from_name: Minh Nguyen

subject: [Foundation-l] Separate mailing list for Embassy Ambassadors?

body:
translators-l [1] and mediawiki-i18n [2] might be helpful there. The
lists have been around for awhile, but we need to have all the
ambassadors subscribed to one of them (or to foundation-l).

[1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/translators-l
[2] http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n

Brianna Laugher wrote:
> Hello,
>
> It seems to me that it would be useful to have a mailing list separate
> from foundation-l that is intended just for Embassy Ambassadors and
> the small number of users from each project that are interested in
> co-ordinating things with cross-project relevance. foundation-l is too
> high traffic and almost all messages are in long, dense English. An
> Ambassadors mailing list would only be for announcement-type messages
> with links to more info. No politics stuff. It could be very useful
> e.g. at fundraiser time. (While comparing welcome messages I have
> noticed some projects still have fundraiser notices up...yes...)
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Brianna
> user:pfctdayelise

--
Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com>
[[en:User:Mxn]] [[vi:User:Mxn]] [[m:User:Mxn]]
AIM: trycom2000; Jabber: mxn at myjabber.net; Blog: http://mxn.f2o.org/


list: wikimedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox


list: foundation-l

from_name: Brianna Laugher

subject:
[Foundation-l] Comparison of new user welcome efforts across
	projects

body:
On 05/02/07, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> Brianna Laugher wrote:
 Also, non-Wikipedia projects can perhaps
> >expect that most of their new users will be familiar with Wikipedia
> >first, and therefore tailor their welcome messages with the
> >expectation that the user already is familiar with the technical
> >aspects, and emphasise the difference in policies between their
> >project and Wikipedia.
>
> There may have been a time when this was true for Wikibooks, but
> increasingly I am finding individuals (at least on en.wikibooks) who are
> coming into content development on Wikibooks first that have never been
> involved with Wikipedia at all on any level.  One of the huge reasons
> for this is some minor publicity that is happening in regards to
> Wikibooks among educators and the broader educational community, and
> because it is growing to become a substantial project in its own right.
>  There have been recently several articles in magazines written for
> educators who mention Wikibooks as an educational resource, and
> Wikipedia is mentioned only as a footnote.

That's awesome to hear, and will become more and more common I
imagine. Unfortunately most of the press I see still acts as if the
only thing WMF does is run English Wikipedia, grooh.
I also noticed as I have been continuing down the list that quite a
few languages have wikt appear above wp. My list was ordered by # of
pages, so this is perhaps not entirely surprising, since writing a
word definition is rather less daunting than writing an encyclopedia
entry, but it still surprises me given Wikipedia's head-start in time,
and Wiktionary's relatively low profile.
I suspect Wiktionary's rather excellent adaption of Special:Search,
with pre-formatted templates for many word types, has helped lots of
people quickly add entries, which is great.

Anyway... I still feel it is probably useful to highlight the
differences between Wikipedia and Wikinotpedia. Two columns can be
used:

1. Brand new to wiki editing?
Howto, Help, Be bold, sign talk pages, NPOV, copyright/license.
2. Familiar with a Wikimedia or MediaWiki wiki?
Prominent link to a project page contrasting other Wikimedia projects
with this one, link to Village pump equivalent.

If I am a Wikipedia user I am going to be arrogant :) and assume this
new project works the same way. And if you give me a message telling
me to sign my talk pages posts, I'm going to figure I've seen it all
before. If I am not a Wikipedia user, then please don't tell me about
the differences between them just yet!
That's what I figure.

While looking at all these welcome templates, I have been thinking
about the EN.wp one which I have never much liked. At the moment, if I
could overhaul its content, I would remove all references to the
Manual of Style and FAs and 'Community', and just put a humungous link
to a list of WikiProjects and invite the newbie to join one they are
interested in. There is just so many of these things. They offer an
instant advice network, shared interests, and topic-specific MOS-type
info; model articles. I like the welcome templates that give users a
link to wanted topics. I imagine a lot of users join with one specific
goal in mind (to write an entry on their favourite sports star, for
example). After that, what next? I think WikiProjects could be a great
way to hook people in. There's over 200 WikiProjects at EN.wp, and
that's just the active ones! (!) I wonder how widespread they are at
other Wikipedias? Are there similar topic-grouped task forces at other
projects?

> BTW, just to plug something from Wikibooks, there is a Wikibook that you
> might want to get involved with that has been addressing some of these
> issues of project management from the viewpoint of a "sysop" on
> Wikimedia projects:
>
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/A_Wikimedia_Administrator%27s_Handbook

Such a book, or rather books, are sorely needed. That one looks like
at least 3 books: How to set up a MediaWiki wiki (the social/community
management side rather than technical, which has decent coverage now);
How to start up a new Wikimedia wiki; Info about these existing
Wikimedia wikis.

The latter seems like the one that is going to be out of date most
quickly. I am interested mostly in the second, I guess: what guidance
can we give to new Wikimedia projects to help them survive? MediaWiki
is set up by default to serve a medium-sized wiki rather than a small
one, so when you start a new one, you spend a lot of time fixing
redlinks that appear in system messages to pages like
[[project:administrators]] and [[project:protected pages]]. And you
are given a sidebar with a good half-dozen links that seem to need
filling out, even though currently the discussion of your entire wiki
could all take place on [[talk:main page]] for a good six months.

this is a general comment - keeping the meta information on your wiki
at an appropriate level is a constant process of review, that should
probably be formally reviewed every 6 months or so. By formally
reviewed, I mean an admin logs out of their account, signs up for a
new one, gets their grandpa's grandpa to sign up for an account, and
tries to see with new eyes, what info is overwhelming and unnecessary
(at that stage), and what needed info is missing.
When you start, you don't even need welcome messages, because maybe
all the people who join are people you personally invited anyway.
Then for a while you write some users manual advice, when they seem to
get a big muddled.
Then you notice you are giving more and more users the same advice, so
maybe you make a template.
Then it becomes part of the community: the expectation that all
newbies should be welcomed, and looked after in this superficial way.
Then it becomes bureaucracy: the templates become overloaded with
"essential" info, they divide and multiply in versions, and... I'm not
sure what next.

At the same time, your community is growing. when you first started,
you didn't even have any formalised policies, because everything was
understood. then you formalise a couple. and a couple more. You start
with one discussion page for everything. It splinters into help desk,
tech help, ref desk, policy proposals, email list, irc, admin
attention board, you name it, it can have its own page. But the new
user didn't do all that growing with your community, and chances are
they don't really need to know about them all yet. You have to
re-evaluate your welcome message to figure out which type of help you
actually wanted to offer.

My point is that it's very likely NOT appropriate to foist a welcome
message with the same level of complexity on every community equally.
In a way, the luxury of having people worry about this 'meta' kind of
information only comes with wikis who have 'enough' content-adding
editors. when you're at the stage where basically anything you type in
can come up a redlink, the opportunity to be the first to create those
basic articles is far much more tempting than figuring out how to
tweak the interface to be friendly to newbies. (Bah, you figured it
out, they will too!)

[these are just general musings not directed at Robert or Wikibooks or
anyone else in particular]

Some of your suggestions
> that you have made here in this e-mail post I would like, with your
> permission, to add to this handbook.

For sure, of course! And please do have a look at some of the nice
designs I have highlighted at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pfctdayelise/welcome :)

cheers,
Brianna


list: wiktionary-l

from_name: Muke Tever

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Block on the Afrikaner wiktionary

body:
Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> The RobotGMwikt has been blocked on the http://af.wiktionary.org. The
> admins there do not have their e-mail enabled so I cannot contact them
> directly. There has been no communication with me about this. The bot
> service I have been performing for the last two years and has clocked
> more than a million edits.
>
> The service that I have been provided will be suspended until there is
> some resolution.

Such as fixing your bot so it works with the actual data, instead of its
misguided ideas of what the data is?

On af: the problem seems to be that your bot is adding interwiki links to
templates without putting them in a <noinclude> section, which is practically
vandalism in its effects--hardly a "service".

http://af.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Sjabloon:tg&diff=prev&oldid=26506

If it can't work correctly, it _should_ be blocked.

	*Muke!
--
website:     http://frath.net/


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Mike T. J. Jiang

subject: [Wikitech-l]Wikimania 2007 Hacking Days	call-for-help

body:
Dear all,

    We've read Mr. Brion Vibber's message on the planning page of hacking days,
also noticed an anonymous comment on the talk page.

We totally understand that the hacking days should be focused and productive.
Unfortunately, we have not received many practical advises and discussions.
That's why the plan had been inaccurate.

After all, one idea that may be crazy came into our minds: shall we just plan
for logistics and leave the actual events to MediaWiki developers? That is, what
will be done in that two days of hacking should be decided by core developers
themselves?

Please provides us more suggestions, thank you. :)

    Sincerely,
Mike


list: wikien-l

from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Search

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Mark Ryan wrote:
>
>> Google search wouldn't pick up orphans much either.
>>
>> We should be aiming to improve our inbuilt search, rather than going
>> back to using Google by default (yes, we did have all searches going
>> through Google or Yahoo! for a long time there). Google's search has a
>> number of critical flaws like inability to search for punctuation and
>> automatic spell correction where no such correction is desired.
>>
>> It would be nice to have boolean searching work on Wikipedia, but
>> that's a topic for another mailing list entirely.
>>
> Boolean searching is only a part of it.  Editors can often need certain
> types of search sophistication that may not be useful to the casual
> reader, which is not to say that I would keep casual readers away from
> it.  As one example, a Wiktionary editor might want to look through
> Wikisource or Wikiquote to look for good examples of a word's usage, or
> to develop a statistical analysis about the way an author uses his words.
>
> Ec

There's still plenty to be done just to get a simple text search working:

* Higher score for unstemmed matches
* Better score normalisation w.r.t. document size
* Improved case folding
* Accent stripping
* Chinese, Japanese and Thai word segmentation or n-gram search
* Better scalability

User:Rainman-sr has been talking about doing a masters thesis on this
subject, so anyone who wants to work on this should talk with him first,
to avoid any duplication of effort.

