment
>
> Though several are currently listed on Cleanup and have been edited a bit,
> VfD might be a better place, since they are so slanted that deleting and
> starting anew is probably the wisest strategy. However, if anyone would
> like to lend hand and try to salvage something...
>
> V.

This person needs a stern talking to.


list: textbook-l

from_name: Chuck Becken

subject: [Textbook-l] Re: Next Of Kin.

body:
I'm trying to reach Job Kwanta. His
email "webcux at hotmail.com" is not
working. What is his current email addr.
THANKS


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] XML export and questions

body:
On Dec 1, 2003, at 10:29, jakob.voss at s1999.tu-chemnitz.de wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm working on a XML representation of Wikipedia articles
> [[meta:Wikipedia
> DTD]]
> - the XML export function [[XML import and export]] is a step forward
> to this
> but I do not understand what the element "restrictions" may contain:
>
> So what is the purpose of table 'cur_restrictions'? Are there any other
> restrictions but 'sysop' or why it is not just a boolean value?

It's a comma-separated list of tags which may be present in a user's
user_rights field (again, as a comma-separated list of tags). I don't
think the software fully supports this model yet (as we don't use
anything more complex that "" / "sysop" on Wikipedia) but that's the
theory.

> Some bugs and wishes for the next update of SpecialExport.php:
> - add an XML header ("<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>")

Hmm, yes that was supposed to be there. Must have forgot...

> - replace the attribute 'xml:ns' with something like 'interwiki' or
> 'language'.
>   Please avoid attributes starting with 'xml:'. 'xml:lang' is not the
> best
>   choice neither since there are MediaWikis like wiktionary and meta
> that
>   does corespondent to languages.

xml:ns??? That's really supposed to be xml:lang! And it's only meant
for the language. If it's ever something other than a language code,
let me know, cause that would be a bug. It should be pumping in the
value of $wgLangCode, which is what we send out as the Content-Language
and the LANG attribute on the HTML element in our web page output.

> - include 'cur_counter'

cur_counter is not an attribute of a wiki page.

> BTW: What about the new namespaces
> 	8	=> "MediaWiki",
> 	9	=> "MediaWiki_talk"
> ??

These are for the interface string editing.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Defendent

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>I think Flexicon is the logical defendent with Wikipedia as a the plaintiff
>should we chose to not accept repeated violations of our copyright, if
>contact with them requesting compliance proves unproductive. Ulrich Fuchs is
>right to point this out but throwing in the "five author" question is not
>productive as we do want people, including commercial sites, to reuse our
>material without onerous requirements.
>
>
I'm not sure how Wikipedia could be the plaintiff, as it doesn't hold
copyright to the material.  The material I've submitted to Wikipedia,
for example, is copyrighted by me.  I have licensed it under the GFDL,
so Wikipedia, as well as anyone else willing to abide by the terms of
the GFDL, is free to use my text.  But they have no more rights to it
than any other random person or entity does.

-Mark


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Defendent

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>>From http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_FDL
>
>"...the text contained in Wikipedia is licensed to the public under the GNU
>Free Documentation License (GFDL)"
>
>This statement gives us standing as licensor, the defendent is a licensee
>under the GFDL.
>
>
That statement is correct, but Wikipedia is not doing the licensing.
The text contained within Wikipedia has been individually licensed by
its authors under the GFDL.  Wikipedia collects all these GFDL texts on
one website, but others are free to do so as well.

Note also that some text on Wikipedia isn't even created by
Wikipedians--it's an import of pre-existing GFDL works from elsewhere.
We can use it, just as anyone else can, as long as we follow the license.

-Mark


from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Defendent

body:
>From http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_FDL

"...the text contained in Wikipedia is licensed to the public under the GNU
Free Documentation License (GFDL)"

This statement gives us standing as licensor, the defendent is a licensee
under the GFDL.

Fred

> From: Delirium <delirium at rufus.d2g.com>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2003 13:29:54 -0800
> To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] The Defendent
>
> Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>> I think Flexicon is the logical defendent with Wikipedia as a the plaintiff
>> should we chose to not accept repeated violations of our copyright, if
>> contact with them requesting compliance proves unproductive. Ulrich Fuchs is
>> right to point this out but throwing in the "five author" question is not
>> productive as we do want people, including commercial sites, to reuse our
>> material without onerous requirements.
>>
>>
> I'm not sure how Wikipedia could be the plaintiff, as it doesn't hold
> copyright to the material.  The material I've submitted to Wikipedia,
> for example, is copyrighted by me.  I have licensed it under the GFDL,
> so Wikipedia, as well as anyone else willing to abide by the terms of
> the GFDL, is free to use my text.  But they have no more rights to it
> than any other random person or entity does.
>
> -Mark
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Subpages broken

body:
On Dec 1, 2003, at 14:31, Erik Moeller wrote:
> I haven't had time to look at the code yet, but one of the recent
> upgrades
> broke subpage support (used on Wikipedia for user and talk pages).
> Check
> out
>
> http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/Boilerplate_texts
>
> for an example. The backlink title is shown, but the actual link is
> not.

Here's your problem:
	$growinglink.=$link;
	$getlink=$this->makeLink( $growingLink, $link);

Case sensitivity strikes again! In PHP function names are not case
sensitive, but variable names are. (GARRRRRRRRRRR) We're passing an
empty string to makeLink()... Fixed.

Also this is hideous:
	if(preg_match("/class='new'/i",$getlink)) { break; } # this is a hack,
but it saves time

but it works for now.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: A

from_email: A

subject: [WikiEN-l] New policy on edit conficts (Re:Martin)

body:
*By the powers vested in me by the Wikipedia power structure, I hereby declare those changes to be de facto official, subject of course to overruling by other sysops
**Is this implying that sysops have special powers in regards to the formulation of policy, I thought they were no better than the rest of us...

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
Jason's got the new machine installed (thanks!). It's at
130.94.122.204, but it needs a name... Among the previous suggestions
to name machines after were:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_Adler

Any preference for 'diderot' or 'adler' or something else?

I can import the last backup dump and test it tonight; if all seems
well any objection to moving the database over tomorrow night? (Early
morning UTC on December 3 == evening US December 2.) The databases will
need to be frozen/read-only for the duration of copying, and I'm not
sure how long this will take so I don't want to spring it on everyone
unannounced.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] XML export and questions

body:
On Dec 1, 2003, at 13:16, Brion Vibber wrote:
>> Some bugs and wishes for the next update of SpecialExport.php:
>> - add an XML header ("<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>")
>
> Hmm, yes that was supposed to be there. Must have forgot...

Fixed.

> xml:ns??? That's really supposed to be xml:lang! And it's only meant
> for the language.

Fixed.

>> - include 'cur_counter'
>
> cur_counter is not an attribute of a wiki page.

To clarify: the hit counter is an attribute of the _site_ which
(loosely) tracks one particular page. Like the cache update timestamps,
it may be in the 'cur' table but it's not intrinsic to the wiki page.
(Also it's disabled on Wikipedia and may eventually get dropped.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Charles Matthews

subject: [WikiEN-l] Mainstream of science

body:
Ed Poor wrote

>The question is: What is "mainstream science"?

I doubt that's the question.  If a science can't account for its internal
mainstream, it's in trouble.  It is perfectly acceptable to argue that some
part of science is in crisis - we know it happens, from time to time.  It
isn't really acceptable, to me, to argue in terms of interest groups.
That's a covert (OK, barely concealed) attack on the status of what is going
on.

Charles


from_name: Rick

body:
I would support this feature.

RickK

"Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
As Wikien-l administrator, I am forwarding this feature suggestion to
the community for comment. --Ed Poor

_______________________________________________

Hello.

Still trying to figure out, with others, how to handle vandalism on fr:
Wikipedia, I have a feature suggestion: ability to prevent someone from
editing only encyclopedia pages (namespace 0, i think?), but letting
her/him edit talk pages and such.
This way articles are protected, but still we can talk with the user
through talk pages, or meta pages, something we can't do if we totally
block the user.

It would also make it easier for a user having an ip matching a blocked
vandal's ip to ask for unblocking.

What do you think?

