subject: [Wikitech-l] Minor updates

body:
On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Tim Starling wrote:
> >I've checked in a few quick tweaks to cvs, just fyi:
>
> I thought there was meant to be a feature freeze on.

There was supposed to be a feature freeze for Lee to upgrade everything
last weekend. I'm not sure what happened there, I assume Lee is swamped
with real life like the rest of us. :)

But anyway, these are bug fixes, not features. The search code changes (to
fix problems with our existing boolean search) is still disabled by
default, there are no code changes yet for image tables, and the
limit/offset consolidation helps protect against possible sql/xss
insertion attacks with better validation (forcing the values to integers
before dumping them into SQL queries or HTML output).

> I've got major changes
> pending to SpecialRecenchanges and SpecialRecentchangeslinked, so don't go
> changing them. I've also got minor (i.e. easily merged) changes pending to
> GlobalFunctions and Language.php.
>
> The changes to SpecialRecentchanges don't look big to the user: now you can
> hide minor edits without going to the user preferences (that's really a bug
> fix more than anything), and you can hide edits by logged in users. But the
> increased complexity incited me to revamp the code somewhat.

Looking forward to it...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [WikiEN-l] Just to throw this out there...

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Ray-
>
>>Erik Moeller wrote:
>>
>
>>>Still, I am not fundamentally opposed to filters on Wikipedia, but I think
>>>whatever solution is used should be NPOV - i.e. allow filtering by all
>>>types of content, not just one specific one. So, for example, if I want to
>>>filter *everything BUT* the sex content, that should also be possible.
>>>
>>Another user may want to filter out religious content, and that would be
>>just fine too.  Is my idea of coding boxes technically feasible?
>>
>
>You mean checkboxes for various categories below the edit submission
>screen? I'm afraid there'd be too many, and too much controversy around
>which ones we need, for that to be workable. Also integration with RC,
>diffs etc. would be tricky.
>
Not checkboxes, which would indeed require so many that they would
become rigid and/or useless.  I would propose searchable write-in boxes
where words and/or codes could be entered.  I prefer codes to words
because its easier to keep them short, and to build them into some sort
of hierarchical structure.  The objection that people are most likely to
raise against codes is the difficulty of remembering them all.  In the
early stages getting the boxes to work and become acceptable would be
more important than developing any system of codes for them.

The primary use of these boxes would be for indexing by subject.
 Secondarily it can be easily be adapted for a wide variety of flags
ranging from "obscene" material to Wikipedia certified material.  In
Wiktionary it could be used for language codes to ease indexing by
language. .

To interate with RC a simple "C" could indicate a code change in the way
that an "M" now indicates a minor change.

>>>At which point I refer you to my pet project, team certification :-)
>>>
>>Have you elaborated on that somewhere?
>>
>
>Many times in many places ;-). Originally here:
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2002-October/001089.html
>
Okay, now I vaguely remember that discussion.  I didn't jump into it
then, which is probaby why I remembered nothing.  I have mixed feelings
 about it, but not ones that are coherent enough to make comments at
this time.

Eclecticology


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Axel Boldt

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:

> > No, the precise thing we need is that the copyright holder releases
> > the picture under GFDL.
>
> Also fine, but again, expensive, because it deviates from usual
> licensing policies.

I'm not sure we should assume this before having tried. One could argue
that this should actually be pretty cheap:
* GFDL materials are useless for most commercial enterprises
* if they refuse to release under GFDL, we can always threaten to take
it under fair use, which means that they neither get author recognition
nor money.

> I don't see the slippery slope, sorry.

I don't either. It's either freely distributable/modifiable or it
isn't.

> A "fair use is not allowed" stance is neither
> balanced  nor logical. I have not seen your response to my
> analysis that conluded that quotations are more problematic
> than images.

If I understood correctly, you argue that quotes are embedded in the
text while images are kept in separate files, thus GFDL is not
inherited by the photo but is inherited by the quotes. This is
incorrect. Derivative work are required to be under GFDL; what
constitutes a derivative work is defined by copyright law. The
technical detail that text and images are typically kept in separate
files is irrelevant; illustrating an article by adding a picture is a
classical case of a derivative work. Moving quotes out of the main text
and then "including" them somehow is a technical gimmick that doesn't
change anything: adding a quote also creates a derivative work.

So yes, fair use quotes are technically violations of GFDL, but
completely harmless. Nobody wants to change quotes anyway, and fair use
quotes are typically minute parts the work they originate from. Even
commercial redistributors can use those quotes under fair use. All
three of the above are false for images.

Axel

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from_name: Lee Daniel Crocker

subject: [Wikitech-l] Minor updates

body:
> (Brion Vibber <vibber at aludra.usc.edu>):
> There was supposed to be a feature freeze for Lee to upgrade everything
> last weekend. I'm not sure what happened there, I assume Lee is swamped
> with real life like the rest of us. :)

That's a pretty fair assumption. I _really_ want to get at least
the English wiki in sync with CVS before we start doing major surgery,
and preferably more of them.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] naming convention for birds and others

body:
Stan Shebs wrote in part:

>So to me it's clearly a
>house style issue, which is fine - we have lots of house style
>rules already, and their existence forestalls edit wars every day.
>What I don't think is acceptable is to get all angry if someone
>doesn't follow a rule that was discussed in various places, but
>never officially documented in the MoS.

Nor, IMO, is it acceptable to get *angry* if someone
doesn't follow a rule that *has* been officially documented in the MoS.
(But they must by default lose any edit war, however, before it starts.)
I certainly don't intend to check the MoS every time I make a style decision,
and even the MoS itself says (or said the last time that I checked)
that its prescriptions don't have to be followed by every writer,
only that MoS-philes will change things when they get around to them.
(Even this way, I think that the MoS has far too much in it,
crowding out the few items that are useful, but I can live with it.)

OTOH, the bird names go beyond the MoS -- they're a *naming*convention*.
The primary point of Stan's post -- that this needs to be documented --
not only stands, but is even more important in light of this.
First, we can't expect people to follow undocumented conventions.
But also, naming conventions really do need to be followed,
or else navigation through the encyclopaedia will get all messed up.

>For instance, in the case of fish, I'm still assessing what is
>favored practice.  When I'm satisfied, I'll write it down in
>the MoS - people disagreeing with the MoS will have to change
>it before I'll go along with them changing articles.

If it's a naming convention that you'll be deciding,
then please write it down on a naming conventions page too!

-- Toby


from_name: Zoe

subject: [WikiEN-l] American diplomatic listings

body:
Does anyone know if the US State Department website
has a list of all of its ambassadors that we can
either steal^H^H^H^H^Hborrow or link to?

Zoe

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Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com


body:
JFrost8401 at aol.com wrote:

> One other point with regard to the everlasting capitalisation debate
> is that it  is usually argued that non-specialist encyclopedias use
> lower case, and only specialist handooks like HBW, HANZAB and BWP use
> capitals.
>
> If it is being seriously suggested that Wikien should be the same as a
> paper encyclopedia (or on-line version thereof), can I suggest the
> following to bring other aspects into line.
>
> 1) Standardise spelling and names as American English (this solves the
> capitalisation problem too, since you lose the European and Australian
> contributors who write 90% of the animal/bird articles at a stroke.
>
> 2) Get rid of articles you wouldn't find in a "proper" encyclopedia,
> such as lists of people called Fred, album play lists, articles on
> "fisting" , lists of famous Hungarians etc. (I'll help on this.)
>
> 3) If you do item 1, then you can also revert the many US-centric
> articles, which just assume there are no other countries that matter,
> back to their original unsullied versions.

This seems to be argument by trivialization.  I suppose that there are
people from AOL who would like to see us standardized to American
English, but I still prefer capitalization to capitalisation.  The
capitalization of bird names has nothing to do with American vs. other
English.  The American Ornithological Union appears to be the
organization spearheading this move toward capitalization.  Some of the
most ardent supporters of capitalized bird names here on Wikipedia are
not Americans, so where does that put your argument?

Most other Americans in Wikipedia have been sensitive to anti-American
attitudes throughout the world, and have bent over backwards to
accomodate other ways of doing things, why should Jim seek to impose
what represents the worst of American stereotypes.

Ec


from_name: Luc Van Oostenryck

subject: [WikiEN-l] Strange user

body:
On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 07:40:02PM -0700, Toby Bartels wrote:
> Looxix wrote:
>
> >Because of certain aggresive attitude concerning the modification
> >of some articles, have looked to the contributions of [[User:Tom Peeters]].
.....

> I looked at all of his edits as [[User:Tom Peters]]
> and [[User:194.109.250.130]].  They don't seem strange.
> He and XJamRastafire will have to work out their disagreements,
> but they don't seem to be having any trouble talking to each other yet.
> (I didn't look at any edits made as [[User:Tompeters]],
> since these were all made a long time ago -- in 2001.)
>
>
> -- Toby

OK, thanks for your feedbak.

