from_name: Larry Sanger

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: What we need

body:
On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> O.k., I hereby proclaim the following:
> > * We will not tolerate biased content.  The neutral point of view is not
> > open to vote; it's decided.  If you don't like it, go somewhere else.
> >
> > * There are certain other policies as well that basically define us as a
> > community.  We have arrived at them by broad consensus, and they should be
> > respected.  Wikipedians working in good faith should feel empowered to
> > enforce those policies.  They shouldn't have to apologize for doing so!
> >
> > * We will not stop banning vandals.  We should seek out the best ways we
> > know how to make sure that non-vandals are not lumped in with the vandals,
> > but please stop talking as if we'll just stop banning them, because it
> > ain't gonna happen.
> >
> > * We try to help newcomers who want to contribute but don't quite
> > understand the body of good habits (and rules) we've built up.  But we
> > should not and *will* not tolerate forever people who are essentially
> > attempting to undermine the system.  See below.
> >
> > * To whatever extent we are or are not, or should be, a democracy, the
> > following is also true.  We are a benevolent monarchy ruled by a
> > "constitution" or, anyway, a developing body of common law that is not
> > open to interpretation, but not vote.  This has been the case from the
> > beginning, and we aren't going to change that.
>
> None of this is new.

Thanks.  Right, none of it is new, but the fact that you're saying it now,
in the present context when various people are straining to cast one or
more of them in doubt, might be useful to those of us who disagree with
them.

Has anyone posted this on Wikipedia itself yet?

> > In addition to this, it would help a LOT for you to solicit draft
> > statements of policy regarding clear circumstances in which people can be
> > banned for being really egregiously difficult.  There has to be a
> > *reasonably* clear line drawn that distinguishes difficult but
> > on-the-whole useful contributors, on the one hand, from contributors so
> > egregiously difficult that the project suffers from their continued
> > presence.  The policy should codify, for example, the reasons why we did
> > ban 24 and Helga, and the reasons why we might ban Lir.  Let's have a
> > discussion about this, bearing in mind that one option that is *not* on
> > the table is that we might decide *not* to ban people for their trollish
> > behavior at all.  We definitely will, so let's make the policy clearer.
> > You could start the discussion and make it clear that at some point soon,
> > we *will* determine a policy.
> >
> > I don't mean to put words in your mouth of course.  I'm just saying that,
> > IMO, Wikipedia is really suffering, and even losing people.  You're in a
> > position to help embolden the most productive members of the project, who
> > it seems to me are, in at least some cases, getting very discouraged.
>
> I agree with all of this, except with your diagnosis of the current
> situation.  Can you show me examples of "anarchists" who are arguing
> that we "we might decide *not* to ban people for their trollish
> behavior at all"?

First, I DON'T think there is a unified band of people who *call*
themselves anarchists with all the same views.  I frankly don't care about
the word.  The point is that there are now a lot of people about who hate
one or more part of what, in my opinion and it so happens yours, defines
Wikipedia, and that they're trying either to eliminate it or to weaken it
radically (as Cunctator, just for example, would like to do with the
nonbias policy).  Those are the people I am calling "anarchists."  I
should probably call them "Wikianarchists" since their political views
might very well not be in the anarchist camp.

Anyway, you want examples: Cunctator (he is now perfectly clear and
unambiguous about it: see
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/006575.html ).
So I trust that Cunctator disapproves of your recent banning of Lir.  TMC
is another easy example.  If you put the question explicitly, you'd find a
number of others, I'm sure.  One person who wrote to me privately
certainly seems to be of this view.

In response to my "In addition to this..." paragraph above, Toby Bartels
wrote:

> IOW, let's decide before the discussion that we will change policy,
> and only leave the discussion open to *how*.
> I support a discussion about policy for banning what you call "trolls"
> (not that Helga, much less Lir, is *actually* a troll),
> but let's not a priori rule out the views of a sizable group.

So he supports a banning policy himself but thinks that there's "a sizable
group" that opposes it.

To put this all in perspective, it really would help to read through
Wikipedia-l discussion from October and November.  It won't be fun, but I
predict it will be enlightening.

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikitech-l] RE: "Watch this article" and "View article" are not correct

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>>But context-based wording is even better: "View user page", "View
>>Wikipedia
>>page", "View image page". If I remember, an early version of Phase II had
>>context-based wording for these links (green links that stated "User",
>>"Wikipedia" etc)
>>
>OK, I'll try to do that. Is there anything else the old version of the
>software had that the current lacks?
>
As long as you put it that way....Yes.

It used to be that when you used the search function the answer would
show the number of articles that fit the search criterion.  This is very
useful when the results suggest a large number of articles.

Since we are on the search function, it would also help if

    1. articles could come out in some kind of sorted order (perhaps
    with various options available to the user),
    2. simple Boolean search options could be incorporated in the search
    function, and
    3. a system were developed to treat accented characters and their
    unaccented counterparts as equivalent for search purposes

There are a few others that have crossed my mind from time to time but I
can mention them as I think about them

Eclecticology


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization

body:
Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:

> First off, in regards to whether anglicization (or rather
> americinization) is dumbing down...why yes it is. As we all know, the
> biggest argument against using more foreign names for foreign objects
> is, "Oh, but its soooooo confusing".
>
It is, for the Americans. ;-)
With redirects, we can catch all common spellings. The idea is that when
someone who doesn't know the "correct" spelling (if there is such a
thing) links to a topic, (s)he will use, with some likelyhood, the most
common spelling. On the English wikipedia, that's the most common one
*in English*. So, we'd want to put the article under that spelling, as
to avoid redirects as much as possible when reading the 'pedia.

> As for me apoligizing for my past actions and changing my behavior
> before I am banned, I would like to state that I am guilty of heresy
> and I did not vote for the rules or the king
>
You moved into the kingdom, now live by the rules of the king (the
"establiched community", or Jimbo;-) or leave. That simple.

> and I think every person should have free will, choice, and speech.
>
Yes. But in the kingdom, you're bound by the law. You can't cut throats
here just because you feel like it.

> I also am opposed to racism and genocide
>
What has that to do with the discussion? [I'll tell you the answer -
nothing at all]

> and I believe wikipedia should strive to be very very very unamerican
> culture friendly, especially in this era of militant anti-americanism.
>
So the English wikipedia should use more accents in their article titles
because you and armed terrorists tell them to? Now that you mention it,
it *does* fit with your prior actions ;-)

> I demand
>
That alone should get you banned again, IMHO, if said in ernest.
"Demand" here reminds me too much of mentioned terrorists. You are in no
position to demand anything from Jimbo (which it boils down to in the
end); neither am I.

> that the authoritarians recognize the value of other cultures and
> languages and that while a german katze is most certainly a cat,
> Dumkopfmeyerstrasse is never Dumbheadmeyerstreet, no matter how many
> americans say otherwise, unless the local inhabitants decide that the
> americans are right and go and change the street signs.
>
Let's call it Dummkopfmeyerstrasse in the German wikipedia, and call it
what ever is common English spelling in the English wikipedia. As
there's probably no know spelling of this specific street, it would
likely be the German one.

Magnus


from_name: Jason Williams

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Educating newcomers

body:
> >--- Jason Williams <jason at jasonandali.org.uk> wrote:
> >
> >
> >Unfortunately that is not the case if Wikipedia still clings to the

I don't want to be picky, but could we be more careful with
attributions? I didn't say that - it is in fact the opposite
of my view.

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


from_name: Poor, Edmund W

subject: [Wikipedia-l] americanization

body:
Lir,

I know the mailing list has been "spammy" recently, but you might want to take a look at Jimbo's e-mail. He didn't say that discussion of the rules is grounds for banning -- but only repeated violation.

No one talks about banning the Cunctator, although he questions the rules more often than any one else -- even you!

You have complete freedom on the Internet, anywhere you go. With the exception that the owner of the server hosting Wikipedia won't permit certain kinds of edits to the article database.

But any contributions to the encyclopedia project that fit the NPOV rules are fine, and we'd appreciate your cooperation on transliteration, too.

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] [mailto:lapollutionestsimauvaise at yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2002 4:02 AM
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] americanization

genocide involves the destorying of culture. americinization is a form of genocide. stop saying that i should be banned for opposing King Jimbo Wales, whoever that is, he probably would rather see the correct name of things, than the same ol americanized crap.

  _____

Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail  <http://rd.yahoo.com/mail/mailsig/*http://mailplus.yahoo.com> Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up  <http://rd.yahoo.com/mail/mailsig/*http://mailplus.yahoo.com> now

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from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] "Mark all edits minor by default"

body:
On 11/21/02 5:52 AM, "Erik Moeller" <e.moeller at fokus.gmd.de> wrote:

> There's a new preference in CVS now to have edits minor by default, as
> per someone's request on wikipedia-l. This may be helpful for
> copyeditors. I haven't added it to the other Language* files (except for
> German) yet.
>
Please take that out.

Marking edits minor by default is not the right behavior. We want to see
clueless newbie edits by default, and for those of us who hide minor edits
(the only way minor edits are used right now) that would make that not
possible.

What I've seen work is to make summaries mandatory for non-minor edits.

Otherwise we should not change the default settings.


subject: [Wikitech-l] "Mark all edits minor by default"


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Educating newcomers

body:
On 11/21/02 2:35 AM, "Toby Bartels" <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:

> The Cunctator wrote:
>
>> Toby Bartels wrote:
>
>>> In fact, anything that includes *all* of human knowledge must be POV.
>
>> Yup. I would much rather the official Wikipedia definition of neutral
>> point of view actually gibe with the meaning of "neutral point of view"
>> (see [[m:NPOV is an ideal]]) than the convoluted redefinition that
>> stands now.
>
> Hum, I pretty much agree with that Meta-Wikipedia article,
> but I don't see how the *definition* of NPOV is at fault.
> No article will ever perfectly satisfy the current definition,
> which is therefore an ideal, and I don't see any proposal
> for replacing that definition.