Nicolas 'Ryo'

_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

---------------------------------
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from_name: Alex R.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Defendent

body:
My reply to this obvious legal issue question posted on the legal list:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikilegal-l/2003-December/000109.html
to join that list: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilegal-l

----- Original Message -----
From: "Fred Bauder" <fredbaud at ctelco.net>
To: <wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, December 01, 2003 5:37 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] The Defendent

> >From http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_FDL
>
> "...the text contained in Wikipedia is licensed to the public under the
GNU
> Free Documentation License (GFDL)"
>
> This statement gives us standing as licensor, the defendent is a licensee
> under the GFDL.
>
> Fred
>
> > From: Delirium <delirium at rufus.d2g.com>
> > Reply-To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2003 13:29:54 -0800
> > To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] The Defendent
> >
> > Fred Bauder wrote:
> >
> >> I think Flexicon is the logical defendent with Wikipedia as a the
plaintiff
> >> should we chose to not accept repeated violations of our copyright, if
> >> contact with them requesting compliance proves unproductive. Ulrich
Fuchs is
> >> right to point this out but throwing in the "five author" question is
not
> >> productive as we do want people, including commercial sites, to reuse
our
> >> material without onerous requirements.
> >>
> >>
> > I'm not sure how Wikipedia could be the plaintiff, as it doesn't hold
> > copyright to the material.  The material I've submitted to Wikipedia,
> > for example, is copyrighted by me.  I have licensed it under the GFDL,
> > so Wikipedia, as well as anyone else willing to abide by the terms of
> > the GFDL, is free to use my text.  But they have no more rights to it
> > than any other random person or entity does.
> >
> > -Mark
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: Viajero

body:
Hi all,

A new user named Mr-Natural-Health has created a number of new articles in
recent days which are disturbingly non-neutral -- this individual has an
axe to grind with mainstream medicine. See:

  Allopathy
  Natural Health
  Natural therapy
  Heroic medicine
  Patient empowerment

Though several are currently listed on Cleanup and have been edited a bit,
VfD might be a better place, since they are so slanted that deleting and
starting anew is probably the wisest strategy. However, if anyone would
like to lend hand and try to salvage something...

V.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Viajero wrote:

>A new user named Mr-Natural-Health has created a number of new articles in
>recent days which are disturbingly non-neutral -- this individual has an
>axe to grind with mainstream medicine. See:
>
>  Allopathy
>  Natural Health
>  Natural therapy
>  Heroic medicine
>  Patient empowerment
>
>Though several are currently listed on Cleanup and have been edited a bit,
>VfD might be a better place, since they are so slanted that deleting and
>starting anew is probably the wisest strategy. However, if anyone would
>like to lend hand and try to salvage something...
>
I've looked through these articles, and they don't seem bad at all.  His
article writing doesn't seem to be from someone with an axe to grind.
 He basically tries to explain what these concepts are.  His opponents
seem to have put themselves into a defensive shell without doing much to
try to reach a compromise.  A couple of the articles haven't had single
word put onto the talk page.  The Allopathy talk page has even been
bizarrely redirected to [[Talk:Criticisms of modern medicines]] in a way
that does not respect that the allopathy's meaning has undergone
significant variation since it was first used by Hahneman.

The level of intolerance coming from supporters of mainstream views is
highly disturbing.  The suggestion that these articles should be deleted
has no foundation in any wiki principles, but suggests that the bully
tactics of some kind of truth squad can prevail.

Knowledge flourishes in circumstances of openness.  Brain-storming is a
technique in some meetings that encourages participants to express their
ideas without fear of ridicule.  We all need to feel that we can
continue to contribute without perpetually feeling that those with
different views will quash our efforts.

Ec


from_name: Fantasy

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: My application (Re: Need Developers)

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> *poof* you're a developer! Welcome to the team! :)

Thanks a lot, I am honoured ;-)

> If you need bug tracker & up-to-date CVS access, let me know your
> Sourceforge account name and I'll add you.

"Fantasy" was already taken :-(
So my SourceForge Account is "wiki-fantasy"

>> ...tasks that just take time away from them and help me learn MediaWiki.
> Evan's been cleaning up the bug reports and feature requests; there's
> plenty of material!

I will look for some small tasks for the beginning. Maybe documentation?
In Germany we are now officially the "number one choice" in
Wiki-Software for large wikis. I guess, we will get more Software-
questions in the near future...

Thanks for letting me be part of the team,
Fantasy :-)


subject: [Wikitech-l] DNS problems

body:
On Dec 1, 2003, at 18:49, Brion Vibber wrote:
> Jason's working on getting it rebooted; it should come back up in the
> correct configuration.

We managed to get it resolved without a reboot; back online!

Note to self: turning an interface off may remove the default gateway
from the routing table.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: jakob.voss at s1999.tu-chemnitz.de

subject: [Wikitech-l] XML export and questions

body:
Hi,

I'm working on a XML representation of Wikipedia articles [[meta:Wikipedia
DTD]]
- the XML export function [[XML import and export]] is a step forward to this
but I do not understand what the element "restrictions" may contain:

So what is the purpose of table 'cur_restrictions'? Are there any other
restrictions but 'sysop' or why it is not just a boolean value?

Some bugs and wishes for the next update of SpecialExport.php:
- add an XML header ("<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>")
- replace the attribute 'xml:ns' with something like 'interwiki' or 'language'.
  Please avoid attributes starting with 'xml:'. 'xml:lang' is not the best
  choice neither since there are MediaWikis like wiktionary and meta that
  does corespondent to languages.
- include 'cur_counter'

BTW: What about the new namespaces
	8	=> "MediaWiki",
	9	=> "MediaWiki_talk"
??

Thank's
  Jakob Voss

P.S: The statistics page is one posibility to include a reference to the
developers more publically - like the "most active wikipedians". Perhaps there
is a way to get some CVS stats out of sourceforge into the wikipedia growth
overview.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Connectivity to wikipedia.org

body:
On Dec 1, 2003, at 17:22, Arwel Parry wrote:
> Is it just me that's having difficulty connecting to wikipedia? For
> the last few days I've been getting 80% packet loss which makes it
> incredibly frustrating to try to edit large articles! Traceroute seems
> to indicate messages are running into the sand in the San Diego
> area...

There've been complaints of sporadic outages from Wanadoo customers in
France also; these may or may not be related, and may or may not have
anything to do with recent problems with transatlantic cables
(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/26/1617237)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On 12/01/03  at 10:52 PM, Arvind Narayanan
<arvindn at meenakshi.cs.iitm.ernet.in> said:

> Mr-Natural-Health is not in a very collaborative mood either. They
> called me names on the talk page of one of those articles and on their
> user page,  but they seem to have edited it out now.

I saw that. Mr N-H thinks that people that interfere with his articles are
"vandals" and "busy-bodies" who "don't have a life".

V.


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] edit conflicts

body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:

>Almost 24 hours have passed since the Sarah Edmonds edit conflict/war, and I
>still am not sure what it was that I accidentally overwrote. Once I realized
>that something was overwritten, I did try to restore it, but I guess I missed
>something. Such is life. If I would have known, I would have put it back, but
>Wik did not want to even tell me what it was.
>
Middle name and month of birth, I think.

>
>On the other hand, more words have been written about that silly edit war
>than on the article itself. I find that kind of pathetic. It is now being debated
>on Wikipedia:Edit conflicts.
>
>Personally, I agree with Martin's suggested policy, though I will add that we
>should be working together, not debating one-upmanship or the rights of one
>contributor's edits to override those of another contributor. In the almost two
>years that i have been part of Wikipedia, there have always been edit
>wars--hell, I was even involved in a few--but they were always over content, not ego.
>I find it unfortunate that Wikipedia has come to this.
>
To put it in perspective, it's just one person instigating all this. I
think it's
inevitable that every sort of social defective will show up sooner or
later - even
.001% of 6 billion is a pretty big handful - but I also think the
culture of the
community is strong enough to deal with assaults by any individual. One
of our
advantages is that we can collectively write down and fine-tune policies; my
impression from old history is that editors now routinely depend on
policy to deal
quickly and efficiently with problems that used to involve a lot of
agonizing.

Stan


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] cur and old

body:
Man, these tables drive me crazy. Is there a good reason I'm missing
that we don't it like this?

        +------------------+            +---------------+
        | page             |            | page_version  |
        +------------------+            +---------------+
        | page_id          |      ----> | version_id    |
        | current_version  | ----/      | page_id       |
        +------------------+            | timestamp     |
                                        | user          |
                                        | ...           |
                                        | data          |
                                        +---------------+

That way, all your page versions are in one place -- a lot easier to
manage than two tables.

Just some woolgathering as I fight my way through some RFEs...

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


from_name: daniwo59 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] edit conflicts

body:
Almost 24 hours have passed since the Sarah Edmonds edit conflict/war, and I
still am not sure what it was that I accidentally overwrote. Once I realized
that something was overwritten, I did try to restore it, but I guess I missed
something. Such is life. If I would have known, I would have put it back, but
Wik did not want to even tell me what it was.

On the other hand, more words have been written about that silly edit war
than on the article itself. I find that kind of pathetic. It is now being debated
on Wikipedia:Edit conflicts.