--
Luc Van Oostenryck aka [[User:Looxix]]


from_name: Thomas Luft

subject: [Wikitech-l] Random Page works a little bit strange

body:
Hi,

I just played a little bit with the "random page" feature on the German
Wikipedia and read an article about "Masatoshi Koshiba". After I hit the
link for the random page again I was directed to "Skins" which seems ok,
but after that I came to "Raymond Davis Jr.
<http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Davis_Jr.>" who was linked as "see
also" on the page of Koshiba. IMHO the random page is not that random at
all, on the other hand this could really be a random coincidence. Maybe
some of you have an idea if the random mode needs to be modulated...
Regards

Thomas aka Urbanus


from_name: Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen

body:
On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Thomas Luft wrote:

> I just played a little bit with the "random page" feature on the German
> Wikipedia and read an article about "Masatoshi Koshiba". After I hit the
> link for the random page again I was directed to "Skins" which seems ok,
> but after that I came to "Raymond Davis Jr.
> <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Davis_Jr.>" who was linked as "see
> also" on the page of Koshiba. IMHO the random page is not that random at
> all, on the other hand this could really be a random coincidence. Maybe
> some of you have an idea if the random mode needs to be modulated...
> Regards

The random page on the English one isn't random either. You will regularly get
the same page again and again if you try a few times.

This is a shame, because one of the most impressive introductions to Wikipedia
is to have someone hit the random page link for a while. The repeating pages
kind of burst the bubble. :)

-- Daniel


from_name: Michael Becker

subject: FW: [WikiEN-l] User:Harry Potter

body:
Has anyone talked to him about the inaccuracies?  This may just be a
misunderstanding.  At the least, someone should tell him that he has
added inaccuracies to his article, and then put the boiler from
[[Wikipedia:Accuracy dispute]] on his contributions.  Tell him why we
are doing it, and give him a chance to correct his errors and become a
contributor.  This is the process we should go through.

--
Michael Becker

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org]
On Behalf Of Stan Shebs
Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2003 12.43
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] User:Harry Potter

I agree.  It sows an atmosphere of distrust, which, going by the
pataphysics manifesto, is the goal.  It's a waste of my time to research
things and add them to an article if the rest of the article is fiction
masquerading as fact; no reader is going to believe any of it.
[[Templars in England]] looks plausible for instance, but given Harry
Potter's other activities, how am I supposed to know if any of it is
true? Better to vaporize it and start over.

Stan


body:
Yes, a voting system would do nicely.  Even if not used for filtering,
people could tell how many people found an article useful, etc.  This
really could work in so many ways!  I think this type of thing is
defiantly something that we should talk about, and develop into
something useable.

--
Michael Becker

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org]
On Behalf Of Daniel Ehrenberg
Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2003 7.12
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Just to throw this out there...

--- Peter Bartlett <pcb21 at btconnect.com> wrote:
>
> Erik wrote:
> >On a wiki, we risk "flagging wars", and by defining
> what "can be
> >considered offensive" we are leaving NPOV behind.
>
> One possibility is that each user has the option to
> give a page a score
> : 1 meaning "Doesn't need filtering" through to 10
> "Nearly everyone
> would want to filter this". Then the overall 'score'
> for a page is the
> average of all scores users have given it. Then
> someone browsing the
> 'pedia could choose to filter at a particular score
> e.g. browse at 0
> (filter everything with an score of more than 0 i.e.
> everything!) to 10
> (= filter articles with average score 10 i.e.
> nothing!). 11 viewing
> configurations available to the user... I believe
> Google only has 3!
>
> Because each person/ip could only cast one score per
> article (though of
> course they could change their score as the article
> changes) "flagging
> wars" would be difficult because it would require
> ip-hopping/multiple-log-in to try to tip the score in a particular
> direction.
>
> This idea may be computationally quite feasible...
> we already have to
> store everyone who's watching an article... maybe we
> could store
> everyone who's scoring an article too. (Watchlist
> has a tag saying
> "article changed since you last scored" etc).
>
> Obviously the idea extends to other scores too...
> instead of a "filter
> score" you could have a "quality score" and users
> could browse only
> articles that on average believed to be high
> quality.
>
> Obvious disadvantage : The filter is "1-dimensional"
> i.e. you can't
> filter on sex, religion whatever... only on the
> score... so if religion
> were to get scores of about 5 and sex 7.. to filter
> religion you would
> have to filter sex too.. I don't know if it can be
> made to fit with team
> certification idea.
>
> Anyhow these are only implementational ideas. My
> personal view is that
> any sort of filtering along these lines is going to
> take effort on the
> part of users.. perhaps we should stick to writing
> the encyclopedia for
> now!
>
> Pete

That sounds like a very good idea, but how would
people deal with unrated pages? Let's say all of the
unmodified rambot pages were unrated. Then no one with
any sort of filtering could go there. If someone made
a rating bot to solve this, it would seriously
undermine the system.

A way to (partially) solve this could be to have a
period wherein people can rate pages (and are required
to in each edit) but ratings cannot yet be used for
filtering.

Overall, it's a good idea but not practical.
--LittleDan

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_______________________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Content Advisory (was The Kils-Viking thing)

body:
How about something like this:
Attention:  As with any web-site, children may require parent
supervision.

--
Michael Becker

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org]
On Behalf Of Jimmy Wales
Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2003 7.18
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The Kils-Viking thing

Erik Moeller wrote:
> A disclaimer would IMHO send the wrong signal; some people would
> believe
> that we only say this because we have lost control over the content of

> Wikipedia (a totally open site after all) and people are posting
> pornography all over the place. We do not allow pornographic content,
but
> we do allow human knowledge that some people might consider offensive
-- I
> think that goes with the territory.

The wrong sort of disclaimer would certainly send the wrong signal, but
I don't think it's impossible to come up with something soft and
tasteful.

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


body:
I don't really have anything in particular in mind.  I think it could go
many ways.  I am totally open for discussion, provide your input.  I had
an idea today of a voting system, and this could work in many different
ways.  People have suggested rating system, or flagging systems.  I
think they all sound good.  Have you guys ever heard of Kuro5hin?  Maybe
we could implement something like that.  There really are so many
possibilities!

--
Michael Becker

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org]
On Behalf Of koyaanis qatsi
Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2003 5.47
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Just to throw this out there...

Hi all,

I'm a bit concerned about what I've been reading
lately about proposed filters.  Before I respond,
though, I'd like to make sure I understand.  Jimmy,
what is it you're thinking of exactly?  Michael, what
did you have in mind?

best.

kq

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from_name: Peter Bartlett

body:
Erik wrote:
>On a wiki, we risk "flagging wars", and by defining what "can be
>considered offensive" we are leaving NPOV behind.

One possibility is that each user has the option to give a page a score
: 1 meaning "Doesn't need filtering" through to 10 "Nearly everyone
would want to filter this". Then the overall 'score' for a page is the
average of all scores users have given it. Then someone browsing the
'pedia could choose to filter at a particular score e.g. browse at 0
(filter everything with an score of more than 0 i.e. everything!) to 10
(= filter articles with average score 10 i.e. nothing!). 11 viewing
configurations available to the user... I believe Google only has 3!

Because each person/ip could only cast one score per article (though of
course they could change their score as the article changes) "flagging
wars" would be difficult because it would require
ip-hopping/multiple-log-in to try to tip the score in a particular
direction.

This idea may be computationally quite feasible... we already have to
store everyone who's watching an article... maybe we could store
everyone who's scoring an article too. (Watchlist has a tag saying
"article changed since you last scored" etc).

Obviously the idea extends to other scores too... instead of a "filter
score" you could have a "quality score" and users could browse only
articles that on average believed to be high quality.

Obvious disadvantage : The filter is "1-dimensional" i.e. you can't
filter on sex, religion whatever... only on the score... so if religion
were to get scores of about 5 and sex 7.. to filter religion you would
have to filter sex too.. I don't know if it can be made to fit with team
certification idea.

Anyhow these are only implementational ideas. My personal view is that
any sort of filtering along these lines is going to take effort on the
part of users.. perhaps we should stick to writing the encyclopedia for
now!