-- Tim Starling


subject: [Wikitech-l] Statistics script on Swedish Wiktionary

body:
Simetrical wrote:
> On 2/4/07, Rob Church <robchur at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 04/02/07, Gurch <matthew.britton at btinternet.com> wrote:
>>> Oh, great. I'm disabling Javascript for all Wikimedia sites. Are any of
>>> the other wikis using this?
>> Some, including, I believe, the English Wikipedia, are using a similar
>> script, but the statistics get pushed to the toolserver.
>
> I don't think that the enwiki script sends IPs, though.

Presumably the IP address is right there in the source address field of
the IP packet. Kind of necessary if a script running on the client is
going to send a message to a server. Adding the IP address to the message,
hashed or unhashed, would be rather redundant.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Cheney Shill

subject: [WikiEN-l] Contradiction between guidelines

body:
--- Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Can't someone dig into the MediaWiki code and have full
> dates display
> > according to the preferences no matter what format
> they're in even without
> > them being linked? That would solve the whole thing.
>
> I think it would slow things down too much, as the code
> would have to
> read every page looking for dates, rather than just
> looking at links.

I'd prefer speed and a focus on more important issues.  I
don't think I've ever pressed a date link while using
Wikipedia.  I guess I'm not part of the astrological
consensus.

Besides, in terms of guideline importance, they both seem
relatively insignificant.

~~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


from_name: Samuel Klein

body:
This sounds like an excellent idea to me; and a way to bring the
ambassadors together, even in the simple act of signing up for the list.

SJ

On Mon, 5 Feb 2007, Brianna Laugher wrote:

> On 05/02/07, Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com> wrote:
>> translators-l [1] and mediawiki-i18n [2] might be helpful there. The
>> lists have been around for awhile, but we need to have all the
>> ambassadors subscribed to one of them (or to foundation-l).
>
> Yes.. they are both related but not exactly what I was thinking of.
> translators-l seems more appropriate for Foundation requests of
> translation of their documents, whereas mediawiki-i18n has a focus on
> default messages. An Ambassadors list would be about disseminating
> info back to all the local projects in an effective way.
>
> Brianna
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: MacGyverMagic/Mgm

body:
Can't someone dig into the MediaWiki code and have full dates display
according to the preferences no matter what format they're in even without
them being linked? That would solve the whole thing.

Mgm

On 2/5/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
> Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>
> >Steve Bennett wrote:
> >
> >
> >>Hi all,
> >>  I just noticed this one. Whenever you have a date, like the 5th of
> >>October, you're supposed to link it, so that the MediaWiki software
> >>can reformat it according to the user's preferences: [[5 October]].
> >>
> >>However, you're never supposed to link *anything* in section headings.
> >>
> >>So is this page following the guidelines or breaking them?
> >>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_car
> >>
> >>
> >It would be helpful if our "guidelines"/"policies" were set down in the
> >same manner as IETF RFCs are, with the same uses of SHOULD, SHOULD NOT,
> >MUST, MUST NOT, etc...
> >
> >"never" overrides "always", so "never link anything in section titles in
> >articles" overrides "always link dates in articles".
> >
> Just because you want to invent that kind of rule in your own little
> imagination doesn't mean that it's going to apply to anybody else.  If
> you don't want to link from section headings nobody is going to force
> you to do it.  Please don't disrespect others by saying that they can't.
>
> Ec
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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: Steve Bennett

body:
Hi all,
  I just noticed this one. Whenever you have a date, like the 5th of
October, you're supposed to link it, so that the MediaWiki software
can reformat it according to the user's preferences: [[5 October]].

However, you're never supposed to link *anything* in section headings.

So is this page following the guidelines or breaking them?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_car

Steve


subject: [WikiEN-l] Survey about paid editing

body:
On 2/5/07, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> Correct me if I'm wrong, Steve, but I rather assumed "interfere" in this
> context meant "block the editors who admit to being paid", not "allow
> others to edit the article too".

I meant, let the normal process run its course, without interfering
with the article simply because it was the trial one. If the article
was about a mobile phone, you would expect to see edits from The Paid
Editor (tm), some other mobile phone geeks, and a few randoms. Not
hundreds of anti-paid-editors turning up and reverting every change.

Steve


subject: [Wikitech-l] add comment when marking bugs INVALID

body:
On 2/5/07, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Well, it would probably help if you didn't flood the bug queue with
> duplicates and vague issues every few days. ;)

Where can one see this bug queue?

Steve


from_name: Thomas Dalton

body:
> Can't someone dig into the MediaWiki code and have full dates display
> according to the preferences no matter what format they're in even without
> them being linked? That would solve the whole thing.

I think it would slow things down too much, as the code would have to
read every page looking for dates, rather than just looking at links.

I did read something on this list a couple of weeks ago about a
possible new way of marking dates... I can't remember the details.


from_name: Plyd

body:
On 2/4/07, Platonides <Platonides at gmail.com> wrote:
> Rob Church wrote:
>
> > On the other hand, I would agree with Brion about keeping it "within
> > the family", or under Wikimedia-affiliated control. Your community
> > should probably jump on it quickly, since it sets a wobbly precedent.
>
> This is a matter of faith. If this admin is trustable,

and if this admin runs a reliable secured computed. Which seems to me
a much bigger issue than the 'not trustable' one. Remember AOL.

anyway, hashes are very easy to retrieve... Just have to run 256^4
times the script... matter of minutes.

Plyd


subject: [WikiEN-l] WikiProjects overriding policy

references:
<epskjg$kvm$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<3f797b9a0702010429n36ad8bb2sf739835f50c8ec15@mail.gmail.com>
	<fb7fdd9c0702010433r4bb04cddu6de32ce50d562d9a@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On 2/1/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
> We never disambiguate pre-emptively (or rather: we shouldn't)
> See [[Wikipedia:Disambiguation]].

Lets of people do though. I seem to recall lots of "... (Price is
Right pricing game)" articles, lots of "... (some lame tv show
episode)" etc articles. There are plenty of reasons for and against.
IMHO, if more than some proportion (like 30%) of articles in a given
category have to be disambiguated, you might as well just do them all
for the sake of consistency and ease of guessing names.

Steve


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Hoi,
The RobotGMwikt has been blocked on the http://af.wiktionary.org. The
admins there do not have their e-mail enabled so I cannot contact them
directly. There has been no communication with me about this. The bot
service I have been performing for the last two years and has clocked
more than a million edits.

The service that I have been provided will be suspended until there is
some resolution.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Domas Mituzas

subject: [Wikitech-l] table text is full

body:
On Jan 27, 2007, at 4:12 AM, Travis Derouin wrote:

> We have reached the maximum table size limit of 4GB for our text table
> - what's the best way around or to fix this?

mysql> alter table text AVG_ROW_LENGTH=10240 MAX_ROWS=1000000000;

now this will safely hold 10T on MyISAM too ;-)
I'll poke mediawiki table definitions for MyISAM-people.

BTW, MySQL in 5.0 increased default pointer size, so the 4GB datafile
size is no longer default maximum.

--
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikimania 2007 Hacking Days	call-for-help

body:
Hi!

> After all, one idea that may be crazy came into our minds: shall we
> just plan
> for logistics and leave the actual events to MediaWiki developers?
> That is, what
> will be done in that two days of hacking should be decided by core
> developers
> themselves?

Terrific idea! \o/

--
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Category:Jews -> Category:Jewsih people

body:
Cool Cat wrote:

>Perhaps, but changing the manual of style is premature at this point IMHO.
>
>A good number of the votes were as per  those comments pointed out here,
>which is rather troublesome of course. But, I think the issue at hand is not
>the number of uncivil comments directed at me, but the topic at hand.
>
>I think it is good practice to toss in "people" after any ethnicity or
>nationality. Some of the terms can have multiple meanings at that was the
>original reason for this IIRC. What do you guys think?
>
>On 2/5/07, Thomas Dalton wrote:
>
>
>>>"...Also without assuming bad faith I have to ask why people would be so
>>>concerned with moving this category..- Moshe Constantine Hassan
>>>Al-Silverburg"
>>>
>>>
>>I interpreted that as assuming bad faith against the opposers, not the
>>proposer. It's rather ambiguous.
>>
>>
>>>"Strong Oppose per IZAK, frankly I'm shocked that this is even up for
>>>discussion. ... -- Chabuk"
>>>"Oppose. ... Share Chabuk's outrage that we're even voting on this. JFW"
>>>
>>>
>>Agreed, those are baffling and offensive comments, and should result
>>in warnings to the commenters. However, they are just 2 people - the
>>vast majority of people commenting did so with no problems at all.
>>
It's just another exercise in political correctness.  All sorts of words
can have multiple meanings, and freezing out a term because some
minority wants to read additional connotations into the use of the word
does not warrant suche an exercise.  Are we also changing "Buddhists"
into "Buddhist people", and doing the same for all the other religious
groups?  Such a discussion would be better placed at that general
religious level instead of singling out the Jews.

Whatever I may think of the specific issue I also think that anyone who
finds those opposing comments to be offensive is only looking for
excuses to be offended.  Also assuming that the the other person
assuming bad faith only seems to elevate the conversation to the silly
level of meta-bad-faith.

Ec


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] conversion to Phase III (no,
 you didn't accidentally enter the 2003 archives)

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

wiki at marcusbuck.org wrote:
> I have investigated the history of the Low Saxon (nds) Wikipedia a bit. It was
> updated to Phase III software in January 2004. Apparently lots of edits got
> lost in this process (even the main page vanished).

It should not have caused any lost edits at all, and as far as I know
there weren't any. You'll have to be more specific?