Personally, I agree with Martin's suggested policy, though I will add that we
should be working together, not debating one-upmanship or the rights of one
contributor's edits to override those of another contributor. In the almost two
years that i have been part of Wikipedia, there have always been edit
wars--hell, I was even involved in a few--but they were always over content, not ego.
I find it unfortunate that Wikipedia has come to this.

Danny
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from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
I vote for diderot.

Brion Vibber wrote:

> Jason's got the new machine installed (thanks!). It's at
> 130.94.122.204, but it needs a name... Among the previous suggestions
> to name machines after were:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_Adler
>
> Any preference for 'diderot' or 'adler' or something else?
>
> I can import the last backup dump and test it tonight; if all seems
> well any objection to moving the database over tomorrow night? (Early
> morning UTC on December 3 == evening US December 2.) The databases will
> need to be frozen/read-only for the duration of copying, and I'm not
> sure how long this will take so I don't want to spring it on everyone
> unannounced.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] cur and old

body:
On Dec 1, 2003, at 17:43, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> Man, these tables drive me crazy. Is there a good reason I'm missing
> that we don't it like this?
>
>         +------------------+            +---------------+
>         | page             |            | page_version  |
>         +------------------+            +---------------+
>         | page_id          |      ----> | version_id    |
>         | current_version  | ----/      | page_id       |
>         +------------------+            | timestamp     |
>                                         | user          |
>                                         | ...           |
>                                         | data          |
>                                         +---------------+

I believe I've already advocated this for the next major revision of
the software. (We can transform 'old' into the revisions table and keep
the present old_id numbers intact, then add the present 'cur' data
after it.)

But first, we branch a stable release of the current version. We _are_
in feature freeze, supposedly.

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

subject: [Wikitech-l] Subpages broken

body:
I haven't had time to look at the code yet, but one of the recent upgrades
broke subpage support (used on Wikipedia for user and talk pages). Check
out

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/Boilerplate_texts

for an example. The backlink title is shown, but the actual link is not.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Arvind Narayanan

in_reply_to:
<E1AQriX-00021D-00@post-21.mail.nl.demon.net>;
	from viajero@quilombo.nl on Mon, Dec 01, 2003 at 06:10:40PM +0100

body:
On Mon, Dec 01, 2003 at 06:10:40PM +0100, Viajero wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> A new user named Mr-Natural-Health has created a number of new articles in
> recent days which are disturbingly non-neutral -- this individual has an
> axe to grind with mainstream medicine. See:
Mr-Natural-Health is not in a very collaborative mood either. They called
me names on the talk page of one of those articles and on their user page,
but they seem to have edited it out now.
>
>   Allopathy
>   Natural Health
>   Natural therapy
>   Heroic medicine
>   Patient empowerment
>
> Though several are currently listed on Cleanup and have been edited a bit,
> VfD might be a better place, since they are so slanted that deleting and
> starting anew is probably the wisest strategy. However, if anyone would
> like to lend hand and try to salvage something...
Just my opinion, but if you try to salvage something you'll probably be met
with even more propaganda. Better to start from scratch. That way we can
incorporate only those points which MNH has written which seem to constitute
a legitimate alternate viewpoint rather than NPOVing the whole lot of it.

Arvind
>
> V.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

--
Its all GNU to me


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Mainstream of science

body:
Ed Poor wrote:

>The question is: What is "mainstream science"?
>
>1. Money

[SNIP]

>2. Journal Articles

Money and journal articles both correlate positively with mainstream
science, but journal articles are a better indicator. If a particular
idea isn't being published at all in the peer-reviewed journals (as
is the case with so-called "creation science"), that's a clear
indication that the idea falls outside mainstream science.

Of course, someone has to _interpret_ those journal articles.
Scientists speak a specialized language, so explaining what the
articles mean may require some translation for lay people. Moreover,
not all scientific papers are equal in significance. For example, a
short-duration health study involving a small number of people is
considered less significant than a long-term study with a large
sample size. Scientific expertise is obviously helpful in assessing
how much weight each piece of published research deserves within the
larger body of research on a given topic.

One common mechanism used by scientists for this purpose is a
"consensus panel" or "consensus conference," which convenes when
expert opinion has converged on a single answer to a previously
controversial question.  The panel's job is to officially state the
consensus so it can be gotten out to the less-expert. The experts are
selected from among the leading researchers in the field, chosen to
reflect the range of viewpoints that exist in that field. They hold a
series of meetings, discuss the relevant published scientific
research on the topic at hand, and put together a report.
Occasionally a panel will be convened when opinion has not completely
converged on all aspects of a question. In this case the panel's job
is to see what everyone can genuinely agree on and what sorts of
hedge statements are acceptable for the rest. Once in a while there
will be an agreement to disagree in certain areas, and if so,
typically the majority view is published accompanied by an appendix
detailing the dissenters' positions.

In the United States, the National Research Council (the working arm
of the National Academy of Sciences) is the body that generally
convenes consensus panels for the purpose of provide expert reports
to policymakers. Many of its reports are published e-books, which
anyone can read online (or download in their entirety, sometimes for
a fee). If you'd like to see a fairly typical example, here's one
that they did in 2002 that looks at the impact of automobile fuel
economy standards on motor vehicle safety:

http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10172.html

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is basically an
extremely large consensus panel (with some 2,000 participants). Their
published reports (along with similar reports that have been
published by smaller scientific panels) are the basis for saying that
there is a "scientific consensus" on global warming. That's term
"consensus" is absolutely, if it is understood to mean that consensus
panels have convened and published their conclusions. However, Ed may
be interested in looking closely at specifically _what_ the IPCC
reached by way of a consensus. Here are a couple of examples that I
posted here previously, taken from their latest report:

>In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining
>uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years
>is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas
>concentrations.

>Emissions of CO2 due to fossil fuel burning are virtually certain to
>be the dominant influence on the trends in atmospheric CO2
>concentration during the 21st century.

Although these are "consensus" statements, they do acknowledge
uncertainty. The IPCC uses the term "likely" to mean that the
probability is higher than 66%. The term "virtually certain" means
99% or higher. This means that the IPCC thinks there is a possibility
(of 33% or less) that the observed warming over the last 50 years is
due to some cause _other_ than greenhouse gas concentrations. In
science, there are no "certainties," only probabilities. Even
commonplace scientific "facts" such as Einstein's theory of
relativity are regarded as theories. Even though the likelihood of
its being false is vanishingly small, science can't entirely rule out
that possibility. (Absolute truths only exist in religious dogma and
other faith-based belief systems. They have no place in science.)

If Ed wants to ensure that the uncertainties related to global
climate research are adequately reflected in the global warming
article, I think the best way to do this would be to accept the
IPCC's standing as a consensus body, and write the article so that it
reflects the degrees of uncertainty actually stated in the IPCC's own
report. This would be more productive, more accurate, and more likely
to lead to consensus under Wikipedia's NPOV rule than trying to
juxtapose the IPCC against Fred Singer's op-ed pieces for the
Washington Times.
--
--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Editor, PR Watch (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
--------------------------------


from_name: Martin Harper

subject: [WikiEN-l] New policy on edit conficts

body:
Dear Wikipedians,

Edit conflicts often occur on Wikipedia. We advise users to do their
best to merge the two texts together when this happens, but mistakes
do happen. Thus, where someone accidentally reverts one of my minor
changes due to such a mistake, while making many other
improvements to the article, I have two options:

1) Reinstate my changes to the other person's text
2) Revert to my version, removing all the other person's improvements.

In choosing between these two options, it is important to note that the
first option has been standard practice on Wikipedia for some years.
Further, the first option results in an improved encyclopedia article,
whereas the second option results in a worse encyclopedia article.
Further, the second option has been empirically observed to cause
conflict. Further, the first option is in accordance with existing policies
on Wikiquette, WikiLove, and with existing advice on avoiding reverts
and staying cool when the editing gets hot.

As a result, I have rewritten [[wikipedia:edit conflicts]] to specifically
deal with this issue. By the powers vested in me by the Wikipedia
power structure, I hereby declare those changes to be de facto official,
subject of course to overruling by other sysops, mailing list opinion, talk
page opinion, and Jimbo's veto.

References: [[wikipedia talk:Edit war]], etc.

Thank you for your time,
-Martin "MyRedDice" Harper


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
On Dec 1, 2003, at 23:33, Constans, Camille (C.C.) wrote:
> Anthere (and me), would like an encyclopedist woman. I think there is
> some on french bistro, but i dont remember the names....

