subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Kenneð

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Matthew Woodcraft wrote:

> >And why on earth do we still have pages which are viewable only by
> >sysops? Undelete was supposed to be made available to all users once
> >the bugs were knocked out of it.

> It's on my todo list. Unless you'd like to knock the bugs out of it,
> it'll be there for a while yet.

Well, I can look. Can you give me the bug numbers?

-M-


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Islamofascism

body:
Dante Alighieri wrote:

> <editorial> What the world REALLY needs to do is put all the people
> like this from both sides into a room and never let them out.
> </editorial>
>
>
I saw a great feature on a news programme recently, about a project in
Israel which arranges for people on opposite sides to speak to each
other regularly on the phone.
Does anyone know the name & can we have an article on it?

it's grass roots things like this that will have a lasting effect on
attitudes :)


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Kennet

body:
Brion-
> Matthew Woodcraft wrote:

>>> http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Undelete&target=To
>>> talitarian+Islamofascism&timestamp=20030810130312
>>>
>>>
>>
>> And why on earth do we still have pages which are viewable only by
>> sysops? Undelete was supposed to be made available to all users once
>> the bugs were knocked out of it.
>>
> It's on my todo list. Unless you'd like to knock the bugs out of it,
> it'll be there for a while yet.

Huh? No, the content of deleted pages is not supposed to be available to
non-sysops. Even Anthere no longer holds that position.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: james duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] JoeM, Paektu & Palestine liberator the same messer?

body:
I suspect that [[User:Palestine liberator]], [[User:Paektu]] and now
[[User:JoeM]] are the same person, purely on the basis of edits. All three
'users' have notable similarities in style, and Paektu's and JoeM's user
pages are strikingly alike in construction. All three strike me as
provocative 'characture' users created to provoke people.

The views of all three are not merely extreme but ludicrously extreme.
Paektu claimed to be a stalinist, yet his writings seemed clich?d and
phoney, basically an act. Ditto with Palestine liberator who didn't seem
concerned with promoting an NPOV analysis of the middle east and actually
appeared to know surprisingly little about the topic for someone who
pretended to know a lot, and seemed to me merely an exercise in screwing up
pages and causing chaos for the fun of it. JoeM's stuff seemed equally
extreme, nutty and phoney, as if trying to pick a fight. Their edits seem
too suspiciously loopy and deliberately ludicrously provocative to be
genuine.

I can't help wondering whether any banned user with a grudge isn't trying to
get revenge. One particular banned user did after all come on some time ago
posing as paedophile, even asking if he could download pictures of any
children we had. (A real paedophile wouldn't have asked, just done so. That
user wanted to let everyone /know/ what he was up to, as if trying to taint
wiki with paedophilia, perhaps hoping it would damage us. These three
'characture' users seem in a similar vein.

JT

>Jimbo wrote
>This sounds like an only 10% milder counterpart to the Palestinian
>activist from last week.  Well, if he keeps it up, I approve that we
>should put him on auto-revert unless and until he gets the message.
>
><editorial>What the world needs to do is put all the people like this
>from both sides into a room and tell them that the outcome will depend
>on them fighting each other.  But while they are in there distracted,
>the rest of us sane people can figure out solutions that are mutually
>acceptable and reasonable to all sensible parties.</editorial>
>
>daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
>
> > User JoeM is constantly reinserting a POV diatribe on this topic, under
> > various names: Islamofascism, Totalitarian Islamofascism,
>Islamo-fascism, World War
> > IV. (In my mind, an article that begins with the assertion "Evil exists"
>is
> > already questionable and hardly encyclopedic.) He has been asked to stop
>and
> > been reverted incessantly. It's just wasting people's time.
> >
> > Danny
>_______________________________________________
>WikiEN-l mailing list
>WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Islamofascism

body:
>From: tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com>
>Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
>To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Islamofascism
>Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2003 19:16:17 +0100
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>
>
>Dante Alighieri wrote:
>
>><editorial> What the world REALLY needs to do is put all the people like
>>this from both sides into a room and never let them out. </editorial>
>>
>>
>I saw a great feature on a news programme recently, about a project in
>Israel which arranges for people on opposite sides to speak to each other
>regularly on the phone.
>Does anyone know the name & can we have an article on it?
>
>it's grass roots things like this that will have a lasting effect on
>attitudes :)

Don't DARE ask Anthere, Stevertigo, MyRedDice, myself and everyone else to
speak on the phone to RK!!! *grin*

lol
JTD

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Watchlist

body:
can you please write an improved routine for the
>watchlist that's a lot faster and less painful for the database on long
>watchlists than the current one? Thanks.
>
Hey Brion, I'm not criticising you. You do a damn good job keeping wiki
together. But I do think a one hour link is completely useless. All its
information will be available on the Recent Changes anyway. BTW I now use my
watchlist set to longer parameters via my bookmarks. Could we issue a
grading system for watchlists. ie. Will appear on watchlist, MAY appear on
watchlist but could be disconnected centrally for periods to avoid system
overload, with people asked to use the second as default and only tick the
'will' button for articles they really do want to keep track on, with each
user having a maximum number of 'Will' ticks, say 100. That way, we could be
guaranteed a watchlist of more than an hour for /key/ articles, with a full
list functional when the system can cope with it. Is it also possible to
redesign a program so that the watchlist only contains the link to where the
article is, rather than links to all redirects people may have entered.

I don't know if any of this is practicable. It is just a theoretical
suggestion.

JT

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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jason Richey

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: wikidown spam...

in_reply_to: <bh2fgr$95j$1@main.gmane.org>; from ts4294967296@hotmail.com on Sat, Aug 09, 2003 at 07:38:26PM +1000

body:
I'm willing to throw a phone number out there:  760-486-9194

If I hear it ring, I answer it.  It's not always close enough to wake
me up when I'm asleep, though.

I have all the access that Jimmy has, including access to the remote
power switch.

Jason Richey

Tim Starling wrote:

>
> "Brion Vibber" <brion at pobox.com> wrote in
> message news:3F30BFC1.5070602 at pobox.com...
> > The wikidown address has been getting spam in the last few days... I
> > don't know if Lee still has it forwarding to his beeper, but that could
> > be awful annoying. :P
> >
> > Suggestions?
>
> I suggest doing away with the whole notification by email thing, and doing
> the following:
>
> * Construct a register of developers, with names, phone numbers, time zones,
> degree of server access (wikidev, root or physical) and availability. A few
> phrases in German might also be handy, like "hello can I speak to Magnus"
> for example.
> * Distribute the register to the developers, and a small number of trusted
> wikipediholics, strategically located in various time zones.
> * When Wikipedia goes down, there's a 99.99% probablilty that one of the
> wikipediholics will be online. Come to think of it, if you just gave it to
> Mav you'd have a 90% chance but we may as well be safe ;)
> * The wikipediholics go to openfacts.berlios.de for coordination. They wait
> a few minutes, and if no developer comes to assure them that the problem is
> under control, they start ringing developers, starting with people who are
> both awake and have root access.
>
> We have had a number of crashes recently where the down-time has been
> extended from minutes to hours due to the lack of someone with the
> appropriate access on the scene. I think it's time we had a method to ensure
> that there is someone available to fix problems 24 hours a day.
>
> -- Tim Starling <tstarlingphysicsunimelbeduau> (add punctuation to email)
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


from_name: Toby Bartels

body:
LittleDan wrote:

>A new Lir? I thought we had just ridden ourselves of
>all of these trolls.

Lir was never a troll; she's in earnest.
I know people that think like that.

What I /don't/ know, however, are people like JoeM.
I'm an American, lived my whole life right here in the good ol' U. S. of A.,
and I know right-wing nuts, but none that /seriously/ want to invade China
(sorry, I mean those Communist rebels currently occupying most of China).
JoeM is over the top; he's a troll.  Don't feed him.  REVERT!

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] mediawiki.org/.com

body:
Daniel-
> http://mediawiki.org and http://mediawiki.com

> I bought these yesterday and forwarded them to
> http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/ . Please test to make sure both work.

Thank you, Daniel! You're our domain grabber #1 ;-)

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Steve Vertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: User:Kenne�

body:
This banning thing should be a no brainer.  Im
wondering why its even being mentioned.  As far as
calling the police -- is there grounds?

-S-

--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> We have zero tolerance for death threats. Ban
> immediately, get his IP, and
> call the police.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Watchlist

body:
james-
> I don't know if any of this is practicable. It is just a theoretical
> suggestion.

It's not a bad suggestion, but the interface for grading might make things
too complicated. We are currently looking at a solution that will allow us
to keep an index of all pages permanently in memory. This could make
things like watchlists and recent changes very fast. It may still take a
few weeks before we make substantial progress on that front, though.

I cannot reproduce the Camino browser issues you have described. Camino
should behave in most ways like Mozilla, but I've never had any of these
problems with Moz.

Regards,

Erik


subject: [WikiEN-l] Islamofascism

body:
JD wrote:
> Don't DARE ask Anthere, Stevertigo, MyRedDice,
> myself and everyone else to
> speak on the phone to RK!!! *grin*
>
> lol
> JTD

Well, I wouldnt presume to speak for anyone, and I
dont like it when its done for me. I wouldnt mind
speaking to RK or others by phone, necessarily --
rather  1. I dont feel inclined to... 2. I am not sure
what the point of such a thing would be --one has to
have a purpose to their actions, otherwise they are
meaningless.

Enough said.
-S-

__________________________________
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subject: [Wikitech-l] language.php

body:
>Brion sayeth:
> I don't know nothing about no snapshots, but don't
> trust anything you
> see on meta. :)

Aw sheesh. I guess all those copyedits Mav did on the
meta  will be useless then. :)

-S-

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from_name: a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk

body:
JT wrote:

> I can't help wondering whether any banned user with a grudge isn't
> trying to get revenge.

