from_name: Jens Frank

subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF

body:
On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 02:27:57PM +0100, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 06:29:06AM +0100, youandme at poczta.fm wrote:
> > Writing in any language is writing in this specific language
> > respecting _it's_ rules, even if the lack of diactrics is a rule.
>
> No. Its rules must be obeyed only for words of that language.
> For words from other languages, like names of people, places etc.
> rules of source language must be obeyed.

No. If you for example write an article on China and always write
city names in Chinese no average user will be able to read this.
I know about Peking, or Bejing, but I won't recognize it in
Chinese.

I agree that on an article about Bejing there should be the
Chinese name mentioned, like e.g. one would do in

	'''Munich''' (German: M?nchen) is a town in Germany.

We could provide Chinese letters as images like we provide
mathematical formulas as images.

Same might be true for other languages if we find that there
is a remarkable number of users not able to use wikipedia
if we switch to utf-8.

BTW, I feel the same for Cologne Blue. I have several computers
and browsers that will not render Cologne Blue readable.
I'd vote for autodetecting "known good" browsers and presenting
Cologne Blue to them only. Forcing users to log in in order to read
an article should not be our policy.

	Best regards,

		JeLuF


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: tarquin

subject: [WikiEN-l] "todo lists" proposal on the village pump

body:
See the section on the village pump headed "Todo lists" about
rearranging Votes for Deletion / stub / articles in need of NPOVing list
pages

I've had two OKs and no objections, so in a few days I'll assume no-one
objects & I'll go ahead and make the changes.


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikitech-l digest, Vol 1 #329 - 13 msgs

body:
On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 11:22:43AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
> On ven, 2003-01-10 at 08:54, Anthere wrote:
> > Meanwhile, please don't switch the fr.wiki to UTF 8 before we all know what it will imply in terms of usability.
>
> My position continues to be that we should not switch the big Latin-1
> wikis to UTF-8 until we have automatic conversion to handle common
> broken browsers.

All common browsers support UTF-8, so what do you mean by
"common broken browsers" ?

Autodetection won't work (all popular browsers, and most of less
popular ones, support UTF-8, and we don't want to break any of them,
list of broken browsers doesn't exist). There should be a link
"my browser is completely broken" which would set a cookie and
software, seeing that cookie, would convert page to "safer" version.

But what would that "safer" version be ?
* ISO-8859-1 + &codes;
* ISO-8859-1 + `?' marks
* ISO-8859-1 + rendered PNGs (do these browsers support PNG ?)
?

I don't think we should support editing that way.


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: kentsin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] www.wikipedia.org

body:
No, Just like, google, make it as simple as possible.

wiki pedista wrote:

>My opinion is that:
>
>a)www.wikipedia.org should be a multilingual greeting
>page,
>with the language recognition used to highlight that
>language's wikipedia link (I think I saw an example of
>this somewhere).
>
>b)www.wikipedia.org/wiki/something should still point
>to
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/something for back compatibility
>reasons.
>
>Ok. Now I have to send this only 499 more times.
>
>AstroNomer
>
>__________________________________________________
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>Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
>http://mailplus.yahoo.com
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>Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
>
>


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>youandme wrote:

>>Writing in any language is writing in this specific language
>>respecting _it's_ rules, even if the lack of diactrics is a rule.

>No. Its rules must be obeyed only for words of that language.
>For words from other languages, like names of people, places etc.
>rules of source language must be obeyed.

Have y'all read the discussions from November on <wikiEN-l>
(often spilling into <wikipedia-l> since the English list was new)
on the English Wikipedia's policy of anglicising names?
There was a lot of argument that could give context here.

>>Instead of rather writing in the language overriden by some
>>extra syntax. Giving a correct spelling once in parentheses
>>is what IMO is sufficient.

>Without UTF-8 you can't even do that.

You can (and we often do, on [[en:]]) using HTML entities,
such as Č (for "C" with a hacek, TeX's "\v C").
What UTF-8 encoding does is to allow:
* Direct entry of the UTF-8 character into the edit box;
* UTF-8 characters in titles.

Direct entry of even Latin-1 characters into the edit box
already screws up a few browsers every once in a while,
so I always change them to HTML entities when I see them.
Thus, the reason for UTF-8 would be non-Latin-1 titles.
Since [[en:]]'s policy favours anglicisation
(more than *I* would like! ^_^), this isn't vital.

Still, there are a few times when it would be appropriate under the policy.
When there is no English standard for a foreign name,
then we give it diactritics in the title if it's Latin-1;
with UTF-8, we could extend this practice to other Latin alphabets.
And (thanks to TeX, I suppose), mathematicians commonly use
any feature of the Latin alphabet supported by plain TeX,
including the aforementioned Č (as in "C(ech homology").
So UTF-8 encoding would still be useful on [[en:]] --
just not (IMO) a pressing concern.

-- Toby


from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikitech-l] Orphans page modification

body:
Aldie wrote:

>Back on the 29th of July Koyaanis Qatsi requested modifications to the
>Orphans page as per:
>
>http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=588072&group_id=343
>73&atid=411195
>
>ie, to show orphans not linked from the article namespace only, therefore
>ignoring links from talk: user: wikipedia: etc.
>
Ah, but wikipedia: contains the disambiguation links! Hundreds, if not
thousands, of links would show up as orphans, but they'd be merely
disambiguation pages, which *should* be orphans.

>This would be a very handy feature for ferreting out those articles that sit
>hidden away.
>
There are more than 300 of them already on the orphans list (last time I
checked, after I brought the number down from ~500). Why don't you start
with these? Once they're down to, say, 20, we can talk about this again ;-)

Magnus


from_name: Zoe

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is down

body:
Wikipedia is down.  Attempts to access any links or to bring up a new Main Page from wikipedia.org are all failing.

Zoe

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Any help?

body:
Will Wikipedia be up any time soon?

Zoe

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from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: www.wikipedia.org

body:
kentsin <kentsin=/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote in
news:3E1F5E66.1000709 at yahoo.com:

> No, Just like, google, make it as simple as possible.
>

Ceep it simple, yes, but not to simple. For Wikipedia a portal more like
http://dmoz.org is better I think instead of that of google.

--
Contact: giskart AT wikipedia.be
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


subject: [Wikitech-l] canceling @nupedia.com forward to the @wikipedia.org lists

body:
For several months I recieve on the lists Intliwiki-l and Wikitech-l
spam almost every day.

see also
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2002-December/001719.html

Those spams always come by the old posting adress of the lists, wikitech-
l at nupedia.com and intlwiki-l at nupedia.com

Can the forward be removed?

--
Contact: giskart AT wikipedia.be
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


subject: [Wikitech-l] Ugly <math>

body:
On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 02:52:22AM +1100, Tim Starling wrote:
> |The result of <math> tags is ugly. The pictures are too big, and
> |the ALT text shows the awful-looking raw markup when people move their
> |mouse over it in most browsers. Any hope of some more user preferences
> |in this area, hopefully with sensible defaults? -- [[User:Tim
> |Starling|Tim Starling]]
> |
> |:I tend to agree on the size; font sizes can be manually bumped up on
> |equations that really need it. (But the PNGs are limited to fixed
> |pixel sizes, which does not have a guaranteed relation to a readable
> |font size for any given user.) What other improvements would you
> |suggest? I'm afraid "not ugly" and "more sensible" aren't things we
> |can code. ;)  Eventually output as inline [[MathML]] is hoped for, but
> |few browsers currently support it and we would need to beef up our
> |wiki->HTML translator to produce proper XHTML. --[[User:Brion
> |VIBBER|Brion]] 06:42 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)
>
> By "user preferences with sensible defaults", I just meant two more items
> in the user preferences:
>
> * TeX formulas display raw markup in ALT text
> * TeX formula size
>
> IMHO the first one should be off, and the second should line up with the
> most common browser configuration. Whoever made [[Image:del.gif]] seemed to
> be on the right track. As for other improvements: perhaps you could find
> some way to convert most formulas to ASCII art and use that for the ALT
> text. Maple can do it, why not Wikipedia? ;) That said, I think you guys
> have more pressing matters. I made a feature suggestion on SourceForge a
> few weeks ago requiring only a few extra lines of code, and AFAIK it hasn't
> been touched.

TeX in ALT by default is necessary to make it look readable in text browsers.
It is the only possibility, as readable ascii-arts would have to be
two-dimensional and ALT doesn't support such thing.

What else do you think could go there ?

> I've heard rumours you can get JavaScript to tell you the font size in
> pixels, but I'm not sure if they're true. Barring that, half-blind people
> can probably find their way to the preferences and enlarge the formulas.

It's almost impossible to get PNGs well-aligned with text,
one reason being that TeX doesn't tell us where is base line ($a^i$ and $a_i$
may have the same height, but they should be treated differently).

> MathML sounds nice, although I can't stand messages in articles saying "if
> the formulas on this page aren't displaying correctly, you need to get a
> better browser", e.g. in [[Table of mathematical symbols]]. As long as we
> don't get any more of them, I'll be happy.

Does any browser other than Mozilla support MathML ?
I'm not going to work on that thing until Konqueror supports it.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is still down

body:
Not only am I not able to get into wikipedia.org or wikipedia.com, but I can't get any of my emails to show up.

Zoe

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from_name: Jonathan Walther

subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF

body:
On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 02:27:57PM +0100, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>> WIkipedia is aimed to last more that 2 years. So the problem will
>> be solved somehow sooner or better. But I understand
>> that you can't wait...
>
>You have to switch to UTF-8 at some point. The sooner the better.