Suggested there by Traroth:

Marie de Vichy-Chamrond , marquise du Deffand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Anne_de_Vichy-
Chamrond,_marquise_du_Deffand

Marie-Th?r?se Rodet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Th%E9r%E8se_Rodet_Geoffrin

Julie de Lespinasse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Julie_Eleonore_de_Lespinasse

Claudine Alexandrine Gu?rin de Tencin
http://5.1911encyclopedia.org/T/TE/
TENCIN_CLAUDINE_ALEXANDRINE_GUERIN_DE.htm

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Matthew Woodcraft

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: contributions of User:Mr-Natural-Health

body:
Viajero wrote:

>A new user named Mr-Natural-Health has created a number of new articles
>in recent days which are disturbingly non-neutral [...]

>Though several are currently listed on Cleanup and have been edited a
>bit, VfD might be a better place, since they are so slanted that
>deleting and starting anew is probably the wisest strategy.

I think deleting them is a bad idea. If we can't avoid an edit war, all
this achieves is making the beginning of it viewable only by sysops. I
don't think that's going to help.

-M-


from_name: Arwel Parry

body:
Is it just me that's having difficulty connecting to wikipedia? For the
last few days I've been getting 80% packet loss which makes it
incredibly frustrating to try to edit large articles! Traceroute seems
to indicate messages are running into the sand in the San Diego area...

This traceroute is from 0115 UTC, 2 Dec 03:

  Traceroute to: en.wikipedia.org
     IP address: [130.94.122.199]

   1: [194.159.180.36]   war1-du-36.access.demon.net
       (  140 ms) !  (  141 ms) !  (  130 ms) !
   2: [194.159.180.1]    war1-service-1v2-15.router.demon.net
       (  130 ms) !  (  140 ms) !  (  130 ms) !
   3: [194.159.180.69]   war1-backbone-1-176.router.demon.net
       (  141 ms) !  (  140 ms) !  (  140 ms) !
   4: [194.159.36.49]    anchor-backbone-11-171.router.demon.net
       (  200 ms) !  (  151 ms) !  (  150 ms) !
   5: [194.159.36.226]   anchor-border-1-1-0-2-551.router.demon.net
       (  150 ms) !  (  140 ms) !  (  140 ms) !
   6: [213.206.156.53]   sl-gw10-lon-4-1.sprintlink.net
       (  151 ms) !  (  160 ms) !  (  160 ms) !
   7: [213.206.128.41]   sl-bb20-lon-8-0.sprintlink.net
       (  150 ms) !  (  151 ms) !  (  150 ms) !
   8: [213.206.128.53]   sl-bb22-lon-14-0.sprintlink.net
       (  160 ms) !  (  160 ms) !  (  151 ms) !
   9: [213.206.131.86]
       (  160 ms) !  (  160 ms) !  (  151 ms) !
  10: [129.250.5.91]     p16-0-0-0.r80.nycmny01.us.bb.verio.net
       (  240 ms) !  (  230 ms) !  (  231 ms) !
  11: [129.250.2.144]    p16-0-1-3.r20.nycmny01.us.bb.verio.net
       (  240 ms) !  (  230 ms) !  (  231 ms) !
  12: [129.250.2.216]    p16-6-0-0.r00.nwrknj01.us.bb.verio.net
       (  240 ms) !  (  240 ms) !  (  231 ms) !
  13: [129.250.5.112]    p16-0-1-1.r20.mlpsca01.us.bb.verio.net
       (  310 ms) !  (  321 ms) !  (  320 ms) !
  14: [129.250.2.224]    p16-2-0-0.r00.mlpsca01.us.bb.verio.net
       (  301 ms) !  (  300 ms) !  (  301 ms) !
  15: [129.250.5.89]     p4-0-2-0.r00.sndgca01.us.bb.verio.net
       (  310 ms) !  (  310 ms) !  (  311 ms) !
  16: [129.250.27.84]    ge-1-1.a03.sndgca01.us.da.verio.net
       (  310 ms) !  (  781 ms) !  (  311 ms) !
  17:  (No reply) *  (No reply) *  (No reply) *
  18:  (No reply) *  (No reply) *  (No reply) *
  19:  (No reply) *  (No reply) *  (No reply) *
  20:  (No reply) *  (No reply) *  (No reply) *
  21:  (No reply) *  (No reply) *  (No reply) *
  22:  (No reply) *  (No reply) *

--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


body:
Sascha Noyes wrote:

>This person needs a stern talking to.
>From his user page:
>under "modified pages"
>"Alternative medicine - I cleaned up this article. I removed the anti-bias and
>made it pro-alternative medicine."
>
>under "Interests"
>"To get important natural health related information and definitions in an
>Internet accessible encyclopedia / dictionary."
>
>It is clear that /his/her/its purpose is to inject their POV and remove that
>of others.
>
So he's trying to put his own spin on things.  How is that so different
from what most Wikipedians are trying to accomplish?  Announcing areas
of interest is pretty normal.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The Defendent

body:
Delirium wrote:

> Fred Bauder wrote:
>
>> I think Flexicon is the logical defendent with Wikipedia as a the
>> plaintiff
>> should we chose to not accept repeated violations of our copyright, if
>> contact with them requesting compliance proves unproductive. Ulrich
>> Fuchs is
>> right to point this out but throwing in the "five author" question is
>> not
>> productive as we do want people, including commercial sites, to reuse
>> our
>> material without onerous requirements.
>>
>
> I'm not sure how Wikipedia could be the plaintiff, as it doesn't hold
> copyright to the material.  The material I've submitted to Wikipedia,
> for example, is copyrighted by me.  I have licensed it under the GFDL,
> so Wikipedia, as well as anyone else willing to abide by the terms of
> the GFDL, is free to use my text.  But they have no more rights to it
> than any other random person or entity does.

So if Wikipedia can't be plaintiff, and you as an individual author are
not willing to be plaintiff, then GFDL is no more than a paper tiger
since violators may copy things with impunity.

Ec

>


from_name: Constans, Camille (C.C.)

subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
>
>Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>> Jason's got the new machine installed (thanks!). It's at
>> 130.94.122.204, but it needs a name... Among the previous
>suggestions
>> to name machines after were:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_Adler
>>
>> Any preference for 'diderot' or 'adler' or something else?
>>
>> I can import the last backup dump and test it tonight; if all seems
>> well any objection to moving the database over tomorrow
>night? (Early
>> morning UTC on December 3 == evening US December 2.) The
>databases will
>> need to be frozen/read-only for the duration of copying, and I'm not
>> sure how long this will take so I don't want to spring it on
>everyone
>> unannounced.
>>
>> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Anthere (and me), would like an encyclopedist woman. I think there is some on french bistro, but i dont remember the names....

--
Shaihulud


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
Andre...

>I would feel for a non-western name, to underline the
>international
>character of Wikipedia. What about Yongle?
>(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia)

Anyone knows the name of a non-western female
encyclopedist ?

Ant

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now
http://companion.yahoo.com/


from_name: Agon S. Buchholz

references:
<bqcis8$h6s$1@sea.gmane.org>	<5CD759A4-232B-11D8-BB4A-000A95DAA284@pobox.com>
	<bqfvkb$t7k$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
Hi Fantasy,

> I will look for some small tasks for the beginning. Maybe
> documentation?

You can have a look at the old and current official documentation (the
so-called User's Guide at meta), or you can help out in my attempt to
restructure and rewrite the complete documentation which I started just
about two weeks ago (http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation). I
want roughly the following structure:

PART 1: Introduction - General Information and Architecture.
PART 2: Administrator's Guide - Installation, Configuration,
Administration, Care & Feeding.
PART 3: User's Guide - Usage of the MediaWiki Software.
PART 4: Developer's Guide - Development, Bug Tracking, Roadmap, Known
Issues, (Feature Requests).
APPENDIX: Additional Information.
FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions.

I need help especially in two areas:

* Administration  - best practices, security issues; part of the
outlined "Administrator's Guide"; wanted: someone with a few months of
experience in administering MediaWiki.

* Development - wanted: someone with experience in PHP and SQL who is
able to write some short intructions how the code works, which scripts
do what, and maybe later some coding guidelines - simply someone to do
some hard work helping other developers to get started easier; this
should be someone not yet involved in the all day's work since I don't
want to absorb time from coding and debugging; part of the outlined
"Developer's Guide".

> In Germany we are now officially the "number one choice" in
> Wiki-Software for large wikis.

Thanks to Erik and the c't ;)

Greetings, -asb

Note: This is not a fork from the current "User's Guide"; more about
this is on my Talk page on meta.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Subpages broken

body:
Brion-
> Case sensitivity strikes again! In PHP function names are not case
> sensitive, but variable names are.

Well, that wasn't me. Someone must have thought that a CamelCase variable
would look nicer. Time to get some naming conventions, maybe?