Pete


body:
JFrost8401 at aol.com wrote:

> In a message dated 04/06/03 04:28:31 GMT Daylight Time,
> saintonge at telus.net writes:
>
>> JFrost8401 at aol.com wrote:
>>
>> > One other point with regard to the everlasting capitalisation debate
>> > is that it  is usually argued that non-specialist encyclopedias use
>> > lower case, and only specialist handooks like HBW, HANZAB and BWP use
>> > capitals.
>> >
>> > If it is being seriously suggested that Wikien should be the same as a
>> > paper encyclopedia (or on-line version thereof), can I suggest the
>> > following to bring other aspects into line.
>> >
>> > 1) Standardise spelling and names as American English (this solves the
>> > capitalisation problem too, since you lose the European and Australian
>> > contributors who write 90% of the animal/bird articles at a stroke.
>> >
>> > 2) Get rid of articles you wouldn't find in a "proper" encyclopedia,
>> > such as lists of people called Fred, album play lists, articles on
>> > "fisting" , lists of famous Hungarians etc. (I'll help on this.)
>> >
>> > 3) If you do item 1, then you can also revert the many US-centric
>> > articles, which just assume there are no other countries that matter,
>> > back to their original unsullied versions.
>>
>
> I was being ironic. Despite the AOL ISP, I am a Brit, and a major
> contributor to bird articles. The non-trivial point I was making is
> that by its nature, the encyclopedia has to be a compromise. If you
> standardise spelling and vocabulary, you lose all the Old World
> contributors. If you insist on lower case birds etc, you lose Tannin,
> Steve Nova and me, the three most prolific contributors. The only
> reason I haven't written a convention sheet is that it will just start
> edit war 6. Incidently, you can't blame the AOU. Capitalisation is
> standard in all specialist books, websites, and English language
> ornithogical organisations.
>
> Jim

I was suspecting irony.  That's why I was pleased to respond in kind.

First of all, stop trying to cast this as an American vs. other English
issue when it's nothing of the sort.  The AOU list is American and
supports capitals; the Globe and Mail Style Book is not American and
opposes them.  This is exactly the opposite to what you claim..Nor is
the argument about spelling or vocabulary; it's about capitalization.
 But for the capital letters , all the words in question are the same.

I've just looked at another source, Species 2000
http://www.usa.sp2000.org/AnnualChecklist.html When I arbitrarily chose
herons as a look-up the results were all with lower case, including for
birds.

The NCBI taxonomy page
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi uses lower case.

There is nothing standard about uppercase.  Even if it is standard among
ornithologists and bird guides, there is no need to extrapolate that POV
and make it apply to other fauna.

The big advantage of having capitals in bird guides lies in that it
makes refocusing one's eyes much easier when going back and forth
between guid and binoculars.

The argument that if you don't get your way on this the three of you
will leave is an irrelevant bully tactic that should be completely
ignored.  It is completely contrary to any spirit of compromise.

Eclecticology


from_name: cprompt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Note from Adam

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>In the interest of Sunshine, Adam has asked that I forward this.
>
>He has agreed, by the way, not to make any edits to wikipedia under
>any username at all.  He seemed to be indicating to me that he didn't
>know that before.  (!)
>
*snip*

>If so, then that's the very *first* step towards reconciliation.
>
>--Jimbo
>
>
I'm very glad to hear that there's steps being taken towards
reconcilation, rather than the cloak-and-dagger editing of before. :-)

--

--cprompt


from_name: Brion Vibber

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

Je Merkredo 04 Junio 2003 00:06, Tim Starling skribis:
> Unless you've already fixed it, the English cur_random column is
> still fine.
>
> SELECT cur_random FROM cur WHERE cur_random>0.01 ORDER BY cur_random
> LIMIT 10

Nope, it got broke again. Try restricting the query to the pages
Special:Randompage is concerned with:

SELECT cur_random FROM cur WHERE cur_random>0.01 and cur_namespace=0 and
cur_is_redirect=0 ORDER BY cur_random LIMIT 10

Not only did it take two minutes to return (mmm, partial table scans),
but there are *huge* gaps:
0.010371912280444
0.0106440456683226
0.0130615625652127
0.0138753941411855
0.0403562412041763
0.0404494861517562
0.044624416199163
0.0523233311738105
0.0542095322666779
0.0586327482560954

When I checked this afternoon, there were only 82 article-space
non-redirect pages with cur_random values less than 0.22something. 82
out of a hundred some thousand... so, no wonder that the page with the
particular value was coming up repeatedly in my Random page clicks.

I'm regenerating the index again now...

- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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iD8DBQE+3aHsxVlOmwh1xjgRAndLAJ0ZFP/tmSufIlj17ZJ+54G0iS5JcQCggZ19
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from_name: JFrost8401 at aol.com

body:
In a message dated 04/06/03 04:28:31 GMT Daylight Time, saintonge at telus.net
writes:

> JFrost8401 at aol.com wrote:
>
> > One other point with regard to the everlasting capitalisation debate
> > is that it  is usually argued that non-specialist encyclopedias use
> > lower case, and only specialist handooks like HBW, HANZAB and BWP use
> > capitals.
> >
> > If it is being seriously suggested that Wikien should be the same as a
> > paper encyclopedia (or on-line version thereof), can I suggest the
> > following to bring other aspects into line.
> >
> > 1) Standardise spelling and names as American English (this solves the
> > capitalisation problem too, since you lose the European and Australian
> > contributors who write 90% of the animal/bird articles at a stroke.
> >
> > 2) Get rid of articles you wouldn't find in a "proper" encyclopedia,
> > such as lists of people called Fred, album play lists, articles on
> > "fisting" , lists of famous Hungarians etc. (I'll help on this.)
> >
> > 3) If you do item 1, then you can also revert the many US-centric
> > articles, which just assume there are no other countries that matter,
> > back to their original unsullied versions.
>
>
I was being ironic. Despite the AOL ISP, I am a Brit, and a major contributor
to bird articles. The non-trivial point I was making is that by its nature,
the encyclopedia has to be a compromise. If you standardise spelling and
vocabulary, you lose all the Old World contributors. If you insist on lower case
birds etc, you lose Tannin, Steve Nova and me, the three most prolific
contributors. The only reason I haven't written a convention sheet is that it will just
start edit war 6. Incidently, you can't blame the AOU. Capitalisation is
standard in all specialist books, websites, and English language ornithogical
organisations.

Jim

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from_name: koyaanis qatsi

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Just to throw this out there ....

body:
Michael writes:
>People have suggested rating system, or flagging
>systems.  I think they all sound good.

Well, I'm not so sure.  I'm a bit ambivalent about
them: on the one hand, I don't mind that Google has a
SafeSearch feature and some people like to use it.  On
the other hand, I do think it's relevant that we don't
know exactly what is and is not included in the
SafeSearch.

If I can take a short divergence before getting back
to the point:

Chain supermarkets in the United States typically have
an "ethnic" food aisle, apparently under the
misapprehension that ethnicity is something their
white owners and CEOs don't have.  Similarly, a few
years ago one of my colleagues at work asked me why I
was so political.  The best parry I could think of was
that complacence is also a political position.

The point is: given that heterosexuality is still a
sexuality, what will we flag as potentially unsafe?
Will it lean more towards fisting and felching, or
will it include all sex?  Will we fall into that
common censorware trap of marking [[breast]] "sexual
content", with the implication that breasts are more
often for--or more importantly for--sexual
gratification than they are for nutrition?  Does
[[George Michaels]] get flagged because of the
bathroom incident?  Is [[oral sex]] too risque?  If
so, aren't we compelled to flag [[Bill Clinton]]?

These sound like idle or rhetorical questions, but
they're not.

I think that any rating system would indicate a
political position, whether to the left, right, or
center, and be a clear and unequivocally POV
annotation of what we intended to be a neutral
article.

I think also that much bickering, tampering, and bad
vibes would result from trying to "rate" articles as
safe or not safe for children; and that anyone with
questions about whether wikipedia is "safe" for their
children ought to assume it is not; and that we should
continue as we are without giving it much more
thought.  The world is an odd place, full of actions
that are sometimes beautiful and reassuring, and
sometimes ugly, sordid, and wearying; and if we're
going to report on as much as we can, as neutrally as
we can, we're going to have to cover things that
people will find offensive.  First, it's impossible
not to since there's such a broad range of potentially
offensive topics; and second; it's just the completist
thing to do.

Personally, I don't mind being offended
occasionally--the affront to my sensibilities reminds
me of what my sensibilities are, and also makes me
consider whether they are what they should be.