Well. It's not escaped my attention that JoeM's username could be
perceived as a combination of Joe Canuck and ChuckM, the last 2 known
DW aliases (except Sue Michael Canuck, who never made any real effort
to pretend to be someone else).

But I believe the DW witch-hunt ended some time ago. :-)

Evercat
--
Allan Crossman - http://dogma.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
PGP keys - 0x06C4BCCA (new) || 0xCEC9FAE1 (compatible)


subject: [Wikitech-l] userid in cookies

body:
Allow me to clarify -- there was a recent study on
fingerprinting done via miscellaneous stuff - server
llogs, etc. cookies being a basic kind of
fingerprinting tool for access. Yadda yadda..

As a sysop -- I have certain limited powers, but few
enough that it doesnt require I log in via ssl etc,
but does this mean that basic accounts be left with no
basic security whatsoever?  I understand the tradeoff
-- does hashing a username/id in a cookie actually eat
up too many cycles with each transaction? Doesnt this
policy sorta open WP up to some havock beyond what
even developers might have a pain of a time changing
back?

-Not to be buggin ya.
-S-

> So that people trying to figure out what the cookies
> on their own
> computer are for will have the truth hidden from
> them?
>
> I don't see the point of that.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] userid in cookies

body:
Steve Vertigo wrote:

>Allow me to clarify -- there was a recent study on
>fingerprinting done via miscellaneous stuff - server
>llogs, etc. cookies being a basic kind of
>fingerprinting tool for access. Yadda yadda..
>
Dude, your user name is shipped across the internet in plaintext in
every page you download from the server while logged in. Why are you
worried about a cookie that has the same information?

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: JFrost8401 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Watchlist

body:
There have been suggestions (well, at least one) for a shorter watchlist
limit on number of articles. It seems to me that you ought to be able to keep
track of at least the articles which you have written from scratch, or effectively
done so, minus redirects.

As someone who does a lot of new articles, I can live with 750, but not 100,
if it means that I can access my watchlist all day.

Jim Frost
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Easter Bradford

body:
>At 09:41 AM 8/10/2003, you wrote:
>
>>--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
>> > In the year in the future when I win both the Nobel
>> > Peace Prize and
>> > the Grammy for my a capella lipsynched rendition of
>> > old Milli Vanilli
>> > classics, I will permit an article about me.
>> >
>> > --Jimbo
>>
>>Even if you were just CEO of Bomis and Wikipedia was
>>started by someone else, you'd still deserve an
>>article. But as head of a giant free encyclopedia
>>project, the biggest and most useful wiki in
>>existance, you definately deserve one. There are
>>already stubs about you in other langauages, such as
>>polish. Why can't these accomplishments be enough?
>>-LittleDan
>
>Dante wrote The irony here is that Jimbo can't really /prevent/ us from
>creating an article about him without using a bit of heavy-handed
>dictatorial power (which he usually seems loath to do).
>
>So, it would seem, that if enough of us think there ought to be an article
>about him, his "permission" would be hardly necessary. :)
>
But the question is, would his picture be "fair use"  to use or might we get
sued? :-)

JT

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Memcached

body:
I've been playing about a bit with memcached, and have just checked into
the unstable branch some initial experimental code to use it to cache
user data (for logged in users) and individual lookups in the LinkCache.
Not very efficient, not very complete, just trying things out.

The PHP memcached client class is under GPL, and I've just included a
copy in for convenience. If we don't tell it to connect, all requests
become no-ops, so we can simply ask it for data, and on a memcached-less
installation we'll always immediately fall back to the database.

Note that the client requires socket support, which generally means
recompiling PHP with --enable-sockets. If disabled it shouldn't get to
any of the socket calls, so it should run fine without memcached enabled
on a stock socketless PHP.

See docs/memcached.doc for more details.

(I've also changed User::loadFromSession() to be a static class method
that returns an instance of User, rather than something that's run on a
newly created instance. This way we can just dump a serialized object to
the cache and get it back intact.)

I haven't thoroughly tested things at this point, but in brief it seems
to work. Note: performance _sucks_ with the stock memcached 1.1.8; use
the prerelease snapshot of 1.1.9:
http://lists.danga.com/pipermail/memcached/2003-August/000092.html

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: textbook-l

from_name: Geoffrey Thomas

subject: [Textbook-l] Re: disappearing/reappearing column-side notes

body:
Karl Wick saith:
> Hey I'm no real programmer although I have tinkered with
> code. I wanted to mess with that cool side note page to see
> if I could format it into two formal columns, one wide one
> on the left and a narrow one on the right. However I don't
> konw how to mess with it as there is no "edit" button in
> the page. (I could note that I have not messed with
> uploading files to the WP before ...) Is there a simple way
> that someone could explain how I can play with that code ?
> Or could someone do the edit into two columns, so that
> there is no text reflow when the note dialog opens ?
>
> Thanks,
> Karl

Like this?

 http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/5/56/Sidenote-column.html

In IE, there's no space between the second and third paragraphs.
In Mozilla, there are two spaces. The reason for the strange
spacing is that a <tr> ends after the second paragraph. I'm
not sure how to fix this. In Opera, the notes stay open and
[hide] doesn't work. (Which is to be expected.) In Lynx, the
notes follow immediately after the text. Lynx's <table> handling
isn't too good (if it even recognizes the tag).

There's only one reflow problem: when you have a note that's
bigger than the associated text. Hmm....what if it changes
the .style.color to the background instead of the .style.display
to none? That would even make the table unnecessary...

To edit: save locally and reupload. HTML (obviously) won't be
an image format. And it's okay to reupload over existing
files because Wikipedia keeps old revisions. I just made a
new file because the interface changed.

=====
-Geoffrey Thomas
geoffreyerffoeg at yahoo.com

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from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] Pseudo-directories by Namespace

body:
So, I'm trying to figure out if it'd be a good idea to use rewrite
rules to make pseudo-directories for the different page
namespaces. For example, rather than:

            http://www.wikitravel.org/article/User:Evan
            http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Special:Upload
            http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Wikitravel:Help
            http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Talk:Switzerland

...to do:

            http://www.wikitravel.org/user/Evan
            http://www.wikitravel.org/special/Upload
            http://www.wikitravel.org/wikitravel/Help
            http://www.wikitravel.org/talk/Switzerland

I think the way to do it is to have multiple formats like
$wgArticlePath ($wgUserPath, $wgTalkPath, $wgMetaPath) and to check
the namespace in wfLocalUrl.

Is this nuts?

~ESP

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


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Fred Bauder

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!!
	HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!!

body:
on 8/11/03 5:40 AM, John CRAWFORD at john_francis_crawford at hotmail.com
wrote:

> Courtesy of Google, I read an article on your site a week or so ago.  I have
> a query about that article, but do not understand from your site
> instructions how to raise it with you.
>
> I am not a member ? do I need to be if I wish to read the articles on your
> site, or raise queries about them?

Well, you seem to have joined the list. So go ahead and post whatever your
question was to this list (for now) There are alternative ways to ask
questions about articles, for example on the "Talk" page for the article,
(Discuss this page link).

Not only can you read articles on Wikipedia and ask questions but you can
also edit them, for example should you have something to add or correct.

Fred


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Wikipedia-l] HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!!	HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!!

body:
I have sent the following directly to Mr. Crawford in response to his
inquiry.
Ec

> Hi John:
>
> I've read your desparate plea to have a question about a particular
> article answered, but the name of the article was not specified.
>
>> Courtesy of Google, I read an article on your site a week or so ago.
>> I have a query about that article, but do not understand from your
>> site instructions how to raise it with you.
>
>
> The usual place to raise questions about a specific article is on its
> "Talk" page. For access to this click on "Discuss this page" in the
> side bar. If no other comments have been previously made about this
> article you will receive an edit box where you can write your question
> and follow that by clicking on the "Save page" button below the box..
> Where their have been previous discussion you will receive a page
> (with a yellow background) showing all those discussions. To add your
> comments click on "Edit this page" wherever it conveniently appears at
> the top or bottom of the page or in the side bar. This will give you
> the edit box with all the previous discussion. Scroll to the bottom of
> the edit box, put four hyphens at the beginning of the line
> immediately below, and after a carriage return begin you questions or
> comments. When you finish your comments click on the "Save page" as
> before. The purpose of the 4 hyphens is to draw a line across the page
> to separate your comments from the previous ones.
>
> Any subsequent response will be from a person interested in that
> topic. If your query is about making an obvious correction to the, go
> directly to "Edit this page" from the article itself, and make your
> changes right there. Extreme caution is advised if the subject matter
> is of a controversial nature. Using the Israel/Palestine dispute as an
> example you can be assured that there are supporters of each side who
> will be quick to revert any change that in their opinion appears to
> unduly favour their opponents.
>
>> I am not a member ? do I need to be if I wish to read the articles on
>> your site, or raise queries about them?
>
>
> Not at all! Even a "non-member" may read, query or edit almost any
> article. Your edits will be identified by your URL number. Any edit
> that is so identified tends to be scrutinized more carefully to insure
> that it is in good faith. This has proved an effective technique for
> weeding out cranks and vandals. If you intend to stick around it would
> be advisable to open an account with a name (or pseudonym) of your
> choice. Your subsequent reappearances as a trustworthy contributor can
> then be recognized by the regulars.
>
>> I have already emailed you, but do not really understand the reply
>> which I received ? copy of both below.
>
>
> The response that you received appears to be an automatic one. If
> there was no problem, which I suspect to be the case, your letter
> would have been forwarded to the mailing list without further ado. The
> list is only very lightly moderated as a means of keeping spam from
> the list. The role of the moderator is simply to make sure that you
> are a real person. Once you have been so recognized, all of your
> future postings will go directly to the list without his intervention.
>
> I hope this answers your questions adequately.
>
> Ray (Eclecticology)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!!

body:
In that email did you also ask him not to be such a
nit?