That's what "NPOV is an ideal" is.

> Surely you don't want Wikipedia to state as fact
> that George W. Bush is an awful US President!
> But if it doesn't, then it won't contain that piece of knowledge;
> it will at best only contain the knowledge that
> certain people hold that view for certain reasons.
> (Well, it might contain that piece of knowledge for a little while,
> but that would surely be quickly replaced by a more NPOV version,
> as we strive ever more for the elusive NPOV ideal.)

Exactly.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Indoctrinating (was Educating) newcomers

body:
Eclecticology,

Please don't condemn my paternalism, it's one of my best qualities.

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] O.k., let's ban Lir

body:
Lir and Helga have distinct patterns of speech. Lir's English is
excellent, and she probably is American as she said. Helga is obviously
European and not a native speaker of English.

They are similar only in that they both flouted the rules too much.

Ed Poor


list: wikien-l

from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: anglicization

body:
On Thursday 21 November 2002 12:41 am, Magnus Manske wrote:
> With redirects, we can catch all common spellings. The idea is that when
> someone who doesn't know the "correct" spelling (if there is such a
> thing) links to a topic, (s)he will use, with some likelyhood, the most
> common spelling. On the English wikipedia, that's the most common one
> *in English*. So, we'd want to put the article under that spelling, as
> to avoid redirects as much as possible when reading the 'pedia.

Thank you Magnus, that is the main point I've been trying to get across for
some time now. It is also one of the main reasons why my preemptive city
naming convention was never adopted - It is simply stupid and not at all
useful for have an article about the Paris in France at [[Paris, France]]
when the great majority of links to it are through the redirect [[Paris]].

Redirects are also ugly and uninformative in the search results. Their byte
counts show up as tiny and no text is displayed below them. This isn't
useful. Articles should be where they are most likely to be searched for.
External search engines like Google will also rank an article lower at a
non-English title linked via an English redirect for searches for the English
term because our article will not have the H1 title in the searched for
English term (which is going to be the most common thing that English
speakers will be searching for).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Collegial respect and fellowship (was: O.k., let's ban Lir)

body:
> Jonathan Walther wrote:
> > Hearing that makes me very happy.  Lir has a lot she could contribute,
> > if she is willing to work in the spirit of collegial respect and
> > fellowship.
>
> Yes.  One of the great things about wikipedia is how much positive
> good people of wildly different viewpoints can do, if they commit to
> this sense of "collegial respect and fellowship".
>
> --Jimbo

This is why I'm grateful to Jimbo and the Wikipedia community. Even though the server owner thinks I'm a "nut" (no offense meant, I'm sure, and none taken) -- I am generally polite and scrupulous about NPOV and cooperating with my fellow contributors.

In any other forum, my pro-absolutist and pro-Unificationist views would be drowned out in a chorus of derision.

Whoever dreamed up the idea of an NPOV encyclopedia is a genius.

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] O.k., let's ban Lir

body:
On 11/21/02 9:55 AM, "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:

> Lir and Helga have distinct patterns of speech. Lir's English is
> excellent, and she probably is American as she said. Helga is obviously
> European and not a native speaker of English.
>
Lir is Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons], not Helga Jonat.

It's not like there's any big mystery about his identity.


body:
On 11/21/02 10:00 AM, "Erik Moeller" <e.moeller at fokus.gmd.de> wrote:

> On Don, 2002-11-21 at 15:49, The Cunctator wrote:
>
>> Marking edits minor by default is not the right behavior. We want to see
>> clueless newbie edits by default, and for those of us who hide minor edits
>> (the only way minor edits are used right now) that would make that not
>> possible.
>
> You don't understand. It's a user pref.
>
Ah, clarity.


subject: [WikiEN-l] What we need

body:
On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Toby Bartels wrote:

> Larry Sanger wrote:
>
> >Toby Bartels wrote:
>
> >>That's right, we know that you're talking about us,
> >>so don't think that we're not going to take your insults personally.
> >>"offensive political posturing" my eye!
> >>I care about this project as much as you do,
> >>whether you can believe it or not.
>
> >You're trying to *change* the project, Toby.
>
> I'm trying to *change* the project???

OK, maybe not.

> Let's see, there's a discussion on a naming convention
> where I'm in favour of the change,
> but that's hardly central to the project.

I agree there.

> OTOH, I'm defending the NPOV, a very central point, to newbies.

This is good, though it shouldn't be necessary at this point.

> When you came on with ideas about how we were dying
> and you wanted to make us more acceptable to "experts",
> I was part of the chorus of scepticism
> that led you to take your ideas to the sifter project
> (where I think that they can do some good)
> and leave Wikipedia itself unaltered.

You apparently never did read my proposal carefully.  You could actually
go back and read it.  I have *always, always* said that any such project
should leave Wikipedia alone, and the "chorus of scepticism" you joined
was pretty much a chorus of confusion and misunderstanding.

> Now I'm opposed both to the voting movement
> and to the idea of banning more people
> (even though these are coming from opposite groups),

Aha, the latter would be a significant change and would essentially render
Wikipedia an anarchy; we might disagree with that, which is why we might
disagree on the label (wiki-) anarchism.

> although at the same time I support continuing to ban vandals.
> I'm trying to *change* the project???

Not as far as most of those listed items goes.

My point wasn't really about you, Toby.

> >>>* We will not tolerate biased content.  The neutral point of view is not
> >>>open to vote; it's decided.  If you don't like it, go somewhere else.
>
> >>Other than TMC, we irresponsible anarchists agree.
>
> >Except that it seems that at least some of you don't want it to be
> >declared as *set policy*.  That was my point, Toby.
>
> Sure, I'd want to keep NPOV as a set policy.

Thank you, that was my point.

> It's a core value, which I'd like to see on mav's proposed
> terms of conditions page.  Perhaps I'm to the right
> of the other "anarchists" on this, but even Cunc supports NPOV,
> even if he has his whole [[m:NPOV is an ideal]] thing.

No, I don't think he does.  I think he's really confused (if it matters).

> >From some perspective, once Jimbo's last minute dictatorial powers
> pass into the hands of a democratically elected board of trustees,
> then even the NPOV might conceivably be changed --
> heck, it might *conceivably* be changed *now*
> if Jimbo went mad and declared it no longer operational --
> but then I would leave, like you, and join the inevitable fork.
>
> >>Apologise in the sense of justifying the policy?  Certainly.
>
> >Certainly *not*.  We should not *constantly* have to defend long-standing
> >policies against the objections of new people who happen not to like them.
>
> Then how do you expect the new people to learn about them?

Um, how about by reading the policies and the old talk pages about them?

> >>For example, Lir has no business moving [[Christopher Columbus]]
> >>to [[Crist?bal Col?n]] *now*, but it's her business as a Wikipedian
> >>to discuss changing the policy on the list.
>
> >It seems to me she's wasting everyone's time.  If she had asked "Gee, why
> >is this the policy?" she might have learned something.
>
> Not if everybody refused to defend it to her.

In this particular case, the point she's making is such an obvious
nonstarter that (with thanks and respect to those who actually *are*
spending the time) I think it's a waste of time to argue with her.

> As for wasting everybody's time, this seems unlikely
> when several people, including some old hands,
> have come out in agreement with her.

Who, besides you?

> We'll probably lose, and that's OK,
> but the idea that discussion is over is absurd.
> (She could certainly be more diplomatic, however!)
>
> >>Gee, even KQ (the potential loss of whom is
> >>the immediate motivation of this post)
> >>doesn't want to ban anybody himself anymore.
> >>AFAICT, this is because of the practical problems with our methods,
> >>not because of some ideological desire to never ban anybody.
>
> >Let him speak for himself.
>
> Like you let Julie, Michael, and Isis speak for themselves?

Those are different things, Toby.  Yes, OBVIOUSLY Julie, Michael, and Isis
would agree with at least most if not all of the basic laundry list of
defining principles I gave.  The point we're discussing just above,
though, is a totally different kettle of fish.

> But he's subscribed to this list, so I hope that he'll clarify.
> I also help that he'll clarify whether is reasons for leaving
> include what you suggested: weariness at having to deal with
> us anarchists.

Right.  Anyway, that's certainly *my* reason, and Isis has told me as much
in e-mail; and you can look at Julie Hoffman Kemp's page:

> >>>* To whatever extent we are or are not, or should be, a democracy, the
> >>>following is also true.  We are a benevolent monarchy ruled by a
> >>>"constitution" or, anyway, a developing body of common law that is not
> >>>open to interpretation, but not vote.  This has been the case from the
> >>>beginning, and we aren't going to change that.
>
> >>Wait, you mean that the proposers of *voting* are the *anarchists*?
> >>Do you still think that Erik is an anarchist or some such thing?
> >>Get a clue, man!
>
> >Uh, no, Toby, that isn't what I meant.
>
> OK, then what do you mean?  I thought that your opponents were
> anarchists, newbies, and trolls.  Which of these is Erik?
> Actually, anarchist theory has a strong presumption
> that voting is a suspect and corruptible method of democracy
> (although certainly better than anything undemocratic to begin with).

I don't know how you get ANY of that out of the part above that follows
the *.  If you read it, you'll see what I meant.  That's what I meant.

