subject: [WikiEN-l] WP:3RR

body:
Shane King wrote:

>On Wed, Nov 17, 2004 at 06:06:15AM -0800, Mark Richards wrote:
>
>
>>Hi - ok, let me give an example. Let's suppose that
>>the religious right were able to muster a relatively
>>small number of people to edit here on the evolution
>>pages. Are you saying that, if there are a large
>>number of people editing on the 'side' of that, then
>>it should go in?
>>If not, can you clarify what you did mean?
>>
>>
>Well, there are a few scenarios here:
>
>If what they're putting in is something they can demonstrate is believed
>by a large number of people (ie the wider community, and not just the
>few editing), and they write it in such as way that it doesn't violate
>the NPOV policy, then yes.
>
>If they fail to write to the NPOV policy, then what they're saying
>should still go in, but it will need to be reworked.
>
>If they're pushing a very minority point of view that's not widely held
>in the greater community, then it's probably one of the few cases where
>the fact that there are a large number of people on one side isn't
>indicative of the validity of their additions.
>
The reference to a tiny marginal minority only confuses the issue when
it comes to creationism.  Whether we agree with what they say or not we
can't ignore the fact that a lot of people do believe that way.

When one harbours the conceit that one is right, as is often the case in
scientism it is much more difficult to write from the NPOV.  The
phrasing of your comments on the matter suggests that only those with a
view contrary to that of orthodox science are prone to POV writing.
NPOV is far more an attitude towards one's writing than a policy.  An
important idea is often cheapened when it is set in policy.  If an
article on evolution happens to have a small section explaining how the
beliefs of a creationist vary from those of an evolutionist that's
fine.  They don't need for an evolutionist to carry on at great length
about how creationists have fallen into error.  A single paragraph is
often enough.  At the same time there should be no need to "rework" that
paragraph to the point where it no longer fairly represents what
creatonists are really saying.  And there is no need to elaborate at
length about why creationists are wrong.  Let their words speak for
themselves.

>My point isn't that the number of editors believing a point of view
>makes it valid to go in the article. My point was that if we have a
>large number of editors thinking something should go in the article, and
>only one person against it, then more often than not the majority is
>going to be right. It's just simple probability, if you think about it.
>
>
Was it not Mark Twain who commented about  "lies, damn lies, and
statistics." :-)

Ec


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Pawe³ 'Ausir' Dembowski

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Enhanced search for local language clusters?

body:
UL> without any capital letters, since the interwiki name of a language
UL> shall be written in
UL> the language itself, and Norwegian does not capitalize any language names.

Actually, neither does Polish, yet links to Polish Wikipedia are
capitalized...

--
Ausir
mailto:fallout at lexx.eu.org
http://fallout.scifi.pl
ICQ 41090834 GG 2730728


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: Enhanced search for local language clusters?
	(Was:: Request ...

body:
Why can't a portal like the one at www.wikipedia.ch be made for
no.wikipedia.org?

--
Ausir
mailto:fallout at lexx.eu.org
http://fallout.scifi.pl
ICQ 41090834 GG 2730728


list: wikien-l

from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: ABC News: Silicon Insider on Robert McHenry

body:
Since we've been on the subject of validation systems, I think the way
he expresses the idea of "Olympics-type grading systems that eliminate
the highs and lows" sounds pretty good. Not that I find Olympic judging
to be the standard we should aspire to, mind you, as the South Koreans
and Canadians can tell us. But the principle of weeding out the highest
and lowest percentiles of an article's ratings would help restrict the
tactics of self-promoters and POV warriors if we do get such a system going.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Baseldytsch Wikipedia: Who can put it online?

references:
<31797.1100530690@www26.gmx.net> <cnjnie$62u$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<cnjofo$856$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
I was unable to find als in a list of ISO 639-2 language codes.

On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 14:15:03 +1100, Tim Starling
<t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> I wrote:
> > bsd is not an ISO 639-2 language code. Subdomains may be either:
> >
> > * An ISO 639-1 language code (e.g. en)
> > * An ISO 639-2 language code (e.g. als)
> > * An RFC 3066 language code (e.g. zh-min-nan)
> > * A descriptive name longer than 3 letters (e.g. tokipona)
> >
> > Do you have a second preference?
>
> It doesn't seem to be in SIL or LinguistList, they both lump it in with
> Allemanisch. So I don't think you can construct an RFC 3066 code for it.
> So that just leaves baseldytsch.wikipedia.org .
>
>
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Data Transfer from usemod to mediawiki?

body:
On Nov 18, 2004, at 11:14 PM, Philipp wrote:
> Tahanks a lot but I'm running into problems with this version: it just
> stops
> after getting the first lemma (are they called so in UseMod?). The
> only output
> is:
>
>> -- Checking page directory /home/cddoc/local/wiki/db/page/A
>>
>> -- Importing page AufgabenEinesEinspielungsverantwortlichen
>
> ... and EOF there.
>
> Running the old script with the same $wgRootDirectory still works
> (when hacked around iconv, but that was no problem here). :-?

Remove the @ from the iconv call; I stuck it in because it was
outputting non-fatal notice warnings which screwed up the SQL output
where a page included an illegal character. However this might be
hiding a fatal error if you don't have iconv support.

If you don't have iconv, replace the call with utf8_encode() (if your
wiki was 8-bit latin-1) or take it out (if your wiki was utf-8).

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

from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia trademark being used incorrectly

body:
NB: IANAL, the following is based on my understanding only, backed up
by articles from Wikipedia[TM], which officially "does not give legal
advice".

On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 13:37:55 -0500, Chitu Okoli
<cokoli at jmsb.concordia.ca> wrote:
> 1. I think the Foundation should indeed officially register the "Wikipedia"
> trademark (I was surprised to learn--correct me if I'm mistaken--that this
> wasn't done ages ago), so that it can easily defend any cases that might
> have to go to court.

I think the main reason this hasn't been done, is that there is no
such thing as *internationally* registering a trademark, and because
registration costs money. Thus there was some concern that proper
research be made into with whom it would be most appropriate to
register it (whether, for instance, it was possible to register in one
go for all EU countries) before setting off on the potentially very
costly course of registering it anywhere and everywhere. Especially
since, even without registration, there would be an extremely good
case that it was a trademark, since it is a neologism created solely
for one particular site.

Oh, and not to mention which trademarks to register - there's not just
Wikipedia, there's Wikimedia, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikisource; and
alternate spellings used in some languages, like Vikipedio in
Esperanto and Wicipedia in Welsh (these would probably be covered by
their similarity to the original, but it all needs careful
consideration)

> 2. Once the trademark is registered, I really don't understand why "we have
> to protect our trademarks". I've always thought it was a good thing for a
> company when its registered trademark becomes a household commodity to the
> extent that it becomes synonymous with the generic item.

I think, in general this is *not* considered the case. If a trademark
is not used, or no action is taken to correct generic use of it, the
trademark becomes invalid - you can't just let everyone call it Coke
and then complain when someone else writes "Coke" on the label. From
my reading of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark, it is still
possible for this to happen even with a registered trademark - hence
the mentionned campaign by Xerox to stamp out the use (which they must
actually be quite pleased with) of "to xerox".

> For example, when I
> used to live in the southern USA, people could go to a restaurant and order
> a Coke. Then the waiter might literally ask, "What kind? Do you want a
> Pepsi, a 7-Up, Dr. Pepper, or Coca-Cola?"
[...]
> A "Kleenex" includes store-brand tissues for wiping your nose, "Cutex" means
> any brand of nail polish, and "Vaseline" means petroleum jelly.

Yes, this happens often - see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark If the owners of
these brands are not careful, they will lose the right to claim the
trademark, and it will become perfectly legal for your local store to
manufacture and sell "Better Value Kleenex". That's not something the
trademark owner will want to happen.

> In fact, for a while IBM advertised its products with the
> line, "Don't just get IBM-compatible, get IBM".

Yes, and note that they used [assuming you have the slogan right]
"IBM-compatible" - a phrase which uses "IBM" to refer to *IBM*
computers and nothing else - and highlighted the difference between
being *compatible with* their brand, and *belonging to* their brand.
This is quite clever, but is definitely not encouraging the
genericisation of the term "IBM", which would have been very bad news.

> The only threat I do see is when competitors make a product that is just as
> good for a better or comparable price, as in the case of 3M defending its
> trademark on "Post-It Notes".

Yes, that is the entire purpose of trademarks, and as I say, you only
keep the right to defend the mark in extreme cases by being seen to
defend the mark in all cases.

> While that is a legitimate businesses threat,
> I would hardly think that there is any such risk in Wikipedia's case--though
> pursuing violators of the trademark seems to imply that this is the case.

Now you seem to be beginning to contradict yourself - just now, you
were urging the Foundation to register its trademarks. Presumably you
felt that there was *some* potential for abuse of it, else why bother
with that? Perhaps you just mean we should be lenient on people using
it casually - the problem being, as I say, that the nature of
trademark law means you can't be two-faced like that, you either
police your trademark or lose it.

> My point is that I find it hard to understand what the problem is if people
> begin to use "Wikipedia" to mean any generic wiki-based encyclopedia.

Well, I'm not sure "wiki-based encyclopedia" is what the term *would*
become if we allowed it to genericize. I can think of two main types
of site for which the term is, or could be, wrongly applied:
1) sites running the same collaborative editing software as
Wikipedia.org (e.g. infoanarchy.org, as started this thread). There is
already a generic name for these: "wikis"; and if they want to be more
specific "MediaWikis" or "MediaWiki installs" or somesuch.
2) sites using some or all of the content of Wikipedia.org, under the
GFDL (there has been at least one which called itself "a wikipedia";
it may have been thefreedictionary.org, I don't remember). These, of
course, are just "websites", "encyclopedias", or at most "mirrors of
Wikipedia".

Now, (1) is probably not too bad, although it could get a little
confusing; there was a question on the 'Help desk' of the English
Wikipedia the other day asking how to do something in a completely
unrelated website - because it was a wiki, the user had immediately
assumed it was "some sort of sub branch" of Wikipedia. And people
asking for changes on static mirrors are quite frequent. If [take the
extreme case] every site using a wiki *and* every copy of Wikipedia's
content became "a wikipedia", we'd get an awful lot more confusion
like this.