I second the motion.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
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from_name: youandme at poczta.fm

subject: [Wikitech-l] Ugly <math>

body:
On 11 Jan 2003 at 19:22, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> Does any browser other than Mozilla support MathML ?
> I'm not going to work on that thing until Konqueror supports it.

Amaya? First browser that implemented MathML...

Youandme

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Oficjalny serwis Polskiej Reprezentacji Skoczkow Narciarskich!
>>> http://link.interia.pl/f16b1


subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF

body:
On Sat, Jan 11, 2003 at 12:44:18PM -0800, Toby Bartels wrote:
>You can (and we often do, on [[en:]]) using HTML entities,
>such as Č (for "C" with a hacek, TeX's "\v C").

That approach borks things up.  Specifically, it screws websearches.
How many people are going to enter, or know to enter, the HTML entity
when they type in a search term?  Related, but slightly different,
it screws up collation.  With collation you can find things with
diacritics even when you aren't putting the diacritics in yourself,
and sorting order gets done properly.

I think UTF-8 is the way to go.  It's been out for years, and is now
widely supported.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

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

subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia mascot

body:
I think that Wikipedia's mascot should be an image which anyone can draw on
and add to at any time. Perhaps some sort of Java applet would be useful,
with a variety of drawing tools and a built-in edit history of the image so
we can easily revert it when people add the Goatse image or other
copyrighted clip art. We could do the same thing with the Wikipedia logo in
the upper corner of the web pages.

No, I'm not actually serious. :)

Perhaps we could use Frankenstein's Monster as our mascot, to represent our
approach to article writing?

Still not serious. :)


body:
On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 12:28:53PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
>What would you prefer? That we tell Anthere to take a hike and buy a new
>computer? That I petition my uni to upgrade hundreds of machines in
>their labs? That we ignore similar conditions across the world where
>people have old machines or machines they cannot control and tell them,
>hey, fuck off, Wikipedia's not for you you whiny bitch?

Your examples are legitimate.  How would you feel if there was a user
option to edit in "broken UTF-8 mode"?  Then when you edited a page, you
could insert some markup to put in non-ASCII characters.  I don't know
what the best way to do this would be; I am guessing something like
\xAB\xCD where \x means "an 8 bit value in hexadecimal representation
follows".  If you have any other ideas, let me know.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

Phone:   604-435-1205
Email:   djw at reactor-core.org
Webpage: http://reactor-core.org
Address: 2459 E 41st Ave, Vancouver, BC  V5R2W2
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subject: [Wikitech-l] Ugly <math>

body:
On 11 Jan 2003 at 19:22, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> TeX in ALT by default is necessary to make it look readable in text
> browsers. It is the only possibility, as readable ascii-arts would
> have to be two-dimensional and ALT doesn't support such thing.
>
> What else do you think could go there ?

At least, TeX with backslashes stripped off would give a nicer "look".

BTW, what do you think about
rendering TeX to PNG only in <math>s that stand in lines alone?
Leaving inline <math>s rendered to HTML
(or suppressing usage of such if that's impossible - I mean one would be
forced to put such <math> to a separate line)

Youandme

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Nowa MOTORYZACJA w portalu INTERIA.PL >>> http://link.interia.pl/f16ba


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is down

body:
Gee, thanks for the hindsight, Pierre.  Nice to be able to say that now.  Highly useful.
Zoe

 Pierre Abbat <phma at webjockey.net> wrote:On Saturday 11 January 2003 19:12, Zoe wrote:
> Wikipedia is down. Attempts to access any links or to bring up a new Main
> Page from wikipedia.org are all failing.

No sense emailing the Wikipedia list to say that the webserver is down when
the mailserver is also down. Try wikidown at bomis.com.

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

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subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF

body:
On Sat, Jan 11, 2003 at 12:44:18PM -0800, Toby Bartels wrote:
> Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> >Without UTF-8 you can't even do that.
>
> You can (and we often do, on [[en:]]) using HTML entities,
> such as Č (for "C" with a hacek, TeX's "\v C").
> What UTF-8 encoding does is to allow:
> * Direct entry of the UTF-8 character into the edit box;
> * UTF-8 characters in titles.

Unless it has obvious symbolic name AND is used just once or twice
it is not any solution.

Do you really expect people to write articles like
http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Polish_language or
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C5%82ownictwo_informatyczne_w_j%C4%99zyku_japo%C5%84skim
with &#numbers; ?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Minor changes to the Watch List

body:
Is there a way to put Minor Changes to articles on your Watch List in the Recent Changes page?  I know this will be different for every user, but when people like 172 label changes to my watched pages as minor (trying to hide them), it's a pain to have to keep going back to all of the pages on my list to see if he's actually updating the pages.

Zoe

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from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [Wikitech-l] Server down !?

body:
On Saturday 11 January 2003 21:55, Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
> I can't acces any of the Wikipedias... the servers are down !?

It's back up - but since the mailing list and the website are on the same box,
when that's down you should email wikidown at bomis.com, then forward the bounce
to Lee Daniel's other address, unless Bomis is also down, in which case if
you can traceroute the problem to some router before Wikipedia, then alert
the noc, else...

phma


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia is down

body:
On Saturday 11 January 2003 19:12, Zoe wrote:
> Wikipedia is down.  Attempts to access any links or to bring up a new Main
> Page from wikipedia.org are all failing.

No sense emailing the Wikipedia list to say that the webserver is down when
the mailserver is also down. Try wikidown at bomis.com.

phma


from_name: elian

subject: [Wikipedia-l] wikipedia mascot

body:
Hello,

In the German WP we just had a discussion that a mascot (like Tux the
Linux Penguin) for Wikipedia would be a nice idea.

What do you think? Ideas for animals, names, artwork greatly appreciated
:-)

I thought that an owl would be appropriate: everybody familiar with greek
mythology associates it with wisdom and the artwork, based on old Athenian
coins could be easily done.

greetings,
elian
--
UNIX is just like Lego, you can build everything.
NT is just like Duplo, it looks nice but for all
practical purposes it is fucking useless.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikitech-l digest, Vol 1 #332 - 14 msgs

body:
Message: 14
Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 21:46:07 -0800
From: Jonathan Walther <krooger at debian.org>
To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikitech-l digest, Vol 1
#329 - 13 msgs
Reply-To: wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
--zYM0uCDKw75PZbzx
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii;
format=flowed
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 12:28:53PM -0800, Brion Vibber
wrote:
>What would you prefer? That we tell Anthere to take a
hike and buy a
new
>computer? That I petition my uni to upgrade hundreds
of machines in
>their labs? That we ignore similar conditions across
the world where
>people have old machines or machines they cannot
control and tell them,
>hey, fuck off, Wikipedia's not for you you whiny
bitch?
Your examples are legitimate.  How would you feel if
there was a user option to edit in "broken UTF-8
mode"?  Then when you edited a page, you could insert
some markup to put in non-ASCII characters.  I don't
know what the best way to do this would be; I am
guessing something like \xAB\xCD where \x means "an 8
bit value in hexadecimal representation follows".  If
you have any other ideas, let me know.
Jonathan

This could not make it in french. We have accentuated
letters in an awful number of words. That would make
editing very difficult.

When is Jimbo coming back from holidays ?

__________________________________________________
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body:
On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 12:23:06AM -0800, Anthere wrote:
>>Your examples are legitimate.  How would you feel if
>>there was a user option to edit in "broken UTF-8
>>mode"?  Then when you edited a page, you could insert
>>some markup to put in non-ASCII characters.  I don't
>>know what the best way to do this would be; I am
>>guessing something like \xAB\xCD where \x means "an 8
>>bit value in hexadecimal representation follows".  If
>>you have any other ideas, let me know.
>
>This could not make it in french. We have accentuated
>letters in an awful number of words. That would make
>editing very difficult.

What if we had a TeX mode for diacritics?  TeX makes it fairly easy to
put diacritic marks over and under letters.  This isn't meant to be the
default editing mode, just a mode for people with broken browsers.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

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

body:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>You can (and we often do, on [[en:]]) using HTML entities,
>>such as Č (for "C" with a hacek, TeX's "\v C").
>>What UTF-8 encoding does is to allow:
>>* Direct entry of the UTF-8 character into the edit box;
>>* UTF-8 characters in titles.

>Unless it has obvious symbolic name AND is used just once or twice
>it is not any solution.

They should all have symbolic names *eventually*.
Let's write a letter to the W3C ^_^!

>Do you really expect people to write articles like
>http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Polish_language or
>http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C5%82ownictwo_informatyczne_w_j%C4%99zyku_japo%C5%84skim
>with &#numbers; ?

No, I don't think that it would work very well at all!
Which must be why these wikis are already on UTF8 --
I was talking about switching [[en:]], [[fr:]], and the like.
(I wouldn't even presume to change "?" to "é" on [[fr:]],
but I'd definitely change "C(" to "Č" on [[en:]].)