Note that the name of the main page was in most cases changed during
this process; eg the new 'Main Page' would not be the same as the old
'HomePage' or whatever.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
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Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.2 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFFx4hAwRnhpk1wk44RAlOLAJ9AxSe+Oviw79ZCjdCiafONGfYv5ACePbF7
ruYl9g5tYrcCwjkv3OXGTKI=
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from_name: William Pietri

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia futurology

body:
David Gerard wrote:
> "I wiki'd it" will probably be used. People already use "wiki" to mean
> "Wikipedia."
>

I hadn't come across this before, but no sooner did David mention this
than I saw a link titled "What did you Wiki today and why?" leading to a
discussion thread where people talk about their Wikipedia experiences:

http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?13@@.773c4efd

You'll find people using "wiki" as a verb for searching or looking
something up on Wikipedia, and they use it a lot as a noun. E.g.: " I
have to do a lot of research on cancer-related topics and Wiki is
surprisingly good for that." It's also a nice collection of
average-citizen reactions to and interactions with Wikipedia, which I
find endlessly fascinating.

William


from_name: Luna

body:
On 2/4/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>   I just noticed this one. Whenever you have a date, like the 5th of
> October, you're supposed to link it, so that the MediaWiki software
> can reformat it according to the user's preferences: [[5 October]].
>
> However, you're never supposed to link *anything* in section headings.
>
> So is this page following the guidelines or breaking them?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_car

Doesn't seem like too big a deal, to me, either way. I think I'd personally
prefer to avoid linking dates in the headings, and just use whichever date
format is most appropriate to the article (much as we'd use UK-English in
UK-related articles), it doesn't seem like anything worth getting into a
scuffle over.

One idea, though, you may be able to avoid the issue entirely, if you use
the dictionary entry-style:

;[[July 8]], [[1949]]
*''Maximum length'' — 2.8 [[metre|m]]
*''Maximum width'' — 1 m
*''Maximum height'' — 2 m
*''Maximum [[engine displacement]]'' — 150 [[cubic
centimetre|cc]] ([[Four-stroke cycle|four-stroke]]), 100 cc;
([[Two-stroke cycle|two-stroke]])

Just a thought. See if you like it -- helps clear out the TOC, if you start
doing these things in really long articles. Sometimes people like to have
the distinct sections, though.

-Luna


body:
On 2/5/07, Cool Cat <wikipedia.kawaii.neko at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Perhaps, but changing the manual of style is premature at this point IMHO.
>
> A good number of the votes were as per  those comments pointed out here,
> which is rather troublesome of course. But, I think the issue at hand is
> not
> the number of uncivil comments directed at me, but the topic at hand.
>
> I think it is good practice to toss in "people" after any ethnicity or
> nationality. Some of the terms can have multiple meanings at that was the
> original reason for this IIRC. What do you guys think?
>

That's the tricky thing, as I see it -- the ethnic categories have a strong
preference to add "people," where the religious categories have a strong
preference to avoid doing so. Since we've been using "Jew" to refer to both
ethnic and religious aspects, I'm not comfortable saying that either of the
two uses would take a clear precedence over the other.

I'm all in favor of naming consistency. This is unfortunately a case where
ANY result will break naming consistency -- it's sort've moot, then. With
that in mind, I turn to the categories main article, [[Jew]], and I think
I'm comfortable with that. Toss in the number of people who are (for reasons
I don't quite follow, unfortunately) strongly and emotionally opposed to the
move, and my general tendency to avoid intentionally angering good
contributors likewise tips my scale a bit towards the status quo.

That said, I'm left bewildered by the number of people who seem to be
offended by what looks to me to have been a good-faith proposal. *shrug*

-Luna


body:
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Brion Vibber wrote:
> wiki at marcusbuck.org wrote:
>> I have investigated the history of the Low Saxon (nds) Wikipedia a bit. It was
>> updated to Phase III software in January 2004. Apparently lots of edits got
>> lost in this process (even the main page vanished).
>
> It should not have caused any lost edits at all, and as far as I know
> there weren't any. You'll have to be more specific?

Note also that the UseModWiki software itself deleted older edits, so
you'll not see many older edits on some older pages because the old wiki
software destroyed them long before the conversion.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)
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from_name: Cool Cat

body:
Perhaps, but changing the manual of style is premature at this point IMHO.

A good number of the votes were as per  those comments pointed out here,
which is rather troublesome of course. But, I think the issue at hand is not
the number of uncivil comments directed at me, but the topic at hand.

I think it is good practice to toss in "people" after any ethnicity or
nationality. Some of the terms can have multiple meanings at that was the
original reason for this IIRC. What do you guys think?

    - Cool Cat

On 2/5/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > "...Also without assuming bad faith I have to ask why people would be so
> > concerned with moving this category..- Moshe Constantine Hassan
> > Al-Silverburg"
>
> I interpreted that as assuming bad faith against the opposers, not the
> proposer. It's rather ambiguous.
>
> > "Strong Oppose per IZAK, frankly I'm shocked that this is even up for
> > discussion. ... -- Chabuk"
> > "Oppose. ... Share Chabuk's outrage that we're even voting on this. JFW"
>
> Agreed, those are baffling and offensive comments, and should result
> in warnings to the commenters. However, they are just 2 people - the
> vast majority of people commenting did so with no problems at all.
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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: elisabeth anderl

references:
<45C700CF.3050805@gmail.com>	<op.tm9ys6092okkek@maadim.hsd1.co.comcast.net>
	<45C71FB4.8060909@gmail.com>

body:
Hi Gerard,
I told You that Manie had problems with the interwikilinks on templates
because they are creating wrong interwikilinks in entries,
of course You say that Your bot does what it is supposed to do, what it
does. But on the other hand this does not help af.wikt to solve this
problem.
Therefore I understand Manie of temporarily blocking Your bot.
You can always contact him on his talkpage since he is active every day.
http://af.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gebruikerbespreking:Manie
Best regards,
Elisabeth Anderl

Gerard Meijssen a ?crit :
> Hoi,
> I have had no contact with the people of the Afrikaner Wikipedia. I
> cannot contact them, contrary to what is required of admins.
>
> The bot has a very simple way of doing things; it takes an article and
> it checks if there is another article by the same name. When there is
> one, it will create an interwiki link.
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
>
> Muke Tever schreef:
>
>> Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Hoi,
>>> The RobotGMwikt has been blocked on the http://af.wiktionary.org. The
>>> admins there do not have their e-mail enabled so I cannot contact them
>>> directly. There has been no communication with me about this. The bot
>>> service I have been performing for the last two years and has clocked
>>> more than a million edits.
>>>
>>> The service that I have been provided will be suspended until there is
>>> some resolution.
>>>
>>>
>> Such as fixing your bot so it works with the actual data, instead of its
>> misguided ideas of what the data is?
>>
>> On af: the problem seems to be that your bot is adding interwiki links to
>> templates without putting them in a <noinclude> section, which is practically
>> vandalism in its effects--hardly a "service".
>>
>> http://af.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Sjabloon:tg&diff=prev&oldid=26506
>>
>> If it can't work correctly, it _should_ be blocked.
>>
>> 	*Muke!
>>
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wiktionary-l mailing list
> Wiktionary-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l
>
>
>


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Liviu Andronic

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Conspicuous only in its absence (was Moldavian)

body:
On 2/4/07, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have said it before and I will say it again: you live in France.

You're welcome to say it as long as you wish.

Mark
>
> On 03/02/07, Liviu Andronic <landronimirc at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > The fact that I do not live in "my" country does not mean that I do not
> live
> > with its realities. I'm concerned with these as much as anyone living in
> > there, as they touch my parents, family and friends - people dear to me.
> As
> > better a position he may be in for day-to-day observations, I'm quite
> suited
> > for periodical ones. Which may not necessarily be "worse", especially
> when
> > backed by previous, relatively recent, day-to-day ones. As for his
> feelings
> > - he would most definitely have some. Positive or negative. In either
> case,
> > he has no right to speak so easily over an issue deemed serious and
> > important by a group of people. Even under the widely accepted freedom
> of
> > speech right.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Liviu
> >
> > On 2/4/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Liviu Andronic schreef:
> > > > On 2/1/07, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com > wrote:
> > > >
> > > >> Well, Berto lives in Ukraine, you live in Toulouse, France.
> > > >>
> > > >
> > > > This is the point. It is my language, my country, my region - if you
> > > want.
> > > > Some things that are important to me. I come from there. While he -
> he
> > > came
> > > > in there.
> > > Hoi,
> > > Would you not agree that because Berto lives in "your" country, a
> > > country where you do not live, is in a better position to observe.
> Would
> > > you not agree that as he chooses to live there he may know the people,
> > > the country, the region and love them as well?
> > > Thanks,
> > >     GerardM
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Liviu
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> --
> Refije dirije lanm? yo paske nou posede pw?p bato.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
Liviu


from_name: Brianna Laugher

body:
On 05/02/07, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 5 Feb 2007, Brianna Laugher wrote:
> > Then it becomes bureaucracy: the templates become overloaded with
> > "essential" info, they divide and multiply in versions, and... I'm not
> > sure what next.
>
> When they start warning you, and edit pages lead off with all the things
> you SHOULD NOT do... and people feel that scaring newbies away is good
> because who needs all these contributors anyway if they're not going to
> fight vandals?  This is the defensive stage of wiki growth.

Mm. I think if I was starting up a wiki now, I'd avoid using the term
'vandal' or 'vandalism' at all.I see a lot of edit summaries that are
like 'rv vandal' or '{{speedydelete|vandal}}' when it's really only
experimenting with the wiki software as it was designed to be
experimented with. 'Vandal' should suggest a malicious intent towards
the wiki community. 'Test' edits are not malicious. Page blanking is
probably not malicious.

I guess since English Wikipedia has always led the way in terms of
user growth and sheer size, it is up to other projects to choose if
they consider that a good path to follow, and let it continue, or try
to intervene to avoid some of the conclusions that EN.wp has reached.
Reactions from users at DE.wp, FR.wp, JA.wp, PL.wp would be
interesting in this regard.

