body:
On Saturday 26 October 2002 18:36, Brion VIBBER wrote:
> Just a reminder...
>
> The French localization is ready to go, I can do a final upgrade to the
> new server and software whenever is convenient. (Anthere, Aoineko, vous
> ?tes pr?ts ?)

Moi aussi. Je serai content de voir les accents au lieu des mots compress?s
comme "Prfrences".

phma


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Paul Ebermann

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
"Gareth Owen" skribis:

> The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> writes:
>
> > How do they clutter the "worthwhile" entries? Wikipedia is not paper.
>
> RandomPages

I just tested this ...

I twenty times klicked on "Random page",
and got

- 3 times these "Village pages"
- 3 times year-pages (two of them 507)
- 14 times other articles (but not all of them
   being "worthwile" articles IMHO).

Is this a great problem?

Paul


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject: [Wikitech-l] Namespace aliases

body:
[fr]
C'est maintenent possible de faire un lien par un 'namespace alias' au
wiki nouveau, selon les besoins de la langue. Par example, en fran?ais
[[Wikipedia:Rapport d'erreurs]] donne [[Wikip?dia:Rapport d'erreurs]]
sans peine.

(vois: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing )

[en]
I've made a tweak to Title::secureAndSplit() to allow a customized
Language::getNsIndex() to provide aliases for namespaces.

So for French, a link to eg [[Wikipedia:Rapport d'erreurs]] can now
transparently go to [[Wikip?dia:Rapport d'erreurs]].

(see http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing )

I _think_ this is safe -- the loop I took out from secureAndSplit()
duplicated the default behavior of getNsIndex() anyway -- but Lee,
please check it over. It's in CVS, but I didn't install it except on the
French test wiki.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] No voting? Then what?

body:
On 10/27/02 2:29 AM, "Jeroen Heijmans" <J.Heijmans at stud.tue.nl> wrote:

> I've not really been following the "international" debate, but I read most of
> the recent stuff about
> voting. Some Wikipedians, notably Cunctator, seem to think that "voting is
> evil", and link to some
> wiki about meatballs for some arguments.

Please give the dismissive tone some time off. Wikipedia is a silly name
too.

> So, suppose voting is evil. Then how do we make decisions? Because with the
> current number of members on this list, there's never going to be something
> like consensus.
That's simply not true.

> Endless discussions are tiring and getting us nowhere.
It may be tiring, but it's hardly getting us nowhere. Ideas and thoughts
have steadily been introduced and refined.

> Already we are getting loads of e-mail about
> one single topic like internationalisation; imagine how it would be with even
> more Wikipedians and, hence, mailing members? That would be terrible, and I
> would probably not even attempt anymore to follow any discussion after the
> first few reactions.
More discussion, terrible? Generally more members of a community doesn't
really mean that discussions go on for that much longer, as there's a law of
diminishing returns on new differences of opinion.

It's certainly not a bad thing if it were the case that as Wikipedia grows,
decisions are made more slowly. If they stop being made, that would be bad.
But a certain degree of inertia on the decisions that need to have a
consensus, rather than the majority of desicions that can be made by
individuals (that is, the actual editing of the articles, for the primary
example), is hardly bad.

> The discussion will die without any solution or will
> continue endlessly.
I don't think that's ever been the case.

> That's not a desirable situation. Voting could end
> discussions. But "voting is evil", so what to do then?

Are you willing to admit the basic problems with voting?

An example of how consensus rather than voting can work is in progress at
[[Wikipedia:Bots]].


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: No voting? Then what?

body:
Jeroen Heijmans wrote:

>>Please give the dismissive tone some time off. Wikipedia is a silly name
>>too.
>>
>My point was rather there's no reason why anything on any other Wiki should apply here. And I'd
>rather hear arguments from you than reading an extensive discussion between other, non-involved
>persons.
>
If at some point very early in the project someone had not made a
decision on the name, we would still be debating it.

>So, suppose voting is evil. Then how do we make decisions? Because with the
>current number of members on this list, there's never going to be something
>like consensus.
>
>>That's simply not true.
>>
>Consensus means everybody agrees, right? I've never seen that so far on the list, but I may have
>missed it.
>
Supeficially, that's what consensus is.  When it's working well
everybody is happy with it.  At its worse it can be a means of wearing
down opposition.  One of the most severe drawbacks of consensus is that
it requires the time and leisure for making patient and reasoned
decisions, and that time and leisure is often unavailable.  Inclusivity
and decisiveness are often at odds.
Eclecticology


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia software upgrade status

body:
--- Pierre Abbat <phma at webjockey.net> wrote:
> On Saturday 26 October 2002 18:36, Brion VIBBER
> wrote:
> > Just a reminder...
> >
> > The French localization is ready to go, I can do a
> final upgrade to the
> > new server and software whenever is convenient.
> (Anthere, Aoineko, vous
> > ?tes pr?ts ?)
>
> Moi aussi. Je serai content de voir les accents au
> lieu des mots compress?s
> comme "Prfrences".
>
> phma

moi aussi

BTW, Sous Op?ra les mots avec une majuscule accentu?e
dans la barre grise du haut sont remplac?s par les
m?mes avec une miniscule accentu?e. Par exemple
WIKIP?DIA ou SP?CIALES
Peux t on y faire quelque chose ???

__________________________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
--- koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
> >> I don't mind Ram-Man's bot so much, but I'd like
> to
> >> find an equivalent resource for towns *outside*
> of
> >> the U.S.
> >>
> >> kq
> >
> >40.000 french postal codes ???
>
> You'll have to explain that to me.  What's a postal
> code?  Is that the same as a city?  In the U.S. we
> frequently have a dozen or more postal codes in a
> single city.  Anyway, if the entries would be more
> than a paragraph apiece and they seem like
> information that somebody might reasonably look for,
> then I don't see what's wrong with including it.
>
> Wikipedia has been growing unevenly since it
> started; I don't see how we could possibly stop it
> from growing unevenly now, especially since it's run
> by volunteers.  I just hope that some day all the
> basic topics are covered accurately, neutrally, and
> in depth.  :-)
>
> kq

ah, a postal code is similar to zipcodes in the us, or
areacode in England (except those are very very
accurate compared to ours). We have 36 679 communes.
It is entirely related to postoffices localisation
only. Most big cities (big communes) have several
zipcodes (such as Paris, Lyon, Marseille), but a code
postal can also be in relation with several small
communes (in short, that's not a bijection relation at
all, so it's a bit messy).

I believe it's probably very similar in the usa. But
that means if you put
78000 : it is Versailles. You could have a nice
article on Versailles maybe ?
But 78001 is also Versailles, so what do you put here
?
And in the 38140, there are several villages
concerned...

Oh well, why not, but only if interesting information
is on these pages, not only list just the code and the
name of the communes concerned.
This is already available on the net.

RamMan pages have contents, so there are fine.

__________________________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: No voting? Then what?

body:
> > > So, suppose voting is evil. Then how do we make
> decisions? Because with the
> > > current number of members on this list, there's
> never going to be something
> > > like consensus.
> > That's simply not true.
>
> Consensus means everybody agrees, right? I've never
> seen that so far on the list, but I may have
> missed it.

Ah no. Consensus is not when everybody is *happy*. A
decision is taken only when everybody agree for the
decision to be taken, which is very slightly
different.
The acceptance of each member of the group is
necessary. In the end, it is not only that the
decision is build in a cooperative way, it is also
that everybody is more satisfied, because each had the
occasion to give his own advice, to provide input, to
feel he is important in the process, to feel he is not
left behind, unlistened.

There is a right for everybody to say "no, this is
absolutely NOT acceptable to my point of view", and
this must be accepted by the others (right of veto ?).
This must stop the decision to be taken, and *require*
that further discussion occur.

Sometimes, the veto is asked because one believe the
decision to be *wrong*, sometimes it is because one
believe a better option could be found through more
discussion, and ask for more time.

But, except for the absolute veto, it is still
possible *at the end* for somebody to say "well, I am
not happy with that decision because
- I think it is an error
- I think that is useless
-...
but, I won't prevent that decision to be taken".

This is just stating we are not really *happy* with
the final decision, but that it's ok nevertheless.
Things can go on.

Or we can drop the discussion, and go do something
else for some time.

And the decision is taken with more satisfaction for
all than through a classical voting system...

Anthere

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from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
At 08:50 PM 10/26/02 -0700, Toby wrote:
>Gareth Owen wrote:
>
> >The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:
>
> >>How do they clutter the "worthwhile" entries? Wikipedia is not paper.
>
> >RandomPages
>
>An idea:
>Can Randompage weight the articles that it picks by their length?
>This will make *any* stub less likely to be chosen,
>arguably without giving a distorted picture of what Wikipedia is like.

That would be a good option, but shouldn't be the default--one of the
ways I use "random page" is to find things to improve and edit, and
stubs definitely qualify there.

--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


from_name: Jeroen Heijmans

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: 80,000

body:
Toby wrote:
> An idea:
> Can Randompage weight the articles that it picks by their length?
> This will make *any* stub less likely to be chosen,
> arguably without giving a distorted picture of what Wikipedia is like.
>
> -- Toby

Rather not. The main reason I use Randompage is to find stub that I can add to, pages with bad style
(usually no bold subject), etc. If any such option is to be implemented, it should be definable per
user.

Jeronimo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] No voting? Then what?

body:
I've not really been following the "international" debate, but I read most of the recent stuff about
voting. Some Wikipedians, notably Cunctator, seem to think that "voting is evil", and link to some
wiki about meatballs for some arguments.

So, suppose voting is evil. Then how do we make decisions? Because with the current number of
members on this list, there's never going to be something like consensus. Endless discussions are
tiring and getting us nowhere. Already we are getting loads of e-mail about one single topic like
internationalisation; imagine how it would be with even more Wikipedians and, hence, mailing
members? That would be terrible, and I would probably not even attempt anymore to follow any
discussion after the first few reactions. The discussion will die without any solution or will
continue endlessly. That's not a desirable situation. Voting could end discussions. But "voting is
evil", so what to do then?