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Looking for a mac extension

body:
Hi

I am looking for the extension CarbonLib 1.5 (Mac)
which would (maybe, I hope) allow me to use Opera 6. I
currently have a 1.3.1, which doesnot allow me to make
it function. I can't find it. Could mac users check if
they have that library ?

anthere

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from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Ugly <math>

body:
I decided to move this discussion from the village pump to here.

|The result of <math> tags is ugly. The pictures are too big, and
|the ALT text shows the awful-looking raw markup when people move their
|mouse over it in most browsers. Any hope of some more user preferences
|in this area, hopefully with sensible defaults? -- [[User:Tim
|Starling|Tim Starling]]
|
|:I tend to agree on the size; font sizes can be manually bumped up on
|equations that really need it. (But the PNGs are limited to fixed
|pixel sizes, which does not have a guaranteed relation to a readable
|font size for any given user.) What other improvements would you
|suggest? I'm afraid "not ugly" and "more sensible" aren't things we
|can code. ;)  Eventually output as inline [[MathML]] is hoped for, but
|few browsers currently support it and we would need to beef up our
|wiki->HTML translator to produce proper XHTML. --[[User:Brion
|VIBBER|Brion]] 06:42 Jan 9, 2003 (UTC)

By "user preferences with sensible defaults", I just meant two more items in
the user preferences:

* TeX formulas display raw markup in ALT text
* TeX formula size

IMHO the first one should be off, and the second should line up with the
most common browser configuration. Whoever made [[Image:del.gif]] seemed to
be on the right track. As for other improvements: perhaps you could find
some way to convert most formulas to ASCII art and use that for the ALT
text. Maple can do it, why not Wikipedia? ;) That said, I think you guys
have more pressing matters. I made a feature suggestion on SourceForge a few
weeks ago requiring only a few extra lines of code, and AFAIK it hasn't been
touched.

I've heard rumours you can get JavaScript to tell you the font size in
pixels, but I'm not sure if they're true. Barring that, half-blind people
can probably find their way to the preferences and enlarge the formulas.

MathML sounds nice, although I can't stand messages in articles saying "if
the formulas on this page aren't displaying correctly, you need to get a
better browser", e.g. in [[Table of mathematical symbols]]. As long as we
don't get any more of them, I'll be happy.

-- Tim Starling.

_________________________________________________________________
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http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus


subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF

body:
Clutch wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>You can (and we often do, on [[en:]]) using HTML entities,
>>such as Č (for "C(", "C" with a hacek, TeX's "\v C").

>That approach borks things up.  Specifically, it screws websearches.
>How many people are going to enter, or know to enter, the HTML entity
>when they type in a search term?

Google is quite capable of finding "Č" when a user enters "C("
(well not literally "C(", but the actual Czech letter itself).
If Wikipedia's own search engine isn't, then we should fix that anyway.

>Related, but slightly different,
>it screws up collation.  With collation you can find things with
>diacritics even when you aren't putting the diacritics in yourself,
>and sorting order gets done properly.

I don't see how this is relevant to text.
It *is* relevant to titles, but I already agree with you
that UTF-8 would be nice to have for those!

>I think UTF-8 is the way to go.  It's been out for years, and is now
>widely supported.

Not widely enough, if anthere is accurate evidence.
(Better evidence would be citations from server logs
for the various Latin-1 wikis that people want to switch over.)
I don't know anybody that would oppose switching everything to Unicode
once it's nearly universally supported -- so that's what it comes down to.

I don't want to get into this argument too much --
I support switching to UTF-8 if it won't screw things up,
and I oppose switching if it will screw things up.
Other than that, I just have some evidence (from meta)
that it *can* screw things up, so we need to watch for it;
but switching may well still be the right thing to do!
I just wanted to point that the functionality is there
(but not conveniently) in the body of the article (but not the title).

-- Toby


body:
Jonathan Walther wrote:

>Your examples are legitimate.  How would you feel if there was a user
>option to edit in "broken UTF-8 mode"?  Then when you edited a page, you
>could insert some markup to put in non-ASCII characters.  I don't know
>what the best way to do this would be; I am guessing something like
>\xAB\xCD where \x means "an 8 bit value in hexadecimal representation
>follows".  If you have any other ideas, let me know.

The specila markup could simply be the &#...; codes themselves.
Internally, we would store UTF-8, not an ampersand, semicolon, etc.
But these would be presented in the edit box as HTML entities
(names if they exist, numbers otherwise), when that option is checked.
(But you could *input* either HTML entities or direct UTF-8 regardless.)

Then we could even let [[fr:]] (say) choose to make that option the default,
while letting [[pl:]] (say) eschew it.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: UTF

body:
On Sunday 12 January 2003 03:23, Anthere wrote:
> Your examples are legitimate.  How would you feel if
> there was a user option to edit in "broken UTF-8
> mode"?  Then when you edited a page, you could insert
> some markup to put in non-ASCII characters.  I don't
> know what the best way to do this would be; I am
> guessing something like \xAB\xCD where \x means "an 8
> bit value in hexadecimal representation follows".  If
> you have any other ideas, let me know.
> Jonathan
>
> This could not make it in french. We have accentuated
> letters in an awful number of words. That would make
> editing very difficult.

If the character is between 128 and 255 inclusive, present it as a single
byte. If it's Greek, give the HTML character name. Else turn it into a
number.

We could have a preference for what encoding to use on edit screens. Any
character not in that encoding is represented as a number, unless it's Greek
or for some reason has a character name.

phma


body:
On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 02:59:54AM -0800, Toby Bartels wrote:
>Jonathan Walther wrote:
>
>>Your examples are legitimate.  How would you feel if there was a user
>>option to edit in "broken UTF-8 mode"?  Then when you edited a page, you
>>could insert some markup to put in non-ASCII characters.  I don't know
>>what the best way to do this would be; I am guessing something like
>>\xAB\xCD where \x means "an 8 bit value in hexadecimal representation
>>follows".  If you have any other ideas, let me know.
>
>The specila markup could simply be the &#...; codes themselves.
>Internally, we would store UTF-8, not an ampersand, semicolon, etc.
>But these would be presented in the edit box as HTML entities
>(names if they exist, numbers otherwise), when that option is checked.
>(But you could *input* either HTML entities or direct UTF-8 regardless.)
>
>Then we could even let [[fr:]] (say) choose to make that option the default,
>while letting [[pl:]] (say) eschew it.

I like it.  I second your proposal.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

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body:
I wrote:

>The special markup could simply be the &#...; codes themselves.
>Internally, we would store UTF-8, not an ampersand, semicolon, etc.
>But these would be presented in the edit box as HTML entities
>(names if they exist, numbers otherwise), when that option is checked.
>(But you could *input* either HTML entities or direct UTF-8 regardless.)

Actually, we need 3 options if everybody is to be satisfied:

Option   Edit box presents as       Edit box accepts input as
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
UTF-8    UTF-8                      UTF-8 &name; &#decimal; &#Xhexadecimal;
Latin-1  Latin-1 &name; &#decimal;  Latin-1 &name; &#decimal; &#Xhexadecimal;
ASCII    ASCII &name; &#decimal;    Latin-1 &name; &#decimal; &#Xhexadecimal;

When presenting the edit box (middle column),
use the first version listed that applies to the character in question;
when accepting input from the edit box (last column),
accept anything that we get, with the default encoding listed.

>Then we could even let [[fr:]] (say) choose to make that option the default,
>while letting [[pl:]] (say) eschew it.

Presumably, of the above, [[pl:]] would set the default to UTF-8,
[[fr:]] would set the default to Latin-1 (for anthere's sake),
and [[en:]] would set the default to ASCII (form mav's sake ^_^).
But everything in the databases would be UTF-8 internally.

Of course, once the system is set up to run in general,
then it'll be no great trick to let [[pl:]] set their default to Latin-2 --
since it's a default of how to present Unicode to editors,
not a limitation on the available Unicode characters.

As for the forbidden numerical character entites from € to š,
we can interpret them as if they came from Micro$oft (most likely)
and convert them to whatever they should be (by table).
(If any other forbidden numerical entities have common nonstandard uses,
then we can adopt those as well as long as they translate to good Unicode.)

Gee, I guess that I'm getting involved in this after all.
But it now seems like there might be a solution, not just an argument!

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] UTF

body:
On Sunday 12 January 2003 10:07, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 06:48:08AM -0800, Toby Bartels wrote:
> > As for the forbidden numerical character entites from € to š,
> > we can interpret them as if they came from Micro$oft (most likely)
> > and convert them to whatever they should be (by table).
> > (If any other forbidden numerical entities have common nonstandard uses,
> > then we can adopt those as well as long as they translate to good
> > Unicode.)
>
> They translate to Unicode 128-154.
> Unicode 0-255 is identical with ISO-8859-1.

The problem is that some contributors, apparently copy-pasting from some word
processor in Windows or from 1911, enter those characters as if they mean
something. Then I see an article with boxes in it, try to guess what the
boxes are supposed to be, and often get it wrong. 80-9f in ISO-8859-1 map to
0080-009f in Unicode, but they are invalid characters in both and display as
boxes, slugs, spaces, or nothing. (9f is 159, btw.)

phma


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikitech-l] Ugly <math>

body:
--- youandme at poczta.fm wrote:
> BTW, what do you think about
> rendering TeX to PNG only in <math>s that stand in lines alone?

Right now, I see as the only legitimate use of <math> these stand-alone
formulas, specifically only those that we formerly approximated with
ASCII art (which is extremely hostile to blind users). Other uses of
<math> are ugly because of alignment/font size/background issues, make
the site less usable for text-mode browsers, and increase the download
time for others.

Some of the stand-alone formulas are also ugly because of missing \big,
\bigg, \Big and \Bigg.