Given that we're encouraged not to talk about
political issues on the list because of the raw
emotion and hostility the discussion causes--would
wikipedia survive an attempt to annotate its articles
with ratings?  Think of all the political hot topics:
gun rights, abortion, homosexuality, drug use,
Christopher Columbus' name...  ;-)

I would have to hear a lot more about the proposed
systems, but as I understand them right now,* I have
grave reservations.  The fairest thing I can think of
would be a list of all possible axes on which a person
could be offended, and ratings for each compiled from
user votes and coupled with a toggle for each of them
in user prefs (Sex:Off, Religion:On, etc.)  And,
honestly, categorizing all the articles and rating
them is bound to be contentious and inflammatory,
aside from being enough work to keep all of us busy
for another five years.  Is it the best use of our
time?  Is it even a *good* use of our time?

kq

*It is, as always, possible that I've misunderstood
something vital.  :-/

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
http://calendar.yahoo.com


body:
Tony Wilson wrote:

>Eclecticology manages, somehow, to thow in the phrase "is completely
>contrary to any spirit of compromise" to a post above.
>
My reference to a "spirit of compromise" was in response to a claim that
the encyclopedia must be a compromise which was immediately followed by
an attempted bully tactic to achieve such a compromise;

>This is an extraordinary thing to say when he is fresh back from -
>let's not put too fine a point on it here - unilaterial vandalisim on a
>major scale, even stooping to cut-and-paste page moves.
>
I will not be intimidated by a liar's phony allegations of vandalism

>Mate, there is ALREADY a well-established compromise, has been for
>quite some time,  which, although it is not by any means completely
>satisfactory to me or to many of the other fauna people, has been
>honoured by everybody except YOU.
>
As far as I'm concerned, the only compromise is that alternate forms
should have redirects.  John suggested that I bring the issue to the
mailing list for further discussion, and I have.  Now Tannin rests on
his laurels and seeks to extrapolate a position beloved by amateur
birders onto all sorts of fauna.  Instead of considering citations that
I have drawn from style manuals and other sources (including ones
contrary to my position), he prefers to ignore these and rely solely on
his own empirical observations of birding manuals.  He has not cited a
single style manual, or rule from any zoological society to back his
position  The strongest clear citation in favour of his POV was my own
from the American Ornithological Union, and it applies only to birds.
 Linking this argument to the American/British English issue is
provocative trolling.

Perhaps Tannin needs a lesson in scientific method.  He hypothesizes
that capitalization is a standard practice.  I have disproved this
hypothesis with several counterexamples.  Time to reformulate the
hypothesis.

>An anon or a  newbie who behaved as you did the other day would have
>had his IP blocked immediately.
>
Hmmm!  A threat by innuendo.

>So please don't insult people like Jim - who, by the way, has done far
>more work on fauna than you ever will, and who has behaved with decency
>throughout - by bandying that "compromise" word around as if it was
>your own invention, and as if you you were willing to abide by the
>terms of the compromise which you knew all about the whole time.
>
I did not initiate the use of the word compromise in that part of the
exchange; see my first comment in this post.  It would be beneath me to
engage in a match of braggadocio about my contributions to Wikipedia in
the way that Tannin suggests.  From the posts that I have read, I think
that Jim is quite capable of defending himself without Tannin's
officiously sanctimonious help.

>The fauna pages were an area of the 'pedia where there was no longer
>any contention, and no ill-feeling. Until your unilaterial "I don't
>care about the consensus, I'm going to do it my way" decision the other
>day, it was an area where everybody was working together happily and
>productively. Now, PLEASE, get out of the road and let those of us who
>are doing the work *do* the work.
>
Do look in a mirror.  Did Tannin not notice that because of conflicting
authorities, I chose to leave the bird pages alone.  There's more than
enough to correct in the mammalian and other fauna that I can wait until
I have strongerauthorities before I do anything to the birds.  I guess
he just chose not to read that point.  It might have hndered his tantrum
of self-righteous indignation.  Nobody has been in your road, Tannin..
 Go ahead with your work; just stop whinging about about my corrections.

Ec


body:
Ec

But there is an agreed compromise-check with Maverick 149 if you don't
believe me. It's you that is trying, intially unilaterally and without consulation,
to change the status quo.

Jim
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from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
"There has been a compromise reached" JFrost8401 at aol.com

I have not read all these. Could  you set forth simply what that is?

Fred


body:
The only problem I can see with this policy (which is that in titles the
proper name in English of a species is capitalized) is that links from text,
to link directly, would have to also be capitalized in that text. This is
contrary to the usual usage, as species names are not proper nouns and ought
not to be capitalized in text.

Fred

From: JFrost8401 at aol.com
Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 06:27:51 EDT
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] naming convention for birds and others

In a message dated 04/06/03 11:24:31 GMT Daylight Time, fredbaud at ctelco.net
writes:

"There has been a compromise reached" JFrost8401 at aol.com

I have not read all these. Could  you set forth simply what that is?

Fred

The current policy is at
Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (fauna)
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(capitaliza
tion)> ; and may also be at
Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (capitalization)
<http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(capitaliza
tion)> ; unless it has been recently moved

Jim

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body:
Well, I looked at [[Red-winged Blackbird]]. It follows the usual convention,
capitalization in title but not in text, until you "tidied it up" and
changed the instances in the text to capitalized. The problem is that
red-winged blackbird is not a proper noun. Not sure how many of these  you
did and it does seem unfair to ask you go back and try to find all of these
that you changed, but the "fait accompli" seems to be of your own making.

Fred

From: JFrost8401 at aol.com
Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 07:06:04 EDT
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] naming convention for birds and others

In a message dated 04/06/03 11:48:07 GMT Daylight Time, fredbaud at ctelco.net
writes:

The only problem I can see with this policy (which is that in titles the
proper name in English of a species is capitalized) is that links from text,
to link directly, would have to also be capitalized in that text. This is
contrary to the usual usage, as species names are not proper nouns and ought
not to be capitalized in text.

Fred

If you look at the majority of the fauna articles, the text links are there,
or potentially there if a link has not been made. Try [[hummingbird]] or
[[whale]] for example. One practical problem with reverting from the current
policy is that literally thousands of text changes would have to be made
(with the additional problem that some would still be partially capitalised,
eg Wilson's Phalarope, because of the proper name.

hope this helps

Jim (jimfbleak)

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list: wikipedia-l

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fair use

body:
[Note: This is crossposted to <wikitech-l> and <wikipedia-l> for continuity.
Replies should go to <wikipedia-l>, since it's a policy discussion.]

Axel Boldt wrote on <wikitech-l>:

>Erik Moeller wrote:

>>I have not seen your response to my
>>analysis that conluded that quotations are more problematic
>>than images.

>If I understood correctly, you argue that quotes are embedded in the
>text while images are kept in separate files, thus GFDL is not
>inherited by the photo but is inherited by the quotes. This is
>incorrect. Derivative work are required to be under GFDL; what
>constitutes a derivative work is defined by copyright law. The
>technical detail that text and images are typically kept in separate
>files is irrelevant; illustrating an article by adding a picture is a
>classical case of a derivative work. Moving quotes out of the main text
>and then "including" them somehow is a technical gimmick that doesn't
>change anything: adding a quote also creates a derivative work.

Including quotations would indeed be a technical gimmick,
and our server would provide a single HTML file, a derivative work.
That images are separate, however, is more than a technical detail;
it's an important feature of HTTP that's used in other ways.
Our copyright notice at the bottom of the page even refers only to "text";
a result of this feature is that the text is easily separated.

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use


body:
Ec

I am sorry that this debate is getting so heated. There has been a compromise
reached, and I can't see the necessity to upset it.

The capitalisation style is not restricted to field guides. It is standard in
indubitably serious profession publications and organisations such as the
British Ornithological Union, British Birds Rarities Committee, Birds of the
Western Palearctic, Handbook of Birds of The World, Handbook of Australian and New
Zealand Birds, Ibis etc.

Also Charles Sibley's DNA-DNA scientific papers use capitalisation, and you
can't get much more serious than that (incidently, he also wrote and
illustrated the best current guide to the birds of North America).

The main exceptions to capitalisation are paper encyclopedias and their
on-line versions. The serious point I was making earlier was that the nature of
wikien means that there have to be compromises, as there are on spelling and
vocabulary issues, and the nature of some of the articles. If we want this project
to be like Brittanica, why bother competing?

As you are aware, my main interest is birds, but mammals, as far as I can
see, follow the same conventions. I don't know enough about other taxonomic
groups to go to the wall on them. I can't see why the people who write the articles
can't get on with using the agreed consistent style without it upsetting
those who don't, on the whole, write the articles

Jim
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body:
In a message dated 04/06/03 11:24:31 GMT Daylight Time, fredbaud at ctelco.net
writes:

> "There has been a compromise reached" JFrost8401 at aol.com
>
> I have not read all these. Could  you set forth simply what that is?
>
> Fred
>

The current policy is at
Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (fauna); and may also be at
Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (capitalization); unless it has been
recently moved

Jim

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body:
In a message dated 04/06/03 11:48:07 GMT Daylight Time, fredbaud at ctelco.net
writes:

> The only problem I can see with this policy (which is that in titles the
> proper name in English of a species is capitalized) is that links from text, to
> link directly, would have to also be capitalized in that text. This is
> contrary to the usual usage, as species names are not proper nouns and ought not
> to be capitalized in text.
>
> Fred
>

If you look at the majority of the fauna articles, the text links are there,
or potentially there if a link has not been made. Try [[hummingbird]] or
[[whale]] for example. One practical problem with reverting from the current policy
is that literally thousands of text changes would have to be made (with the
additional problem that some would still be partially capitalised, eg Wilson's
Phalarope, because of the proper name.

hope this helps

Jim (jimfbleak)

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body:
Eclecticology wrote at last:

>Tannin wrote:

>>The fauna pages were an area of the 'pedia where there was no longer
>>any contention, and no ill-feeling. Until your unilaterial "I don't
>>care about the consensus, I'm going to do it my way" decision the other
>>day, it was an area where everybody was working together happily and
>>productively. Now, PLEASE, get out of the road and let those of us who
>>are doing the work *do* the work.