Jeronimo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: No voting? Then what?

body:
--- Jason Williams <jason at jasonandali.org.uk> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 27, 2002 at 07:45:39AM -0800, Anthere
> wrote:
> > Ah no. Consensus is not when everybody is *happy*.
> A
> > decision is taken only when everybody agree for
> the
> > decision to be taken, which is very slightly
> > different.
> Some serious problems with consensus that I'm sure
> you're
> aware of but bear mentioning anyway:
>
> * It only works well when the population has quite
> similar views and
>   attitudes,

Absolutely. The fr.wiki is democratically voting.

> * It slows everything down,

Agree. We have time in this case

> * It is biased in favour of whatever the status quo
> is,

Very true. Notice that in the current case, nobody (I
think) voted for option 1) keep www.wikipedia.org just
as it is. So this point is not valid in the current
case.

> * It gives a heavily disproportionate advantage to
> those willing or able
>   to shout longer and louder.

Hum, yes.
However, right now, it doesnot seem obvious to me that
those still shouting, or shouting very loudly are
having a clear advantage over the others. Or, am I
wrong ?

Which are the other drawbacks ?

__________________________________________________
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from_name: Lightning

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
> MY RESULTS
>
> 1) Whippet - tiny stub
>
> 2) Master station - straightforward definition, drawn from Federal
> Standard 1037C
>
> 3) Topological group - lengthy mathematical article
>
> 4) Lexington, Missouri - Rambot entry
>
> 5) Worcester Cathedral - tiny stub
>
> 6) F-14 Tomcat - lengthy article, with written information and a long
> list of stats
>
> 7) Triboluminescence - stub, basically a definition
>
> 8) Antony and Cleopatra - stub on the Shakespeare play
>
> 9) Stotts City, Missouri - Rambot entry
>
> 10) History of Swaziland - CIA factbook entry, very stubbish
>
> 11) Arecales - microstub (family listing)
>
> 12) Ripe - disambiguation page, no actual info
>
> 13) Der er et yndigt land -  (Danish national anthem) lyrics and English
> translation
>
> 14) Cow tipping - short article on an urban legend
>
> 15) Hub - definition
>
> 16) Feyenoord Rotterdam - short article on the Dutch football team
>
> 17) Cleveland, Illinois - rambot entry
>
> 18) Marion Heights, Pennsylvania - rambot entry
>
> 19) Spring Valley, Ohio - rambot entry
>
> 20) New Richmond, Wisconsin - rambot AGAIN
>

Well, uhm, a truly random page selector should be able to pick the same page
20 times, or rambot cities 20 times, or foods that start with the letter q
20 times, because if it can't, then its not truly random. so this is a bad
way of doing this. theres 35k rambot articles, out of 80k articles, that
just beans that rambot articles have a 7/16 probability of being picked. but
that doesnt rule out the possibility that if i click it 50 times i will get
years 2-51.  Remember that with random picking the last choice has no effect
on the next one.  soooo lets stop looking for patterns in a random page
generator... we could be doing real work... it seems that a lot of people
sometimes get carried away in details. dont worry people, once wikipedia
grows the randompage gen will even itself out.

Lightning


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Image:Soldierwithwings thumb.htm

body:
Pierre wrote:
>The image namespace is used for sounds as well as images. There are also a
>few .ai, .ps, or .dia files which are the source code of images. But if the
>.htm file is not an illustration of some HTML feature that can't be coded in
>wikicode, and it isn't the source code of some illustration (e.g. Indian
>numerals, IIRR), then delete it.

I know this is separate from what you're talking about, but I also make it a point to delete any uploaded file which claims an extension it's not.  e.g. Jokerman9000 does that frequently, and also has a penchange for uploading .phtmls for whatever reason (frequently containing javascript and some scrawlings about hax0rs).

kq


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Brion VIBBER wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>Can Randompage weight the articles that it picks by their length?
>>This will make *any* stub less likely to be chosen,
>>arguably without giving a distorted picture of what Wikipedia is like.

>The Ram-bot city entries average somewhere around 2130 bytes each
>(standard deviation 113), which is *larger* than the English
>Wikipedia-wide average for article-space non-redirect pages (about 1900
>bytes, standard deviation a whopping 3028).

I knew that they weren't short, but I was hoping that they weren't *long*.
I guess that they are.

>As I recall, the median article size is smaller than the average; if you
>could cut out the Ram-bot cities by size, you'd cut out most of the rest
>of Wikipedia with them.

(I assume that by "average" you mean <arithmetic mean>, then?)
Weighting by size could never cut out articles larger than the mean,
so the conclusion is not that most of Wikipedia would be cut out
but instead that the Ram-bot entries would not be cut out.

In light of other responses, there seem to be two purposes to Randompage.
One is to give visitors an idea of what Wikipedia is like,
and if Ram-bot entries are both among the most common and most substantial
of Wikipedia articles, that it's only fair that they show up often.
But another is to give contributors ideas for new things to work on,
and Ram-bot entries are generally useless for this purpose.
Perhaps we need 2 versions of Randompage?
(I should not really talk about it, since I rarely use Randompage anyway.)

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] No voting? Then what?

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

>Jeronimo wrote:

>>So, suppose voting is evil. Then how do we make decisions? Because with the
>>current number of members on this list, there's never going to be something
>>like consensus.

>That's simply not true.

"consensus" doesn't mean the same as "unanimous consent".
If everybody on the list agrees except for TC, then that is consensus.
(I don't want to get into a discussion of whether this has ever happened,
but it certainly could.)

There's even room for voting in some consensus decision making processes:
We discuss the idea for a while, making up new ideas and hashing out old ones.
Eventually, it becomes clear what most people think the right idea is.
Then somebody announces <OK, this is the consensus, so I'll do it.>.
At that point, anybody who thinks <Hold on! that is *not* the consensus!>
is the person that should call a vote in order to prove that
no such consensus exists -- not to *make* a decision but to *stop* one.

Voting for survey purposes is a fine idea as well,
as when elian didn't want to keep working on something with no hope,
as long as we don't intend to let a 51% majority "win" the vote.
In this case, it seems (without counting, this is just an impression)
that the portal has received a majority vote, but it's pretty close.
Conclusion: elian can work on a portal without wasting his time,
but nobody could possibly claim that any consensus has been reached,
hence no decision yet (which is good, since new ideas are still coming).

>>The discussion will die without any solution or will
>>continue endlessly.

>I don't think that's ever been the case.

I do think that this has definitely been the case in some situations.
But I would also argue that that's exactly what should happen
in most such situations.  Votes that are used to make decisions
should be reserved only for times when a decision *must* be made now.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] No voting? Then what?

body:
I agree with everything you said but

> If everybody on the list agrees except for TC, then
> that is consensus.

It seems to me that as long as somebody *strongly*
(strongly meaning not "mumble mumble, I am not very
happy with this...", but heavy unhappiness), there is
no consensus.

For if somebody disagrees absolutely with a decision,
he/she might feel like his/her only option is to
leave. And if he/she leaves, it's a loss, and it's not
good (of course, I don't mean here that tc would leave
:-), but others would)

Besides, that would require to define a "level" over
or under which the number of very unhappy people is
acceptable in terms of consensual decision or not.
How many people have been expressing their views here
? say 25. How would we decide 1 over 25 is an
acceptable number to ratify a decision and say it is
consensual ? Why would it not be 10 over 25 acceptable
rather ? Or why not 12 ? (that would make the 49%)

If you enter into a "number" process, that's voting.

What do you think ?

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from_name: Pierre Abbat

body:
On Sunday 27 October 2002 09:28, Neil Harris wrote:
> This appears to be vandalism.  Surely .htm should not be allowed as a
> file suffix for images?

The image namespace is used for sounds as well as images. There are also a
few .ai, .ps, or .dia files which are the source code of images. But if the
.htm file is not an illustration of some HTML feature that can't be coded in
wikicode, and it isn't the source code of some illustration (e.g. Indian
numerals, IIRR), then delete it.

phma


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Santa Claus & Snowmen

body:
Pierre Wrote:
>Please use plain text when sending email. HTML is not secure when sending
>email because it can contain malicious programs; so I view my mail only
>in plain text. Please see http://www.houghi.org for how to set this in
>your mail program.

That's spam you're replying to.  The second piece of spam I've received at this address now.  Perhaps whatever's gone wrong in hiding this address from the spammers could be changed before the floodgates open.

kq


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Demo front page, enhanced

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>>OK, new version is up. It will go through the browser languages until it
>>finds one. It doesn't use quality checking, though.
>>
>>
>
>It doesn't seem to do this for me.
>
Sorry, one-line-bug. Fixed.


from_name: Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Intlwiki-l] voting on www.wikipedia.org

body:
On 26-10-2002, Toby Bartels wrote thusly :
> Anthere wrote in part:
> >I have been looking a bit around on the "Troph?e du
> >Libre" these past two days in case we decide to run
> >for it.
> >To register, we must provide an url for the project we
> >are working on. It seems very natural (obvious) that
> >the url should be www.wikipedia.org, don't you think ?
> >Then, when the jury will look at the project, since
> >they will be probably french, and very likely on a
> >french computer, with french brower set up, if they
> >type www.wikipedia.org, they could be automatically
> >redirected to the french wikipedia.
> >Honestly, do you think a better view of the project
> >will be given on the fr.wiki or on the en.wiki ???
> >So, what should we do then ? provide en
> >en.wikipedia.org adress instead for a better
> >assessment of what wikipedia is ?
> >That, for sur, would be a big blow to the
> >internationals wikis.
> >So, in case redirection is chosen, which url would you
> >prefer we give ? Let's think a bit about promotion
> >also in this decision.
> I think that Anthere has a very good argument here.
Hello all,

Seriously. I agree there seems to be a problem here.
> OTOH, if we browser sniff with Neil Harris' modification,
> which puts international stuff at the top of <www.wikipedia.org>
> and then put <xx.wikipedia.org> after it, this would still work.