Axel

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from_name: Guillaume Blanchard

subject: [Wikitech-l] Server down !?

body:
I can't acces any of the Wikipedias... the servers are down !?

Aoineko


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On dim, 2003-01-12 at 02:21, Anthere wrote:
> I am looking for the extension CarbonLib 1.5 (Mac)
> which would (maybe, I hope) allow me to use Opera 6. I
> currently have a 1.3.1, which doesnot allow me to make
> it function. I can't find it. Could mac users check if
> they have that library ?

You can download CarbonLib 1.6 here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120047

(Which was harder than I would have thought to find!)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
   Not a mac user, I just salivate over Apple's newest offerings,
   then feel my wallet and stick with my outdated Athlon...
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body:
On dim, 2003-01-12 at 07:07, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 06:48:08AM -0800, Toby Bartels wrote:
> > As for the forbidden numerical character entites from € to š,
> > we can interpret them as if they came from Micro$oft (most likely)
> > and convert them to whatever they should be (by table).
> > (If any other forbidden numerical entities have common nonstandard uses,
> > then we can adopt those as well as long as they translate to good Unicode.)
>
> They translate to Unicode 128-154.
> Unicode 0-255 is identical with ISO-8859-1.
>
> There are many other Unicode (and ISO-8859) characters that mean nothing,
> so this is not a problem.

Well, it's a problem when people trying to write the euro symbol, the
French oe-ligature, or Slovene/Czech accented letters get mysterious
high control characters instead of the characters that they typed
legally in CP1252 (even though their browser shouldn't have given them
the option, since it was told to use ISO 8859-1, it's not the users'
fault).

I'd rather silently do input conversion from CP1252 to UTF-8 (thus
preserving those nasty Microsoft extentions as good Unicode characters),
and output conversion to ISO 8859-1 to keep with standards.

There's no legitimate use of ISO 8859-1's or Unicode's 128-154 range
that I know of except conceivably in terminal control. In plaintext on
the web, they're 100% useless, so if they show up it's safe to assume
they're really CP1252.

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

subject: [Wikitech-l] Ugly <math>

body:
youandme at poczta.fm wrote:

>On 11 Jan 2003 at 19:22, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
>
>
>BTW, what do you think about
>rendering TeX to PNG only in <math>s that stand in lines alone?
>Leaving inline <math>s rendered to HTML
>(or suppressing usage of such if that's impossible - I mean one would be
>forced to put such <math> to a separate line)
>
>
>
Maybe instead of <math> ... </math> we should have used a different syntax.
Something like:

:$$ ...

where the ":" indents the line. The math markup block is closed by a
double newline (so single linebreaks can be used for clarity)

>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] WinCVS. Help!

body:
Has anyone managed to use WinCVS on Windows to work on the codebase?

I have successfully logged in and downloaded the code with it, but I am
having problems committing changes.

I'm trying to follow instructions on this page:
http://www.wincvs.org/ssh.html

but the ssh I downloaded from the ftp server that page gives does not
have the same commands or support the same options.

Furthermore, I'm baffled by CVS. I already use it for another project,
but I don't understand how WinCVS perceives passwords. The interface
seems to present passwords & authenticaiton methods as global settings
when they must clearly be project-specific.

I have so far managed to break my existing settings so I can't work on
Unreal Wiki's script & I'm no closer to working on Wikipedia.


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: UTF

body:
On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 04:22:21PM -0800, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> On Saturday 11 January 2003 04:00 am, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > No. Its rules must be obeyed only for words of that language.
> > For words from other languages, like names of people, places etc.
> > rules of source language must be obeyed.
>
> When words from other languages are used in any language that language tends
> to modify those words so that they are pronounceable and usable by people who
> speak that language. In English this is called Anglicisation and in Polish it
> is called Polonisation (which has already been pointed out to you).
>
> All languages pick up and modify words from other languages. When these
> languages do this the words are no longer foreign, but they are now part of a
> new language. Words are merely used to name things and different languages
> have different words for things.

"Wrocl/aw" or "Wal/e,sa" don't suddenly become "English" words because you
use them it English sentence. They're still Polish words and should use
correct Polish spelling. The same applies to all other languages.


from_name: Nicholas Knight

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Line Breaks

body:
On Sunday 12 January 2003 03:37 pm, Jason \"Rodzilla\" Rodzik wrote:
> Is it possible for there to be a linebreak created whenever there is a
> newline character?  For example: Line 1.
>   Line 2.
> That would currently be displayed as "Line 1.  Line 2."  Could it instead
> be displayed exactly as typed?  Where in the code would this be
> implemented?

If you need linebreaks to show up in certain places, use <br>. You can also
start a line with a space and it will show up exactly as it was typed.

See [[wikipedia:How to edit a page]] for details.


body:
On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 06:48:08AM -0800, Toby Bartels wrote:
> As for the forbidden numerical character entites from € to š,
> we can interpret them as if they came from Micro$oft (most likely)
> and convert them to whatever they should be (by table).
> (If any other forbidden numerical entities have common nonstandard uses,
> then we can adopt those as well as long as they translate to good Unicode.)

They translate to Unicode 128-154.
Unicode 0-255 is identical with ISO-8859-1.

There are many other Unicode (and ISO-8859) characters that mean nothing,
so this is not a problem.


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: UTF

body:
On Saturday 11 January 2003 04:00 am, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> No. Its rules must be obeyed only for words of that language.
> For words from other languages, like names of people, places etc.
> rules of source language must be obeyed.

And who are you to dictate what the naming conventions on the English
Wikipedia should be?

When words from other languages are used in any language that language tends
to modify those words so that they are pronounceable and usable by people who
speak that language. In English this is called Anglicisation and in Polish it
is called Polonisation (which has already been pointed out to you).

All languages pick up and modify words from other languages. When these
languages do this the words are no longer foreign, but they are now part of a
new language. Words are merely used to name things and different languages
have different words for things.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Inappropriate names

body:
Oy.  Someone is creating and editing entries using the name "Cumguzzler".

Zoe

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subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 :-(

body:
No one seems interested in doing anything about him, despite repeatedly writing POV articles and refusing to compromise.  If nobody cares what the Wikipedia looks like, why should we?
Zoe
 Eric Demolli <eric at bidouille.dyndns.org> wrote:172 is still POVing some articles have a look at : 2008 Summer Olympics
history & Talk

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

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subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 :-(

body:
No one seems interested in doing anything about him, despite repeatedly writing POV articles and refusing to compromise.  If nobody cares what the Wikipedia looks like, why should we?
Zoe
 Eric Demolli <eric at bidouille.dyndns.org> wrote:172 is still POVing some articles have a look at : 2008 Summer Olympics
history & Talk

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

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Line Breaks

body:
It would certainly change the look of a lot of articles which, for some reason, have weird line breaks in the middle of sentences.
Zoe
 "Jason \"Rodzilla\" Rodzik" <rodzilla at seriouszone.com> wrote:Is it possible for there to be a linebreak created whenever there is a newline character?  For example:Line 1.Line 2.That would currently be displayed as "Line 1.  Line 2."  Could it instead be displayed exactly as typed?  Where in the code would this be implemented?
---------------------------------------------------
Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik
Seriously! Owner & Director of Operations
http://www.seriouszone.com

---------------------------------
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Line Breaks

body:
The problem with starting a sentence with a space is that it converts the line to Courier case, which stands out from the rest of the page, and it also doesn't line wrap those lines.
Zoe
 Nicholas Knight <nknight at pocketinet.com> wrote:On Sunday 12 January 2003 03:37 pm, Jason \"Rodzilla\" Rodzik wrote:
> Is it possible for there to be a linebreak created whenever there is a
> newline character? For example: Line 1.
> Line 2.
> That would currently be displayed as "Line 1. Line 2." Could it instead
> be displayed exactly as typed? Where in the code would this be
> implemented?

If you need linebreaks to show up in certain places, use
. You can also
start a line with a space and it will show up exactly as it was typed.

See [[wikipedia:How to edit a page]] for details.
_______________________________________________
Wikipedia-l mailing list
Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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from_name: Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Line Breaks

body:
Is it possible for there to be a linebreak created whenever there is a newline character?  For example:
  Line 1.
  Line 2.
That would currently be displayed as "Line 1.  Line 2."  Could it instead be displayed exactly as typed?  Where in the code would this be implemented?

---------------------------------------------------
Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik
Seriously! Owner & Director of Operations
http://www.seriouszone.com
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from_name: Magnus Manske

subject: [Wikipedia-l] c't

body:
The en and de wikipedia have been briefly covered in an article in the
current "c't", likely Germany's most important computer magazine.

The article explains the wiki concept, and hints on how to configure
your own UseModWiki. Wikipedia is mentioned as the largest wiki, with
95000/8000 articles, and as proof that wikis don't end in chaos, despite
the open-edit-policy.

Just letting you know,
Magnus


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Line Breaks

body:
Using
 every time you need a new line is a pain, however.  Could this be
implemented?  Where in the code would it be done?

---------------------------------------------------
Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik
Seriously! Owner & Director of Operations
http://www.seriouszone.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Nicholas Knight" <nknight at pocketinet.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2003 6:49 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Line Breaks

> On Sunday 12 January 2003 03:37 pm, Jason \"Rodzilla\" Rodzik wrote:
> > Is it possible for there to be a linebreak created whenever there is a
> > newline character?  For example: Line 1.
> >   Line 2.
> > That would currently be displayed as "Line 1.  Line 2."  Could it
instead
> > be displayed exactly as typed?  Where in the code would this be
> > implemented?
>
> If you need linebreaks to show up in certain places, use
. You can
also
> start a line with a space and it will show up exactly as it was typed.
>
> See [[wikipedia:How to edit a page]] for details.
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Line Breaks

body:
Nevermind.  I realized that the negatives of implementing it outweigh the
benefits, and adding a single space in from gets the job done just as well.