But allowing (2) could be even more risky. A lot of work is put into
spreading the word about Wikipedia, and the goal of it and the
Wikimedia Foundation - take Angela's recent radio interview, for
instance. If another site is also allowed to call itself "[a]
wikipedia", then they get free publicity, and siphon off people who
might otherwise become contributors; and if they run advertising for
profit and give nothing to the Foundation, they will actually profit
from our promotion work.

OK, I'm giving pessimistic views of what could happen, I know, but I'm
playing Devil's Advocate: if we allow "Wikipedia" to become a generic
trademark, this is what we risk. I don't see that the vague benefits
of people saying the word "Wikipedia" more often outweigh the cost of
them not meaning wikipedia.org when they say it.

> 3. Related to my previous point, I also think that the (TM) superscript is
> *semantically* ugly, if not aesthetically so, because of the corporate image
> it gives--so very un-free like.

Yes, that's certainly a consideration. It's like a Co-operative
Society having "Limited" in its name (e.g. the chain of shops known as
"the Co-op" in the UK is "The Co-operative Group (CWS) Ltd").
Technically, it just implies a certain legal status in terms of
liability (and some associated tax rules, etc, etc); but in people's
minds, it means its some kind of greedy corporation with fat-cat
shareholders. Indeed, my dad was a Limited company for a while; just
him. Similarly, "TM" probably makes some people think of multinational
corporations, for whom brand is everything, when in reality it just
means "please don't use this generically, it refers specifically to
this product/service/whatever".

> And I don't think chasing down violations of
> the trademark helps Wikipedia's image. I don't think it's necessary, if the
> Foundation has a legal registration in its pocket to pull out when it might
> really become necessary.

As you're probably bored of me repeating now, it *is* necessary,
because that's how [as I understand it] trademark law works. A legal
registration doesn't obviate the need to stop the term becoming
generic.

Sorry if this has ended up a bit verbose - one of the problems with
responding point by point to someone else's message like this is that
it makes it harder to restructure your own points. That, and I just
have a tendency to write messages that are a bit long-winded!

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


list: wikimedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fwd: Banned from editing except on en

body:
And people want me to apologise for things *I* have said to
"well-respected Wikipedians"? I am trying now to be less abrasive, but
it is a bit more difficult than you might expect since well-respected
Wikipedians continue to toss personal attacks at me as they did
before.

(18/11/2004 [23:19:10]) <GerardM> do not be stupid
(18/11/2004 [23:19:17]) <node_ue> Excuse me?
(18/11/2004 [23:19:27]) <node_ue> Would you like me to paste this
conversation on the mailinglist?
(18/11/2004 [23:19:32]) <GerardM> it is a lame argument
(18/11/2004 [23:19:44]) <node_ue> Would you like to explain that?
(18/11/2004 [23:19:59]) <node_ue> Or are you going to just tell me my
argument is lame like you did before, and then never tell me why?
(18/11/2004 [23:20:25]) <GerardM> I do not have time at this moment,
what is difficult about that ?
(18/11/2004 [23:20:48]) <node_ue> Apparently you never have time,
because you never explain it, yet you always tell me my arguments are
lame.
(18/11/2004 [23:21:18]) <node_ue> I think you have plenty of time, but
you don't want to because you cannot support it, so you will just
stand behind a rock and tell me how lame my argument is while you
pretend to be too busy to have a rational discussion.
(18/11/2004 [23:21:21]) <GerardM> I am working on stuff, and do not
have the time to go on discussing things. We do not agree

And seriously, the last time we had a disagreement (that time it was
over e-mail), he told me my arguments were all lame, and told me I had
yet to explain my feelings about the issue when I had spent at least 2
very very very long non-hostile e-mails doing exactly that. When I
asked him to explain *why* they were lame, he did not respond and thus
our correspondence came to an end.

Mark


body:
...and if there was any doubt in my mind that my message was overly
verbose, the fact that Rich Holton has said much of what I did in half
the time and half the words leaves me with absolutely none. Again, I
apologise. :(

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Wikitech-l] enable full file upload for WikipediaNL

body:
I noticed that now you can not upload anymore a lot of file types. Like
zip, gz, doc, xls, sxw, sxc

I understand that some types of files are not allowed for legal and
system security reasons. But this is not the case here. For creating and
maintaining the wikipedia software all are the system developers
greatful. But to use or not to use those files is a editorial decision
that has to be made by every wikipedia. It is not something that may be
decided by the system developers.

I most strongly request on behalf of the dutch wikipedia a more free
upload possibility. Like a white list that can be edited or a override.
Do not ignore this.

--
[[w:nl:gebruiker:walter]]


from_name: Gerrit

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Cleaning the Wikipedia namespace (was [[Extreme
	article deletion]] is up for deletion)

body:
Mark Richards wrote:
> When was the last time a newbie was told to 'read the
> manual'?! ;) Mark

To be honest, the manual is not that easy to find.

Gerrit.

--
Weather in Lulea / Kallax, Sweden 18/11 22:20:
	-17.0?C   wind 2.2 m/s NW (34 m above NAP)
--
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
    -Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17, 1961


body:
On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 23:30:57 +0100, Walter Vermeir <walter at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> I noticed that now you can not upload anymore a lot of file types. Like
> zip, gz, doc, xls, sxw, sxc

> I understand that some types of files are not allowed for legal and
> system security reasons. But this is not the case here.

Why not? The same security flaws will be present wherever the software
is used. If I remember rightly, the originally security breach that
prompted the crack-down was a Japanese user uploading a specially
contstructed text-file that caused anyone browsing a certain page with
Internet Explorer to have their username and password automatically
sent elsewhere. It is not a risk to be taken lightly.

If you mean there is no risk in the filetypes you mentionned, I would
also disagree - apart from the possibility of the IE bug I just
mentioned applying, .doc and .xls files are notoriously good hosts for
Trojan horses, and an enticingly-named .zip file could contain
anything (and people *will* open it; remember the "I love you"
virus?).

I'm not saying the whitelist should never be expanded whatsoever, or
even that these filetpes should never ever be allowed, just that
opening up this decision to wiki administrators who may not understand
the full implications could be very risky. Currently, those with
access to the configuration files on the server can edit the
whitelist, and in general these are likely to be people who will
consider the implications of doing so. And the fact that there are so
few encourages discussion before action (as opposed to the "be bold"
mantra common on wikis).

You might want to look through the list archives at previous threads
on this topic. There is also a suggestion at
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/898 to implement validity-checking for
various types of file, to verify them as "safe".

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Red Drag Diva

subject: [WikiEN-l] ABC News: Silicon Insider on Robert McHenry

body:
   http://abcnews.go.com/Business/print?id=88655

"Finally, as long as Mr. McHenry is going to end on a crude analogy, so
will I: using a traditional encyclopedia is like owning a nice, well-built
automobile that, unfortunately, has the seats and mirrors locked in place,
the radio frozen on one station, the throttle welded in one position -- and
the car is capable of only driving to a limited number of places
predetermined by the manufacturer.

Frankly, I'd rather pee in a public toilet."

*mreee-oww!*

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] MonoBook without PHPTAL

body:
I've converted the MonoBook template to a PHP function which doesn't
require PHPTAL. This has a few advantages:

* Since it doesn't need to store a compiled template, this should
greatly reduce the amount of problem reports we get due to unwritable
temp directories, safe mode oddities, etc.

* We won't need to bundle a second version of PHPTAL for PHP 5 support:
the pure PHP version works on both PHP 4 and PHP 5.

* We can save a few hundred kb from the distribution by removing the
bundled PHPTAL and PEAR core. Since we're adding a crapload of support
data files for Unicode and Chinese script conversion, this is nice.

* No one could read the template code anyway, why not make it uglier? ;)

In my crude tests, loads of a short wiki page with the PHP version are
5% faster than the PHPTAL version on PHP 5.0.2 with a PHPTAL 1.0.0 dev
snapshot (no accelerator/opcode cache). This is probably due to time
spent loading up PHPTAL and PEAR include files rather than the
execution of the compiled template.

The new SkinTemplate.php is a slightly altered version of the prior
SkinPHPTal.php; it does pretty much all the same stuff, but sends it to
a different final output path. The new SkinPHPTal.php now inherits that
code and interfaces to either PHPTAL 0.7 (on PHP 4) or 1.0 (on PHP 5).
So, if you want to make a new custom PHPTAL-based skin it can still be
done.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Automated Categorization for Wikipedia

body:
On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 23:36:13 +0000 (UTC), Pablo Mayrgundter
<pablo at freality.com> wrote:
> I happen to have professional experience with automated categorization
> software, and think you could use it to automatically populate
> categories with relevant articles.
[details removed for convenience]

It's certainly an interesting idea. (And as a graduate in artificial
intelligence, I'm personally intrigued as to what kind of classifier
is under the hood, but that would be off-topic, so we'll leave that
for another time). I think the biggest concern would be that the
Wikimedia Foundation itself really really can't afford that kind of
server-resources to carry out the task "officially".

I would therefore suggest it would be better for you to run the
software yourself (using a database dump from
http://download.wikimedia.org/) and then to publish the results to the
wiki(s) in question somehow. Perhaps you could write and run a bot (or
collaborate with someone who wanted to) which could add the automated
suggestions to relevant talk pages: "The following may belong here..."
to Category_talk: pages, and/or "This may belong to the following
categories..." to the Talk: pages of categories. Or even, if you felt
particularly dedicated, a bot that helped you add the [[Category:...]]
tag yourself where it was indeed appropriate.

[Note that you should read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots
for the official policy on bot use in [English?] Wikipedia.]

Good luck...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 23:59:26 +0000, Red Drag Diva
<fun at crushed.velvet.net> wrote:
>    http://abcnews.go.com/Business/print?id=88655
[...]
> *mreee-oww!*

Wow! It seems a no-holds-barred fight is rapidly spreading through the
world's media over whether Wikipedia is a hopeless idea, or the
beginning of something amazing. [After the rash of warring blogs, now
we're getting journalists with pretty good credentials...]

