from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Marc Riddell wrote:
> Ya know what we need in WP, an Article on Expertaphobia: The fear of, and
> seeming intimidation by, people who know stuff about things.
>
I think there is one somewhere already, maybe on meta.
> Someone, I don't recall who it was, wrote that they would never work on
> something where experts were involved. Really? Who would you go to if you
> needed heart surgery, or wanted to learn how to play a violin?
>
> Don't look now, but you are working with the aid of experts right now! Those
> marvelous persons behind the scenes of this computerized market place who
> make all of this possible. Without them we would be typing into the ether.
>
Indeed, I'm an expert in some areas myself, and there are even a couple
articles in WP where I could fairly lay claim to being the "leading
authority" on those topics. There have been plenty of times where I've
seen a moronic edit and spluttered at the screen "who do you think you
are, to be questioning *me*?", and times where I was tempted to add an
interesting detail, and then realized that I only knew it because of a
private email in my possession - so the WP addition must await
publication of the book.

WP is an unusual challenge for experts, because you can't just say "X is
true" and have a crowd of adoring students copy it down uncritically.
It's much more like being the ringer at the pool hall, where you go in
unknown and have to impress people with your present skill rather than
your past reputation. I think it's a good challenge for experts actually
- can you command respect for your knowledge using your words alone,
without falling back on the CV? We have some pseudonymous experts in WP
who are really world-class and receive considerable deference, so it can
work that way.

Stan


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Fastfission

subject: [WikiEN-l] Troubling news on Citizendium

body:
On 1/16/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/16/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > You seem to know more about it.
> > Are you saying her accusations are unfounded?
> >
> > Mgm
> >
>
> No idea. It's not an area I know much about since other than a few
> skirmishes it isn't something that chemistry has much in the way of
> dealings with.

The problem is the categorization of disciplines can be a very
controversial issue even if the discipline itself does not come with
specific and explicit political or cultural agendas, much less tied up
in questions of identity or the ability of individuals to make
decisions on account of their cultural heritage.

There is absolutely no easy answer to it. The question of where
ethnic/gender studies (and its variants) fall within the organization
of knowledge has been something the American academy has been
periodically battling with for forty years (Peter Novick's _That Noble
Dream_ has some great accounts of how the discipline of History in the
US struggled with these issues in the 60s and 70s). The question of
disciplinary disputes (what sociologists sometimes call "boundary
work") has existed since before Copernicus (the question of whether
mathematicians could make statements which impinged on areas of
philosophy was a big one in his era). Categorization of knowledge was
one of the most radical aspects of the original Encyclopedie, and some
scholars (Robert Darnton in particular) have argued that it was in
categorizing religion in the same tree as black magic (rather than a
source of revealed truth) that really invoked the ire of the Church
(rather than the snippy little asides poking fun at the Eucharist).

Which is just to say that while I don't think this is necessarily any
example of systemic racism or sexism on Sanger's part (there are
legitimate reasons for not considering these fields to be top-level
categories, one need not attribute such opinions to philosophies of
prejudice), it is an example of what some of the difficulties with an
"expert-driven" system will be. The problem is, experts don't even
agree on very basic things at times, such as whose knowledge counts as
genuine, such as how knowledge should be organized, such as where a
discipline stops and ends. No matter what decision is made in these
sorts of issues, they will alienate entire disciplines of experts.

I think Wikipedia gets around it, paradoxically enough, by not
pretending to have any expert rule, as well as having a relatively
democratic categorization system (things can be redundantly
categorized). If you don't make the assumption that the material is
heavily mediated by experts, then you don't feel quite as bad if it
doesn't align with one point of view or the other. Or maybe experts
just don't pay a lot of attention to issues like this on Wikipedia for
one reason or another.

In any case... it will be interesting to see how Sanger works this out
over time. He really can't afford to alienate the entire humanities
and if he is perceived as shutting out or, god forbid, segregating
ethnic/gender studies he will probably end up doing just about that.
(I'm not saying he's doing that, I'm just talking about how he will be
perceived.) If he insists on making determinations like this on his
own (if that is indeed what he has done), he will likely end up
stepping on a lot of toes.

FF


from_name: Thomas Dalton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Independent article

body:
> > You know what would be great? Any text added less than 24 hours ago
> > appears in a different colour, with a red background perhaps. No ifs,
> > no buts. Wouldn't that solve a *lot* of problems?
>
>
> Great idea! Go code it ;-p

Shouldn't be hard, all the code for diffs already exists. It just a
matter of parsing the wikicode in the diff, rather than printing it as
source code, and obviously the parsing code already exists as well.

I think the Stable Version feature that is being worked on is a better
solution, though. It's more flexible, but does pretty much the same
job.


body:
> umm we use Free art images on wikipedia.
> [[Image:Heckert_GNU_white.svg]] for example.

I've just read the Free Art license. Are we not violating the following section?

"3. INCORPORATION OF ARTWORK

All the elements of this work of art must remain free, which is why
you are not allowed to integrate the originals (originals and
subsequents) into another work which would not be subject to this
license."

We are integrating the artwork into Wikipedia, which is not subject to
that license...


list: foundation-l

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Board meeting in Rotterdam later this week

body:
teun spaans wrote:

>>If
>>'fair use' in the broad terms of American law would be available in many
>>more countries it would make sense to allow it on Wikimedia projects, but at
>>the moment it is an almost exclusively American law, and raises many
>>problems on non-English projects.
>>
>>
>Which again shows that "fair use" images are not free, applicable only
>on american territory, and so is again an argument to do away with
>fair use image on wikis in all languages, including the english
>language.
>
>In another related thread it was coprrectly pointed out that there is
>a difference between the italian wiki and italy. I'd like to point out
>that there is a similar difference between the english wiki and the
>usa and gt britain. There is also Australia, New Zealand, Canada and
>India to consider, where many people have english as their primary
>language. Not to mention the rest of the world. :-)
>
Speaking for the Canadian situation I am guided by the ruling of the
Supreme Court of Canada in the ruling in CCH Canada vs. The Law Society
of Upper Canada.  The fair use criteria of US law (which were themselves
based on precedent and not codified until 1909) were reviewed favorably
by the Court in attempting to understand "fair dealing".
Philosophically the Court appears to have taken the stand that copyright
law is about balancing two divergent interests.

Ec


list: wikimedia-l


body:
On 1/17/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't see how the page being an aggregation of two separate works is
> relevant - the page as a whole is a work, and the Free Art image has
> been incorporated into it.

The problem with the Free Art license is that it says nothing about
aggregate/collective works, actually. You'd have to interpret their
use of "distribution" to include "aggregation of independent works"
(per GDFL) for it to be kosher.

That being said, I would be surprised if they were against
aggregations of independent works (it would seriously cut down on the
ability to distribute any work), so it could probably be clarified
somehow...

FF


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 17/01/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> > umm we use Free art images on wikipedia.
> > [[Image:Heckert_GNU_white.svg]] for example.

> I've just read the Free Art license. Are we not violating the following section?
> "3. INCORPORATION OF ARTWORK
> All the elements of this work of art must remain free, which is why
> you are not allowed to integrate the originals (originals and
> subsequents) into another work which would not be subject to this
> license."
> We are integrating the artwork into Wikipedia, which is not subject to
> that license...

A work can't claim copyright on another work. "Viral licences" aren't.
What they can do is require distribution of a merged work to only be
under their conditions. An image on an article page is an aggregation
of two separate works, the text and picture.

- d.


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: geni [mailto:geniice at gmail.com]
>Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 05:48 AM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Troubling news on Citizendium
>
>On 1/17/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  but sometimes "how do we
>> organize this information" is a much harder problem, often requiring
>> professional help.
>>
>
>We get by. The answer appears to be "in as may ways as posible".
>
>--
>geni
>

That is really an excellent answer. Most of the trouble we have results from trying to impose some pattern on knowledge, which, as we know, wants to be free.

Fred


subject: [WikiEN-l] Searching an article history

body:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: zero 0000 [mailto:nought_0000 at yahoo.com]
>Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 06:57 AM
>To: 'wikipedia'
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Searching an article history
>
>If an article is pretty active, it can be quite a chore
>to locate the edit where a particular text was added.
>Is there any sort of tool to help with that?
>
>Thanks.
>Zero.

This would be a daunting coding problem, but would be very useful. It would be a search of diffs I guess.

Fred


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Jeff V. Merkey

subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiDump Parsing

body:
I have written a complete set of tools that do all of this, but they are
not open sourced. I would suggest a simple
C or C++ program calling stdin and looking for just the tags you want.
Be careful as the buffering required is LARGE
to parse these files. You will need at least 16K buffer as many lines
read with fgets can exceed 8192 bytes in size.

Look for the beginning tags for each section. Category links are
embedded in the articles themselves.

tags are <TAGNAME> start and </TAGNAME> end.

Jeff

Harish TM wrote:

>I was trying to parse the Wikipedia dumps but unfortunately I find the XML
>file that can be downloaded a little hard to parse. I was wondering if there
>is a neat way to extract:
>                         1. The article title
>                         2. The article content ( without links to articles
>in other languages, external links and so on )
>                         3. The category.
>
>Also I find that there are a large number of tools that allow one to convert
>plain text to media wiki text. What if I want to go the other way and
>extract information exactly the way it appears on the wikipedia site.
>
>
>Harish
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>


from_name: Steve Sanbeg

subject: [Wikitech-l] New mediawiki diff and blamemap extension is live

body:
On Wed, 17 Jan 2007 18:25:04 +0000, Neil Harris wrote:

> Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 04:10:10PM +0000, David Gerard wrote:
>>
>>> On 17/01/07, Roman Nosov <rnosov at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> You can take a look at live demo.
>>>> Sample blamemap:
>>>> http://217.147.83.36:9001/wiki/Freebsd?trackchanges=blamemap&oldid=1524
>>>> Can track even a single character change:
>>>> http://217.147.83.36:9001/wiki/Freebsd?trackchanges=diff1&oldid=1516
>>>> Handles text swap:
>>>> http://217.147.83.36:9001/wiki/Freebsd?trackchanges=diff2&oldid=1513
>>>>
>>> Nice!
>>>
>>> Cosmetic question: does it have to flash like that? I'm using SeaMonkey.
>>>
>>
>> No flashing here; FF1.5.0.>
>>
>> Any change you have a more... traditionally edited page on there to aim
>> the blame map at?  :-)
>>
>> Cheers,
>> -- jra
>>
> Some of the coloured text inverts to colour-on-black when I mouse over
> it, and reverts when the cursor moves off it. Some other highlighted
> blocks go to colour-on-white. Moving the mouse over multiple ranges of
> coloured text makes the text appear to be flashing. (FF 2.0.0.1)

The colored blocks are inverting (to color on black/white) when I mouse
over them.  I'm not sure what the diff tabs are useful for, but the
blamemap looks useful.


subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiDump Parsing

body:
This works too, but its slower than mollasses on a cold Utah day ....