BTW, on the topic of research: there is a lot that could be done with
existing projects, tracking new projects from creation onwards,
basically seeing which project namespace pages they choose to create
in what order, and who they choose to model themselves on (the
majority of welcome messages I have seen so far have been modelled on
EN.wp or FR.wp)
It would also be possible to track two same-language projects such as
EN.wq against EN.wp. (This would be a lot easier if you had a minority
lang speaker to help out as well...)

cheers,
Brianna


body:
Hoi,
I have had no contact with the people of the Afrikaner Wikipedia. I
cannot contact them, contrary to what is required of admins.

The bot has a very simple way of doing things; it takes an article and
it checks if there is another article by the same name. When there is
one, it will create an interwiki link.
Thanks,
    GerardM

Muke Tever schreef:
> Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hoi,
>> The RobotGMwikt has been blocked on the http://af.wiktionary.org. The
>> admins there do not have their e-mail enabled so I cannot contact them
>> directly. There has been no communication with me about this. The bot
>> service I have been performing for the last two years and has clocked
>> more than a million edits.
>>
>> The service that I have been provided will be suspended until there is
>> some resolution.
>>
>
> Such as fixing your bot so it works with the actual data, instead of its
> misguided ideas of what the data is?
>
> On af: the problem seems to be that your bot is adding interwiki links to
> templates without putting them in a <noinclude> section, which is practically
> vandalism in its effects--hardly a "service".
>
> http://af.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Sjabloon:tg&diff=prev&oldid=26506
>
> If it can't work correctly, it _should_ be blocked.
>
> 	*Muke!
>


from_name: Andrew Gray

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Milestones

body:
Since I haven't seen it mentioned...

it.wikipedia broke 250,000 articles in the last few days; it's the
seventh one to pass the quarter-million mark. Portugese is close
behind - maybe this month for them? Finnish and Norwegian (Norsk, not
Nynorsk) are a couple of thousand away from 100,000, so they'll hit
their next milestone this month, too.

Congratulations to all involved.

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


from_name: Christophe Millet

references:
<45C700CF.3050805@gmail.com>
	<op.tm9ys6092okkek@maadim.hsd1.co.comcast.net>
	<45C71FB4.8060909@gmail.com>
	<45ACCA79.8080509@students.meduniwien.ac.at>
	<45C72B58.3010602@gmail.com>

body:
Well,

Sjabloon is a well defined template on af:
(
http://af.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Spesiaal%3AAllpages&namespace=10)

Actually, the same problem occured on the nl wiktionary,
see for example:
http://nl.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Sjabloon%3Atg&diff=136134&oldid=34626

And as a consequence, articles including that template, like
http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/Russisch
have wrong interwiki links to tg: and af:

Looks like a bug in the software...

Christophe.


body:
I wrote Manie an Email to activate it.

The bot did also add interwikilinks to nl.wikt as shown here
http://af.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Sjabloon:tg&action=history
which is a template in template namespace, but also on nl.wikt this will
cause problems since there were also interwikilinks addet to this template
http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sjabloon:tg

The templates in non template namespace on tg.wikt was actually Your
addition
http://tg.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Sjabloon:tg&action=history
There the template does exist also under the right namespace
http://tg.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD:tg

Best regards,
Elisabeth Anderl

Gerard Meijssen a ?crit :
> Hoi,
> First of all I am blocked so I cannot contact anyone. I cannot because
> the admins do not have their e-mail enabled.
>
> The bot works based on finding stuff in the standard namespace .. it
> seems that the problem is with articles that seem to be in a namespace
> while they are not. It might well be that this is a problem with the
> Tajik Wiktionary .. I cannot help there, I am not an admin there.
> Thanks,
>    GerardM
>
>
> elisabeth anderl schreef:
>> Hi Gerard,
>> I told You that Manie had problems with the interwikilinks on
>> templates because they are creating wrong interwikilinks in entries,
>> of course You say that Your bot does what it is supposed to do, what
>> it does. But on the other hand this does not help af.wikt to solve
>> this problem.
>> Therefore I understand Manie of temporarily blocking Your bot.
>> You can always contact him on his talkpage since he is active every day.
>> http://af.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gebruikerbespreking:Manie
>> Best regards,
>> Elisabeth Anderl
>>
>> Gerard Meijssen a ?crit :
>>
>>> Hoi,
>>> I have had no contact with the people of the Afrikaner Wikipedia. I
>>> cannot contact them, contrary to what is required of admins.
>>>
>>> The bot has a very simple way of doing things; it takes an article
>>> and it checks if there is another article by the same name. When
>>> there is one, it will create an interwiki link.
>>> Thanks,
>>>     GerardM
>>>
>>> Muke Tever schreef:
>>>
>>>> Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hoi,
>>>>> The RobotGMwikt has been blocked on the http://af.wiktionary.org. The
>>>>> admins there do not have their e-mail enabled so I cannot contact
>>>>> them
>>>>> directly. There has been no communication with me about this. The bot
>>>>> service I have been performing for the last two years and has clocked
>>>>> more than a million edits.
>>>>>
>>>>> The service that I have been provided will be suspended until
>>>>> there is
>>>>> some resolution.
>>>>>
>>>> Such as fixing your bot so it works with the actual data, instead
>>>> of its
>>>> misguided ideas of what the data is?
>>>>
>>>> On af: the problem seems to be that your bot is adding interwiki
>>>> links to
>>>> templates without putting them in a <noinclude> section, which is
>>>> practically
>>>> vandalism in its effects--hardly a "service".
>>>>
>>>> http://af.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Sjabloon:tg&diff=prev&oldid=26506
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> If it can't work correctly, it _should_ be blocked.
>>>>
>>>>     *Muke!
>
>


body:
Hmm,
sorry for my previous post, I didn't get that:

On 05/02/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It might well be that this is a problem with the Tajik Wiktionary ..

Yes !

I posted a message there, for them to fix that
http://tg.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B0%D2%B3%D1%81:Sjabloon:tg

It's the only "Sjabloon:*" word they have.

Christophe.


references:
<45C700CF.3050805@gmail.com>	<op.tm9ys6092okkek@maadim.hsd1.co.comcast.net>	<45C71FB4.8060909@gmail.com>
	<45ACCA79.8080509@students.meduniwien.ac.at>

body:
Hoi,
First of all I am blocked so I cannot contact anyone. I cannot because
the admins do not have their e-mail enabled.

The bot works based on finding stuff in the standard namespace .. it
seems that the problem is with articles that seem to be in a namespace
while they are not. It might well be that this is a problem with the
Tajik Wiktionary .. I cannot help there, I am not an admin there.
Thanks,
    GerardM

elisabeth anderl schreef:
> Hi Gerard,
> I told You that Manie had problems with the interwikilinks on templates
> because they are creating wrong interwikilinks in entries,
> of course You say that Your bot does what it is supposed to do, what it
> does. But on the other hand this does not help af.wikt to solve this
> problem.
> Therefore I understand Manie of temporarily blocking Your bot.
> You can always contact him on his talkpage since he is active every day.
> http://af.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gebruikerbespreking:Manie
> Best regards,
> Elisabeth Anderl
>
> Gerard Meijssen a ?crit :
>
>> Hoi,
>> I have had no contact with the people of the Afrikaner Wikipedia. I
>> cannot contact them, contrary to what is required of admins.
>>
>> The bot has a very simple way of doing things; it takes an article and
>> it checks if there is another article by the same name. When there is
>> one, it will create an interwiki link.
>> Thanks,
>>     GerardM
>>
>> Muke Tever schreef:
>>
>>
>>> Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> Hoi,
>>>> The RobotGMwikt has been blocked on the http://af.wiktionary.org. The
>>>> admins there do not have their e-mail enabled so I cannot contact them
>>>> directly. There has been no communication with me about this. The bot
>>>> service I have been performing for the last two years and has clocked
>>>> more than a million edits.
>>>>
>>>> The service that I have been provided will be suspended until there is
>>>> some resolution.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Such as fixing your bot so it works with the actual data, instead of its
>>> misguided ideas of what the data is?
>>>
>>> On af: the problem seems to be that your bot is adding interwiki links to
>>> templates without putting them in a <noinclude> section, which is practically
>>> vandalism in its effects--hardly a "service".
>>>
>>> http://af.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Sjabloon:tg&diff=prev&oldid=26506
>>>
>>> If it can't work correctly, it _should_ be blocked.
>>>
>>> 	*Muke!


body:
Cool Cat wrote:

>I do not believe Jews are singled out. Every other ethnicity has people
>after them. Jews are the only ethnicity without it.
>   - Cool Cat
>
It's not an ethnicity; it's a religion.

Ec


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Hi all,
>   I just noticed this one. Whenever you have a date, like the 5th of
> October, you're supposed to link it, so that the MediaWiki software
> can reformat it according to the user's preferences: [[5 October]].
>
> However, you're never supposed to link *anything* in section headings.
>
> So is this page following the guidelines or breaking them?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kei_car
>

It would be helpful if our "guidelines"/"policies" were set down in the
same manner as IETF RFCs are, with the same uses of SHOULD, SHOULD NOT,
MUST, MUST NOT, etc...

"never" overrides "always", so "never link anything in section titles in
articles" overrides "always link dates in articles".

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: GerardM

body:
Hoi,
Check out the number of users on the Persian Wikipedia and compare it with
the number of people actually editing..
Any metric is wrong; there is no one size fits all solution.
NB On wiktionary there is nothing wrong with using bots to create content.
What you do not see is the preparation that went before they actually
uploaded things.

It is not nice nor is it correct to talk down on the effort of the
Vietnamese Wiktionary crowd.

