from_name: Thomas Gries

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Five points we should be discussion about
	the	mediawiki projects

body:
Can we please come back applying the KISS principle: keep it short and
simple ?
Thanks

Alex J. Avriette wrote:
10 KByte


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Michael Snow

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: 500k press release

body:
Sj wrote:

>Thanks for the feedback, Charles and Tony.  I'll make some tweaks in
>an hour or so to make sure it mentions our amazing multilingualism,
>and highlights our popularity /as a reference work/, if I can think of
>a good way to slip it in.
>
>I was planning to leave a couple days for people to set up a new
>press-log, and think about who to contact; and then send out the
>releases all at once this Sunday.  However, people are already
>starting to write about us reaching the half-million mark, not least
>b/c of Jimbo's presentation yesterday at e-tech.  See for instance the
>Inquirer:
>   http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21909
>
>What do you all think?  Should we send out press releases
>tommorrow/Saturday, to be as timely as possible?  Also, what was the
>500,000th article?
>
>
Answers:
1. I think the press release is great work, good job all around.
2. Yes, we should act quickly. Nothing kills the media's interest in a
press release quicker than being old news. Although news cycles being
what they are, once we hit the weekend it won't matter that much which
day it is, so might as well keep sending it out through Sunday.
3. Based on Alterego's calculation of the precise time (I'm not sure how
that was determined, but I'll take what I can get), the article that's
the closest match seems to be [[Involuntary settlements in the Soviet
Union]]. So congratulations to Mikkalai, and of course congratulations
to everybody who's helped make Wikipedia into a wonderful resource. Now
we just need to go and make that into a featured article!

--Michael Snow


list: foundation-l

from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Foundation-l] What is de.wikiversity.org?

body:
Nicolas-

> The part I don't like is that there is no trace

The trace is here:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-March/002581.html

Regards,

Erik


list: wikimedia-l


list: wikitech-l

subject: [Wikitech-l] AuthPlugin.php

body:
Hello all, I could not yet find a page collecting the contributions for
this module.

This is why I'd like to promote using
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authentication as a central node to
discuss existing and further authentication modules. There are already
LDAP by Ryan, Webserver by Bill, local table (=standard wiki handling =
intern MySQL), Auto-Login based on hostname or NTLM by myself, and I
think, a central place for documentation on subpages to the meta page
would be a good idea.

Bugtracking can be performed in parallel to the meta pages as usual.
If nobody is against, I will soon start with my contributions. Even when
EAuthent (email address authentication) is not fully related, it has
some conceptual parts in parallel and will move there, too.
T.


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Hoi,
So we have a problem. The problem is the architecture. The architecture
is being worked on. Release 1.5 has an improvement in the database
design. The improvements made possible by better software and hardware
are used up by the relentless growth of our consumer base. Every bit of
capacity is used as it becomes available. This is also what makes it so
interesting, Where do we get the money from to pay for all the nice
toys.. ( he/she who dies with the most toys, wins)

When you compare what is done on the Mediawiki software and compare it
with what is done in a commercial environment, than the first thing that
strikes you is the budgets involved. The big achievement of Mediawiki is
what it enables for what budget. The price performance ratio is
staggering. Yes it comes with occasional downtime. We do not have a SLA,
we run on BETA software, we have volunteers making the impossible a
daily occurence and it does work on a best effort basis. Is it not great ??

When you consider that some stuff should be deleted in order to get the
extra bit of umf out of our systems, you have to realise that we do not
produce a "classic" encyclopedia. What we have with Wikipedia is
different, it is all the weird and wonderfull stuff we have that makes
us different. Some have argued that we do not need all these other
wikipedia's because all the knowledge should be included in the one, the
English one. I congratulate the en:wikipedia with their 500.000th
article. At the same time the biggest growth is in the other projects.
Removing a few articles, the so called fancruft, will not make a dent in
a pack of butter as the growth is elsewhere and it will continue to grow
exponentially for some time to come.

So what will the solution be ?? Your guess is as good as mine (have also
been in steamy rooms with highflyers). But I strongly believe that a way
will be found as this is one of the most amazing projects to work on. It
does change the concepts of how you do business, it is a completely
different ecology from the typical comercial world (by the way a
professional is someone who is payed to do a job).

Thanks,
    GerardM

Alex J. Avriette wrote:

>On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 10:04:00 +0000, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>>Indeed. keats appears to be starting from a personal distaste and
>>then claiming this will be the destruction of Wikipedia. I note a
>>curious lack of substantiating, ahh, numbers. keats, do you have any?
>>
>>
>
>First off, you can call me "Alex". That is my name. If you want to
>argue on IRC call me keats or whatever you choose to call me. I am not
>John Keats, nor am I a character in a book. A nick is chosen on IRC to
>be distinct from others. It could be waerth, jwales, TimStarling, or
>whatever. But, we are discussing this on a public mailing list, where
>my name is quite apparent, and I have signed my emails as such. Let's
>be adults about this.
>
>Second, I do not have any numbers. I said that I felt that we had some
>problems. I proposed some solutions, and gave my analysis of said
>problems. The first step in solving a problem is to identify the
>problem. Then you go and find what might be possible solutions (more
>disk on the master db, squids on freebsd, postgres on the backend,
>multiply redundant masters, colos on different continents, a BigIP or
>two), and you /test them/. The fact that I haven't gone out and built
>my own wikipedia cluster and tested every solution I offered is hardly
>a fair criticism. I have at my disposal two powerbooks, two ibooks,
>and a single 2x 866mhz Linux firewall. I don't have the resources to
>do all this testing. Nobody just cut me a check for $86,000, either. I
>am offering my time and my expertise, and even some money. But the
>testing has to be done by the foundation.
>
>
>
>>Fundamentally, taking out the word "fancruft": keats appears to be
>>claiming that the mere fact of having 500k articles is unsustainable
>>in MediaWiki. Is this the case? Do we stop all article creation now?
>>If not, what do we do? Ration them?
>>
>>
>
>Do you not see that we are having weekly outages? So we hit 500k
>articles and lo, it holds together. Where do we go from here? With our
>one master database server. Somebody goes out and drops $100k on an
>8-way 848 opteron. Somebody drops a further $100k on disk. Problem
>solved until we hit 100M articles. Right, because every single power
>ranger should have their own page, and every single villain, and every
>single care bear, and every character from charmed, and every dicdef
>that never makes it into the wiktionary, and so on and so forth.
>
>You can't just say "let's just stick with what we're doing, it works
>for now, and we'll just grow the architecture we've got by throwing
>cubic dollars at it until it works properly."
>
>You're wasting my and the foundation's money by doing so. FIx the
>architecture and you reduce the cost of operation.
>
>I mean, have you actually ever designed anything near as complicated
>as the wikipedia? Have you actually ever been in a board room with the
>program manager, project manager, VP, eight developers, and two
>sysadmins when you all realize at the same time that the architecture
>you've got just won't scale to the point you need it to?
>
>I've been there. I can draw you two distinct pictures on the
>whiteboard I mentioned in my previous email. One will be called
>"horribly fucked" and the other will be called "ideal". We can get
>from "horribly fucked" to "ideal" (that's what I do for a living), but
>we have to stop calling eachother names, and start figuring out what
>we can do to fix the problem. Test. Benchmark. I mean, start doing
>what it takes. Right now we're doing nothing. We're putting out fires.
>Adding more servers is only going to help you until you reach some new
>unsustainable point. The current architecture is (let me spell it out
>real big for you)
>
>U N S C A L A B L E
>
>period.
>


subject: [Foundation-l] Intent to launch Ukrainian Wikinews

body:
I will set up the Ukrainian edition of Wikinews tomorrow if there are no
objections.

1) There are 9 contributor pledges.

2) 5 of these contributors have made more than 200 contributions to
their Wikipedia.

3) A basic set of pages and policies has been prepared at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_language_pre-launch#Ukrainian

Hopefully, the combination of these factors will contribute to a
successful launch.

All best,

Erik


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: I have unblocked Blair P. Houghton.

body:
BJ?rn Lindqvist said:
>> to realize overnight.  It's becoming clear to me that by reading the
>> "Ko rule" into the 3RR I am being led to a different interpretation
>> than many take from the rule.  The Ko rule allows a repeat of a Ko
>> when progress is made between repeats.  That's what I focussed on and
>> believed to be the letter and intent of the law.  Perhaps having the
>> Ko rule as an analogy in the rule is a mistake.
>
> That analogy fooled me too. The rules for what constitutes three
> reverts or not is so unclear that you have to be extremely careful when
> editing contentious articles.

I removed the analogy.  Anybody who thinks it's useful, please restore.


from_name: Richard Holton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia map of British Columbia

body:
Mr. ONeil,

I am an editor on Wikipedia, though I have no official standing at the
Wikimedia Foundation. However, I noticed your request regarding the
use of the map of British Columbia that came from your website.

I have taken the step of tagging that image as a possible copyright
violation.  You can see the resulting message on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BCMap-doton-Victoria.png

This issue is also now listed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_problems
Please feel free to add comments on that page.

Regarding your question about our policy on use of material from other
sites. Wikipedia is committed to respecting copyrights. Please see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

As a citizen and resident of the United States, I know that many
people here assume that all government documents are public domain, as
that is generally true of the US Federal government. I don't know
about this particular case, but it could be that this image was placed
on Wikipedia based on that assumption.

I also do not know if the same sort of rules apply to the government
of Canada and/or British Columbia.

Either way, the source of the image should be properly attributed,
even if the image is in the public domain.

If you have any further questions, you can either contact me at
richholton at gmail.com, or respond to the English Wikipedia mailing list
at wikien-l at wikipedia.org.

Sincerely,

Richard J. Holton

en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Concern related to copyright problem handling

body:
I think, at least in the US, substantial changes to every paragraph of
the article are good enough for it to be considered a "derived work",
but I don't know if that would include just adding a sentence or two
onto the end of each paragraph.