Semi-seriously. If the redirection is the way to go.
The multilingual opening page is _automatically_ redirecting
after, say 15 seconds, to a page that redirects without delay to
the language being the first in browser preferences. If there is
no such language version of Wikipedia is redirecting to the second...
If the list is exhausted the user lands in the English Wikipedia.

I hope we are not going in circles with this redirection thing ;-)

Regards,
Kpjas.


from_name: kristen at krspromotions.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Santa Claus & Snowmen

body:
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URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/attachments/20021027/65404e9e/attachment.htm


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Anthere wrote:

>--- koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
>
>>Anthere wrote:
>>
>>>>I don't mind Ram-Man's bot so much, but I'd like to
>>>>
>>>>find an equivalent resource for towns *outside* of
>>>>
>>>>the U.S.
>>>>
>>>40.000 french postal codes ???
>>>
>>You'll have to explain that to me.  What's a postal
>>code?  Is that the same as a city?  In the U.S. we
>>frequently have a dozen or more postal codes in a
>>single city.  Anyway, if the entries would be more
>>than a paragraph apiece and they seem like
>>information that somebody might reasonably look for,
>>then I don't see what's wrong with including it.
>>
>ah, a postal code is similar to zipcodes in the us, or
>areacode in England (except those are very very
>accurate compared to ours). We have 36 679 communes.
>It is entirely related to postoffices localisation
>only. Most big cities (big communes) have several
>zipcodes (such as Paris, Lyon, Marseille), but a code
>postal can also be in relation with several small
>communes (in short, that's not a bijection relation at
>all, so it's a bit messy).
>
If somebody is really interested in postal codes the site
http://www.escapeartist.com/global10/zip.htm has links to how the matter
is treated in a large range of countries.

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: No voting? Then what?

body:
wikipedia-l-request at wikipedia.org wrote:
> Please give the dismissive tone some time off. Wikipedia is a silly name
> too.

My point was rather there's no reason why anything on any other Wiki should apply here. And I'd
rather hear arguments from you than reading an extensive discussion between other, non-involved
persons.

> > So, suppose voting is evil. Then how do we make decisions? Because with the
> > current number of members on this list, there's never going to be something
> > like consensus.
> That's simply not true.

Consensus means everybody agrees, right? I've never seen that so far on the list, but I may have
missed it.

> > Endless discussions are tiring and getting us nowhere.
> It may be tiring, but it's hardly getting us nowhere. Ideas and thoughts
> have steadily been introduced and refined.

Note the "endless" part. Discussions are necessary and useful. But after a while it becomes
restating of opinions. Discussions then either end without a solution or don't end. That's bad. It
happens a lot.

> > That's not a desirable situation. Voting could end
> > discussions. But "voting is evil", so what to do then?
>
> Are you willing to admit the basic problems with voting?

I think voting is just fine. Sure, there are some drawbacks, but I don't see them as critical. At
least it has the advantage that decisions are made.

> An example of how consensus rather than voting can work is in progress at
> [[Wikipedia:Bots]].

Where? I don't see any decisions being taken, rather a proposal only edited by you and Chas zzz
brown - hardly consensus. Also, there's some voting at the top...

Jeronimo


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] No voting? Then what?

body:
I wish we'd done a vote on a wiki page, it's much lighter on traffic --
this list has generated 100 (!!!!) emails overnight.


body:
Irina Rosenthal wrote:
> Brion VIBBER <brion at pobox.com> writes:
>>A number of languages are currently virtually unusable on the
>>Latin-1-hardwired old server. (Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hebrew...) If
>>anyone expresses interest I can set them up in Unicode on the new
>>server; though there are presently problems with the search function,
>>you can edit and link so it's better than nothing!
>
> Please do that - I don't want to know how many possible contributors have
> been driven away by the broken encoding up to now.

Got the Chinese last night, I'll get the others of these four later today.

http://zh.wikipedia.org/

 > Maybe I'll find the time to do some promotion for the arabic wikipedia.

Cool!

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: phma at webjockey.net

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Santa Claus & Snowmen

body:
Please use plain text when sending email. HTML is not secure when sending
email because it can contain malicious programs; so I view my mail only
in plain text. Please see http://www.houghi.org for how to set this in
your mail program.

phma


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
This appears to be vandalism.  Surely .htm should not be allowed as a
file suffix for images?

Neil


from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] I'm seeing a trend here or How to keep drivingaway
 good contributors

body:
Stephen Gilbert wrote:
> --- Larry Sanger <lsanger at nupedia.com> wrote:
> > "Experts"?  There are no experts in this area.  Or,
>
> That's an odd statement. There's no Ph.Ds, for
> certain.

Is anybody here interested in "going academic" on this topic?
We could set up a page on the meta wiki with pointers to published
papers, research groups, etc.  Or did anybody do this already?

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik
  Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxk?ping, Sweden
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/


from_name: Jason Williams

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: No voting? Then what?

body:
On Sun, Oct 27, 2002 at 07:45:39AM -0800, Anthere wrote:
> Ah no. Consensus is not when everybody is *happy*. A
> decision is taken only when everybody agree for the
> decision to be taken, which is very slightly
> different.
Some serious problems with consensus that I'm sure you're
aware of but bear mentioning anyway:

* It only works well when the population has quite similar views and
  attitudes,

* It slows everything down,

* It is biased in favour of whatever the status quo is,

* It gives a heavily disproportionate advantage to those willing or able
  to shout longer and louder.
--
jason at jasonandali.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: Jonathan Walther

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Is anybody else noticing the timeouts and lags?

body:
On Mon, Oct 28, 2002 at 11:32:40AM +1100, Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
>The last few days, every so often the wikipedia slows to a crawl and
>won't load the page change properly. I've 'lost' a few edits that way
>because it's timed out.

I've experienced the same thing.  When is Wikipedia switching from MySQL
to Postgres?

Also, it is frustrating during those times when every link is a "random"
link.  When is Wikipedia switching from MySQL to a real ACID database
(Postgres)?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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body:
On Mon, Oct 28, 2002 at 11:32:40AM +1100, Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
>The last few days, every so often the wikipedia slows to a crawl and
>won't load the page change properly. I've 'lost' a few edits that way
>because it's timed out.

I've experienced the same thing.  When is Wikipedia switching from MySQL
to Postgres?

Also, it is frustrating during those times when every link is a "random"
link.  When is Wikipedia switching from MySQL to a real ACID database
(Postgres)?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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from_name: Brion VIBBER

body:
Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
> The last few days, every so often the wikipedia slows to a crawl and
> won't load the page change properly. I've 'lost' a few edits that way
> because it's timed out.

Saving verrryyyy llloonnnggg pages seems to precipitate this. I just
cropped off the upload log ([[Wikipedia:Upload log]]) from several
gazillion lines each with two links, and it took a few minutes to finish
saving, blocking the database until it was done.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
On Sun, Oct 27, 2002 at 04:42:16PM -0800, Brion VIBBER wrote:
>Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
>>The last few days, every so often the wikipedia slows to a crawl and
>>won't load the page change properly. I've 'lost' a few edits that way
>>because it's timed out.
>
>Saving verrryyyy llloonnnggg pages seems to precipitate this. I just
>cropped off the upload log ([[Wikipedia:Upload log]]) from several
>gazillion lines each with two links, and it took a few minutes to finish
>saving, blocking the database until it was done.

*cough*Postgres*cough* Anyone else agree it's time to switch to a
database that is just as fast as MySQL, but does row level locking
without slowing down any other concurrent database accesses, plus has
roll-back and all the other nice ACID features?

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Gareth Owen wrote:
> Because they're not encyclopedia articles.
> They're entries from a gazetteer.
>
> One could dump a PD dictionary into wikipedia, and each article would be more
> informative than many stubs.  But wikipedia is not a dictionary.
>
> Its not a gazetteer, either.

I cannot quite understand what makes this orthodox/exclusive/purist
point of view so attractive.  By your definition, would Diderot's
encyclopedia qualify as an encyclopedia?  If not, is that good or bad
for your definition?

Diderot's vision (which seems to have been shared by Vannevar Bush,
Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee) was to *include* all of the world's
knowledge into one (net-)work, and *not* to exclude knowledge that
could be called geographic (gazetteer) or lingustic (dictionary).  How
could they be so wrong (what idiots!), when your own (and Larry's)
purist wisdom should have been obvious to them?

So much of the distinction between these kinds of reference works were
forced upon their creators by the limitations of the print medium.
With the World Wide Web we are no longer bound by these limitations.
Only our preconceived notions, our prejudice bind us now.

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik
  Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxk?ping, Sweden
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Create a MONTHLY INCOME with your COMPUTER

body:
You Wrote:
>Good morning -
>
>You get emails every day, offering to show you how to make money.
>Most of these emails are from people who are NOT making any money.
>And they expect you to listen to them?
>
>Enough.
>
>If you want to make money with your computer, then you should

Ok.  Some suggestions: no one who's subscribed can post to the list.  Also,
and I mentioned this to Jimbo several months ago, the email addresses
should all be obscured in the archives at nupedia.

kq


body:
On Sun, Oct 27, 2002 at 05:36:56PM -0800, Brion VIBBER wrote:
>Jonathan Walther wrote:
>>*cough*Postgres*cough* Anyone else agree it's time to switch to a
>>database that is just as fast as MySQL, but does row level locking
>>without slowing down any other concurrent database accesses, plus has
>>roll-back and all the other nice ACID features?
>
>Worth a shot; I'll see if I can get it running on my test server.

Sweet ^_^ I'm anxious to know how it goes; keep us posted!

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

  Providing Unix & Internet Contracting and Consulting,
  QA Testing, Technical Documentation, Systems Design & Implementation,
  General Programming, E-commerce, Web & Mail Services since 1998

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:
> *cough*Postgres*cough* Anyone else agree it's time to switch to a
> database that is just as fast as MySQL, but does row level locking
> without slowing down any other concurrent database accesses, plus has
> roll-back and all the other nice ACID features?

Worth a shot; I'll see if I can get it running on my test server.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Is anybody else noticing the timeouts and lags?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] No voting? Then what?

body:
Anthere wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>If everybody on the list agrees except for TC, then
>>that is consensus.