:-)

Jeff

Brion Vibber wrote:

>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>Hash: SHA1
>
>Harish TM wrote:
>
>
>>I was trying to parse the Wikipedia dumps but unfortunately I find the XML
>>file that can be downloaded a little hard to parse. I was wondering if there
>>is a neat way to extract:
>>                         1. The article title
>>
>>
>
>/mediawiki/page/title
>
>
>
>>                         2. The article content ( without links to articles
>>in other languages, external links and so on )
>>
>>
>
>The article content *contains* those links, so I guess you mean you want
>to parse the text and remove certain elements of it?
>
>
>
>>                         3. The category.
>>
>>
>
>Again, that's part of article text.
>
>
>
>>Also I find that there are a large number of tools that allow one to convert
>>plain text to media wiki text. What if I want to go the other way and
>>extract information exactly the way it appears on the wikipedia site.
>>
>>
>
>Run the wiki parser on it.
>
>- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
>Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
>Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
>iD8DBQFFrpxXwRnhpk1wk44RArnZAKCe347OtktrffTXbzGgzb0xVNnZOQCeO7sq
>MIjjmK5c8Oc4RYQzMExvqHQ=
>=jTHV
>-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikitech-l mailing list
>Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
>
>


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mail archives and Google

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> Timwi wrote:
>
>>Is there any specific reason why the mailing list archives are
>>explicitly marked as 'noindex'? That makes it next to impossible to find
>>an old message by keywords; otherwise Google would be pretty useful.
>
> Allow me to quote you from your post of November 6, 2006 about this very
> topic:
>
>>Don't take this the wrong way, but I hope you'll /still/ receive
>>complaints that things people posted are visible publicly, even if it's
>>not googlable. Then hopefully you'll reinstate Google's indexing.

Ah! So can we have the Google indexing back then? Pretty please? :-)


from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Independent article

body:
"David Gerard" wrote

> Journalists are a good audience to get this across to, because they
> looove Wikipedia - it's the universal background resource (an area
> where our breadth is a strength).
>
> This is also useful for getting across to journalists that saying
> "according to Wikipedia" is as appropriate as it would be using any
> useful but non-canonical source. Attribute your sources!

Unsourced recent reports of deaths on WP are in the same class as 'unconfirmed reports', i.e. rumours that have got onto the wire services qua rumours. If the hacks take unsourced stuff from WP without provenance they are not doing the job they are paid for.

Charles

-----------------------------------------
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body:
> A work can't claim copyright on another work. "Viral licences" aren't.
> What they can do is require distribution of a merged work to only be
> under their conditions. An image on an article page is an aggregation
> of two separate works, the text and picture.

There is a difference between restricting what work your work can be
incorporated in, and claiming copyright. The free art license isn't
saying "if you include this image in your work, then your work is
automatically under our license" it's saying "the only work you can
include this image in is work released under this license" - they are
very different things.

I don't see how the page being an aggregation of two separate works is
relevant - the page as a whole is a work, and the Free Art image has
been incorporated into it.


body:
"David Gerard" wrote

> Larry Sanger seems to be doing a lot of one-to-one outreach to
> academia. If he can work out a way for contribution to a GFDL
> encyclopedia to enhance an academic career, the growth in quality
> contributions to the open content pool should be fantastic.

The people slogging for tenure will do it? The professors won't delegate it to the grad students? The grad students won't be the people who are already writing for us?

If Larry gets tenure-track people to believe it will help them, then it really might be a breakthrough.

Charles

-----------------------------------------
Email sent from www.ntlworld.com
Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software
Visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information


subject: [WikiEN-l] Independent article

body:
On 17/01/07, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> "David Gerard" wrote

> > Journalists are a good audience to get this across to, because they
> > looove Wikipedia - it's the universal background resource (an area
> > where our breadth is a strength).
> > This is also useful for getting across to journalists that saying
> > "according to Wikipedia" is as appropriate as it would be using any
> > useful but non-canonical source. Attribute your sources!

> Unsourced recent reports of deaths on WP are in the same class as 'unconfirmed reports', i.e. rumours that have got onto the wire services qua rumours. If the hacks take unsourced stuff from WP without provenance they are not doing the job they are paid for.

With some prominent recent firings of journalists for plagiarism from
Wikipedia, I think this matter is in their awareness!

I also find it useful telling them the story of the circular reference
that was discussed on this list a short while ago - Wikipedia article
gets reference added, editor tracks down journalist who wrote
reference, journalist says he read it on Wikipedia ... ahem! That's
embarrassing for them too. "Always note 'According to Wikipedia', like
you would quoting a person."

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Reliable sources

body:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:

>"MacGyverMagic/Mgm" wrote:
>
>
>>I totally agree that creators of fictional material are not a reliable
>>source for their own notability in 99.9% of the cases,
>>but I also believe that for uncontroversial information like character
>>information creators are a source far more superior than fansites (who
>>speculate) and newspaper articles and interviews (who can misunderstand and
>>misinterpret).
>>
>>
>I agree completely with this.  As long as some credible independent
>sources exist for the major premise of the article, sourcing details
>from the originators is no different from sourcing minor details on a
>company from the company's website. Why would anyone have a problem
>with that, at least in general?
>
This sounds sensible.  Perhaps what we need some where is a list of what
would be "standard" information in a biographical article.  Essentially
we would be looking at the kind of boring data that would be found in a
"Who's Who" that chose to include the individual: date and place of
birth and marriage, where they went to school, etc.  Any of ths stuff
could still be disputed, put it would be presumed valid unless that happens.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] Moving the Main Page

body:
On 14/01/07, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:

> '''Main Page''' is a movie released in [[2008]].  It starred [[Tom
> Hanks]] as a U.S. [[United States Congress|congressman]] who gets
> embroiled in a sex scandal when he is suspected of having
> inappropriate relations with a teenage page.

If this isn't an Uncyclopedia article yet it should be.

- d.


from_name: Luna

subject: [WikiEN-l] Independent article

body:
On 1/17/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Shouldn't be hard, all the code for diffs already exists. It just a
> matter of parsing the wikicode in the diff, rather than printing it as
> source code, and obviously the parsing code already exists as well.
>

Agreed -- I don't know any PHP, but it seems to me that most of the
technical support for that sort of feature is already in place. We can
already make diffs and parse code, and we can already tell which edits were
made when, so just compare against the most recent oldid that's over 24
hours old, I guess.

That might have some interesting impact on content disputes. Or what happens
when the version being compared against was the vandal version. But it's at
least possible.

I think the Stable Version feature that is being worked on is a better
> solution, though. It's more flexible, but does pretty much the same
> job.

Even if we only applied stable versions to a select few articles (say, those
that seem to get sprotected all the time, because vandals think they're
funny, or anything that may have or frequently has BLP concerns), it would
probably go a long way toward avoiding this sort of situation, and the
resulting press.

Unless staying in the press is a good thing. And in some cases, it is.

So, I dunno. Our counter-vandalism efforts seem to work, for the most part,
but BLP is always a hard patrol.

-Luna


list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Israeli Esperanto stamps, oh my

body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

>Andrew Gray wrote:
>
>
>>[copied to foundation-l and wikipedia-l; please note this when replying]
>>
>>I was sure I'd seen this on the mailing lists before, but I couldn't
>>find it on a quick search (which is odd - I'm sure I heard a week ago)
>>
>>It appears the Esperanto Wikipedia is on a stamp. Well, Esperanto is
>>on the stamp; a chunk of the text from [[eo:L. L. Zamenhof]] is used
>>as a sort of background illustration.
>>
>>Colour image: http://www.jr.co.il/pictures/stamps/jrst0399.jpg
>>Detailed description: http://www.jr.co.il/pictures/stamps/jrst0399e.jpg
>>Brief discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28news%29
>>
>>
>>
>Hmm, I didn't see a GFDL anywhere. On the back, in very small print
>maybe? :-)
>
Canadian stamps at least have copyright notices. :-)

>We should tell the Israelis we'll overlook this little mistake in return
>for a free license for all of Israel's stamp images...
>
Make sure this also applies to the tabs, since these are a unique
feature of Israeli stamps.

This is the beginning of a whole new subject for topical (thematic)
collectors.

Ec


body:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com [mailto:charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com]
>Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 07:41 AM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Troubling news on Citizendium
>
>"David Gerard" wrote
>
>> Larry Sanger seems to be doing a lot of one-to-one outreach to
>> academia. If he can work out a way for contribution to a GFDL
>> encyclopedia to enhance an academic career, the growth in quality
>> contributions to the open content pool should be fantastic.
>
>The people slogging for tenure will do it? The professors won't delegate it to the grad students? The grad students won't be the people who are already writing for us?
>
>If Larry gets tenure-track people to believe it will help them, then it really might be a breakthrough.
>
>Charles
>

I think any of us, if asked, should be willing to write recommendations for contributors. Whether they will have traction will depend on how knowledgeable and intelligent the person considering it is.

Fred


body:
> If Larry gets tenure-track people to believe it will help them, then it really might be a breakthrough.