Thanks :)

---------------------------------------------------
Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik
Seriously! Owner & Director of Operations
http://www.seriouszone.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik" <rodzilla at seriouszone.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2003 7:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Line Breaks

> Using
 every time you need a new line is a pain, however.  Could this
be
> implemented?  Where in the code would it be done?
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
> Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik
> Seriously! Owner & Director of Operations
> http://www.seriouszone.com
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Nicholas Knight" <nknight at pocketinet.com>
> To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
> Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2003 6:49 PM
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Line Breaks
>
>
> > On Sunday 12 January 2003 03:37 pm, Jason \"Rodzilla\" Rodzik wrote:
> > > Is it possible for there to be a linebreak created whenever there is a
> > > newline character?  For example: Line 1.
> > >   Line 2.
> > > That would currently be displayed as "Line 1.  Line 2."  Could it
> instead
> > > be displayed exactly as typed?  Where in the code would this be
> > > implemented?
> >
> > If you need linebreaks to show up in certain places, use
. You can
> also
> > start a line with a space and it will show up exactly as it was typed.
> >
> > See [[wikipedia:How to edit a page]] for details.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> > http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
> >
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
>
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Ugly <math>

body:
On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 10:58:44AM -0800, Axel Boldt wrote:
> Some of the stand-alone formulas are also ugly because of missing \big,
> \bigg, \Big and \Bigg.

Could you elaborate and tell us about a few such formulas
and in which articles they are ?


subject: [Wikitech-l] Wikipedia and blind people

body:
Does anybody have experience with making websites accessible
for blind people ? I think this is important in long-term,
but I don't have any experience with that.

So could someone with such experience please describe
what is best current practice in this domain ?


from_name: Richard Grevers

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: UTF

body:
On Sun, 12 Jan 2003 03:32:20 -0500, Pierre Abbat
<phma=ce9h4FcxEoVIf6P1QZMOBw at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> If the character is between 128 and 255 inclusive, present it as a single
> byte. If it's Greek, give the HTML character name. Else turn it into a
> number.
Actually, if it's between 128 and 159, reject it outright. Characters with
bytecodes between those values have no meaning on the web at all.
Unfortunately, they have meaning in the default"Windows" character set, so
a certain Word processor from a very large software corporation with a poor
reputation litters its documents with #146, #147 etc in the guise of "smart
quotes", and these fail to render on some good browsers. Perhaps the input
processor could clean the text, replacing these characters with unicode
equivalents via a lookup table?

--
Richard Grevers


subject: [Wikitech-l] Ugly <math>

references:
<F35VPwHsTpYmQz4lDPH00002991@hotmail.com>
	 <20030111182232.GA17029@tavaiah>  <DAV48qUlyunxtkVO4al000034eb@hotmail.com>

body:
On dim, 2003-01-12 at 22:32, Tim Starling wrote:
> >From "Tomasz Wegrzanowski" <taw at users.sourceforge.net>:
> > TeX in ALT by default is necessary to make it look readable in text
> browsers.
> > It is the only possibility, as readable ascii-arts would have to be
> > two-dimensional and ALT doesn't support such thing.
>
> Sorry, I thought for a second that they could be two dimensional, becuase
> the formula I was looking at was so long that it ran on the the next line in
> the IE6 tooltip.

The spec doesn't mention anything about linebreaks in alt text, so we
can't rely on them to actually break lines; Lynx for instance (quite
correctly) considers linebreaks in put to be regular whitespace, and
only breaks alt text for long lines.

Also, Multiline ASCII art would likely be much worse than TeX for blind
users with a screen reader.

I notice there's also a "longdesc" attribute for images, does anything
support it? (It references an external URl, though.)

> I've always thought IE's and Navigator's handling of ALT text was flawed,
> and that it should be much more discreet than a tooltip popping up.

The alt text isn't *for* those graphical browsers; they oughtn't to show
it at all, unless the image isn't available in which case they by
default become "user agents that cannot display images, forms, or
applets".

> Perhaps we could put in a JavaScript browser test, and strip the ALT text
> for browsers recognised as graphical, such as IE and Navigator. The handful
> of rebellious users who use a graphical browser with the pictures turned off
> can just turn them back on, or find the user preference I suggested.

I got a better idea, and it takes a lot less coding: move your mouse. :)
Seriously, "the alt text looks ugly when I let my mouse sit on top of an
image for several seconds" is what I would consider a non-problem.

> >From  youandme at poczta.fm:
> >At least, TeX with backslashes stripped off would give a nicer "look".
>
> Yes, I think that would definitely be a good start. Removing various
> formatting instructions (such as \mathbf and \left) would also be nice.

The point is not to look good (though if we can, great), but to get
information across. How much can we strip out of the TeX without losing
information?

--

Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com>
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body:
--- Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> On dim, 2003-01-12 at 02:21, Anthere wrote:
> > I am looking for the extension CarbonLib 1.5 (Mac)
> > which would (maybe, I hope) allow me to use Opera
> 6. I
> > currently have a 1.3.1, which doesnot allow me to
> make
> > it function. I can't find it. Could mac users
> check if
> > they have that library ?
>
> You can download CarbonLib 1.6 here:
>
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120047
>
> (Which was harder than I would have thought to
> find!)

Thanks Brion (and Tarquin and anom-Tim)!

You probably had the same weird idea than I did : go
to the apple site and try to use their search feature.
Beurk ! Look like Google is a better way to find
things...
After some minor (but quite persistant) -39 error
(which is very instructional for a laywoman indeed), I
have my folder. Still not working, but I am
optimistic...am I going to "see" these polish names
properly after all ????

> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>    Not a mac user, I just salivate over Apple's
> newest offerings,
>    then feel my wallet and stick with my outdated
> Athlon...

Quite true. Je r?ve d'un G4 portable. Avec toutes les
petites options id?ales, ?a arrive ? environ 5000
euros (euros which we write full letters because it's
often not supported by browsers)

__________________________________________________
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from_name: Eric Demolli

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 :-(

body:
172 is still POVing some articles have a look at : 2008 Summer Olympics
history & Talk


subject: [WikiEN-l] Obscene user names

body:
Below is a question posed on the Village pump about obscene user names. Yep,
we've got another one.

==Obscene user names==
I see that with the advent of [[User:Cumguzzler|Cumguzzler]] we are probably
in for a rerun of the TMC nonsense. Is there clear policy on this? There
should be. It should be that obscene user names are not allowed and that
accounts using them will be deleted. This should be made clear when people
are signing up for accounts. [[User:Cumguzzler|Cumguzzler]] should be deleted
immediately. Iam sorry to sound both angry and prescriptive about this but I
think we have been through this debate before and we are, or should be, too
busy building an encyclopedia to mess around with the feeble arguments about
civil liberties which will now undountedly ensue. The funny thing is that
when discussing this, some people are always very hot on the freedoms of
those who want to offend, and rather less concerned about the freedoms of
those who might be offended. I don't want to bring up Isis and TMC again
(well, OK, I just did), but you have to ask yourself, what's it worth?
[[User:138.37.188.109|138.37.188.109]] 09:02 Jan 13, 2003 (UTC)

:Yes there is a policy on this: No offensive user names. I'll forward your
complaint to the [[Wikipedia mailing list]]. You are right in that this needs
to be made clear when people sign-up. --[[User:Maveric149|mav]]

:Thanks! Oh and (trivially but hey) btw try setting up a new account with an
existing name. The error message in red needs a space between "Choose" and
"A" in "please choosea different name" (or whatever the exact wording is.).
Thanks again, [[User:138.37.188.109|Anonymous disgruntled user :)]]

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma Payment. Have you had your Wiki today?
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=January_12&diff=581011&oldid=581002
I also updated every year page and most of the other pages linked from that
page (sorry for spamming Recent Changes with the updates....)


from_name: Jens Frank

body:
On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 12:23:06AM -0800, Anthere wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 12:28:53PM -0800, Brion Vibber
> > wrote:
> > >What would you prefer? That we tell Anthere to take a
> > hike and buy a
> > new
> > >computer? That I petition my uni to upgrade hundreds
> > of machines in
> > >their labs? That we ignore similar conditions across
> > the world where
> > >people have old machines or machines they cannot
> > control and tell them,
> > >hey, fuck off, Wikipedia's not for you you whiny
> > bitch?
> > Your examples are legitimate.  How would you feel if
> > there was a user option to edit in "broken UTF-8
> > mode"?  Then when you edited a page, you could insert
> > some markup to put in non-ASCII characters.  I don't
> > know what the best way to do this would be; I am
> > guessing something like \xAB\xCD where \x means "an 8
> > bit value in hexadecimal representation follows".  If
> > you have any other ideas, let me know.
> Jonathan
>
> This could not make it in french. We have accentuated
> letters in an awful number of words. That would make
> editing very difficult.
>

French accentuated letters are part of Latin-1, they
could be edited directly. Only more foreign alphabetes
would suffer. In an article about Lech Walesa you could
not directly input the stroken-through "l" of his last
name but would see something like ł

See for example
 http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=List_of_Polish_prime_ministers
 http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=China
for a articles on the English wikipedia having those
kind of letters.