I love the way Malone throws everything right back the other way; a
nice demonstration of the use of 'spin', I feel. E.g. "approaching
400,000 pages" vs McHenry's back-handed "over 382,000 pages that were
thought "probably" to be encyclopedic articles".

May the best man win, I guess - but lets hope we make some serious
progress on validation soon, to give them an extra weapon or two...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 22:20:23 -0200, Ribamar Santarosa de Sousa
<ribamar.sousa at ic.unicamp.br> wrote:
> I see no problems too. I think is cool Wikipedia be remembered more than
> a site or a trademark, but as an concept.

But what if, as Rich Holton said, someone uses the term for something
that goes completely against our goals, or in such a way that our
image is tarnished? Or even, as I suggested, people deliberately
trading off our name and publicity? And, as I mentioned, what about
the confusion of people thinking that Wikipedia is the place to
discuss things that have nothing to do with it, because they are "a
wikipedia"?

(Hmm, he thinks evilly, this might get some people thinking...) What
if Microsoft decided to rebrand Encarta as "Microsoft Wikipedia" to
make people think they were getting something new, and equal in
quality to the "real" Wikipedia...?

Having a name that uniquely identifies Wikipedia as being Wikipedia is
very useful, and enforcing it as a trademark is the only way we can be
sure of having such a name. What would we say if it became truly
generic "the Real Wikipedia"? "the original and still the best"? "the
Wikipedia wikipedia"?

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Aaron E. Klemm

subject: [Wikipedia-l] interesting 3rd party usage of Wikipedia

body:
Hello,

I am writing an article about the usefulness of Wikipedia outside of
it's purpose as a reference and knowledge resource.

It would be very helpful to know more about the most interesting uses
people have seen of 3rd parties using Wikipedia content. What projects
are innovating with either the Wikipedia dumps or by accessing the
content directly? Primarily I'm looking for projects who sort of extend
the usefulness and the philosophy of--and perhaps contribute back
to--Wikipedia since I've already see many of those that simply try to
capitalize on it (with the ad content, which still is interesting, if
less than scrupulous).

Is there an official collection of 3rd party activity? Does Wikimedia
track/advertise 3rd parties that use the software--this is a secondary
interest for me.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts,

--
Aaron E. Klemm <lists at axiomos.com>
Axiom Open Solutions


body:
On Nov 19, 2004, at 12:47 AM, Gerrit wrote:
> Mark Williamson wrote:
>> I was unable to find als in a list of ISO 639-2 language codes.
>
> http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ALS
>
> ALBANIAN, GHEG: a language of Yugoslavia

Ethnologue uses SIL codes, not ISO 639-2. (SIL is the organization that
produces Ethnologue.)

als is not an ISO 639-2 code; I foolishly created the pseudo-code out
of thin air when creating the Allemanish wiki. This was a mistake
because new codes may be assigned in the future which conflict with
invented ones; since then our policy has been to use longer names when
an official iso 639-1 (2-letter) or 639-2 (3-letter) code is not
available, to avoid potential conflicts.

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

body:
Rowan Collins wrote:

>Having a name that uniquely identifies Wikipedia as being Wikipedia is
>very useful, and enforcing it as a trademark is the only way we can be
>sure of having such a name. What would we say if it became truly
>generic "the Real Wikipedia"? "the original and still the best"? "the
>Wikipedia wikipedia"?
>
>
Well, I do think Wikimedia has picked a rather poor naming scheme in
terms of enforcing a unique brand, although I'm not sure what to best do
about it.  The scheme is essentially Wiki____, where the ____ is the
project-specific name, but that's a completely generic naming scheme,
because we are not the inventors, owners, or exclusive users of the
prefix "wiki".  This leads to a confusing situation where an arbitrary
Wiki____ may or may not be a Wikimedia project, and there's no way of
knowing without investigating.

So you end up with the confusing situation where it's: Wikipedia?
that's us.  Wikitravel?  that's someone else.  Wikibooks?  that's us.
Wikicities?  that's someone else. (etc.)

-Mark


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

body:
Nicholas Knight wrote:

>Months? It takes me a few *hours* to be able to create useful code in a
>new language. A few days and I can embark on significant projects. This
>isn't about difficulty or time (though I'd not be happy about wasting
>the time), it's about not wanting to subject myself to the horror that
>is PHP just to be able to do a couple things with MediaWiki, probably
>never to touch the code again.

Well, it only took *me* a few hours to learn how to create useful
code in PHP, and my programming skills are strictly hobbyist level. I
worked through a couple of online tutorials, and that was all I
needed. PHP is actually a lot like Perl, with somewhat more
conventional syntax and a little less emphasis on text processing. I
love the way you can use it to drop code right into the middle of
HTML. With just a few lines of code you can create an interactive
form that queries a database and returns a result. To do the same
thing in Perl, you'd typically need one static HTML page and a
separate page for the CGI script that processes the form data and
returns the result. It can be done, but it's more work. Once I
discovered PHP, I stopped using Perl and haven't looked back.

--Sheldon Rampton


from_name: Anthere

body:
Rich Holton wrote

The real danger I see with not protecting our
trademark, even after it's registered, is the
likelihood that another "wikipedia" will do something
completely antithetical to our goals. Inevitably, some
people will then write off "wikipedias" and we will
suffer as a result. Not my idea of a good time.

-------------

I think Rich is absolutely right, so is Michael to have written to correct the mistake.

Infoanarchy may not hurt by being antithetical, but it is not neutral.
Anything that could lead people to think we follow certain political stances could hurt ut.

Anthere

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Meet the all-new My Yahoo! ? Try it today!


from_name: Philipp

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

> I've added conversion of /Subpage and CamelCase links (by saving a new
> revision with the brackets added). You could probably further hack that
> if you want renaming of actual pages.
>
> The update is checked into CVS, and should appear shortly at:
> http://cvs.defau.lt/phase3/maintenance/importUseModWiki.php

Tahanks a lot but I'm running into problems with this version: it just stops
after getting the first lemma (are they called so in UseMod?). The only output
is:

> -- Checking page directory /home/cddoc/local/wiki/db/page/A
>
> -- Importing page AufgabenEinesEinspielungsverantwortlichen

... and EOF there.

Running the old script with the same $wgRootDirectory still works (when hacked
around iconv, but that was no problem here). :-?

Best regards
  Philipp


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

> Remove the  <at>  from the iconv call; I stuck it in because it was
> outputting non-fatal notice warnings which screwed up the SQL output
> where a page included an illegal character. However this might be
> hiding a fatal error if you don't have iconv support.
>
> If you don't have iconv, replace the call with utf8_encode() (if your
> wiki was 8-bit latin-1) or take it out (if your wiki was utf-8).

Thanks, that helped. Now for the inevitable manual cleanup of exceptions. :)

Bye
 Philipp


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Mark Williamson wrote:

>And people want me to apologise for things *I* have said to
>"well-respected Wikipedians"? I am trying now to be less abrasive, but
>it is a bit more difficult than you might expect since well-respected
>Wikipedians continue to toss personal attacks at me as they did
>before.
>
>(18/11/2004 [23:19:10]) <GerardM> do not be stupid
>(18/11/2004 [23:19:17]) <node_ue> Excuse me?
>(18/11/2004 [23:19:27]) <node_ue> Would you like me to paste this
>conversation on the mailinglist?
>(18/11/2004 [23:19:32]) <GerardM> it is a lame argument
>(18/11/2004 [23:19:44]) <node_ue> Would you like to explain that?
>(18/11/2004 [23:19:59]) <node_ue> Or are you going to just tell me my
>argument is lame like you did before, and then never tell me why?
>(18/11/2004 [23:20:25]) <GerardM> I do not have time at this moment,
>what is difficult about that ?
>(18/11/2004 [23:20:48]) <node_ue> Apparently you never have time,
>because you never explain it, yet you always tell me my arguments are
>lame.
>(18/11/2004 [23:21:18]) <node_ue> I think you have plenty of time, but
>you don't want to because you cannot support it, so you will just
>stand behind a rock and tell me how lame my argument is while you
>pretend to be too busy to have a rational discussion.
>(18/11/2004 [23:21:21]) <GerardM> I am working on stuff, and do not
>have the time to go on discussing things. We do not agree
>
>And seriously, the last time we had a disagreement (that time it was
>over e-mail), he told me my arguments were all lame, and told me I had
>yet to explain my feelings about the issue when I had spent at least 2
>very very very long non-hostile e-mails doing exactly that. When I
>asked him to explain *why* they were lame, he did not respond and thus
>our correspondence came to an end.
>
>Mark
>
Mark,
If this is an example of you being less abrasive.. :( I answered some
questions, then was working on some stuff, you started a private chat.
This went on for some time, I told you I was busy. You did not like
that, you said that I did not have an argument. I told you not to be
stupid as I did not have the time.

Basically Mark, I did not have the time and you sure do not make friends
making people do things when they do not have the time. You are a
nuisance that way. You do not take no for an answer. You do not accept
that people disagree with you.

De groeten,
    GerardM


from_name: Charles Matthews

subject:
[WikiEN-l] About the reliability of the Wikipedia process
	andcontent

body:
David Gerard wrote

> > > (And I'm still seeking details of what de: did to get to that
standard!
> > > Could someone on de: please tell us? cc'd to wikipedia-l for this
purpose)
>
> > Yes - that is very important information to know before we proceed with
> > anything.

> There must be SOMEONE reading this who is familiar with de:.

I just dip into it.  I would guess that (against a thesis I was propounding)
there is extensive academic or para-academic input.  I think the domination,
generally speaking, of pages on the Web in English may motivate those adding
pages in other languages to do more.

Charles


from_name: manfred

subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikimedia Boards disabled for now

body:
Did anybody know about them? :-)

I'd suggest the use of invision board anyway.
Well, it's not free as in free of charge but it works way better and makes
no troubles.

But, as there doesn't seem to be demand for it . . .