The breakthrough is getting the people that decide who to give tenure
to think contributing to Citizendium is a good thing, and I can't see
why they would. Universities want researchers doing research, because
that's what gets funding. Writing textbooks is important, but I don't
think you generally get tenure for it, and that's the closest
comparison I can see.


from_name: Marco Schuster

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mail archives and Google

body:
Timwi schrieb:
> Is there any specific reason why the mailing list archives are
> explicitly marked as 'noindex'? That makes it next to impossible to find
> an old message by keywords; otherwise Google would be pretty useful.
>
Doesnt the new mailman version have htdig or similar?

regards
marco


subject: [WikiEN-l] Moving the Main Page - sequel

body:
On 15/01/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Daniel R. Tobias wrote:

> > > '''Main Page''' is a movie released in [[2008]].  It starred [[Tom

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page_%28movie%29

(yer both named in the edit summary fwiw :-)

- d.


from_name: Andrew Dunbar

subject: [Wikitech-l] Use binary to represent varchar rather than UTF8

references:
<b66ddc900701090914k309b6844r9dc0fe7ce0bcef61@mail.gmail.com>
	<eo0nsu$c90$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<b66ddc900701091847p1cd536a4pdffd6fe51ca34c5c@mail.gmail.com>
	<45A4A414.4060203@pobox.com> <eoh0hg$9d7$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<45AC0FCF.8010903@pobox.com>

body:
On 1/16/07, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> > Brion Vibber wrote:
> >> If MySQL supported UTF-8, we'd be happy to make use of it. Using proper
> >> character sets gives us warm, fuzzy feelings and makes it easier to work
> >> in terminals and other direct-database tools, as well as potentially
> >> making it easier to use built-in database support for case-insensitive
> >> lookups and proper sorting. [snip]
> >
> > On a related tack, why isn't MediaWiki using MySQL 5 yet? (I remember
> > there was a very good reason, but I can't find it now)
>
> 1) The biggest reason we'd want to upgrade would be to make use of
> native unicode support, but it doesn't work ;)
>
> There are a few other niceties in 5, but not a lot of incentive to
> upgrade considering that...
>
> 2) To upgrade cleanly without using the (broken) unicode support, we'll
> want to finish working out and testing a proper binary schema and a
> migration to it.
>
> The good news is that we've more or less got the hang of doing clean
> schema upgrades using replication and switching masters around. So once
> we get the schema details worked out, we *should* be able to do the
> upgrade with minimal downtime.
>
> In theory. :)

1) Does mysql support UCS-2, UTF-8, or UCS-4 beyond the BMP? If so we
can still use UTF-8 internally and rely on mysql's encoding conversion
for the rest.

2) Has a bug report or feature request been filed on mysql's site? I'm
fumbling through now trying to find one.

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)

> - -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iD8DBQFFrA/PwRnhpk1wk44RAnBFAKCloQv6n8PvHebk3vbnhd5gJKnBVgCg0drL
> x56ggVGtQA49T0GvFST0s2M=
> =iDVS
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
http://linguaphile.sf.net


subject: [WikiEN-l] Exposure of magic on Wikipedia

body:
On 17/01/07, Sean Barrett <sean at epoptic.com> wrote:
> David Gerard stated for the record:

> > That reminds me, [[Robert Anton Wilson]] is really pretty skimpy. Also
> > needs a few more <!--fnord-->s.

> It already has plenty ... can't you see them?

No ... but somehow, I don't want to look.

- d.


from_name: Roman Nosov

body:
Hello everyone

Back in the summer I did a small demo
http://217.147.83.36:9000/history::171=170 that allowed tracking
contributions. It was quite slow and UTF-8 incompatible.
So I'm pleased to announce that after some optimization and rewriting
it in C I've managed to implement UTF-8 support and substantially
increase performance. At the moment it is several times faster than
current wikidiff2 extension (C++ version) and has peak throughput of
around 3 mb/s.
You can take a look at live demo.
Sample blamemap:
http://217.147.83.36:9001/wiki/Freebsd?trackchanges=blamemap&oldid=1524

Can track even a single character change:
http://217.147.83.36:9001/wiki/Freebsd?trackchanges=diff1&oldid=1516

Handles text swap:
http://217.147.83.36:9001/wiki/Freebsd?trackchanges=diff2&oldid=1513

I've plugged it into mediawiki code so at the moment every article and
talk page is having credits section and corresponding blamemap. At the
moment in order to use this you'll have to have root access to the
server and some changes to the mainline code and database will be
needed. If you're interested in testing this extension drop me a line.

Best regards
Roman


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

body:
On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 06:25:04PM +0000, Neil Harris wrote:
> > No flashing here; FF1.5.0.>
> >
> > Any change you have a more... traditionally edited page on there to aim
> > the blame map at?  :-)
> >
> Some of the coloured text inverts to colour-on-black when I mouse over
> it, and reverts when the cursor moves off it. Some other highlighted
> blocks go to colour-on-white. Moving the mouse over multiple ranges of
> coloured text makes the text appear to be flashing. (FF 2.0.0.1)

Correct.  I didn't consider that flashing, because it's user-commanded.

If you pause in one of those selection spots, you'll see a tooltip with
the details of the edit.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274


from_name: Marc Riddell

body:
> From: "Fred Bauder" <fredbaud at waterwiki.info>
> Reply-To: fredbaud at waterwiki.info, English Wikipedia
> <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 20:57:07 +0000
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Troubling news on Citizendium
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Marc Riddell [mailto:michaeldavid86 at comcast.net]
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 10:24 AM
>> To: 'English Wikipedia'
>> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Troubling news on Citizendium
>>
>>
>>
>>> From: "Nina Stratton" <ninaeliza at gmail.com>
>>> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>>> Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 08:20:48 -0800
>>> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>>> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Troubling news on Citizendium
>>>
>>> +!
>>>
>>> On 1/17/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Phil Sandifer wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> [...] If Larry wants an encyclopedia free of its biases, he should
>>>>> work on one. But he shouldn't call it an encyclopedia run by experts
>>>>> if he's going to dismiss the experts.
>>>>>
>>>> There are plenty of experts going at each other with knives on WP;
>>>> expertise is simply a fund of knowledge, and does not magically confer
>>>> diplomatic, communication, or collaboration skills. In fact, great
>>>> knowledge tends to breed arrogance, making conflict more likely, not
>>>> less so. CZ adds real names and attributions to the mix, raising the
>>>> stakes even further by introducing the possibility of effect on one's
>>>> careers. The organizer would need the superior political skills of an
>>>> Ivy League dean to make it all work, but Larry's forum postings don't
>>>> evidence much improvement at diplomacy since the times he was angering
>>>> editors on WP.
>>>>
>>>> Stan
>>
>> Ya know what we need in WP, an Article on Expertaphobia: The fear of, and
>> seeming intimidation by, people who know stuff about things.
>>
>> Someone, I don't recall who it was, wrote that they would never work on
>> something where experts were involved. Really? Who would you go to if you
>> needed heart surgery, or wanted to learn how to play a violin?
>>
>> Don't look now, but you are working with the aid of experts right now! Those
>> marvelous persons behind the scenes of this computerized market place who
>> make all of this possible. Without them we would be typing into the ether.
>>
>> Ease up!
>>
>> Marc Riddell
>
> Unless I have gotten the personalities mixed up, Stan is himself an certified
> expert employed in an academic setting, which is one reason he can make such
> an incisive comment about Larry. When I was butting heads with Larry over
> [[reality]] and [[knowledge]] on Wikipedia in the old days, we were both doing
> essentially the same thing, I was doing my original research thing, making up
> stuff from whole cloth, while Larry was, working apparently from memory,
> putting forth the party line as taught in a freshman philosophy course, as he
> understood it. It did not occur to either of us to cite substantial reliable
> sources. What resulted was mutual disgust, vigorously expressed.
>
> Experts, to function well on Wikipedia, need to more than just proclaim
> themselves an expert and regurgitate what they learned in school. Particularly
> they must be familiar with the literature and be able to cite it. That may be
> a rare talent, as is excellent teaching, the underlying skill that is involved
> in writing an introductory textbook, which is what a Wikipedia article is, in
> part.
>
> Fred

Fred,

I was not referring to anyone in particular; simply the attitudes some in WP
seem to have regarding the input of "experts"

Marc
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
On 17/01/07, Roman Nosov <rnosov at gmail.com> wrote:

> You can take a look at live demo.
> Sample blamemap:
> http://217.147.83.36:9001/wiki/Freebsd?trackchanges=blamemap&oldid=1524
> Can track even a single character change:
> http://217.147.83.36:9001/wiki/Freebsd?trackchanges=diff1&oldid=1516
> Handles text swap:
> http://217.147.83.36:9001/wiki/Freebsd?trackchanges=diff2&oldid=1513

Nice!

Cosmetic question: does it have to flash like that? I'm using SeaMonkey.

- d.


from_name: Delirium

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:
> Unless I have gotten the personalities mixed up, Stan is himself an certified expert employed in an academic setting, which is one reason he can make such an incisive comment about Larry.

Indeed I think this is a general feature.  I was a lot more deferent
towards experts before I went into academia---once you find out how the
sausage is made, and even occasionally get deferred to yourself in an
area where you know your word has no business being accepted
unquestioningly, it's hard to view it in as idealized a fashion.  I'd
say most of the academics I know on Wikipedia are *less* deferent
towards credentials than most of the non-academics are (with some
exceptions).