Mark

On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 23:25:23 -0500, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am concerned that the current handling of copyright problems on
> wikipedia may be insufficient.  As it stands, after detection the
> offending text is completely removed.
>
> Unfortunately, if there has been a long time span since the insertion
> of the infringing text there may have been a substantial number of
> valuable contributions to the article. With the way that  most content
> grows organically over time, it may be very difficult to say if the
> new text would have been created without the infringing text with any
> certainty.
>
> In the United States the recent tendency in court appears to be to
> favor the most expansive definition of a derived work possible.
> Because of this, I suspect that it would be likely that at least some
> of the contributions made to an article after the insertion of
> infringing text would be found by a US court to be derived, thus
> placing their ownership in question.  This interpretation of derived
> isn't necessitated by current international treaty, and would likely
> be different (and possibly more sane) in other locations, but I
> suspect that US legality is a substantial concern.
>
> Determining if a piece of text is derived from another, at least in
> the over broad sense favored by US courts, is an intractable problem,
> but the policy could do a better job of avoiding these concerns.
> Reverting to the point where a substantial amount of infringing text
> was added, and deleting *all* modifications after that point would be
> much more certain to avoid impinging on the intellectual property
> rights of others.
>
> The cost of destroyed improvements might be mitigated by the benefit
> of creating a greater incentive for frequently contributors to quickly
> catch and remove violating text.
>
> Of course, none of this is legal advice...
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

body:
I am concerned that the current handling of copyright problems on
wikipedia may be insufficient.  As it stands, after detection the
offending text is completely removed.

Unfortunately, if there has been a long time span since the insertion
of the infringing text there may have been a substantial number of
valuable contributions to the article. With the way that  most content
grows organically over time, it may be very difficult to say if the
new text would have been created without the infringing text with any
certainty.

In the United States the recent tendency in court appears to be to
favor the most expansive definition of a derived work possible.
Because of this, I suspect that it would be likely that at least some
of the contributions made to an article after the insertion of
infringing text would be found by a US court to be derived, thus
placing their ownership in question.  This interpretation of derived
isn't necessitated by current international treaty, and would likely
be different (and possibly more sane) in other locations, but I
suspect that US legality is a substantial concern.

Determining if a piece of text is derived from another, at least in
the over broad sense favored by US courts, is an intractable problem,
but the policy could do a better job of avoiding these concerns.
Reverting to the point where a substantial amount of infringing text
was added, and deleting *all* modifications after that point would be
much more certain to avoid impinging on the intellectual property
rights of others.

The cost of destroyed improvements might be mitigated by the benefit
of creating a greater incentive for frequently contributors to quickly
catch and remove violating text.

Of course, none of this is legal advice...


subject: [WikiEN-l] 500k press release

body:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 00:18:15 -0500, Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:

>    http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21909
>

So, now we're "the Wiki"?

-- Rich Holton

en.wikipedia:User:Rholton


from_name: Sj

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Theora / ogg usage

body:
On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 15:36:57 +0000, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason
<avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> I just want to respond to this threat to remind everyone that not
> everything ending in .ogg that is a video file is an Ogg Theora file,
> alot, if not the majority of .ogg video (ogm) files are actually xvid
> files with Ogg Vorbis audio.

Interesting!  Is xvid a similarly free format?


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Theora / ogg usage

body:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 00:07:59 -0500, Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 15:36:57 +0000, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason
> <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I just want to respond to this threat to remind everyone that not
> > everything ending in .ogg that is a video file is an Ogg Theora file,
> > alot, if not the majority of .ogg video (ogm) files are actually xvid
> > files with Ogg Vorbis audio.
>
> Interesting!  Is xvid a similarly free format?

xvid is a gratis mpeg4 implementation.

It would violate the spectrum of patents that any other mpeg4 codec
implementation.

If xvid were unencumbered there would be no theora. :)


subject: [WikiEN-l] 500k press release

body:
Thanks for the feedback, Charles and Tony.  I'll make some tweaks in
an hour or so to make sure it mentions our amazing multilingualism,
and highlights our popularity /as a reference work/, if I can think of
a good way to slip it in.

I was planning to leave a couple days for people to set up a new
press-log, and think about who to contact; and then send out the
releases all at once this Sunday.  However, people are already
starting to write about us reaching the half-million mark, not least
b/c of Jimbo's presentation yesterday at e-tech.  See for instance the
Inquirer:
   http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21909

What do you all think?  Should we send out press releases
tommorrow/Saturday, to be as timely as possible?  Also, what was the
500,000th article?

+Sj+

On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 16:29:17 -0000, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Sj wrote
>
>
> > I've put up a draft press release to celebrate the English WP's
> > 500,000th article here:
> >  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_releases/March_2005
>
> > It is not quite like our previous press releases; see what you think,
> > edit and improve on it.
>
> The current version looks pretty good to me - not a great deal I could see
> to add, and it seems tightly and professionally written (I've done a few
> press releases that have got into national newspapers).
>
> Just one aspect, and perhaps not so newsworthy.  There is not much emphasis
> given to the scholarly side.
>
> It could say a little more about WP's stature as a reference site.
>
> Charles
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
+sj+
 _ _ :-------.-.--------.--.--------.-.--------.--.--------[...]


from_name: Cormac Lawler

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article cited on Open Democracy

body:
There's an interesting article on Open Democracy (diverse site with
good debate) about code and copyright, ending with a feature on open
source, and which references the en:Wikipedia article on the [[Tragedy
of the commons]].

http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-8-40-2370.jsp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Cormac


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia article cited on Open Democracy


from_name: Reinhardt Wiewe

subject:
[Wikitech-l] RTL redirect image
	[[Commons:Image:Redirect_arrow_rtl.png]] now available

body:
Hall?!

See http://he.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Foo&redirect=no .

The redirect image should / could be reversed at [[ar:]], [[fa:]], [[he:]], [[yi:]] (?) etc.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Get_It
made http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Redirect_arrow_rtl.png

Best regards

Reinhardt [[User:gangleri]]


from_name: Marc O'Morain

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:WikiIndex (idea)

body:
After thinking some more about the merits of the augmenting the
category system or creating a new system, I thought of the following:

The Category tag can only ever represent an "is a" relationship.

By adding the Category:Human tag to Liam Neeson, we are really trying
to convey that Liam Neeson IS A human. The category system is perfect
for defining this kind of information. However, the category system
cannot be used to define any other kind of relationship. For example,
in the Anne Frank article, it is not currently possible in wikipedia
to have an "author of" relationship.

It would therefore be a good idea to add an AuthorOf tag to wikipedia.
There are many other relationships like this that could be defined.
Each such relationship should have a well defined domain and co-domain

(For those that are unfamiliar with these terms, I will explain them
with an example). Consider the "Author of" relationship:

(Lewis Carroll) AuthorOf (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)
AuthorOf is a relation, that maps a Person to a Book.
We say that the domain of AuthorOf is People, and the co-domain of
AuthorOf is Books.

Each new relation defined in wikipedia would have to have a domain and
a co-domain associated with it. For the sake of example, I will create
the following syntax to define a new relationship:

Relation: AuthorOf
Domain: Person
CoDomain: Book

Because we have defined the domains of the AuthorOf relation, we can
now do some very powerfull stuff with wikipedia:

Imagine Dave is a user of wikipedia, who does not know about defining
categories. He is doing some research on the web on his favourite
author, Lewis Carroll, and notices that there is no page on wikipedia
about him. He goes ahead and creates the page, and he also creates two
pages for Lewis' most famour books: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
and Through the Looking Glass. Dave does not add his new pages to any
category.

At the same time Mike is looking at the recent changes, and sees the
new editions on Lewis Caroll, and decides to have a look at the pages.
He notices that Dave has not defined the AuthorOf relationship, so on
the Lewis Caroll page Mike adds:

[[AuthorOf:Alice's Adventures in Wonderland]]
[[AuthorOf:Through the Looking Glass]]

Remember that Wikipedia knows that the domain of the AuthorOf relation
is Person, and that the co-domain is Book, so it can automatically add
Category:Person to Lewis Caroll, and Category:Book to Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

We can also define an inverse of AuthorOf: consider the revised syntax:

Relation: AuthorOf
Inverse: WrittenBy
Domain: Person
CoDomain: Book

Now when someone defines that Lewis Carroll was the AuthorOf Through
the Looking Glass, Wikipedia will automatically know that Through the
Looking Glass was written by Lewis Carroll.

Mikes adds the tag [[AuthorOf:Through the Looking Glass]] to Lewis
Caroll, and Wikipedia will automatically add [[WrittenBy:Lewis
Carrol]] to the Through the Looking Glass page.

What does anyone else think?

--
Marc O'Morain


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] [Ticket#: 115103-FW] Just wondering

body:
Wikimedia Foundation wrote:

>---- Forwarded message from "O'Neil, David MSER:EX"
><Dave.ONeil at gems8.gov.bc.ca> ----
>
>Date:
>From: "O'Neil, David MSER:EX" <Dave.ONeil at gems8.gov.bc.ca>
>To: "'board at wikimedia.org'" <board at wikimedia.org>
>Cc:
>Reply-To:
>Subject: [Ticket#: 115103-FW] Just wondering
>
>
>
>>Hello,
>>	Just wondering what the policy on materials that are embedded in
>>your pages, when the material is taken from other sites?  I noticed a
>>map on
>>site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BCMap-doton-Victoria.png
>><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BCMap-doton-Victoria.png> )  that
>>originally came from our web site
>>(http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/data/pop/maps/rdmap.htm
>><http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/data/pop/maps/rdmap.htm> ).  The real
>>source
>>of this image really should be BC Stats, Ministry of Management
>>Services.
>>Descriptive bits were removed from the image, but I don't think it
>>removes
>>the reality of the actual source of the image.  I'm not that retentive,
>>but
>>we try to always properly attribute source, to avoid confusion (among
>>other
>>things).
>>
>>Cheers
>>
>>David O'Neil,  Manager
>>Population Section, BC Stats
>>Service BC
>>Ministry of Management Services
>>
>>email: Dave.ONeil at gems8.gov.bc.ca
>>tel: 250-387-0335    fax: 250-387-0329
>>www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca <www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>---- End forwarded message ----
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Hello,
>	Just wondering what the policy on materials that are embedded in
>your pages, when the material is taken from other sites?  I noticed a map on
>site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BCMap-doton-Victoria.png
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BCMap-doton-Victoria.png> )  that
>originally came from our web site
>(http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/data/pop/maps/rdmap.htm
><http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/data/pop/maps/rdmap.htm> ).  The real source
>of this image really should be BC Stats, Ministry of Management Services.
>Descriptive bits were removed from the image, but I don't think it removes
>the reality of the actual source of the image.  I'm not that retentive, but
>we try to always properly attribute source, to avoid confusion (among other
>things).
>
>Cheers
>
>David O'Neil,  Manager
>Population Section, BC Stats
>Service BC
>Ministry of Management Services
>
>email: Dave.ONeil at gems8.gov.bc.ca
>tel: 250-387-0335    fax: 250-387-0329
>www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca <www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca>
>
>
I have some serious doubts about the claims of the BC Government in this
regard.
    1. It is really unclear whether our contributor copied these maps
(and similar ones at other articles that Mr. O'Neill did not mention)
from the site in question.  True our version differs in that we do not
include the names for the Regional Districts, but we also do not show an
inset map from their site that gives greater detail ton the more heavily
populated southwestern corner of the province.
    2. The Regional Districts are a creation of legislation.  British
Columbia does not have counties in the more traditional sense of that
term.  These districts when they began to be created in 1965 were in
some respects equivalent to the establishment.  In other jurisdictions
Mr.O'neil's claim would be tantamount to claiming that a map of the
counties there are not in the public domain.
    3. It is not clear that legislative provisions can be copyrighted,
and it would therefore seem that Mr. O'Neil's claims are ultra vires, no
matter what is said ion the BC government website.

Ec (a resident of BC)


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:WikiIndex (idea)

body:
On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 17:03:34 -0800, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Marc O'Morain wrote:
> > After thinking some more about the merits of the augmenting the
> > category system or creating a new system, I thought of the following:
> >
> > The Category tag can only ever represent an "is a" relationship.
>
> Actually, the [[category:x]] system doesn't represent any fixed type of
> relationship at all.

I see your point. I am confident that my definition holds for pages
that are tangible things - pages about people, places etc. My
definition does not hold for other types of thing:

Usability_testing is part of Category:Software_engineering
Usability_testing is not a Software_engineering :)


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] [Fwd: [WikiEN-l] Bug in Wikipedia]

body:
> It appears someone has found a bug in our software. They put in
> #redirect [[de:en:Goatse.cx]] and this redirects to Goatse WITHOUT the
> redirect link appearing at the top. I figure you guys should know as
> they just edited [[Evolution]], which is on the front page. I reverted
> anonymously but now I can't see Evolution.

This is a known issue. I've already made a fix for it in 1.5, which
needs to get backported to 1.4.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Wikimedia Foundation

body:
---- Forwarded message from "O'Neil, David MSER:EX"
<Dave.ONeil at gems8.gov.bc.ca> ----

Date:
From: "O'Neil, David MSER:EX" <Dave.ONeil at gems8.gov.bc.ca>
To: "'board at wikimedia.org'" <board at wikimedia.org>
Cc:
Reply-To:
Subject: [Ticket#: 115103-FW] Just wondering

> Hello,
> 	Just wondering what the policy on materials that are embedded in
> your pages, when the material is taken from other sites?  I noticed a
> map on
> site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BCMap-doton-Victoria.png
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BCMap-doton-Victoria.png> )  that
> originally came from our web site
> (http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/data/pop/maps/rdmap.htm
> <http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/data/pop/maps/rdmap.htm> ).  The real
> source
> of this image really should be BC Stats, Ministry of Management
> Services.
> Descriptive bits were removed from the image, but I don't think it
> removes
> the reality of the actual source of the image.  I'm not that retentive,
> but
> we try to always properly attribute source, to avoid confusion (among
> other
> things).
>
> Cheers
>
> David O'Neil,  Manager
> Population Section, BC Stats
> Service BC
> Ministry of Management Services
>
> email: Dave.ONeil at gems8.gov.bc.ca
> tel: 250-387-0335    fax: 250-387-0329
> www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca <www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca>
>
>
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subject: [Wikitech-l] femmes

body:
Anthere wrote:
> In particular, when he edits, some words disappear, or parts of words do.
>
> A couple of examples :
> *http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discussion_Utilisateur:Anthere&diff=0&oldid=1618445
> *http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discuter:Accueil&diff=prev&oldid=1595496
> *http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dieu&diff=prev&oldid=1566454
>
> Now... this guy argues that he is not responsible of the consequences of
> his edits, that either he has a virus, or that his browser (Firefox) is
> responsible of the word damaging and removal of all references to women.

The removed portions in those pages are:
   pagan
   femmes
   d il do
   images q

It's possible that this person is behind some kind of censoring web
proxy which is trimming out words it has listed as potentially
"offensive" or "sexual" or perhaps even "un-Christian". I'm not sure
what's wrong with "imagesq" though... ;)

The word 'femme' in English sometimes has connotations regarding
homosexuality and gender identity and I can certainly imagine a
hypersensitive prude filter removing it. (See the Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femme )

For background on these censoring proxies and their problems, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorware

> What do you suggest ? In all good faith ? Seriously ?

Such a filter might be installed by a workplace, library, or school and
the person might not even be aware of it... but now that they are, it
would be irresponsible for them to continue editing and corrupting our
content without doing something about it. (ie, SHUTTING IT OFF or
editing from someplace where the filter is not active.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [WikiEN-l] 500k press release

body:
--- Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> What do you all think?  Should we send out press releases
> tommorrow/Saturday, to be as timely as possible?  Also, what was the
> 500,000th article?

Send now.

--mav

__________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: 500k press release

body:
Alright, the press release is finished now, the multilingual portal's
stats are updated, the 500k'th article has been chosen... the
million-article pool has closed.  I suppose we'd better date the press
release and announce it!   On Michael's advice, let's start sending
out the release today, and throughout the weekend.

I've updated the text on meta, for those who wish to translate it:
  http://tinyurl.com/58dnq
For the proofreaders out there : please check to make sure there are
no stray typos or missing commas.

If you have press contacts in your area, please add them to the
logbook and send them a release... if you don't have contacts, now's a
good time to make some.  When you send a release to someone, make sure
you enter their name in the logbook, claim it, and then update it with
a  timestamp.  That way we won't spam anyon with more than one notice.
   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Press_release_logbook/pr-en-500k

--
+sj+


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: 500k press release

body:
Tips on how to send a press release:
   http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/How_to_send_a_press_release

Which links to the text-only press release, suitable for email:
   http://tinyurl.com/43t3k

+sj+

On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 08:05:37 -0500, Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I suppose we'd better date the press release and announce it!

On Mav's advice, too :-)  Come, claim media targets while they're hot...


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] PR: Wikipedia publishes 500,
	000 English-language articles

body:
Please forward widely.

TAMPA, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES, March 18, 2005

The Wikimedia Foundation announced today the creation of the 500,000th
article in the English-language Wikipedia, its project to create a
free, multilingual, online encyclopedia.  The article was about
"Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union"
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_settlements_in_the_Soviet_Union).
Wikipedia is a comprehensive online reference that has won acclaim and
awards for its detailed coverage of current events and popular
culture, its usability, and its community of contributors.  It
receives millions of visits each day.

Other recent additions to its English-language edition include
hundreds of full-length songs, almost a gigabyte of new images, and
subject-specific portals.

Daniel Pink, author and WIRED Magazine columnist, recently described
Wikipedia as "the self-organizing, self-repairing, hyperaddictive
library of the future."  BBC News calls it "One of the most reliably
useful sources of information around, on or off-line," and Tim
Berners-Lee, father of the Web, has called it "The Font of All
Knowledge."

Wikipedia is the first and best-known project of the Wikimedia
Foundation.  It has spawned sister projects, including a dictionary, a
library of textbooks, a compendium of quotations, and a news site.
These projects are all run on the open source MediaWiki platform
(http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/).

Wikipedia is available free of charge and free of advertising from its
website, http://en.wikipedia.org.  Interested contributors can visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction to learn how to
add to the encyclopedia.  DVD versions of the encyclopedia are
scheduled to be released in English, German, and French, later this
year (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia-Distribution).

==About Wikipedia==
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given
free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're
doing." --Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder

Started in January 2001, Wikipedia is currently the world's
fastest-growing, most current, and largest encyclopedia, with 1.5
million articles under active development in over 120 languages.  It
is created entirely by volunteers who contribute, update, and revise
articles in a collaborative process.  The English-language edition
contains 10 million internal links, and incorporates 25,000 edits and
1,000 new articles each day.

Wikipedia's content is written for a general audience, and is
continually being revised for clarity, readability, and accuracy.
Original text, images and sounds contributed to Wikipedia are licensed
under the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL; see
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), which lets users copy and
modify each other's work based on a principle known as "copyleft."
The entire database is freely downloadable from
http://download.wikimedia.org.

==About Wikimedia==
The Wikimedia Foundation (http://www.wikimediafoundation.org) is a
non-profit corporation
based in Florida, USA.  It was founded in 2003 to maintain and develop
free-content projects like Wikipedia, and to provide the full contents
of those projects to the public free of charge.

The Foundation recently concluded a fund drive which raised over
US$90,000 (£55,000 or ?80,000), primarily through individual
donations of US$50 or less
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising).  It has national
chapters in Germany and France.

==Further information==
* About Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
* The Wikimedia Foundation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia
* About MediaWiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki
* Wikipedia statistics - http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/Sitemap.htm
* Wikipedia's best articles -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AFeatured_articles
* Wikipedia press coverage -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3APress_coverage

==Contact==
For questions and interviews, please contact (in English only):

 Jimmy Wales, Chair, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation
 Phone: +1-310-474-3223
 Email: jwales at wikimedia.org

 Angela Beesley, Executive Secretary, Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation
 Phone: (+44)-7796-305-786
 Email: angela at wikimedia.org


subject:
[Wikitech-l] You have lots of money to spend ;
	time to get to it! :-)

body:
Not sure if this has been discussed yet, but we have US$95,000 budgeted for
hardware this quarter ($20,000 of which for Extra hardware/dev projects ;
meaning hardware and/or paying for critical software development). This does
not include whatever has been bought already (Jamesday ; how much have we spent
since the January order? I don't have the bank records for that yet.).