Thanks,
     GerardM

On 2/5/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Of the top 100 projects (according to # of articles[1]), here are some
> statistics:
>
> *only about 10 have made significant changes to
> MediaWiki:Welcomecreation, the first page their new registered users
> will see.
>
> This is a big missed opportunity for projects to impress their
> standards and methods on their newest user.
>
> *23 either don't welcome new users by template, or if they do, their
> template doesn't have an interwiki link to
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Welcome and I was not able to
> find the local equivalent. (For non-Wikipedia projects, I checked to
> see if they had a template with the same name as their Wikipedia
> equivalent, assuming *it* had a valid interwiki link.) These projects
> are: EL.wikt, FI.wikt, DE.wikt, HU.wikt, VI.wikt, KU.wikt, BG.wikt,
> TH.wp, ES.ws, CEB.wp, GL.wikt, ID.wikt, SQ.wp, KO.wikt, BPY.wp,
> ET.wikt, FA.wikt, SU.wp, WA.wp, SH.wp, SCN.wp, KU.wp, LV.wp.
>
> If you speak one of these languages PLEASE ADD THE INTERWIKI LINK to
> the English one, or just reply and tell me the name of it! :)
>
> This top 100 covered 4 special wikis (commons, meta, species,
> nostalgia), 1 wikinews (EN), 1 wikibooks (EN), 1 wikiquote (EN), 5
> wikisource (EN, PT, ES, FR, ZH), 26 wiktionaries (...) and 62
> wikipedias (...).
>
> If you want to improve these pages for your pet project, I recommend
> "shopping around" and picking a design you like. Formulating the text
> is also very important but much harder for one person to judge over 62
> languages :)
>
> Best so far (at least, these have elements that I think are worth
> considering including in your redesign):
>
> MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
>
>     * VI.wikt: http://vi.wiktionary.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
>     * FR.wp: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
>     * KO.wikt: http://ko.wiktionary.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
>     * SR.wp:
> http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%98%D0%B0%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8:Welcomecreation
>     * ID.wp: http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
>
> Template:Welcome (or equiv.)
>
>     * ES.wp: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantilla:Bienvenido_usuario
>     * MK.wp:
> http://mk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD:%D0%94%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%BE%D1%98%D0%B4%D0%B5
>     * ZH.wp: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:%E6%AC%A2%E8%BF%8E
>     * NL.wp: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sjabloon:Welkom
>     * PL.wp: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szablon:Witaj2
>     * EN.wikt: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Template:pediawelcome (as
> a contrastive message)
>
>
> cheers,
> Brianna
>
>
> [1] In hindsight I should have used the table ordered by number of
> users rather than pages. Some projects have page numbers falsely
> boosted by huge bot imports, for example VI.wikt.
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


body:
David Gerard wrote:

>On 05/02/07, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Please, please keep this off the list.
>>I mean, I know that I am horribly guilty about getting into off-topic
>>discussions that border on flame wars, but I remember dealing with this
>>dispute on Wikipedia in 2001....
>>
>>
>I have this most interesting online encyclopedia to hand with an
>article in it called [[Jew]], which, despite being fairly busily
>edited, has a decently informative intro and subsection on the matter.
>
Exactly.  That subsection establishes that Judaism is multi-ethnic.

Ec


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia futurology

body:
On 05/02/07, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:

> You're looking for a "google it" analogon? A suitable pesudo-verb to
> shorten "I looked it up on wikipedia" might be "I wp'd it" (pronounced
> "I whipped it").

"I wiki'd it" will probably be used. People already use "wiki" to mean
"Wikipedia."

- d.


body:
On 04/02/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:

> That's awesome to hear, and will become more and more common I
> imagine. Unfortunately most of the press I see still acts as if the
> only thing WMF does is run English Wikipedia, grooh.

It's by far our biggest and most popular project, so attracts the
attention. But I do try to make a point of mentioning 200 languages
and other projects.

Journalists' ears in particular prick up at Commons being a free image
repository. "It's not quite Getty Images, but we're working on it.
Once the search doesn't suck." I think that describes its potential
and problems quite succinctly and accurately ;-)

- d.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Project as namespace

body:
Kirill Lokshin wrote:

>On 2/5/07, stvrtg <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I know this has probably been beaten to death,
>>but shouldnt Project (or Wikiproject) be a namespace?
>>
>>
>Project: is functionally equivalent to Wikipedia:, as far as our MW
>setup is concerned.
>
It was an unfortunate ambiguity that developed earlier on.  If there was
some intention to move "Wikiproject" to its own namespce that might be a
good time to change the name.  I would suggest something like "Study group"

Ec


subject: [Foundation-l] [Announcement] Welcome to the advisory group

body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> The short answer is that he is one of the best people at analyzing and
> understanding how to construct and manage online communities, particularly
> wiki projects. IMHO. (But if my claim is true I hope you can see how he
> would be a very good person to have on the Wikimedia Advisory Board.)
>

Personally, I'm starting to get rather tired of all this "Oh well
so-and-so should be on the advisory board", so I will ask plain and
simple: Did anyone reply to Anthere's email of November 7th 2006, with
subject "[Foundation-l] [Advisory board]: appeal for members
suggestion", and *formally* suggest them?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> The short answer is that he is one of the best people at analyzing and
> understanding how to construct and manage online communities, particularly
> wiki projects. IMHO. (But if my claim is true I hope you can see how he
> would be a very good person to have on the Wikimedia Advisory Board.)
>

Personally, I'm starting to get rather tired of all this "Oh well
so-and-so should be on the advisory board", so I will ask plain and
simple: Did anyone reply to Anthere's email of November 7th 2006, with
subject "[Foundation-l] [Advisory board]: appeal for members
suggestion", and *formally* suggest them?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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body:
The Cunctator wrote:
> The short answer is that he is one of the best people at analyzing and
> understanding how to construct and manage online communities, particularly
> wiki projects. IMHO. (But if my claim is true I hope you can see how he
> would be a very good person to have on the Wikimedia Advisory Board.)
>

Personally, I'm starting to get rather tired of all this "Oh well
so-and-so should be on the advisory board", so I will ask plain and
simple: Did anyone reply to Anthere's email of November 7th 2006, with
subject "[Foundation-l] [Advisory board]: appeal for members
suggestion", and *formally* suggest them?

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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from_name: Sean Barrett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia futurology

body:
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Oskar Sigvardsson stated for the record:
> On 2/5/07, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> This might cause confusion in the BDSM scene, though.
>
> And god knows we wouldn't want that!

It might make the edit wars more interesting.

- --
 Sean Barrett     | My wife says I should get up and go to
 sean at epoptic.com | work, but the voices in my head say
                  | I should stay home and clean my guns.
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from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia futurology

body:
On 2/3/07, Sage Ross <sage.ross at yale.edu> wrote:
> For your light amusement, my attempt at predicting what Wikipedia will
> be like in 5 years:
>
> http://ragesossscholar.blogspot.com/2007/02/what-will-wikipedia-be-like-5-years.html

You're looking for a "google it" analogon? A suitable pesudo-verb to
shorten "I looked it up on wikipedia" might be "I wp'd it" (pronounced
"I whipped it").

This might cause confusion in the BDSM scene, though. It might also
trigger baseless accusations from the animal protection people. But
then, so could "mouse driver".

Magnus


body:
Hello,

It seems to me that it would be useful to have a mailing list separate
from foundation-l that is intended just for Embassy Ambassadors and
the small number of users from each project that are interested in
co-ordinating things with cross-project relevance. foundation-l is too
high traffic and almost all messages are in long, dense English. An
Ambassadors mailing list would only be for announcement-type messages
with links to more info. No politics stuff. It could be very useful
e.g. at fundraiser time. (While comparing welcome messages I have
noticed some projects still have fundraiser notices up...yes...)

Thoughts?

Brianna
user:pfctdayelise


from_name: phoebe ayers

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia futurology

body:
On 2/5/07, William Pietri <william at scissor.com> wrote:
>
> David Gerard wrote:
> > "I wiki'd it" will probably be used. People already use "wiki" to mean
> > "Wikipedia."
> >
>
> I hadn't come across this before, but no sooner did David mention this
> than I saw a link titled "What did you Wiki today and why?" leading to a
> discussion thread where people talk about their Wikipedia experiences:
>
> http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?13@@.773c4efd
>
> You'll find people using "wiki" as a verb for searching or looking
> something up on Wikipedia, and they use it a lot as a noun. E.g.: " I
> have to do a lot of research on cancer-related topics and Wiki is
> surprisingly good for that." It's also a nice collection of
> average-citizen reactions to and interactions with Wikipedia, which I
> find endlessly fascinating.
>
> William

Thanks for the link; it's always interesting to see what people actually
find the site useful for.

Though, "Wiki" as a noun meaning Wikipedia? Ugh, ugh, ugh. Surely we can do
better things than that to the language; people already have a hard time
differentiated other wikis vs Wikipedia.  "Wiki'd" as a verb is not as bad,
but 'whipped' (under any spelling) is better.

-- phoebe

--
phoebe ayers | brassratgirl /at/ gmail.com |


from_name: jayjg

body:
On 2/5/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Cool Cat wrote:
>
> >I do not believe Jews are singled out. Every other ethnicity has people
> >after them. Jews are the only ethnicity without it.
> >   - Cool Cat
> >
> It's not an ethnicity; it's a religion.
>
> Ec

And an ethnicity, of course.


from_name: The Cunctator

body:
On 2/5/07, jayjg <jayjg99 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/5/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> > Cool Cat wrote:
> >
> > >I do not believe Jews are singled out. Every other ethnicity has people
> > >after them. Jews are the only ethnicity without it.
> > >   - Cool Cat
> > >
> > It's not an ethnicity; it's a religion.
> >
> > Ec
>
> And an ethnicity, of course.

Please, please keep this off the list.

I mean, I know that I am horribly guilty about getting into off-topic
discussions that border on flame wars, but I remember dealing with this
dispute on Wikipedia in 2001....


from_name: DaB.

body:
Hello,
Am Sonntag, den 04.02.2007, 15:12 -0500 schrieb Simetrical:

>
> I don't think that the enwiki script sends IPs, though.

The scripts sends the IP of corse, but the IP is not logged at the
toolserver in any way (not clear and not hashed).