> Also this is hideous:
> 	if(preg_match("/class='new'/i",$getlink)) { break; } # this is a hack,
>                                                 # but it saves time

Dude, read the comment! It's all documented! ;-)

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
Importing the cur and old tables for the English Wikipedia's last
backup dump took 2 hours and 45 minutes, at about 20-25% CPU usage.
Most of the time spent was waiting on disk output, and most of the CPU
that was used was for decompression.

Write speed was around ~15k blocks/sec (1KB blocks -> 15MB/s?)... the
InnoDB data store has grown to about 18gb, so a straight write of the
data at that rate should have taken about 20 minutes. Clearly it's
updating more than it needs to; some tweaking of the MySQL
configuration should help streamline this, increasing the buffers and
flushing the log less often. It's now on the defaults... I just slapped
in a MySQL 4.0.16 Max binary install for AMD64.

(I'm not sure if just copying the datastore files from pliny would
work; I have the impression that the on-disk format is
platform-dependent, and we've got a 32/64-bit difference here.) Note
also that the network seems to be 100-megabit, so a live transfer may
be limited by network speed, but that doesn't look like the biggest
bottleneck right now.

If I can get PHP up and running I'll try rebuilding the links table and
see how long that takes...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
On Dec 2, 2003, at 04:50, Brion Vibber wrote:
> If I can get PHP up and running I'll try rebuilding the links table
> and see how long that takes...

Okay, got that started:
...
6000 of 352641 articles scanned (58 articles and 1302 titles per second)
Title cache hits: 37%
...

IO is fairly light, and the processes seem CPU-bound; usage bounces
between about 50/50 mysqld/php to more like 75/25. Between them they
only use a single processor, though, since PHP waits for MySQL to
process and return an entire query before continuing.

I've put in the stock my-huge.cnf with slight modifications; bumped key
cache and innodb buffer cache up to 1 gig each, innodb log file to
128meg (good? bad?), and set the transaction log to only force disk
flushes at most once per second.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] links table

body:
On Nov 30, 2003, at 14:54, Evan Prodromou wrote:

> So, design question: in the links table, why is l_from a string rather
> than a cur_id? I'm trying to dig it up, but I can't.

As far as I know there is no good reason for this.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Alex R.

subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
I have no problem with Diderot who some consider the
patron saint of enyclopedists, but of all the below Gu?rin
would be my choice as it is also the name of a publisher
(in Quebec), so it would follow in the footsteps of Larousse
as being another publishers name as well (not as famous
though and I don't think they registered their TM like
Larousse did in the US).

Alex from Brooklyn (formerly Alexei de Montr?al)

 From: "Dufrenoy, Alexis" <ADufrenoy at mos-ch.com>
To: "'Wikimedia developers'" <wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org>

I posted these on the french Bistro :

-Marie de Vichy-Chamrond , marquise du Deffand
-Marie-Th?r?se Rodet
-Julie de Lespinasse
-Claudine Alexandrine Gu?rin de Tencin

:-)

Traroth

-----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Constans, Camille (C.C.) [mailto:cconsta4 at ford.com]
Gesendet: Dienstag, 2. Dezember 2003 08:34
An: 'Wikimedia developers'
Betreff: RE: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

>
>Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>> Jason's got the new machine installed (thanks!). It's at
>> 130.94.122.204, but it needs a name... Among the previous
>suggestions
>> to name machines after were:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_Adler
>>
>> Any preference for 'diderot' or 'adler' or something else?
>>
>> I can import the last backup dump and test it tonight; if all seems
>> well any objection to moving the database over tomorrow
>night? (Early
>> morning UTC on December 3 == evening US December 2.) The
>databases will
>> need to be frozen/read-only for the duration of copying, and I'm not
>> sure how long this will take so I don't want to spring it on
>everyone
>> unannounced.
>>
>> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Anthere (and me), would like an encyclopedist woman. I think there is some
on french bistro, but i dont remember the names....

--
Shaihulud
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
_______________________________________________
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Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [WikiEN-l] New policy on edit conficts

body:
I endorse Martin's policy wholeheartedly.

In this kind of on-line community, 'authority' means nothing more or less than "how many people will go along with what you recommend". Well, I'm ready and willing to go along with whatever Martin Harper recommends.

(I also listen to Anth?re and Maveric - following their recommendations in nearly all cases - or at least not going AGAINST them without a lengthy period of reflection. I'm still thinking about Mav's advice about science controversies, and haven't edited those articles in nearly a week).

I have not read the rewritten [[wikipedia:edit conflicts]] meta-article yet, but I'm so confident about Martin's good sense that I'm approving it in advance.  Whatever weight my words carry, they carry (Hi, Lir!).

Ed Poor, aka 'Uncle Ed'


from_name: Dufrenoy, Alexis

subject: AW: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
I posted these on the french Bistro :

-Marie de Vichy-Chamrond , marquise du Deffand
-Marie-Th?r?se Rodet
-Julie de Lespinasse
-Claudine Alexandrine Gu?rin de Tencin

:-)

Traroth

-----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Constans, Camille (C.C.) [mailto:cconsta4 at ford.com]
Gesendet: Dienstag, 2. Dezember 2003 08:34
An: 'Wikimedia developers'
Betreff: RE: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

>
>Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>> Jason's got the new machine installed (thanks!). It's at
>> 130.94.122.204, but it needs a name... Among the previous
>suggestions
>> to name machines after were:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_Adler
>>
>> Any preference for 'diderot' or 'adler' or something else?
>>
>> I can import the last backup dump and test it tonight; if all seems
>> well any objection to moving the database over tomorrow
>night? (Early
>> morning UTC on December 3 == evening US December 2.) The
>databases will
>> need to be frozen/read-only for the duration of copying, and I'm not
>> sure how long this will take so I don't want to spring it on
>everyone
>> unannounced.
>>
>> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Anthere (and me), would like an encyclopedist woman. I think there is some
on french bistro, but i dont remember the names....

--
Shaihulud
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] cur and old

body:
Brion,

If there's a way to refactor the database to incorporate a good
suggestion like Evan's, I hope we will do it. Hint: use "wrapper"
methods for calls from the client to the database.

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
I like the idea of a female name.  Rodet and Tencin have the
virtue of being short and easy to type?

Dufrenoy, Alexis wrote:

> I posted these on the french Bistro :
>
> -Marie de Vichy-Chamrond , marquise du Deffand
> -Marie-Th?r?se Rodet
> -Julie de Lespinasse
> -Claudine Alexandrine Gu?rin de Tencin
>
> :-)
>
> Traroth
>
> -----Urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Constans, Camille (C.C.) [mailto:cconsta4 at ford.com]
> Gesendet: Dienstag, 2. Dezember 2003 08:34
> An: 'Wikimedia developers'
> Betreff: RE: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!
>
>
> >
> >Brion Vibber wrote:
> >
> >> Jason's got the new machine installed (thanks!). It's at
> >> 130.94.122.204, but it needs a name... Among the previous
> >suggestions
> >> to name machines after were:
> >>
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot
> >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_Adler
> >>
> >> Any preference for 'diderot' or 'adler' or something else?
> >>
> >> I can import the last backup dump and test it tonight; if all seems
> >> well any objection to moving the database over tomorrow
> >night? (Early
> >> morning UTC on December 3 == evening US December 2.) The
> >databases will
> >> need to be frozen/read-only for the duration of copying, and I'm not
> >> sure how long this will take so I don't want to spring it on
> >everyone
> >> unannounced.
> >>
> >> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> Anthere (and me), would like an encyclopedist woman. I think there is some
> on french bistro, but i dont remember the names....
>
> --
> Shaihulud
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [Textbook-l] Subject: SPAM altert!

body:
> Sorry folks, a couple got through. PLEASE do not
> respond to "[Textbook-l] Job Kwanta" posts unless
> you
> want you inbox full of SPAM and your email account
> rendered useless (set aside the fact that SPAM is
> part
> of a scam!).
>
> This is getting annoying - every day at least a
> couple
> SPAM emails are sent to this list and either Brion
> or
> I have to review and reject each one. My work email
> is
> also exposed on the Internet as a 'mailto:' and yet
> I
> have received only one commercial SPAM email in 2
> years (office SPAM is another issue...).

The french ml mail box has to be cleaned everyday.
>From Ed Poor comments, I understood it was not
necessary on the en mailing list. I am failing to
figure why some mailing lists are spoiled while others
are not.

To avoid users to receive the spam, forbid posting by
non registered users.
Of course, you will still have to clean up, plus to
deal with wikipedia editors insisting to post from non
registered adresses, but at least, the list won't let
spam go through.

__________________________________
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from_name: Hunter Peress

subject: [Wikitech-l] Section editing weirdness

body:
Just reminding that the difflib3.php (i think thats the file) from phpwiki.sf.net (latest version)
does indeed have an implemention of merging.