> >>IOW, let's decide before the discussion that we will change policy,
> >>and only leave the discussion open to *how*.
> >>I support a discussion about policy for banning what you call "trolls"
> >>(not that Helga, much less Lir, is *actually* a troll),
> >>but let's not a priori rule out the views of a sizable group.
>
> >Yes, I'm asking Jimbo to take a controversial stand that might offend a
> >group of anarchists.  What amazing gall I have.
>
> I don't think that it requires gall to ask him to take such a stand.
> I *do* think that it requires gall to suggest that
> we make a change in policy that isn't widely agreed upon,
> and move to discussion only about *how* to make that change.

Except that it has already been decided--in the case of 24, Helga, and now
Lir.  And you'll even see in his reply to me that Jimbo is skeptical that
there is anyone who actually opposes it!

> >>You just assume that Jimbo will agree with you about everything.
> >>Well, we'll see.
>
> >No, I certainly do not, Toby.  In fact, I'm very worried that he might
> >disagree on some point that I personally regard as key.
>
> OK, good, I misinterpreted your suggestion that
> "these things shouldn't need saying".
> You only said that he *might* think that,
> and then that he "might not want to say all of them".
> My apologies.

Thank you.

> >>>I'm just saying that,
> >>>IMO, Wikipedia is really suffering, and even losing people.
>
> >>We're losing people and gaining people, and I don't just mean gaining Lir.
> >>If you think that nobody will or should ever leave Wikipedia
> >>(except people that you don't like and so banned, of course),
> >>then you're terribly na?ve.
>
> >Toby, please--I founded this project and have watched it from the
> >beginning.  I know that people leave all the time.  You obviously did not
> >understand my point in your desire to poke holes in whatever I had to say.
>
> I obviously didn't understand your point,
> but it wasn't through any desire to poke holes in whatever you say.

You'll forgive me for continuing to be very skeptical about that.

> My only desire is to do what's best for Wikipedia.
> I'm sorry that you and I don't agree on what that is,
> but both of our hearts are in the right place.

That's a good thing, I agree.

> >The point is that there are a lot of people who just will not work in an
> >environment when trolls can wander around and wreak havoc with no public
> >repercussions.
>
> By "trolls", you mean people like TMC and Lir?

I like to distinguish trolls from trollish behavior.  And there are of
course different kinds of trolls.  I think TMC acted quite trollishly in
choosing his user name.  Other than that, I'm not familiar with much
trollishness on his part.  As for Lir, of course Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons] is a troll.
As far as I can tell, at least half of what he does is specifically
calculated to whip up controversy and upset people, even though he knows
(and obviously doesn't care) that most people working on Wikipedia want to
do so without having to deal with childish nonsense.

> While they both (damnedly) enjoy upsetting people,
> that's not why they're here; they're both trying to contribute.

That's highly debatable in the case of Lir.

> As Wikipedia grows, we'll get more annoying but well-meaning users,

You're not the first one to make *that* observation.

> and unless we become a police state (in an appropriate metaphorical sense),
> we won't be able to get by with only users with thin skins.

You blame people who have a problem with Lir and his ilk on "users with
thin skins," and I think *that attitude* is a problem.  Plenty of users
(and potential users) have plenty thick skins but zero tolerance for
bullshit.

Wikipedia needs to reduce its tolerance for bullshit.  This doesn't
require being a police state; it *does* require ultimate, clear sanctions
enforced as and when needed.  This will then rebuild something we once had
more of: mutual respect and moral authority on the basis of our engaging
in a project the principles upon which we agree and will defend.

This is what I think Jimbo can help us regain.

If you agree, I'm sure he'd appreciate your support.

> Luckily, we don't have to; trolls or no trolls,
> we still get more and more users all the time.

And they will leave faster and faster if the place is infested with
trolls and in the hands of the crowd that thinks there *really are* no
rules.

> >>>"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
> >>>the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell
>
> >>Ah, the voice of arrogance.  I mean, isn't Larry always *obviously* right?
> >>Anybody that disagrees with him is either an ideologue or an idiot,
> >>and that's how it'll always be.
>
> >Boy, have a look in the mirror, dude.
>
> Well, let's see.  I don't merely insist that my opinions are obvious
> when they're challenged, and I don't accuse those that disagree with me
> of being blinded by ideology or being idiots.
> If you want to return my insults with insults,
> then I'm sure that you can find some that actually fit.
>
> But it wasn't fair to bring your sig into the discussion.
> I'm letting my personal feelings slip in here again.
> My apologies.

Thanks.

It wasn't an insult, anyway.  When someone insults you and you tell him to
"look in the mirror," it can mean, "takes one to know one," which would be
an insult, but it can and probably more often means, as the song says,
"Afore you 'cuze me, take a look at yoursel'," which isn't to make any
particular accusation.

Anyway, let's stop this mutual insulting.

You may have the last word if you want it--I really have to get back to
work.

Larry


subject: [Wikipedia-l] [WikiEN-l] Re: What we need (fwd)

body:
I think this should be of considerable interest to readers of Wikipedia-l.
It appeared on Wikien-l.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 03:57:08 -0800
From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: What we need

O.k., I hereby proclaim the following:
> * We will not tolerate biased content.  The neutral point of view is not
> open to vote; it's decided.  If you don't like it, go somewhere else.
>
> * There are certain other policies as well that basically define us as a
> community.  We have arrived at them by broad consensus, and they should be
> respected.  Wikipedians working in good faith should feel empowered to
> enforce those policies.  They shouldn't have to apologize for doing so!
>
> * We will not stop banning vandals.  We should seek out the best ways we
> know how to make sure that non-vandals are not lumped in with the vandals,
> but please stop talking as if we'll just stop banning them, because it
> ain't gonna happen.
>
> * We try to help newcomers who want to contribute but don't quite
> understand the body of good habits (and rules) we've built up.  But we
> should not and *will* not tolerate forever people who are essentially
> attempting to undermine the system.  See below.
>
> * To whatever extent we are or are not, or should be, a democracy, the
> following is also true.  We are a benevolent monarchy ruled by a
> "constitution" or, anyway, a developing body of common law that is not
> open to interpretation, but not vote.  This has been the case from the
> beginning, and we aren't going to change that.

None of this is new.

> In addition to this, it would help a LOT for you to solicit draft
> statements of policy regarding clear circumstances in which people can be
> banned for being really egregiously difficult.  There has to be a
> *reasonably* clear line drawn that distinguishes difficult but
> on-the-whole useful contributors, on the one hand, from contributors so
> egregiously difficult that the project suffers from their continued
> presence.  The policy should codify, for example, the reasons why we did
> ban 24 and Helga, and the reasons why we might ban Lir.  Let's have a
> discussion about this, bearing in mind that one option that is *not* on
> the table is that we might decide *not* to ban people for their trollish
> behavior at all.  We definitely will, so let's make the policy clearer.
> You could start the discussion and make it clear that at some point soon,
> we *will* determine a policy.
>
> I don't mean to put words in your mouth of course.  I'm just saying that,
> IMO, Wikipedia is really suffering, and even losing people.  You're in a
> position to help embolden the most productive members of the project, who
> it seems to me are, in at least some cases, getting very discouraged.

I agree with all of this, except with your diagnosis of the current
situation.  Can you show me examples of "anarchists" who are arguing
that we "we might decide *not* to ban people for their trollish
behavior at all"?

--Jimbo
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] minor changes default

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>>its interesting how upset people have gotten over this minor changes issue
>>without really making any effort to explain it to me
>>
>>how about an option to have the minor changes box checked on default?
>>
>Good idea for copyeditors, and reasonably simple to do, if nobody else wants
>to do it, I can implement it.
>
I don't think it's such a good idea.  It makes it too easy for a person
to sneak in a POV change without anybody noticing.  Sometimes adding the
three-letter word "not" at some place in an article can substantially
change a meaning, yet because it's only a single three-letter there are
people who would consider that minor.

>Also, free of charge, here's a guide for stopping people from getting upset
>about what you do:
>1) Stop being confrontational and silly. We don't need to take ourselves too
>seriously, but the project itself is not a playground.
>2) Apologize to the list for your past behavior of category 1). Apologies
>are something only mature people are capable of, and therefore always a good
>demonstration.
>3) Try to communicate your ideas in a reasonable fashion, arguing logically
>and not emotionally. Be willing to compromise. Be willing to learn.
>
These are all good points.  Unfortunately, when Lir made a series of
minor changes to an article and saved each one separately, her critics
could only respond with a whole lot of attitude thrown in.  The
specifics of the criticism were likely warranted; the attitude was not.
 There was absolutely no need to refer to threats of banning just
because she caused too many entries on the Recent Changes page.

Some of her views have been a little strange, and at times she may have
insisted a little too strongly about those views.  I did look at the
"Minoa" issue where I didn't feel knowledgeable enough to voice an opinion.

As I understand it, she was criticized there for using questionable
references on the internet as sources to back opinion.  That problem is
not really about Lir; she represented only one small manifestation of a
far more serious problem.  Those who argue that since Option A receives
100,000 hits on Google, while Option B receives only 1,000 hits, Option
A must be a superior option are also adding to the problem.

The much more serious problem has to to with the reliability in general
of internet information.  Educational tradition has been that
questioning information sources is not encouraged before a student has
reached university level, and even there it is a relatively recent
phenomenon.  I would venture so far as to say that schools have openly
discouraged any kind of critical thinking; that produces a more
compliant citizenry.

At 14 (if that really is Lir's age) she may not yet have acquired the
skills related to the evaluation of sources.  For many it takes a
several failing term papers at the university level before they get the
point.  The prospect of people relying on internet sources is really scary.

Eclecticology


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re:  transliteration is stupider

body:
On Thursday 21 November 2002 12:44 am, Toby Bartels wrote:
> NPOV, of course, has nothing to do with this (despite what Lir says).
> As you know, NPOV doesn't mean the majority point of view.
> It means presenting every point of view in a manner fair to it.