>It seems to me that as long as somebody *strongly*
>(strongly meaning not "mumble mumble, I am not very
>happy with this...", but heavy unhappiness), there is
>no consensus.

That depends on exactly what you mean by "consensus".
The word does not, inherently, mean a lack of dissent.
(For example, the "Washington Consensus" in favour of
neoliberal economic policies in Latin America
is now breaking down and can no longer be regarded as a consensus.
But even in its most successful era, it was dissented to
by some people in every country, and by one Latin American country
in particular.)

There actually might be a US/UK English distinction here.
The OED says that consensus requires unanimity,
while Webster's describes "public opinion" (never unanimous)
as a potential source of consensus, thus agreeing with me.
I have no idea what differences there may be in French ^_^.

>For if somebody disagrees absolutely with a decision,
>he/she might feel like his/her only option is to
>leave. And if he/she leaves, it's a loss, and it's not
>good (of course, I don't mean here that tc would leave
>:-), but others would)

And other people here will leave if decisions are never made.
Let me make a request now for people to say so
if they would leave if TC were really able to
veto every decision ever made about Wikipedia.
I'll bet that this request gets a response ^_^.

The point is, we shouldn't try to please everybody;
that's not the only goal of consensus decisions,
and not a realistic goal in groups of this size.
The goal that *I* prize is that everybody continues to have
ample opportunity to speak their opinion until such time
that everybody has made up their minds --
at which point, there is usually a consensus.

We also get the bonus that we're less likely to make decisions at all,
given that most decisions do not, in fact, have to be made.
For example, we have made no decision on English spelling systems
(American vs the rest of the English speaking world),
and I sincerely hope that we never do.
We could easily make such a decision if we voted on it,
but we never could if we waited for a consensus.

(The decision under discussion now probably does have to be made,
although if it were delayed until PediaWiki 4.0
links the different languages together better --
at which time consensus will in fact be easier to reach --
then that wouldn't be such a bad thing,
even though I would not wait if it were up to just me.)

>Besides, that would require to define a "level" over
>or under which the number of very unhappy people is
>acceptable in terms of consensual decision or not.
>How many people have been expressing their views here
>? say 25. How would we decide 1 over 25 is an
>acceptable number to ratify a decision and say it is
>consensual ? Why would it not be 10 over 25 acceptable
>rather ? Or why not 12 ? (that would make the 49%)
>If you enter into a "number" process, that's voting.

I agree.  Why enter into a "number" process?
If I honestly think that there is a consensus,
then I'm going to go ahead and implement that consensus.
It is a subjective decision, I admit.
But since I have very little power compared to everybody else
(even though I have as much power as almost anybody else),
I can't get away with it if I'm wrong and there's no consensus.
I *can* get away with it if, say, TC is the only dissenter.
This is one step removed from just doing what I think is right,
which is what I do for *most* decisions that I make on a wiki.
(OTOH, for the really important stuff,
we may first have to come to a consensus
on whether or not there's a consensus ^_^.)

For example, when I first arrived on the mailing list,
there was a discussion about naming conventions for city names.
That discussion did not IMO reach a consensus,
but somebody thought that it did and wrote up a policy page.
Then I said that I didn't think that any consensus had been reached,
and a bunch of people agreed with me, so obviously it hadn't.
This generated further discussion (on the talk page, not the list),
and the policy was ultimately changed, for the better IMO.
(This is not the best example of how things should work, unfortunately,
because the discussion eventually degenerated into voting.
It is only an example of how the fact that consensus doesn't exist
will cause people to be unable to get away with claiming that it does;
but it's not an example of consensus decision making in all its glory.)

-- Toby


body:
Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:

>The last few days, every so often the wikipedia slows to a crawl and
>won't load the page change properly. I've 'lost' a few edits that way
>because it's timed out.

This was happening quite often during the final days of PediaWiki 2,
and I had to learn the habit of copying all of my text to the clipboard
before pressing save (or preview, if the last change had been substantial).

It's sad that we're reaching this point already again.
(Well, it's happy in some other ways.)

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] What Jokerman might be doing

body:
Jokerman9001 has been persistently uploading junk to Wikipedia for several
months. Normally, after someone uploads a few junks and finds that they are
quickly deleted, he goes away. Could he be using Wikipedia as a dead drop for
transferring illicit files? Can someone check the web logs to see if anyone
other than Jokerman downloads files that Jokerman uploaded, but never
accesses Wikipedia at other times?

phma


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikitech-l] wikipedia.sourceforge.net

body:
Has the page http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net been removed? I can't get
there anymore. Formerly, this was a handy page containing an
introduction to the Wikipedia software and several links, much more
digestable than the disaster that is
http://sourceforge.net/projects/wikipedia/

Axel

P.S. See
http://216.239.53.100/search?q=cache:nk3YWmXcUg0C:wikipedia.sourceforge.net/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
for Google's cache of the page.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Timeouts and lags

body:
Brion wrote:

>Saving verrryyyy llloonnnggg pages seems to precipitate this. I just
>cropped off the upload log ([[Wikipedia:Upload log]]) from several
>gazillion lines each with two links, and it took a few minutes to
>finish saving, blocking the database until it was done.

Could it be that updating the link tables (links, brokenlinks and
imagelinks) takes a long time? Are these tables properly indexed?

Axel

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/


from_name: Karen AKA Kajikit

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
>
> Gareth Owen wrote:
>
> >The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> wrote:
>
> >>How do they clutter the "worthwhile" entries? Wikipedia is not paper.
>
> >RandomPages
>
> An idea:
> Can Randompage weight the articles that it picks by their length?
> This will make *any* stub less likely to be chosen,
> arguably without giving a distorted picture of what Wikipedia is like.

It's not the length of these machine-generated articles that's at issue.
These particular ones are GOOD articles - they have all the information
we need, they're automatically spellchecked etc. There isn't anything
that needs to be done to them that's visible to someone from the other
side of the world - and therein lies the reason why they're 'cluttering'
the place up. Recent Changes and the Random button are the two primary
methods of finding articles that need work, for me at least, and these
articles cut down on the number of 'needing work' articles I can see.

I find the long and completed articles on the elements etc just as much
of a nuisance, for the same reason. If anything, I'd like an option to
search just the SHORT articles and to randomly pull up a stub that I
could work on. I know the 'short articles' listing will do it, but I've
worked through about the first six pages and the majority of the
remaining articles at the beginning of the list are the mythology stubs
that I know nothing about and can't extend. A 'random stub' (choosing
only articles under about 1000bytes) button would be a handy maintenance
tool for me, but I don't know if anyone else would want to use it.

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

To err is human... to really foul things up add kitten and stir.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Paul Ebermann wrote:
>
> "Gareth Owen" skribis:
>
> > The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> writes:
> >
> > > How do they clutter the "worthwhile" entries? Wikipedia is not paper.
> >
> > RandomPages
>
> I just tested this ...
>
> I twenty times klicked on "Random page",
> and got
>
> - 3 times these "Village pages"
> - 3 times year-pages (two of them 507)
> - 14 times other articles (but not all of them
>    being "worthwile" articles IMHO).
>
> Is this a great problem?

In itself, no it's not. I did a random page search myself just now and
here are my results. I didn't happen to get any year pages this time
around, but six out of my twenty clicks took me to a rambot town and the
last four of those were in a row directly after each other. One year
entry, or one town, or one country demographics entry (etc) by itself
isn't a problem, but when you click again and get another one, and again
etc, it might make people think that that's all we have in the
wikipedia. I could see it dissuading people from trying to use the
wikipedia, because they might think that their kind of information
wasn't wanted or needed, or that the wikipedia just doesn't have what
they're looking for when it probably does.

MY RESULTS

1) Whippet - tiny stub

2) Master station - straightforward definition, drawn from Federal
Standard 1037C

3) Topological group - lengthy mathematical article

4) Lexington, Missouri - Rambot entry

5) Worcester Cathedral - tiny stub

6) F-14 Tomcat - lengthy article, with written information and a long
list of stats

7) Triboluminescence - stub, basically a definition

8) Antony and Cleopatra - stub on the Shakespeare play

9) Stotts City, Missouri - Rambot entry

10) History of Swaziland - CIA factbook entry, very stubbish

11) Arecales - microstub (family listing)

12) Ripe - disambiguation page, no actual info

13) Der er et yndigt land -  (Danish national anthem) lyrics and English
translation

14) Cow tipping - short article on an urban legend

15) Hub - definition

16) Feyenoord Rotterdam - short article on the Dutch football team

17) Cleveland, Illinois - rambot entry

18) Marion Heights, Pennsylvania - rambot entry

19) Spring Valley, Ohio - rambot entry

20) New Richmond, Wisconsin - rambot AGAIN

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

To err is human... to really foul things up add kitten and stir.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/


subject: [Wikitech-l] Timeouts and lags

body:
Axel Boldt wrote:
> Brion wrote:
>>Saving verrryyyy llloonnnggg pages seems to precipitate this. I just
>>cropped off the upload log ([[Wikipedia:Upload log]]) from several
>>gazillion lines each with two links, and it took a few minutes to
>>finish saving, blocking the database until it was done.
>
> Could it be that updating the link tables (links, brokenlinks and
> imagelinks) takes a long time? Are these tables properly indexed?

The link updating (LinksUpdate.php) does up to five queries on page save:

DELETE FROM links WHERE l_from='{$t}'
INSERT INTO links (l_from,l_to) VALUES {very long list}
DELETE FROM brokenlinks WHERE bl_from={$this->mId}
INSERT INTO brokenlinks (bl_from,bl_to) VALUES {very long list}
DELETE FROM brokenlinks WHERE bl_to='{$t}'

Hmm, I notice that l_from contains the title as text. Wouldn't it be
more efficient to use the ID? You can't have links from nonexistent
articles, after all.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
On Sunday 27 October 2002 20:30, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> Ok.  Some suggestions: no one who's subscribed can post to the list.  Also,
> and I mentioned this to Jimbo several months ago, the email addresses
> should all be obscured in the archives at nupedia.