-Mark


body:
> From: Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:49:19 -0800
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Could we tone down the language a bit?
>
> Marc Riddell wrote:
>
>>> From: "K P" <kpbotany at gmail.com>
>>>
>>>
>>> Yes, this is problematic, but if the "experts" use so much jargon
>>> that the
>>>
>>> lay reader cannot use the article, which is often the case, then it's as
>>> good as no article, because experts probably aren't consulting Wikipedia for
>>> information in their field.  This is another area where it is hard to get
>>> some Wikipedia editors to see the problem, that using jargon, first isn't
>>> necessary, and that second, blue-linking jargon doesn't make it acceptable,
>>> and that third, if you can't explain it without the jargon maybe someone
>>> else should be writing it.
>>>
>>>
>> KP,
>>
>> I absolutely agree with you. As I said somewhere else, the real test of an
>> "expert" is their ability to explain something to someone who isn't. There
>> are many, many fields I don't have a technical clue about, but I do have the
>> curiosity to want to know something about. Therefore, my questions are going
>> to be very basic ones, and it's a joy to come across a source that has the
>> ability to answer these basic question in terms I can understand.
>>
>> In Wikipedia, if an Article is written by an "expert" in the field, and it
>> cannot be understood by someone who is not, it should be edited by another
>> "expert" in that field with the ability to make it understood.
>>
> I'm led to believe that we have many articles on mathematics that could
> use this kind of treatment. :-)
>
> People familiar with the jargon tend to be blind to the effect on the
> learnng of others.  The use of WP: shortcuts on this mailing list is an
> example of this.
>
> Ec

How about this?  There would be two versions of the same Article in WP. One
written by a jargon-insistent ?expert? for the benefit of other ?experts?,
and the other written by a different ?expert? writing for those readers
trying to figure out what the hell the other ?expert? is talking about. And,
on this alternative page, in a very prominent place would be a button such
as Google has: [Translate this page]. :-)

Marc

>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Rob Church

subject: [Wikitech-l] slowness today

body:
On 17/01/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Fortunately, this has been written up as policy: [[m:Don't be dense]].
> Phew! Writing it up as policy should fix the problem!

We also now have the [[Wikipedia:Everything Brion says is gospel]]
policy, which means we also have [[Wikipedia:Brion is on crack]] and
[[Wikipedia:Wikipedia sucks]] policies now.

Rob Church


from_name: Tomasz Sienicki

subject: [Wikitech-l] Data dumps again...

body:
[2007-01-12 18:24] Alai Wiki wrote:
> If I'm reading the timestamps at:
>         http://storage2.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20061230/
> and:
>         http://storage2.wikimedia.org/hewiki/20070111/
> correctly, it looks like both of these dumps have paused/stalled/crashed.  If so, can someone give them a poke, or restart them, or whatever is required exactly?

In case that report went unnoticed... the dump process is still dead.

--tsca


body:
On 1/17/07, Andrew Dunbar <hippytrail at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/16/07, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Edward Z. Yang wrote:
> > > Brion Vibber wrote:
> > >> If MySQL supported UTF-8, we'd be happy to make use of it. Using proper
> > >> character sets gives us warm, fuzzy feelings and makes it easier to work
> > >> in terminals and other direct-database tools, as well as potentially
> > >> making it easier to use built-in database support for case-insensitive
> > >> lookups and proper sorting. [snip]
> > >
> > > On a related tack, why isn't MediaWiki using MySQL 5 yet? (I remember
> > > there was a very good reason, but I can't find it now)
> >
> > 1) The biggest reason we'd want to upgrade would be to make use of
> > native unicode support, but it doesn't work ;)
> >
> > There are a few other niceties in 5, but not a lot of incentive to
> > upgrade considering that...
> >
> > 2) To upgrade cleanly without using the (broken) unicode support, we'll
> > want to finish working out and testing a proper binary schema and a
> > migration to it.
> >
> > The good news is that we've more or less got the hang of doing clean
> > schema upgrades using replication and switching masters around. So once
> > we get the schema details worked out, we *should* be able to do the
> > upgrade with minimal downtime.
> >
> > In theory. :)
>
> 1) Does mysql support UCS-2, UTF-8, or UCS-4 beyond the BMP? If so we
> can still use UTF-8 internally and rely on mysql's encoding conversion
> for the rest.
>
> 2) Has a bug report or feature request been filed on mysql's site? I'm
> fumbling through now trying to find one.

I couldn't find anything so I've gone ahead and filed this:

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=25666

> Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
>
>
> > - -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> > Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
> > Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
> >
> > iD8DBQFFrA/PwRnhpk1wk44RAnBFAKCloQv6n8PvHebk3vbnhd5gJKnBVgCg0drL
> > x56ggVGtQA49T0GvFST0s2M=
> > =iDVS
> > -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> >
>
>
> --
> http://linguaphile.sf.net
>

--
http://linguaphile.sf.net


from_name: thomasasta at gmx.net

body:
Hello David,

right. Wikiseek is from the idea and architecture not bad, wikiwax already there, I do not like the ads and timestamp of launch.
Ok so we see how wikiasari might look and it shows, that wikiseek and yacysearch are faster and exaggerated done by private persons than the wikia company. So this shows, that building a community with each member running a p2p search engine node is the way to go. Together we are stronger than 3 wikis servers or the google ones.
But what is important for the foundation list still remains, that the wikipedia websites and urls are very good content, we need not only in google, but as well in the p2p search engine. So i would like to see more persons indexing wikipedia. Maybe the foundation of wikimedia can support this process wirh a few servers please for yacy. And then: besides
a) private engagement in a community and
b) indexing wikipedia sites we need
c) as well a instituional support for open source search engines and open source seach indexed / databases. Open source means for me, without advertisements as well. And this is why the wikimediafoundation needs an open search engine and database as well. yacy could be this code for the projct. We do not need to develop code for the application, I just want a project of wikimedia foundation to run a small yacy server to index the wikipedia in each country languag please.

Would be nice, if someone can organize this and the discussion is as well done here on the foundation list. We could make a wiki-webpage for this project, we then could edit some proposals for it.

Does anyone of wikimedia foundationm agree and could provide a wiki-page on the foundation homepage to announce some search index servers (yacy) for the whole wikipedia content?

Thanks and regards.
As gini is out of the bottle with wikiseek, we do not need to wait for wikiasari, we just need a community doing it with yacy.

-------- Original-Nachricht --------
Datum: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 03:11:53 -0600
Von: David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com>
An: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Betreff: Re: [Foundation-l] wikiseek & wikiwax is out

> Please reexamine what *free* knowledge means in the context of Wikipedia
> and the GFDL. Wikipedia's sense of "free" includes other people's
> freedom to profit from the work.
>
> Regarding brands, "wiki" is not one. Wiki is a type of technology and
> (possibly) a type of community. Wikimedia, Wikipedia, and Wikia are
> brands.
>
> And before you accuse Wikiseek of being a corrupt commercial preemption
> of Wikiasari, you should remember something: not only does Wikiasari
> only exist in rumor, it's probably also commercial. Neither Wikiasari
> nor Wikiseek is a charitable project of the Wikimedia Foundation.
>
> > -------- Original-Nachricht --------
> > Datum: Tue, 16 Jan 2007 18:09:33 -0600
> > Von: David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com>
> >
> >> I don't understand the critical reaction to Wikiseek. No one here would
> >> criticize a new search engine that indexed the whole web *including*
> >> Wikipedia, so there's no reason to criticize a search engine that
> >> indexes *only* Wikipedia.
> >>
> >
> > - google does not brand itself wiki
> > - google is not doing this before a wiki *open search* launch is done
> > - it is a trojaner, as google is behind it with its ads.
> > - it shows, that wikimedia needs an own open search engine for wikipedia
> content and links/web outside.
> >
> >> I also don't see how Wikiseek could hurt Wikipedia. If anything, more
> >> avenues to Wikipedia will *increase* the number of readers and editors.
> >
> > - one is making money from my work, searching hoursly for the best
> weblinks for the article of "pregnancy"? They are doing money with my free
> editors work and manual linksearch, either they make the database open or this
> is a GPL violation.
> > - it is a misleading of the brand for wikipedia and for wikia?s
> wikiasari open search
> > - ir opens the hint for google?s bribery of wikipedia, as the
> advertisements of google finance wikipedia
> > - it is a google trojaner in disguise for wikiasari
> >
> >> And in the event that Wikiseek is successful, the Foundation might even
> >> receive some sizable contributions.
> >
> > Totally wrong: we do nto want that money. Wikipedia?s contimbution it
> the community and not money from the google syndication ads. Google cannot
> buy the community. This is a hit for corruption.
> >
> > and what about the second clone:  http://www.wikiwax.com/
> >
> > ????
>

--
Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen!
Ideal f?r Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer


subject: [Foundation-l] wikiseek & wikiwax is out


from_name: Husky

body:
The vast majority of album covers on the English Wikipedia are not used in
the context of 'album cover analysis' are anything like that, but usually
just to give an overview of albums by a certain artist or even to use as a
photograph to identify the artist. The problem therefore still remains that
a large part of articles can't be freely distributed (with images) without
checking first if there are any copyright problems. E.g. the Dutch-language
Wikipedia doesn't allow album and book covers under fair use, even though it
is probably legal under Dutch law (a proposal to include album covers with
articles was voted down). Having fair use on the English Wikipedia therefore
makes it more difficult to distribute its contents.

-- Hay Kranen / [[User:Husky]]

On 1/17/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/17/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm fine with book and album covers in an article substantially
> > dealing with the book or album or its cover specifically - that's
> > clearly fair use. It's when e.g. it's a general illustration on an
> > artist article that it's pushing it.
> >
> >
>
> Why? If you want to view images as quotes then their use only makes
> sense when the article talks about the images.
>
> --
> geni
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: David Goodman

subject:
[WikiEN-l] [Wikipedia-l] Policies for students regarding use of
	Wikipedia?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Policies for students regarding use of Wikipedia?


from_name: Ilmari Karonen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Offer to improve PNG thumbnailing

body:
Brianna Laugher wrote:
>
> <quote>
> == PNG images not thumbnaling to JPG ==
> As discussed [[Commons:File_types#Images|here]], "thumbnails are
> generated in the same format as the original image and are always in
> 24-bit color ...".
>
> Obviously the reason this issue still exists is because some images
> should by all means be thumbnailed to PNG (line art, comics, maps,
> etc), and would suffer from JPEGification.  However, as also pointed
> out on that page, this discourages people from uploading PNGs, which
> are particularly favourable for long-term archival purposes.
>
> I have some background in digital imaging and watermarking, and could
> probably throw together a set of scripts and programs in a month's
> spare time to algorithmically analyse candidate images and determine
> how they should be thumbnailed.  The issue of properly handling
> greyscale images would also be handled.
>
> But of course, I don't want to start on this, only to find out later
> that it's rejected for some reason <tt>:-)</tt>.
>
> Is this something the Wikimedia community would find useful?
> </quote>
>
> What is necessary for his work to be useful, and used, in MediaWiki?