Key words "in a manner fair to it". In my world view what is most "fair" in
terms of NPOV is to express majority opinions as majority opinions and
minority ones as minority. This also affects the amount of text we give to
any particular opinion in an article. So majority opinions get majority time.
Therefore if something is known by a particular name by the great majority of
English speakers we should reflect this fact in our choice of what to name
the article. So yes, NPOV does most certainly apply.

> A truly NPOV title would be [[The city known to its residents as
> "M?nchen" but commonly called "Munich" in English,
> and which some people argue that we should talk about
> in an article entitled "M?nchen" becuase <blah blah blah>
> but which others argue that we should talk about
> in an article entitled "Munich" because <yada yada yada>]].
> But we can't do this, so we pick one or the other.
> Either is an equally POV choice (since the majority POV
> is as much a POV as going to the original name is),
> which is why we use naming *conventions* instead.

Either is /not/ equally POV. See above. And the description of things go into
the articles themselves, not in titles so that anti-argument is no argument
at all.

> Under the current plan we also have to delve into linguistic usage
> (not *wars* that I can see, but I don't anticipate those in any case),
> to decide which usage is most common.  That's an issue of linguistic usage.

Eh? Finding out what most English speakers actually use is much easier than
having to research what the residents of where the term is derived use it.
Their language evolves too, just like ours. Should we use what they call the
term now, back when the term was coined or some arbitrary date inbetween?
There will also be different spellings and different use of diacriticals to
deal with, not to mention competing terms. How in the world can an
English-only speaker sort this out? The proposed plan is asking way too much
and the more I argue about it the more I am convinced that it would be a very
very bad thing to do.

> I don't know about Lir, but I don't propose such a thing,
> because "mammal" is a common noun, not a proper noun.
> I certainly don't want to change all of our article titles
> back to Proto-Indo-European ^_^!

Well that is the road we will be heading down if this convention takes hold. I
for one will fight tirelessly to stop this from happening. Already there is a
continuum of opinion on how such a convention would work; Lir on the extreme
"all anglicization is bad" end, you in the middle and Ec on the more liberal
and IMO sane side.

> >There is also
> >article rankings by Google to take into consideration: Articles that have
> > the searched-for name in the title are ranked higher. Why should we
> > purposely reduce article rankings and therefore reduce the reach of our
> > content?
>
> This is definitely the best point that I've seen so far.
> You can tell, because I don't have any response to it ^_^!
> I'll have to think about that.

The "Google question" is an important point to consider.

Below are some questions that you haven't answered yet to my recollection.:
1) There is also the fact that the proposed change absolutely requires the use
of a technological fix to work (namely redirects). How is it less complicated
when redirects are absolutely required? Not to mention the fact that the
current display of redirects is rather ugly after following them. To fix this
would require yet another technological fix.
2) Google's language tools can be used as an objective measure of widest usage
whereas the proposed plan depends on subjective choices between different
more native transliterations and language sets.
3) How is it more NPOV when it shuns widest English usage for a minority
naming scheme?
4) What about the audience: How is it more useful for them to use words they
can't pronounce, spell or are familiar with?
6) What about the writers: How is it more useful for them to have articles
that they can't link to directly (or at all when redirects are not made)?
Also, most English speakers do not know how to make the more elaborate
diacrtic marks with their keyboard. So they will have to copy and paste to
make direct links. How is that at all user-friendly?
7) How would the proposed system not cause a chilling effect by favoring
titles that most English speakers don't know? Remember: "Otherwise somebody
will come by later and move the article and probably chide the original
author for their Anglo-centric based ignorance." Just because you won't do
it, doesn't mean that others will be so nice.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] O.k., let's ban Lir

body:
Cunctator, why do you keep calling Lir "Adam" -- which is a boy's name -- when she calls herself a woman and e-mails to the list as "Bridget"?

Ed Poor


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject:
[Wikitech-l] RE: "Watch this article" and "View article" are
	not correct

body:
On Don, 2002-11-21 at 07:28, Brion VIBBER wrote:

> Off the top of my head:
> * 'view changes since <time list was generated>' link on Recentchanges

Sounds like a good idea. Do we want this as a separate link from Recent
Changes in the sidebar, so you would click "New Changes" to get only new
ones? Or just as an option in RC, or as the default view? If we
implement this, it should be in a way where it actually saves us
bandwidth.

Magnus suggested summarizing changes, this also would be helpful, but
I'm still wondering what the most user-friendly way to build this would
be. My personal preference would be something based on JavaScript, but
I'd probably run into fierce opposition there. (Kuro5hin has a "dynamic
comment mode" where you can expand threads without reloading the entire
page, just the comment you want to look at is fetched from the server
and inserted. The same could be done to view details about a change.)
The current non-table based layout loads fast in old browsers, but
doesn't allow good design.

> * http://foo/bar.html. etc didn't add the final punctuation to the link,
> since 99% of the time it's just punctuation, not intended as part of the
> link.

Ah, I just tested that. Yeah, URL parsing is hard. I'll fix this.

> * I had the Esperanto X-system editing stuff working fine on phase II.
> Sigh. Have to finish hacking that back in the right way...

That's your area :-)

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
>
>
>Right, the passwords and cookies are sent over the Net unencrypted.
>They just need to sniff our packets (how rude!).
>
For dogs it's just their way of handshaking. :-)   Shake-a-paw is a
human cultural imposition on the canine nation.
Ec


from_name: Jonathan Walther

body:
On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 10:41:04AM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>Key words "in a manner fair to it". In my world view what is most "fair" in
>terms of NPOV is to express majority opinions as majority opinions and
>minority ones as minority. This also affects the amount of text we give to
>any particular opinion in an article. So majority opinions get majority time.
>Therefore if something is known by a particular name by the great majority of
>English speakers we should reflect this fact in our choice of what to name
>the article. So yes, NPOV does most certainly apply.

We should be more concerned with presenting facts than with opinions.
People turn to an Encyclopedia to find out the truth about things.  Just
regurgitating "what everyone knows" is counter-productive when actual
facts exist.

Believe it or not, NPOV requires the facts to be presented wherever
possible, instead of opinions.

For the record, the above two paragraphs have nothing to do with what
you talked about in the rest of your message.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

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

body:
> >I think techniques for automatically slowing down bots would be the
> >most valuable place to concentrate our efforts.
>
> This sounds promising to me too.
> What's the fastest rate of saving that a legitimate user is likely to use?
> What's the fastest rate of saving that we can expect to keep up with
> if used by a bot?  I'm going make a 0th approximation of 1 minute for each.
> Too slow? too fast?

Although I fear that something that is fast enough is too fast by definition
(if I can keep up with a bot having a certain speed, I will have to have at
 least that speed myself, and it's something one does quite fast, but not the
 fastest of all - correcting a spelling error is often faster).

With that proviso, I can say that faster than 1 minute is certainly being
done by legitimate users. For example, on November 18, maveric made 42 edits
in 20 minutes (as part of his latest naming war with Lir), and jheijmans made
16 edits in 6 minutes on November 12 (disambiguating Helle).

A limit of 1 per minute would be much too strict, in my opinion. One should
really not go further than 2 edits per minute, and even that might be enough
to have some people get irritated and decide not to do 'trivial tasks' such
as going through the 'regular misspellings' or disambiguating pages.

Andre Engels


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: What we need

body:
On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 01:28:34PM -0500, The Cunctator wrote:
>Yes, I think banning people is bad. But it may help the situation since
>everyone needs to take a few steps back and relax, Lir especially. Since I
>trust that Jimbo isn't happy and self-satisfied about banning Lir, I'm not
>overly upset. What we *don't* need is people like Clutch being juvenile with
>Lir's userpage, because public shaming in this manner isn't really the right
>tactic to handle someone like Lir.

If public shaming isn't available to us, then what other methods can we
use?  I don't think Lir is going to shape up within a week.  I didn't
see anyone trying to "shame" Lir; what I saw was Clutch offering an
article that looked like it could really benefit Lir, if he would read
it and take it seriously.

Lir enjoys the community here, but has a strong trollish streak.  He
alienated a lot of people so badly, they may never be able to look at
his edits in an unbiased way.  Maybe his user account should stay
locked, but at the end of the week his IP be unblocked so he can make a
new account, and take a fresh start, with a fresh name, without all the
poisonous bile which makes any attempt at reconciliation impossible.

I further propose that if Lir shows any sign that he hasn't learned his
lesson, he be banned right away again.  He has already wasted an
incredible amount of time and energy of Wikipedians who have tried to
help him and work with him.  He rejected all such help and delighted in
fucking people around.

His edits were trash, and they were all the worse because of our policy
of never deleting information.  I feel that policy needs to be reevaluated.
Not all information is appropriate to an encyclopedia, no matter how
interesting and factual it is.  Like Lirs edits to "Wealth of the
Nations", which just consists of a string of quotes from the book.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] O.k., let's ban Lir

body:
On 11/21/02 10:41 AM, "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:

> Cunctator, why do you keep calling Lir "Adam" -- which is a boy's name -- when
> she calls herself a woman and e-mails to the list as "Bridget"?

Why? Because Lir is Adam [name omitted for privacy reasons].

Adam only calls himself a "paragon of womanhood" because
someone else did. See http://qwert.diaryland.com/021031_8.html.

I assume he uses "Bridget" to maintain the fiction.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: plz let me play chess :<

body:
On Thursday 21 November 2002 06:52 am, Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons]  wrote:
> plz let me play chess with ram-man i have nobody else to play :<

I don't think the block affects your ability to edit meta. I also don't see
why you shouldn't be able to play chess there - even develop articles for
later importing into Wikipedia.