A UTF-8 capable browser would present all letters
directly in the edit window. A Non-UTF-8-browser
would present the accentuated characters in a
numeric form like it's already used in parts of the
english wikipedia.

Making UTF-8 edits an option would ease the life of
people working on Asian, eastern European, Hebrew ...
topics while still allowing edits by older browsers.

	Best regards,

		JeLuF


from_name: Jimmy Wales

in_reply_to: <avpnvn$iue$1@main.gmane.org>; from giskart@wikipedia.be on Sat, Jan 11, 2003 at 06:32:23PM +0000

body:
I have no opposition to removing these forwards now.  People have
had enough time to adjust to the new addresses.

Giskart wrote:

> For several months I recieve on the lists Intliwiki-l and Wikitech-l
> spam almost every day.
>
> see also
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2002-December/001719.html
>
> Those spams always come by the old posting adress of the lists, wikitech-
> l at nupedia.com and intlwiki-l at nupedia.com
>
> Can the forward be removed?
>
> --
> Contact: giskart AT wikipedia.be
> Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
> http://www.wikipedia.be
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: kent sin

subject: [Wikipedia-l] #REDIRECT synonyms

body:
I would like to suggest that WikiPedia use a db to
handle name conflicts intstead of using #REDIRECT.

--- tarquin <tarquin at planetunreal.com> wrote:
> Would it be a good idea to have synonyms of the
> #REDIRECT keyword on the
> non-english pedias?
>
> this would of course be in addition to #REDIRECT to
> avoid breaking
> existing usage.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
>
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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subject: [Wikitech-l] Talk pages redesign proposal

in_reply_to: <1041970992.5821.34.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org>; from brion@pobox.com on Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 12:23:11PM -0800

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> On mar, 2003-01-07 at 09:13, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > Current talk pages are extremely unfriendly.
> > I think they should be abandoned and replaced by
> > more "natural" system of posting.
>
> You mean, not a wiki?
>
> I think not.

I think not, too.  I do acknowledge the difficulties that Tomasz
identifies.  But I think that moving away from wikiness would lead to
unpleasant consequences.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Micronations

in_reply_to: <11a.1cab3e56.2b4cefb7@aol.com>; from daniwo59@aol.com on Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 10:06:31PM -0500

body:
daniwo59 at aol.com wrote:
> I would like to think that we are trying to put together a serious
> encyclopedia. It has nothing to do with whether we are paper or not.

I agree.  Not having reviewed the articles in question, I would say
that if they are nonserious or frivolous, they should go, and not
because of any concern for *space constraints* (i.e. wiki is not
paper) but because of concern for our mission (i.e. wikipedia is an
encyclopedia).

If there are "micronations" that have some kind of real importance, we
should report on them.  But if they are just an in-joke among several
otherwise unimportant friends, then no.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Micronations

body:
Geoff Burling wrote:
> I vaguely recall some guys trying to set up a Micronation in the South
> Pacific on a coral atoll few decades ago. They made the news when the King
> who claimed that atoll (& had a few thousand subject & an army) rounded
> them up & put them on the next plane out of his kingdom. If the activities
> of some would-be Micronation types actually amount to something tangible,
> then let the article stand.
>
> But if there is no proof that this isn't a running joke of a bunch of
> drinking buddies, then delete it.

I agree.  I think this is very well put.

> My criteria for any article about a ``Micronation" include some tangible
> proof that someone tried to make the idea work, or that the event gathered
> enough attention that someone will look for information about it. An example
> would be ``Emperor" Norton, a colorful character of 19th century San
> Francisco.

And this is a delightful example.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Wikipedia and blind people

body:
On Sun, 12 Jan 2003 20:59:04 +0100, Tomasz Wegrzanowski
<taw=Rn4VEauK+AKRv+LV9MX5uipxlwaOVQ5f at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Does anybody have experience with making websites accessible
> for blind people ? I think this is important in long-term,
> but I don't have any experience with that.
>
> So could someone with such experience please describe
> what is best current practice in this domain ?
>
I've never actually worked alongside a blind web user, but I have
experimented with for or five different "talking browsers" and tested my
sites with them.

The current situation is that most products simply read the text that is
written to the screen. THere is only one browser that understands aural css
(emacspeak) and it's still in development, and only runs on unix/linux. But
the author is on the W3C's aural css committee. Opera has some sort of deal
with IBM over voice technology, but It's not very clear what that is about.

I would regard "best practice" as:
1) Punctuate everywhere! - current screen readers are totally unaware of
the HTML and just ride roughshod over boundaries between structural
elements. So if your H1 doesn't have a full stop at the end, the reader
will run straight on into the next sentence without pausing. You get a
short pause for a comma, a longer one for a full stop or question mark.
Navigation lists also tend to get run into one gooey mass.

2) Use CSS positioning to get the actual page content as high as possible
in the page source. So if the navigation bar is at the bottom of the source
and rendered as a left (or right) column via css, a blind user won't be
forced to listen to the entire site navigation on every page. In table-
driven layouts, content on the left, auxiliary material on the right is
more accessible than the opposite layout.

Note that this does not reduce navigability - the user is NOT forced to
listen to the entire page in order to get to another. This is because most
talking browsers use a separate function which reads a list of all the
links on a page.

Come to think of it, some of the talking browsers I tried did not announce
hyperlinks "inline", which might be a challenge for richly-linked material
such as Wikipedia.

--
Richard Grevers
Christchurch, New Zealand


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Line Breaks

body:
Jason "Rodzilla" Rodzik wrote:

> Is it possible for there to be a linebreak created whenever there is a
> newline character?  For example:
>
>     Line 1.
>     Line 2.
>
> That would currently be displayed as "Line 1.  Line 2."  Could it
> instead be displayed exactly as typed?  Where in the code would this
> be implemented?

Line breaks shouldn't be used. The smallest break is a paragraph break.
There is no such thing as a "half-paragraph" break.

However, if you find paragraph breaks leave too much blank space, this
could be changed in the Wikipedia stlye sheet so all para breaks are
smaller.

>
>
> <http://www.seriouszone.com>


subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 :-(

body:
Zoe wrote:

> No one seems interested in doing anything about him, despite
> repeatedly writing POV articles and refusing to compromise.  If nobody
> cares what the Wikipedia looks like, why should we?
>
I'm too busy watching Fwappler (and trying to understand what on earth
s/he means) and despairing at the latest invasion by BDSMers. (what is
it about fetishists and wikipedia? oh yeah. I remember. we're ALL
masochists here.... ;-)

the Olympics article is fine at the mo. I'll stick it on my watchlist


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

subject: [Wikipedia-l] #REDIRECT synonyms

body:
At 09:15 AM 1/13/03 -0800, Kent wrote:
>I would like to suggest that WikiPedia use a db to
>handle name conflicts intstead of using #REDIRECT.
I suspect this is an AI-complete problem. If you have
a database solution, you can probably get a degree in
CS or a large sum of money, or both.

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


from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [WikiEN-l] Obscene user names

body:
> Below is a question posed on the Village pump about obscene user names.
> Yep,
> we've got another one.

While there are arguments to be made both for and against the current
policy, Jimbo has established that "obscene" user names are not OK. "Cumguzzler"
probably qualifies, so Brion (or someone else with db access) should go ahead
and change it to CMG or something similar.

Regards,

Erik

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


subject: [Wikipedia-l] #REDIRECT synonyms

body:
Would it be a good idea to have synonyms of the #REDIRECT keyword on the
non-english pedias?

this would of course be in addition to #REDIRECT to avoid breaking
existing usage.


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] strange wiki

body:
Meta phase II I think

--- Giskart <giskart at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> I have found a strange wikipedia.
> http://php.wikipedia.com
>
> What is that?
>
> --
> Contact: giskart AT wikipedia.be
> Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije
> GNU/FDL encyclopedie
> http://www.wikipedia.be
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] #REDIRECT synonyms

body:
No. I am not proposing this is done by computer, but
like the current #REDIRECT and disambiguation by
human. But just group these into a single place for
easy management.

> I suspect this is an AI-complete problem. If you
> have
> a database solution, you can probably get a degree
> in
> CS or a large sum of money, or both.

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subject: [Wikitech-l] strange wiki

body:
On lun, 2003-01-13 at 15:51, Anthere wrote:
> --- Giskart <giskart at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> > I have found a strange wikipedia.
> > http://php.wikipedia.com
> >
> > What is that?
>
> Meta phase II I think

Yes, that's the previous incarnation of meta-wikipedia running an
*ancient* version of phase 2 from late '01. I wasn't aware that an alias
existed for it; Jimbo, can we get it shut down or repoint it to the new
server? That version of the software contains a number of bugs and
probably security problems, and it should not be running publicly
accessible anymore.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Robert Graham Merkel

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Another offensive nickname

body:
Somebody has given themselves the nickname "Cumguzzler".  What people
do in their spare time is their business (as long as it doesn't take away
time from working on the 'pedia :) but for me this particular nickname
pushes the boundaries of good taste a little too far in the same way that
Mr TMC did, without even the benefit of an attempt at humor.

What do others think?

--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                           Robert Merkel
                                          rgmerk at mira.net
Strangely enough, I don't feel like taking advice from a man who spends
his time behind a sofa with his arm up an artificial cat."
  -- Linda Day (Julia Sawalha); "Press Gang"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikitech-l] Ugly <math>

body:
--- Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 10:58:44AM -0800, Axel Boldt wrote:
> > Some of the stand-alone formulas are also ugly because of missing
> \big,
> > \bigg, \Big and \Bigg.
>
> Could you elaborate and tell us about a few such formulas
> and in which articles they are ?