While that might be a really nifty feature, I can't help but think that
allowing users to specify the thumbnail format manually would be both
easier to implement and more useful in practice.

The syntax should actually be pretty straightforward -- just add a few
more magic words (we only really need "jpeg" and "png" for now) to the
image tag parser -- and ImageMagick can already convert from one format
to another just fine.  The hardest part would be restructuring the
thumbnail repository to allow thumbs in multiple formats to coexist.

Of course, that and any autodetection code could presumably work
together, should we actually get around to developing both.

--
Ilmari Karonen


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 17/01/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/17/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> > I'm fine with book and album covers in an article substantially
> > dealing with the book or album or its cover specifically - that's
> > clearly fair use. It's when e.g. it's a general illustration on an
> > artist article that it's pushing it.

> Why? If you want to view images as quotes then their use only makes
> sense when the article talks about the images.

No, that's an illustration of the thing actually being talked about
that can't really be substituted (the way a picture of a living person
can).

My favourite example is [[Xenu]]. I think the BBC and South Park
screencaps could be lived without, but the book covers, Sea Org logo
and snippet of Hubbard's handwriting are entirely relevant fair use in
an educational article about Xenu.

- d.


subject: [Wikitech-l] Special:Undelete title search

body:
On 17/01/07, Steve Sanbeg <ssanbeg at ask.com> wrote:
> On a related note, is there a simple way to make these pages disappear
> when upgrading to 1.9?  I think maintenance/nukePage.php does something
> like this, but would have to be called once per page.  A script to nuke
> the whole namespace may be useful for small wikis that normally have only
> a few items in the deletion log.

I don't see what's wrong with the existing method, apart from the fact
that it floods the deletion log; we could do something about that, I
expect.

Rob Church


from_name: Edward Z. Yang

subject: [Wikitech-l] batch upload

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Liz Kim wrote:
> Anyone know of any extensions for uploading a directory of multiple files at
> once?

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/SpecialUploadLocal

Should work with latest version of MediaWiki.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFFrp3LqTO+fYacSNoRAjiQAKCCjRGBvEz33pM/J6Z6Dj2EPTmsEACgiY0q
tlrgD8CeazNjbXWtlFIk3rE=
=pie7
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


body:
Phil Sandifer wrote:
> On Jan 16, 2007, at 2:39 PM, geni wrote:
>
>
>> I doubt it. To me it loks like one person went looking for a fight and
>> managed to find one. I still think "wait and see" is the best aproach
>> to Citizendium.
>>
>
> The decision in question is without a doubt a bad one that
> fundamentally de-emphasizes major academic disciplines in favor of an
> underinformed view that has no place in a project supposedly devoted
> to experts.
>
> It points to a fundamental flaw in Citizendium, and one that wouldn't
> surprise anyone who saw Larry's name attached to it - it's an
> encyclopedia that favors experts that's run by someone with a view of
> the academy that is wildly out of step with current senses of what
> mainstream academic thought is.
>

I don't think that's entirely true---academia is not a monolith, and
"mainstream academic thought" depends on who you ask.  This particular
case is more or less a small portion of the debate over "critical
theory", which is considered unmitigated bullshit by large sections of
academia, but extremely important by other large sections of academia.

-Mark


from_name: geni

body:
On 1/17/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17/01/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 1/17/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > I'm fine with book and album covers in an article substantially
> > > dealing with the book or album or its cover specifically - that's
> > > clearly fair use. It's when e.g. it's a general illustration on an
> > > artist article that it's pushing it.
>
> > Why? If you want to view images as quotes then their use only makes
> > sense when the article talks about the images.
>
>
> No, that's an illustration of the thing actually being talked about
> that can't really be substituted (the way a picture of a living person
> can).
>
> My favourite example is [[Xenu]]. I think the BBC and South Park
> screencaps could be lived without, but the book covers, Sea Org logo
> and snippet of Hubbard's handwriting are entirely relevant fair use in
> an educational article about Xenu.
>
>

Those things are all talked about in the article. However to chose an
example at random:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Bring_Me_Down_%28album%29

Doesn't mention the album cover.

--
geni


from_name: Cheney Shill

subject: [WikiEN-l] Spam and advertising dilemma

body:
--- Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 1/18/07, Cheney Shill <halliburton_shill at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > podcasts.  This is a great example of Wikipedia being
> > abused to advertise and promote, if not straight
> product
> > placement and shilling.
>
> Does that harm us?

As an encyclopedia, yes.  Would you trust another
encyclopedia, pick whichever you like, if you knew it was
being used for non-explicit/hidden advertising and
promotion?  Considering NPOV is the base policy at
Wikipedia, the question is how does advertising & promotion
within articles support that?

What if a company with more money views the article and
companies mentioned within it as as competition and starts
adjusting the content to promote it?  Does that harm your
claimed purpose for the article?

~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (now a Wikia supported site)

--spam may follow--

____________________________________________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta.
http://new.mail.yahoo.com


list: commons-l

from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject:
[Commons-l] Image maps enabled;
	useful Javascript support functions now available

body:
Hi all,

Some useful tips from the English Wikipedia Signpost:

Image maps are now enabled. See
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ImageMap for syntax usage.

For user Javascript scripts, such as Extra-tabs and Quick-delete and
the like, these functions will be useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/common/wikibits.js

WP:POST: 'addPortletLink() will conveniently add a link to any of the
"portlets" in Monobook, including the content actions, personal tools,
navigation sidebar, and toolbox.'

cheers,
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise


from_name: Neil Harris

body:
Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 04:10:10PM +0000, David Gerard wrote:
>
>> On 17/01/07, Roman Nosov <rnosov at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> You can take a look at live demo.
>>> Sample blamemap:
>>> http://217.147.83.36:9001/wiki/Freebsd?trackchanges=blamemap&oldid=1524
>>> Can track even a single character change:
>>> http://217.147.83.36:9001/wiki/Freebsd?trackchanges=diff1&oldid=1516
>>> Handles text swap:
>>> http://217.147.83.36:9001/wiki/Freebsd?trackchanges=diff2&oldid=1513
>>>
>> Nice!
>>
>> Cosmetic question: does it have to flash like that? I'm using SeaMonkey.
>>
>
> No flashing here; FF1.5.0.>
>
> Any change you have a more... traditionally edited page on there to aim
> the blame map at?  :-)
>
> Cheers,
> -- jra
>
Some of the coloured text inverts to colour-on-black when I mouse over
it, and reverts when the cursor moves off it. Some other highlighted
blocks go to colour-on-white. Moving the mouse over multiple ranges of
coloured text makes the text appear to be flashing. (FF 2.0.0.1)

-- Neil


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [Foundation-l] Fundraiser thank-you notice

body:
On 17/01/07, Gary Kirk <gary.kirk at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't know whether it has legal connotations or was written from a
> manual of style or similar, but to me, 'Thank you to all those who
> donated from the Wikimedia Foundation!' looks funny. I think 'The
> Wikimedia Foundation thanks all those who donated [to us/to the
> Wikimedia Foundation] during [the/our] fundraiser'.

I was meaning to find someone on IRC last night with access to this,
but failed - it really would read better as "...all those who donated,
from the..." - the comma clarifies that we mean [thanks to donors]
[from us] not [thanks to] [donors who are part of us].

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


subject: [WikiEN-l] Independent article

body:
On 17/01/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/17/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Fans of the Wet Wet Wet frontman Marti Pellow were left stunned yesterday
> > after the online encyclopedia Wikipedia reported that he had died last
>
> The word "reported" is very telling of how we are still misperceived.
> We're not a news site. Why do people think we are?

Hmm. The alternative word would be "stated". Reported makes it sound a
bit less bad, at least to my ears...

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


body:
On 17/01/07, thomasasta at gmx.net <thomasasta at gmx.net> wrote:

> - google is not doing this before a wiki *open search* launch is done

"Wiki open search", right now, is a fantasy. It was a project that
died years ago and was recreated *by accident* in late December. It
has no defined schedule, no solidly decided plans, nothing much beyond
"some kind of user-worked search engine thing might be pretty funky,
let's look into this"

To pretend that an actual, existing, unrelated project, which has been
in the works for some time, suspend itself while people tell
themselves how wonderful this new and un-created vague concept of a
search engine will be is just... silly.

> > I also don't see how Wikiseek could hurt Wikipedia. If anything, more
> > avenues to Wikipedia will *increase* the number of readers and editors.
>
> - one is making money from my work, searching hoursly for the
> best weblinks for the article of "pregnancy"? They are doing money
> with my free editors work and manual linksearch, either they make
> the database open or this is a GPL violation.

It appears you a) don't understand the GPL - you mean the GFDL - and
b) don't understand the GFDL either - it has no prohibitions on making
money off your content, or any kind of bizzare 'to work with this you
must have our preferred type of software' requirements)

> and what about the second clone:  http://www.wikiwax.com/

Wikiwax is not a "clone" of anything, and they've been around almost two years.

They've contributed something very useful to the community which they
don't charge for, and they've not tried to pass themselves off as
anything they're not. They do an excellent job of providing a
highly-tailored service using some innovative software. If they make
enough money off it to cover costs and give them some reward for their
time and effort, then good for them.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk


from_name: David Strauss

subject: [Foundation-l] P2 - PEERPEDIA

body:
You probably shouldn't have told everyone on this mailing list not to
buy peerpedia.net. Someone registered it, and it's active now.

http://peerpedia.net/

The registration was today, so it might take 48 hours or so until it's
active Internet-wide.