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005

I?d really like to have a general idea on what we want to buy soon and if that
can be bought before the end of the quarter in 2 weeks, then that?d make
accounting a bit easier for me :).

Note: About $20,000 of the money generated is in the Wikimedia Deutschland bank
account. The easiest way I can see to use that money is to buy equipment that
would be used in a German-based datacenter. I?ve been told that there are many
different offers for free/subsidized hosting in Germany.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q1

So, what do we want to buy?

Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
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Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail


from_name: Nicolas Weeger

body:
> > The part I don't like is that there is no trace
>
> The trace is here:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-March/002581.html

As I said, I for one don't expect people to go search the mailing lists (and which one? wikitech? wikipedial? foundation? wikiversity?) for what happened on the wiki, but just the local logs - which don't contain anything afaik.

But then, that's my personal point of view :)

> Regards,
>
> Erik

Regards

Nicolas

Acc?dez au courrier ?lectronique de La Poste : www.laposte.net ;
3615 LAPOSTENET (0,34?/mn) ; t?l : 08 92 68 13 50 (0,34?/mn)


from_name: Sabine Cretella

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Persian New Year

body:
Hi, as much as I am informed (tell me if I am wrong) on 20th of March is
the recurrence of the Persian New Year.

So I would like to take this occasion to wish a Happy New year to
everyone who would like to accept this wish.

And of course I would very much appreciate your adding the translation here:
http://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/Felice_Anno_Nuovo%21

As well as a neat .ogg file with the pronunciation to
http://commons.wikipedia.org

Ciao, Sabine

--

Sabine Cretella
Translations
s.cretella at wordsandmore.it
Meetingplace for translators
http://www.wesolveitnet.com
*****
Vuoi la parola del giorno nella tua casella di posta?
Invia un'e-mail vuota a:
laparoladelgiorno-subscribe at yahoogroups.com


list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Persian New Year


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Persian New Year

body:
Me again: I'd like to use this for the "word of the day - list" (in
Italian) on 20th of March ... so please: let's show what
wikimedia-people can create.

Also links to other projects concerning this day would be very much
appreciated :-)

Thank you!

Sabine Cretella wrote:

> Hi, as much as I am informed (tell me if I am wrong) on 20th of March
> is the recurrence of the Persian New Year.
>
> So I would like to take this occasion to wish a Happy New year to
> everyone who would like to accept this wish.
>
> And of course I would very much appreciate your adding the translation
> here:
> http://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/Felice_Anno_Nuovo%21
>
> As well as a neat .ogg file with the pronunciation to
> http://commons.wikipedia.org
>
> Ciao, Sabine
>
>

--

Sabine Cretella
Translations IT-DE, EN-DE
s.cretella at wordsandmore.it
Meetingplace for translators
http://www.wesolveitnet.com
*****
Vuoi la parola del giorno nella tua casella di posta?
Invia un'e-mail vuota a:
laparoladelgiorno-subscribe at yahoogroups.com


subject: [Wiktionary-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Persian New Year


from_name: Andreas Hoerstemeier

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Bug in Wikipedia

body:
csherlock at ljh.com.au wrote:
> It appears someone has found a bug in our software. They put in
> #redirect [[de:en:Goatse.cx]] and this redirects to Goatse WITHOUT the
> redirect link appearing at the top. I figure you guys should know as
See Bugzilla #1656 - this seems to be the new fun of one of our
experienced vandals, often using the infamous Autofellatio porn image.

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1656

[[User:Ahoerstemeier|Andy]]


subject: [Wiktionary-l] Translations of Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wiktionary

body:
Sabine Cretella wrote:

> Hi Yann,
>
> I added Sicilian for Wikipedia and Wiktionary - but I have a problem
> with Wikimedia ... shouldn't this remain the same for all languages
> since it is the name of the foundation?

This is a good point for legal reasons.

Ec


from_name: Domas Mituzas

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Five points we should be discussion about
	themediawiki projects

body:
> U N S C A L A B L E
> period.

Scalability happens, when performance grows in linear mode with hardware
and even uses some synergy. This is one of mediawiki performance development
goals. Make it distributed as much as possible. Make it as async as possible.
Taming cheap horsepower is a challenge, but it helps project to work on low
budget. There are guys in this project working with large systems, who are
really skilled system administrators (though, maybe not second-generation
ones :), and who know meanings of 9's after comma. Sure, you've got possibility
to brainstorm and bring all kinds of ideas, but we aware, that those won't be
accepted as absolute truth. People do not need prophets when critical thought is
involved :) Though, any contribution to development is here highly appreciated.

Cheers,
Domas


from_name: Yann Forget

subject: [Foundation-l] Translations of Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wiktionary

body:
Hi,

I noticed that the translations for Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wiktionary are
very far from complete.

Please could you add translations of these important words to their respective
pages:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wikipedia
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wikimedia
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary

Especially interesting are translations in non Latin scripts.

Thanks for your help,
Yann

--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Translations of Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wiktionary


subject: [Wikipedia-l] WikiIndex (idea)

body:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 11:37:36 +0100, Kardos Andris <k.andris at gmail.com> wrote:
> You are further and further away from my original idea.

No, I am just taking a long time in getting there :)

> On the page en.wikipedia.org/Anne_Frank for example:
> Person = {Name: Anne Frank, Born: 1929, Died: 1944, Sex: female,
> Nationality: German....}
> Writer = {Name: Anne Frank, Language: German, Duthch}
> WWII_Victims = {Died: 1944}

If you take the system that I outlined last night, you would create a
relation like this:

Relation:YearOfBirth
Inverse:BornThisYear
Domain:Person
CoDomain:Year

Relation:YearOfDeath
Inverse:DiedThisYear
Domain:Person
CoDomain:Year

And add the following to the Anne Frank page:
[[YearOfBirth:1929]]

The following would be added to the 1929 page:
[[BornThisYear:Anne Frank]]

For the other fields that you mention other relations could be made:
Relation: Nationality
Domain:Person
CoDomain:Country*
[[Nationality:Germany]]

(This could be done this way, or by associating a nationality with a
coutry, and mapping a person to a nationality rather than a country).

I would make WWII_Victims a category, so Anne Frank is a member of
Category:WWII_Victims, and if the user wants to search for Victims who
died in 1944 they could search for: (People DiedThisYear 1944)
(intersection) (Category:WWII_Victims)

--
Marc O'Morain


subject: [Foundation-l] suggestion for coming fundraising drives

body:
--- Elisabeth Bauer <elian at djini.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I yesterday answered a mail from a german donator in the last
> fundraising drive. He suggested to inform better about the results of
> the drive and what will happen with the money. I think this is a quite
> reasonable suggestion. Next time we should definitely publish a press
> release - best in several languages-, summarizing the results of the
> fundraising drive.
>
> putting this idea here so it doesn't get forgotten.

Good idea.

-- mav

__________________________________
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http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/


body:
Hi Yann,

I added Sicilian for Wikipedia and Wiktionary - but I have a problem
with Wikimedia ... shouldn't this remain the same for all languages
since it is the name of the foundation?

Ciao, Sabine

Yann Forget wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I noticed that the translations for Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wiktionary are
>very far from complete.
>
>Please could you add translations of these important words to their respective
>pages:
>http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wikipedia
>http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wikimedia
>http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary
>
>Especially interesting are translations in non Latin scripts.
>
>Thanks for your help,
>Yann
>
>
>


from_name: Kardos Andris

subject: [Wikipedia-l] WikiIndex (idea)

body:
You are further and further away from my original idea. Putting things into
categories does not solve the problem I wanted to solve. If you add a person
to tha person category, that will not make it easier to find people born in
a certain year. Beside adding a page to an index, you should specify other
"fields". For person: born, died, nationality, For place: country, gps, ...
For event: year, place, ... Tags like below embedded in pages. The parser
would put apropriate data in the "person", "writer", etc. tables (!)

On the page en.wikipedia.org/Anne_Frank for example:

Person = {Name: Anne Frank, Born: 1929, Died: 1944, Sex: female,
Nationality: German....}

Writer = {Name: Anne Frank, Language: German, Duthch}

WWII_Victims = {Died: 1944}


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:WikiIndex (idea)

body:
Marc O'Morain wrote:

 > [some good stuff]

Marc, have you taken a look at RDF, and, more to the point, n3, which is
a simplified notation that is equivalent to RDF? You are quite right,
our current categories approximate is-a relationships (although there
are some subtleties that they completely skate over).

At the risk of repeating myself, it would be really neat if we could
write something like

[[attribute = value]]

in articles, since we could then use it to generate all sorts of good
stuff, including automatic rendering of navigation tables in the UI,
structured search, and autogeneration of RDF for semantic search engines.

-- Neil


from_name: Rick

body:
How can a red dot on an otherwise blank map of British
Columbia with the county lines listed, possibly be
copyrighted?

RickK

__________________________________
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Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/


subject:
[Foundation-l] Re: [Wiktionary-l] Translations of Wikipedia,
	Wikimedia and Wiktionary

body:
Le Friday 18 March 2005 11:23, Sabine Cretella a ?crit :
> Hi Yann,
>
> I added Sicilian for Wikipedia and Wiktionary - but I have a problem
> with Wikimedia ... shouldn't this remain the same for all languages
> since it is the name of the foundation?

In languages written with the Latin alphabet, may be yes.
But for others, at least a transcription with the local alphabet is needed.