>Do look in a mirror.  Did Tannin not notice that because of conflicting
>authorities, I chose to leave the bird pages alone.  There's more than
>enough to correct in the mammalian and other fauna that I can wait until
>I have stronger authorities before I do anything to the birds.  I guess
>he just chose not to read that point.  It might have hndered his tantrum
>of self-righteous indignation.  Nobody has been in your road, Tannin..
>Go ahead with your work; just stop whinging about about my corrections.

Previous discussion on the mailing list focussed on birds,
and I agree that a rough consenus for capitalisation was reached,
at least among contributors likely to work on those articles.
But if any compromise was reached that included mammals etc,
then we haven't seen it on the mailing list yet.
A citation of such discussion elsewhere would be helpful.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Harry Potter

body:
Mintguy wrote at last, quoting Harry Potter:

>I find your suggestion that I should exclude myself from this project
>because I do not have a naive realist viewpoint hardly helpful.

I knew that NPOV would run against this some day.
There is a question as to whether HP is only trolling,
but even if he is, some day we'll meet somebody that isn't.

-- Toby


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Counter-Intuitive Wikipedia Conventions,  was
	naming convention for birds and others

body:
One of the counter-intuitive things a new Wikipedian has to adjust to is the
convention on capitalization of titles: Only the first word is capitalized
unless it is a proper noun. This is not natural as all words in a title are
conventionally capitalized. We do that so that links from within text do not
need to be capitalized.

In the case of species names we are now making an exception, creating
another counter-intuitive requirement: in text all words in the name of a
species must be capitalized. Again in contradiction to expected usage.
Having adopted the convention that in titles all words in a species name are
capitalized we are now forced to have them capitalized in text in order that
links work.

So we have three choices: put the titles of species in the usual first word
only capitalized format; capitalize all words of a species name in text; or
made a redirect for each species to the all caps format.

This is not a major issue with me. I guess I only want to see a definite
convention established.

Fred


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Reclaim the Public Domain Petition

body:
Kurt Jansson wrote:

>http://www.PetitionOnline.com/eldred/petition.html

>Everybody who has ever uploaded a public domain image or used the old
>Britannica should put Wikipedia in the "Something I Created Using Public
>Domain" field.

"We, the undersigned, while believing in the importance of copyright, [...]"

I'm afraid that I can't sign that petition. ^_^

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Counter-Intuitive Wikipedia Conventions

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>One of the counter-intuitive things a new Wikipedian has to adjust to is the
>convention on capitalization of titles: Only the first word is capitalized
>unless it is a proper noun. This is not natural as all words in a title are
>conventionally capitalized. We do that so that links from within text do not
>need to be capitalized.

>In the case of species names we are now making an exception, creating
>another counter-intuitive requirement: in text all words in the name of a
>species must be capitalized. Again in contradiction to expected usage.
>Having adopted the convention that in titles all words in a species name are
>capitalized we are now forced to have them capitalized in text in order that
>links work.

Actually, the position of Tannin et al is that
it always was supposed to be capitalised in running text.
To capitalise the article title is merely a deduction from this;
the controversy is ultimately about what should appear in text.
But this question gains additional importance because of the effects
that it'll have on article titles.

-- Toby


body:
In a message dated 04/06/03 13:00:55 GMT Daylight Time, fredbaud at ctelco.net
writes:

> Well, I looked at [[Red-winged Blackbird]]. It follows the usual
> convention, capitalization in title but not in text, until you "tidied it up" and
> changed the instances in the text to capitalized. The problem is that red-winged
> blackbird is not a proper noun. Not sure how many of these  you did and it
> does seem unfair to ask you go back and try to find all of these that you
> changed, but the "fait accompli" seems to be of your own making.
>
> Fred
> >>
>>
> Some of the earlier bird articles pre-dated the agreed convention, so were,
of course, brought into line. One reason that we have only recently started
adding full species lists for large groups like the hummingbirds is that the
sources I know capitalise in line with the agreed wikien convention, so it is
simple to convert the list to a suitable layout. Doing the 337 hummingbirds took
about 10 minutes.

If the agreed convention is reversed, future species for large families lists
are likely to be less forthcoming, since there is no source with
uncapitalised lists, and converting a capitalised list to the appropriate form would not
be easily automated because (a) some names would remain partially capitalised
like Wilson's petrel (b) nobody has disputed that the genus name must be
capitalise, eg Parus ater.

I would not accept this is a problem of our own making-we followed an agreed
policy. I should also point out that new fauna contributors like Kingturtle
and Hawthorne have automatically gone for the capitaisation style they are
familiar with.

At the risk of seeming churlish, I should point out that if the policy is
reversed, it won't be me going through all the articles (written in good faith to
an agreed style) to change the capitaisation.

Jim
.
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body:
Fred

the other point I should have made is that non-standard capitalisation
creates problems in itself. How do I distinguish [[penduline tit]], the group Remiz,
from [[Penduline Tit]]  the species Remiz pendulinus. For that matter, how do
I distinguish, in the text , Spotted Crakes, the species, from spotted crakes
(all crakes with spots).

There are good reasons why the normal capitalisation of species have been
adopted. Even some of the invertebrate groups where scientific names are more
common still capitalize the English name if it exists.

Jim
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body:
I'm not sure what you are implying by making it a meta page.  Please
elaborate.

--
Michael Becker

-----Original Message-----
From: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org]
On Behalf Of Magnus Manske
Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 7.08
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Cc: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Just to throw this out there...

Erik Moeller schrieb:

>Ray-
>
>
>>Not checkboxes, which would indeed require so many that they would
>>become rigid and/or useless.  I would propose searchable write-in
>>boxes where words and/or codes could be entered.
>>
>>
>
>This sounds a lot like my proposed [[Category:Foo]] scheme
>
I even had the category thing implemented on the test wikipedia a long
time ago, but it was unpopular.

These category links would be similar to the language links (at least,
in my implementation), right? But, we are some time now to switch to a
central database managing the language links, as just putting the links
into the text is kinda chaotic.

So, maybe we should consider a meta page (Special:Meta) for articles, as

was suggested. This could contain categories, show the language links
from the central database etc.

Anyone against meta pages? If so, why? Otherwise, I might start
implementing a test version soon. (You have been warned!;-)

Magnus

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


from_name: Vicki Rosenzweig

body:
At 06:02 AM 6/4/03 -0600, Fred Bauder wrote:
>Well, I looked at [[Red-winged Blackbird]]. It follows the usual
>convention, capitalization in title but not in text, until you "tidied it
>up" and changed the instances in the text to capitalized. The problem is
>that red-winged blackbird is not a proper noun. Not sure how many of
>these  you did and it does seem unfair to ask you go back and try to find
>all of these that you changed, but the "fait accompli" seems to be of your
>own making.

It may be relevant that I, rather than Jim, wrote that article. I have no
strong
opinion on the capitalization issue, but my impulse, based on how the rest of
English works, is toward lower-case. That is, if I don't stop and think
either way,
I'll write "I saw a red-winged blackbird", no caps.

It's not a proper noun, but it is a species name.

And can everyone *PLEASE* turn the HTML off. I don't care if you want to
read your
email in black-on-yellow, but send it in plain text and let me make my own
choices.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr at redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org


body:
sorry Vicki, as a benighted AOL user, no plain text option

Jim
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subject: [WikiEN-l] Counter-Intuitive Wikipedia Conventions,  was naming conventio...

body:
In a message dated 04/06/03 14:14:45 GMT Daylight Time, fredbaud at ctelco.net
writes:

> One of the counter-intuitive things a new Wikipedian has to adjust to is
> the
> convention on capitalization of titles: Only the first word is capitalized
> unless it is a proper noun. This is not natural as all words in a title are
> conventionally capitalized. We do that so that links from within text do not
> need to be capitalized.
>
> In the case of species names we are now making an exception, creating
> another counter-intuitive requirement: in text all words in the name of a
> species must be capitalized. Again in contradiction to expected usage.
> Having adopted the convention that in titles all words in a species name are
> capitalized we are now forced to have them capitalized in text in order that
> links work.
>
> So we have three choices: put the titles of species in the usual first word
> only capitalized format; capitalize all words of a species name in text; or
> made a redirect for each species to the all caps format.
>
> This is not a major issue with me. I guess I only want to see a definite
> convention established.
>
> Fred

it has been and I'm following the agreed policy until a new agreed one
replaces it.