It's a private registration:
http://who.godaddy.com/WhoIs.aspx?domain=peerpedia.net&prog_id=godaddy

thomasasta at gmx.net wrote:
> -------- Original-Nachricht --------
> Datum: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:13:26 +0100
> Von: Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>
>
>> Hoi,
>> Open source means for me software. Software pure and simple. Wikipedia
>> is NOT Open Source, MediaWiki is Open Source. Wikipedia is Open Content.
>
> yes and wikimedia needs an open search engine. I do not represent yacy development, but want to suggest to use it to make wikipedia open source engine.
>
>> There is a procedure for suggesting new projects.. I suggest you follow
>> that one.
>>
>
> I will do it in a few days here: Proposal for P2 (peerpedia)
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_P2-search_peerpedia
>
> (peerpedia.net is free atm and I kill the person registering it, if not from wikifoundation or donating it to it!!)
>
>> Thanks,
>>      GerardM
>>
>> Source:
>> http://wikipedia.ilse.nl/
>
> Ise is cool !
>

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subject: [Foundation-l] P2 - PEERPEDIA

body:
You probably shouldn't have told everyone on this mailing list not to
buy peerpedia.net. Someone registered it, and it's active now.

http://peerpedia.net/

The registration was today, so it might take 48 hours or so until it's
active Internet-wide.

It's a private registration:
http://who.godaddy.com/WhoIs.aspx?domain=peerpedia.net&prog_id=godaddy

thomasasta at gmx.net wrote:
> -------- Original-Nachricht --------
> Datum: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:13:26 +0100
> Von: Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>
>
>> Hoi,
>> Open source means for me software. Software pure and simple. Wikipedia
>> is NOT Open Source, MediaWiki is Open Source. Wikipedia is Open Content.
>
> yes and wikimedia needs an open search engine. I do not represent yacy development, but want to suggest to use it to make wikipedia open source engine.
>
>> There is a procedure for suggesting new projects.. I suggest you follow
>> that one.
>>
>
> I will do it in a few days here: Proposal for P2 (peerpedia)
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_P2-search_peerpedia
>
> (peerpedia.net is free atm and I kill the person registering it, if not from wikifoundation or donating it to it!!)
>
>> Thanks,
>>      GerardM
>>
>> Source:
>> http://wikipedia.ilse.nl/
>
> Ise is cool !
>

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subject: [Foundation-l] P2 - PEERPEDIA

body:
You probably shouldn't have told everyone on this mailing list not to
buy peerpedia.net. Someone registered it, and it's active now.

http://peerpedia.net/

The registration was today, so it might take 48 hours or so until it's
active Internet-wide.

It's a private registration:
http://who.godaddy.com/WhoIs.aspx?domain=peerpedia.net&prog_id=godaddy

thomasasta at gmx.net wrote:
> -------- Original-Nachricht --------
> Datum: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:13:26 +0100
> Von: Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>
>
>> Hoi,
>> Open source means for me software. Software pure and simple. Wikipedia
>> is NOT Open Source, MediaWiki is Open Source. Wikipedia is Open Content.
>
> yes and wikimedia needs an open search engine. I do not represent yacy development, but want to suggest to use it to make wikipedia open source engine.
>
>> There is a procedure for suggesting new projects.. I suggest you follow
>> that one.
>>
>
> I will do it in a few days here: Proposal for P2 (peerpedia)
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_P2-search_peerpedia
>
> (peerpedia.net is free atm and I kill the person registering it, if not from wikifoundation or donating it to it!!)
>
>> Thanks,
>>      GerardM
>>
>> Source:
>> http://wikipedia.ilse.nl/
>
> Ise is cool !
>

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from_name: Steve Sanbeg

body:
On Wed, 17 Jan 2007 13:59:04 -0500, Steve Sanbeg wrote:

> On Wed, 17 Jan 2007 17:01:08 +0000, Rob Church wrote:
>
>> On 17/01/07, Steve Sanbeg <ssanbeg at ask.com> wrote:
>>> On a related note, is there a simple way to make these pages disappear
>>> when upgrading to 1.9?  I think maintenance/nukePage.php does something
>>> like this, but would have to be called once per page.  A script to nuke
>>> the whole namespace may be useful for small wikis that normally have only
>>> a few items in the deletion log.
>>
>> I don't see what's wrong with the existing method, apart from the fact
>> that it floods the deletion log; we could do something about that, I
>> expect.
>
> It's not a big issue, but on small private wikis where deletions aren't
> common, it should be fairly easy to find deleted pages, so flooding the
> delete logs and recent changes probably isn't ideal.
>
> It seems simple enough to modify nukePage to delete a namespace, and even
> skip articles with multiple revisions; which would make for a cleaner
> upgrade.

I've added a maintenance/nukeNS.php script, which I used to do an upgrade.
It deletes entries with one revision, which causes it to miss any that
were modified by an upgrade script.  So instead of 1500 entries in the
delete log, you'd get something like 5.


from_name: nunh.huh at mac.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Independent article

body:
> what do we do when mostly we're right, we're occasionally
laughably (or harmfully?) wrong

Well, when the reporter calls, it might be good to follow-up "Wikipedia is not a reliable source" with "and there are no sources which are completely reliable", and point them towards our <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_premature_obituaries>

 - Nunh-huh


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] editorial oversight, re: afd, fac, etc.

body:
On 1/17/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Look at the editing history of User:Amarkov. An editor who edits
> NOTHING but deletion debates, apparently in all hard-working
> sincerity.

A filthy job, but someone has to do it.

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Spam and advertising dilemma

body:
I feel like a baby for coming crying to the list, but so be it.

I created [[One deal a day]], a business model used by certain
web-based retailers. I added a list of retailers that use this
model.[1] I linked them to their websites. Another user deleted the
whole list as spam, citing our "Wikipedia is not a repository of
external links" guideline.

I contend that this alleged "list of links" is distinct from a normal
list of advertising links as:
 - the list is intended to be exhaustive
 - the interest is in the retailer appearing in the list, not in
sending the user to the website for further information
 - there is genuine interest in the list for its own sake: you could
make a table and build further information about the entries, and you
could easily conceive of someone doing research based on the list

Am I wrong? Is the list just a glorified form of advertising? Or is
this an example of how we seem to throw out the baby with the
bathwater, depriving ourselves of decent coverage of electronic
commerce in our quest against spam and advertising?

Steve
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=One_deal_a_day&oldid=101273913
- the list is actually adapted from the last section in [[Woot
(retailer)]].


subject: [WikiEN-l] Moving the Main Page

body:
On 1/15/07, Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:
> What is the rationale for shifting the Main Page out of the main
> namespace? Is there something else called "Main Page" that deserves an
> article that is currently missing out? Is there a technical inability
> to produce main-namespace-only article dumps that do not include the
> Main Page? Or is it just the same old pedantry?
>
> I look eagerly forward to your response.

I eagerly await acceptance from those in the "don't move it" camp that
it is in fact in the wrong namespace. Certainly, it's causing very
little harm there. And moving it might cause more harm. But the only
reason it is where it is is entirely historical.

Does [[Main Page]] violate policy? Probably not. Policies have more
important things to do with their time. It might step on some
guidelines' toes: "Remember, articles are part of an encyclopedia, not
part of the Wikipedia project being used to create them." (WP:SELF)
Amusingly enough, [[WP:SELF]] actually refers to the specific problem
caused by Main Page being a navigational page, not an article:

  In cases where a Wikipedia page should be mentioned on Wikipedia
itself (for instance, at [[Wikipedia]]), and this link should be kept
on mirrors, the format {{[[{{ns:Template}}:srlink|srlink]]|link}}
can be used to write the link as external rather than internal, to
prevent it breaking in mirrors. For instance: {{srlink|Main Page}} as
opposed to [[Main Page]].

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Moving the Main Page

body:
On 1/17/07, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> So we move it to, what, "Wikipedia:Main Page"?  "Portal:Main Page"?  But
> what shall we do when something comes along that deserves _that_ title?
>
> See also:
> [[Category:Articles whose titles conflict with an existing namespace]].

Duh. Rename all namespaces.

Steve


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Marc Riddell [mailto:michaeldavid86 at comcast.net]
>Sent: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 10:24 AM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Troubling news on Citizendium
>
>
>
>> From: "Nina Stratton" <ninaeliza at gmail.com>
>> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>> Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 08:20:48 -0800
>> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Troubling news on Citizendium
>>
>> +!
>>
>> On 1/17/07, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> Phil Sandifer wrote:
>>>>
>>>> [...] If Larry wants an encyclopedia free of its biases, he should
>>>> work on one. But he shouldn't call it an encyclopedia run by experts
>>>> if he's going to dismiss the experts.
>>>>
>>> There are plenty of experts going at each other with knives on WP;
>>> expertise is simply a fund of knowledge, and does not magically confer
>>> diplomatic, communication, or collaboration skills. In fact, great
>>> knowledge tends to breed arrogance, making conflict more likely, not
>>> less so. CZ adds real names and attributions to the mix, raising the
>>> stakes even further by introducing the possibility of effect on one's
>>> careers. The organizer would need the superior political skills of an
>>> Ivy League dean to make it all work, but Larry's forum postings don't
>>> evidence much improvement at diplomacy since the times he was angering
>>> editors on WP.
>>>
>>> Stan
>
>Ya know what we need in WP, an Article on Expertaphobia: The fear of, and
>seeming intimidation by, people who know stuff about things.
>
>Someone, I don't recall who it was, wrote that they would never work on
>something where experts were involved. Really? Who would you go to if you
>needed heart surgery, or wanted to learn how to play a violin?
>
>Don't look now, but you are working with the aid of experts right now! Those
>marvelous persons behind the scenes of this computerized market place who
>make all of this possible. Without them we would be typing into the ether.
>
>Ease up!
>
>Marc Riddell

Unless I have gotten the personalities mixed up, Stan is himself an certified expert employed in an academic setting, which is one reason he can make such an incisive comment about Larry. When I was butting heads with Larry over [[reality]] and [[knowledge]] on Wikipedia in the old days, we were both doing essentially the same thing, I was doing my original research thing, making up stuff from whole cloth, while Larry was, working apparently from memory, putting forth the party line as taught in a freshman philosophy course, as he understood it. It did not occur to either of us to cite substantial reliable sources. What resulted was mutual disgust, vigorously expressed.

Experts, to function well on Wikipedia, need to more than just proclaim themselves an expert and regurgitate what they learned in school. Particularly they must be familiar with the literature and be able to cite it. That may be a rare talent, as is excellent teaching, the underlying skill that is involved in writing an introductory textbook, which is what a Wikipedia article is, in part.