I never saw the spam, so it must have been in Razor already. I suggest
rewiring Mailman's alias to run a procmail script that checks for spam.
There's a HOWTO for this, which I am partway through implementing on my lists.

phma
---
aliases:
list: "|/usr/bin/procmail MAILMAN=list"
---
.procmailrc:
:0 c:
last32

:0 ic: /tmp/baklock
| cd last32 && rm -f dummy `ls -t msg.* | sed -e 1,32d`

# razor-check goes here

:0
|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper post ${MAILMAN}


from_name: elian

subject: [Wikipedia-l] No voting? Then what?

body:
tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> writes:

> I wish we'd done a vote on a wiki page, it's much lighter on traffic --
> this list has generated 100 (!!!!) emails overnight.

There is also a possibility to add votes at metawikipedia [[What to do
with www.wikipedia.org]].

In the next days I'll post a summary of collected opinions so far.

greetings,
elian
--
BSOD = Blue Screen Of Death. Selbstaufrufendes M$-SpielProgramm, das
nicht installiert werden muss, die Faehigkeit des Benutzers zur
Interpretation hexadezimaler Gedichte trainiert und einen Kanal
der Graphikkarte (blau) testet. [Herwig Huener in ger.ct]


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [Wikipedia-l] every decision has a down side

body:
For my sins I spent many years as a minor manager and learned very
little, but I did learn the following:

     Every decision has a down side.  If there were no cost to making
     a decision, there would be no difficulty in making it.  Indeed,
     there would be no decison to make.

In the present case of an opening page:

-- Multilingual page -- builds and advertises the multilingual
   wikipedia at the cost of distracting and possibly driving away
   readers with a limited-content page, mostly in languages they don't
   speak (et cetera)

-- Automatic redirect to language setting of browser -- takes the
   reader where they probably want to go at the cost of annoying them
   with our arrogance if that isn't what they want (et cetera)

No amount of discussion can make either of these costs go away.  I
would rather pay the second cost.  Other people would rather pay the
first.

For the record, I could read a reasonably simple article in English,
Spanish, and German, and a list of Christmas baked goods in Norwegian.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On 10/27/02 11:13 PM, "Tom Parmenter" <tompar at world.std.com> wrote:

>
> For my sins I spent many years as a minor manager and learned very
> little, but I did learn the following:
>
>    Every decision has a down side.  If there were no cost to making
>    a decision, there would be no difficulty in making it.  Indeed,
>    there would be no decison to make.
>
> In the present case of an opening page:
>
> -- Multilingual page -- builds and advertises the multilingual
>  wikipedia at the cost of distracting and possibly driving away
>  readers with a limited-content page, mostly in languages they don't
>  speak (et cetera)
>
> -- Automatic redirect to language setting of browser -- takes the
>  reader where they probably want to go at the cost of annoying them
>  with our arrogance if that isn't what they want (et cetera)
>
> No amount of discussion can make either of these costs go away.  I
> would rather pay the second cost.  Other people would rather pay the
> first.
>
Well spoken. Of course, one should take into account that drawbacks of
implementations can often be reduced or eliminated by redrawing the problem
space.

In other words, if you can change the problem, new solutions become
possible.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] [cunctator@kband.com: sep. 11.]

body:
Can someone set this up for Cunc?

----- Forwarded message from The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> -----

From: The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com>
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2002 13:31:45 -0400
To: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
Subject: sep. 11.

Would you be willing to set up sep11.wikipedia.org with the Phase III
software? If you do so, I can do the work so that the advocacy/tribute pages
can be redirected from Wikipedia to there.

Thanks,

tc

----- End forwarded message -----


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikipedia-l] No voting? Then what?

body:
Imran Ghory wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>That depends on exactly what you mean by "consensus".

>Try [[Consensus]].

I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but I haven't yet reached the point
where I trust Wikipedia over a good dictionary to accurately describe
the precise meanings of words.  But there is still nice info in that article.

>>There actually might be a US/UK English distinction here.
>>The OED says that consensus requires unanimity,

>You're misreading the OED, it states unanimity of a number of
>persons, not however of everyone involved.

That's a good point, although I don't think that it's very clear either way.

Well in any case, with Webster's (1913) offering a quotation
that becomes quite implausible if consensus requires unanimity,
with Wikipedia explicitly stating that there is no such requirement,
and with the OED now proved at worst a little wishy washy,
clearly a single person cannot (necessarily) veto a consensus decision.

Although Anthere seemed to regard such veto power as a *good* thing,
its lack should make the vote supporters happier about consensus.

(Not that we couldn't invent a thing-like-consensus-except-that-it-
-doesn't-have-to-be-unanimous if the dictionaries had gone the other way,
but it's nice to know that people have discussed your idea beforehand,
to the point of giving it a name.  It's not such an unknown forbidding
new territory ^_^.)

-- Toby


subject: [Intlwiki-l] [Wikipedia-l] No voting? Then what?

body:
[Note:  The post that I'm replying to wasn't sent to <wikipedia-l>.
        Or perhaps it was sent separately; I'm not sure.]

Anthere wrote:

>That also depends on exactly what *others* mean by
>"consensus".

>Please, try http://fr.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Consensus

Ah, so if I'm willing to trust Wikipedia as a dictionary,
it seems that there *is* a French/English difference in meaning.
If only we spelled it differently from each other, then we could keep track!
In the meantime, the French sense of "consensus"
can be described in English as "unanimous consent", I think.
And since I can't write in French in the first place,
I don't have to worry about how to express English "consensus"
in that language ^_^!

OK, so clearly we have two ideas, each with its own word,
in fact apparently the same word, albeit in different languages.
We can talk about whether we should have consensus or unanimous consent
(or voting, or the autocratic dictatorship of Jimbo, or ...).
I myself would suggest consensus (whatever that may be called in French).

The sad thing is that we seemed to have a longstanding consensus
in favour of decision making by consensus, although that consensus
was breaking as people started to advocate voting more and more.
But now it appears that we may never have had such a consensus;
we had a consensus that we made decisions by a method called "consensus",
but unfortunately that word has different meanings in different languages,
so there was consensus only on the word but not on the thing itself.

That's the problem with foreign languages;
everybody should just use English the way that God intended,
which to be quite specific is the way that it's used by me.
(I hope that it's obvious that this last sentence is a joke.)

-- Toby


body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Can someone set this up for Cunc?

Done. I gave it a light blue background just to be distinct from the
encyc; if it's hideously ugly say something and I'll tweak it.

   http://sep11.wikipedia.org/

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

> ----- Forwarded message from The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com> -----
>
> From: The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com>
> Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2002 13:31:45 -0400
> To: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
> Subject: sep. 11.
>
> Would you be willing to set up sep11.wikipedia.org with the Phase III
> software? If you do so, I can do the work so that the advocacy/tribute pages
> can be redirected from Wikipedia to there.


body:
On Sun, Oct 27, 2002 at 09:41:21PM -0500, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> I never saw the spam, so it must have been in Razor already. I suggest
> rewiring Mailman's alias to run a procmail script that checks for spam.
> There's a HOWTO for this, which I am partway through implementing on my lists.
Please, no. Let those who want to run the risk of losing legitimate
mails do so personally.

--
jason at jasonandali.org.uk    http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

body:
Imran wrote:
>> >If you want to make money with your computer, then you should
>>
>> Ok.  Some suggestions: no one who's subscribed can post to the list.
>
>Don't you mean only people who are subscribed should be able to post to
>the list ?

Heh.  Yes, that's what I meant.  "no one who's *not* subscribed..."  :-)

kq


body:
The last few days, every so often the wikipedia slows to a crawl and
won't load the page change properly. I've 'lost' a few edits that way
because it's timed out.

--

Karen AKA Kajikit

To err is human... to really foul things up add kitten and stir.

Come and visit my part of the web:
Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/
Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport
Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating
Ample Aussies Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ampleaussies/


from_name: Imran Ghory

body:
On Sun, 27 Oct 2002 koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:

> You Wrote:
> >Good morning -
> >
> >You get emails every day, offering to show you how to make money.
> >Most of these emails are from people who are NOT making any money.
> >And they expect you to listen to them?
> >
> >Enough.
> >
> >If you want to make money with your computer, then you should
>
> Ok.  Some suggestions: no one who's subscribed can post to the list.

Don't you mean only people who are subscribed should be able to post to
the list ?

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


subject: [Wikipedia-l] No voting? Then what?

body:
On Sun, 27 Oct 2002, Toby Bartels wrote:

> Anthere wrote:
>
> >Toby Bartels wrote:
>
> >>If everybody on the list agrees except for TC, then
> >>that is consensus.
>
> >It seems to me that as long as somebody *strongly*
> >(strongly meaning not "mumble mumble, I am not very
> >happy with this...", but heavy unhappiness), there is
> >no consensus.
>
> That depends on exactly what you mean by "consensus".

Try [[Consensus]].

> There actually might be a US/UK English distinction here.
> The OED says that consensus requires unanimity,

You're misreading the OED, it states unanimity of a number of
persons, not however of everyone involved.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Anthere wrote:
>ah, a postal code is similar to zipcodes in the us, or
>areacode in England (except those are very very
>accurate compared to ours). We have 36 679 communes.

>[snip]

>I believe it's probably very similar in the usa. But
>that means if you put
>78000 : it is Versailles. You could have a nice
>article on Versailles maybe ?
>But 78001 is also Versailles, so what do you put here
>?
>And in the 38140, there are several villages
>concerned...

Ah, but then what would we do when the year 38140 comes around?  ;-)

kq


body:
The Cunctator wrote:
>>   http://sep11.wikipedia.org/
>
> Is there some way for me to be able to tweak the settings myself? E.g.
> stylesheet, default text, etc. Otherwise I guess I'll build a mockup of
> the interface.

Not yet, no.