-S-

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


from_name: John CRAWFORD

body:
Dear Sir/Madam,

HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!!
HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!!

Courtesy of Google, I read an article on your site a week or so ago.  I have
a query about that article, but do not understand from your site
instructions how to raise it with you.

I am not a member ? do I need to be if I wish to read the articles on your
site, or raise queries about them?

I have already emailed you, but do not really understand the reply which I
received ? copy of both below.

HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!!
HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!!


subject: [Wikitech-l] userid in cookies

body:
Good question. NM.
-S-

--- Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Steve Vertigo wrote:
>
> >Allow me to clarify -- there was a recent study on
> >fingerprinting done via miscellaneous stuff -
> server
> >llogs, etc. cookies being a basic kind of
> >fingerprinting tool for access. Yadda yadda..
> >
> Dude, your user name is shipped across the internet
> in plaintext in
> every page you download from the server while logged
> in. Why are you
> worried about a cookie that has the same
> information?
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!!  HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!!

body:
--- Vicki Rosenzweig <vr at redbird.org> wrote:

> Every time I conclude that you're not a troll, you write
> something like this. It's hardly surprising that someone
> might not immediately recognize how Wikipedia works.

Agreed.

I'm suprised sometimes that /anyone/ knows how wikipedia works.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


body:
Steve Vertigo wrote:

>In that email did you also ask him not to be such a
>nit?
>
It is important to be charitable with confused newbies, and to give them
the benefit of the doubt.  This one had merely asked the wrong question
at the wrong place.  He has not yet shown himself to be a hardcore nit.

Ec


subject: [Wikipedia-l] help, help, help, help...

body:
Hehe. Well Im glad to see Vicki's keeping an open mind
anyway. Nitdom, trolldom, and the like are all highly
subjective terms.  When *I 'misuse' one, though,
people like to reconsider their verdicts (put down the
gavel....) . But I'll regard that behaviour and its
attached organisms fondly. :)

-S-

> It is important to be charitable with confused
> newbies, and to give them
> the benefit of the doubt.  This one had merely asked
> the wrong question
> at the wrong place.  He has not yet shown himself to
> be a hardcore nit.
>
> Ec

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] help, help

body:
>VR wrote: It's hardly surprising that  someone
> might not immediately recognize how Wikipedia works.

Nobody "immediately recognizes" anything.  It took
each of us time to get the wiki - and even then there
are parts and conventions, rules in pencil, and
verdictum-a-la-Jimbo that are still not apparent to
most regular contributors.  Heck, I still have no clue
how certain details of how this whole internet thing
actually works.

If your talking about civility - I would agree,
however (though there are a million caveats to this,
as well TROLL and such) and I've scheduled for myself
this week a sound pounding for my misdemeanor.

:)
-S-

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] LanguageRu.php

body:
On talk
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3ALanguageRu.php

someone wrote the below text.

Is it proper to stick Javascript in the langa.php
file? Im sure the anon user here is just trying to be
helpful, but it doesnt seem like a good idea.

-S-

===
The following link leads to LanguageRu.php variant,
working at Russkaja wikipedia! project
(http://www.wikipedia.ru). This could be of use to the
translation team...

The text should be used as is, because

    * only ~80% is translated, sometime orignal
meaning changed drastically
    * it conatains special javasxcript code for
russian rating catalogues
    * some string translations are ugly

---

http://www.wikipedia.ru/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%8F:%D0%A0%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%84%D0%B5%D0%B9%D1%81%D0%B0

(vovkav yahoo com - put punctuation, where applicable)

====

-S-

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!!
  HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!! HELP!!!!!

body:
At 12:39 PM 8/11/03 -0700, Stevertigo wrote:
>In that email did you also ask him not to be such a
>nit?

Every time I conclude that you're not a troll, you write
something like this. It's hardly surprising that someone
might not immediately recognize how Wikipedia works.

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


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] wiki syntax parser

body:
Here's one that uses lex + single pass over tokens, and can generate
valid XHTML. It's proof-of-concept program, not a drop-in replacement
for current parser.

=== How it works ===

Wiki syntax is line based and uses state-transition model -
a token chances state from anything to X. HTML is free-form
and states can nest.

This parser maintains stack of "inline" elements. Every time it
finds </X>, it checks if <X> is on stack, and if it is, it pops and closes
every element till it gets to <X>, otherwise it prints raw </X>.

If it finds <X>, it checks if it conflicts with something on stack,
and acts accordingly.

When "paragraph state" has to change, it closes all open inline tags.

It doesn't preserve whitespace unless necessary (
 and wiki pre,
for now also <nowiki>).

Example: <<END
Ala ma kota

Ala ma kota

Ala ma kota

Ala  ma kota

Ala  ma kota
END

Output (with \ns inserted): <<END

Ala ma kota

Ala ma <b>kota

Ala </b>ma kota

Ala  <b>ma kota

Ala  ma kota

END

Because it has to support both HTML and wiki paragraph control,
it's quite ugly code.

Example: <<END

Ala

Ma

Kota

i

 Psa

END

Output: <<END

 Ala

 Ma

 Kota

i

 Psa

END

As you can see above,
 was automatically opened in nested list.

=== More examples of magic ===

Example: <<END
=== Foo ===
Bar
END

Output: <<END

 Foo

Bar

END

But also:

Example: <<END
=== Foo
Bar
END

Output: <<END

 Foo

Bar

END

=== '''-magic  ===

It reopens quote if necessary.

Example (Quotes.txt from test suite) <<END
Wikipedia quoting tests:

(1) normal '''bold''' normal

(2) normal ''italic'' normal

(3) normal '''''bold italic''''' normal

(4) normal '''bold ''bold italic'' bold''' normal

(5) normal ''italic '''bold italic''' italic'' normal

(6) normal '''''bold italic'' bold''' normal

(7) normal '''''bold italic''' italic'' normal

(8) normal ''italic '''bold italic''''' normal

(9) normal '''bold ''bold italic''''' normal

(10) normal '''bold's''' normal

(11) normal ''italic's'' normal

(12) normal ''italic's '''bold's italic''' italic's'' normal

(13) normal '''''bold's italic'' bold's''' normal

(14) normal ''italic''' normal

(15) normal ''''bold''' normal

(16) normal ''italic'' normal ''italic'' normal

(17) normal ''italic'' normal '''bold''' normal

(18) normal '''bold''' normal '''bold''' normal

(19) normal '''bold''' normal ''italic'' normal
END

Output (with \ns inserted): <<END

Wikipedia quoting tests:

(1) normal bold normal

(2) normal italic normal

(3) normal bold italic normal

(4) normal bold bold italic bold normal

(5) normal italic bold italic italic normal

(6) normal bold italic bold normal

(7) normal bold italic italic normal

(8) normal italic bold italic normal

(9) normal bold bold italic normal

(10) normal bold's normal

(11) normal italic's normal

(12) normal italic's bold's italic italic's normal

(13) normal bold's italic bold's normal

(14) normal italic normal

(15) normal 'bold normal

(16) normal italic normal italic normal

(17) normal italic normal bold normal

(18) normal bold normal bold normal

(19) normal bold normal italic normal

END

7 is not optimal but still 100% correct.
14 has different interpretation.
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from_name: Jay Bowks

body:
From: "Ray Saintonge" <saintonge at telus.net>
>He has not yet shown himself to be a hardcore nit.
> Ec

I'm of the belief that all of us sooner or
later, probably sooner, can qualify as
a nits. The only consolation is that at
times we also may qualify for full blown
wit. This message of mine of course
doesn't qualify for the later although
making a stong case for the former
as far as I'm concerned.
;-)
Since,
Jay B.

P.S. to the wikipedians who've put up
with me and my newbieness...
...thanks for the times when I've asked
stupid questions and received worthwhile
answers without too much elbow jabbing.


subject: [WikiEN-l] DW now on French wiki.

body:
I received the following message:

Hi; I thought you might be interested in knowing that DW is up to his old
shenanigans on the French wiki under the name JacquesD. (I'm off on vacation
so may not be able to reply for a while) - Hephaestos 16:07, 11 Aug 2003
(UTC)

Does a hard ban apply across the wikis?  If it does, shouldn't  DW as
JacquesD be automatically banned? Comments please.

JT

_________________________________________________________________
Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: definition lists

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski saith:
> Any idea to do it [indenting] in a saner way ?

Just use paragraphs within list items without bullets. It really
doesn't matter if the bullets display in non-CSS browsers.

Comment

Reply

Another reply

Another comment

This same structure, with style= instead of


from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] wiki syntax parser

body:
On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 04:12:08PM +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> Here's one that uses lex + single pass over tokens, and can generate
> valid XHTML. It's proof-of-concept program, not a drop-in replacement
> for current parser.
>
> === How it works ===
>
> Wiki syntax is line based and uses state-transition model -
> a token chances state from anything to X. HTML is free-form
> and states can nest.
>
> This parser maintains stack of "inline" elements. Every time it
> finds </X>, it checks if <X> is on stack, and if it is, it pops and closes
> every element till it gets to <X>, otherwise it prints raw </X>.
>
> If it finds <X>, it checks if it conflicts with something on stack,
> and acts accordingly.
>
> When "paragraph state" has to change, it closes all open inline tags.
>
> It doesn't preserve whitespace unless necessary (<pre> and wiki pre,
> for now also <nowiki>).