A logline looks like:

[05/Feb/2007:17:17:57 +0000]
"GET /index.png?ns=0&title=Lima&factor=6000&wiki=enwiki HTTP/1.1"

Sincerly,
DaB.
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from_name: wiki at marcusbuck.org

subject:
[Wikitech-l] conversion to Phase III (no,
	you didn't accidentally enter the 2003 archives)

body:
Hello,

I have investigated the history of the Low Saxon (nds) Wikipedia a bit. It was
updated to Phase III software in January 2004. Apparently lots of edits got
lost in this process (even the main page vanished). Looking at the statistics
under http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/ChartsWikipediaNDS.htm you can see, that
there were only few edits in the six months before conversion. But after
conversion the edit numbers went up abruptly. Is this only a effect of lost
edits in this time?

Additionaly let me ask: What were the reasons that the conversion script caused
so much lost edits? Phase III was already in use by other wikis for six months,
so why was the conversion script still buggy in January 2004 when used for Low
Saxon Wikipedia?

Aren't there any dumps or archived versions made before conversion?

Would be nice if you could enlighten me a bit or point me to a page, where I can
find info about this.

Thanks and
Sch?ne Gr?ten
Slomox
Marcus Buck


from_name: stvrtg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Project as namespace

body:
I know this has probably been beaten to death,
but shouldnt Project (or Wikiproject) be a namespace?

-SV


body:
Hello,

I have moved my comparison into the meta namespace, available from
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cross-project_comparisons . On this
page I also  listed some other comparisons it would be interesting to
do, with thanks to Minh (user:Mxn) for some suggestions and
information about the Vietnamese Wikipedia and Wiktionary.

cheers
Brianna


from_name: Kirill Lokshin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Project as namespace

body:
On 2/5/07, stvrtg <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:
> I know this has probably been beaten to death,
> but shouldnt Project (or Wikiproject) be a namespace?

Project: is functionally equivalent to Wikipedia:, as far as our MW
setup is concerned.

Kirill


body:
On 2/5/07, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:

> Please, please keep this off the list.
>

(nods in agreement).

Luna seems to have all the points covered.  My suggestion would be to not
use exonyms
for cultures at all and use only the native language term.

-SV


from_name: Thomas Dalton

body:
> It's just another exercise in political correctness.

How can calling a Jewish person a Jew be not politically correct?
That's crazy...


from_name: Simetrical

subject: [Wikitech-l] Fwd: [Commons-l] One new and one old tool

body:
On 2/5/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> WikiBlame would be a *fantastically* useful tool to put into
> MediaWiki, if it didn't cause too much load.

roman was just given commit access to work on a wikiblame extension
(or maybe in core, I dunno).  I'm not sure what Flinfo is good for in
the context of the Commons, but there's an ImportFreeImages extension
in Subversion that might be conceptually related.


body:
WikiBlame would be a *fantastically* useful tool to put into
MediaWiki, if it didn't cause too much load.

- d.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Florian Straub <flominator at gmx.net>
Date: 05-Feb-2007 20:16
Subject: [Commons-l] One new and one old tool
To: commons-l at lists.wikimedia.org

Hi there,

I just wanted to share two of tools with you:

* Flinfo fetches a complete picture description from Flickr by a given
picture ID like 151898652:
http://wikipedia.ramselehof.de/flinfo.php

* WikiBlame searches different versions of an article for one specific
string:
http://wikipedia.ramselehof.de/wikiblame.php

I just wanted to hear your opinions and to tell you, that I'm always open
for suggestions and translations of WikiBlame :))

Best regards,

Flo

PS: I know that fetching the license from flickr as well would be perfect
.... I'm working on it ....

_______________________________________________
Commons-l mailing list
Commons-l at lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l


body:
On 05/02/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:

> Can't someone dig into the MediaWiki code and have full dates display
> according to the preferences no matter what format they're in even without
> them being linked? That would solve the whole thing.

This may be too susceptible to the AskFactMaster.compedia problem.

- d.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] embedded links in UI messages (splitted from
	"Major flaws...")

body:
On 2/5/07, Daniel Arnold <arnomane at gmx.de> wrote:
> As you probably can imagine, fixing all 151 message files takes quite a while
> and thatfor I call for your help. As well I wasn't able to fix every link
> (tagged with '# problem with link' in message files). So please retranslate
> them now from the English original using the new link guidelines.

I suggest you familiarize yourself with sed.  A while back I was
trying to do something pretty similar to this.  After a couple dozen
languages I was ready to go insane and left off for a few months.
While it took several hours to figure out how sed worked and run it,
it was a hell of a lot quicker than it would've been for me to finish
it all by hand.

Of course, your job may be a little trickier, since you'll probably
need to run one sed for each specific link that needs replacing, but
something along the lines of

sed -R s/('anontalkpagetext'.*)\[\[([^]]*IP[^]]*)\]\]/\1\2/ Messages*.php

should be a lot faster than manually replacing same in every file.


from_name: Marc Riddell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia futurology

body:
on 2/5/07 8:27 PM, phoebe ayers at phoebe.wiki at gmail.com wrote:

> "Wiki'd" as a verb is not as bad,
> but 'whipped' (under any spelling) is better.

'whipped' or, perhaps, 'whiked'?

Marc


list: commons-l

from_name: Florian Straub

subject: [Commons-l] One new and one old tool

body:
Hi there,

I just wanted to share two of tools with you:

* Flinfo fetches a complete picture description from Flickr by a given
picture ID like 151898652:
http://wikipedia.ramselehof.de/flinfo.php

* WikiBlame searches different versions of an article for one specific
string:
http://wikipedia.ramselehof.de/wikiblame.php

I just wanted to hear your opinions and to tell you, that I'm always open
for suggestions and translations of WikiBlame :))

Best regards,

Flo

PS: I know that fetching the license from flickr as well would be perfect
.... I'm working on it ....


from_name: Andrew Gray

body:
On 05/02/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 05/02/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Can't someone dig into the MediaWiki code and have full dates display
> > according to the preferences no matter what format they're in even without
> > them being linked? That would solve the whole thing.
>
> This may be too susceptible to the AskFactMaster.compedia problem.

Quite. Nothing worse than rewriting quotes, or the names of sources.

http://blog.anubite.co.uk/index.php/2006/12/23/dates/ seems to be a
promising solution - <date>text</date> tagging, and reformat anything
tagged as such, leave the rest alone.

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


from_name: mingwangx

subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimania 2007 Team Bulletin, 5 February, 2007

body:
*Wikimania 2007 Team Bulletin*

5 February, 2007
  *Call for Help*

   - school promotion tour and volunteer recruitment

   - translation

   - someone who is conversant with PayPal and PHP

  Summary:

   - KJ will spend 50% of her work time at Wikia as a dedicated volunteer
   for Wikimania 2007.
   - The obligations and rights of volunteers.
   - The translation plan for Wikimania 2007.

KJ will spend 50% of her work time on Wikimania 2007

At 26 Jan., Jimmy Wales
announce<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2007-January/027257.html>through
Wikimedia
Foundation Mailing
List<http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l>that
KJ <http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:KaurJmeb> will be spending 50% of her
work time at Wikia <http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Wikia> over the next 6 months
as a dedicated volunteer for Wikimania 2007. KJ will be one of the main
organizers of Wikimania 2007 and is responsible for Wikimania sponsorship.
KJ is responsible for preparing sponsor proposals and will be spending time
visiting the sponsors to discuss their proposals.

The obligations and rights of volunteers

The Taipei Team announce the obligations and rights of volunteers:

   - Online Service
      - Work: website content, translation, WikiReader.
      - Obligation: service for 10-40 hours a month.
      - Rights:
         1. Volunteer training course.
         2. If 50 hours sevice is completed, the volunteers can
         attend Wikimania for free.
       - On-site service: and other services on site.
      - Work: reception, venue decoration, equipment management
      - Obligation: at least 16 service hours
      - Rights:
         1. Volunteer training course.
         2. If 16 hours sevice is completed, the volunteers can
         attend Wikimania for free.
       - Both
      1. If 70 hours sevice is completed, the volunteers can apply a
      volunteer certificate in Chinese or English.
      2. If 70 hours sevice is completed, the volunteers can apply
      letters of recommendation for work or school.

 The translation plan

The translation plan for Wikimania
2007<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania:Translation/Plan>is
announced. Please go to Talk
Page<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_talk:Translation/Plan>to
discuss.

Distribution of this Bulletin and feedback

Everyone is welcome to reproduce and distribute this bulletin to their
websites, mailing lists, BBS, blogs, and so on, but please kindly include the
Bulletin's original
location<http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Team_Bulletin/20070205>on
the official Wikimania 2007 website in your distribution.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave them at...

   - http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Team_Bulletin/20070205
   - Wikimania-l mailing
list<http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l>


from_name: Cool Cat

body:
I do not believe Jews are singled out. Every other ethnicity has people
after them. Jews are the only ethnicity without it.
   - Cool Cat

On 2/5/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
> Cool Cat wrote:
>
> >Perhaps, but changing the manual of style is premature at this point
> IMHO.
> >
> >A good number of the votes were as per  those comments pointed out here,
> >which is rather troublesome of course. But, I think the issue at hand is
> not
> >the number of uncivil comments directed at me, but the topic at hand.
> >
> >I think it is good practice to toss in "people" after any ethnicity or
> >nationality. Some of the terms can have multiple meanings at that was the
> >original reason for this IIRC. What do you guys think?
> >
> >On 2/5/07, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> >
> >
> >>>"...Also without assuming bad faith I have to ask why people would be
> so
> >>>concerned with moving this category..- Moshe Constantine Hassan
> >>>Al-Silverburg"
> >>>
> >>>
> >>I interpreted that as assuming bad faith against the opposers, not the
> >>proposer. It's rather ambiguous.
> >>
> >>
> >>>"Strong Oppose per IZAK, frankly I'm shocked that this is even up for
> >>>discussion. ... -- Chabuk"
> >>>"Oppose. ... Share Chabuk's outrage that we're even voting on this.
> JFW"
> >>>
> >>>
> >>Agreed, those are baffling and offensive comments, and should result
> >>in warnings to the commenters. However, they are just 2 people - the
> >>vast majority of people commenting did so with no problems at all.
> >>
> It's just another exercise in political correctness.  All sorts of words
> can have multiple meanings, and freezing out a term because some
> minority wants to read additional connotations into the use of the word
> does not warrant suche an exercise.  Are we also changing "Buddhists"
> into "Buddhist people", and doing the same for all the other religious
> groups?  Such a discussion would be better placed at that general
> religious level instead of singling out the Jews.
>
> Whatever I may think of the specific issue I also think that anyone who
> finds those opposing comments to be offensive is only looking for
> excuses to be offended.  Also assuming that the the other person
> assuming bad faith only seems to elevate the conversation to the silly
> level of meta-bad-faith.
>
> Ec
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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: Daniel P. B. Smith

body:
>
>> I do not believe Jews are singled out. Every other ethnicity has
>> people
>> after them. Jews are the only ethnicity without it.
>>   - Cool Cat
>>
> It's not an ethnicity; it's a religion.
>
> Ec

Old joke:

Q: What is a Jew?