Mock away...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
On Mon, 2002-10-28 at 08:18, Brion VIBBER wrote:
> Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > Can someone set this up for Cunc?
>
> Done. I gave it a light blue background just to be distinct from the
> encyc; if it's hideously ugly say something and I'll tweak it.
>
>    http://sep11.wikipedia.org/
>
Is there some way for me to be able to tweak the settings myself? E.g.
stylesheet, default text, etc. Otherwise I guess I'll build a mockup of
the interface.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Quick note: disambiguation

body:
Just a quick note:

I have given the page Wikipedia:Disambiguation a bit of a rewrite.
I'm not changing policy, I'm updating the article to reflect what has
previously been discussed here, and what is current behaviour (eg
[[Newton]], [[Cream]])

I hope it is now clearer.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: my quick note

body:
Well, I *would* be rewriting the article, but for the last 5 mins I get
a "refused connection" or "timed out".


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
--- cunctator at kband.com wrote:
> > Anthere wrote:
> > >ah, a postal code is similar to zipcodes in the
> us, or
> > >areacode in England (except those are very very
> > >accurate compared to ours). We have 36 679
> communes.
> >
> > >[snip]
> >
> > >I believe it's probably very similar in the usa.
> But
> > >that means if you put
> > >78000 : it is Versailles. You could have a nice
> > >article on Versailles maybe ?
> > >But 78001 is also Versailles, so what do you put
> here
> > >?
> > >And in the 38140, there are several villages
> > >concerned...
> >
> > Ah, but then what would we do when the year 38140
> comes around?  ;-)
> >
> By then Wikipedia will have long since become the
> core of a godlike universal AI,
> able to disambiguate queries (which will be
> expressed not as verbal or written
> queries, but as low-level fluctuations in the
> post-organic brains of individuals)
> instantaneously and precisely.
>
> Disambiguation pages are, of course, just a
> necessity of imperfect technology.

:-)))))

Will I live to see that ?!

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/


body:
--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> Ah, so if I'm willing to trust Wikipedia as a
> dictionary,
> it seems that there *is* a French/English difference
> in meaning.
> If only we spelled it differently from each other,
> then we could keep track!
> In the meantime, the French sense of "consensus"
> can be described in English as "unanimous consent",
> I think.
> And since I can't write in French in the first
> place,
> I don't have to worry about how to express English
> "consensus"
> in that language ^_^!

ahum, cough, cough. Well, when you look in a wonderful
Larousse 84200 articles (is 84200 articles enough for
a decent langage speaking ?),
and...well...okay...consensus does not exist in
french.

Clarification : it does not exist for the Acad?mie.

Don't repeat it to the french *Acad?mie* please. For
once, we have our chance...

I'm willing to trust Wikipedia as a dictionary here
:-)))
More than the academy, for the notion of consensus
*does* exist in french.

> OK, so clearly we have two ideas, each with its own
> word,
> in fact apparently the same word, albeit in
> different languages.
> We can talk about whether we should have consensus
> or unanimous consent
> (or voting, or the autocratic dictatorship of Jimbo,
> or ...).
> I myself would suggest consensus (whatever that may
> be called in French).

May I add a point here, for the lines below are really
head spinning.

It seems the final blocking vote must be made (that's
personal self control) only if the blocker deeply
believe the potential decision is gonna be *very
harmful* to the project/community. A bloking vote over
the feeling the decision is stupid or useless is
wrong.
Likely, the certainty that the decision is going to
have destructive consequences, can be supported with
good arguments. If the blocker is in a good community
where people listen to the others, good arguments are
listened to, and the blocker will not appear
unreasonable.

If the blocker just block because he thinks it is
useless, then his block is probably not to be
considered.

Theory !

> The sad thing is that we seemed to have a
> longstanding consensus
> in favour of decision making by consensus, although
> that consensus
> was breaking as people started to advocate voting
> more and more.
> But now it appears that we may never have had such a
> consensus;
> we had a consensus that we made decisions by a
> method called "consensus",
> but unfortunately that word has different meanings
> in different languages,
> so there was consensus only on the word but not on
> the thing itself.

It sure is the case on the fr.wiki. We agree on the
word. Not on the way :-)

And from an international point of view, if we are all
to work together, we must share *some* values. How do
we know we share them ? How do we know we are talking
of the same thing ? When even in english you may not
be ?

> That's the problem with foreign languages;
> everybody should just use English the way that God
> intended,
> which to be quite specific is the way that it's used
> by me.
> (I hope that it's obvious that this last sentence is
> a joke.)

uh, no, your way is ok. But imho God has nothing to do
with that ;-)

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/


from_name: Jeff Bronks

subject: FW: [Wikipedia-l] voting on www.wikipedia.org

body:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
> [mailto:wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org]On Behalf Of elian
> Sent: 26 October 2002 14:12
> To: wikipedia-l at nupedia.com
> Cc: intlwiki-l at nupedia.com
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] voting on www.wikipedia.org
>
>
>
> Hello,
>
> Mmost arguments in favor or against different
> solutions seem to have been presented now, but I must say I lost
> track who wants
> what. Furthermore it's a useless waste of energy to work on different
> solutions without knowing which is wanted.
>
> So I invite people to give their vote..
>
>
> www.wikipedia.org should:
>
> [x] not be changed at all.
>
> [] redirect depending on the browser's language setting to the wikipedia
> in the prefered language.
>
> [] be a multilingual portal (1)
>
> [] other ______
>
> (1) draft to be further improved at
> http://mitglied.lycos.de/manske/wiki/test.php
> with language of the welcome message derived from the browser settings and
> prefered language highlighted.
>
> this message is crossposted to intlwiki-l and wikipedia-l and to
> metawikipedia [[What to
> do with www.wikipedia.org]]
>
> greetings,
> elian
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: cunctator at kband.com

body:
> The Cunctator wrote:
> >>   http://sep11.wikipedia.org/
> >
> > Is there some way for me to be able to tweak the settings myself? E.g.
> > stylesheet, default text, etc. Otherwise I guess I'll build a mockup of
> > the interface.
>
> Not yet, no.
>
> Mock away...
>
Other than dev. access, of course.  I suppose I should avoid that timesink.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
> Anthere wrote:
> >ah, a postal code is similar to zipcodes in the us, or
> >areacode in England (except those are very very
> >accurate compared to ours). We have 36 679 communes.
>
> >[snip]
>
> >I believe it's probably very similar in the usa. But
> >that means if you put
> >78000 : it is Versailles. You could have a nice
> >article on Versailles maybe ?
> >But 78001 is also Versailles, so what do you put here
> >?
> >And in the 38140, there are several villages
> >concerned...
>
> Ah, but then what would we do when the year 38140 comes around?  ;-)
>
By then Wikipedia will have long since become the core of a godlike universal AI,
able to disambiguate queries (which will be expressed not as verbal or written
queries, but as low-level fluctuations in the post-organic brains of individuals)
instantaneously and precisely.

Disambiguation pages are, of course, just a necessity of imperfect technology.


from_name: youandme at poczta.fm

subject: [Wikitech-l] Is anybody else noticing the timeouts and lags?

body:
On 27 Oct 2002 at 17:36, Brion VIBBER wrote:
> Jonathan Walther wrote:
> > *cough*Postgres*cough* Anyone else agree it's time to switch to a
> > database that is just as fast as MySQL, but does row level locking
> > without slowing down any other concurrent database accesses, plus
> > has roll-back and all the other nice ACID features?
>
> Worth a shot; I'll see if I can get it running on my test server.

1) PostgreSQL supports UTF-8; even in regexps.
    So no problems with non-latin1 languages
2) MySQL even in version 4.0 doesn't
Conclusions? To obvious to write...

User:Youandme

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Zmiany w "Na dobre i na zle" >>> http://link.interia.pl/f1674


subject: [Wikitech-l] Patch for editondblclick

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> I decided to give it a try myself and wrote a patch for allowing edits
> on doubleclick. It is attached. I decided not to create a context diff
> because I think the patch is so small to be better readable without it

Since no one seems to be against it and I rather like it myself (and I
needed a break from reading postgresql documentation!), I've committed
the patch and installed it on the live wiki (all ph3 langs and meta). Go
into your user prefs and give it a try!

One slight code tweak:

>>		if($wgOut->isArticle() && $wgUser->getOption("editondblclick") ) {
>>                        $n = $wgTitle->getPrefixedText();

changed to getPrefixedURL() for URL-encoding.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Anthere wrote:

>The Cunctator wrote:

>>By then Wikipedia will have long since become the
>>core of a godlike universal AI,
>>able to disambiguate queries (which will be
>>expressed not as verbal or written
>>queries, but as low-level fluctuations in the
>>post-organic brains of individuals)
>>instantaneously and precisely.

>Will I live to see that ?!

Not directly.
However, they will reconstruct your brainwaves
by observing correlations among cosmic neutrinos
and you will be resurrected in a perfect body.

-- Toby


body:
Anthere wrote:

>It seems the final blocking vote must be made (that's
>personal self control) only if the blocker deeply
>believe the potential decision is gonna be *very
>harmful* to the project/community. A bloking vote over
>the feeling the decision is stupid or useless is
>wrong.
>Likely, the certainty that the decision is going to
>have destructive consequences, can be supported with
>good arguments. If the blocker is in a good community
>where people listen to the others, good arguments are
>listened to, and the blocker will not appear
>unreasonable.

>If the blocker just block because he thinks it is
>useless, then his block is probably not to be
>considered.

So, if the rest of the people, with their consensus opinion,
don't believe that the potential vetoer has a good argument,
then there is no veto?  OK, sure, that's plain old consensus.

>And from an international point of view, if we are all
>to work together, we must share *some* values. How do
>we know we share them ? How do we know we are talking
>of the same thing ? When even in english you may not
>be ?