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from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Help us be good neighbors

body:
So, on Wikitravel, we have various "Expeditions", kinda like Wikipedia
projects, for very specific projects within the travel guide. One of
the Expeditions we just started is to identify and list related
projects, and explore ways to cooperate with them:

     http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Wikitravel:Fellow_Traveller_Expedition

Obviously, one of the main projects we'd like to cooperate with is
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. We use the MediaWiki software
that runs Wikipedia, and we've learned about how to do our site from
how Wikipedia works. I think we're all grateful for the software and
the example, and we want to give back whatever we can.

We've got a page going about cooperating with Wikipedia here:

    http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Wikitravel:Cooperating_with_Wikipedia

(Thanks to Stephen Gilbert for the original ideas). If you've got some
suggestions, please feel free to add them to that page, or to the talk
page, or respond here, or what have you.

Thanks,

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
On Mon, 1 Dec 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:

> Jason's got the new machine installed (thanks!). It's at
> 130.94.122.204, but it needs a name... Among the previous suggestions
> to name machines after were:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_Adler
>
> Any preference for 'diderot' or 'adler' or something else?

I would feel for a non-western name, to underline the international
character of Wikipedia. What about Yongle?
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia)

But the more important thing here is not to get delayed by these trivial
considerations...

Andre Engels


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 11:17:38AM +0100, Andre Engels wrote:
> I would feel for a non-western name, to underline the international
> character of Wikipedia. What about Yongle?
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia)

That's an excellent idea. I vote for it.

--
http://www.tomk32.de - just a geek trying to change the world
   -.-       http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
   /|>	           http://tomk32.bookcrossing.com
   / \                 http://tinyurl.com/u6de


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
It seems to me that the more sane approach is to give
all the machines descriptive names, such as
"Dataserver", "webserver1", and "webserver2". As it
is, all past references to the database server were
named "pliny". Now pliny is going to be a webserver -
this is confusing. It would be much less confusing IMO
if we had stated "database server" all along and just
noted upgrades as an aside when they happen. However,
if total logic is ruled out, then please stabilize on
some names and give each of those names specific
tasks. For example the new name Diderot (or whatever
is chosen) will always be the name of the fastest,
most powerful database server (no matter what specific
hardware it has). The name Pliny will always be used
for webserver 1 and the nameLarousse will always be
used for webserver 2 (both irrespective of what
hardware they have). Adding more machines to the mix
will add more names, but those names should be given
as-yet-unfilled tasks such as database server 2, and
webserver 3, 4, 5... So when we buy our next even more
monstrous database server that would become the new
Diderot and the current machine with that name would
be assigned the new task of database server 2 (in
which case a new name would be needed for it).

That way the name "Diderot" would always refer to the
primary database server.

-- mav

__________________________________
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
On Dec 2, 2003, at 05:24, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On Dec 2, 2003, at 04:50, Brion Vibber wrote:
>> If I can get PHP up and running I'll try rebuilding the links table
>> and see how long that takes...
>
> Okay, got that started:
> ...
> 6000 of 352641 articles scanned (58 articles and 1302 titles per
> second)
> Title cache hits: 37%

It did get through the index rebuild, but seems to have croaked
rebuilding the search index fields (via rebuildall.php):

Rebuilding index fields for 352641 pages...
500
[snip]
231000

Fatal error:  Call to a member function on a non-object in
/home/brion/src/wiki/phase3/includes/SearchUpdate.php on line
15

D'oh!

Took an hour and 42 minutes to get to that point.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
On Dec 2, 2003, at 12:28, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> It seems to me that the more sane approach is to give
> all the machines descriptive names, such as
> "Dataserver", "webserver1", and "webserver2". As it
> is, all past references to the database server were
> named "pliny". Now pliny is going to be a webserver -
> this is confusing.

The reason we give names to the machines is to tell the *machines*
apart.

You'll notice we're not sending people to http://pliny.wikipedia.org or
http://larousse.wikipedia.org, but giving them functional work names
like en.wikipedia.org (English Wikipedia), download.wikipedia.org
(download backups), mail.wikipedia.org (mailing lists)... These are
"titles", or job positions, that don't change regardless of who's
filling them; they could even be served by multiple machines.

But the machines still have to be able to be individually addressed for
us to work on them, and changing their inherent names when we decide to
change what they do is a real pain in the ass which would involve
waiting for DNS changes to go through and invalidating SSH keys, which
is totally insane.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
How about Anthere?

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Jimmy Wales [mailto:jwales at bomis.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2003 12:26 PM
To: Wikimedia developers
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

I like the idea of a female name.  Rodet and Tencin have the virtue of
being short and easy to type?


subject: [WikiEN-l] Sans Seriffe

body:
Drop whatever you're doing and read THIS! You'll bust a gut...

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=San_Serriffe&oldid=1859677

I had nothing to do with this article, but I sure wish I had!

Uncle Ed


subject: [Wikitech-l] links table

body:
>>>>> "BV" == Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> writes:

    Me> So, design question: in the links table, why is l_from a string
    Me> rather than a cur_id? I'm trying to dig it up, but I can't.

    BV> As far as I know there is no good reason for this.

The best thing about it is that you can find things-that-link-here
fast. The bad thing is that you can't find out anything about those
things unless you send another query to the database.

For the what links here page, for example, the code makes one query on
links, to find all the links to a page, and one query per link (!) to
find out if it's a redirect or not. If it were easy to join cur and
links, this could be reduced to a single query. (Another possibility,
of course, is caching cur_is_redirect in the links table, too. But
then if you needed any other info from cur, you'd still have the same
problem.)

I actually tried doing something sick like this:

  SELECT DISTINCT cur_namespace, cur_title, cur_is_redirect
  FROM cur, links
  WHERE l_to = {$id_to_find_links_to}
  AND (( cur_namespace = 0 and l_from = cur_title ) OR
       ( cur_namespace = 1 and l_from = CONCAT("Talk:", cur_title)) OR
       ( cur_namespace = 2 and l_from = CONCAT("Wikipedia:", cur_title)) OR
       ...)

It actually worked -- I even bothered to get the prefixes from
$wgLang! -- but I can't imagine those CONCAT's being anything but a
totally ugly superhack. Probably much much better to just go ahead and
do the multiple queries.

Anyways, something I was thinking about.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/
The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide


subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>

Dufrenoy, Alexis wrote:

>> I posted these on the french Bistro :
>> -Marie de Vichy-Chamrond , marquise du Deffand
>> -Marie-Th?r?se Rodet
>> -Julie de Lespinasse
>> -Claudine Alexandrine Gu?rin de Tencin
>> > :-)
>> > Traroth

>I like the idea of a female name.  Rodet and Tencin
have >the virtue of being short and easy to type?

Marie de Vichy-Chamrond
I found a  quote from la marquise du Deffand
"It is only the first step which costs"
"Il n?y a que le premier pas qui co?te."
There is no article on wikipedia about her.
She should be called "Vichy-Chamrond"

Marie-Th?r?se Rodet
She is refered to as Mme "Geoffrin", not Rodet.
She held one of the most famous place. She sponsored
Diderot encyclopedia. She was a great interviewer,
famous for being very subtile a woman.
Mme Geoffrin focused on philosophy. She was not of
high birth (and I like the idea...though not of high
society origin, she was very well known, and really
had impact)

Julie de Lespinasse
She was a passionate... But she should be "de
Lespinasse". That is a bit of a problem.

Claudine Alexandrine Gu?rin de Tencin
She should be called "de Tencin" normally.
She was previously a nonne :-) From what I read, she
was very much of a manipulator. Mme de Tencin place
was very open, to actors, politicians...

Mme du Deffand, Mlle de Lespinasse, Mme Necker places
were very much open to women; there are sometimes
considered as feminists.

------

I support Geoffrin, that is a good name for a server
:-)))

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Opteronically good!

body:
>From: Ashar Voultoiz <thoane at altern.org>

>>On Tue, 2 Dec 2003 13:14:47 -0500, Poor, Edmund W
>>wrote:

>> How about Anthere?
>> > Ed Poor

>Excellent,

>I vote for this one !! :0))

>cheers,

Eh, thanks a lot :-)

But I am not yet famous as an encyclopedist :-)

That is just too bad, the name was good...

I was really showered with compliments today. That was
very nice :-)

PS : m?me par Papotages, c'est tout dire :-)

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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Section editing weirdness

body:
Arvind-

> Hi,

> Consider this scenario:

> * User A starts to edit section 1 of a page.
> * User B starts to edit section 2 of the same page
> * User A adds a new section and saves.
>   What was section 2 earlier should now be section 3,
>   but user B does't know this.
> * User B saves the section they were editing. There is
>   no edit conflict, but it gets saved as section 2, and
>   user A's work is lost.