I for one don't have a big problem with your edits -- many, if not most are
quite sensible. What I do have a very big problem with is your apparent
inability to get along with others and work constructively within the
community and respect (however wrong you think they are) our conventions.
This doesn't mean that you can't work to change the conventions.

As somebody has already mentioned Cunctator disagrees with many people here on
many points. But he does it as a community member and doesn't demean others
or their culture and insist that only he is correct and also demand things
(not to mention your assertion that you think most humans as "inferior
lifeforms" and that you are the "world's foremost authority" in presumably
everything). This type of professed arrogance, true or not, doesn't a
community build.  And as Jonathan Walther so elegantly said " The
Encyclopedia doesn't exist to support the community; the community exists to
support the Encyclopedia." So with a fractured or sick community, the
Encyclopedia suffers.

I do wish you can come back in a week and start working with the community
instead of against it.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: What we need

body:
On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, The Cunctator wrote:

> I do not hate what in Jimbo's opinion defines Wikipedia, nor am I
> trying to weaken or eliminate it.  [snip]

I'm sorry I even mentioned your views, Cunc.

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Interlanguage links to Esperanto

body:
On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 11:04, Andre Engels wrote:
> When I click on an Interlanguage link to Esperanto from Dutch, it takes me
> to eo.wikipedia.com. From English, I get to eo.wikipedia.org.

Oops, fixed.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] anglicization

body:
Magnus Manske wrote:

> Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:
>
>> First off, in regards to whether anglicization (or rather
>> americinization) is dumbing down...why yes it is. As we all know, the
>> biggest argument against using more foreign names for foreign objects
>> is, "Oh, but its soooooo confusing".
>
> It is, for the Americans. ;-)
> With redirects, we can catch all common spellings. The idea is that
> when someone who doesn't know the "correct" spelling (if there is such
> a thing) links to a topic, (s)he will use, with some likelyhood, the
> most common spelling. On the English wikipedia, that's the most common
> one *in English*. So, we'd want to put the article under that
> spelling, as to avoid redirects as much as possible when reading the
> 'pedia.

Why such antipathy to redirects?  Whether we choose English spellings or
original spellings, the redirects should still be there.  The only
difference is which way they're pointing.

> So the English wikipedia should use more accents in their article
> titles because you and armed terrorists tell them to? Now that you
> mention it, it *does* fit with your prior actions ;-)

"Armed terrorists!" - That's raising the smell of the debate a little
high isn't it?

>> I demand that the authoritarians recognize the value of other
>> cultures and languages and that while a german katze is most
>> certainly a cat, Dumkopfmeyerstrasse is never Dumbheadmeyerstreet, no
>> matter how many americans say otherwise, unless the local inhabitants
>> decide that the americans are right and go and change the street signs.
>>
> Let's call it Dummkopfmeyerstrasse in the German wikipedia, and call
> it what ever is common English spelling in the English wikipedia. As
> there's probably no know spelling of this specific street, it would
> likely be the German one.

Yes, but many anglophiles would like to believe that there is an English
form even when they have to make it up.

Eclecticology


body:
On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Jonathan Walther wrote:

> Believe it or not, NPOV requires the facts to be presented wherever
> possible, instead of opinions.

One important reason for the neutrality policy is precisely that people
disagree--have different opinions--as to what the facts are.  And those
people of differing opinions are being asked to work on the same project.
The neutrality policy is what allows those people to maintain peace.

>From http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NPOV

Alternative formulation of the policy: assert facts, including facts about
opinions--but don't assert opinions themselves

We sometimes give an alternative formulation of the nonbias policy: assert
facts, including facts about opinions--but don't assert opinions
themselves. By "fact," on the one hand, we mean "a piece of information
about which there is no serious dispute." In this sense, that a survey
produced a certain published result is a fact. That Mars is a planet is a
fact. That 2+2=4 is a fact. That Socrates was a philosopher is a fact. No
one seriously disputes any of these things. So Wikipedians can feel free
to assert as many of them as we can. By "opinion," on the other hand, we
mean "a piece of information about which there is some serious dispute."
There's bound to be borderline cases where we're not sure if we should
take a particular dispute seriously; but there are many propositions that
very clearly express opinions. That God exists is an opinion. That the
Beatles were the greatest rock and roll group is an opinion. That
intuitionistic logic is superior to ordinary logic is an opinion. That the
United States was wrong to drop the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and
Nagasaki is an opinion.

For determining whether something is fact or opinion in this sense, it
does not matter what the actual truth of the matter is; there can at least
in theory be false "facts" (things that everybody agrees upon, but which
are, in fact, false), and there are very often true "opinions," though
necessarily, it seems, there are more false ones.

Wikipedia is devoting to stating facts and only facts, in this sense.
Where we might want to state opinions, we convert that opinion into a fact
by attributing the opinion to someone. So, rather than asserting, "God
exists," which is an opinion, we can say, "Most Americans believe that God
exists," which is a fact, or "Thomas Aquinas believed that God exists,"
which is also a fact. In the first instance we assert an opinion; in the
second and third instances we convert that opinion into a fact by
attributing it to someone. In presenting an opinion, moreover, it is
important that we bear in mind that there are sometimes even disagreements
about how opinions might be best stated; sometimes, it will be necessary
to qualify the description of an opinion or to present several
formulations, simply to arrive at an overall characterization that fairly
represents all the leading views of the situation.

But it's not enough, to express the Wikipedia nonbias policy, just to say
that we should state facts and not opinions. When asserting a fact about
an opinion, it is important also to assert facts about competing opinions,
and to do so without implying that any one of the opinions is correct.
It's also generally important to give the facts about the reasons behind
the views, and to make it clear who holds them. (It's often best to cite a
prominent representative of the view.)

(end of quote)

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


subject: [WikiEN-l] Facts and NPOV

body:
On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 02:35:40PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>On controversial topics, such as politics, all we can ever say with
>certainty is that X said Y about Z. Even then, sometimes X turns around
>and says Y2 about Z later on!

No, because opinions that contradict known facts have no need to be
represented.  A propagandist can say "Most of the Arab world firmly
believes Jews eat the blood of non-Jewish children", but does that
opinion really belong in an article on Judaism?  By asserting that some
people believe something, without some basis, you give tacit endorsement
that "yes, thats one more valid opinion".  But I am also opposed to
putting such an opinion in just so one can bash the opinion (and in so
doing, bash all Arabs by proxy).

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

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

subject: [Wikipedia-l] bot

body:
The french wiki will be running a bot in a couple of
days. It is meant to automatically create the frame
for years, from year 0 to year 2000 (except the ones
that already exist)

The bot will also automatically create the
international links.
I checked yesterday on several wikipedias to try to
determine how each one named years. You will find
below the wikipedias which are concerned, and the way
years are set.
The first number is describing the years after
official christ birth, and the second the way years
are defined before christ birth.

1) could you please check I did not make mistake for
your wikipedia ?

2) could you please add info where it is missing if it
has already been determined ? For example, I was not
able to say how german were naming the pages before
christ

3) when your wiki is missing and year naming has been
determined, could you please add it ?

Francais (fr) : [[xxxx]] et [[?]]
Anglais (en) : [[xxxx]] et [[xxxx BCE]]
Allemand (de) : [[xxxx]] et [[?]]
Esperanto (eo) : [[xxxx]] et [[-xxxx]]
Espagnol (es) : [[xxxx]] et [[?]]
Polonais (pl) : [[xxxx]] et [[?]]
Hollandais (nl) : [[xxxx]] et [[xxxx v. Chr.]]
Portugais (pt) : [[?]] et [[?]]
Danois (da) : [[?]] et [[?]]

thanks

__________________________________________________
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body:
There's a new preference in CVS now to have edits minor by default, as
per someone's request on wikipedia-l. This may be helpful for
copyeditors. I haven't added it to the other Language* files (except for
German) yet.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


subject: [Wikipedia-l] americanization

body:
Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:

> genocide involves the destorying of culture. americinization is a form
> of genocide.

However true that may be, it's grossly impolite to say so.

> stop saying that i should be banned for opposing King Jimbo Wales,
> whoever that is, he probably would rather see the correct name of
> things, than the same ol americanized crap.

Banning threats are not a constructive form of debate.

Jimbo Wales is the fiscal benefactor of this project, but as a monarch
is very tolerant of the silliness of some of his subjects.  He also has
the wisdom of mostly remaining silent in these debates.  A lot of the
rules in this discussion are not his doing; the evidence does not
support an accusation of lese-majesty.

Eclecticology


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: bot

body:
On Thursday 21 November 2002 11:59 am, Anthere wrote:
> Anglais (en) : [[xxxx]] et [[xxxx BCE]]
Change [[xxxx BCE]] to [[xxxx BC]] for pre-0 dates

> Espagnol (es) : [[xxxx]] et [[?]]
Change [[?]] to [[xxxx adC]] for pre-0 dates

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Facts and NPOV

body:
On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 03:13:28PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
>The chief difference between science and politics is that most of the people who publish scholarly articles on scientific subjects are on a quest for verifiable knowledge, while most people who write about politics are partisans, purely promoting their point of view for selfish or party gain.
>
>In science, there is a gentleman's agreement to share data and to replicate one another's findings, for the express purpose of adding to human knowledge. That's why there are no edit wars about the [[Mars]] article.

I don't think so.  I observed the way Scientific American magazine
trashed Bjorn Lomborg.  Looking for controversy in an article on Mars is
like looking for controversy in an article on Moses; there may be some,
but in general you aren't going to find a lot.

>In politics, every sovereign nation places its "national interests" above all other considerations. Nations are perfectly willing to lie, cheat and murder.
>How can you jump from discussion of the partisanship of politics to the cooperation inherent in science so glibly?