--tic

Am Thu, 18 Nov 2004 12:28:24 -0800 hat Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
geschrieben:

> For a while we experimented with a bulletin-board discussion site
> (running on phpBB) at http://boards.wikimedia.org/  This hasn't been
> used since August as far as I can see.
>
> A serious security vulnerability has been announced in phpBB recently;
> rather than add to our maintenance burden for an unused site I'm taking
> the boards offline. If there's a sudden demand for it, we could upgrade
> it and put it back online.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

--
http://glassdoc.org
http://glassdoc.de


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Well, I do think Wikimedia has picked a rather poor naming scheme in
> terms of enforcing a unique brand, although I'm not sure what to best do
> about it.  The scheme is essentially Wiki____, where the ____ is the
> project-specific name, but that's a completely generic naming scheme,

No more generic than 'The New York Times.' 'New York' is generic, and 'Times'
is one of several generic names for newspapers. Yet put together it is a very
enforceable trademark.

> because we are not the inventors, owners, or exclusive users of the
> prefix "wiki".  This leads to a confusing situation where an arbitrary
> Wiki____ may or may not be a Wikimedia project, and there's no way of
> knowing without investigating.

That is easy to fix. Just put "A Wikimedia project" below the logo of each of
our projects.

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today!
http://my.yahoo.com


subject: [Foundation-l] Single login - decision 2004

body:
--- user_Jamesday <user_Jamesday at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> It's easy for me to register my name in all projects. I haven't bothered to
> do it: I know I won't ever participate significantly in them because I don't
> understand the language. So, no pioint in me stopping someone else from using
> the name.

Having the option to automatically reserve your name in all projects should
address my concerns. The default setting of this option would be set not to
reserve the names - thus the great majority of accounts will not have
cross-project names.

Is this acceptable?

-- mav

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today!
http://my.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Baseldytsch Wikipedia: Who can put it online?

body:
David Rossel wrote:
> And please tell me: Why is there already a Plattd??tsch wikipedia? And a
> L?tzebuergesch wikipedia? They also seem to be dialects (although
> L?tzebuergesch is official in Luxemburg). So, why shouldn't there be other
> dialect wikipedias? In Swabian, in Bernese German, in Saxony-German?

Plattd??tsch is not a dialect. Since 1998, it has been recognized by the
EU:

Plattd??tsch is een eegen Spraak (eenige L?d dink, dat is een Dialekt).
Upp ingelsch seggt de L??t Low Saxon (wesslich vun de Ilv) ellers East
Low German (?sslich vun de Ilv) dorto, ook Nedersassisch, Nedersaksisch
un Nieders?chsisch (wat nich heet, dat bloots Neddersassen dat snackt)
un Ostnederd??tsch. De offizielle Spraakencode na ISO 639-2 is nds.
Plattd??tsch is in de Europ??sche Kort vun de Regionaal un
Minnerheetenspraaken opnahm. Dat is nu g?llig vun 1998 af.

Translation (I don't know Plattd??tsch, but with German and Dutch it can
be reasonably understood):

Plattd??tsch is a language (some people think it is a dialect). East of
the Ilv, the English name is Low Saxon. West of the Ilv it's East Low
German. The official language code is, according to ISO 693-2, nds.
Since 1998, Plattd??tsch has been recognized by the European bureau for
minority languages.

> And yes, Baseldytsch has ist own orthography and dictionary (which many
> dialects don't). I think that's also an argument for this wikipedia. The
> interface are already translated into Baseldytsch. So lets just put it
> online under bsd.wikipedia.org and we shall see how it'll be running and
> what the reactions are. Then we can take it offline, or we just let it be in
> its developpment to a useful encyclopedia.

+1, for what it's worth.

regards,
Gerrit Holl.

--
Weather in Lulea / Kallax, Sweden 19/11 08:50:
	-13.0?C   wind 0.9 m/s SW (34 m above NAP)
--
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
    -Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17, 1961


from_name: David Gerard

subject:
[WikiEN-l] About the reliability of the Wikipedia process and
	content

body:
I think I'm about to spend most of this email agreeing with you.

Daniel Mayer (maveric149 at yahoo.com) [041118 07:19]:
> --- David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

> > We went through this (you and I) on this very list just recently. You're
> > still reasoning along the lines of:
> > 1. We must do something.
> > 2. This is something.
> > 3. Therefore, we must do this.

> No, my reasoning is that there is a good deal of FUD about Wikipedia right now
> and that some of it is *valid.* Just pretending that everything is fine as is
> does not move us forward.

Fair enough. I'll certainly acknowledge that.

> > Not only is this logically fallacious, you haven't really proven 1. as yet.
> > Note that de: Wikipedia recently beat two commercial encyclopedias in blind
> > testing without imposing review boards.

> I would like to see the same test done on the English version before I jump to
> that conclusion.

Indeed!

IS THERE ANYONE ON DE: WHO CAN ANSWER THIS FOR US??

> We also need a way to mark articles as being OK for a 1.0 version. We *can not*
> just give out the most recent database dump.

I would certainly agree with that.

> > I suspect review boards will not scale. What is the processing rate of a
> > review board likely to be? How many articles are there again? How many
> > being created each day?

> There could be different levels of review; at the lowest level we would have
> what we have now, on top of that could be a reader feedback mechanism that is
> in beta, the top level would be a review board review. The strengths of each
> should be leveraged on the other. Users should have a choice of which versions
> to use.

I'd like to see a more wikilike method than a review board. Something that
would naturally scale, at least. An appointed board or a WP:FAC-style
examination won't scale as we will need.

I'm not sure (or unsure) Magnus Manske's experimental review software on
test: is the perfect example, but it's interesting to consider. What
results would we get from letting the wiki do the reviewing? (What gaming
would the POV warriors try?)

> Scale issues are very important so we must develop ways to to quickly review
> content. Only by starting on that road can we work out bottlenecks. Note: that
> the featured article process selects the best of Wikipedia content and is
> therefore slow. Review boards would not have 'best of' as part of its criteria
> but would look at a short list of criteria before marking it as reviewed. Such
> as:
> 1) Does it cover the basic aspects of the subject?
> 2) Are there any obvious errors of fact?
> 3) Are alternate views given an appropriate amount of space and qualified?
> 4) Mechanics (spelling, garmmar, etc)

Yes. Wikipedia Adequate Prose, as opposed to Wikipedia Brilliant Prose.

> > While reviewing content sounds like a good ide (to me too), there should be
> > a way to do it wihtout seeming to repudiate the concept of the wiki.

> I agree. That is why Bryan and I have suggested that users be given the most
> recent version by default with a link to the last reviewed version.

I'm not actually so sure about that, but that can be debated further later.

> > I'm
> > not actually wedded to the idea myself, but repudiating it as you describe
> > would be extremely jarring culturally and - and this is the important point
> > - demotivating for the volunteers.

> I AM NOT REPUDIATING WIKI!! I want to add better review mechanisms onto what we
> are already doing (which is not pure wiki). When I say that wiki is a means to
> an end, I am just pointing out that the product is more important than the
> process. But if changes in the process harm the product, then those changes
> will have to be modified. That is as true for wiki as it would be for any
> review system.

I agree. But I think care needs to be taken with the review system (I think
we will need one) not to appear to repudiate the wiki process either.

We really have generated a tremendous amount of quality text with the wiki
process. What Wikipedia has done really is remarkable.

> > If it can at all be done within the wiki process, it should be. de: is
> > solid evidence it can be achieved within the wiki process; neither your
> > assertions nor those of the Britannica editor are solid evidence it can't.

> Again, we need a way to check content before publishing it in print or digital
> media. We also need a way to give users the *option* to see those checked
> versions so that they do not have to worry if some nut job distorted the facts
> presented in the article version the user is reading.

Of course.

(Stgable versions will also require pulling in the stable versions of
images, to e.g. avoid pulling in chimp images for George W. Bush.)

> Studies that show the average quality of Wikipedia are better than other
> encyclopedias will be *very* little comfort for those people who happen upon a
> particular article in a sub-par state (however brief that may be).

Well, yes ... I'd personally still prefer the current version of an article
appear by default with a link to the stable version. But that's a separate
(though related) issue.

> > (And I'm still seeking details of what de: did to get to that standard!
> > Could someone on de: please tell us? cc'd to wikipedia-l for this purpose)

> Yes - that is very important information to know before we proceed with
> anything.

There must be SOMEONE reading this who is familiar with de:.

- d.


body:
P.S. Please refrain from top-posting.

Gerrit Holl
kind regards,

Mark Williamson wrote:
> I was unable to find als in a list of ISO 639-2 language codes.

http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ALS

ALBANIAN, GHEG: a language of Yugoslavia

Population      1,372,750 to 1,800,000 in Yugoslavia (1992). Ethnic
Albanians are 90% of Kosovo's 2,000,000 people (1998 Los Angeles Times).
Population total all countries 2,000,000 (1980 UBS).

Hello,

--
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
    -Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17, 1961


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

body:
I'm not sure what this discussion is doing on wikien-l, but I'm happy to
participate.

Tim Starling wrote:
> Nicholas Knight wrote:
> >Call me when you're using a sane programming language. I'll be happy to
> >help.

<aol>I wholeheartedly agree</aol>

> Great! We already have three working modules in C++ (wikidiff, UTF-8
> normalisation and waikiki) one in C (Chinese word splitting) one in
> Ocaml (texvc), one in Perl (EasyTimeline), a bot written in Python, plus
> Lee's incomplete test suite in Java, Timwi's incomplete parser in bison
> and Magnus' incomplete parser in C++.

I'm note completely sure of your tone here, I am bad at interpreting it.
Are you or are you not being sarcastic here?

> Really the possibilities are unlimited. My point was that PHP is not a
> very good excuse for avoiding MediaWiki, despite being often cited. It's
> easy to learn, but if it's against your religion or something, you can
> always code in something else.

I think a lot more people have this "PHP-religion-problem", really (I
know at least three people in my immediate environment with this
problem: a Pythonist, a Rubyist and a Perlist). If the modularisation of
PHP is of a degree that it would indeed be possible to code new parts in
other languages, I'd be happy to dive into a task that could be
fulfilled in Python (I'm already an active pywikipediabot-developer).

Multi-lingual coding has major advantages and disadvantages. It can draw
more people in the development process: Nicholas and I are most
certainly not the only people avoiding MediaWiki because of PHP (calling
it religion is unfair: there are very good reasons, perhaps PHP-ers
don't care about them). Further, some languages may be better at other
tasks. Disadvantages might be that it would be more difficult to have an
overall view over the codebase, and that it might be slower. The latter,
however, might be negligeble or not too important, depending on the task
involved.