A: A person who asks, "what is a Jew?"


body:
I don't think that the the point of adding people. "Politically correctness"
plays no role in categorization.

   - Cool Cat

On 2/5/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > It's just another exercise in political correctness.
>
> How can calling a Jewish person a Jew be not politically correct?
> That's crazy...
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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: Brianna Laugher

subject: [Foundation-l] Separate mailing list for Embassy Ambassadors?

body:
On 05/02/07, Minh Nguyen <mxn at zoomtown.com> wrote:
> translators-l [1] and mediawiki-i18n [2] might be helpful there. The
> lists have been around for awhile, but we need to have all the
> ambassadors subscribed to one of them (or to foundation-l).

Yes.. they are both related but not exactly what I was thinking of.
translators-l seems more appropriate for Foundation requests of
translation of their documents, whereas mediawiki-i18n has a focus on
default messages. An Ambassadors list would be about disseminating
info back to all the local projects in an effective way.

Brianna


from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
>
>> Steve Bennett wrote:
>>
<snip>
>>> However, you're never supposed to link *anything* in section headings.
>>>
<snip>
>> "never" overrides "always", so "never link anything in section titles in
>> articles" overrides "always link dates in articles".
>>
> Just because you want to invent that kind of rule in your own little
> imagination doesn't mean that it's going to apply to anybody else.  If
> you don't want to link from section headings nobody is going to force
> you to do it.  Please don't disrespect others by saying that they can't.
>

I didn't invent it, I'm just stating how it should be applied; secondly,
linking section headings is horrible from a usability perspective - just
imagine how it will look when you print it!

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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body:
On 2/5/07, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wasn't aware that the client IP address was visible in Javascript, and
> I saw no such code in that file. It's not much different from having an
> external link in an article.

Except it's one that all contributors follow every time they go to the
page.  It's not much different from, say, the ads you see on most
pages on the Internet, though.  Or, for that matter, visiting an
external site that you haven't already vetted, which I suppose is what
you were getting at.  This is the Internet, people, everyone knows
your IP address.


from_name: David Gerard

body:
On 05/02/07, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:

> Please, please keep this off the list.
> I mean, I know that I am horribly guilty about getting into off-topic
> discussions that border on flame wars, but I remember dealing with this
> dispute on Wikipedia in 2001....

I have this most interesting online encyclopedia to hand with an
article in it called [[Jew]], which, despite being fairly busily
edited, has a decently informative intro and subsection on the matter.

- d.


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia futurology

body:
On 2/5/07, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
> This might cause confusion in the BDSM scene, though.

And god knows we wouldn't want that!


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2007-02-06

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

This is MediaWiki version 1.10alpha (r19802).

Reading tests from "maintenance/parserTests.txt"...
Reading tests from "extensions/Cite/citeParserTests.txt"...
Reading tests from "extensions/Poem/poemParserTests.txt"...

   4 new PASSING test(s) :)
      * Interlanguage link  [Has never failed]
      * Double interlanguage link  [Has never failed]
      * Interlanguage link, with prefix links  [Has never failed]
      * Double interlanguage link, with prefix links (bug 8897)  [Has never failed]

   3 previously passing test(s) now FAILING! :(
      * Blank ref followed by ref with content  [Introduced between 05-Feb-2007 08:15:29, 1.10alpha (r19781) and 06-Feb-2007 08:15:27, 1.10alpha (r19802)]
      * Regression: non-blank ref "0" followed by ref with content  [Introduced between 05-Feb-2007 08:15:29, 1.10alpha (r19781) and 06-Feb-2007 08:15:27, 1.10alpha (r19802)]
      * Regression sanity check: non-blank ref "1" followed by ref with content  [Introduced between 05-Feb-2007 08:15:29, 1.10alpha (r19781) and 06-Feb-2007 08:15:27, 1.10alpha (r19802)]

  18 still FAILING test(s) :(
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (single parameter)  [Has never passed]
      * URL-encoding in URL functions (multiple parameters)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Link containing double-single-quotes '' (bug 4598)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: message transform: <noinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: message transform: <onlyinclude> in transcluded template (bug 4926)  [Has never passed]
      * BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML bullet list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML ordered list, unclosed tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML nested bullet list, open tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: HTML nested ordered list, open tags (bug 5497)  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Inline HTML vs wiki block nesting  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Mixing markup for italics and bold  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: 5 quotes, code coverage +1 line  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: dt/dd/dl test  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Images with the "|" character in the comment  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, without trailing slash or name.  [Has never passed]
      * TODO: Parents of subpages, two levels up, with lots of extra trailing slashes.  [Has never passed]

Passed 490 of 511 tests (95.89%)... 21 tests failed!


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Project as namespace

body:
On 2/6/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Kirill Lokshin wrote:
>
> >On 2/5/07, stvrtg <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>I know this has probably been beaten to death,
> >>but shouldnt Project (or Wikiproject) be a namespace?
> >>
> >>
> >Project: is functionally equivalent to Wikipedia:, as far as our MW
> >setup is concerned.
> >
> It was an unfortunate ambiguity that developed earlier on.  If there was
> some intention to move "Wikiproject" to its own namespce that might be a
> good time to change the name.  I would suggest something like "Study group"
>
> Ec
>

Could be done in theory but since I can spell wikipedia I'd rather
people didn't mess around with the namspaces unless there is a very
good reason. WP should be made into a real namespace mind.

--
geni


subject:
[Foundation-l] Comparison of new user welcome efforts across
	projects

body:
Of the top 100 projects (according to # of articles[1]), here are some
statistics:

*only about 10 have made significant changes to
MediaWiki:Welcomecreation, the first page their new registered users
will see.

This is a big missed opportunity for projects to impress their
standards and methods on their newest user.

*23 either don't welcome new users by template, or if they do, their
template doesn't have an interwiki link to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Welcome and I was not able to
find the local equivalent. (For non-Wikipedia projects, I checked to
see if they had a template with the same name as their Wikipedia
equivalent, assuming *it* had a valid interwiki link.) These projects
are: EL.wikt, FI.wikt, DE.wikt, HU.wikt, VI.wikt, KU.wikt, BG.wikt,
TH.wp, ES.ws, CEB.wp, GL.wikt, ID.wikt, SQ.wp, KO.wikt, BPY.wp,
ET.wikt, FA.wikt, SU.wp, WA.wp, SH.wp, SCN.wp, KU.wp, LV.wp.

If you speak one of these languages PLEASE ADD THE INTERWIKI LINK to
the English one, or just reply and tell me the name of it! :)

This top 100 covered 4 special wikis (commons, meta, species,
nostalgia), 1 wikinews (EN), 1 wikibooks (EN), 1 wikiquote (EN), 5
wikisource (EN, PT, ES, FR, ZH), 26 wiktionaries (...) and 62
wikipedias (...).

If you want to improve these pages for your pet project, I recommend
"shopping around" and picking a design you like. Formulating the text
is also very important but much harder for one person to judge over 62
languages :)

Best so far (at least, these have elements that I think are worth
considering including in your redesign):

MediaWiki:Welcomecreation

    * VI.wikt: http://vi.wiktionary.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
    * FR.wp: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
    * KO.wikt: http://ko.wiktionary.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation
    * SR.wp: http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%98%D0%B0%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8:Welcomecreation
    * ID.wp: http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Welcomecreation

Template:Welcome (or equiv.)

    * ES.wp: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantilla:Bienvenido_usuario
    * MK.wp: http://mk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD:%D0%94%D0%BE%D0%B1%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%BE%D1%98%D0%B4%D0%B5
    * ZH.wp: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:%E6%AC%A2%E8%BF%8E
    * NL.wp: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sjabloon:Welkom
    * PL.wp: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Szablon:Witaj2
    * EN.wikt: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Template:pediawelcome (as
a contrastive message)

cheers,
Brianna

[1] In hindsight I should have used the table ordered by number of
users rather than pages. Some projects have page numbers falsely
boosted by huge bot imports, for example VI.wikt.


body:
On 06/02/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> It is not nice nor is it correct to talk down on the effort of the
> Vietnamese Wiktionary crowd.

Sorry, that was not my intent. I have no opinion on whether it is
appropriate for bots to produce large numbers of wiktionary pages
because I'm not familiar with Wiktionary.
By 'falsely boost' I am referring to the contradiction from what one
might expect, that more pages = more users. If WI.wikt had the 11th
largest number of registered users, I would be extremely surprised if
they had no template:Welcome, and IMO they would be missing a big
opportunity by not having this practice of welcoming users with a
standard message.

Different messages are appropriate at different stages of wiki growth
(as I have said previously). So in my opinion it can be appropriate
for a project with  relatively low USER growth, like VI.wikt, to not
have a template:welcome.

Does it make sense?

regards,
Brianna


from_name: Daniel Arnold

body:
Hi,

I now have fixed the internal links in MessagesEn.php and all message files
from A to C (except MessagesAr.php which will follow later, blame my text
editor's rtl bugs). See http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8846
for patch files (all applied to SVN) and
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/languages/messages/?sortby=date.