Scientists often falsify (and not in the Karl Popper sense) data and use
statistics in a misleading way to get the results they need to get their
grant money.  Science will say roughly whatever the person with the
grant money wants to hear.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

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

body:
On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Jonathan Walther wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 02:35:40PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> >On controversial topics, such as politics, all we can ever say with
> >certainty is that X said Y about Z. Even then, sometimes X turns around
> >and says Y2 about Z later on!
>
> No, because opinions that contradict known facts have no need to be
> represented.  A propagandist can say "Most of the Arab world firmly
> believes Jews eat the blood of non-Jewish children", but does that
> opinion really belong in an article on Judaism?  By asserting that some
> people believe something, without some basis, you give tacit endorsement
> that "yes, thats one more valid opinion".  But I am also opposed to
> putting such an opinion in just so one can bash the opinion (and in so
> doing, bash all Arabs by proxy).

The NPOV statement, URL given earlier, actually addresses this.

In describing opinions it's necessary to do so *in a way* with which all
parties to the relevant disputes can agree.  The declaration, "Most of the
Arab world firmly believes Jews eat the blood of non-Jewish children,"
would not count as neutral, not only because it's obviously false on the
view of virtually anyone, but because Arabs could not agree with such a
formulation of their own views.

Neutrality requires subtlety and intelligence.  Bias is easy, and
demonstrates intellectual laziness.  Neutrality also sometimes requires
extremely in-depth knowledge of the subject matter: it can take a high
degree of mature understanding in order to state various views on
controversial issues in such a way that all parties to the dispute can
agree the dispute has been described fairly.

(Even the above is incomplete; again, see [[NPOV]].)

Larry
--
"We have now sunk to a depth at which the re-statement of the obvious is
the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell


from_name: Zoe

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Duplicate messages?

body:
Is anybody else getting duplicate mail messages?
Zoe

---------------------------------
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Facts and NPOV

body:
> >In science, there is a gentleman's agreement to
> share data and to replicate one another's findings,
> for the express purpose of adding to human
> knowledge. That's why there are no edit wars about
> the [[Mars]] article.

Sorry, but here, you are deeply wrong. If there is no
edit war on this article, it is just that the right
people are not there. I kinda know quite a bit about
the issue of life on Mars, closely knowing people
working on that very subject. Believe me, battles are
homeric. Facts had been distorted for labs to get
public funds. Facts have been distorted for missions
not to be cancelled. It is quite a pain for european
labs to get samples brought back by a non-european
mission. Articles reviews can be *arranged*. Where
there is money and power, there is no gentleman
agreement that exists. And there's no research without
money and power struggle. Don't presume to much on
Human Knowledge wish.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus ? Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] sumer and wealth of nations

body:
Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:

> It has been said I am blocked for my work on sumer and wealth of
> nations. Nobody has directed a complaint regarding this to me before.
> I see no reason why you wouldn't be willing to discuss things.

I just looked at both of these articles and their talk pages, and there
is no apparent cause for this drastic action.  These actions against Lir
are reminiscent of sharks on a hysterical feeding frenzy.


body:
On Don, 2002-11-21 at 12:35, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> How many people actually find this distinction between major/minor edits
> useful?  Most of us leave minor edits enabled anyway, so we can see
> potential vandals try to sneak by.  Shouldn't that be part of the social
> contract?  For the benefit you receive from the Wikipedia, you need to
> be in a position where you can see the litter if you decide to be an
> editor?  And if you can see the litter, it's up to you if you want to
> leave it, or clean it up...  I am in favor of abolishing the distinction
> entirely.

Hi Jon,

I think the distinction does make sense, but it can be abused easily. So
in the long term, we might want to plan giving the "minor edit" option
only to a selection of users (every signed in user || every signed in &
validated user || every trusted user || every user who has made >x
contributions ..). Then it wouldn't be as problematic if some people
chose to filter minor edits.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


subject: [Wikipedia-l] americanization

body:
Yes, she does.  She's said so frequently.
Zoe
 tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:
Do you think the French wikipedia should write "london" instead of
"londres"?

---------------------------------
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] why am I banned? :<

body:
Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:

> I do not understand why I have been banned. I do not understand why
> nobody has bothered to specifically address anything I have done
> wrong, with the exception of those who reverted various changes I have
> made after which I have moved on to other topics and in many cases one
> should note that my changes have, at the very least, been partially
> accepted.
>
> Anyone examing my user contributions will see that I have been doing
> nothing but working on topics such as blackbody, wilhelm wien,
> electromagnetic radiation, etc., while being harrased by Clutch who
> repeatedly vandalized my page and insulted everything I did, without
> explanation of what he did not like.
>
> Why am I being banned and why has no attempt been made to explain what
> it is I have done that is so offensive? What am I supposed to do for
> the next week? I have nothing to do ever. My whole life I just sit
> around wishing I had something productive to do and now you ban me for
> trying to correct the numerous errors I found in your naming schema?
>
> i think ill go kill myself
>
The last bit of dramatics is singularly unhelpful for those of us who
are not convinced that you have committed a banning offence.  As to your
suicide bluff - if it's your body, it's your right.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] plz let me play chess :<

body:
Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:

> plz let me play chess with ram-man i have nobody else to play :<

Please don't whine.
Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia slowdown

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:

> Just 20 minutes ago there was a dramatic slowdown in the Wikipedia.  Now
> I can't access the pages at all.  Is Lir doing something nasty in the
> way of big queries?  Is there a regularly scheduled cron job doing this?
> My attempts to access various pages on the 'pedia are just timing out.

The gratuitous and slanderous innuendo about Lir is a fine example
sharklike behaviour.  I see no evidence that she has the technical
ability to do what you suggest.  Perhaps you should apologize to her.

Eclecticology


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: What we need

body:
On 11/21/02 12:30 PM, "Larry Sanger" <lsanger at nupedia.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Jimmy Wales wrote:
>>> I don't mean to put words in your mouth of course.  I'm just saying that,
>>> IMO, Wikipedia is really suffering, and even losing people.  You're in a
>>> position to help embolden the most productive members of the project, who
>>> it seems to me are, in at least some cases, getting very discouraged.
>>
>> I agree with all of this, except with your diagnosis of the current
>> situation.  Can you show me examples of "anarchists" who are arguing
>> that we "we might decide *not* to ban people for their trollish
>> behavior at all"?
>
> First, I DON'T think there is a unified band of people who *call*
> themselves anarchists with all the same views.  I frankly don't care about
> the word.  The point is that there are now a lot of people about who hate
> one or more part of what, in my opinion and it so happens yours, defines
> Wikipedia, and that they're trying either to eliminate it or to weaken it
> radically (as Cunctator, just for example, would like to do with the
> nonbias policy).  Those are the people I am calling "anarchists."  I
> should probably call them "Wikianarchists" since their political views
> might very well not be in the anarchist camp.
>
> Anyway, you want examples: Cunctator (he is now perfectly clear and
> unambiguous about it: see
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/006575.html ).
> So I trust that Cunctator disapproves of your recent banning of Lir.  TMC
> is another easy example.  If you put the question explicitly, you'd find a
> number of others, I'm sure.  One person who wrote to me privately
> certainly seems to be of this view.

I do not hate what in Jimbo's opinion defines Wikipedia, nor am I trying to
weaken or eliminate it. Larry's assertion that I want to weaken the nonbias
policy radically is a gross and unfortunate misinterpretation.

Yes, I think banning people is bad. But it may help the situation since
everyone needs to take a few steps back and relax, Lir especially. Since I
trust that Jimbo isn't happy and self-satisfied about banning Lir, I'm not
overly upset. What we *don't* need is people like Clutch being juvenile with
Lir's userpage, because public shaming in this manner isn't really the right
tactic to handle someone like Lir.

In other words, it's not people making wrong or somewhat harmful decisions
that upsets me--we all do that, and often necessarily. It's people taking
pleasure from making those kinds of decisions.

Or to use analogy: I think prisons are dehumanizing institutions that harm
society by their mere existence. That does not mean that I think that
everyone in prison should be released, and that we should dismantle our
criminal justice system. I do think that it means that we should spend more
money on education and civic empowerment than on building jails, and that we
should not criminalize homeless, etc. In other words, try to change society
so that prisons are needed as little as possible.

But as Mr. Sanger has said, the record exists, and people can derive their
own interpretation as they wish.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] americanization

body:
You know Zoe, most of your posts are a real mystery to
me...

Who is she ?

Is it okay to answer "yes she does" to a "do you think
this should be" ?

Since when is an encyclopedia talking ?

What is "frequent" ?

Did you ever go on the french wiki and check the
"Londres" article (please some bilingual do something
for that poor lonesome city...)

I am at a loss really

--- Zoe <zoecomnena at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Yes, she does.  She's said so frequently.
> Zoe
>  tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:
> Do you think the French wikipedia should write
> "london" instead of
> "londres"?
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus ? Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com


body:
Poor, Edmund W wrote:

>This is why I'm grateful to Jimbo and the Wikipedia community. Even though the server owner thinks I'm a "nut" (no offense meant, I'm sure, and none taken) -- I am generally polite and scrupulous about NPOV and cooperating with my fellow contributors.
>
We need nuts to control the loose screws~ :-)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia slowdown

body:
On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 01:21:02PM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>Just 20 minutes ago there was a dramatic slowdown in the Wikipedia.  Now
>>I can't access the pages at all.  Is Lir doing something nasty in the
>>way of big queries?  Is there a regularly scheduled cron job doing this?
>>My attempts to access various pages on the 'pedia are just timing out.
>
>The gratuitous and slanderous innuendo about Lir is a fine example
>sharklike behaviour.  I see no evidence that she has the technical
>ability to do what you suggest.  Perhaps you should apologize to her.