Isn't this the wrong aproach? Shouldn't we try to get rid of HTML
in articles in the first place? Doesn't the necessary fixing
prove that HTML is not what the average contributor can be
expected to use?

JeLuF


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] DW now on French wiki.

body:
james-
> I received the following message:

> Hi; I thought you might be interested in knowing that DW is up to his old
> shenanigans on the French wiki under the name JacquesD. (I'm off on vacation
> so may not be able to reply for a while) - Hephaestos 16:07, 11 Aug 2003
> (UTC)

> Does a hard ban apply across the wikis?  If it does, shouldn't  DW as
> JacquesD be automatically banned? Comments please.

Has it ever been safely established that Jacques Delson and DW are the
same person?

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] wiki syntax parser

body:
On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 09:32:21PM +0200, Jens Frank wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 04:12:08PM +0200, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > Here's one that uses lex + single pass over tokens, and can generate
> > valid XHTML. It's proof-of-concept program, not a drop-in replacement
> > for current parser.
> >
> > === How it works ===
> >
> > Wiki syntax is line based and uses state-transition model -
> > a token chances state from anything to X. HTML is free-form
> > and states can nest.
> >
> > This parser maintains stack of "inline" elements. Every time it
> > finds </X>, it checks if <X> is on stack, and if it is, it pops and closes
> > every element till it gets to <X>, otherwise it prints raw </X>.
> >
> > If it finds <X>, it checks if it conflicts with something on stack,
> > and acts accordingly.
> >
> > When "paragraph state" has to change, it closes all open inline tags.
> >
> > It doesn't preserve whitespace unless necessary (<pre> and wiki pre,
> > for now also <nowiki>).
>
> Isn't this the wrong aproach? Shouldn't we try to get rid of HTML
> in articles in the first place? Doesn't the necessary fixing
> prove that HTML is not what the average contributor can be
> expected to use?

If you suplemented Wiki syntax with markup for everything we're doing
with HTML now, you'd get something that's not significantly easier.


from_name: Michael Becker

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Update to gfdl copyright notice

body:
It has been discussed (here:  http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Sites_that_use_Wikipedia_for_content) that the gfdl notice on the bottom of every page needs updating.  The following notice is the result of the discussion "All text is available under the terms of the [[Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License|GNU Free Documentation License]]. See [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]] for suggested practices."  I would like to request that as long as no one has any more suggestion to make on the talk page, this new notice be instituted ASAP.  Also, the "Printable version" pages need to have the same notice (currently they don't).

--
Michael Becker


subject: [Wikitech-l] CSS Design Question

body:
Evan-
> So, is there a good reason that the default CSS for stub links is to
> take out the underlines? I don't get it, and after some complaints I
> reenabled underlines for wikitravel.org. I'm wondering if there
> is some user-interface principle I'm missing here.

No underlying logic AFAIK (or none that is applicable any longer with
underlining itself being an option). Stub links are simply not used by
default on any of the Wikimedia projects, so that aspect of the style
sheets is a bit neglected.

Regards,

Erik


body:
Evan-
> So, I'm trying to figure out if it'd be a good idea to use rewrite
> rules to make pseudo-directories for the different page
> namespaces. For example, rather than:

>             http://www.wikitravel.org/article/User:Evan
>             http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Special:Upload
>             http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Wikitravel:Help
>             http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Talk:Switzerland

Instead of doing this, I'd try to get rid of the /article/, put everything
in the rootdir and try to use mod_rewrite for all requests which do not
contain ^/images/ or ^/cache/. Then you'd have a relatively clean access
structrue. The "/" as namespace identifier has the additional problem of
being easily confused with the "/" as subpage handler.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
This requests goes out _especially_ to the 'hands dirty' developers
who are intricately familiar with where our hardware bottlenecks are
most likely to be.  But anyone with solid, non-speculative ideas is
welcome to comment!

As Jason said, he bought another gig of ram -- we are planning to
basically max out the machines if that will help.  That hard drive
that didn't work, well, we'll get the right one soon, and that'll help
significantly I think.  Also, if I'm not mistaken, one of these
machines has a dual processor board, but only a single processor, is
that right, Jason?  So that's an easy upgrade, once we find and buy
the right part.

But, imagine this: suppose I were shopping at
http://www.penguincomputing.com/, as I always do, and I wanted to
spend around $3000 on new hardware for wikipedia.  Presumably, this
could either be one new kickass machine, or 2 new very nice frontend
webservers, or whatever else we think we could best use.

Given that budget, what should I buy that's most likely to give us the
best bang for the buck?

And then, of course, once we have settled on the general type of
hardware (i.e. 2 medium machines or 1 kickass machine) that will be
most useful to us, we could also extend our shopping to other
suppliers.  I have used penguincomputing many times and I've been very
happy, but I'd go elsewhere if there was good reason.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] CVS Request

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>I would like to get CVS access to be able to upload new versions of
>languageNl.php myself rather than have to go through a busy Brion VIBBER
>every time.
>
I'd do it in a second, but I don't know your sourceforge user name. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] CVS Request

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>On Tue, 12 Aug 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:
>
>
>>I'd do it in a second, but I don't know your sourceforge user name. :)
>>
>>
>
>Neither did I, I don't think I had one. Created one under the name
>"a_engels".
>
Great, you're added.

If you've pulled a CVS tree anonymously, you'll want to grab a fresh
one. Go to http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=34373 and scroll down to
the section "Developer CVS Access via SSH" for vague directions on
UNIX-like systems.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] CVS Request

body:
tarquin wrote:

> The problem is getting from CVS to the test server & then to the live
> server -- that is the bottleneck.
> Jimbo said a while back that more people would be given access at this
> level -- any news?

Erik Moeller (Eloquence) and Tim Starling should both have the necessary
access to do this, if I'm not mistaken, as well as the usual suspects
(Magnus Manske, Lee Crocker, and me).

Anyway, I keep meaning to finish up the live-editable
translations-in-the-database system which will virtually eliminate the
muss and fuss of this 'edit and fix source files with a bunch of damn
string arrays' process, but I'm trying to get the memcached stuff in
first (for one thing, I really don't like the idea of bugging mysql with
a bajillion requests for individual strings!)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Developer documentation on meta

body:
In the hopes that people will one day be able to understand our
software, I've started putting some documentation onto meta:

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

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Phase III name change to MediaWiki and separate press releases

in_reply_to: <3F347DF2.6000106@telus.net>; from saintonge@telus.net on Fri, Aug 08, 2003 at 09:52:02PM -0700

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> No.  We aren't '''going''' non-profit; we always have been.

In spirit, yes.  In fact, yes.  But in the law, Wikipedia was just a
project of Bomis, Inc., a for-profit corporation.

>  Incorporating Wikimedia is an administrative action which probably
> doesn't mean much to the general public.

I think it means a lot to a lot of people.  There was significant
distrust of me for a long time.  For one thing, people are not willing
to 'donate' money to a for-profit corporation, and with good reason.

> Stressing that we have a quarter million articles appeals to the
> bandwagon effect.  Remarking about our competitive position in relation
> to other on-line encyclopedias makes sense because because it draws
> people into a competition where they can feel a part of the winning
> team.  Being mentioned by CNN means something; being high rated by Alexa
> is noteworthy; having a news article say, "These guys know their stuff,"
> says something about our credibility.

I do agree with all of this.

> Even more important is stressing our core principles of NPOV and making
> knowledge broadly and freely available to everybody.  Stressing also
> that participants can share the responsibility of safeguarding those
> core principles is a further strength.

That's right, but we can't put too much into a press release.  For a
press release to get press, it has to be "punchy", it has to have a
"hook", a storyline that attracts the attention of journalists.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Easter Bradford

in_reply_to: <20030810164128.43351.qmail@web41806.mail.yahoo.com>; from littledanehren@yahoo.com on Sun, Aug 10, 2003 at 09:41:28AM -0700

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> Even if you were just CEO of Bomis and Wikipedia was
> started by someone else, you'd still deserve an
> article. But as head of a giant free encyclopedia
> project, the biggest and most useful wiki in
> existance, you definately deserve one. There are
> already stubs about you in other langauages, such as
> polish. Why can't these accomplishments be enough?

I'm not comfortable saying whether or not an article about me would,
under other circumstances, be appropriate.  I got my picture in the
New York Times, so I guess so.

But I'd like to set what I think is a good example of modesty about
such things.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] How does this website work?

body:
Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
> It's hardly surprising that someone
> might not immediately recognize how Wikipedia works.

I have a confession.  I barely know how it works, myself.  Since I
gave up editing almost completely, so that I might function as a
neutral moderator to assist people with disputes, and so that my own
admittedly extreme political views (libertarian) wouldn't seem in some
way 'favored', many new features have been added, and whenever I do
edit (rarely, and sometimes anonymously, *gasp*!), I find myself a
little bit baffled as to what to do.

[[How to edit a page]] is very helpful, though, if a bit long.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] CVS Request

in_reply_to: <3F38E4E7.1070505@planetunreal.com>; from tarquin@planetunreal.com on Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 02:00:23PM +0100

body:
tarquin wrote:
> The problem is getting from CVS to the test server & then to the live
> server -- that is the bottleneck.
> Jimbo said a while back that more people would be given access at this
> level -- any news?

What is needed, here?  Perhaps Brion and some of the other developers
could throw out some names, I'll give the thumbs-up, and then whatever
needs to be done can be done.

No need in having this as a bottleneck, although I should throw in the
caveat that a certain amount of conservatism about throwing things on
the live site is not necessarily a 'bottleneck', but merely a prudent
means of avoiding outright disaster.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
Nick Reinking wrote:
> Well, I do agree that a single kickass machine would probably help the
> most, you really can't get something that kickass for $3000, especially
> in a rackmountable format.  I think it will be much cheaper and more
> cost effective upgrading pliny, if possible.  $3000 will just not buy
> you a dual Athlon 2800/4GB DDR/2x 72GB SCSI disk rackmountable machine.