Basically I did replace things like "blabla see [[Project:help|help]]"
with "blabla see [[{{MediaWiki:helppage}}]]" (among other things like
localised namespace names and custom links, see below). See previous mails
for the detailed reasons.

However "{{MediaWiki:" is only temporary syntax as in multilingual wikis
people would also like to get linked to localised project pages in case they
exist. With my current patch this is possible if people customize the
messages for that language locally in their wiki. In order to reduce the need
for such customization we need a new special template token (maybe
called "{{link:") that would need to work the following way (I explain it
with the example of MediaWiki:helppage):

Embedd MediaWiki:helppage/your_language -> if not existing in the wiki
database: embedd MediaWiki:helppage -> if not existing in the wiki database
embedd 'helppage' from MessagesEn.php.

This would cause the following: Certain localised links can be activated by
local admins with one single MediaWiki namespace edit individually for each
language. This would be probably the best solution between "link hell into
nowhere" and "default language only links".

This approach is closely related to the solution idea of another link bug
(interface URLs resolution order (splitted from "Major flaws...")):

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2007-January/thread.html#29287
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2007-February/029335.html

So far to the reasons of my changes. My fix also means standardisation as the
same page links only need to be defined in one place.

Furthermore there is now a narrow set of link defining pages which is allowed
to be used in standard system messages (no custom link calls anylonger!):

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Configuration_settings#Page_customizations

+ the new "MediaWiki:policy-url" link definition page. See also current
MessagesEn.php in SVN.

So my work resulted in these style guidelines for translations:

1) Do not use local namespace names in standard message strings. The same
applies for localised wiki markup (like translations of "thumb" and such).
Especially something like "Benutzerseite von [[Benutzer:$1|$1]]"
(German "user page of ...") instead of "Benutzerseite von [[User:$1|$1]]" is
dangerous as the link does not work in wikis with a different name for user
namespace (basically all wikis with a default language other than German,
canonical namespace links get translated to localised, use {{ns:user}} and
such when not using alternative link text or text outside links).

2) Do not link article namespace images or or other local content. Something
like "Your [[IP adress]] has been blocked..." is wrong. It has to be "Your IP
adress has been blocked...". No other wiki than Wikipedia or a wiki on
networking will usually have an article about IP adresses.

3) No Cross-wiki/interwiki links. Especially links like "[[w:en:IP adress]]"
are not allowed as well as interwiki link definitions into Wikimedia wikis
are removed in default MediaWiki.

4) Do not directly link any project pages in messages. Use only the link
definitions such as {{MediaWiki:helppage}}. Do not create new link
definitions in your local MessagesXX.php file.

As you probably can imagine, fixing all 151 message files takes quite a while
and thatfor I call for your help. As well I wasn't able to fix every link
(tagged with '# problem with link' in message files). So please retranslate
them now from the English original using the new link guidelines.

I will post a detailed list of affected message strings that need
retranslation on mediawiki-i18n-l
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n in the next hours
and hope there for coordination of the remaining message file fixes.

Have fun,
Arnomane


body:
On 06/02/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 04/02/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > That's awesome to hear, and will become more and more common I
> > imagine. Unfortunately most of the press I see still acts as if the
> > only thing WMF does is run English Wikipedia, grooh.
>
>
> It's by far our biggest and most popular project, so attracts the
> attention. But I do try to make a point of mentioning 200 languages
> and other projects.
>
> Journalists' ears in particular prick up at Commons being a free image
> repository. "It's not quite Getty Images, but we're working on it.
> Once the search doesn't suck." I think that describes its potential
> and problems quite succinctly and accurately ;-)

Nice one :)
or maybe 'It's like Flickr, with less photos of people you don't know,
and more useful content. Once the search doesn't suck."

Brianna


from_name: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Milestones

body:
On 2/5/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> it.wikipedia broke 250,000 articles in the last few days; it's the
> seventh one to pass the quarter-million mark. Portugese is close
> behind - maybe this month for them? Finnish and Norwegian (Norsk, not
> Nynorsk) are a couple of thousand away from 100,000, so they'll hit
> their next milestone this month, too.

Update on the Finnish wikipedia milestone; current best estimate is we will
pass 100 000 articles around 24:00 GMT 12th of February (give or take a day
or two ;)

The Finnish wikipedian community is planning to organize a celebratory
public event (perhaps a panel/talks and/or a press junket sort of thing; not
set in stone by any means); perhaps late in March. Anyone wishing to come
and attend is wellcome, but if you are coming from afar, might be best to
check the details with me or [[K?ytt?j?:Joonasl]] on the Finnish Wikipedia.

Congratulations to all involved.

Thank you. Things are beginning to get interesting on the Finnish Wikipedia.
In fact it is just about as active and large in size as the English Language
wikipedia was about at the time I joined in 13th of April, 2003.

--
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]


from_name: stvrtg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Project as namespace

body:
On 2/6/07, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>
> WikiProject is a namespace on a few Wikipedias  (cs, eu, fr, it, lmo, es).
> If the English Wikipedia wants it, we'll enable it there too. Personally I
> could never see the point in having a proliferation of namespaces, but
> it's not up to me, it's up to the community.

Cool! How about just "Project" ( in imitation of "portal" ).
Dunno about WP, Geni.

-SV


subject: [WikiEN-l] Project as namespace

body:
On 2/6/07, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> As Kirill Lokshin noted, Project is taken already. You can't have it.

Ah, but you must mean "the community cant have it"  ;)

I had thought Kirill was making some kind of epistemological point about
"functional equivalency" - ie. semantics not syntax - as you apparently
refer.

Since you raised the point ...  the question that comes to mind is...  why?

-SV


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia futurology

body:
On 2/5/07, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

Though, "Wiki" as a noun meaning Wikipedia? Ugh, ugh, ugh. Surely we can do
> better things than that to the language; people already have a hard time
> differentiated other wikis vs Wikipedia.  "Wiki'd" as a verb is not as
> bad,
> but 'whipped' (under any spelling) is better.

Someone was bold enough to claim "all websites will be wiki" back in '02
IIRC.
I predict that all wiki will be icky, and hence all net will be nutty.

-SV


from_name: Angela

subject: [Wikitech-l] Your details

body:
I didn't send that message. Isn't there a way of preventing emails
with forged headers like this reaching the list?

Angela

On 2/6/07, beesley at gmail.com <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Here is the note.
> Yours sincerely
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


from_name: Phil Boswell

subject: [WikiEN-l] Google Groups Suggestion

body:
George Drummond wrote:
>
> For novices i think it is difficult to read these mailing lists.
> I think that it would be an idea to have the mailing lists
> archived to google groups (which i believe is possible)
>
Someone already pointed you to gmane. This list, along with several others,
is also mirrored by Nabble:
http://www.nabble.com/English-Wikipedia-f14021.html

HTH HAND
--
Phil
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/-WikiEN-l--Google-Groups-Suggestion-tf3133813.html#a8826893
Sent from the English Wikipedia mailing list archive at Nabble.com.


references:
<epskjg$kvm$1@sea.gmane.org>
	<f30e42de0702010423h364a99b6oc179fa774bc8b359@mail.gmail.com>
	<fb7fdd9c0702010430x3b510dc5od9c9f2b76d66537d@mail.gmail.com>

body:
MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
>
> [snip]
> The naming convention was created to avoid
> overly convoluted names. The places articles are located should be easy to
> link to.
>
>
The Naming Conventions are created to avoid endless move-wars between people
who favour one formulation over another. Copy & paste takes care of problems
to do with linking.

It just so happens that there is a strange wrinkle in the way that links are
processed which can be useful in this context; see here (it will open a
preview first that you might check I'm not linking you to the Last Resort
:-):
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2xxkd5
Check out the "link with leading pipe".

So to link from [[a (b)]] to [[c (b)]] placing the link [[|c]] in the former
during an edit will, at the moment, work just fine: it will automagically
expand to [[c (b)|c]] in just the same way as [[c (b)|]] would have expanded
to the same thing. I leave enumerating the advantages to the interested
student.

HTH HAND
--
Phil
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/-WikiEN-l--WikiProjects-overriding-policy-tf3154417.html#a8827289
Sent from the English Wikipedia mailing list archive at Nabble.com.


from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [WikiEN-l] Project as namespace

body:
stvrtg wrote:
> I know this has probably been beaten to death,
> but shouldnt Project (or Wikiproject) be a namespace?

WikiProject is a namespace on a few Wikipedias  (cs, eu, fr, it, lmo, es).
If the English Wikipedia wants it, we'll enable it there too. Personally I
could never see the point in having a proliferation of namespaces, but
it's not up to me, it's up to the community.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: Kirill Lokshin

subject: [WikiEN-l] Project as namespace

body:
On 2/6/07, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> stvrtg wrote:
> > I know this has probably been beaten to death,
> > but shouldnt Project (or Wikiproject) be a namespace?
>
> WikiProject is a namespace on a few Wikipedias  (cs, eu, fr, it, lmo, es).
> If the English Wikipedia wants it, we'll enable it there too. Personally I
> could never see the point in having a proliferation of namespaces, but
> it's not up to me, it's up to the community.

Frankly, I don't see the point.  WikiProjects are a type of
Wikipedia-internal group/process/guideline-development area/whatnot,
just as everything else in the Wikipedia: namespace is; trying to
split them out seems artificial.  We'd wind up with, for example, the
central peer review page sitting in one namespace, but the
WikiProject's peer reviews in another.  I can't really see any
benefits here.

(As a practical point, the amount of work needed to move everything to
a new namespace is staggering; it's not something to be done on a
whim.)

Kirill


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia futurology

body:
Marc Riddell wrote:
> on 2/5/07 8:27 PM, phoebe ayers at phoebe.wiki at gmail.com wrote:
>
>> "Wiki'd" as a verb is not as bad,
>> but 'whipped' (under any spelling) is better.
>
> 'whipped' or, perhaps, 'whiked'?
>
> Marc

I think we're a bit late to the party. If only this mailing list was the
Acad?mie fran?aise of English.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wiki (currently 34 up, 34 down)
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=wiki+it

-- Tim Starling