"She" turns out to be a young male, at least 18 years of age and
probably in his 20's.  Cunc can provide more details, I think.  It
changes my whole perception of "her".

At 18, I would have had no problem remembering people mentioning on the
mailing list here "be careful about using the URL interface to doing
raw SQL queries, because some queries can REALLY SLOW THE DATABASE
DOWN".  We have no idea about this young mans technical abilities, good
or bad.  We do know he was immature and unstable enough to threaten to
commit suicide on a public mailing list.  He also posted on my
Eleutherphilic Creed article yesterday that the Wikipedia didn't
provide any value over the same information being scattered all over
the web...  Sounds to me like he doesn't really care about the Wikipedia
itself, and is getting a charge out of getting people here riled up.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

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

subject: [Wikipedia-l] bot

body:
>===== Original Message From wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org =====
>The french wiki will be running a bot in a couple of
>days. It is meant to automatically create the frame
>for years, from year 0 to year 2000 (except the ones
>that already exist)

BTW, I believe that the calender doesn't actually have a year 0; it went
straight from -1 to 1 the next year. Hence causing all the pointless arguments
over whether to celebrate the new millennium on jan 1 2000 or jan 1 2001.


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: "Mark all edits minor by default"

body:
On Thursday 21 November 2002 06:52 am, The Cunctator wrote:
> Please take that out.
>
> Marking edits minor by default is not the right behavior. We want to see
> clueless newbie edits by default, and for those of us who hide minor edits
> (the only way minor edits are used right now) that would make that not
> possible.

I agree - even though the majority of my edits are minor to moderate I know
the opposite is true for many other people. It would be nice, however, to
have this as a user-selectable option that is off by default (hence, the
default would require the user to explicitly mark an edit as minor).

BTW, why do anonymous IPs have the ability to mark edits as minor? That wasn't
the case for Phase II. The way it is now "hide minor edits" is useless
because most vandals are anonymous and oftentimes mark their vandalisms as
"minor". I therefore don't use the hide minor edits feature.

> What I've seen work is to make summaries mandatory for non-minor edits.

Sound like an interesting idea.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Duplicate messages?

body:
Zoe wrote:

> Is anybody else getting duplicate mail messages?
>
Yes, but this seems to happen when you are on more than one mailing
list, and the other of the message has posted the message to more than
one list.

Eclecticology


body:
On Don, 2002-11-21 at 07:28, Brion VIBBER wrote:
> * http://foo/bar.html. etc didn't add the final punctuation to the link,
> since 99% of the time it's just punctuation, not intended as part of the
> link.

OK, after playing with the regex for an hour or so, I think I got this
to work properly. The following characters are no longer included in
URLs (those without brackets around them) if they occur at the end:

	,;.:

It's committed to CVS.

Regards,

Erik

--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


subject: [WikiEN-l] Facts and NPOV

body:
Clutch wrote:

> We should be more concerned with presenting facts than with opinions.
> People turn to an Encyclopedia to find out the truth about things.
Just
> regurgitating "what everyone knows" is counter-productive when actual
> facts exist.
>
> Believe it or not, NPOV requires the facts to be presented wherever
> possible, instead of opinions.

Okay, then the facts are:
* Arabs want to eliminate Israel completely.
* There are no "Palestinians" other than Palestinian Arabs
* Jordan *is* the Palestinian state.
* Propagandists like you think lying and murdering are justified.

Now that we're all agreed on that, RK and I will go ahead and ....

Huh? What's that you say? Those aren't the facts?

What are they, then? Just my opinion?

Golly, it sounds like you and I can't agree on what the facts are, even
if we both agree that we should present the facts wherever possible.

So what can we do? I guess we have to agree to disagree, and just say
that Source A thinks the facts are X, and Source B thinks the facts are
Y.

Which is exactly where we were before.

On controversial topics, such as politics, all we can ever say with
certainty is that X said Y about Z. Even then, sometimes X turns around
and says Y2 about Z later on!

In a spirit of collegial cooperation,

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Changes starting from ..

body:
On Don, 2002-11-21 at 12:54, Brion Vibber wrote:

> I hacked it back in, more or less replicating the old behavior. (I only
> put in translations for English and Esperanto.) Enjoy!

Neat! Of course with the current implementation you have to keep an RC
window open. Hmm, I wonder if it would make sense to have

	Recent Changes (*)

where the * would show only changes made after the last view, stored in
the user table. It's not very user friendly, but possibly better than
yet another sidebar link, and we already use the * syntax for Talk.

Should we have a page on meta for logging the translations we still
need?

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


subject: [WikiEN-l] Facts and NPOV

body:
On 11/21/02 2:35 PM, "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> Okay, then the facts are:
> * Arabs want to eliminate Israel completely.
> * There are no "Palestinians" other than Palestinian Arabs
> * Jordan *is* the Palestinian state.
> * Propagandists like you think lying and murdering are justified.
>
> Now that we're all agreed on that, RK and I will go ahead and ....
>
> Huh? What's that you say? Those aren't the facts?
>
> What are they, then? Just my opinion?
>
> Golly, it sounds like you and I can't agree on what the facts are, even
> if we both agree that we should present the facts wherever possible.
>
> So what can we do? I guess we have to agree to disagree, and just say
> that Source A thinks the facts are X, and Source B thinks the facts are
> Y.

We can also have people provide evidence for their assertions. We can only
say "Mars is a planet"--and have that have any meaning--because of of how we
have defined "planet", and the observational record that correlates with
that definition.

Saying that Source A thinks X and Source B thinks Y is just part of that
process. It is a valid starting point, but it is not the end.


from_name: Paul Ebermann

subject: [Wikipedia-l] plz let me play chess :<

body:
Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] skribis:
> plz let me play chess with ram-man i have nobody else to play :<
>

Why don't you do this on the meta-wikipedia?

There it is (a little bit) on topic ...

Paul


body:
Oliver Pereira wrote:

>Is there an agreed definition of what is or is not a "minor edit"? I
>haven't been able to find one, so I've just been guessing. I suspect that
>most people are just guessing. So if it's such a big deal to people,
>perhaps there should be clearer guidelines on what should or should not be
>marked as a minor edit. Perhaps the "minor edit" box should have a link by
>it, with the text "What is a minor edit?", linking to a page of such
>guidelines.
>
I shudder at the thought of having yet another rule.  Ultimately,
people's common sense should prevail.  If I'm reviewing changes to an
article that interests me as an editor, I'll look at all the changes
both major and minor.  If I'm reviewing it as a reader, I'll stick to
the major changes.

Eclecticology


body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>>Since we are on the search function, it would also help if
>>
>>    1. articles could come out in some kind of sorted order (perhaps
>>    with various options available to the user),
>>
>The problem is - what order should that be? And would it not cost too much
>too check it?
>
Alphabetical would be a good start.  Even reverse alphabetical.  Other
options are conceivable with a check box.

>>    2. simple Boolean search options could be incorporated in the search
>>    function, and
>>
>they can; I already use them (I'm going through years looking for events,
>and to avoid getting all the RanMan demography data in between, I make
>searches like "819 and not households".
>
Forgive me if I'm missing something.  It could be that all we need
somewhere is an explanation of just what can be done using the Wikipedia
search function.

Thanks for your reply,
Eclecticology


subject: [WikiEN-l] Facts and NPOV

body:
The Wikipedia should not say that most of the Arab world firmly believes
ANYTHING, unless there has been a survey or something. Rather, it should
say,
* Leader X of country Y has repeatedly announced...
* Newspaper A of country B often prints editorials saying...

Which I think is what the articles do say.

Do you support NPOV?

And what is your user name on Wikipedia? I'm getting confused about who
is who.

Ed Poor, aka [[user:Ed Poor]]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Facts and NPOV

body:
The chief difference between science and politics is that most of the people who publish scholarly articles on scientific subjects are on a quest for verifiable knowledge, while most people who write about politics are partisans, purely promoting their point of view for selfish or party gain.

In science, there is a gentleman's agreement to share data and to replicate one another's findings, for the express purpose of adding to human knowledge. That's why there are no edit wars about the [[Mars]] article.

In politics, every sovereign nation places its "national interests" above all other considerations. Nations are perfectly willing to lie, cheat and murder.

How can you jump from discussion of the partisanship of politics to the cooperation inherent in science so glibly?

Ed Poor


subject: [WikiEN-l] Facts and NPOV

body:
Anthere, vous avais raison.

Ah, excusez-moi, nous sommes chez wikipedia anglais.

What I mean, Anthere, is that you are right: there is controversy about life on Mars. The part all scientists agree on, is that Mars is a planet.

As for the battles and distortions, we need only look at the global warming issue.

Ed Poor (aka [[user:Edmond Le Pauvre]])


body:
On Don, 2002-11-21 at 15:49, The Cunctator wrote:

> Marking edits minor by default is not the right behavior. We want to see
> clueless newbie edits by default, and for those of us who hide minor edits
> (the only way minor edits are used right now) that would make that not
> possible.

You don't understand. It's a user pref.

Regards,

Erik
--
FOKUS - Fraunhofer Insitute for Open Communication Systems
Project BerliOS - http://www.berlios.de


subject: [WikiEN-l] Facts and NPOV

body:
Given the trashing of Lomborg by Scientific American and the faking of
data for grant money, there is plainly a need for NPOV in science as
well as in politics.

Researcher A says there's a warming trend; researcher B says there
isn't. And C says the sunspot cycle correlates with temperature more
closely than carbon dioxide level does; while agency D never mentions
the sunspot cycle in any of their reports.

So much of what "we all know" often turns out to be propaganda. My hope
is that by naming the voices in the clamor, we can give listeners a
chance to discern the voice of reason. We'll lead them to the water, but
we shouldn't force them to drink it.