Actually, there is an edit conflict, so that scenario should be avoided.
Edit conflicts are disabled, however, when A and B have the same user ID,
so you didn't get the conflict.

I considered hacking some basic merging into the section editing part, but
that was non-trivial, and it seems like a better solution to have general
merging code for edit conflicts. In order to merge in case of section
editing, one would have to first piece together the section with the older
version of the page, and then merge that article with the new one.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Andrew Lih

subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
Woman's name would be great, and I always disliked machine names with
slient consonants, like diderot. :)

-----Original Message-----
From: wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org
[mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Constans, Camille
(C.C.)
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2003 3:34 PM
To: 'Wikimedia developers'
Subject: RE: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

>
>Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>> Jason's got the new machine installed (thanks!). It's at
>> 130.94.122.204, but it needs a name... Among the previous
>suggestions
>> to name machines after were:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_Adler
>>
>> Any preference for 'diderot' or 'adler' or something else?
>>
>> I can import the last backup dump and test it tonight; if all seems
>> well any objection to moving the database over tomorrow
>night? (Early
>> morning UTC on December 3 == evening US December 2.) The
>databases will
>> need to be frozen/read-only for the duration of copying, and I'm not
>> sure how long this will take so I don't want to spring it on
>everyone
>> unannounced.
>>
>> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Anthere (and me), would like an encyclopedist woman. I think there is
some on french bistro, but i dont remember the names....

--
Shaihulud
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia in read-only mode for database
	transfer/rebuild

body:
This could take a few hours; sorry for the inconvenience, but things
should improve after this!

* The databases are being moved to the new bigger, faster, dedicated
database server. this should lighten the load on the web servers and
hopefully let us reenable some of the features that have been off for a
while.

* The link tables will be rebuilt. Oddities in 'what links here',
orphans lists, and image use links should be resolved.

* The article count will be recalculated. Some bugs caused drift in the
article count; corrections may move the number up or down.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Arvind Narayanan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Section editing weirdness

body:
Hi,

Consider this scenario:

* User A starts to edit section 1 of a page.
* User B starts to edit section 2 of the same page
* User A adds a new section and saves.
  What was section 2 earlier should now be section 3,
  but user B does't know this.
* User B saves the section they were editing. There is
  no edit conflict, but it gets saved as section 2, and
  user A's work is lost.

Is this possible, or does the software detect it? I got
some strange results when editing 2 sections of a page
at the same time and I'm guessing that this is what
happened.

Arvind
--
Its all GNU to me


from_name: Martin Harper

body:
Martin>> "...subject of course to overruling by other sysops..."

> "Is this implying that sysops have special powers in regards to the formulation of policy"

Of course not. Sysops should never wave around their sysop status in
discussions of policy. Anyone who talked of sysops as being able to "overrule"
policy would be simply incorrect.

A foolish self-consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. :-)
-Martin "MyRedDice" Harper


from_name: jakob.voss at s1999.tu-chemnitz.de

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Articles and speeches about Wikipedia?

body:
Hi!

I am a) writing a student research paper and b) going to have a lecture on a
german linux-congress about Wikipedia. Has there anybody done this before?
I know the lecture of Kurt Janson last year on 19C3 in Berlin but is there no
newer stuff? Well I know what to write and talk but I am just wondering why
there are so little (=practically no) scientific publications or conference
papers (=everything but simple newspaper articles) on Wikipedia yet. On the
other hand I don?t mind if I am the first one ;-)

The only references I found (up to now):

http://wiki.wizards-of-os.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Wikipedia_And_Friends

Thanks a lot
  Jakob Voss / nichtich


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Articles and speeches about Wikipedia?

body:
Oh, I found

http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tomos

that?s what I was searching for. I moved the part to a page of it?s one.

Greetings,
  Jakob


from_name: Ashar Voultoiz

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Opteronically good!

body:
On Tue, 2 Dec 2003 13:14:47 -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:

> How about Anthere?
>
> Ed Poor

Excellent,

I vote for this one !! :0))

cheers,

--
Ashar Voultoiz
http://fr.wikipedia.org/Utilisateur:Hashar
do not send mail to listme at listme.dsbl.org


body:
jakob.voss-
> Hi!

> I am a) writing a student research paper and b) going to have a lecture on a
> german linux-congress about Wikipedia. Has there anybody done this before?
> I know the lecture of Kurt Janson last year on 19C3 in Berlin but is there
> no newer stuff? Well I know what to write and talk but I am just wondering
> why there are so little (=practically no) scientific publications or
> conference papers (=everything but simple newspaper articles) on Wikipedia
> yet. On the other hand I don?t mind if I am the first one ;-)

Wikipedia is less than 3 years old. Many people still don't take us
seriously, and most academics are relatively clueless with regard to the
Internet, i.e. they know how to find stuff, but they aren't usually
familiar with the communities. Give it time -- sooner or later, most of
them will discover Wikipedia by pure chance.

Jimbo and I are going to talk about the project at the Wizards of OS
conference next year, and I think I'm the only one in Germany to have done
any in depth reporting on the project. It's not in a peer reviewed
journal, but probably more thorough than anything you are going to find in
the journals for some time to come:

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/fr-30.05.03-000/

When I talk about Wikipedia at conferences, once thing I like to do is to
just show people some articles, even using the "random page" function to
give people an impression how the quality is and what kind of material we
have. When people think "encyclopedia", they usually don't think of a
reference work that has everything from comprehensive Harry Potter
summaries to in depth articles about Irisih politics.

At the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart I did a direct comparison with
Britannica on some key subjects, and Wikipedia clearly came out on top in
many areas. If you're going to do a comprehensive paper, that's the
direction I would pursue.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Section editing weirdness

body:
Hunter-
> Just reminding that the difflib3.php (i think thats the file) from
> phpwiki.sf.net (latest version) does indeed have an implemention of merging.

It does, though it's not a particularly good one. The conflict markers are
kind of annoying, and they get saved along with the regular text if you
fail to remove them.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Brion wrote:
>This could take a few hours; sorry for the inconvenience,
>but things should improve after this!

No need to apologize! :) I feel like a kid on Christmass - I can't wait to
edit with the new server config and see what that does to our Alexa ranking.
It should go through the roof!

>* The databases are being moved to the new bigger, faster,
>dedicated database server. this should lighten the load on the
>web servers and hopefully let us reenable some of the features
>that have been off for a  while.

Remember what I said about induced demand? Alas our growing popularity will
probably put us in the same pickle by June (which should be a couple months
after the our 500,000 article press release boost).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
Daniel-
> It seems to me that the more sane approach is to give
> all the machines descriptive names, such as
> "Dataserver", "webserver1", and "webserver2".

How dare you bring logic into this discussion! I vote that the new server
should be called "Maverick", just to piss you off. ;-)

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
Brion wrote:
>You'll notice we're not sending people to http://pliny.wikipedia.org
>or http://larousse.wikipedia.org, but giving them functional work
>names like en.wikipedia.org (English Wikipedia), download.wikipedia.org
>(download backups), mail.wikipedia.org (mailing lists)... These are
>"titles", or job positions, that don't change regardless of who's
>filling them; they could even be served by multiple machines.

That makes sense. Your Schwartz beats my Schwartz Lonestar!

--mav


from_name: Fantasy

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Opteronically good!

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> How about Anthere?

Great!!
You have my vote as well.

For the ones who are not yet sure, just have a look at her eyes, and
then try to say "no" ;-)
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye

Fantasy :-)


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <jheiskan at welho.com>

On Wed, 2003-12-03 at 01:29, Anthere wrote:

    Julie de Lespinasse
    She was a passionate... But she should be "de
    Lespinasse". That is a bit of a problem.

>Please be advised that there is a more significant
>consideration here
>than the necessary addition of "de".

>In the Finnish language there is a real possibility
>that "Lespinasse"
>would be parsed: "lisping alcoholic pedophile".

>And "Nasse"? Well Nasse was a clown fairly popular on
>Finnish TV
>(portrayed by a genius actor, Vesa-Matti Loiri) whose
>shctick was to
>quiz children on their habits on the potty to a
>ludicrously explicit
>degree, while taking mock surreptious swigs out of
his >bottle.

>Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (aka Cimon Avaro)

LOL.

These two are redhibitory defects ;-)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now
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from_name: Thomas Corell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>How about Anthere?
>
>
Every Opteron should have an ant inside :-)  Someone has to move the
bits and bytes and the dust around in those 19inch cases.;)
--
Smurf


subject: [Wikitech-l] Opps!

body:
I was bored so I started clicking on things. Apparently the sysop function
"rollback" is immune to a database freeze. I hope I didn't mess anything up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Donald_Rumsfeld&diff=0&oldid=1861947

-- mav


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Opps!

body:
On Dec 3, 2003, at 00:31, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> I was bored so I started clicking on things. Apparently the sysop
> function
> "rollback" is immune to a database freeze.