No, but if you're willing to settle for
a dual Athlon 2200/4GB DDR/2x 36GB SCSI disk rackmountable machine,
the price is $3276 from PenguinComputing, and likely less elsewhere.

So, that's pretty good, huh?


from_name: Karl Wick

subject: [Textbook-l] distinct books

body:
I think that the textbook site would be better organized
with each book falling into its own place on the site. This
is what I mean:

http://wikibooks.org/Spanish/

http://wikibooks.org/French_4_Kids/

etc.

That way a page within the Spanish textbook could be named
"Infinitives" and a page within any other language textbook
could be named the same without conflict. I think that in
the long run this will make naming simpler.

We would ideally also have the option to limit searches to
one textbook at a time.

About interchangeable modules (that is, using one module
for multiple textbooks): this solution may be inideal
because the goals of each textbook are different and
editing a module for one book will sometimes make it less
suited to other books. Even if I were to take my own
organic chemistry book and rearrange it I would have to
rewrite many parts of it to make sure that supporting ideas
arent being thown out there before they have been properly
covered.

The advantage to reusing modules is that it saves a little
bit of copying and pasting, right ? This is a shortcut that
I think sets books up to be more on the generic side than
tailored to suit. And when I use a textbook for myself Id
rather have the whole thing tailored to suit.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

__________________________________
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from_name: Nick Reinking

subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 05:25:26AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> This requests goes out _especially_ to the 'hands dirty' developers
> who are intricately familiar with where our hardware bottlenecks are
> most likely to be.  But anyone with solid, non-speculative ideas is
> welcome to comment!
>
> As Jason said, he bought another gig of ram -- we are planning to
> basically max out the machines if that will help.  That hard drive
> that didn't work, well, we'll get the right one soon, and that'll help
> significantly I think.  Also, if I'm not mistaken, one of these
> machines has a dual processor board, but only a single processor, is
> that right, Jason?  So that's an easy upgrade, once we find and buy
> the right part.
>
> But, imagine this: suppose I were shopping at
> http://www.penguincomputing.com/, as I always do, and I wanted to
> spend around $3000 on new hardware for wikipedia.  Presumably, this
> could either be one new kickass machine, or 2 new very nice frontend
> webservers, or whatever else we think we could best use.
>
> Given that budget, what should I buy that's most likely to give us the
> best bang for the buck?
>
> And then, of course, once we have settled on the general type of
> hardware (i.e. 2 medium machines or 1 kickass machine) that will be
> most useful to us, we could also extend our shopping to other
> suppliers.  I have used penguincomputing many times and I've been very
> happy, but I'd go elsewhere if there was good reason.
>
> --Jimbo

Other than maxing the RAM in pliny, and adding a second processor to
larousse, I don't think spending $3000 on hardware is a wise investment
at this point.  The hardware than it can buy would not help to provide a
significant enough speed improvement for the cost.

However, if you are dead set on spending your money, this is how I see
the greatest benefit:

Get a cheapish  1U dual CPU Athlon/Xeon system.  It doesn't need to have
a lot of memory or speedy disks.  It does need reasonable processors,
since it will be crunching on PHP all day.  Make this our front end web
server, and move the web serving off of both pliny and larousse.  Don't
bother upgrading larousse - instead, make this our mail server / backup
server.  Upgrade pliny (if possible) to 4GB of memory and some faster
RAIDed hard disks.  If within budget, you might want to upgrade pliny
past the Athlon MP 1800s (I think), which is what it has now. (provided
this is possible in our servers)

Any counter-opinions out there?

Estimates:
4x 1GB PC2100 for pliny: $800
2x Athlon MP 2.08 (2800) Barton for pliny: $500
2x ?GB 10k RPM SCSI disks: ?
Dual rackmount 1U web server: ?

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


from_name: Vaughan

subject: [Wikipedia-l] WikiProject Psychopathology

body:
A belated announcement for the Psychopathology WikiProject.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Psychopathology

If you have an interest in the science, history or culture or mental
illness, psychiatry, psychology or related topics feel free to pitch in.

Vaughan


from_name: Jason Richey

subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> As Jason said, he bought another gig of ram -- we are planning to
> basically max out the machines if that will help.  That hard drive
> that didn't work, well, we'll get the right one soon, and that'll help
> significantly I think.

Oops...  I forgot to tell everyone.  I went back the next day and got
the right hard drive.  36 Gig is installed now.  I think Brion set up
the partitions/filesystem(s) as well.

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
> Oops...  I forgot to tell everyone.  I went back the next day and got
> the right hard drive.  36 Gig is installed now.  I think Brion set up
> the partitions/filesystem(s) as well.

Jason could you post for everyone all the current specs on both
machines, as best as we know them, as well as what each machine is
doing?  This would probably help us to plan for a reconfiguration in
the event of a new server (or two) purchase.

--Jimbo


from_name: tarquin

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: definition lists

body:
Geoffrey Thomas wrote:

>Tomasz Wegrzanowski saith:
>
>
>>Any idea to do it [indenting] in a saner way ?
>>
>>
>
>Just use paragraphs within list items without bullets. It really
>doesn't matter if the bullets display in non-CSS browsers.
>
interesting idea.

>
>Explicitly giving <blockquote> instead of : works, for mathematics
>and stuff - but the unnumbered lists may be fine for this.
>
>Is there anywhere in Wikipedia where definition lists (;term :def) are
>actually used as such?
>
>
yes! many places! (;term :def) is a really neat piece of wiki markup,
and DLs are very good for certain things.

Perhaps we should do this:

1) BLOCKQUOTE is made with an initial ">" character (seen on other
wikis, looks like quoted text in emails)
2) Initial ":" character makes a list with bullets killed off, as
described above.

Drawbacks:
<math> stuff needs to be fixed, since pages current begin a line
":<math>" to indent it.
However, I suggest that our parser treats a line that begins with
"<math>" as special, and sticks a "<div class="math">" around it, which
can then define nice indentation and so on. (and maybe even a fancy
border like those that some people have been putting in by hand and that
I've been removing)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
> First a disclaimer, as nobody has done any serious measurement,
> what we can do is no more than an educated guess.
>
> It seems that adding much more RAM (the fastest kind of RAM you can find)
> to all machines would help most. So that all the databases fit in RAM,
> and there's plenty space left for tcp/ip connection buffers,
> per-process PHP memory etc.
>
> Current database design is very centralized, so single kickass machine
> would probably help more.

Well, I do agree that a single kickass machine would probably help the
most, you really can't get something that kickass for $3000, especially
in a rackmountable format.  I think it will be much cheaper and more
cost effective upgrading pliny, if possible.  $3000 will just not buy
you a dual Athlon 2800/4GB DDR/2x 72GB SCSI disk rackmountable machine.

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


from_name: Alex R.

body:
"Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
> > No.  We aren't '''going''' non-profit; we always have been.
>
> In spirit, yes.  In fact, yes.  But in the law, Wikipedia was just a
> project of Bomis, Inc., a for-profit corporation.

Also there is an argument that the volunteers of Wikipedia are a
collective voluntary association (in law) that while informal are still
functioning as a group. The hardware might have belonged
to Bomis, but the volunteers are acting independently. I think
there is a strong argument to that effect, many volunteer organizations
develop that way.  If volunteers use the telephone to communicate
the telephone company does not own their organization does it?
Volunteer associations do not need any formality to exist (such as
filing a corporate charter). I think it important to keep this distinction
in mind as Wikimedia (which seems to be the foundation that allows
Wikipedia to exist but is independent of Wikipedia in a certain way)
is just a formal entity, it is not the contributions that have been made
to the nexus of activity known as Wikipedia.

> >  Incorporating Wikimedia is an administrative action which probably
> > doesn't mean much to the general public.
>
> I think it means a lot to a lot of people.  There was significant
> distrust of me for a long time.  For one thing, people are not willing
> to 'donate' money to a for-profit corporation, and with good reason.

I don't know if that is true. The people at movable type are not
a non-profit operation and they are accepting "donations" via paypal,
actually I run across websites every week that do this and that are usually
small business operations. When I email them and ask them about it
they say that since they provide their services at low cost they need
to ask for donations, legally they must report these donations as
income, but if they spend the money on business expenses, then their
are no taxes due (as long as the IRS accepts their business status).

Alex756


from_name: Steve Vertigo

subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
somebody clued me in to http://www.pricewatch.com/
-- supposedly a nexus for OEM overstock liqidators --
they seem to have decent prices. (in case anybody
didnt know )

-S-

--- Nick Reinking <nick at twoevils.org> wrote:
> > First a disclaimer, as nobody has done any serious
> measurement,
> > what we can do is no more than an educated guess.
> >
> > It seems that adding much more RAM (the fastest
> kind of RAM you can find)
> > to all machines would help most. So that all the
> databases fit in RAM,
> > and there's plenty space left for tcp/ip
> connection buffers,
> > per-process PHP memory etc.
> >
> > Current database design is very centralized, so
> single kickass machine
> > would probably help more.
>
> Well, I do agree that a single kickass machine would
> probably help the
> most, you really can't get something that kickass
> for $3000, especially
> in a rackmountable format.  I think it will be much
> cheaper and more
> cost effective upgrading pliny, if possible.  $3000
> will just not buy
> you a dual Athlon 2800/4GB DDR/2x 72GB SCSI disk
> rackmountable machine.
>
> --
> Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 --
> Minneapolis, MN
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

__________________________________
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from_name: Mark Christensen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
> Any counter-opinions out there?