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] "Mark all edits minor by default"

body:
On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 15:54, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> The only other thing, which is I think why there's a check box for
> "minor edit" in the first place, is that a lot of people don't want to
> see minor edits: the "view minor edits" option is off by default.

"*Hide* minor edits" is off by default. Logged-in users may, at their
option, enable it and hide minor edits.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Minor edits

body:
On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 15:58, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> I propose that we restrict the "mark edit as minor" option to signed-in
> contributors, on the grounds that it will help protect against
> vandalism.

We used to do exactly this. When and why did it change?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] The sweden site must be updated!

body:
Max,

This is the right place!

And I am forwarding your request to the Wikitech-l mailing list, at Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org -- see http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l for old discussion.

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikitech-l] FW: [Wikipedia-l] The sweden site must be updated!

body:
-----Original Message-----
From: Max Walter [mailto:taxen at telia.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2002 4:15 PM
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] The sweden site must be updated!

I'm new to the list and I don't know if this is the right place to ask
this question: We in Sweden wonder when sv.wikipedia.com will be
updated to the new version? Who should we contact to solve this issue?

//Max Walter (taxen at telia.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia slowdown

body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:

> Just 20 minutes ago there was a dramatic slowdown in the Wikipedia.  Now
> I can't access the pages at all.  Is Lir doing something nasty in the
> way of big queries?  Is there a regularly scheduled cron job doing this?
> My attempts to access various pages on the 'pedia are just timing out.
Lir can't run queries, and neither can you, Jonathan. Only users with "sysop" privileges can run queries.

None of the queries I've run have taken longer than a few seconds to return, even though some of this cross-linked between 2 or more tables -- so I don't think dramatic slowdowns are being caused by ad hoc queries.

Brion or someone eles explained a few days ago about how MySQL makes one query wait for another. I suspect that these forced waits tend to "cascade", if you know what that means.

Ed Poor


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia slowdown

body:
On 11/21/02 4:34 PM, "Jonathan Walther" <krooger at debian.org> wrote:
> At 18, I would have had no problem remembering people mentioning on the
> mailing list here "be careful about using the URL interface to doing
> raw SQL queries, because some queries can REALLY SLOW THE DATABASE
> DOWN".  We have no idea about this young mans technical abilities, good
> or bad.  We do know he was immature and unstable enough to threaten to
> commit suicide on a public mailing list.  He also posted on my
> Eleutherphilic Creed article yesterday that the Wikipedia didn't
> provide any value over the same information being scattered all over
> the web...  Sounds to me like he doesn't really care about the Wikipedia
> itself, and is getting a charge out of getting people here riled up.

No, he really cares about Wikipedia. That's the problem.

http://qwert.diaryland.com/021120_73.html

This whole scene is a repetition of tedious Usenet wars, where both sides
think that being online allows for more rudeness, not less. Lir's rudeness
comes in the form of seeing wp az jst ant4r kewl haxor site fiting r fr33d0m
and teasing all the stuck-up people who treat him like an idiot, and the
rudeness on the other side is from people being stuck up and treating him
like an idiot.

Or to put it another way: once you assume Lir's behavior comes from not
caring about Wikipedia, you've missed what's actually going on.

And if you take his "i'm going to commit suicide" comment seriously, you're
missing what's going on.

He's fallen into the insidious trap that using an online persona can create:
acting to meet expectations. That is to say, he's already got the standard
anti-authority mindset of young college students, but people here have
treated him like he's an unstable, deranged girl, and whenever he makes some
inane comment people react, so he keeps it up.


body:
Ray wrote:

> We need nuts to control the loose screws~ :-)

LOL, I resemble that remark!

Ed Poor


from_name: Mark Christensen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Educating newcomers

body:
> >Unfortunately that is not the case if Wikipedia still clings to the
> >notion that it would cover human knowledge. The only requirement for
> >that is to be humans. Tigers and whales can set up their "Tigers and
> >Whales" encyclopedia.
>
> No, what you should say is: That is not the case if Wikipedia
> clings *only* to the notion that it will cover human
> knowledge. But it *also* clings to certain other notions,
> such as NPOV. POV writers can set up theire POV encyclopaedia.

Not to mention that there are some important assumptions about what we
are doing inherent in calling it "a compendium of human knowledge" --
not a compendium of "information about what humans think."

Knowledge is more than just information, it's information we are
warranted in believing to be true.  Alternatively some philosophers
would say that knowledge is information we are justified in believing to
be true.   But no matter what you call it, there's something which must
be added to mere belief which makes it knowledge, and unless we are
willing to give up on knowledge all together we'll have to require
something more than mere humanity, we require accurate reporting of
known true information.

One of the ways we know things to be true, is that the "experts"
investigate and tell us what they have discovered.  Everything I know
about subatomic partials I learned this way.  And since "western
education" has produced a large number of experts in a large number of
fields, we ought never discount the value they bring to our project.  At
the same time, there are experts on agricultural techniques who live in
Zambia and have never seen the inside of a "western school."  They have
a different knowledge set than the average agriculture student in the
U.S., but it they have real and valuable knowledge to bring to the
project.   Either way, being human is not what makes you able to
contribute to Wikipedia, it is the ablility to communicate knowledge
about some subject.


body:
There's not really much of a rule, except that if you make a change that you KNOW is really big or controversial and mark it as minor, you're going to tick off the NPOV umpires.

The only other thing, which is I think why there's a check box for "minor edit" in the first place, is that a lot of people don't want to see minor edits: the "view minor edits" option is off by default.

If you've merely corrected the spelling of they're to their, or fixed a [[broken link] to a [[good link]] -- I might not want to know about it. (Except for the anti-vandalism squad, who keep "view minor edits" on all the time).

Ed Poor


body:
That's not why Jimbo banned her. How can you be so obtuse?

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Ray Saintonge [mailto:saintonge at telus.net]
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2002 3:46 PM
To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] sumer and wealth of nations

Bridget [name omitted for privacy reasons] wrote:

> It has been said I am blocked for my work on sumer and wealth of
> nations. Nobody has directed a complaint regarding this to me before.
> I see no reason why you wouldn't be willing to discuss things.

I just looked at both of these articles and their talk pages, and there
is no apparent cause for this drastic action.  These actions against Lir
are reminiscent of sharks on a hysterical feeding frenzy.

_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikitech-l] Minor edits

body:
Mav wrote (on the other list):

> BTW, why do anonymous IPs have the ability to mark edits as minor?
> That wasn't the case for Phase II. The way it is now "hide minor edits"
> is useless because most vandals are anonymous and oftentimes mark
> their vandalisms as "minor".

I propose that we restrict the "mark edit as minor" option to signed-in contributors, on the grounds that it will help protect against vandalism.

Ed Poor


from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Lir's demands

body:
>I demand that the authoritarians recognize the value of other cultures
and
>languages and that while a german katze is most certainly a cat,
>Dumkopfmeyerstrasse is never Dumbheadmeyerstreet, no matter how many
americans
>say otherwise, unless the local inhabitants decide that the americans
are
>right and go and change the street signs.

Your authoritarian demand is rejected.

--
 Sean Barrett
 sean at epoptic.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] vandalism spree

body:
>>I think techniques for automatically slowing down bots would be the
>>most valuable place to concentrate our efforts.

>This sounds promising to me too.
>What's the fastest rate of saving that a legitimate user is likely to
use?
>What's the fastest rate of saving that we can expect to keep up with
>if used by a bot?  I'm going make a 0th approximation of 1 minute for
each.
>Too slow? too fast?

I often prepare a set of inter-related articles and upload them using
multiple browser tabs, saving them as fast as I can click the button.
There's no reason I couldn't wait between saves, but I don't want to....

--
 Sean Barrett
 sean at epoptic.com


from_name: Tom Parmenter

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] "Mark all edits minor by default"

in_reply_to:
<3DDD6396.3010605@telus.net> (message from Ray Saintonge on Thu,
	21 Nov 2002 14:52:06 -0800)

body:
|From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
|X-Accept-Language: en-us
|Sender: wikipedia-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 14:52:06 -0800
|
|Oliver Pereira wrote:
|
|>Is there an agreed definition of what is or is not a "minor edit"? I
|>haven't been able to find one, so I've just been guessing. I suspect that
|>most people are just guessing. So if it's such a big deal to people,
|>perhaps there should be clearer guidelines on what should or should not be
|>marked as a minor edit. Perhaps the "minor edit" box should have a link by
|>it, with the text "What is a minor edit?", linking to a page of such
|>guidelines.
|>
|I shudder at the thought of having yet another rule.  Ultimately,
|people's common sense should prevail.  If I'm reviewing changes to an
|article that interests me as an editor, I'll look at all the changes
|both major and minor.  If I'm reviewing it as a reader, I'll stick to
|the major changes.
|
|Eclecticology
|
|

If you don't think it's worth anyone's while to know about the edit,
it's minor.

Tom P.
O88


subject:
[Wikitech-l] RE: "Watch this article" and "View article" are not
 correct

in_reply_to:
<3DDD1951.3020202@telus.net> from Ray Saintonge at "Nov 21, 2002
 09:35:13 am"

body:
> Since we are on the search function, it would also help if
>
>     1. articles could come out in some kind of sorted order (perhaps
>     with various options available to the user),

The problem is - what order should that be? And would it not cost too much
too check it?

>     2. simple Boolean search options could be incorporated in the search
>     function, and

they can; I already use them (I'm going through years looking for events,
and to avoid getting all the RanMan demography data in between, I make
searches like "819 and not households".

Andre Engels


body:
When I click on an Interlanguage link to Esperanto from Dutch, it takes me
to eo.wikipedia.com. From English, I get to eo.wikipedia.org.

Andre Engels