Fred


from_name: Andrew Garrett

subject: [Wikitech-l] Mail archives and Google

body:
Timwi wrote:
> Is there any specific reason why the mailing list archives are
> explicitly marked as 'noindex'? That makes it next to impossible to find
> an old message by keywords; otherwise Google would be pretty useful.

I think it's because people keep posting their personal information
accidentally.

Andrew Garrett
(werdna)


from_name: teun spaans

body:
I took a look at the xenu article and dont see any reason for including the
bbc screen shot. Likewise, the artcile remains perfectly understandable
without the book covers and handwriting. Hence, there is no need to include
these fair use images, and make the article undistributable in large parts
of the world.

Please keep in mind that we english wiki is not the same as USA. The stuff
on the english wiki should be equially well usable all over the world: UK,
australia, canada, new zealand, israel, african countries, india, you name
it. The need for fair use images is often greatly exaggerated.

Please keep in mind:
a) our aim is to cerate an encyclopedia the knowledge of which can be freely
modified and distributed
b) our aim is not to illustrate articles for the sake of illustration
c) our aim is not to exploit all loopholes of USA law
d) our aim is not  be nice to each other and  thus ruin our goal
e) our aim is only to built an encyclopedia in all languages of which all
knowledge is truly free.

kind regards,
~~~~

On 1/17/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 17/01/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 1/17/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > I'm fine with book and album covers in an article substantially
> > > dealing with the book or album or its cover specifically - that's
> > > clearly fair use. It's when e.g. it's a general illustration on an
> > > artist article that it's pushing it.
>
> > Why? If you want to view images as quotes then their use only makes
> > sense when the article talks about the images.
>
>
> No, that's an illustration of the thing actually being talked about
> that can't really be substituted (the way a picture of a living person
> can).
>
> My favourite example is [[Xenu]]. I think the BBC and South Park
> screencaps could be lived without, but the book covers, Sea Org logo
> and snippet of Hubbard's handwriting are entirely relevant fair use in
> an educational article about Xenu.
>
>
> - d.
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Thomas Dalton

body:
> Side benefit of Wikipedia: we're teaching legions (well, thousands) of
> people who otherwise never would have had the opportunity how to do
> good, well researched and cited academic type writing.

According to Wikipedia (see how easy it is? Why can't the newspapers
manage... it's just 3 words... oh well...) a Roman legion generally
consisted of between 1000 and 6000 men, so no need to correct
yourself.


body:
On 1/17/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> According to Wikipedia (see how easy it is? Why can't the newspapers
> manage... it's just 3 words... oh well...)

Because they have rules against useing wikipedia as a source.

--
geni


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

body:
On Wed, 17 Jan 2007 08:45:08 -0500, "Daniel R. Tobias"
<dan at tobias.name> wrote:

>> > Conspiracies are never straight.
>> Well, the good ones aren't, anyway.
>They're gay?

Must be.  Look how many of their friends edit Wikipedia.

Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Hoi,
Open source means for me software. Software pure and simple. Wikipedia
is NOT Open Source, MediaWiki is Open Source. Wikipedia is Open Content.

Your notion that open source means no adverts, is just your notion.
Perfectly valid to you however it is perfectly clear how Google adds
have to be enabled in a MediaWiki environment. So effectively Open
Source does advertisements when this is enabled. Does this mean that to
you MediaWiki is not Open Source/Free Software??  The two examples,
wikiseek and wikiwax, are just two applications that you are aware off.
There are more. What Ilse did to support the content of the Dutch
Wikipedia is more advanced than these two. They had at some stage even a
diagram with other related articles to the article you were looking for.

Wikia may indeed come up with a search engine, when it is to do the
whole of the web, there will be a need for a lot of technology,
innovation and money. You have to be fair, Wikia DOES use advertisements
to generate its profit. This is imho perfectly fine. I do not understand
why Wikia may use adverts and these other companies may not. I also fail
to see that a ghost is out of a bottle; there are a number of people and
organisations that can contribute to what the Wikimedia Foundation aims
to do. I do think we should collaborate with many of them because it
will help us achieve our goals. When a collaboration comes with implied
requirements or expectations that are detrimental to our aims, we do not
collaborate. When you represent the yacy people and you expect a blanket
"no advertisements" or no "commercial use" then your aims are not
necessarily compatible with our aims.

There is a procedure for suggesting new projects.. I suggest you follow
that one.

Thanks,
     GerardM

Source:
http://wikipedia.ilse.nl/
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects

thomasasta at gmx.net schreef:
> Hello David,
>
> right. Wikiseek is from the idea and architecture not bad, wikiwax already there, I do not like the ads and timestamp of launch.
> Ok so we see how wikiasari might look and it shows, that wikiseek and yacysearch are faster and exaggerated done by private persons than the wikia company. So this shows, that building a community with each member running a p2p search engine node is the way to go. Together we are stronger than 3 wikis servers or the google ones.
> But what is important for the foundation list still remains, that the wikipedia websites and urls are very good content, we need not only in google, but as well in the p2p search engine. So i would like to see more persons indexing wikipedia. Maybe the foundation of wikimedia can support this process wirh a few servers please for yacy. And then: besides
> a) private engagement in a community and
> b) indexing wikipedia sites we need
> c) as well a instituional support for open source search engines and open source seach indexed / databases. Open source means for me, without advertisements as well. And this is why the wikimediafoundation needs an open search engine and database as well. yacy could be this code for the projct. We do not need to develop code for the application, I just want a project of wikimedia foundation to run a small yacy server to index the wikipedia in each country languag please.
>
> Would be nice, if someone can organize this and the discussion is as well done here on the foundation list. We could make a wiki-webpage for this project, we then could edit some proposals for it.
>
> Does anyone of wikimedia foundationm agree and could provide a wiki-page on the foundation homepage to announce some search index servers (yacy) for the whole wikipedia content?
>
> Thanks and regards.
> As gini is out of the bottle with wikiseek, we do not need to wait for wikiasari, we just need a community doing it with yacy.
>
> -------- Original-Nachricht --------
> Datum: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 03:11:53 -0600
> Von: David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com>
> An: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Betreff: Re: [Foundation-l] wikiseek & wikiwax is out
>
>
>> Please reexamine what *free* knowledge means in the context of Wikipedia
>> and the GFDL. Wikipedia's sense of "free" includes other people's
>> freedom to profit from the work.
>>
>> Regarding brands, "wiki" is not one. Wiki is a type of technology and
>> (possibly) a type of community. Wikimedia, Wikipedia, and Wikia are
>> brands.
>>
>> And before you accuse Wikiseek of being a corrupt commercial preemption
>> of Wikiasari, you should remember something: not only does Wikiasari
>> only exist in rumor, it's probably also commercial. Neither Wikiasari
>> nor Wikiseek is a charitable project of the Wikimedia Foundation.
>>
>>
>>> -------- Original-Nachricht --------
>>> Datum: Tue, 16 Jan 2007 18:09:33 -0600
>>> Von: David Strauss <david at fourkitchens.com>
>>>
>>>
>>>> I don't understand the critical reaction to Wikiseek. No one here would
>>>> criticize a new search engine that indexed the whole web *including*
>>>> Wikipedia, so there's no reason to criticize a search engine that
>>>> indexes *only* Wikipedia.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> - google does not brand itself wiki
>>> - google is not doing this before a wiki *open search* launch is done
>>> - it is a trojaner, as google is behind it with its ads.
>>> - it shows, that wikimedia needs an own open search engine for wikipedia
>>>
>> content and links/web outside.
>>
>>>> I also don't see how Wikiseek could hurt Wikipedia. If anything, more
>>>> avenues to Wikipedia will *increase* the number of readers and editors.
>>>>
>>> - one is making money from my work, searching hoursly for the best
>>>
>> weblinks for the article of "pregnancy"? They are doing money with my free
>> editors work and manual linksearch, either they make the database open or this
>> is a GPL violation.
>>
>>> - it is a misleading of the brand for wikipedia and for wikia?s
>>>
>> wikiasari open search
>>
>>> - ir opens the hint for google?s bribery of wikipedia, as the
>>>
>> advertisements of google finance wikipedia
>>
>>> - it is a google trojaner in disguise for wikiasari
>>>
>>>
>>>> And in the event that Wikiseek is successful, the Foundation might even
>>>> receive some sizable contributions.
>>>>
>>> Totally wrong: we do nto want that money. Wikipedia?s contimbution it
>>>
>> the community and not money from the google syndication ads. Google cannot
>> buy the community. This is a hit for corruption.
>>
>>> and what about the second clone:  http://www.wikiwax.com/
>>>
>>> ????
>>>
>
>


body:
Hello,

Commons received this offer on its Village pump recently:

<quote>
== PNG images not thumbnaling to JPG ==
As discussed [[Commons:File_types#Images|here]], "thumbnails are
generated in the same format as the original image and are always in
24-bit color ...".

Obviously the reason this issue still exists is because some images
should by all means be thumbnailed to PNG (line art, comics, maps,
etc), and would suffer from JPEGification.  However, as also pointed
out on that page, this discourages people from uploading PNGs, which
are particularly favourable for long-term archival purposes.

I have some background in digital imaging and watermarking, and could
probably throw together a set of scripts and programs in a month's
spare time to algorithmically analyse candidate images and determine
how they should be thumbnailed.  The issue of properly handling
greyscale images would also be handled.

But of course, I don't want to start on this, only to find out later
that it's rejected for some reason <tt>:-)</tt>.

Is this something the Wikimedia community would find useful?
</quote>

What is necessary for his work to be useful, and used, in MediaWiki?

thanks,
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise


from_name: Platonides

body:
Ilmari Karonen wrote:
> The hardest part would be restructuring the
> thumbnail repository to allow thumbs in multiple formats to coexist.

The thumbnail repository is made of folders, and thumbs keep their
format extension, so Having 800px-Example.jpg and 800px-Example.png
wouldn't be a problem.
However, i think there was also a SQL table indexing them, which may
need some little changes. Also the auto-thumbnailing script (should be
easy).


subject: [WikiEN-l] Spam and advertising dilemma

body:
On 1/17/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> Firstly, I don't see how such a list could be exhaustive. Secondly,

Yeah, it turns out there are a lot more than I thought. I had thought
there were a dozen or so. Looks to be more than a hundred. So in the
end it's probably a non-issue. Still worth listing the most prominent
ones perhaps.

> your mistake (in my view) was in linking to their websites - you
> should have linked to their Wikipedia articles, just as we do in any
> other list (if they aren't notable enough for Wikipedia articles, they
> aren't notable enough to be in the list).

Yes, but the flaw in that reasoning is that lack of article does not
mean lack of notability. In most cases it's probably just that no one
can be bothered writing the article. I normally agree that it's much
preferable to link to the article about the website - but if there's
no article, do you redlink, weblink, or not link? The idea of creating
12 stubs about websites of perhaps borderline notability makes my
stomach churn.

Steve


from_name: Rupert Millard

body:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

My thoughts exactly, so I gave it a go -

Vandalised:
http://217.147.83.36:9001/wiki/Freebsd?trackchanges=blamemap&oldid=1531

Reverted:
http://217.147.83.36:9001/wiki/Freebsd?trackchanges=blamemap&oldid=1532

It recognizes all the original authors, which I think is v. impressive!

Best wishes,

Rupert

Platonides wrote:
> Excelent! :)
> I had the 'blaming' feature on the wish-list.
>
> How does it work on blanking+revert? Does it recognize the original
> author or only the reverter?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.4 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD4DBQFFrqemx/vTHLNw1E8RAr8qAJ4mrsDFpZDkb3nYHx9d0lQ/77PbIACYuu+b
gVrWlOk5jLyC7pTNckwYAw==
=jSWS
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


subject: [WikiEN-l] Spam and advertising dilemma

body:
On 1/17/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> If there is no article, but the website is notable, you have a choice
> of redlinking, or making a stub. Either is good.

What if the website isn't *that* notable? I'm not that familiar with
the notability standards for websites, but it must be a tough barrow
to shove sometimes. Is it a contradiction to say a website is notable
enough for some given list, but not for a whole article?

Actually I'm sure it's not...you could easily imagine a list in an
article that was "websites set up by John X". They would be noteworthy
for that context, but not noteworthy in general.

Steve


from_name: Alai Wiki

subject: [Wikitech-l] PDA browsing and large pages

body:
Gmaxwell points out that one issue with viewing WP on PDAs is large
pages, and this has also been reported to be an occasional problem
even for desktop browsers -- admittedly generally only for _very_
large pages, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:WSS/ST, seemingly.
It occurs to me that we _nearly_ have a fix for this:  if one edits by
section number, which one can do by suffixing the page URL by
&action=edit&section=N, and then previews, one gets a view of that
section, by itself.  Obviously there's the difficulty with finding the
right section without being able to view the TOC, and the nuisance of
this requiring more than one step and generating an unwanted edit box.

What I'd like to suggest, then, is an added action (or else some sort
of integrated mode) to render only the lead section and TOC; and an
action to render a single section, by number (as with section-editing,
but without the edit box, and the separate preview step).  Then,
rather than #-style links in the TOC, have links to the section-view
actions.  As my PHP is non-existent I've no idea if this would be
difficult to implement, but it doesn't sound mega-complicated.  Make
sense to anyone else?

Cheers,
Alai.


from_name: Violet/Riga

subject: [WikiEN-l] spoiler warnings

body:
My problem with them is when the spoiler message comes at the start of the
plot synopsis.  Sorry but there should always be a spoiler-less opening
paragraph explaining the plot as described in the film blurb (or whatever).
Otherwise they lose their purpose.

On 1/15/07, Christopher Thieme <cdthieme at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Can we get rid of spoiler warnings for plots in novels, movies, etc.?
>
> I doubt anyone cares (and doubt that they don't know) that King Kong falls
> off the Empire State Building, or that Darth Vader is Luke's father.
>
> Another reason...the infinitely wiser Germans have sensibly gotten rid of
> them and for good reasons.
>
> Regards,
> Christopher D. Thieme
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--