Jim
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from_name: Tim Starling

subject: [Wikitech-l] Minor updates

body:
>I've checked in a few quick tweaks to cvs, just fyi:

I thought there was meant to be a feature freeze on. I've got major changes
pending to SpecialRecenchanges and SpecialRecentchangeslinked, so don't go
changing them. I've also got minor (i.e. easily merged) changes pending to
GlobalFunctions and Language.php.

The changes to SpecialRecentchanges don't look big to the user: now you can
hide minor edits without going to the user preferences (that's really a bug
fix more than anything), and you can hide edits by logged in users. But the
increased complexity incited me to revamp the code somewhat.

-- Tim Starling

_________________________________________________________________
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subject: [WikiEN-l] A clarificaton for Toby

body:
Cunctator,

Well, Tannin has laid down the law (and changed lots of articles) ;

Fred

> From: The Cunctator <cunctator at kband.com>
> Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2003 12:12:47 -0400
> To: <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] A clarificaton for Toby
>
> On 6/4/03 11:05 AM, "Tony Wilson" <list at redhill.net.au> wrote:
>> The executive summary: simply use the correct capitalisation whenever
>> you use the phrase and you will rarely go wrong.
>>
> Good thing there's no dispute on what the correct capitalization is.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Fair use

body:
On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Toby Bartels wrote:
> [Note: This is crossposted to <wikitech-l> and <wikipedia-l> for continuity.
> Replies should go to <wikipedia-l>, since it's a policy discussion.]

As a reminder, none of us are real lawyers, and nothing in this discussion
is going to get anyone anywhere. May I suggest we all agree to disagree
and keep our options open until such time as the project receives
professional advice?

> Axel Boldt wrote on <wikitech-l>:
> >Derivative work are required to be under GFDL; what
> >constitutes a derivative work is defined by copyright law. The
> >technical detail that text and images are typically kept in separate
> >files is irrelevant; illustrating an article by adding a picture is a
> >classical case of a derivative work.

This is the primary concern, which needs to be answered by a professional
with a firm knowledge of the law, the licenses involved, and the precedent
set by other cases.

On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Toby Bartels wrote:
> Including quotations would indeed be a technical gimmick,
> and our server would provide a single HTML file, a derivative work.

Careful there -- someone will suggest using an <iframe> tag to pull the
quote from a separate file. ;)

> Our copyright notice at the bottom of the page even refers only to "text";
> a result of this feature is that the text is easily separated.

As we've heard before, saying something in a copyright statement doesn't
make it true.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: Eugene Gill

subject: [WikiEN-l] User:Harry Potter

body:
Ohhh yes.

Here is a quote from HP on
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Cimon_avaro

As we have noted, some of the people "correcting" these pages have adopted
blanket reversions on account of a very povie view that fact and fantasy are
two distinct categories, whereas I experience them as an interpenetrating
dialectic unity. i.e. we can only comprehend the world through a skein of
signification which is culturally constructed and which structures
information. This rejection of hardline Cartesian dualism may also be povie,
but then so is anyones contribution. It is the interaction of us as human
beings which creates some sort of consensual reality, so the whole NPOV can
only happen as a consequence of these interactions. This means we are all
liable to experience frissance with people coming from cultures different or
even anti-thetical to our own. OK that's life. Harry Potter.

And http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Stan_Shebs

It is not a matter of "challenging the line between fact and fantasy" as
this would be to assert some sort of legitimacy to such a putative line.
Rather I am suggesting that such a line is a product of a point of view in
motion and that different people see it in different ways. .... I find your
suggestion that I should exclude myself from this project because I do not
have a naive realist viewpoint hardly helpful. Harry Potter

Mintguy

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Becker" <wikipedia at jumpingjackweb.com>
To: <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, June 04, 2003 2:58 AM
Subject: FW: [WikiEN-l] User:Harry Potter

> Has anyone talked to him about the inaccuracies?  This may just be a
> misunderstanding.  At the least, someone should tell him that he has
> added inaccuracies to his article, and then put the boiler from
> [[Wikipedia:Accuracy dispute]] on his contributions.  Tell him why we
> are doing it, and give him a chance to correct his errors and become a
> contributor.  This is the process we should go through.
>
> --
> Michael Becker
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org]
> On Behalf Of Stan Shebs
> Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2003 12.43
> To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] User:Harry Potter
>
> I agree.  It sows an atmosphere of distrust, which, going by the
> pataphysics manifesto, is the goal.  It's a waste of my time to research
> things and add them to an article if the rest of the article is fiction
> masquerading as fact; no reader is going to believe any of it.
> [[Templars in England]] looks plausible for instance, but given Harry
> Potter's other activities, how am I supposed to know if any of it is
> true? Better to vaporize it and start over.
>
> Stan
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


body:
> From: "Tony Wilson" <list at redhill.net.au>
> Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Thu, 05 Jun 2003 02:55:50 +1000
> To: "WikiEN" <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Tannin, it seems, has changed lots of articles
>
> Tannin, it seems "has changed lots of articles"

> rat kangaroo
>
> Which last is what I'm supposed to be working on at the moment, only
> I'm having to fend off attacks with one hand and create good new
> material with the other. Hardly condusive to productive working
> conditions.
>
> And those above are just the entries I have made *substantial*
> contributions to, never mind the many hundreds of smaller
> contributions. And I'm not even the most prolific contributor to the
> fauna section - Jim Frost outproduces me by a factor of two or three.
>
> Have I changed lots of articles? Too right I have. That is what I am
> SUPPOSED to do here: change articles for the better. And that is
> exactly what I am doing, have been doing for months. Now, can we PLEASE
> have some peace and quiet so that I can go do more of it?

Good work, but that still doesn't give you the final word.

Fred


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Tannin, it seems, has changed lots of articles

body:
Tony Wilson wrote:

>
>Which last is what I'm supposed to be working on at the moment, only
>I'm having to fend off attacks with one hand and create good new
>material with the other. Hardly condusive to productive working
>conditions.
>
Nobody is denying your productivity, but disagreeing with you
hardly qualifies as an "attack" - it's just a disagreement,
one among the many that are inevitable in a large group of
people with disparate opinions. If you're mistaken in your
position, then changing lots of articles is not making them
better, it's making them worse, so it should always be a fair
question to ask about the authority justifying those changes,
just as we do for history, and higher taxa, and other tricky
subjects. As I'm sure you know, part of scholarly discourse is
identifying points of contention and talking about the evidence
for and against, and outside of the bird arena, which is known
to be a special case, I have yet to see anything that requires
wholesale capitalization of species' common names.  We're having
good discussion on the naming conventions page though, and I
hope that will continue until we have a solid result.

I don't much care about the outcome either way, but
without a convention based on authority so great that
no rational person would ever dare challenge, the argument
is going to come up over and over.  In fact it will likely
get worse, if we succeed in attracting large number of new
editors and are not able to convince them all to go along
with the established conventions.

Stan


body:
On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Tim Starling wrote:

> Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen <daniel at copyleft.no> wrote:

>> The random page on the English one isn't random either. You will regularly
>> get the same page again and again if you try a few times.

> This should have been fixed a month ago, when Brion reset the index. Have
> you checked since then?

Yes, this happened to me about a week ago.

-- Daniel


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
Jimmy-
> But I didn't recommend that we implement a family filter.  Google
> doesn't filter -- but they do allow end users to configure what sorts
> of results are presented.

Hmm -- I do not really see the difference? Most filters are optional, at
least for adults.

Regards,

Erik


body:
kq-
> I'm a bit concerned about what I've been reading
> lately about proposed filters.

Don't worry. Until someone implements it, it's just talk. And I think none
of the current Wikipedia developers is too keen on filters :-)

Regards,

Erik


body:
Jimmy-
> If we were writing disclaimers at the top of some pages, we would
> require the disclaimer to be NPOV.  We wouldn't say "This page is bad
> for children."  And we wouldn't say "Anyone who doesn't let children
> read this is a stick in the mud."  We would say "Some may consider
> this page inappropriate for children."

That's fair enough. I will add the appropriate disclaimers to all the
pages about Christianity, which I consider potentially dangerous to
children. Of course I will do so in an NPOV way. ;-)

Can you see where this is going? Standards for what is and isn't
appropriate for children or adults vary so greatly that any offensiveness
disclaimer is bound to be either POV (because we only add it to some
pages) or useless (because we add it to all pages). We can't really solve
this in the wiki way, *if* we are going to add disclaimers/filters, these
have to be configurable. One size doesn't fit it all.