I am an experienced Python programmer with a relatively broad knowledge,
only no database experience. But I suppose a number of tasks currently
fulfilled by pywikipediabot could and should be done server-side or
partly server-side. It would be much faster. I'm sure there are other
points beside further development of Pywikipediabot where Python
knowledge might be useful.

PHP *can* be a valid reason to refrain from MediaWiki. Some people care
about things like language design, and since MediaWiki is of course OSS,
those people will not get involved in a PHP project. Nicholas and I
apparantly are two of them, I'm sure there are many others.

kind regards,
Gerrit Holl.

--
Weather in Lulea / Kallax, Sweden 19/11 09:20:
	-12.0?C   wind 1.3 m/s SW (34 m above NAP)
--
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
    -Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17, 1961


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:
> With just a few lines of code you can create an interactive
> form that queries a database and returns a result. To do the same
> thing in Perl, you'd typically need one static HTML page and a
> separate page for the CGI script that processes the form data and
> returns the result. It can be done, but it's more work. Once I
> discovered PHP, I stopped using Perl and haven't looked back.

I can imagine there are situations this is a reason to use PHP.
I don't see how MediaWiki is one, though. Isn't MediaWiki trying to be a
solid, well-designed, large and scalable application? It takes time to
write such a thing. Probably more in PHP than in languages designed for
(among other things) such tasks. A well-designed application seperates
interface and implementation, which requires a good templating system. I
believe Ruby on Rails is such a thing (www.rubyonrails.org), but being a
Pythonista, I'm not sure. Development speed is a good thing. At the cost
of scalability, however, it is not.

regards,
Gerrit Holl.

--
Weather in Lulea / Kallax, Sweden 19/11 09:20:
	-12.0?C   wind 1.3 m/s SW (34 m above NAP)
--
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.
    -Dwight David Eisenhower, January 17, 1961


body:
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 12:02:10 +0100, Andreas Br?ndle <andreas at obacht.ch> wrote:
> As I see you have already decided to set up a Baseldytsch Wikipedia,
> since you are looking for a language code. Didn't you wonder why there
> isn't a language code?
>
> I want to make you aware of the consequences of setting up a
> Baseldytsch Wikipedia:
>
> *Every single dialect group in Switzerland will have an own WP. There
> are around 100 local dialects (Baseldytsch is one of the bigger ones).
> *There are also regional and local dialects in Germany and Austria who
> might want to have their own WP
>
> Am 18.11.2004 um 12:55 schrieb David Rossel:
> > Please, don't think about one wikipedia for all swiss-german dialects.
> > That
> > would be the same thing like the Alemannic wikipedia: An uncommon
> > mixture of
> > native dialects.
> In this point I agree with you.
>
> But basically you want to set up a Wikipedia for one city with some
> 160'000 inhabitants and 600'000 inhabitants in the surroundings (where
> they already speak a slightly different dialect). That is comparable
> with an American suburb; let's call it Springfield. Imagine they want
> to have an own Wikipedia, because they're feeling so different,
> although they're all reading and writing in english.
>
> A Baseldytsch Wikipedia would have much sense as a repository for words
> that only exist in Baseldytsch and not in German. But for that purpose
> it might be better to find a way to implement dialect and regional
> language culture into to the big German one.
>
> German is a standardized language that everyone between the Matterhorn
> (southern part of Switzerland) and Hamburg (northern Germany)
> understands, reads and writes. In fact Swiss (also the people in Basel)
> read better German than their local dialect, because they're not used
> to the written form of the dialect. That makes German the best language
> for sharing knowledge within this geographic area. And sharing
> knowledge is actually the purpose of Wikipedia.
>
> I am not against wiki-encyclopedias in Swiss German dialects. I am very
> proud of my native dialect and I wanna preserve it as well. But in my
> opinion this doesn't support the much more important purpose of
> Wikikpedia to make free knowledge accessible to everyone. If everyone
> sets up its own wiki, wiki-culture doesn't work anymore.
>
> Cheers
> Andreas
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Ainu, an isolated indigenous language of Japan with perhaps around 200
native-fluent speakers, has no ISO code, even though it is definitely
not a dialect of any other language by anybody's measurement. The
O'odham language has almost 50000 speakers, and is by no measure a
dialect of another language, but has no ISO code. (allow me to correct
myself, these have collective ISO codes but not individual codes)
Having no ISO code does not mean a language is not a language, or that
it is negligible.

As far as bsd not being an ISO code... it would of course take more
time, but one option would be for our proposers here to take it to the
committee which oversees the standard and request that their language
be added to the standard.

That aside, I think the best domain would probably be
http://baseldytsch.wikipedia.org/

Speaking of which, now that a speaker of Friulian has actually turned
up on the ML and is already a Wikipedian and has been for some time,
and there are no linguistic issues with Friulian, can somebody create
http://fur.wikipedia.org/ ? The language name is "Furlan".

If you actually care, there are already websites in Friulian, for
example http://www.friul.net/ http://www.lenghe.net/
http://www.partitrepublichefurlane.org/
http://www.siencis-par-furlan.net/ http://www.glesiefurlane.it/
http://www.sacilotto.net/index_fur.htm http://www.scritorsfurlans.org/
http://www.lacomugne.it/ http://www.istitutladinfurlan.it/
http://www.ladinsdalfriul.org/
http://www.lingue.regione.fvg.it/minor/fu/homepage.aspx etc etc etc...

Mark


from_name: Matt R

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

body:
 --- Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:

> Unfortunately it seems most programmers on Wikipedia would rather think
> of excuses, complain about the lack of progress and file bug reports.

There's an unfortunate tendency on Wikipedia to suppose that if you identify a
problem that you can fix, then you have an obligation to fix it. Even if you
have the capability, there is no moral imperative for volunteers to do anything
at all on Wikipedia, and documenting a problem is already a positive
contribution, albeit a comparatively minor one. Of course, to grumble or whine
about a problem that you've identified is churlish, as you have no right to
expect that others fix things on your behalf.

But to get to the point: I'm very grateful to the developers. I would quite
like to hack on Mediawiki myself some day, but right now I prefer to spend my
time contributing to the content of articles -- this is not an *excuse*; this
is a choice, and I (only mildly!) resent any such implication.

-- Matt (User:Matt Crypto)

___________________________________________________________
Moving house? Beach bar in Thailand? New Wardrobe? Win ?10k with Yahoo! Mail to make your dream a reality.
Get Yahoo! Mail www.yahoo.co.uk/10k


from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Language names

body:
Hi all,

We have some language names (ie, for interwiki) that aren't right.

Among them are:

bo (tibetan): bod skad (should be ???????)
bn (bengali): should be ?????
or (oriya): Oriya (should be ????)
xh (xhosa): Xhosa (should be isiXhosa)
zu (zulu): Zulu (should be isiZulu)
dv (divehi): should be ??????
lo (lao): should be ???
si (sinhala): should be ?????
ht (haitian creole): should be Kr?yol
dz (dzongkha): should be ?????

Best,
Mark


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 12:55:20 +0100, David Rossel <cdamvvwgs at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Please, don't think about one wikipedia for all swiss-german dialects. That
> would be the same thing like the Alemannic wikipedia: An uncommon mixture of
> native dialects. Surely all Baseldytsch speakers understand the Z?rit??tsch
> (zurich-german) speakers and vice versa.
>
> And please tell me: Why is there already a Plattd??tsch wikipedia? And a
> L?tzebuergesch wikipedia? They also seem to be dialects (although
> L?tzebuergesch is official in Luxemburg). So, why shouldn't there be other
> dialect wikipedias? In Swabian, in Bernese German, in Saxony-German?

Apart from these both having official status as a language, it is
definitely the case that at least nds: weakens your case more than it
strengthens it. It is not the dialect of one single city or small
region, but a combination of all dialects in a large region - in the
case of Lower Saxon, according to ethnologue Germany 'below [i.e.
north of] the line Aachen-Wittenberg', plus parts of the east and the
northeast of the Netherlands.

Andre Engels


subject: [Foundation-l] Symposium in Rotterdam

body:
On Saturday 27 November, that is in one week, a Wikipedia/Wikimedia
symposium will be held in Rotterdam. There will be a large number of
Dutch Wikipedians as well as Jimbo, Angela and Anthere. Might there be
interest from others, see
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Symposium/Najaar_2004 -
unfortunately all in Dutch, but most Dutch Wikipedians know about it
and will be willing to answer your questions in English or anothr
language.

Andre Engels


subject: [Foundation-l] Symposium in Rotterdam


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Symposium in Rotterdam


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP / Python / Something

body:
I would personally like that the number of programmers remain small,
otherwise there will be an need for project managers, documenters,
and, well, overhead. And overhead just kills developer productivity.
(trust me on that one).

On an aside, I'd like to point out that I think that mediawiki is
better than a lot of commercially available software and that the
core team needs more of "Thankyou Thankyou"s than "Biatch, where's my
featureitis".

Furthermore, if you like what the developers have done, email them a
$50 paypal donation.

On another aside, I've deployed mediawiki internally on the company
intranet, and it took 30 minutes to set up, so "ThankyouThankyou" to
the devs.

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

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today!
http://my.yahoo.com


from_name: S.M.Sabri S.M.Ismail

body:
From: "Rowan Collins" <rowan.collins at gmail.com>
>>    http://abcnews.go.com/Business/print?id=88655
> I love the way Malone throws everything right back the other way; a
> nice demonstration of the use of 'spin', I feel. E.g. "approaching
> 400,000 pages" vs McHenry's back-handed "over 382,000 pages that
> were thought "probably" to be encyclopedic articles".

His ending "crude analogy" was on the mark too. ;-)

"...  Finally, as long as Mr. McHenry is going to end on a crude analogy, so
will I: using a traditional encyclopedia is like owning a nice, well-built
automobile that, unfortunately, has the seats and mirrors locked in place, the
radio frozen on one station, the throttle welded in one position -- and the car
is capable of only driving to a limited number of places predetermined by the
manufacturer. ... Frankly, I'd rather pee in a public toilet."

> May the best man win, I guess - but lets hope we make some
> serious progress on validation soon, to give them an extra weapon
> or two...