Seems sensible to me.  But I am more optimistic about the possibility of
using hardware to improve our performance.

I think we should aim for a dedicated database server with this
configuration:

A dual CPU box maxed out with memory, whatever drive we have for the OS,
logs, and everything but the database, and the fastest drive we can
afford housing just the DB files.

We should then have a PHP front end server with all language wiki's
installed:

This should have enough memory to keep us from paging all the time, and
some CPU horsepower would be nice.

If we can get a new machine, I would say get another server to use as a
second database server.  We could then make one server the home of the
English wiki's DB, and the other the home of all the international
wiki's DBs -- this would put about 150,000 articles on each database
server.

I think further performance enhancements could be found by getting a
third database server handle read-only copies of all the DB's server, to
use for full text searches, user generated sql queries and the like.

--Mark Christensen


from_name: Evan Prodromou

in_reply_to: Erik Moeller's message of "12 Aug 2003 00:22:00 +0200"

body:
>>>>> "EM" == Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> writes:

    EM> Instead of doing this, I'd try to get rid of the /article/,
    EM> put everything in the rootdir and try to use mod_rewrite for
    EM> all requests which do not contain ^/images/ or ^/cache/. Then
    EM> you'd have a relatively clean access structrue. The "/" as
    EM> namespace identifier has the additional problem of being
    EM> easily confused with the "/" as subpage handler.

When you say "easily confused", do you mean for humans or for the
MediaWiki software?

But, yes, this is a low priority for me right now.

~ESP

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] CSS Design Question

in_reply_to: Erik Moeller's message of "12 Aug 2003 00:10:00 +0200"

body:
>>>>> "EM" == Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> writes:

    EM> No underlying logic AFAIK (or none that is applicable any
    EM> longer with underlining itself being an option). Stub links
    EM> are simply not used by default on any of the Wikimedia
    EM> projects, so that aspect of the style sheets is a bit
    EM> neglected.

Good. I don't feel so bad about re-enabling them, then.

Thanks,

~ESP

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


subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Jason could you post for everyone all the current specs on both
> machines, as best as we know them, as well as what each machine is
> doing?  This would probably help us to plan for a reconfiguration in
> the event of a new server (or two) purchase.

Pliny - Running MySQL, Apache 1.3.27 and kernel 2.4.20  and the
non-English Wikis

Tyan S2462 motherboard
2 Gig RAM (4 512Meg modules of ECC Reg. 266 MHz PC2100 DDR RAM in 4
slots)
2 Processor AMD Athlon MP 1800+/266FSB
Adaptec AIC-7899P SCSI U160 controller
1 IBM 36 GB SCSI Ultra 160 / 10 K RPM
1 IBM 36 GB SCSI Ultra 320 / 10 K RPM (running as U160, of course)
Dual onboard 3Com 10/100 (3C982) adapters

Larousse - Running Apache 1.3.27 and kernel 2.4.20 and the English Wiki

TYAN S2518UGN motherboard
2Gig RAM (4 512Meg modules of ECC Reg. 133 MHz PC133 SDRAM in 4 slots)
Pentium III 866MHz processor w/256K cache
Adaptec AIC-7899 SCSI U160 controller
1 Quantum Atlas 18 GB SCSI U160 Drive, currently unused and known to
  be troublesome (It's awaiting some tsting which I have put off due to
  the high load on the system)
1 IBM 36 GB SCSI U160 Drive
Dual onboard Intel 10/100 (eepro) adapters

--
"Jason C. Richey" <jasonr at bomis.com>


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
Just a few notes:

Pliny crashes roughly once a month. This must stop.

Not only are the outage periods annoying, but every crash risks
corrupting the database. Hardware problems have been vaguely suspected,
but we've never really had the chance to swap pieces out until it stops
crashing.

At this point I would tend to suggest that we:
* replace pliny as the database server with a slightly beefier machine
(eg, the Altus 130 or 140, with the max of 4 gig ram)
* take the old hard drive _out_ of pliny and set it aside, as it's been
suspected of being a problem
* reassign pliny as the new web server front end
* reassign larousse as the backup server; it could hold both a
replicated database and take over web server duties in a crash emergency
by taking over the other machine's IP address

The present larousse is overloaded (typical load average around 8-10
during daytime US, or up to 30 if some ass decides to spider the site
for every printable page), and a lot of pliny's CPU is taken by its
additional web duties (pushing load to around 4).

More RAM for the database should help it.

More CPU for the web server would definitely help it.

More RAM for the web server should help it once we start making more use
of in-memory caching, which should decrease load on the database (and
decrease the amount of stuff that it has to lock, leading to faster
response times on reads while other operations are running).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Copyright Schmopyright

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>Is it another attempt to introduce images of dubious legal status (claimed
>by some to be under "fair use") into Wikipedia ?
>
We've already got them. Making people _say_ it will make it easier to
cleanse our righteous server of these impurities later when the others
see the light. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 09:34:24AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Nick Reinking wrote:
> > Well, I do agree that a single kickass machine would probably help the
> > most, you really can't get something that kickass for $3000, especially
> > in a rackmountable format.  I think it will be much cheaper and more
> > cost effective upgrading pliny, if possible.  $3000 will just not buy
> > you a dual Athlon 2800/4GB DDR/2x 72GB SCSI disk rackmountable machine.
>
> No, but if you're willing to settle for
> a dual Athlon 2200/4GB DDR/2x 36GB SCSI disk rackmountable machine,
> the price is $3276 from PenguinComputing, and likely less elsewhere.
>
> So, that's pretty good, huh?

It is reasonable, and you can't get much better for cheaper elsewhere,
but you're really looking at (I'm assuming you're talking about the
Atlus 140 server with:

Dual Athlon 2200+ CPUs
+ 4GB PC2100 DDR memory
+ 2x 36GB SCA hard drives
- No warranty
- No rackmount kit
- No gigabit ethernet (this would be very nice...)

This runs $3280 for me.  I believe there will also be sales tax added to
this price (for being in CA).  I'm not sure if it is worth that much
money for what adds up to being 20% faster processors, 2GB of memory
extra, and an extra 36GB hard drive.

Here is what I think the best way to go would be:
Relion 130 server with:
2x Xeon 2.4GHz
512MB PC2100 (2x256MB)
+ 2x 40GB IDE hard drives
+ Free gigabit ethernet
- No warranty
- No rackmount kit

This server runs $1954, and I think would make a great replacement for
larousse.  Now, assuming that pliny can be upgraded, I'd get (prices
from NewEgg):

2x Athlon MP 2800 Barton: $500
4x 1GB PC2100 ECC: $1200
36GB 15k RPM SCSI hard disk: $300
Gigabit ethernet card: $50

Now, assuming pliny currently has ECC memory in it, we move the 2GB
currently in it to the new machine.

That way, we end up with:

pliny (database server only):
2x Athlon MP 2800
4GB PC2100 DDR
2x 36GB SCSI disks (1x 15000, 1x 10000)
Gigabit ethernet

larousse (web server only):
2x Xeon 2.4GHz
2GB PC2100 DDR
2x 40GB IDE disks
Gigabit ethernet

newserver (mail + backup + misc):
1x PIII 866MHz
2GB PC133
1x 36GB SCSI disk
10/100 ethernet

I'd then directly connect pliny and larousse over gigabit ethernet with
a crossover cable.  It's more expensive than $4000, but I think this
configuration would at least make a significant performance difference.

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Textbook-l] distinct books

body:
Karl wrote:
>The advantage to reusing modules is that
>it saves a little bit of copying and pasting,
>right ? This is a shortcut that I think sets
>books up to be more on the generic side than
>tailored to suit. And when I use a textbook
>for myself Id rather have the whole thing
>tailored to suit.

Instructors do this already; they start a class on
chapter 3, then go onto chapter 4.1, skip the rest of
ch 4 and then do ch 2, then back to 5, then to
7.3-7.6, 9.1, 8.3-4 etc. The beauty of modules is that
the same content can be reorganized in many different
ways without having to fork content. There should, of
course, be one reference edition for each book that
the community maintains, but I would like to give
instructors the ability to create index pages in their
own userspace (in a user index:namespace perhaps). And
having too many self references is bad anyway and
should be avoided since things change. This will mean
that some modules will have to be a bit more generic
than they would otherwise, but I think that this will
be a killer feature to have. Having this ability will
also help to prevent book forks, since most forks
would be organizational or content-based (that is, an
instructor may want to have more or fewer modules in
the textbook used in his/her class).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> * replace pliny as the database server with a slightly beefier machine
> (eg, the Altus 130 or 140, with the max of 4 gig ram)
> * take the old hard drive _out_ of pliny and set it aside, as it's been
> suspected of being a problem
> * reassign pliny as the new web server front end
> * reassign larousse as the backup server; it could hold both a
> replicated database and take over web server duties in a crash emergency
> by taking over the other machine's IP address

One thing I like about this plan is that most of it doesn't
involve changing the way things are working.

pliny (dual Athlon 1800) can surely do more than larousse (Pentium III),
so that will likely solve the overloaded webserver problem.  Going to
a slightly beefier db server will probably help a lot, too.

Under your setup, presumably the non-English wiki webserving could be
handled by either pliny (dual Athlon 1800) or by the backup (Pentium
III) server?  If pliny can do it, that's great, but if not, well,
the backup server should be plenty enough to handle that for now.

> The present larousse is overloaded (typical load average around 8-10
> during daytime US, or up to 30 if some ass decides to spider the site
> for every printable page), and a lot of pliny's CPU is taken by its
> additional web duties (pushing load to around 4).

So in addition to beefy up the db server, we want to also not have
it doing additional web duties at all, right?