~~~~ Violet/Riga


subject: [WikiEN-l] Spam and advertising dilemma

body:
On 1/17/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> For some lists, it makes sense to include less notable items, but I
> don't think it does in this case. The business model is notable
> because it is used by notable sites - if the sites it's used by turn
> out not to be notable, then the list shouldn't even exist. A website
> set up by John X is notable (although maybe not enough for an article)
> because it was set up by John X, rather than John X being notable for
> setting up the website - it's the other way around.

Yeah, I agree with your reasoning. There's no other claim to fame for
this business model. You could imagine a situation where a business
model was notable due to having been endorsed by some famous person
(eg, Kofi Annan says websites should do Y), then some hitherto
un-notable website that actually does Y would be worth mentioning in
that context.

Steve


subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiDump Parsing

body:
Jeff wrote:
>You will need at least 16K buffer as many lines
> read with fgets can exceed 8192 bytes in size.

Shouldn't be realley needed. You parse < && > tags. The problem is that
some tags can be splitted. You get "..long long line</te"
and on next line "xt>" and *if* you're looking for "</text>", you have
problems.
</text> is tricky, because most tags start on their own line, but
</text> doesn't (unless article ends with its own blank line).


subject: [WikiEN-l] Independent article

body:
On 1/17/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Fans of the Wet Wet Wet frontman Marti Pellow were left stunned yesterday
> after the online encyclopedia Wikipedia reported that he had died last

The word "reported" is very telling of how we are still misperceived.
We're not a news site. Why do people think we are?

Steve


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Independent article

body:
On 17/01/07, Luna <lunasantin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/17/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think the Stable Version feature that is being worked on is a better
> > solution, though. It's more flexible, but does pretty much the same
> > job.

> Even if we only applied stable versions to a select few articles (say, those
> that seem to get sprotected all the time, because vandals think they're
> funny, or anything that may have or frequently has BLP concerns), it would
> probably go a long way toward avoiding this sort of situation, and the
> resulting press.

Note by the way that stable versions doesn't exist yet. If this
'showing stuff under 24 hours old' is in fact technically not
horrible, run it past wikitech-l or #wikimedia-tech and see what the
devs think of the idea. And if it exists first, then our readers (who
now vastly outnumber our editors) will have another thing that makes
Wikpedia more useful to them.

- d.


body:
Excelent! :)
I had the 'blaming' feature on the wish-list.

How does it work on blanking+revert? Does it recognize the original
author or only the reverter?


from_name: Simetrical

subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiDump Parsing

body:
On 1/17/07, Harish TM <harish.tmh at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a big problem for me. Cause when I do a regular expression
> match on "Category :", I get those lines within the article that are
> references to other categories as well. I Just want the category that
> the current article belongs to. Its worse cause sometimes its "
> Category :" sometimes "   Category :" and at times "Category :"

Any category link without a leading colon will add the category.  With
a leading colon, it links.  So [[Category:Foo]] categorizes,
[[:Category:Foo]] links.  You can use that to your advantage.

You may wish to look over the parser at
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/includes/Parser.php?view=markup.
 Be aware that the parser is not short, simple, or clean, because (as
you've discovered) neither is the markup language.

The legal title characters, by default, are "
%!\"$&'()*,\\-.\\/0-9:;=?@A-Z\\\\^_`a-z~\\x80-\\xFF+".  Therefore, a
reasonable PCRE regex (with no string escaping of backslashes et al)
might be:

/\[\[Category:([ %!"$&'()*,\-.\/0-9:;=?@A-Z\\^_`a-z~\x80-\xFF+]+)\]\]/i

Which would give you the category name.  Hopefully.  In most cases.
Because other things can make a title invalid.  Basically, it's a
mess, and the only surefire way around it is using MediaWiki itself to
do the parsing.

> Cant seem to find it. Searching for it seems to give me wikipeida
> articles on parsing!!!

Basically: install MediaWiki and hack it to do what you want.  The
parser is not well-defined or application-independent.  You can make
your own simplified parser, but it *will* fail in corner-cases (unless
your simplifications consist of hacking out stuff you don't need and
inlining stuff from other files).

> Just to further clarify what it is that I am looking for - Lets say I
> want to PRINT out a copy of wikipedia ( I know thats insane - but I
> need text to be as clean as if I were printing it out ), with the
> articles indexed as per Title and category, how would I get that
> data??

Use your own script to parse the XML part of the dumps and reformat
them how you like.  Then run each article's text through the parser,
and grab the category list it spits back.  It will not be very easy.


from_name: Roman Nosov

subject: [Wikitech-l] New mediawiki diff and blamemap extension is live 2

body:
Hello again

Just to let everyone know I'm not getting emails from this mail list
so if you want me to answer your question write me directly. In reply
to all "cosmetic" questions: extension "look and feel" could and
should be changed. Tabs can be renamed, removed or added, same with
colours. Flashing is a bit annoying but it's good for showing sequence
borders. Also I haven't protected any pages so everything is editable.
If you have some doubts you can edit and try. However I'm not
recommending transferring of entire GWB article history (it's a shared
server with mediawiki caching turned off).
Currently my main concern is integration with the mainline code. At
the moment extension is literally hacked into it. Several patches are
desperately needed.  Unfortunately mainline developers don't seem to
be very responsive. I'll give them another go though.
Stuff I'm talking about is this
http://217.147.83.36:9001/wiki/Freebsd?trackchanges=blamemap&oldid=1524
If you want to see/test/develop this extension give me a shout.

Best regards
Roman


from_name: Mark Clements

subject: [Wikitech-l] License status of MW screenshots.

body:
This pops up every so often at www.mediawiki.org, particularly in relation
to the public domain help pages that we are trying to compile.

What is the correct license for screenshots of MediaWiki?  Are we able to
distribute them along with the PD help pages (when we get to that stage)?
Currently they are variously tagged as GFDL, PD, (c) WMF and possibly
others.

Are there any considerations that may cause some screenshots to be under one
license and some under another?  E.g. if the screenshot includes the MW logo
or certain interface text does it affect how it can be licensed?  What about
the different skins?

It would be good to have this question answered officially, once and for
all.

- Mark Clements (HappyDog)