Regards,

Erik


body:
JFrost8401 at aol.com wrote:

>
> There are huge numbers of American bird species that have no articles
> at all. Wouldn't it be better to write some instead of wasting time on
> the umpteenth regurgitation of  this topic?

To be brutally honest, I've been shying away from birds
so as not to get jumped on about the many errors that I'm
sure I would make.  That, and I can't get close enough to the
Northern Mockingbird in my backyard to get the good photo. :-)

Stan


body:
Ray-
> Not checkboxes, which would indeed require so many that they would
> become rigid and/or useless.  I would propose searchable write-in boxes
> where words and/or codes could be entered.

This sounds a lot like my proposed [[Category:Foo]] scheme, only that you
want codes instead of words for the categories. My scheme has the
advantage that it can be built very easily on top of the existing data
structures, with no extra input fields or changes to RC required.

With this scheme, you would have

[[Category:Sex]] [[Category:Sexually explicit]]
or
[[Category:Religion]]
or
[[Category:Music]]

and meta-categories:

[[Category:Stub]]
or
[[Category:Delete]]
or
[[Category:NPOV dispute]]

each of these category pages would be editable, but always automatically
include a sorted list of the pages that link to the category ("what links
here"). It would also be nice if a text could be configured for each
category that is displayed on pages that are part of it, e.g.

[[Category:Stub]] -> This article is a stub article ...

Regards,

Erik


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Fair use

body:
Axel-
> I'm not sure we should assume this before having tried. One could argue
> that this should actually be pretty cheap:
> * GFDL materials are useless for most commercial enterprises

Which includes the people who sell them ;-). The problem is that by
licensing under the GFDL, the company loses the ability to license to
people like us in the future, i.e. those who want to produce freely
copiable materials. So they will want to get as much money from the first
GFDL licensee as they can, because they won't get another one.
Furthermore, copyright holders are notiously suspicious about anything
new -- they usually have ready made packages and will not alter their
licensing policies just because we tell them to, simply because
understanding the implications of the FDL requires legal consultation
which costs money.

I obviously agree that it's worth trying. But I am not very optimistic.

>> I don't see the slippery slope, sorry.

> I don't either. It's either freely distributable/modifiable or it
> isn't.

In its entirety, yes. But just because we allow fair use, Wikipedia will
not automatically and gradually turn into a proprietary encyclopedia
(slippery slope argument).

> If I understood correctly, you argue that quotes are embedded in the
> text while images are kept in separate files, thus GFDL is not
> inherited by the photo but is inherited by the quotes. This is
> incorrect. Derivative work are required to be under GFDL;

So is the text

Bla

in combination with the text

[[Image:Bla.jpg]]

> The
> technical detail that text and images are typically kept in separate
> files is irrelevant; illustrating an article by adding a picture is a
> classical case of a derivative work.

The wiki-author doesn't add a picture, he adds a reference to a picture.
The web browser will automatically retrieve that image if so instructed
(visit the page with lynx and there is no image). The result is an
aggregated, not a combined work under the FDL. The author cannot even
change the image in any way by editing the article. Now, if article and
image were always compiled together (as they would be on paper), that
would be a different matter. But they aren't.

> Moving quotes out of the main text
> and then "including" them somehow is a technical gimmick that doesn't
> change anything: adding a quote also creates a derivative work.

You would no longer add a quote, but a reference to one, and the same
logic as above would apply.

> So yes, fair use quotes are technically violations of GFDL, but
> completely harmless.

Many copyright holders see things differently. Author Dan van der Vat, for
example, was asked to pay 25 British pounds for quoting two sentences from
Churchill's History of the Second World War in his book "The Atlantic
Campaign". Sure: The legality is questionable. But don't kid yourself
into believing that nobody would ever consider quotes infringing.
Treating fair use of quotes and images entirely differently is
hypocritical and wrong.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: The Cunctator

subject: [WikiEN-l] A clarificaton for Toby

body:
On 6/4/03 11:05 AM, "Tony Wilson" <list at redhill.net.au> wrote:
> The executive summary: simply use the correct capitalisation whenever
> you use the phrase and you will rarely go wrong.
>
Good thing there's no dispute on what the correct capitalization is.


from_name: Anthere

body:
--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Ray-
> > Not checkboxes, which would indeed require so many
> that they would
> > become rigid and/or useless.  I would propose
> searchable write-in boxes
> > where words and/or codes could be entered.
>
> This sounds a lot like my proposed [[Category:Foo]]
> scheme, only that you
> want codes instead of words for the categories. My
> scheme has the
> advantage that it can be built very easily on top of
> the existing data
> structures, with no extra input fields or changes to
> RC required.
>
> With this scheme, you would have
>
> [[Category:Sex]] [[Category:Sexually explicit]]
> or
> [[Category:Religion]]
> or
> [[Category:Music]]

For *all* the very good reasons KQ has been
summarizing earlier today, I think this type of
categorizing is very bad. I understand the need some
feel to protect sensible eyes, but I believe this is
not the proper way. I think it will introduce POV in
an encyclopedia struggling to be NPOV.

As Ed (eh, Ed, where are you ?) would put it, when we
write an article, a good way is to write "xx said yyy
about zzzz".

With categories, it will be "wikipedianUser says yyy
about zzzz".

Plus, I think with filters, many many articles will be
more red than blue/grey. Very bad.

> and meta-categories:
>
> [[Category:Stub]]
> or
> [[Category:Delete]]
> or
> [[Category:NPOV dispute]]
>
> each of these category pages would be editable, but
> always automatically
> include a sorted list of the pages that link to the
> category ("what links
> here"). It would also be nice if a text could be
> configured for each
> category that is displayed on pages that are part of
> it, e.g.
>
> [[Category:Stub]] -> This article is a stub article

This, I agree with.

I can figure a [[Category:Copyright]] -> This article
is suspected of copyright violation

Then, when the violation is asserted, and a sysop
delete it, it goes automatically in the right
temporary database of copyrighted material, to be
permanently emptied on the first of each month.

hum...:-)

PS : I "to" to the main list. Where this ever to be
implemented, it is likely to interest all wikipedias
as well

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] Just to throw this out there...


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Jimmy-
>
>>If we were writing disclaimers at the top of some pages, we would
>>require the disclaimer to be NPOV.  We wouldn't say "This page is bad
>>for children."  And we wouldn't say "Anyone who doesn't let children
>>read this is a stick in the mud."  We would say "Some may consider
>>this page inappropriate for children."
>>
>
>That's fair enough. I will add the appropriate disclaimers to all the
>pages about Christianity, which I consider potentially dangerous to
>children. Of course I will do so in an NPOV way. ;-)
>
>Can you see where this is going? Standards for what is and isn't
>appropriate for children or adults vary so greatly that any offensiveness
>disclaimer is bound to be either POV (because we only add it to some
>pages) or useless (because we add it to all pages). We can't really solve
>this in the wiki way, *if* we are going to add disclaimers/filters, these
>have to be configurable. One size doesn't fit it all.
>
To me, the filtering ability of coding boxes is incidental to having an
indexing system that can be scaled up to an ever larger Wikipedia.  The
filtering possibilities would be rudimentary.  There could be a place on
the preferences page for a user to indicate the codes for articles not
to be downloaded.  Thus (without prejudice to what the codes might
actually become), he could enter SEX, REL, or GEO for sex, religion or
geology.  (There is a risk that an article on geology could be preaching
evolution. ;-) )  In many cases where the parent would use the filter
the kid is often smarter, and can probably figure out the override long
before the parent realizes.  I may not always admit it to him, but I
feel proud when my 13 year old does things better than I do.

Choosing whether an article will be subject to a particular filtering
code is so subjective as to often be meaningless, but having this sort
of thing available has a tremendous public relations value..Some porno
sites put a long list of unlikely words on their home page to improve
the chance that a search engine can find them.  Filtering them all can
be a losing battle.

Ec


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Umlauts in article titles

body:
--- Mirko Thiessen <mt at mirko-thiessen.de> wrote:
> Hello,
>
>
> I just came back from a month of absence from
> Wikipedia and realised,
> that lots of article titles about German cities,
> regions etc. have
> been changed from titles WITHOUT umlauts to titles
> WITH umlauts (e.g.
> Moelln is M?lln now). I searched in the naming
> conventions, but I
> didn't find any conventions about this topic. Up to
> now, I created every
> article without umlauts (that means, with ae instead
> of ?). How should
> we handle this in the future? Is there a convention,
> which I was just
> too stupid to find?
>
> And what about the sharp s (?)? Should it be used in
> article titles as
> well, or should it (as I did so far) be replaced
> with "ss"?
>
>
> Mirko (Cordyph)

I thought we were supposed to render umlauts as an 'e'
after the modified letter in the article titles. In
any case, there should be all possible redirects for
these different renderings. Sometimes there will need
to be disambiguation pages if the umlaut is omitted. I
know that in atleast one case (sch&oumlaut;n
(beautiful/very) vs. schon (already), but that's not a
place name) the umlaut matters, so there could be
more.
--LittleDan

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from_name: Magnus Manske

body:
Erik Moeller schrieb:

>Ray-
>
>
>>Not checkboxes, which would indeed require so many that they would
>>become rigid and/or useless.  I would propose searchable write-in boxes
>>where words and/or codes could be entered.
>>
>>
>
>This sounds a lot like my proposed [[Category:Foo]] scheme
>
I even had the category thing implemented on the test wikipedia a long
time ago, but it was unpopular.