> More RAM for the database should help it.
>
> More CPU for the web server would definitely help it.
>
> More RAM for the web server should help it once we start making more use
> of in-memory caching, which should decrease load on the database (and
> decrease the amount of stuff that it has to lock, leading to faster
> response times on reads while other operations are running).

Excellent.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

in_reply_to: <3F392B14.5060006@corell.dyndns.org>; from corell@corell.dyndns.org on Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 07:59:48PM +0200

body:
Thomas Corell wrote:
> I think Nick is right, getting a fast 'php' (Webserver) frontend for all
> the languages still running on pliny. And giving the database enought
> memory,  and a fast RAID (striping is usually the version with fast read
> access, if I remember, feel free to correct me) will help to get a
> database-server only doing mysql and this hopefully at all his speed and
> memory.

How much priority should I give to RAID versus RAM for the db server,
if there's a tradeoff?  Does anyone really know the answer to that?

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
I notice that the Penguin Dual MP Altus is $1700
with 4GB is another 1500

Pricewatch.com lists:
$233 Athlon MP 2800
...x2=$466
$403 Dual MP server (rack)
$170 1GB DDR memory
...x4=$680

just an idea.
-S-

--- Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Just a few notes:
>
> Pliny crashes roughly once a month. This must stop.
>
> Not only are the outage periods annoying, but every
> crash risks
> corrupting the database. Hardware problems have been
> vaguely suspected,
> but we've never really had the chance to swap pieces
> out until it stops
> crashing.
>
> At this point I would tend to suggest that we:
> * replace pliny as the database server with a
> slightly beefier machine
> (eg, the Altus 130 or 140, with the max of 4 gig
> ram)
> * take the old hard drive _out_ of pliny and set it
> aside, as it's been
> suspected of being a problem
> * reassign pliny as the new web server front end
> * reassign larousse as the backup server; it could
> hold both a
> replicated database and take over web server duties
> in a crash emergency
> by taking over the other machine's IP address
>
> The present larousse is overloaded (typical load
> average around 8-10
> during daytime US, or up to 30 if some ass decides
> to spider the site
> for every printable page), and a lot of pliny's CPU
> is taken by its
> additional web duties (pushing load to around 4).
>
> More RAM for the database should help it.
>
> More CPU for the web server would definitely help
> it.
>
> More RAM for the web server should help it once we
> start making more use
> of in-memory caching, which should decrease load on
> the database (and
> decrease the amount of stuff that it has to lock,
> leading to faster
> response times on reads while other operations are
> running).
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
>
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

__________________________________
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Copyright Schmopyright

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> >Is it another attempt to introduce images of dubious legal status (claimed
> >by some to be under "fair use") into Wikipedia ?
> >
> We've already got them. Making people _say_ it will make it easier to
> cleanse our righteous server of these impurities later when the others
> see the light. ;)

I think that's right!

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> (eg, the Altus 130 or 140, with the max of 4 gig ram)

Altus 130 is Dual Channel ATA-100, (2 drive bays)
Altus 140 is U160 SCSI (3 drive bays)

I have *always* used SCSI for servers, but is this just superstition?

I'm narrowing it down to these three:

Altus 130
Dual Athlon 2800+, 4 gig DDR, 2 80 gig EIDE drives
$3006

Altus 140
Dual Athlon 2800+, 4 gig DDR, 2 36 gig SCSI drives
$3590

Altus 1000
Dual Opteron 240 (sweet!), 4 gig DDR, 2 80 gig EIDE drives
$3526

As you can see, within the budget range of potential tradeoffs, it
looks like SCSI costs $500 more for half the disk space.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
Nick Reinking wrote:
> In reality, we are likely going to need twice that $3000 to get
> a setup that is really going to perform appreciably better than our
> current setup.

I highly doubt that.  But if that's true, then we should really be
thinking of what we buy today as only an interim measure, to be
followed in a month with more stuff bought by Paypal donations.

For $6,000 we could buy 3 very decent webserver-only machines and move
everything off the existing DB machine and use load balancing.  I
*know* that would rock, if the DB machine was pumped up to 4 gig.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] CVS Request

body:
Andre Engels wrote:

>I would like to get CVS access to be able to upload new versions of
>languageNl.php myself rather than have to go through a busy Brion VIBBER
>every time.
>
>
>
The problem is getting from CVS to the test server & then to the live
server -- that is the bottleneck.
Jimbo said a while back that more people would be given access at this
level -- any news?


subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

in_reply_to: <20030812204019.57620.qmail@web11504.mail.yahoo.com>; from utilitymuffinresearch@yahoo.com on Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 01:40:19PM -0700

body:
I hear you.  Once we settle on what's the best bang for the buck given
the options at Penguin (which helps focus the discussion), then we can
also shop around for the best possible deal.

Steve Vertigo wrote:

> I notice that the Penguin Dual MP Altus is $1700
> with 4GB is another 1500
>
> Pricewatch.com lists:
> $233 Athlon MP 2800
> ...x2=$466
> $403 Dual MP server (rack)
> $170 1GB DDR memory
> ...x4=$680
>
> just an idea.
> -S-
>
> --- Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > Just a few notes:
> >
> > Pliny crashes roughly once a month. This must stop.
> >
> > Not only are the outage periods annoying, but every
> > crash risks
> > corrupting the database. Hardware problems have been
> > vaguely suspected,
> > but we've never really had the chance to swap pieces
> > out until it stops
> > crashing.
> >
> > At this point I would tend to suggest that we:
> > * replace pliny as the database server with a
> > slightly beefier machine
> > (eg, the Altus 130 or 140, with the max of 4 gig
> > ram)
> > * take the old hard drive _out_ of pliny and set it
> > aside, as it's been
> > suspected of being a problem
> > * reassign pliny as the new web server front end
> > * reassign larousse as the backup server; it could
> > hold both a
> > replicated database and take over web server duties
> > in a crash emergency
> > by taking over the other machine's IP address
> >
> > The present larousse is overloaded (typical load
> > average around 8-10
> > during daytime US, or up to 30 if some ass decides
> > to spider the site
> > for every printable page), and a lot of pliny's CPU
> > is taken by its
> > additional web duties (pushing load to around 4).
> >
> > More RAM for the database should help it.
> >
> > More CPU for the web server would definitely help
> > it.
> >
> > More RAM for the web server should help it once we
> > start making more use
> > of in-memory caching, which should decrease load on
> > the database (and
> > decrease the amount of stuff that it has to lock,
> > leading to faster
> > response times on reads while other operations are
> > running).
> >
> > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> >
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
> __________________________________
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> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] CVS Request

body:
I would like to get CVS access to be able to upload new versions of
languageNl.php myself rather than have to go through a busy Brion VIBBER
every time.

As things are now, I intend to use this access only for updating the Dutch
(and perhaps in the future the Frisian) language-version.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] CVS Request

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> tarquin wrote:
>
>> The problem is getting from CVS to the test server & then to the live
>> server -- that is the bottleneck.
>> Jimbo said a while back that more people would be given access at
>> this level -- any news?
>
>
> Erik Moeller (Eloquence) and Tim Starling should both have the
> necessary access to do this, if I'm not mistaken, as well as the usual
> suspects (Magnus Manske, Lee Crocker, and me).
>
I asked for this access too so I could work on skins & CSS without
bugging the hardcore SQL programmers :) Jimbo agreed to it IIRC,  but I
haven't heard any more about it

(BTW -- could you update the test server's css from CVS please?)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Copyright Schmopyright

in_reply_to: <87ptjaimvb.fsf@unicorn.bad-people-of-the-future.san-francisco.ca.us>; from evan@wikitravel.org on Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 05:31:36PM -0400

body:
Evan Prodromou wrote:
> The main idea is to store as much rights information as possible in
> machine-readable format. For me, I want to be able to put
> automatically-generated copyright notices on the printable version of
> a page.

Just as a point of reference, machine-readable licensing is a big BIG
deal to Larry Lessig.  He goes on about it every time I talk to him.

I'm not sure I see his point, but I also don't see any harm in it.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
On Wed, 13 Aug 2003, Richard Grevers wrote:
> One question to throw into the mix - If we cache static pages for anonymous
> (no skin preference)users (updating them when edited) rather than pulling
> them afresh from the database, on which mahine should the static pages
> reside - the web server, the db box or a dedicated box?

At present those are on the web server, in the local filesystem.

The (compressed) cache for the English Wikipedia presently weighs in at
790,348 kb.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [Wikitech-l] CVS Request

body:
On Tue, 12 Aug 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:

> Andre Engels wrote:
>
> >I would like to get CVS access to be able to upload new versions of
> >languageNl.php myself rather than have to go through a busy Brion VIBBER
> >every time.
> >
> I'd do it in a second, but I don't know your sourceforge user name. :)

Neither did I, I don't think I had one. Created one under the name
"a_engels".

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 01:40:15PM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Thomas Corell wrote:
> > I think Nick is right, getting a fast 'php' (Webserver) frontend for all
> > the languages still running on pliny. And giving the database enought
> > memory,  and a fast RAID (striping is usually the version with fast read
> > access, if I remember, feel free to correct me) will help to get a
> > database-server only doing mysql and this hopefully at all his speed and
> > memory.
>
> How much priority should I give to RAID versus RAM for the db server,
> if there's a tradeoff?  Does anyone really know the answer to that?
>
> --Jimbo

RAM is more important than fast disks, but you really are going to want
to have both.  We're definitely not going to want to stripe these disks
if we want reliability.  Having two disks in RAID 0 is doing to double
our chances of losing everything in a disk failure.  We're going to
probably want RAID 5, or RAID 10 at the worst.