> Ciao, Sabine

Cordialement,
Yann

> Yann Forget wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >I noticed that the translations for Wikipedia, Wikimedia and Wiktionary
> > are very far from complete.
> >
> >Please could you add translations of these important words to their
> > respective pages:
> >http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wikipedia
> >http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wikimedia
> >http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary
> >
> >Especially interesting are translations in non Latin scripts.
> >
> >Thanks for your help,
> >Yann

--
http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence
http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net
http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclop?die libre
http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux


from_name: Tony Sidaway

subject: [Wikitech-l] femmes

body:
Anthere said:
> stupid question :
>
> We have a contributor, who is degrading our content.
>
> In particular, when he edits, some words disappear, or parts of words
> do.
>
> A couple of examples :
> *
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discussion_Utilisateur:Anthere&diff=0&oldid=1618445> *http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discuter:Accueil&diff=prev&oldid=1595496> *http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dieu&diff=prev&oldid=1566454
>
>
> For those who do not know : "femmes" means "women".
>
> Now... this guy argues that he is not responsible of the consequences
> of  his edits, that either he has a virus, or that his browser
> (Firefox) is  responsible of the word damaging and removal of all
> references to women.
>
> Now...
>
> What do you suggest ? In all good faith ? Seriously ?
>

Ask him to submit a bug report--Hardware, OS, browser version, extensions
and plugins in use, character set if known, keyboard settings in use.  Ask
him to check with a different browser (IE, Opera, whatever is available to
him).  Ask him to play around on the en or de sandboxes, as well as fr, to
see if he can reproduce the problem on another MediaWiki.  Ask him to
report any other odd behavior he has noticed, particularly when editing
forums or wikis using that browser.  Has he had complaints from users of
other web-hosted systems about his posts mangling quoted text, or
whatever?
Meanwhile remind him that he shouldn't continue to knowingly use software
that may damage the wiki.  What you do if he refuses is a matter for your
local wiki policy.


from_name: Alex J. Avriette

body:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 10:30:52 +0200, Domas Mituzas
<Domas.Mituzas at microlink.lt> wrote:

> Scalability happens, when performance grows in linear mode with hardware
> and even uses some synergy. This is one of mediawiki performance development
> goals. Make it distributed as much as possible. Make it as async as possible.

I think the big lynchpin right now is the fact that we have one master
database. I don't know how we get from here to dual (or more) master
databases. I think we also have a disk deficiency. Things like PDU's
are easy to fix, and I think jwales/chaper are already on that.

> Taming cheap horsepower is a challenge, but it helps project to work on low

The last installation I worked had thousands (many thousands) of dual
1.3ghz p3's, and we did just fine. Taming cheap horsepower is a
challenge, but not an insurmountable one. It takes infrastructure and
a little bit of work.

> ones :), and who know meanings of 9's after comma. Sure, you've got possibility
> to brainstorm and bring all kinds of ideas, but we aware, that those won't be
> accepted as absolute truth. People do not need prophets when critical thought is
> involved :) Though, any contribution to development is here highly appreciated.

Things I say are clearly not being accepted as absolute truth. I
expected as much. I did not expect the personal attacks and
name-calling.

What I most want to address is these things:

* Why are we having outages?
-- When I say outage, I mean people popping up in #mediawiki or
#wikipedia and saying "wikislow" or "wikidown". It seems that we
actually have a system that is working for now, but there are a few
magic bullets that seem to sneak into the system from time to time and
cause utter havoc for the developers, or if you want to be honest
about it, the SA's and DBA's.

* What can we do to streamline or otherwise improve the performance of
the project?
-- The "fancruft" thing has been nagging at me since David started
attacking me on it. I really don't care what kind of article it is,
but would it be possible to create "clusters" of articles (represented
in the database as such) to make it easier for the database engine to
find what it wants? I'll continue these thoughts in reply to David's
message.

alex

--
Alex Avriette
avriette at gmail.com


from_name: csherlock at ljh.com.au

subject: [WikiEN-l] Bug in Wikipedia

body:
It appears someone has found a bug in our software. They put in
#redirect [[de:en:Goatse.cx]] and this redirects to Goatse WITHOUT the
redirect link appearing at the top. I figure you guys should know as
they just edited [[Evolution]], which is on the front page. I reverted
anonymously but now I can't see Evolution.

TBSDY


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Five points we should be discussion about the
	mediawiki projects

body:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 16:12:32 +0000, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> It was that you spent five and a half paragraphs (618 words) decrying
> fancruft and positing that the problem was too many articles, presumably
> caused primarily by fancruft (I'm presuming from the 618 words leading
> up to saying it was overloading the system). This seemed a somewhat novel
> argument against fancruft, and I recall asking a dev on IRC (think it was
> JamesDay, not sure) if too many articles was in fact a source of our
> problems, and being told no.

I've been accused many times of being inconcise. This is perhaps one
of those times. The fact, however, that you and others are measuring
the responses I am making to these posts by words and kilobytes is
shocking to me. What a complete and utter waste of time.

> So yes: since it's an anti-fancruft diatribe with blame on the end, I'm

Here's some vituperation for you. Kindly fuck off. This is not an
anti-fancrut diatribe.

> 1. Alex, are you *seriously* claiming excess small articles will hasten the
> downfall of Wikipedia?
>
> [ ] Yes
> [X] No
>
> 2. If "yes", do you have any numbers?
>
> [ ] Yes, here they are
> [ ] No
> [X] N/A

First, I am asking questions and making suggestions. If I made any
statements that seemed to indicate that I knew that X thing was
exploding the wikipedia, either I overstated my point, or somebody
misunderstood what I was saying. I think you'll understand if you read
on.

Let me explain the reason I bring fancruft up. In fact, since fancruft
is obviously such a loaded term, let's just use the word "cruft" to
refer to large groups of small related articles.

As a database goes searching through its indices and tables looking
for a tuple, it must iteratively go over other tuples before it finds
the one it wants. It doesn't just have some magic pointer that knows
where [[designated marksman]] is. It has to figure it out. When the
number of articles exceeds several hundred thousand, you really need
to "give it hints" about where to find that article. I don't know if
this is already being done, but it might be possible to use things
like categories (or some form of tagging) to "associate" groups of
articles so that, while they might not have to live in their own
separate table, that they were more easily "findable" by the database.

Do you understand the difference between a sequential scan and an
index scan? I mean, I don't know what technical level to start at.
Postgres has this feature I like a lot called "explain", so I can say:

wikipedia=# explain select colname from tablename where length(colname) > 5;

and it will explain how the query planner intends to execute that
query. This is how one obtains numbers and increases the performance
of ones' SQL or ones' schema (although there's hardly any difference,
now, is there?).

Right now, I can tell you that "having more articles" means "the
wikipedia will get slower" because there is no way to avoid the fact
that the database has to go through the articles its got to find the
one you just asked it for.

Now might be a good time for somebody familiar with the schema to step
in and either tell me that I'm FOS or whether MySQL has some
devil-instilled magic that allows it to defy the laws of databases, or
something.

Since there seems to be so much hostility coming from you, let me
point you in the direction of two small pages which will help:

http://www.petdance.com/perl/geek-culture/

and

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SetTheBozoBit

Cheers,
aa

--
Alex Avriette
avriette at gmail.com


body:
> So, what do we want to buy?

My first concern is for the Florida datacenter. A redundant power
supply for the switch (jwales should have these urls), a new APC (if
the current isn't working, Kate wondered that on IRC, a test is in
order), and APC PDU's. None of this is expensive.

Suda and Ariel could probably both use some more disk, since they seem
to be trading master database roles. Whether this means local disk or
disk in the NFS servers, I don't know. It's also not terribly
expensive, depending on how much disk is necessary, and how impacted
the servers are.

I have said already that I am willing to drive or fly to Florida to
help with installation of all of the above.

alex

--
Alex Avriette
avriette at gmail.com


from_name: Sj

subject:
[Wikipedia-l]
	varied voices, warm vibes, sxsw, and what follows what

body:
Liz Lawley of Corante writes about how she chose not to go to e-Tech
this week, but to go to sxsw instead; and the relationship b/t those
decisions and how diverse the speakers and attendees at each
conference are.  The piece is worth reading; she says interesting
things such as "If you build a place that women love, the men will
follow. The reverse is not true," and "There were more conversations
than there were pontifications."

http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2005/03/16/why_sxsw.php

Applying similar thoughts to the Wikipedia community, similar comfort
zones for certain demographics of users have perhaps as much to do
with diversity of philosophy as with diversity of gender and race.
But the point about conversations v. pontifications hits home.

I'd like to know what other people think about this; how we might
conceive of gatherings and big events like meetups or wikimania in
ways that draw out people who will make them warmer, and more varied
and interesting.

--
+sj+


from_name: Anthere

subject: [Wikitech-l] femmes

body:
stupid question :

We have a contributor, who is degrading our content.

In particular, when he edits, some words disappear, or parts of words do.

A couple of examples :
*
http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discussion_Utilisateur:Anthere&diff=0&oldid=1618445
*http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discuter:Accueil&diff=prev&oldid=1595496
*http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dieu&diff=prev&oldid=1566454

For those who do not know : "femmes" means "women".

Now... this guy argues that he is not responsible of the consequences of
his edits, that either he has a virus, or that his browser (Firefox) is
responsible of the word damaging and removal of all references to women.

Now...

What do you suggest ? In all good faith ? Seriously ?

Ant

(to quote Robert, this is no joke)


from_name: Jan Henning

subject: [Wikitech-l] femmes

body:
> What do you suggest ? In all good faith ? Seriously ?

If this is a regular occurence with his edits, I do not see that it
matters much whether he does it deliberately, does it out of stupidity,
has a virus, or suffers from a browser bug (that nobody else with
Firefox suffers from): It's his responsibility to make sure that his
system is compatible with Wikipedia.

If he cannot do so, he should refrain from editing. If he will not do
so voluntarily, his writing privileges should be removed.

What would be the alternative? Somebody (or several somebodies) would
have to constantly clean up after him. If you find people for this
diaper duty, fine, but I'd view that as a waste of editor resources
that could otherwise be put to better use.

The openness of Wikipedia menas that every participant becomes
responsible for the project's well-being. I do not see how people who
do not want to shoulder their share of this responsibility can be
reasonably accommodated in Wikipedia.