Every formula that has lots of nested parentheses needs the outer ones
to be larger than the innner ones for readability. For example: logical
formulas with many quantifiers as on the various set theory axiom
pages, lambda expressions, higher order associative laws, lisp  etc.

Also, formulas where one pair of absolute values |x| is nested inside
another pair are unreadable without the outer pair being bigger than
the inner pair. Shows up for example if you want to prove that the
absolute value function is continuous.

Why don't you just implement \big? All you have to do is check that the
next symbol is a delimiter, then pass it straight through to TeX.

Axel

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from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Ugly <math>


from_name: Pierre Abbat

subject: [Wikitech-l] strange wiki

body:
On Monday 13 January 2003 18:51, Anthere wrote:
> Meta phase II I think

Telo phase IV :)

phma


from_name: Tomasz Wegrzanowski

body:
On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 09:27:18AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Brion Vibber wrote:
> > On mar, 2003-01-07 at 09:13, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > > Current talk pages are extremely unfriendly.
> > > I think they should be abandoned and replaced by
> > > more "natural" system of posting.
> >
> > You mean, not a wiki?
> >
> > I think not.
>
> I think not, too.  I do acknowledge the difficulties that Tomasz
> identifies.  But I think that moving away from wikiness would lead to
> unpleasant consequences.

Still, I think that we should add "Post a comment" feature,
which would append whatever one writes to Talk page, without
any edit conflicts and with nicer interface.


body:
My proposal outline (simpelst):
* Have a "Post comment" button
* That adds a comment you write in a blank edit box, attaches your
signature, date, etc.
* It also inserts some tag in front, to keep track of "who answered what
to whom"
* All that is added/inserted into the talk page
* The talk page is still wiki-editable
* Every comment contains a "Reply"-link (part of said tag) which opens
an edit box (see above).

We'd be adding some tree-like structure without losing the wiki way.

Magnus

P.S.: I'm too busy to code something like that in the next few weeks ;-)


from_name: rose.parks at att.net

subject: [Wikitech-l] Ugly <math>

body:
On Monday, January 13,2003, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:

The spec doesn't mention anything about linebreaks in alt text, so we
> can't rely on them to actually break lines; Lynx for instance (quite
> correctly) considers linebreaks in put to be regular whitespace, and
> only breaks alt text for long lines.
>
> Also, Multiline ASCII art would likely be much worse than TeX for blind
> users with a screen reader.
>
> I notice there's also a "longdesc" attribute for images, does anything
> support it? (It references an external URl, though.)

     In regard to the "alt" attribute, my html books say that the text does not
wrap around.
     In regard to the "longdesc" attribute, according to the www3c guidelines
on accessibility at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#image-text-equivalent

the "longdesc" attribute is used when a short text-equivalent is not sufficient
to convey all of the information one wants to about an image. It points to an
html file that contains the description and is used in addition to the "alt"
attribute.

Example:

<IMG src="97sales.gif" alt="Sales for 1997"
        longdesc="sales97.html">

In sales97.html:

A chart showing how sales in 1997 progressed. The chart
is a bar-chart showing percentage increases in sales
by month. Sales in January were up 10% from December 1996,
sales in February dropped 3%, ..

(example taken directly from "HTML Techniques for Web Accessibility Guidelines
1.0", Secs. 7.1, 7.2 at above address)

     Hope I'm answering the right question...

                      Best Regards,

                         Ruth Ifcher
--


from_name: Giskart

subject: [Wikitech-l] strange wiki

body:
I have found a strange wikipedia.
http://php.wikipedia.com

What is that?

--
Contact: giskart AT wikipedia.be
Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
http://www.wikipedia.be


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] Obscene user names

body:
Below is a question posed on the Village pump about obscene user names. Yep,
we've got another one.

==Obscene user names==
I see that with the advent of [[User:Cumguzzler|Cumguzzler]] we are probably
in for a rerun of the TMC nonsense. Is there clear policy on this? There
should be. It should be that obscene user names are not allowed and that
accounts using them will be deleted. This should be made clear when people
are signing up for accounts. [[User:Cumguzzler|Cumguzzler]] should be deleted
immediately. Iam sorry to sound both angry and prescriptive about this but I
think we have been through this debate before and we are, or should be, too
busy building an encyclopedia to mess around with the feeble arguments about
civil liberties which will now undountedly ensue. The funny thing is that
when discussing this, some people are always very hot on the freedoms of
those who want to offend, and rather less concerned about the freedoms of
those who might be offended. I don't want to bring up Isis and TMC again
(well, OK, I just did), but you have to ask yourself, what's it worth?
[[User:138.37.188.109|138.37.188.109]] 09:02 Jan 13, 2003 (UTC)

:Yes there is a policy on this: No offensive user names. I'll forward your
complaint to the [[Wikipedia mailing list]]. You are right in that this needs
to be made clear when people sign-up. --[[User:Maveric149|mav]]

:Thanks! Oh and (trivially but hey) btw try setting up a new account with an
existing name. The error message in red needs a space between "Choose" and
"A" in "please choosea different name" (or whatever the exact wording is.).
Thanks again, [[User:138.37.188.109|Anonymous disgruntled user :)]]

--Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma Payment. Have you had your Wiki today?
http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=January_12&diff=581011&oldid=581002
I also updated every year page and most of the other pages linked from that
page (sorry for spamming Recent Changes with the updates....)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Getting rid of protected pages

in_reply_to: <8dOHqdUCpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 10:55:00PM +0100

body:
(Catching up)

Erik Moeller wrote:
> 1) Protected pages have a link called "Editable copy" or something
> similar. This is simply a copy of the page, perhaps with some flag in the
> database or a modifier in the page title like "(COPY)".
>
> 2) This page can be edited freely. After every edit, a timer is reset. The
> timer counts down to, say, 2 hours (we may want to define this on a per-
> site or per-page basis). Once the time has elapsed, the original version
> of the page is replaced with the COPY.
>
> Because the timer is reset any time someone edits the page, regular users
> can prevent the page from being substituted with vandalism if no sysop is
> near. Similarly, edit wars are given time to "cool" before the page in
> question changes.
>
> 3) Sysops have the additional privileges of being able to directly replace
> the original page with the COPY (so as to say, "this version is good,
> gimme this NOW"), and of course, of being able to edit the original page
> directly.

This is cute and all, but it seems like a lot of new complexity for no
really important purpose.

> The Main Page of all language wikis would benefit greatly from this, as it
> could now be updated by everyone without the risk of the goat-man suddenly
> appearing on our frontpage.

Well, this would be nice, I admit.  But sysop status is handed out
freely for the asking, for the most part, so I'm not sure if the
benefit is really all that great.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] GNU/FDL and other copyleft restrictions.

in_reply_to: <200301091158.h09BwBZ23377@chakotay.uni-koblenz.de>; from engels@uni-koblenz.de on Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 12:58:10PM +0100

body:
Andre Engels wrote:
> I may be committing blasphemy here, but how much is Wikipedia
> 'married' to the GNU/FDL? The reason I'm asking is that I recently
> wanted to download a picture of the signing of the Treaty of Rome
> from the EU website. Only after I did so, I found that the pictures
> can be copied only for non-commercial purposes. And while Wikipedia
> itself would fall under that heading, the GNU/FDL does not forbid
> commercial use. And it's not the first time I've had that problem
> with texts or pictures either. The GNU/FDL allows a lot, which is
> good on itself, but also means that we cannot use any material under
> stricter copyleft restrictions.

I am open to thoughtful explorations along these lines, but I think
that we're pretty 'married' to GNU/FDL.  The viral nature of the
license makes it pretty impossible at this point to do anything about
nagging issues like this.

At the same time, though, I like the fact that there is no prohibition
on commercial uses of the Wikipedia.  Given my ultimate goal that
there be a free encyclopedia distributed at extremely low cost to
every person on the planet, permitting _nonproprietary_ commercial use
(as GNU/FDL does) is pretty important.

Someday a clever entrepreneur in, say, India, will realize that
although it's not possible to price Britannica/Encarta or a locally
produced conventional encyclopedia at a price point for the masses, it
*is* possible to price a derived version of Wikipedia that way.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] strange wiki

in_reply_to: <1042503803.1688.5.camel@rdaneel.vibber.org>; from brion@pobox.com on Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 04:23:24PM -0800

body:
I asked Jason to shut this down for us.

Brion Vibber wrote:

> On lun, 2003-01-13 at 15:51, Anthere wrote:
> > --- Giskart <giskart at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> > > I have found a strange wikipedia.
> > > http://php.wikipedia.com
> > >
> > > What is that?
> >
> > Meta phase II I think
>
> Yes, that's the previous incarnation of meta-wikipedia running an
> *ancient* version of phase 2 from late '01. I wasn't aware that an alias
> existed for it; Jimbo, can we get it shut down or repoint it to the new
> server? That version of the software contains a number of bugs and
> probably security problems, and it should not be running publicly
> accessible anymore.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 :-(

body:
Zoe wrote:
> No one seems interested in doing anything about him, despite
>repeatedly writing POV articles and refusing to compromise.  If nobody
>cares what the Wikipedia looks like, why should we?

Hey, I care.  I was on vacation and I'm still catching up.