Well, we'll have to fix that!

>  I hope I didn't mess anything up.

Nah, you'll just have to roll them back again later on the new
database. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Mostly back up!

body:
At this point Wikipedia proper in all languages (that are on the new
software) should be transferred to the new server and running and
editable. Please report any new and exciting bugs!

Meta and the sister projects should follow shortly.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] governance

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>I'm with you 100% on the openness thing, and probably with you on the
>hierarchy thing, too.  And don't even get me started on dmoz's broken
>culture.
>
>The Cunctator wrote:
>
>>Claims that mediation and arbitration can't work without secrecy are
>>false.
>>
>>Or to be more positive: any structure set up which involves a level of
>>secrecy, if we are to move past the benevolent dictator model, MUST have
>>formal methods of ensuring accountability and oversight by the general
>>community--that is, everyone, including non-Wikipedians.
>>
Arbitration should be a completely open process, where everybody knows
all that is happening.  This may be different for mediation where the
objective is to have the warring parties come to some agreement.

The last thing that the mediator needs when he is trying to resolve a
delicate question is to have a hamhanded newcomer to the war throwing
flames when the matter is none of his business.  That can drive away one
combatant, and harden the other in his position.

Ec


from_name: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Opteronically good!

body:
On Wed, 2003-12-03 at 01:29, Anthere wrote:

    Julie de Lespinasse
    She was a passionate... But she should be "de
    Lespinasse". That is a bit of a problem.

Please be advised that there is a more significant consideration here
than the necessary addition of "de".

In the Finnish language there is a real possibility that "Lespinasse"
would be parsed: "lisping alcoholic pedophile". To explain; "lespi" can
be with ill will construed as an adverb denoting the property of having
a lisp (Any lisp code working our servers? Didn't think so.)

And "Nasse"? Well Nasse was a clown fairly popular on Finnish TV
(portrayed by a genius actor, Vesa-Matti Loiri) whose shctick was to
quiz children on their habits on the potty to a ludicrously explicit
degree, while taking mock surreptious swigs out of his bottle. If you
think this is strange, I can assure his act was stranger than you can
possibly imagine. (Catchphrase: "Uncle Nasse is veery angry now!") Well,
on the other hand, he did used to wear a "polytechnic student cap" (i.e.
the ceremonial cap of engineering students).

Anyway, good night., and thank you for your time,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (aka Cimon Avaro)

    __________________________________
    Do you Yahoo!?
    Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now
    http://companion.yahoo.com/
    _______________________________________________
    Wikitech-l mailing list
    Wikitech-l at Wikipedia.org

http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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from_name: Peter Bartlett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia articles in PDF format

body:
As a bit of fun, I have written a tool that asks Wikipedia what articles
are listed on Brilliant Prose, and then produces an automatic
compilation of those articles in PDF format through a wiki-markup ->
LaTeX -> PDF conversion.

An example where Brilliant Prose was supposed to consist of the articles
[[Tony Blair]] and [[Jacques Chirac]] is available at
http://www.geocities.com/pcb21/brilliant_prose_test_pdf.pdf

Though there are obvious initial problems with the PDF markup, I think
the articles actually look pretty reasonable. I would be interested in
any comments that anyone has on this capability and its uses (if any!)

Pete/User:Pcb21


subject: [Wikipedia-l] All back up!

body:
Everything should be up and running with the databases on the new
server.

There are a few link anomalies here and there, but hopefully less than
there were before!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Errors in conversion?

body:
On Dec 3, 2003, at 03:14, Andre Engels wrote:
> Anyone knows what the problem is, and how to solve it? I find this
> especially bad, because with the move these problems should have
> been solved - instead they seem to have been added.

I'm running a quick script to take out the bad brokenlinks entries (and
clear linkscc). Obviously some problems in rebuildlinks remain...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Errors in conversion?

body:
On Dec 3, 2003, at 04:07, Brion Vibber wrote:
> I'm running a quick script to take out the bad brokenlinks entries
> (and clear linkscc). Obviously some problems in rebuildlinks remain...

'remove-brokenlinks.php' in maintenance subdirectory in unstable cvs.

Output (I forgot to add headers saying which database is which, but you
can pretty much tell):
http://download.wikipedia.org/archives/brokenlinks.out.gz

Altogether 13528 bad brokenlinks items turned up. The script didn't
check which were or weren't also in the links table...

A link that's missing from the links table is an annoyance, but doesn't
harm the appearance of links and will be safely re-added when the page
is next saved. A bogus link in brokenlinks causes false edit links and
generally don't seem to go away when the page is saved, so they're more
of a problem.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Backups and stuff

body:
Haven't yet worked out exactly where backups are going to be coming
from. The backup I made while transferring is currently in the usual
locations, but in gzip instead of bzip2 compression (since that was
faster). download.wikipedia.org main page doesn't reflect this just
yet; go in manually if you _really_ want it now.

As an experiment, an xdelta diff is available between the 20031129 and
20031203 cur en dumps; this is made against the uncompressed source
version. The delta is about 5 megabytes, compared with ~140 megs for
the bzipped complete dump.

http://download.wikipedia.org/archives/en/20031203_cur_delta
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xdelta

If you don't have lots of memory, this might run slow. It would
probably run really slow on the old dump.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] scientific publication about Wikipedia

body:
On Dec 3, 2003, at 04:54, Chuck Smith wrote:
> I've given lectures on Wikipedia (in Esperanto) in
[snip]
> Now I have a question: is there a place in the English
> Wikipedia to put these links?  If so, are they already
> there?

Chuck, your interview is cited at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_coverage#Esperanto

That would not be an unreasonable place to put the other links, perhaps.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Chuck Smith

body:
> Date: Tue,  2 Dec 2003 20:07:43 +0100
> From: jakob.voss at s1999.tu-chemnitz.de
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Articles and speeches about
> Wikipedia?
> To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> Message-ID:
> <1070392063.3fcce2ff43f4f at mail.tu-chemnitz.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hi!
>
> I am a) writing a student research paper and b)
> going to have a lecture on a
> german linux-congress about Wikipedia. Has there
> anybody done this before?
> I know the lecture of Kurt Janson last year on 19C3
> in Berlin but is there no
> newer stuff? Well I know what to write and talk but
> I am just wondering why
> there are so little (=practically no) scientific
> publications or conference
> papers (=everything but simple newspaper articles)
> on Wikipedia yet. On the
> other hand I don?t mind if I am the first one ;-)
>
> The only references I found (up to now):
>
>
http://wiki.wizards-of-os.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Wikipedia_And_Friends
>
> Thanks a lot
>   Jakob Voss / nichtich

Hi,

I've given lectures on Wikipedia (in Esperanto) in
Brazil, France, Czech Republic, Belgium, Netherlands
and Sweden before, so if you need help preparing your
lecture, feel free to ask.  Probably early next year
I'll be lecturing in Warsaw (Polland).  I wrote a
scientific publication for the book: Fakaj Studoj en
Esperanto (Specialist Studies in Esperanto) which has
summaries in English, German and Czech.  If you can
read Esperanto, you can read the original text at:
http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikipedio:KAEST_prelego

If you want to see the Esperanto articles I've written
about Wikipedia, you can find links from my userpage
at
http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikipediisto:Chuck_SMITH

Also, an Esperanto radio interview can be found at
http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikipedio:Intervjuo_%C4%89e_Radio_Polonia
(transcription and sound files).

Now I have a question: is there a place in the English
Wikipedia to put these links?  If so, are they already
there?

Best wishes,
Chuck

=====
We are the Esperanto speakers who say "Ni!"
http://www.esperantomobilo.org/

_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Informaci?n de Estados Unidos y Am?rica Latina, en Yahoo! Noticias.
Vis?tanos en http://noticias.espanol.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] math broken?

body:
On Dec 3, 2003, at 06:17, Peter Gervai wrote:
> Could be math regeneration broken?
>
> I tried to put a new formula on [[w:en:user:grin]] (for testing) and
> it links to a nonexistant directory.
> Same on hungarian wikipedia (where it was noticed first).

Intermittent PATH problem... should be cleared up now.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Fast

body:
mmm, yummy.  When will we get up the nerve to turn full-text searching
back on?

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Tweaks

body:
I've raised the watchlist default cutoff from the much-hated 1-hour for
users with 250+ items to 12 hours for 1000+ items. It could comfortably
go rather further, I suspect.

Also, I noticed that Special:Asksql was a little too permissive; until
this is locked down right I've disabled Asksql on the live servers.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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