FWIW, I think those "mark article as 1.0 version" and similar proposals, would
go a long way there.

regards, sabre23t =^.^=

---
Outgoing mail scanned.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.797 / Virus Database: 541 - Release Date: 17.11.04


from_name: Andreas Brändle

body:
As I see you have already decided to set up a Baseldytsch Wikipedia,
since you are looking for a language code. Didn't you wonder why there
isn't a language code?

I want to make you aware of the consequences of setting up a
Baseldytsch Wikipedia:

*Every single dialect group in Switzerland will have an own WP. There
are around 100 local dialects (Baseldytsch is one of the bigger ones).
*There are also regional and local dialects in Germany and Austria who
might want to have their own WP

Am 18.11.2004 um 12:55 schrieb David Rossel:
> Please, don't think about one wikipedia for all swiss-german dialects.
> That
> would be the same thing like the Alemannic wikipedia: An uncommon
> mixture of
> native dialects.
In this point I agree with you.

But basically you want to set up a Wikipedia for one city with some
160'000 inhabitants and 600'000 inhabitants in the surroundings (where
they already speak a slightly different dialect). That is comparable
with an American suburb; let's call it Springfield. Imagine they want
to have an own Wikipedia, because they're feeling so different,
although they're all reading and writing in english.

A Baseldytsch Wikipedia would have much sense as a repository for words
that only exist in Baseldytsch and not in German. But for that purpose
it might be better to find a way to implement dialect and regional
language culture into to the big German one.

German is a standardized language that everyone between the Matterhorn
(southern part of Switzerland) and Hamburg (northern Germany)
understands, reads and writes. In fact Swiss (also the people in Basel)
read better German than their local dialect, because they're not used
to the written form of the dialect. That makes German the best language
for sharing knowledge within this geographic area. And sharing
knowledge is actually the purpose of Wikipedia.

I am not against wiki-encyclopedias in Swiss German dialects. I am very
proud of my native dialect and I wanna preserve it as well. But in my
opinion this doesn't support the much more important purpose of
Wikikpedia to make free knowledge accessible to everyone. If everyone
sets up its own wiki, wiki-culture doesn't work anymore.

Cheers
Andreas


body:
Rowan Collins (rowan.collins at gmail.com) [041119 11:32]:

> Wow! It seems a no-holds-barred fight is rapidly spreading through the
> world's media over whether Wikipedia is a hopeless idea, or the
> beginning of something amazing. [After the rash of warring blogs, now
> we're getting journalists with pretty good credentials...]

I saw an interesting thing at Dorkbot (http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotlondon/)
last night: http://uo.space.frot.org/?LondonFreeMap - a Wiki-like mapping
of the streets of London. They referred to Wikipedia as an example a lot.
A friend who works for a mapping provider was there and didn't think much
of the project (it's presently at a level only truly obsessive nerds could
love), but I pointed out the example of Wikipedia as well ...  it was a lot
less impressive when it had thirty articles .

The point being that we are an example and inspiration for others.

(The reason for the need for an open-content map is that, unlike in the US
where government data is p[ublic domain, the good data in the UK is owned
by Ordnance Survey and is Crown Copyright. This is considered a bad thing.)

> May the best man win, I guess - but lets hope we make some serious
> progress on validation soon, to give them an extra weapon or two...

Erm, yes. What was up with that proposed referencing syntax? Were any
developers taking any notice?

(I'm going to have to learn decent Perl just to get my ideas into the
codebase, aren't I.)

- d.


from_name: Zoney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Learn PHP

references:
<cnkg0a$ngn$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<20041119105127.46318.qmail@web25009.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
	<cnkori$i6j$1@sea.gmane.org>

body:
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 23:28:49 +1100, Tim Starling
<t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> Matt R wrote:
>
>
> >  --- Tim Starling wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Unfortunately it seems most programmers on Wikipedia would rather think
> >>of excuses, complain about the lack of progress and file bug reports.
> >
> >
> > There's an unfortunate tendency on Wikipedia to suppose that if you identify a
> > problem that you can fix, then you have an obligation to fix it. Even if you
> > have the capability, there is no moral imperative for volunteers to do anything
> > at all on Wikipedia, and documenting a problem is already a positive
> > contribution, albeit a comparatively minor one. Of course, to grumble or whine
> > about a problem that you've identified is churlish, as you have no right to
> > expect that others fix things on your behalf.
> >
> > But to get to the point: I'm very grateful to the developers. I would quite
> > like to hack on Mediawiki myself some day, but right now I prefer to spend my
> > time contributing to the content of articles -- this is not an *excuse*; this
> > is a choice, and I (only mildly!) resent any such implication.
>
> I'm sorry if I caused offence, I just wanted to impress on everyone that
> Wikipedia has barely any developers. If you're ever wondering why some
> feature hasn't been written yet, it's because there's been no-one around
> to write it. Most of the active developers seem to be more interested
> writing features for a general audience than for Wikimedia projects.
> There's more editors on the Old English Wikipedia than there are
> developers overall. Maybe Matt doesn't want to help, and that's fine. I
> get the feeling Gerrit doesn't either. But is there anyone? Every second
> Wikipedian seems to know a programming language. We just need, say, two
> or three developers willing to put in a few hours per week.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

I'd help were I paid - I'd love to do it as a job! But even my
Wikipedia editing is eating into valuable work time, in fact, too much
of my "relaxation time" is Wikipedia editing as it is. I should rest
my eyes more.

Sorry, but I can't afford to spend even a couple hours a week on
development, not to mention the initial familiarisation and learning
PHP (OK it'd be useful elsewhere - but I have enough to do with my
ordinary University research).

Zoney

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


subject: [WikiEN-l] Consolidation (whose, what?)

body:
So perhaps a debate has crept up on us. I'm still in two minds about the
Forum for Encyclopedic Standards.  But there are plenty of candidates for
the ArbCom; which therefore must have something of a reputation as an
institution putting down roots.  I have signed up for the Systemic Bias
project, which (non-radically) might be saying 'more of same, but spread the
butter more evenly'.  And the Version 1.0 and article review strand is not
going to go dormant, I suppose.

Seems there are many voices for solidifying the Wikipedia's current
achievements.  And, while a natural empire-builder rather than consolidator
myself, I'm inclined to agree with this as a main thrust.  Wikimedia can
hatch other projects.  Wikipedia does a lot; it's the old goose with golden
eggs, despite the voices who want platinum and less of a farmyard smell.

Does it come down to saying that choices different flavours of consolidation
are the main issues where consensus is lacking, and on which progress might
be made?

I know that I think that another 12 months in the same vein, with added
server power, would do very nicely.  The other matter that seems to me
central is simply to get the coverage of the humanities up to the kind of
intensity and engagement that science and technology has.  Which I don't
think is utopian.

Charles


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
cdamvvwgs at gmx.ch wrote:
> Hello dear Wikipedians,
> I listed a proposal for a Wikipedia in Baseldytsch (a swiss-german dialect
> in Switzerland with its own dictionary and orthography, about one million
> speakers; see also http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/
> Request_for_new_language). I'm currently translating the interface (http:/
> /meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Locales_for_the_Wikipedia_Software), but is there
> anyone who can put the Baseldytsch Wikipedia online under the domain http:
> //bsd.wikipedia.org/ ??? If yes, please do so! Or send me an e-mail how to
> do so. Thank you very much,
> CdaMVvWgS
>

bsd is not an ISO 639-2 language code. Subdomains may be either:

* An ISO 639-1 language code (e.g. en)
* An ISO 639-2 language code (e.g. als)
* An RFC 3066 language code (e.g. zh-min-nan)
* A descriptive name longer than 3 letters (e.g. tokipona)

Do you have a second preference?

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] Hooks and filters

body:
This is a MediaWiki programming issue; if you're only interested in
admin stuff, you can safely delete.

So, I'd like to set up a system of hooks and filters for MediaWiki. We
have right now four ways to change how MediaWiki works:

     1. Tag extensions. You can add new tags that the parser can
        generate code for.
     2. Special pages. You can add special pages that do different kinds
        of queries.
     3. Edit filtering. You can put a pre-filter on editing.
     4. Skin changes. You can create new skins.

However, we don't have an easy way to change the behaviour of mainline
functionality. I think it would be a good idea to add some simple hook
processing to MediaWiki, so that extensions can add hooks and run custom
code when something happens.

Consider, for example, an extension to log key actions in the wiki to a
specialized logging system. The extension setup function could look
something like this:

function setup_logging {
    global $wgLogFile;
    wfAddHook('after_article_save', log_article_save, $wgLogFile);
    wfAddHook('after_delete', log_deletion, $wgLogFile);
    wfAddHook('after_user_ban', log_user_ban, $wgLogFile);
}

By calling the wfAddHook() function, the extension asks that a function
get called if/when an event happens. wfAddHook() takes three arguments:
the name of the event (say, after an article is deleted), a function to
call, and an optional data block that can be used by the function. This
way, we can use the same function for different hooks or different
actions, like:

	wfAddHook('after_article_save', irc_notify, 'brion');
	wfAddHook('after_article_save', irc_notify, 'TimStarling');

A hook function would look something like this:

function log_deletion(&$params, $data) {
    $title = $params['title'];
    $dbkey = $title->getDBkey();
    $filename = $data;
    foo_log_message("Article '$dbkey' deleted.", $filename);
    return true;
}

The $params argument here is an associative array of the event-specific
parameters. We use this instead of named arguments so that the same
function could be used for different events. The $data is just the data
item that was used when the hook was added.