Also, the reason why I gave my design is it is the cheapest way to get
the most performance out of three machines.  The other way (buying a
machine to straight replace pliny) is certainly less work, but with
considerably less performance benefit (unless you're willing to up the
CPUs to dual Athlon 2800+ CPUs for an extra $314).  RAID would also
help, but that's going to cost an additional $1200 or so at the very
least.  In reality, we are likely going to need twice that $3000 to get
a setup that is really going to perform appreciably better than our
current setup.

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 01:56:19PM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> > (eg, the Altus 130 or 140, with the max of 4 gig ram)
>
> Altus 130 is Dual Channel ATA-100, (2 drive bays)
> Altus 140 is U160 SCSI (3 drive bays)
>
> I have *always* used SCSI for servers, but is this just superstition?
>
> I'm narrowing it down to these three:
>
> Altus 130
> Dual Athlon 2800+, 4 gig DDR, 2 80 gig EIDE drives
> $3006
>
> Altus 140
> Dual Athlon 2800+, 4 gig DDR, 2 36 gig SCSI drives
> $3590
>
> Altus 1000
> Dual Opteron 240 (sweet!), 4 gig DDR, 2 80 gig EIDE drives
> $3526
>
> As you can see, within the budget range of potential tradeoffs, it
> looks like SCSI costs $500 more for half the disk space.

No, it isn't superstition if you want to have good, reliable, fast RAID
on a server.  There are IDE solutions out there but the vast majority of
them, well, suck.  If you are willing to spend more than your $3000
target, it might be wised to get the 1000E w/ 4GB (4x1GB) + 2x 120GB IDE
disks (these are newer disks than the 80GB).  That gives us considerable
upgrade potential in the future (as AMD phases out Athlon MPs), as well
as allowing us to move up to 8GB of memory in the future.  If worse
comes to worse, you can always add a PCI SCSI card and gets some
external SCSI storage in the future.

Or, if you're willing to mess around, go to a single 40GB IDE disk on
the 1000E and buy a couple of Western Digital 10k RPM Raptor hard drives
from another vendor.  They are SCSI size (36GB), SCSI speed (10k RPM),
but for a lot lower price (only $136 at newegg.com); which is almost as
cheap as the much slower, older disks from Penguin Computing.

--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN


subject: [Wikitech-l] Copyright Schmopyright

in_reply_to:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski's message of "Tue, 12 Aug 2003 21:13:19
 +0200"

body:
>>>>> "TW" == Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sourceforge.net> writes:

    TW> Is it another attempt to introduce images of dubious legal
    TW> status (claimed by some to be under "fair use") into Wikipedia
    TW> ?

No, not at all. "Fair use" isn't good enough to get stuff into Wikitravel:

    http://www.wikitravel.org/article/Wikitravel:Copyright_details#Fair_Use

...and I'd probably disable that option for wikitravel.org.

The main idea is to store as much rights information as possible in
machine-readable format. For me, I want to be able to put
automatically-generated copyright notices on the printable version of
a page.

~ESP

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


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Help me select hardware

body:
On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 05:25:26AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> This requests goes out _especially_ to the 'hands dirty' developers
> who are intricately familiar with where our hardware bottlenecks are
> most likely to be.  But anyone with solid, non-speculative ideas is
> welcome to comment!
>
> As Jason said, he bought another gig of ram -- we are planning to
> basically max out the machines if that will help.  That hard drive
> that didn't work, well, we'll get the right one soon, and that'll help
> significantly I think.  Also, if I'm not mistaken, one of these
> machines has a dual processor board, but only a single processor, is
> that right, Jason?  So that's an easy upgrade, once we find and buy
> the right part.
>
> But, imagine this: suppose I were shopping at
> http://www.penguincomputing.com/, as I always do, and I wanted to
> spend around $3000 on new hardware for wikipedia.  Presumably, this
> could either be one new kickass machine, or 2 new very nice frontend
> webservers, or whatever else we think we could best use.
>
> Given that budget, what should I buy that's most likely to give us the
> best bang for the buck?
>
> And then, of course, once we have settled on the general type of
> hardware (i.e. 2 medium machines or 1 kickass machine) that will be
> most useful to us, we could also extend our shopping to other
> suppliers.  I have used penguincomputing many times and I've been very
> happy, but I'd go elsewhere if there was good reason.

First a disclaimer, as nobody has done any serious measurement,
what we can do is no more than an educated guess.

It seems that adding much more RAM (the fastest kind of RAM you can find)
to all machines would help most. So that all the databases fit in RAM,
and there's plenty space left for tcp/ip connection buffers,
per-process PHP memory etc.

Current database design is very centralized, so single kickass machine
would probably help more.


from_name: Sanford Forte

subject: [Textbook-l] distinct books

body:
> Karl wrote:
> >The advantage to reusing modules is that
> >it saves a little bit of copying and pasting,
> >right ? This is a shortcut that I think sets
> >books up to be more on the generic side than
> >tailored to suit. And when I use a textbook
> >for myself Id rather have the whole thing
> >tailored to suit.

>Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Instructors do this already; they start a class on
> chapter 3, then go onto chapter 4.1, skip the rest of
> ch 4 and then do ch 2, then back to 5, then to
> 7.3-7.6, 9.1, 8.3-4 etc. The beauty of modules is that
> the same content can be reorganized in many different
> ways without having to fork content. There should, of
> course, be one reference edition for each book that
> the community maintains, but I would like to give
> instructors the ability to create index pages in their
> own userspace (in a user index:namespace perhaps). And
> having too many self references is bad anyway and
> should be avoided since things change. This will mean
> that some modules will have to be a bit more generic
> than they would otherwise, but I think that this will
> be a killer feature to have. Having this ability will
> also help to prevent book forks, since most forks
> would be organizational or content-based (that is, an
> instructor may want to have more or fewer modules in
> the textbook used in his/her class).
-------------

This is all good stuff. The way it works in California is as follows (I
would assume it's similar in most of the other large states):

1) after a publisher readies a book, it has to pass a textbook committee
review to make sure that it conforms to the frameworks.

2) Once a book has been approved, it's available for any district to adopt.
The districts have their various curriculum experts, teachers, interested
parents, etc. determine what's the best fit for the district. btw, it's more
complex at K-5 [elementary school], where amorphous 'topics' like 'language
development' take on the flavor of entire integrated programs, and are more
complex, (but ideally suited to open content development).

So, this is one way it gets interesting is with open content developed in
modular format via Wikipedia. It turns out that many, many excellent
teachers have developed very good materials on their own over the years.
Often, this material is published by a district, and distributed to all the
schools in that district.

If a specific book is published via Wikipedia to adhere to standards, once
the content is approved at state level, various districts could either
self-publish, or request that a commercial publisher include those teacher
materials specific to the district that had been published by Wikipedia.
This would save time, money, and other resources - not to mention the
benefit that(again, I would start with one (recommending California), and
migrate to many...in fact, eventually, one could tag various modules within
a 'book' as specific to one or another state, and go from there).

This is just one advantage of the modular approach, from a practical
'on-the-ground' approach. There are many others.

Sanford


subject: [Wikitech-l] Copyright Schmopyright

body:
Daniel Herding wrote:
>In the Upload form, below the ''summary'' field,
>there should be fields called ''source'' and
>''copyright status''. ''summary'' should be
>renamed to ''description''. The Wikipedia software
>should refuse to accept the file unless all fields
>are filled out. After that, it can create a nice
>image description page from the entered information.

I agree completely. We could also add category tags
based on the above info so that third parties could
filter out "fair use" and no tag images.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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from_name: Daniel Herding

subject: [Wikitech-l] CologneBlue stylesheet

body:
Hi!

Someone on the German mailinglist pointed out that CologneBlue
doesn't show tables correctly. It ignores the table's cellpadding
tag. A screenshot can be found here:

http://www.studentendorf-vauban.de/~zeno/pics/wikipedia-table-cb.png

This is also the case on the English wikipedia, e.g.
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta

The reason is an entry in cologneb.css:

>#article, #article td, #article th, #article p {
> font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
> font-size: 10pt; color: black;
> padding: 0;
>}

If you delete
>padding: 0;
everything looks fine.

I also want to remind you about another thing that needs to be fixed
with the CologneBlue stylesheet:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-July/004911.html

Thanks
Daniel


subject: [WikiEN-l] Update to gfdl copyright notice needed

body:
It seems that your the point man on this, Mike.  To my
eye the one that stands out is Encyclozine --
apparently "powered by e-library"  It has a staff of
writers, and seems intent on making a name for itself
and the furthest it goes for crediting wikipedia is a
little tag at the bottom of the authors page.
"We have adopted several articles from Wikipedia, a
multilingual project to create a complete and accurate
open content encyclopedia. Our appreciation and thanks
go to the many authors."

Thats almost as good as:

(From Din Cyclopedia)  "This is how it works. First it
pulls content from WIkipedia.com. ..This content is
then altered slightly so that links will remain local.
But most importantly, this content is only pulled one
time, then it is stored locally and from that point
the wikipedia server is no longered bothered by this
site....The Din Cyclopedia tecnically is the
wikipedia, but somethings need to be explained about
the later..."

-S-

--- Michael Becker <wikipedia at jumpingjackweb.com>
wrote:
> It has been discussed (here:
>
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Sites_that_use_Wikipedia_for_content)
> that the gfdl notice on the bottom of every page
> needs updating.  The following notice is the result
> of the discussion "All text is available under the
> terms of the [[Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free
> Documentation License|GNU Free Documentation
> License]]. See [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]] for
> suggested practices."  I would like to request that
> as long as no one has any more suggestion to make on
> the talk page, this new notice be instituted ASAP.
> Also, the "Printable version" pages need to have the
> same notice (currently they don't).
>
> --
> Michael Becker
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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