Hope this helps
Jan


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia hits the big time

body:
On 3/16/05 10:04 AM, "Poor, Edmund W" <Edmund.W.Poor at abc.com> wrote:
> I was approached by the director of a foundation (with a multi-million
> dollar budget) to create a fork of Wikipedia leading to a print edition
> to be published no later than 2008. If I do this, maybe it will get me
> out of your hair? (The Cunctator wrote, "Rinse, wash, repeat.") But I
> worry whether a fork is the best approach, or even necessary at all.

My comment was as much about the enabling behavior of the Wikipedia
community was it was about Ed's.

That aside: one of the obvious baby steps that should be taken in regards to
questions of reliability, tagging versions, etc., is to give people a
permanent link to the current version of an article. Ideally in a relatively
succinct format.

This does not exist--you can link without fear of change to historical
revisions, but not to the most recent revision.

Not only should this functionality exist, it should be relatively obvious.

That would eliminate a *lot* of worries from the academic world--yes, the
reliability of the information would still be questionable, but at least
they'd know that the reference they make now will be identical at any time
in the future.

And yes, I know this is difficult in the current code, but it's an important
need.


subject: [Wikitech-l] femmes

body:
Nicolas Weeger wrote:

>>what's wrong with "imagesq" though... ;)
>>
>>
>
>As pronunced in french, "q" becomes "cul", which means "ass", or "porn". Thus "images de cul" or "images de q" => porn pics.
>
>So it does have some meaning.
>
>
>
>>-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>>
>>
>
>Nicolas
>
>
>
Wow. Just wow. Ok, here's a suggestion, somewhere between humorous and
completely serious: when sending an edit form, the user interface should
send a hidden "canary" field containing various safe-for-work words that
will be mutilated by idiotic censorware such as this: words like
"Middlesex", "Cockfosters" and "Scunthorpe" come to mind. Then, if the
"canary" field is returned in a mutilated form  (for example,  "Middle
fosters Sthorpe") when the edit is submitted, we know that the rest of
the edit is potentially dubious. We could then refuse the edit, alerting
the user that they are in a text-mangling environment, and that they
should edit from somewhere else. The uses of "canary" field could also
potentially be extended to check that the browser correctly handles
various other technical issues, such as not mangling character sets.

-- Neil


subject: [Wikitech-l] femmes

body:
> what's wrong with "imagesq" though... ;)

As pronunced in french, "q" becomes "cul", which means "ass", or "porn". Thus "images de cul" or "images de q" => porn pics.

So it does have some meaning.

> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Nicolas

Acc?dez au courrier ?lectronique de La Poste : www.laposte.net ;
3615 LAPOSTENET (0,34?/mn) ; t?l : 08 92 68 13 50 (0,34?/mn)


subject: [Wikitech-l] femmes

body:
Neil Harris said:
> Nicolas Weeger wrote:
>
>>>what's wrong with "imagesq" though... ;)
>>>
>>>
>>
>>As pronunced in french, "q" becomes "cul", which means "ass", or
>>"porn". Thus "images de cul" or "images de q" => porn pics.

Hence the caption LHOOQ on Marcel Duchamp's defaced Mona Lisa.

http://www.studiolo.org/Mona/MONA11.htm
>>
> Wow. Just wow. Ok, here's a suggestion, somewhere between humorous and
> completely serious: when sending an edit form, the user interface
> should  send a hidden "canary" field containing various safe-for-work
> words that  will be mutilated by idiotic censorware such as this: words
> like
> "Middlesex", "Cockfosters" and "Scunthorpe" come to mind. Then, if the
> "canary" field is returned in a mutilated form  (for example,  "Middle
> fosters Sthorpe") when the edit is submitted, we know that the rest of
> the edit is potentially dubious. We could then refuse the edit,
> alerting  the user that they are in a text-mangling environment, and
> that they  should edit from somewhere else. The uses of "canary" field
> could also  potentially be extended to check that the browser correctly
> handles  various other technical issues, such as not mangling character
> sets.

So simple it could just work! :)

I'm still boggled by the suggestion that this censorware nonsense may have
infected languages other than American.


from_name: Jean-Baptiste Soufron

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Concern related to copyright problem handling

body:
I agree with you but it would request to have specific discussions
about wikipedia legal issues. Of coursre I am voluntary for this if
necessary...

Jean-Baptiste Soufron, Doctorant
CERSA - CNRS, Paris 2
http://soufron.free.fr

Le 18 mars 05, ? 05:25, Gregory Maxwell a ?crit :

> I am concerned that the current handling of copyright problems on
> wikipedia may be insufficient.  As it stands, after detection the
> offending text is completely removed.
>
> Unfortunately, if there has been a long time span since the insertion
> of the infringing text there may have been a substantial number of
> valuable contributions to the article. With the way that  most content
> grows organically over time, it may be very difficult to say if the
> new text would have been created without the infringing text with any
> certainty.
>
> In the United States the recent tendency in court appears to be to
> favor the most expansive definition of a derived work possible.
> Because of this, I suspect that it would be likely that at least some
> of the contributions made to an article after the insertion of
> infringing text would be found by a US court to be derived, thus
> placing their ownership in question.  This interpretation of derived
> isn't necessitated by current international treaty, and would likely
> be different (and possibly more sane) in other locations, but I
> suspect that US legality is a substantial concern.
>
> Determining if a piece of text is derived from another, at least in
> the over broad sense favored by US courts, is an intractable problem,
> but the policy could do a better job of avoiding these concerns.
> Reverting to the point where a substantial amount of infringing text
> was added, and deleting *all* modifications after that point would be
> much more certain to avoid impinging on the intellectual property
> rights of others.
>
> The cost of destroyed improvements might be mitigated by the benefit
> of creating a greater incentive for frequently contributors to quickly
> catch and remove violating text.
>
> Of course, none of this is legal advice...
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
I disagree with this. Do you really intend to allow that if you add
something to an article that has later found to have a bit of text
that is copyrighted, your text should be removed because it 'could be
derived from the copyrighted work'? But what then with using a source?
That 'could be derived' too. Wikipedia is very pro-active when there
are copyright violations, and I think rightfully so. But to delete
non-violating pieces of texts because they appear in one article with
violating pieces is a level of destruction that even as a rather
strong deletionist I find abhorrent.

Now, if I were to *change* a paragraph that later appeared to be a
copyright violation, that's another issue. But adding something
separate or changing another part of the article are changes I don't
think should be undone. We might as well rollback the whole Wikipedia
(what if we consider Wikipedia as a single work, then it is derived
too, right?)

Andre Engels

On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 23:25:23 -0500, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am concerned that the current handling of copyright problems on
> wikipedia may be insufficient.  As it stands, after detection the
> offending text is completely removed.
>
> Unfortunately, if there has been a long time span since the insertion
> of the infringing text there may have been a substantial number of
> valuable contributions to the article. With the way that  most content
> grows organically over time, it may be very difficult to say if the
> new text would have been created without the infringing text with any
> certainty.
>
> In the United States the recent tendency in court appears to be to
> favor the most expansive definition of a derived work possible.
> Because of this, I suspect that it would be likely that at least some
> of the contributions made to an article after the insertion of
> infringing text would be found by a US court to be derived, thus
> placing their ownership in question.  This interpretation of derived
> isn't necessitated by current international treaty, and would likely
> be different (and possibly more sane) in other locations, but I
> suspect that US legality is a substantial concern.
>
> Determining if a piece of text is derived from another, at least in
> the over broad sense favored by US courts, is an intractable problem,
> but the policy could do a better job of avoiding these concerns.
> Reverting to the point where a substantial amount of infringing text
> was added, and deleting *all* modifications after that point would be
> much more certain to avoid impinging on the intellectual property
> rights of others.
>
> The cost of destroyed improvements might be mitigated by the benefit
> of creating a greater incentive for frequently contributors to quickly
> catch and remove violating text.
>
> Of course, none of this is legal advice...
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject: [Wikitech-l] many-wiki spam solution

body:
On Thu, 2005-17-03 at 20:12 -0700, Brian wrote:

> Small wikis no-doubt get the most spam. I run several smallish wikis
> and removing spam from them is nearly an everyday occurance. Take for
> instance the bomis wiki. [1]. Scroll down to the bottom and take a
> look at how hard it is getting hit (that's use mod)
>
> So the idea is to build into the mediawiki software an interwiki
> watchlist, hosted by the foundation. This requires little modification
> as we can use the RSS feed that is already generated by the software
> and found at RC.  A simple opt-in during the install of the software
> and a message will be sent home to retrieve the feed every so often.
>
> What it is appropriate to do after that, i'm not sure. But there are a
> lot of ways it could go.
>
> Just wanted to throw this out there and see if it has merit. I think
> it is a simple solution at identifying lots of spam around the web.

It's probably worth noting that there's already an excellent shared
regexp list here:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cw/BannedContent

It's based on experience of Wiki admins and maintainers as well as some
other centralized lists (MoinMoin main list, I believe).

Wikitravel uses this list and I'd be happy to package the software that
implements the check as an extension if there's interest.

~Evan

--
Evan Prodromou
evan at bad.dynu.ca


subject: [Wikipedia-l] no need to remove the article nor the chapter

body:
I agree with you but not for the same reasons.

Inserting a copyrighted text in an article is not creating a derivative
work from the insterted text, but a derivative work from the original
article.

The use of the copyrighted text is prohibited, that's for sure.

But the article is not a derivative work of this copyrighted text. It
is a derivative work of the original article, including a copyrighted
work without proper authorization. This derivative work is not
forbidden because it derivates of a copyrighted text, but because it is
a derivative work including a copyrighted text.
Then, removing this part should be far enough.

I will provide some jurisprudence about this when I can.

> I disagree with this. Do you really intend to allow that if you add
> something to an article that has later found to have a bit of text
> that is copyrighted, your text should be removed because it 'could be
> derived from the copyrighted work'? But what then with using a source?
> That 'could be derived' too. Wikipedia is very pro-active when there
> are copyright violations, and I think rightfully so. But to delete
> non-violating pieces of texts because they appear in one article with
> violating pieces is a level of destruction that even as a rather
> strong deletionist I find abhorrent.