Hooks can return four possible values:

      * true -- the hook has operated successfully and subsequent hooks
        should be run
      * false -- the hook has operated successfully but no subsequent
        hooks should be run
      * "some string" -- an error occurred; processing should stop and
        the error should be shown to the user
      * NULL -- the hook has successfully done the work necessary and
        the calling function should skip

The last result would be for cases where the hook function replaces the
main functionality. For example, if you wanted to authenticate users to
a custom system (LDAP, another PHP program, whatever), you could do:

        wfAddHook('before_user_login', ldap_login);

        # ...

        function ldap_login(&$params, $data) {
            $user_id = $params['user_id'];
            $password = $params['password'];
            # log user into LDAP
            return NULL;
        }

Note that a reference to the parameters is passed to the hook function:
the hook could theoretically change its parameters, like so:

        wfAddHook('before_article_save', reverse_title);

        # ...

        function reverse_title(&$params, $data) {
            $old_title = $params['title'];
            $params['title'] = Title::makeTitle($old_title->getNamespace(), strrev($old_title->getDBkey()));
            return true;
        }

A calling function or method would use the wfRunHooks() function to run
the hooks related to a particular event, like so:

        class Article {

        # ...

        function submit(...) {
            $params['title'] = ...;
            $params['user'] = ...;
            $params['section'] = ...;
            $params['is_new'] = ...;
            if (wfRunHooks('before_article_save', $params)) {
                # save the article
                wfRunHooks('after_article_save');
            }
        }

wfRunHooks() returns true if the calling function should continue
processing (the hooks ran OK), or false if it shouldn't (an error
occurred, or one of the hooks handled the action already). Checking the
return value matters more for "before_*" hooks than for "after_*" hooks.

The big advantage to this event-handling approach is that we can start
isolating site-specific features into extension files. The "mainline"
code only concerns itself with "mainline" features, and "extension" code
can handle more exotic ones. It simplifies our mainline code,
centralizes extension features into one easy-to-comprehend package, and
hopefully improves our quality and reliability. (The simpler our
mainline code is, the fewer bugs it will have; the easier it is to read,
the more people will want to help maintain it.)

It should also help us evaluate/implement experimental new features, and
obviate the need to patch the mainline code to do so. Lastly, it could
let us move little-used features out to extension files to simplify the
main code.

There are disadvantages, of course, too. If MediaWiki is only supposed
to work for a single wiki installation, or multiple installations that
should behave exactly the same, then the hooks code is unnecessary -- we
should just code it all in the mainline code. There's also some
additional complexity in the mainline code in setting up the parameters
and calling the hook functions; this can be balanced against the
complexity of adding each extension's code into the mainline functions.

Finally, there is a lot of documentation that would need to be done to
say 1) where hooks are defined and 2) what parameters they provide.

Anyways, I'm going to post this to meta, and implement it for 1.4. But I
figured this would be a good forum for discussion -- hopefully making
the feature better.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
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body:
I wrote:
> bsd is not an ISO 639-2 language code. Subdomains may be either:
>
> * An ISO 639-1 language code (e.g. en)
> * An ISO 639-2 language code (e.g. als)
> * An RFC 3066 language code (e.g. zh-min-nan)
> * A descriptive name longer than 3 letters (e.g. tokipona)
>
> Do you have a second preference?

It doesn't seem to be in SIL or LinguistList, they both lump it in with
Allemanisch. So I don't think you can construct an RFC 3066 code for it.
So that just leaves baseldytsch.wikipedia.org .

-- Tim Starling


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Learn PHP (was Re: ABC News: Silicon Insider on Robert
	McHenry)

body:
Nicholas Knight wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
>
>> (I'm going to have to learn decent Perl just to get my ideas into the
>> codebase, aren't I.)
>
>
> Sadly, no. MediaWiki is written in PHP. When I tried to pick up PHP
> (partially with an eye toward contributing to MediaWiki), I ran
> screaming back to Perl.

Excuses excuses. We have 2000 times as many active editors as we do
active developers. Everyone has damn excuses. What's so hard about
learning a language or two? It'll only take you a few months, and you'll
come away from it with a skill you can use elswhere in life.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] MonoBook without PHPTAL

body:
Excuse me for use this list but i found a companie with put all
wikipedia content under copyright.

http://england.asinah.net/

Is It legal?

Erchache
asmarin at us.es
Enciclopedia Libre


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004, Delirium wrote:
> Well, I do think Wikimedia has picked a rather poor naming scheme in
> terms of enforcing a unique brand, although I'm not sure what to best do
> about it.  The scheme is essentially Wiki____, where the ____ is the
> project-specific name, but that's a completely generic naming scheme,
> because we are not the inventors, owners, or exclusive users of the
> prefix "wiki".  This leads to a confusing situation where an arbitrary
> Wiki____ may or may not be a Wikimedia project, and there's no way of
> knowing without investigating.

Yes, I'd have to agree there - although I'd tend to say "ended up
with" rather than "picked", given the way the names have come about.
But in a way, this makes it even *more* important that we protect the
individual terms that *are* part of the Foundation. There's nothing we
can do about a site calling itself "Wikitravel", but at least we can
draw the line at someone starting a "Wikipediatravel" or somesuch
(which would actually sound more like part of the same brand than
"Wikibooks" does...)

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikitech-l] MonoBook without PHPTAL

body:
On bottom of every article they show you'll find that

---snip

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
License.
This article is courtesy of Wikipedia

---snap

So it will be right.

--manfred

Am Fri, 19 Nov 2004 15:18:55 +0100 hat Erchache2000
<erchache2000 at yahoo.es> geschrieben:

> Excuse me for use this list but i found a companie with put all
> wikipedia content under copyright.
>
> http://england.asinah.net/
>
> Is It legal?
>
> Erchache
> asmarin at us.es
> Enciclopedia Libre
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
http://glassdoc.org
http://glassdoc.de


body:
[Aw crap, I hate it when replies end up going to individuals and not
the list; you'd think the list software would always make the headers
the same, wouldn't you?]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 02:07:24 +0000
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia trademark being used incorrectly
To: Scott Nelson <scott at penguinstorm.com>

On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 17:22:14 -0800, Scott Nelson <scott at penguinstorm.com> wrote:
> And you're suggesting that this would somehow be different if the
> reference was to a Wiki instead of a Wikipedia?

Yes, because we can distance ourselves from other wikis by saying "its
a different wiki; that's 'FoonamiWiki' this is 'Wikipedia' ". We can
explain that wikis have been around a lot longer than Wikipedia has.

> To my mother, there is no difference between a Wiki and a Wikipedia.
> The risk your describing is real as long as the foundation continues to
> use the word Wiki in it's project names. This is quite distinct from
> the situation with Movable Type which, to the media, produces "blogs"
> but can in fact be used for much much more.

But isn't that a bit like saying that calling a website "blogger" or
"blogspot" leads to confusion with the concept of blogging? I mean if
another *wiki* does something evil, we can say "yes, but it wasn't
Wikipedia, it was just some other wiki", and explain the difference
between the two terms. Just like Blogger could say "blogging is a
general term, not every blogging system reflects on us".

If we allow it to be "an unrelated wikipedia", how do we even begin to
clarify the distinction? I mean, literally, how would you construct a
sentence to explain to someone "that's not the *real* Wikipedia, it's
just *a* wikipedia"? (or even, of course, "something else that's
decided to *call* itself Wikipedia"; cf. my "MS Wikipedia" example)

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Nick Triantos

subject: [Wikitech-l] How to enable EasyTimeline in MediaWiki ?

body:
Thanks Erik, for that pointer.  I just tried it out, and EasyTimeline is
working in my wiki.  I'll go add a pointer to this to meta.wikimedia.org
somewhere, if I can find a suitable page.

cheers,
-Nick

Erik Zachte wrote:

>I received about 10 inquiries so far about how to enable EasyTimeline in
>MediaWiki.
>
>I have to answer I don't really know.
>I always point them to the link below, but noone takes the trouble to report
>succes or failure, either out of laziness or frustration.
>(spam filter might be partial explanation, my provider is known for this)
>
>Can someone give me foolproof instructions on how to enable ET ?
>I will add those to my support page. Thanks.
>
>Erik Zachte
>
>
>
>http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/wikipedia/extensions/timeli
>ne/Timeline.php?rev=1.6
>
>Comment at the top says:
>
># Timeline extension
># To use, include this file from your LocalSettings.php
># To configure, set members of $wgTimelineSettings after the inclusionpoint
>them to
>
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>


body:
[note: replying to the list, despite the conversation inadvertently
becoming 'private'; for that reason, I've left the quoted bits
untrimmed, so people can follow]

On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 18:21:21 -0800, Scott Nelson <scott at penguinstorm.com> wrote:
> On Nov 18.2004, at 18:07, Rowan Collins wrote:
>
> > But isn't that a bit like saying that calling a website "blogger" or
> > "blogspot" leads to confusion with the concept of blogging?
>
> Indeed, it's a very analogous situation. And the reason "blog" became
> such a common term was because in the early days "blogger"was driving
> the explosion of the phenomenon.
>
> Blogger benefited from this, of course, to the point that Google bought
> 'em.

Well, yes there are advantages to matching your brand to a generic
term, but there's big disadvantages too. They'll have a tough time if
they want to claim the name back off http://blogger.de for instance,
who in the meantime can benefit not only from the same link to the
generic term as Blogger.com, but also from all the effort that has
been put into promoting "Blogger" as a brand; and that's the kind of
risk Wikipedia would face, too.

If you look at the Wikipedia articles on [[trademark]] and
[[genericized trademark]], there are some interesting examples. For
instance, Xerox apparently actively discourages use of the verb "to
xerox", since if you can use a photocopier made by Acme Corp to
"xerox" things [without Xerox challenging you], it becomes, logically,
an "Acme Xerox Machine", and they can't suddenly turn around and say
"oh, actually, we don't like you using the word that way".

Hm, interesting: I googled for "Blogger trademark", and found that
Google have apparently tried to formally register "B Blogger" - one
blogger suggested that they know full well that just "blogger" would
be considered already too generic. [Yes, I'm deliberately using
genericized trademarks] And, like Wikipedia's [[trademark]] article,
they point out that use of a trademark as a verb is a real no-no
[http://www.google.com/permissions/trademarks.html], so they must be a
little concerned about the verb "to google"; of course, it's an
unusual one, because I don't think people generally "use Yahoo! to
google" or whatever. Perhaps they could trademark it by using it as an
advertising phrase: "Don't just search for it, Google it!"...

> I'd say the key difference is that blogging took off like a rocket,
> whereas the "wiki" phenomenon seems to be a bit more snail-lake; this
> is awesome from a software development perspective - it allows a more
> organic, iterative development cycle to proceed. It does mean, however,
> that the media were SCRAMBLING for a general term such as "Blog" to
> describe the type of content that Blogger (and others) were producing,
> they don't really seem to be doing the same thing in the case of Wiki
> software.