Well, what you apparently don't realise is that,
due to an obscure English grammatical construction,
when you say "How do we know we are talking of the same thing ?",
you actually mean the same thing as "I agree with you completely
from now on, no matter what.".  That is our little secret,
in order to trick French people into doing our nefarious will.
^_^ ^_^ ^_^

-- Toby


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Problem report

body:
Matt M. wrote:
> At last report, the new software has been implemented at eo.W.org which is
> very nice. I was adding en: links to some of my articles on eo: and they
> worked fine. However, the eo: links in the en.W.org wikipedia pointed to the
> OLD esperanto page. Check out [[drag queen]] for an example. So:  ?
>
> (of course if this has been fixed between yesterday and today I'm gonna wind
> up looking like a dufus.)

eo.wikipedia.org ankoraux estas provservilo! La sercxfunkcio ne jam
riparigxas, kaj X-redaktado ne estas restarigita. La 'vivanta'
enciklopedio restas por la momento cxe eo.wikipedia.com. :(   Do, ne tro
zorgu la pagxaron cxe eo-.org -- gxi tute malaperos kiam la datumbazon
mi fine konvertos.

eo.wikipedia.org is still a test server! The search function isn't fixed
yet, and X-system editing isn't set up again. The 'live' encyclopedia is
still at eo.wikipedia.com for the moment. :(   So, don't put too much
effort into the pages at eo-.org -- they'll all disappear when I do a
final convert on the database.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Matt M.

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Problem report

body:
At last report, the new software has been implemented at eo.W.org which is
very nice. I was adding en: links to some of my articles on eo: and they
worked fine. However, the eo: links in the en.W.org wikipedia pointed to the
OLD esperanto page. Check out [[drag queen]] for an example. So:  ?

(of course if this has been fixed between yesterday and today I'm gonna wind
up looking like a dufus.)

-Matt (montrealais)
Montreal, Canada


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:

>Anthere wrote:
>
>>The Cunctator wrote:
>>
>>>By then Wikipedia will have long since become the
>>>core of a godlike universal AI,
>>>able to disambiguate queries (which will be
>>>expressed not as verbal or written
>>>queries, but as low-level fluctuations in the
>>>post-organic brains of individuals)
>>>instantaneously and precisely.
>>>
>>Will I live to see that ?!
>>
>Not directly.
>However, they will reconstruct your brainwaves
>by observing correlations among cosmic neutrinos
>and you will be resurrected in a perfect body.
>
This has possibilities, though I wonder whether the "s" in "cosmic" is a
mispeeling.  This could revolutionize our notions of sexual
reproductions with the future of the species transferred from the bawdy
shop to the body shop,  "Beam me up, Scotty," will have a whole new
dimension.  As one's brain power grows, then, like a hermit crab, a new
and better brain case will be needed to accomodate that increased
capacity.  What wonders to behold!

Eclecticology

>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 80,000

body:
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Toby Bartels wrote:
>
> >Anthere wrote:
> >
> >>The Cunctator wrote:
> >>
> >>>By then Wikipedia will have long since become the
> >>>core of a godlike universal AI,
> >>>able to disambiguate queries (which will be
> >>>expressed not as verbal or written
> >>>queries, but as low-level fluctuations in the
> >>>post-organic brains of individuals)
> >>>instantaneously and precisely.
> >>>
> >>Will I live to see that ?!
> >>
> >Not directly.
> >However, they will reconstruct your brainwaves
> >by observing correlations among cosmic neutrinos
> >and you will be resurrected in a perfect body.
> >
> This has possibilities, though I wonder whether the
> "s" in "cosmic" is a
> mispeeling.  This could revolutionize our notions of
> sexual
> reproductions with the future of the species
> transferred from the bawdy
> shop to the body shop,  "Beam me up, Scotty," will
> have a whole new
> dimension.  As one's brain power grows, then, like a
> hermit crab, a new
> and better brain case will be needed to accomodate
> that increased
> capacity.  What wonders to behold!
>
> Eclecticology

I hope I will be able to participate to the "Perfect
Body" draft specifs. You guys tend to have
miss-conception of what a perfect body is.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Edit pages by double clicking them

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>I've written a small patch that allows you to edit Wikipedia articles by
>just double clicking the page.
>
>Please let me know if you notice any problems or special cases that need to
>be considered. Note: I agree it would be neat to place the cursor where you
>click, but to my knowledge this isn't possible with JavaScript.
>
I've tried it, and I'm going back to the old way.  It may be fine for
others, but I found that in the case of long articles (even more notably
in some talk pages) as I clicked along the scroll bar my cursor would
drift off the bar and I would end up with an edit page that I didn't want.

Eclecticology


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Math markup

body:
The question of TeX markup for equations & obscure symbols has cropped
up a few times -- consider it bumped again :)

It's a complex issue with all sorts of technical considerations, which
could clog up this list.
So rather than do that, I've compiled all past discussion I could find
on it on Meta:

http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Math_Markup

It needs a good clean-up by someone aware of the technical issues (ie
not me, I've never even used TeX)


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Hi,

I've written a small patch that allows you to edit Wikipedia articles by
just double clicking the page. This works in IE, Mozilla and Konqueror with
JavaScript enabled.

To enable it, go to your preferences and check "Edit pages on double click"
(on en.wikipedia.org). Then choose an editable page (not Main Page) and click
twice anywhere on the page. It should have the same effect as "Edit this
page".

Please let me know if you notice any problems or special cases that need to
be considered. Note: I agree it would be neat to place the cursor where you
click, but to my knowledge this isn't possible with JavaScript.

Thanks to Brion VIBBER for applying this patch.

Regards,

Erik

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from_name: Lightning

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Math markup

body:
why not MathML? its a standard, its already supported by mozilla/netscape,
and their derivatives, and sooner or later MS will have to add it to IE.. i
just think this is the way to go...

Lightning

> The question of TeX markup for equations & obscure symbols has cropped
> up a few times -- consider it bumped again :)
>


from_name: Brion VIBBER

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] cross-Wikipedia redirects

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> Right now the #REDIRECT [[ns:link]] function doesn't
> work with namespaces outside of www.wikipedia.org (such as meta, and the
> various languages.
>
> It would probably be good (and easy?) to change it so that redirects can
> be set up naturally.

Done.

They behave the same as redirects to special pages, which is to say
there are a couple of caveats:

* If the target page doesn't exist, we don't know it; you get sent to
the empty page.

* There's no 'redirected from' notice/backlink, so editing the redirect
page must be done manually

* Can't backtrace them from a 'What links here' page

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] cross-Wikipedia redirects


from_name: lcrocker at nupedia.com

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Copyright violations

body:
> Tokerboy has uploaded a bunch of record album covers,
> without permission of the various copyright holders.
> I don't have the time or the sysop privileges
> to delete them, so can someone else.  Cheers

They should have the same "fair use" status as Isis's
videotape box covers: as long as they're just being used
to illustrate articles about the albums, they're fine.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Please list the IP address when deleting

body:
Pierre Abbat wrote:
> Brion earlier today deleted several junk entries whose content related to
> sexual perversion. Looking at the deletion log, I can't tell whether they are
> the same IP address (in which case it's a vandal and should be blocked) or
> different ones. If different people delete junks by the same person, no one
> knows that he should be blocked. Please, therefore, when deleting junk
> entries, list the IP address (or user name, if any) of whoever wrote the junk.

If you're referring to the junk edits to Sukarno, Suharto, Adolf Hitler,
etc; those came from various IPs, mostly from what looks like a school
or library in Ohio (probably public machines or a cache/proxy); banning
wouldn't help much.

Suharto - 156.63.200.159
Sukarno - 156.63.200.159, 156.63.205.5
Image talk:Hitler.jpg - 156.63.205.5
Talk:Hafez al-Assad - 198.234.102.59
Hitler: The Last Ten Days - 156.63.205.5

156.63.205.5 and 198.234.102.59 also each vandalised Adolf Hitler once;
both were quickly reverted.

You'll notice that after cleaning the first batch, I added the IP in the
deletion notice for "Hitler: The Last Ten Days". You'll also notice no
further activity from these IPs, though no ban is in place.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request

body:
On Tue, 2002-10-29 at 19:05, Imran Ghory wrote:
> A useful feature to have would be automated list sorting, for instance if
> you put some code above/below a list it would automatically sort the list
> alphabetically before saving.
>
The best way to do this would probably be through a javascript
add-on/external cgi the way that dmoz has editor tools that aren't
integrated with the codebase.

See, for example,
http://www.rpfuller.com/odp/

Of course, we can have all these scripts hosted at Wikipedia, instead of
at personal sites. But it's probably healthy to have them be separate
from the PediaWiki software, at least by default.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] cross-Wikipedia redirects

body:
Right now the #REDIRECT [[ns:link]] function doesn't
work with namespaces outside of www.wikipedia.org (such as meta, and the
various languages.

It would probably be good (and easy?) to change it so that redirects can
be set up naturally.

A number of entries redirect into the [[Wikipedia:]] namespace (like
[[Votes for deletion]]). This would be useful for meta.wikipedia and
interlanguage redirects as well.

Of course, internal links to such redirects should be fixed to direct
links. But this will allow us to preserve the integrity of outside
bookmarks if we move content from one namespace to another.

It may also allow for interesting crosslanguage capacities that I can't
predict myself...

tc


subject: [Wikitech-l] cross-Wikipedia redirects


from_name: Pierre Abbat

body:
Brion earlier today deleted several junk entries whose content related to
sexual perversion. Looking at the deletion log, I can't tell whether they are
the same IP address (in which case it's a vandal and should be blocked) or
different ones. If different people delete junks by the same person, no one
knows that he should be blocked. Please, therefore, when deleting junk
entries, list the IP address (or user name, if any) of whoever wrote the junk.

phma


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On Tue, 2002-10-29 at 20:13, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> Brion earlier today deleted several junk entries whose content related to
> sexual perversion. Looking at the deletion log, I can't tell whether they are
> the same IP address (in which case it's a vandal and should be blocked) or
> different ones. If different people delete junks by the same person, no one
> knows that he should be blocked. Please, therefore, when deleting junk
> entries, list the IP address (or user name, if any) of whoever wrote the junk.
>
Why bother blocking? The entries are gone.


body:
On Tuesday 29 October 2002 20:26, The Cunctator wrote:
> Why bother blocking? The entries are gone.