>
> Now, if I were to *change* a paragraph that later appeared to be a
> copyright violation, that's another issue. But adding something
> separate or changing another part of the article are changes I don't
> think should be undone. We might as well rollback the whole Wikipedia
> (what if we consider Wikipedia as a single work, then it is derived
> too, right?)
>
> Andre Engels
>
>
> On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 23:25:23 -0500, Gregory Maxwell
> <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am concerned that the current handling of copyright problems on
>> wikipedia may be insufficient.  As it stands, after detection the
>> offending text is completely removed.
>>
>> Unfortunately, if there has been a long time span since the insertion
>> of the infringing text there may have been a substantial number of
>> valuable contributions to the article. With the way that  most content
>> grows organically over time, it may be very difficult to say if the
>> new text would have been created without the infringing text with any
>> certainty.
>>
>> In the United States the recent tendency in court appears to be to
>> favor the most expansive definition of a derived work possible.
>> Because of this, I suspect that it would be likely that at least some
>> of the contributions made to an article after the insertion of
>> infringing text would be found by a US court to be derived, thus
>> placing their ownership in question.  This interpretation of derived
>> isn't necessitated by current international treaty, and would likely
>> be different (and possibly more sane) in other locations, but I
>> suspect that US legality is a substantial concern.
>>
>> Determining if a piece of text is derived from another, at least in
>> the over broad sense favored by US courts, is an intractable problem,
>> but the policy could do a better job of avoiding these concerns.
>> Reverting to the point where a substantial amount of infringing text
>> was added, and deleting *all* modifications after that point would be
>> much more certain to avoid impinging on the intellectual property
>> rights of others.
>>
>> The cost of destroyed improvements might be mitigated by the benefit
>> of creating a greater incentive for frequently contributors to quickly
>> catch and remove violating text.
>>
>> Of course, none of this is legal advice...
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wikipedia-l mailing list
>> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: David Gerard

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Five points we should be discussion about
	the	mediawiki projects

body:
Alex J. Avriette wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 10:04:00 +0000, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

>>Indeed. keats appears to be starting from a personal distaste and
>>then claiming this will be the destruction of Wikipedia. I note a
>>curious lack of substantiating, ahh, numbers. keats, do you have any?

> First off, you can call me "Alex". That is my name.

Sorry. Alex.

> Second, I do not have any numbers. I said that I felt that we had some
> problems. I proposed some solutions, and gave my analysis of said
> problems.
     [...]
> You're wasting my and the foundation's money by doing so. FIx the
> architecture and you reduce the cost of operation.

It was that you spent five and a half paragraphs (618 words) decrying
fancruft and positing that the problem was too many articles, presumably
caused primarily by fancruft (I'm presuming from the 618 words leading
up to saying it was overloading the system). This seemed a somewhat novel
argument against fancruft, and I recall asking a dev on IRC (think it was
JamesDay, not sure) if too many articles was in fact a source of our
problems, and being told no.

So yes: since it's an anti-fancruft diatribe with blame on the end, I'm
going to ask for your numbers. And if you come back and say you have no
numbers but instead give seven more vituperative paragraphs, I'll probably
assume the sky is not in fact falling in the manner you describe.

Let me put it more simply:

1. Alex, are you *seriously* claiming excess small articles will hasten the
downfall of Wikipedia?

[ ] Yes
[ ] No

2. If "yes", do you have any numbers?

[ ] Yes, here they are
[ ] No

- d.


from_name: Stepanek, George

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Re: I have unblocked Blair P. Houghton.

body:
From: <jfdwolff at doctors.org.uk>
>This is getting ridiculous.
>This issue has now generated close to 60 messages. I urge Blair, his
>detractors and everyone else to stop this discussion.

I apologise for adding to an already overlong debate, but my name has
been mentioned many times, motivations have been attributed to me, and I
would just like an opportunity to respond to the allegations, and to
clear my name. Apart from this one email, I will not post further to
this mailing list. Even if Blair responds--and I have no doubt he
will--I will not be responding.

Before I begin, may I first thank Blair for his recent attempts to
discuss the issues at hand on the Weight Training talk page. I hope that
a compromise can be achieved that will be satisfactory to all parties
concerned.

The fact is that the first revert was made by Blair, not myself. I'm
sorry if this sounds like a kindergarten justification ("he started it",
"no he did"), but this fact sheds light on what follows, so please bear
with me. Here are Blair's original changes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=11090304&
oldid=11088511

I left the bulk of the changes as they were, and only undid changes to
the lead section that I felt removed information, or put in information
that had already been disputed by three other editors (Sfahey, Taxman
and myself):
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=11158163&
oldid=11090304

The information that was removed was:
* that whether weight training is effective at building strength depends
upon how it is done
* that weight training provides functional benefits (etc.) only via
increases to strength and muscle size
* that the progressive overload principle is essential to building
strength via weight training
The disputed fact was Blair's assertion that weight training is aerobic
if done at a sufficiently low intensity. I explained my reasoning on the
talk page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Weight_training#Article_summary

This was at least an opportunity for Blair to discuss the proposed
changes, and seek consensus before putting in place an agreed text, but
instead he simply reverted my last edit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=11159169&
oldid=11158163

Why did I revert his revert? Because I didn't want to see one stubborn
individual override the consensus that had been achieved by the other
interested parties.

Why did I count my reverts (first, second, third) in the edit summaries?
Because I didn't want to break the 3RR myself, or give Blair any
opportunity to accuse me of doing so. And because I knew that the revert
war was futile, since we were both limited by the 3RR, and I wanted to
make this fact totally obvious. After my third revert, Blair made the
following changes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=11177874&
oldid=11171514

While not exactly the same as his previous edits, this edit implemented
all four of the changes that I had discussed on the talk page. I felt
that this was an attempt to subvert the 3RR. I therefore flagged it as a
possible 3RR violation, while mentioning the fact that the 4 edits were
not exactly alike. I left the matter to the discretion of the admins
monitoring the 3RR page.

I mentioned the potential 3RR violation to Taxman while asking his
advice whether to open an RfC. He suggest not to do so yet, and to "try
as hard as you can to see what part of what he has to say is helpful and
incorporate those changes." Being an admin Taxman could have blocked
Blair at that point, but he chose instead to merely revert once more,
and leave it to another admin to block Blair. Taxman's behaviour has
been beyond reproach at all times.

After Taxman's last revert, I attempted to create a compromise version
that included as many of Blair's grammatical and phrasing changes as
possible, but including all of the information that Blair had removed,
and without the disputed assertion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weight_training&diff=11226439&
oldid=11185482

From: Blair P. Houghton <blair at houghton.net>
>It was a trap.  GeorgeStepanek accepted almost all of my edits, but
only after
>I was blocked.
>Clearly he wasn't disagreeing with everything I was saying, he was just
reverting
>the page to goad me into re-reverting it.

This is simply not true. I did not, and still do not agree with the four
changes described above, and that I have discussed at some length on the
talk page. I utterly reject the insinuations that I somehow "tricked"
Blair into breaking the 3RR. Indeed, by counting the reverts, I was
making it as obvious as possible just how many reverts we were each
doing.

From: John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com>
>If you would stop blabbing about Taxman and George for a minute to
>understand this, we might get somewhere. Just because they are the
>aggressors does not give you the right or privilege to go ahead and
>participate in the fight.

I hope that the above evidence is sufficient to show that I was not "the
aggressor" in this "fight". I do not wish to have such aspersions
against my name left on the record.

I am aware that this issue has become a political football between those
who support the 3RR, and those who oppose it. I do not wish to enter
this debate, except to mention some aspects that no-one has yet
mentioned:

1. Yes, Cecropia had every right to unblock Blair. But think about it:
isn't this just reverting CryptoDerk's actions? What efforts did
Cecropia make to discuss the issue with CryptoDerk, and achieve
consensus? As the admin community grows, are we going to see more and
more "admin revert wars" pitting one admin against another? Isn't this
just going to motivate troublemakers to try to exploit differences of
opinion between admins?

2. Yes, a 24-hour block is ineffective in itself at resolving ongoing
disputes between long-time users. But a 3RR sanction is not ipso facto
meaningless in such cases. To compare it to a real-world example, why do
we have $50 parking fines if most people can easily spare $50? A
sanction like this is effective because it unequivocally conveys the
message that you have broken the rules. It also serves as evidence of
poor conduct for any future investigation of the dispute.

3. The 3RR prevents edit wars with hundreds of reverts on each side.
Does anyone seriously want to go back to that? It's an arbitrary rule,
to be sure, but rules help people to work together by clearly indicating
where boundaries of acceptable conduct lie.

4. No-one can build the Wikipedia alone. Indeed, given how hard it is to
write to a strict NPOV, I would argue that no-one can even create a
single article alone. Jimbo's primary goal--creating an encyclopedia--is
impossible without a community that can work together effectively. We
should find ways to identify, sanction and eliminate any and all forms
of disruptive behaviour, simply because they just stop us from achieving
our primary goal.

From: JAY JG <jayjg at hotmail.com>
>>Am I the only one who feels that the 3RR is making life harder for
admins?
>
>I'm sure you're not the only one, but I feel quite the opposite.  More
>importantly, I think it's made it less likely for regular (i.e. non
>edit-warrior) editors to be scared away from Wikipedia.

May I note two of Blair's assertions that no-one has yet challenged. He
says that I am one of the "Evil Ones", and that I "raped" him. Is this
kind of language and conduct acceptable in Wikipedia?

My impression from the events so far is that it is. I have found this
dispute to be extremely unpleasant and stressful, and I really do not
wish to find myself in this kind of situation again. I am therefore
going to withdraw from the Wikipedia community. I will still read
articles, and fix typos when I find them, but I will no longer be
working seriously on any more Wikipedia articles.

Thank you for reading my comments.