No, the key difference is that there is already a word for wikis:
"wiki", and this is not the same as the name of our site. Why should
we give up all rights over the name of our site just because people
don't know that term yet?

> I personally wouldn't stress too much over potential confusion between
> Wikimedia/Pedia/and just plain Wiki's. I tend to give most of the media
> enough credit to understand the differences, and I think the time spent
> explaining the subtle differences would be better used promoting the
> concept of collaboration software in general, and Wiki software
> specifically.

Well, I'm not saying we should get *stressed* (or even 'stressy')
about it, but I do think that allowing 'wikipedia' to become a synonym
(or near-synonym) for 'wiki' is unnecessary and undesirable. I guess
if we were genuinely trying to promote wikis as a concept, or a
service, or a piece of software, then yes, there'd be an advantage to
people thinking "hmm, wikipedia, where can I get one". But that's
*not* what Wikipedia is there for, so we don't get much benefit from
people typing wikipedia.com because they think "wikipedia" means
"wiki" - they won't find what they're looking for. As I say, if it
came to mean "an online encyclopedia" then we'd maybe get more out of
it, but I don't think that's generally how people would start defining
it.

And there's a difference between being at the top of people's minds,
and being a generic term: take 'Encarta' in the mid-90s; people
thought "CD-ROM encyclopedia" and put "Encarta" in their drive. They
*didn't* think "Encarta" and actually put the CD-ROM of "Encyclopedia
Britannica" in (maybe they'd say "oh, Encarta or something", but
that's not saying EB *is* Encarta) - and I'm sure Microsoft were very
pleased at that.

I'm going to end with a repeat of a point I already made: if we don't
claim "Wikipedia" as a trademark - and that means being seen to
discourage its use as a generic term - anyone can use it for a rival
product. So, to put it bluntly, would you be happy to let Microsoft
rename "Encarta" to something like "MSN Wikipedia"? If you would, then
fine, we'll agree to differ; I know I wouldn't.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 00:46:56 -0800, Aaron E. Klemm <lists at axiomos.com> wrote:
> Is there an official collection of 3rd party activity? Does Wikimedia
> track/advertise 3rd parties that use the software--this is a secondary
> interest for me.

Well, users of the content are listed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks (sorted by
compliance level; note also the "in other languages links" if you want
to investigate non-English versions). Users of the software,
meanwhile, are listed at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sites_using_MediaWiki

I can't think of any particularly innovative uses, I'm afraid.
thefreedictionary.com has some funky mouse-over previews of article
introductions, but they're not much more than 'interface sugar'. The
most notable use I've seen is probably clusty.com, which integrates
the content fairly firmly into its cluster-based search engine, which
is certainly an interesting idea.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Requirement for news servers on Enciclopedia Libre

body:
Hello, I'm Alejandro S?nchez, erchache on irc, system administrator
(sure? ;P) of Enciclopedia Libre, fork of es.wikipedia.org.

We are planning to expand our system. We are in negotiations with some
universities of Spain to make a global farm. I think to install a linux
virtual server, on a machine or more, with ip-ip encapsulated mode, to
be able to connect any machine to our farm without problems about
differences network connection.

I never buy a "real" server before and i dont know all aspect of this.
For this reason I ask to this channel for requirements on:

- Linux virtual server.

- Apache+php+memcache.

- Mysql server.

- Mysql slave.

- Squid.

And a good network filesystem to interconect all machines, ours and the
others machines.

See on http://enciclopedia.us.es/webalizer, to see real stadistic of our
site, hangs and breakdowns are include ;D

Im very paranoid about security, but i dont want to mount a system who
only runs to make DoS attack for crackers, you know? ;P

All sugestion are welcome, except to join es.wikipedia....Sorry :( All
users of our comunity vote from this explicitly.....

We are planning to talk with all universities which join to us to add
mediawiki on studies plan on computer science, Literature, and more. To
get more programmers and users, to our projects, all Wikipedia and
Enciclopedia Libre.

Well this is all for the moment, and i'm waiting for your replies.


body:
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 17:58:57 +0100, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...the answers that have already been given can of course be used in a type
> of learning algorithm to be even better in sorting out later
> candidates (although doing so would probably much slow down the bot,
> so perhaps it's better to get a start on the 'include' and 'exclude'
> categories by hand, then go offline to make the estimates, and after
> that do the real work in the abovementioned way).

Well, given that both the content of articles and, more importantly,
the hierarchy of categories, will change over time, I'd have thought
it would be necessary/useful to re-run the entire classifier algorithm
every now and then anyway; so perhaps a log of human
'rejected'/'approved' responses from running the bot could be fed back
in as an extra data source somehow...

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Rowan Collins wrote:

>On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 17:58:57 +0100, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>...the answers that have already been given can of course be used in a type
>>of learning algorithm to be even better in sorting out later
>>candidates (although doing so would probably much slow down the bot,
>>so perhaps it's better to get a start on the 'include' and 'exclude'
>>categories by hand, then go offline to make the estimates, and after
>>that do the real work in the abovementioned way).
>>
>>
>
>Well, given that both the content of articles and, more importantly,
>the hierarchy of categories, will change over time, I'd have thought
>it would be necessary/useful to re-run the entire classifier algorithm
>every now and then anyway; so perhaps a log of human
>'rejected'/'approved' responses from running the bot could be fed back
>in as an extra data source somehow...
>
>
>
Before we consider automatic classification, we should first use all the
information in the various human-generated lists. Many of these map
directly to categories, and could be used to auto-categorise articles
with no AI effort needed.
I suggest a concerted bot-aided effort to data-mine the existing list
information would be very useful.

The more genuine classification seed-information we have as input, the
better AI algorithms will be able to work. None of this need hold up
efforts on developing auto-categorization algorithms; but it will
provide a much better dataset for testing them, thus hopefully greatly
enhancing their performance when they are rolled out.

Perhaps we should have an article-categorization developers group?

-- Neil


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Re: enable full file upload for WikipediaNL (Brion
	Vibber)

body:
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 18:17:22 +0100, Daniel Kinzler <daniel at brightbyte.de> wrote:
> I would however like to add another suggestion: Show an extra warning on
> the description-page of media in a potentially dangerous format (or
> rather for any non-image, non-sound format).

That leads to an interesting thought: presumably, non-image files are
already blocked from being included "inline"; but what about the magic
[[Media:...]] links? I know it's pretty dumb to open a file that you
don't know what it is, but some people genuinely are, and it would be
nice to do everything we can to help them. ;) In other words, perhaps
it would make sense to have *three* whitelists:

1) Images: can be uploaded, linked to direct, and included inline
2) Other trusted files (e.g. sounds, videos): can be uploaded, linked
to directly with [[Media:]], but not included inline with [[Image:]]
3) Potentially harmful files (e.g. .zip, .doc): can be uploaded (if
they pass a virus scan), but not linked to directly; users are always
directed to the description page, where they are presented with a
warning message.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Nicholas Moreau

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia trademark being used incorrectly

body:
To whoever was saying there is no difference between
Wikis and Wikipedia, there is.

Wiki is to Wikipedia what Apple is to Granny Smith.
Suppose Granny Smith became the most popular apple
type, and everyone started calling every apple a
Granny Smith. Suddenly, you'd buy what you thought was
a bag of real Granny Smiths, and end up biting into a
Lodi or Gala.

You'd be disappointed.

No offense meant to Ohio or New Zealand, I just chose
random apples. And not bad apple. There's not a bad
apple in the bunch. (I'm just covering my tracks, in
case there's any Wikimedian from these areas.)

Nick Moreau
"Zanimum"

___________________________________________________________
Moving house? Beach bar in Thailand? New Wardrobe? Win ?10k with Yahoo! Mail to make your dream a reality.
Get Yahoo! Mail www.yahoo.co.uk/10k


from_name: Jens Ropers

body:
On 19 Nov 2004, at 17:37, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>> we are not the inventors, owners, or exclusive users of the
>> prefix "wiki".  This leads to a confusing situation where an arbitrary
>> Wiki____ may or may not be a Wikimedia project, and there's no way of
>> knowing without investigating.

>> So you end up with the confusing situation where it's: Wikipedia?
>> that's us.  Wikitravel?  that's someone else.  Wikibooks?  that's us.
>>  Wikicities?  that's someone else. (etc.)

> That is easy to fix. Just put "A Wikimedia project" below the logo of
> each of
> our projects.
>
> -- mav

<aol>
	STRONGLY support.
</aol>

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


body:
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 00:11:35 +0000, Rowan Collins
<rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's certainly an interesting idea. (And as a graduate in artificial
> intelligence, I'm personally intrigued as to what kind of classifier
> is under the hood, but that would be off-topic, so we'll leave that
> for another time).

Apart from a simple textual analysis (an article with the word
"molecules" is quite likely to be about chemistry, an article with the
word "wolf" much less), the existing wiki-links (both forward and
backward) give much hints - if a page links to or is linked from
several pages already in my set, that increases the chance it also is.

> I would therefore suggest it would be better for you to run the
> software yourself (using a database dump from
> http://download.wikimedia.org/) and then to publish the results to the
> wiki(s) in question somehow. Perhaps you could write and run a bot (or
> collaborate with someone who wanted to) which could add the automated
> suggestions to relevant talk pages: "The following may belong here..."
> to Category_talk: pages, and/or "This may belong to the following
> categories..." to the Talk: pages of categories. Or even, if you felt
> particularly dedicated, a bot that helped you add the [[Category:...]]
> tag yourself where it was indeed appropriate.

This last one seems like the way to go - a bot that asks you one page
after one another a yes/no question whether to include it. This can be
done quite fast, much faster than peopling a category by hand, and the
answers that have already been given can of course be used in a type
of learning algorithm to be even better in sorting out later
candidates (although doing so would probably much slow down the bot,
so perhaps it's better to get a start on the 'include' and 'exclude'
categories by hand, then go offline to make the estimates, and after
that do the real work in the abovementioned way).

In fact I have already made such a bot, using the simple algorithm of
asking all pages linked to or from a page already included to create a
list. However, this was before Categories were implemented, and I have
not gone to reprogram it for that purpose yet.

Andre Engels