Huh? Blocking doesn't delete entries already made, it prevents future
entries. The guy could be a vandal in the middle of pasting junk. Blocking
the IP prevents him from pasting any more junk.

phma


from_name: Gareth Owen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Copyright violations

body:
Tokerboy has uploaded a bunch of record album covers, without permission of
the various copyright holders.  I don't have the time or the sysop privileges
to delete them, so can someone else.  Cheers
--
Gareth Owen
"Wikipedia does rock.  By the count on the "brilliant prose" page, there
 are 14 not-bad articles so far" -- Larry Sanger (12 Jan 2001)


body:
On Tue, 2002-10-29 at 20:42, Pierre Abbat wrote:
> On Tuesday 29 October 2002 20:26, The Cunctator wrote:
> > Why bother blocking? The entries are gone.
>
> Huh? Blocking doesn't delete entries already made, it prevents future
> entries. The guy could be a vandal in the middle of pasting junk. Blocking
> the IP prevents him from pasting any more junk.
>
Why bother? The IP could belong to more people, now or in the future.
The guy could decide to make valid contributions. Or most like, the guy
will stop adding detritus now that it's evident it'll just be erased.

Path of least harm.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] newsgroups

body:
Mentions of Wikipedia on usenet seem to be growing fairly fast, in the
past 24 hours an english wikipedia article has been linked to in the
following groups,

alt.slack
sci.crypt
fr.comp.lang.java
rec.arts.tv.uk.eastenders
alt.fan.cecil-adams
de.sci.philosophie
alt.messianic
talk.politics.misc
alt.religion.islam

Wikipedia seems to be getting a lot of readers from a wide range of
groups.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Feature request

body:
A useful feature to have would be automated list sorting, for instance if
you put some code above/below a list it would automatically sort the list
alphabetically before saving.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


from_name: erik_moeller at gmx.de

body:
> I've tried it, and I'm going back to the old way.  It may be fine for
> others, but I found that in the case of long articles (even more notably
> in some talk pages) as I clicked along the scroll bar my cursor would
> drift off the bar and I would end up with an edit page that I didn't want.

Hi,

wow, you're actually using the scrollbar? I thought everyone used
wheelmice these days. Anyway, some people are obviously better mouse
jockeys than others, that's why it's a pref.

All best,

Erik


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [Wikipedia-l] submit function problem

body:
Something odd seems to have happened to the submit action used by Save
and Preview.  This only happens on one of my browsers, OmniWeb under
Mac OSX, but since it's my preferred browser . . .

This started today, so some change today must have affected it.  The
display is truncated for Review so you don't see the new format and
(sometimes) Save reports an editing conflict when there is none.


body:
Magnus Manske wrote:
> Can I now redirect [[en:xyz]] to [[de:xyz]] and back, keeping the system
> busy?

Um, yes. Please don't do that. ;)

Your browser should be smart enough to give up after the first few.

> Also, I don't see any reason why one would redirect to another language.
> If one reads the en wikipedia, I doubt s/he wants to be redirected to,
> say, a chinese article. IMHO that should be restricted to wikipedia,
> meta and the 9-11 site.

Well, what's the benefit in not being able to? (Once the kinks are
smoothed out, which you're more than welcome to do.)

Which reminds me -- not for redirecting, but for interwiki linking in
general. Do we want to allow convenient [[Site:Title]] linking to other
non-Wikipedia wikis?

Eg, [[MeatBall:InterWiki]] would get you to
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?InterWiki

I imagine this would be of use mainly in discussion pages, though
perhaps there's some good reference material out there.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
Pierre Abbat wrote:

>On Tuesday 29 October 2002 20:26, The Cunctator wrote:
>
>>Why bother blocking? The entries are gone.
>>
>Huh? Blocking doesn't delete entries already made, it prevents future
>entries. The guy could be a vandal in the middle of pasting junk. Blocking
>the IP prevents him from pasting any more junk.
>
Blocking some of these guys strikes me as a useless effort.  Many of
these guys have a short attention span, and they soon become bored by
their own work.
Eclecticology


body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> Thanks, and thanks for making the Memoriam redirect. One more thing:
> could you/someone copy over the article history from Wikipedia to sep11
> for
> September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Personal experiences ->
> sep11:Personal experiences

Done.

> I'd like to do that for the tribute pages as well; if I give you a list
> of the entry names, would it be straightforward to copy them over
> en-masse? The pages wouldn't be redirected; rather, the [[Tributes and
> comments]] link on the encyclopedia entry pages would be changed to
> point to sep11.

Sure.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
On Tue, 2002-10-29 at 21:13, Brion VIBBER wrote:
> The Cunctator wrote:
> > Right now the #REDIRECT [[ns:link]] function doesn't
> > work with namespaces outside of www.wikipedia.org (such as meta, and the
> > various languages.
> >
> > It would probably be good (and easy?) to change it so that redirects can
> > be set up naturally.
>
> Done.
>
Thanks, and thanks for making the Memoriam redirect. One more thing:
could you/someone copy over the article history from Wikipedia to sep11
for
September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Personal experiences ->
sep11:Personal experiences

I'd like to do that for the tribute pages as well; if I give you a list
of the entry names, would it be straightforward to copy them over
en-masse? The pages wouldn't be redirected; rather, the [[Tributes and
comments]] link on the encyclopedia entry pages would be changed to
point to sep11.


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Copyright violations

in_reply_to: <200210300216.g9U2G0l20732@ross.bomis.com>; from lcrocker@nupedia.com on Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 06:16:00PM -0800

body:
lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
> > Tokerboy has uploaded a bunch of record album covers,
> > without permission of the various copyright holders.
> > I don't have the time or the sysop privileges
> > to delete them, so can someone else.  Cheers
>
> They should have the same "fair use" status as Isis's
> videotape box covers: as long as they're just being used
> to illustrate articles about the albums, they're fine.

I agree with this, particularly if they are of a size suitable for
illustration, and not suitable for full-scale "pirated" reproduction.

Fair use can be tricky in some cases, but this one seems pretty
straightforward to me.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] RecentChanges Performance

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> (Is there any way to determine if the index is used, BTW? MySQL has
 > some weird conditions under which it ignores indexes.)

Stick "EXPLAIN " in front of a query; it comes back and tells you if
it's using indexes, how many rows it turns up, yada yada.

> I noticed that there is already a
> recentchanges table that new rows are inserted into upon edits. Is a
> move away from SELECTs on the CUR table already in the works? If so,
> what is its current status and who's doing it?

I had been under the impression we were already using that table, but,
well, we're not! I dashed off a quick change to use it (so a single
query to the recentchanges table instead of two separate ones to cur and
old), it seems workable. Committed to CVS, not yet installed on the live
server.

Unlike the current code, initial page creation events are still marked
as new even when there's a later revision. Yay!

Caveat; various things are _not_ currently registered in the
recentchanges table:
* Updates to deletion, upload logs
* Creation of image description pages on file upload
* Deleted pages remain listed as though they existed

Those should be fixed. Any other problems?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Copyright violations

body:
Comments?  I think Imran has a point.

Imran Ghory wrote:

> On Tue, 29 Oct 2002 lcrocker at nupedia.com wrote:
>
> > > Tokerboy has uploaded a bunch of record album covers,
> > > without permission of the various copyright holders.
> > > I don't have the time or the sysop privileges
> > > to delete them, so can someone else.  Cheers
> >
> > They should have the same "fair use" status as Isis's
> > videotape box covers: as long as they're just being used
> > to illustrate articles about the albums, they're fine.
>
> My understanding of the GNU FDL is that we can't incorporate "fair
> use" material unless we implictly declare those sections as "Invariant
> Sections".
>
> Imran
> --
> http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] RecentChanges Performance

body:
> I think we should adopt a principle similar to KeptPages for
> RC logs, that is, to maintain a consistent log for 14 days or
> so, no matter how many entries happen in those days, instead
> of just saying "the last 5000 changes". So I guess we should
> just DELETE FROM the RecentChanges table all entries that are
> older than n days regularly.

Either should be fine, but keeping it at a constant 5000 should
make it faster.  I created the table originally in an attempt to
speed up the RC page, and also to generate the new formats, which
gathered multiple changes to the same page.  Alas, no matter how
many methods I tried for that, none of them had acceptable
performance, so I stepped back to think about it for a while, and
never got around to actually using the table even for the present
RC format.  It should be simple to do that; I'll test Magnus's
fix and install it if all is well.


from_name: Stephen Gilbert

body:
--- Brion VIBBER <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Which reminds me -- not for redirecting, but for
> interwiki linking in
> general. Do we want to allow convenient
> [[Site:Title]] linking to other
> non-Wikipedia wikis?
>
> Eg, [[MeatBall:InterWiki]] would get you to
> http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?InterWiki
>
> I imagine this would be of use mainly in discussion
> pages, though
> perhaps there's some good reference material out
> there.

Yes please. I would use it, anyway.

Stephen

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia photo squad?

body:
Sounds good. I'm leaving South Korea, but I have an
ameteur photographer friend staying behind, and she
just bought a scanner. She's agreed to release many of
her pictures under the GFDL.

Stephen

--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> The image copyright discussion reminds me of an idea
> that has been going
> through my head for a while. How about an organized
> effort to create (shoot)
> public domain photos of important
> people/places/events? I am not a photographer
> so I would be a bad person to lead this WikiProject,
> but maybe there are
> people on this list who would be interested in it.
>
> Basically, the effort would have to be organized in
> such a way that
> - interested photographers put their names and
> locations on the page and put
> the page in their watchlist
> - interested users add people, places, things,
> events etc. to a To Do list.
> Photographers add their names to the list if they
> want to finish a task. The
> task is moved into a "Finished tasks" list later and
> the photos are uploaded.
>
>
> Additionally, people who are willing to scan photos
> sent to them (for people
> without scanners or digicams) might enter themselves
> into a third list --
> don't know if that would be necessary.
>
> What do you think? Given the international nature of
> Wikipedia, I really see
> the potential for a large and impressive effort to
> get relevant photos from
> all around the world.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik Moeller
>
> --
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> +++
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> Min. surfen!
>
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>
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