George Stepanek


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:WikiIndex (idea)

references:
<d8b8be2d0503151025d7b28ad@mail.gmail.com>
	<4239e035.23eb7a3f.05a4.ffffdda6SMTPIN_ADDED@mx.gmail.com>
	<d8b8be2d050317165050e4ee14@mail.gmail.com>

body:
On Fri, 2005-18-03 at 00:50 +0000, Marc O'Morain wrote:

> After thinking some more about the merits of the augmenting the
> category system or creating a new system, I thought of the following:

> What does anyone else think?

I think that the best thing to do is use RDF for metadata, and use
Turtle to save in-page RDF.

        http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/2004/01/turtle/

RDF is _the_ Internet metadata format. Turtle is the Wikitext of RDF: a
plain, easy way to do metadata markup that anyone can learn in a few
minutes.

I plan on incorporating Turtle markup into MediaWiki 1.5.x, probably as
part of a larger overhaul of the RDF generation modules to use RAP (the
RDF API for PHP).

~Evan

--
Evan Prodromou
evan at bad.dynu.ca


from_name: John Lee

body:
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[WikiEN-l] Bug in Wikipedia
Date: 	Fri, 18 Mar 2005 12:27:18 +1100
From: 	csherlock at ljh.com.au <csherlock at ljh.com.au>
Reply-To: 	English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
To: 	wikien-l at wikipedia.org

It appears someone has found a bug in our software. They put in
#redirect [[de:en:Goatse.cx]] and this redirects to Goatse WITHOUT the
redirect link appearing at the top. I figure you guys should know as
they just edited [[Evolution]], which is on the front page. I reverted
anonymously but now I can't see Evolution.

TBSDY

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


from_name: Delirium

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re:WikiIndex (idea)

body:
Neil Harris wrote:

> At the risk of repeating myself, it would be really neat if we could
> write something like
>
> [[attribute = value]]
>
> in articles, since we could then use it to generate all sorts of good
> stuff, including automatic rendering of navigation tables in the UI,
> structured search, and autogeneration of RDF for semantic search engines.

Not to mention that this data can be reused.  For example, there are all
sorts of attributes on the Wikiproject Mountains pages.  If I could
specify "height=1377 meters" somewhere, then it could *both* be used to
generate the infobox, *and* used to sort mountains by height and
whatnot.  It'd also make the markup easier, because the current tables,
even with the simplified table notation, are pretty hard to read for a
layperson...

-Mark


from_name: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Theora / ogg usage

body:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 00:07:59 -0500, Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 15:36:57 +0000, ?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason
> <avarab at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I just want to respond to this threat to remind everyone that not
> > everything ending in .ogg that is a video file is an Ogg Theora file,
> > alot, if not the majority of .ogg video (ogm) files are actually xvid
> > files with Ogg Vorbis audio.
>
> Interesting!  Is xvid a similarly free format?
>
It implements the MPEG4 standard, it's non-free in the United States
but presumably free outside of the US.


body:
> Order 64-bit capable machines, of course, for their security advantages,
> and speed advantages when running 64-bit software. Move to 64-bit
> software as soon as reasonably possible.

Want to voice 100% approval of this. Nobody wants to hear that
Postgres compiles natively in 64-bit and makes use of it (I measured
40% increase in row-insert performance on UltraSPARC, among other
things), but it bears mentioning. I don't know whether MySQL is
n64'able. I can help building a 32/64 or a 64-bit gcc if anyone would
like help. Opteron, Opteron, Opteron. I don't think we need 64-bit
Xeon's or Itanium/Itanium2's.

> vastly more reliable systems deployment. Consider Debian as both an
> operating system and a deployment system: at the moment, different
> machines run different operating system flavours, making sysadminning
> harder.

RedHat, of course, has its own products for these purposes. But I'm
pretty OS agnostic.

> Databases are a different issue: you can't apply the same commodity
> thinking: however, try to order DB machines in identical multiples, too,

Anyone know what an 8-way 848 Opteron costs these days?

> for the same reasons. Clearly the DB machines will need to be
> hand-crafted. I don't know much about databases on this sort of scale...
> but I imagine the Wikipedia developers do.

First, multiplicity. Second, fast disk. Hardware raid controllers and
tablespaces which allow you to put your indices on the really fast
disk and your "big data" on the slower, cheaper, bigger disk. Is SAN
attachment an option or are we sticking with NFS? SAN over 1gbit ether
(which is where we're at) is not so bad. I mean, it could be worse.

> for your servers, and hence your data and syadmin sanity. An ounce of
> prevention is again worth a pound of cure.

Amen.

> Finaly, you might consider buying a cheap radio clock on a per-site
> basis, if your colo does not already provide you with a local stratum-1

Am I missing something? Can we not just sync with
{tick,tock}.usno.navy.mil? If usno.navy.mil goes down, we have much
bigger problems than a toasted wikipedia.

Nobody's mentioned backups. Automated backups are hard to do, and
manual backups require somebody to go there and swap tapes. Is a tape
changer in the cards for us? We'd need to go with LTO or something....
and that's pretty ugly, money wise. Anyone?

aa

--
Alex Avriette
avriette at gmail.com


body:
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 12:41:27 -0500, Alex J. Avriette <avriette at gmail.com> wrote:

> As a database goes searching through its indices and tables looking
> for a tuple, it must iteratively go over other tuples before it finds
> the one it wants. It doesn't just have some magic pointer that knows
> where [[designated marksman]] is. It has to figure it out. When the
> number of articles exceeds several hundred thousand, you really need
> to "give it hints" about where to find that article. I don't know if
> this is already being done, but it might be possible to use things
> like categories (or some form of tagging) to "associate" groups of
> articles so that, while they might not have to live in their own
> separate table, that they were more easily "findable" by the database.

Why use categories or tagging for that? And how would it help at all.
You have to have the article first before knowing what category or tag
it has! A much better method, is to use the title itself as the tag,
index the 'title' field, and then do a binary search on it.

No need for tagging, categories, or whatever. The only downside of it
is that we are already using it, so implementing it will not make it
any iota faster. But at least it doesn't slow it down either, which I
fear your plans would.

Andre Engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: femmes

body:
My, thanks for all these answers. I will paste the links on his talk
page (and pray he understands english) and see what comes out of it.

That would be properly amazing.

Ant

Brion Vibber a ?crit:
> Anthere wrote:
>
>> In particular, when he edits, some words disappear, or parts of words do.
>>
>> A couple of examples :
>> *http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discussion_Utilisateur:Anthere&diff=0&oldid=1618445
>> *http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discuter:Accueil&diff=prev&oldid=1595496
>> *http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dieu&diff=prev&oldid=1566454
>>
>> Now... this guy argues that he is not responsible of the consequences of
>> his edits, that either he has a virus, or that his browser (Firefox) is
>> responsible of the word damaging and removal of all references to women.
>
>
> The removed portions in those pages are:
>   pagan
>   femmes
>   d il do
>   images q
>
> It's possible that this person is behind some kind of censoring web
> proxy which is trimming out words it has listed as potentially
> "offensive" or "sexual" or perhaps even "un-Christian". I'm not sure
> what's wrong with "imagesq" though... ;)
>
> The word 'femme' in English sometimes has connotations regarding
> homosexuality and gender identity and I can certainly imagine a
> hypersensitive prude filter removing it. (See the Wikipedia article:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femme )
>
> For background on these censoring proxies and their problems, see:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorware
>
>> What do you suggest ? In all good faith ? Seriously ?
>
>
> Such a filter might be installed by a workplace, library, or school and
> the person might not even be aware of it... but now that they are, it
> would be irresponsible for them to continue editing and corrupting our
> content without doing something about it. (ie, SHUTTING IT OFF or
> editing from someplace where the filter is not active.)
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Parsing wiki tags inside extension tags

body:
On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 11:53:41 +0000, Jim Higson <jh at 333.org> wrote:
> how about instead of an extension allowing something like:
> spoil!
>
> Then you could hide it with some quite simple CSS.

The problem with that is that it assumes that everyone who doesn't
want to see the content is using a CSS-enabled browser. OK, so that
may be the majority of people, but it's kind of awkward to have
"hidden" content that defaults to being visible.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia hits the big time

body:
The Cunctator wrote:

> That aside: one of the obvious baby steps that should be taken in regards to
> questions of reliability, tagging versions, etc., is to give people a
> permanent link to the current version of an article. Ideally in a relatively
> succinct format.
> This does not exist--you can link without fear of change to historical
> revisions, but not to the most recent revision.
> Not only should this functionality exist, it should be relatively obvious.

I believe this is in the current development version, to be released as 1.5.

- d.


from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

body:
Hi,

I yesterday answered a mail from a german donator in the last
fundraising drive. He suggested to inform better about the results of
the drive and what will happen with the money. I think this is a quite
reasonable suggestion. Next time we should definitely publish a press
release - best in several languages-, summarizing the results of the
fundraising drive.

putting this idea here so it doesn't get forgotten.

greetings,
elian


from_name: James D. Forrester

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia map of British Columbia

body:
On Friday, March 18, 2005 7:56 PM, Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> How can a red dot on an otherwise blank map of British
> Columbia with the county lines listed, possibly be
> copyrighted?

One imagines that the contention is that the source blank map is in fact
held in copyright.

> RickK

Yours,
--
James D. Forrester -- Wikimedia: [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]

Mail: james at jdforrester.org | jon at eh.org | csvla at dcs.warwick.ac.uk
IM  : (MSN) jamesdforrester at hotmail.com


body:
Rowan Collins wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 11:53:41 +0000, Jim Higson <jh at 333.org> wrote:

>>how about instead of an extension allowing something like:
>>spoil!
>>Then you could hide it with some quite simple CSS.

> The problem with that is that it assumes that everyone who doesn't
> want to see the content is using a CSS-enabled browser. OK, so that
> may be the majority of people, but it's kind of awkward to have
> "hidden" content that defaults to being visible.

Well, at present *everyone* sees it, so it'd be a new shiny thing
on top of that, rather than leading to an unexpected result on old
browsers.

- d.