--Jimbo


from_name: koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] appearence of Wikipedia

body:
You Wrote:
>We got mentioned as a resource for a particular topic in The Straight
Dope.
>Their homepage is http://www.straightdope.com. The recent article I am
>talking about that mentions us is
>http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030110.html
>
>--Qaz

Yes, that's been on the top 20 random "Links for your browsing
pleasure" at http://kottke.org for a few days.  I haven't noticed any
surge in anonymous edits to the page, though, so I'm still curious how
many people follow the links.

kq

wikikarma: [[Oman]] and related pages Jan 14 ~ 02:30 UTC


from_name: Qaz

subject: [WikiEN-l] appearence of Wikipedia

body:
We got mentioned as a resource for a particular topic in The Straight Dope.
Their homepage is http://www.straightdope.com. The recent article I am
talking about that mentions us is
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030110.html

--Qaz


subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 :-(

in_reply_to: <200301141808.NAA22055@TheWorld.com>; from tompar@world.std.com on Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 01:08:47PM -0500

body:
Tom Parmenter wrote:
> I say this in all seriousness:  172 is forcing us to look at aspects
> of totalitarian regimes that we might otherwise miss.
>
> On the other hand, he apparently never saw a totalitarian regime he
> didn't like.  Not a "leftist" one anyway.

Delightful.  A general rule of thumb is that if people can tell
where I'm coming from, I'm not writing NPOV.

> And willfully and massively deleting other people's changes to "his"
> articles changes without notice or discussion is inexcusable.  As is
> his rudeness to Zoe.

Yes, this is unacceptable.

> I wonder if he is salvageable, given my first observation.  Stalin did
> modernize Russia, and it's worth knowing, but only at the cost of
> millions of lives, also worth knowing, and more important.  Ideally,
> someone like 172 says the first thing and someone like me says the
> second and we end up with an NPOV article.  172 rarely plays that way,
> however.

And even that way of playing is misdirected, I think.  We should all
try to write for both sides as much as we can, rather than "competing"
away our biases.  If you see what I mean.

And if someone won't even play *that way*, well, forget it.

Can someone persuade 172 to come chat here?


from_name: Jason Richey

subject: [Wikitech-l] strange wiki

body:
I removed the line in the old server's config that made it answer for
this name.  Also, I updated the DNS to point the name to the new
server...

Jason

Jimmy Wales wrote:

> I asked Jason to shut this down for us.
>
> Brion Vibber wrote:
>
> > On lun, 2003-01-13 at 15:51, Anthere wrote:
> > > --- Giskart <giskart at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> > > > I have found a strange wikipedia.
> > > > http://php.wikipedia.com
> > > >
> > > > What is that?
> > >
> > > Meta phase II I think
> >
> > Yes, that's the previous incarnation of meta-wikipedia running an
> > *ancient* version of phase 2 from late '01. I wasn't aware that an alias
> > existed for it; Jimbo, can we get it shut down or repoint it to the new
> > server? That version of the software contains a number of bugs and
> > probably security problems, and it should not be running publicly
> > accessible anymore.
> >
> > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Source code for graphics/images

body:
I think we should add some text to our file upload page and to our
Copyrights page, regarding the source code of graphics/images.

I'm talking about graphics/images that were created by a program based
on some textual input. Examples are images created by raytracers like
POV-Ray, graphs of functions created with octave, mathematical
illustrations created with Maple, 3-d pictures of molecules created
with rasmol etc. Basically, any image/graphic that was not created by
somebody painting with a mouse on the screen, but by feeding some text
into a program.

(The same would also apply to midi sound files that were automatically
created from music scores.)

The GFDL insists that a "transparent copy [...] that is suitable for
revising the document straightforwardly" be made available to all
users. While the GFDL explicitly lists png as an admissable transparent
format, I don't think this follows the spirit of "transparent" for
these types of images. The GPL uses a definition which clearly rules
out png's in these cases: "the preferred form of the work for making
modifications to it."

So one could make a case that the the spirit of the GFDL requires that
the source text of images be made available. In any case, I think it is
important for Wiki purposes to have source code available, to
facilitate modification of all content. We should simply tell uploaders
to list the software and source text they used on the image description
page.

Axel

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


from_name: Brion Vibber

body:
On Tue, 14 Jan 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> > The Main Page of all language wikis would benefit greatly from this, as it
> > could now be updated by everyone without the risk of the goat-man suddenly
> > appearing on our frontpage.
>
> Well, this would be nice, I admit.  But sysop status is handed out
> freely for the asking, for the most part, so I'm not sure if the
> benefit is really all that great.

Then apparently you haven't been following the Swedish mess. ;)

The fundamental problem with our current sysop model is that promotion and
demotion of sysops rests with Jimbo, the owner, and myself, one of the
software maintainers.

Jimbo has very little contact with the non-English wikis, and I am
directly active in only a couple; as such we can't easily monitor abuse of
sysop privs or find trustworthy people who should be sysops. An edit war
goes on and we just don't _know_ who's at fault, who can be trusted to
calm down, or who's just going to keep trolling.

Related to this is the absent maintainer bottleneck; if the sysops *aren't
around*, changes don't get made to protected pages. If Jimbo and I *aren't
around*, new sysop requests don't get filled, and changes don't get made
to protected pages.

Automatic replacement of an edit copy means that users can still get stuff
done without constantly petitioning a small number of god-kings; instead,
the god-kings' responsibility becomes the much smaller task of watching
for _problematic_ edits and canceling them before they take effect... and
that can be done by the rest of the users, too, so things keep running if
every sysop and developer is hit by a bus simultaneously with no plans
for succession.

We have the same problem with updates to the interface translation files,
which currently wait on me to fix them up and put them online (and if
necessary set up and convert the wiki). It's slow, it's prone to delays,
and it's damned aggravating for everyone involved. Frankly, it's a
kludge and it's un-wiki... the wiki way would be much better served by
user-editable stuff at all levels.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


body:
I have removed all forwards for intlwiki-l and wikipedia-l from the
old @nupedia.com mail server...

Jason

Giskart wrote:

> For several months I recieve on the lists Intliwiki-l and Wikitech-l
> spam almost every day.
>
> see also
> http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2002-December/001719.html
>
> Those spams always come by the old posting adress of the lists, wikitech-
> l at nupedia.com and intlwiki-l at nupedia.com
>
> Can the forward be removed?
>
> --
> Contact: giskart AT wikipedia.be
> Ook een artikeltje schrijven? WikipediaNL, de vrije GNU/FDL encyclopedie
> http://www.wikipedia.be
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

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


from_name: Jonathan Walther

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 :-(

body:
On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 01:08:47PM -0500, Tom Parmenter wrote:
>I wonder if he is salvageable, given my first observation.  Stalin did
>modernize Russia, and it's worth knowing, but only at the cost of
>millions of lives, also worth knowing, and more important.  Ideally,

Stalin only modernized Russia with massive outside funding from the very
"capitalists" he was supposedly fighting against.

Jonathan

--
                     Geek House Productions, Ltd.

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

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

subject: [WikiEN-l] 172 :-(

body:
I say this in all seriousness:  172 is forcing us to look at aspects
of totalitarian regimes that we might otherwise miss.

On the other hand, he apparently never saw a totalitarian regime he
didn't like.  Not a "leftist" one anyway.

And willfully and massively deleting other people's changes to "his"
articles changes without notice or discussion is inexcusable.  As is
his rudeness to Zoe.

I wonder if he is salvageable, given my first observation.  Stalin did
modernize Russia, and it's worth knowing, but only at the cost of
millions of lives, also worth knowing, and more important.  Ideally,
someone like 172 says the first thing and someone like me says the
second and we end up with an NPOV article.  172 rarely plays that way,
however.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88

|From: Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com>
|Content-Disposition: inline
|Sender: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 04:14:20 -0800
|
|Zoe wrote:
|> No one seems interested in doing anything about him, despite
|>repeatedly writing POV articles and refusing to compromise.  If nobody
|>cares what the Wikipedia looks like, why should we?
|
|Hey, I care.  I was on vacation and I'm still catching up.
|
|--Jimbo
|_______________________________________________
|WikiEN-l mailing list
|WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
|http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
|


subject: [WikiEN-l] appearence of Wikipedia

body:
> We got mentioned as a resource for a particular topic in The Straight
> Dope.
> Their homepage is http://www.straightdope.com. The recent article I am
> talking about that mentions us is
> http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030110.html

We have a list of "Articles that use Wikipedia as a reference" here:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3APress_coverage_(English)

I have added this one to the list.

Regards,

Erik

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!


body:
> This is cute and all, but it seems like a lot of new complexity for no
> really important purpose.

Not complex, really.
1) Add copy namespace
2) Change "protected page" link to "Edit copy"
3) Add notice about page replacement
4) Implement

Making more people sysops is not a good solution. Some people do not want to
be sysops because of the responsibility, others do not know about the
sysop/user distinction and just want to make a quick fix to a protected page. With
an increased number of sysops, the likelihood of abuse (the most obvious
being banning and protecting pages unnecessarily, both of which has happened)
obviously increases.  Also, you get more and more of a power hierarchy, which is
very un-wiki.

The protected page change would have no disadvantages I can see.

Regards,

Erik

--
+++ GMX - Mail, Messaging & more  http://www.gmx.net +++
NEU: Mit GMX ins Internet. Rund um die Uhr f?r 1 ct/ Min. surfen!