These category links would be similar to the language links (at least,
in my implementation), right? But, we are some time now to switch to a
central database managing the language links, as just putting the links
into the text is kinda chaotic.

So, maybe we should consider a meta page (Special:Meta) for articles, as
was suggested. This could contain categories, show the language links
from the central database etc.

Anyone against meta pages? If so, why? Otherwise, I might start
implementing a test version soon. (You have been warned!;-)

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] There WAS an attack, Stan

body:
Tony Wilson wrote:

>There WAS an attack, Stan. Did you miss it?.
>
I wouldn't call changing a bunch of articles an attack, unless
the edit summary said something "fix egregious mistakes by
Tannin the idiot" or something like that. All I see in, say,
[[Panda]] is "correcting capitals" which to me sounds like
honest disagreement.

Now I don't think that what Eclecticology did was very
smart; it would have been better to fill up talk pages with
whining until you screamed for mercy and gave in. :-)  As
they say, "never attribute to malice what can be explained
by stupidity".  (Not that I'm saying Eclectocology is stupid
in general, far from it, but the collective IQ of Wikipedia
editors is much higher than any of us can muster individually,
which is why we prefer to work together instead of at odds.)

Stan


body:
--- Oliver Pereira <omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> If the majority of experts on fauna call an animal
> the "Aardvark", and the
> majority of non-experts call it the "aardvark", then
> the majority of our
> potential *readership* call it the "aardvark". So
> that's what our usual
> naming convention says that *we* should call it,
> too. We shouldn't make
> special cases just for one particular group of
> people without a better
> reason than just because that's how they do it
> themselves.
> Oliver

If the majority of non-experts call MS-DOS "DOS",
should we? "DOS" means *any* disc operating system,
even certain versions of Linux. And same with IM.
In this case, we're lucky. Capitalisation conveys no
information whatsoever, so it really doesn't matter.
We just need to be consistant. In my opinion, we
should be scientific and capitalise when we are
talking about a specific species (like Bald Eagle),
but not when talking about general, non-scientific
general things (like eagle).

--LittleDan

__________________________________
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http://calendar.yahoo.com


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>Ray-
>
>>Not checkboxes, which would indeed require so many that they would
>>become rigid and/or useless.  I would propose searchable write-in boxes
>>where words and/or codes could be entered.
>>
>
>This sounds a lot like my proposed [[Category:Foo]] scheme, only that you
>want codes instead of words for the categories. My scheme has the
>advantage that it can be built very easily on top of the existing data
>structures, with no extra input fields or changes to RC required.
>
>With this scheme, you would have
>
>[[Category:Sex]] [[Category:Sexually explicit]]
>or
>[[Category:Religion]]
>or
>[[Category:Music]]
>
>and meta-categories:
>
>[[Category:Stub]]
>or
>[[Category:Delete]]
>or
>[[Category:NPOV dispute]]
>
>each of these category pages would be editable, but always automatically
>include a sorted list of the pages that link to the category ("what links
>here"). It would also be nice if a text could be configured for each
>category that is displayed on pages that are part of it, e.g.
>
>[[Category:Stub]] -> This article is a stub article ...
>
I think there is much in common between the two ideas, at least in terms
of what we want the two visions would accomplish.  I think there is
probably a lot of room for reconciling the two.  I'd need to give more
thought to the way it might be done.  I can give a few preliminary
observations.
    1. Codes or words?  Use both, but have a way of distinguishing which
is being uses, e.g. it is a word if the second character is in lower
case.  We would still need to find a way of accomodating the "NPOV"
example above.
    2.  Does "category page" mean a whole separate page?  If it is,
isn't a category box the same thing, only much tinier, and without the
need to write the word "category" every time?  Some articles will belong
to several categories.

Anyway, I'm sure there will be more to say on this.
Ec


body:
In a message dated 04/06/03 18:14:49 GMT Daylight Time, fredbaud at ctelco.net
writes:

> Good work, but that still doesn't give you the final word.
>
> Fred
>
>

So who decides?
I assumed there was intended to be some sort of consensus, as when the
present policy was agreed by all who participated. At present, the lineup appears to
be a few people who, pace Vicki, do not make significant contribution to the
fauna articles, whereas Kingturtle, Tannin, Steve Nova and myself are fairly
happy with the present situation. This hardly seems a clear mandate for
changing the current policy.

Personally, I think it will be a sad day if style triumphs over substance,
and I can't help thinking we could all be better occupied creating and improving
articles instead of revisiting a previously agreed policy, with the
inevitable acrimony that tends to creep in.

There are huge numbers of American bird species that have no articles at all.
Wouldn't it be better to write some instead of wasting time on the umpteenth
regurgitation of  this topic?

Jim
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from_name: Dante Alighieri

body:
At 01:34 PM 6/4/2003, you wrote:
>--- Oliver Pereira <omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> > If the majority of experts on fauna call an animal
> > the "Aardvark", and the
> > majority of non-experts call it the "aardvark", then
> > the majority of our
> > potential *readership* call it the "aardvark". So
> > that's what our usual
> > naming convention says that *we* should call it,
> > too. We shouldn't make
> > special cases just for one particular group of
> > people without a better
> > reason than just because that's how they do it
> > themselves.
> > Oliver
>
>If the majority of non-experts call MS-DOS "DOS",
>should we? "DOS" means *any* disc operating system,
>even certain versions of Linux. And same with IM.
>In this case, we're lucky. Capitalisation conveys no
>information whatsoever, so it really doesn't matter.
>We just need to be consistant. In my opinion, we
>should be scientific and capitalise when we are
>talking about a specific species (like Bald Eagle),
>but not when talking about general, non-scientific
>general things (like eagle).
>
>--LittleDan

Yes, I agree. I think we have a responsibility to use the more correct
name.... *cough* [[Talk:Occam's Razor]] *cough*

I actually have no opinion on this bird issue, I just wanted a chance to
dig up and old battle that I lost and try to win it anew. ;)

-----
Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321


from_name: Matthew Woodcraft

body:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Of course we do risk 'flagging wars' -- but that's par for the course
> -- we risk 'edit wars' and so on all the time.  The best way to
> minimize such wars is to approach tagging *as NPOV meta-data*.

But one of the main tools we use to come to NPOV -- 'going meta' --
isn't really available here.

> If we were writing disclaimers at the top of some pages, we would
> require the disclaimer to be NPOV.  We wouldn't say "This page is bad
> for children."  And we wouldn't say "Anyone who doesn't let children
> read this is a stick in the mud."  We would say "Some may consider
> this page inappropriate for children."

'Going meta' isn't just saying 'some people think this', it's
describing who thinks it. If we have to decide how many people should
hold an opinion before a flag is set then I think we really will get
'wars' of back-and-forth reversions.

-M-


body:
On 6/4/03 2:03 PM, "JFrost8401 at aol.com" <JFrost8401 at aol.com> wrote:

> In a message dated 04/06/03 18:14:49 GMT Daylight Time, fredbaud at ctelco.net
> writes:
>
>
>> Good work, but that still doesn't give you the final word.
>>
>> Fred
>>
> So who decides?
> I assumed there was intended to be some sort of consensus, as when the present
> policy was agreed by all who participated. At present, the lineup appears to
> be a few people who, pace Vicki, do not make significant contribution to the
> fauna articles, whereas Kingturtle, Tannin, Steve Nova and myself are fairly
> happy with the present situation. This hardly seems a clear mandate for
> changing the current policy.
>
> Personally, I think it will be a sad day if style triumphs over substance, and
> I can't help thinking we could all be better occupied creating and improving
> articles instead of revisiting a previously agreed policy, with the inevitable
> acrimony that tends to creep in.
>
> There are huge numbers of American bird species that have no articles at all.
> Wouldn't it be better to write some instead of wasting time on the umpteenth
> regurgitation of  this topic?
>
Yes. I also am one who believes that Wikipedia policies should follow a
variant of Occam's Razor--given two reasonable policies, choose the one less
likely to instigate conflict.

For example, instead of asserting that There Exists One Correct
Capitalization For Bird Names, admit that there is clearly dispute in the
outside world as to what is preferable, and let people do what they see fit.
It's the same rule we've followed with American/British spelling, and it
works fine. I'm driven crazy every time I see the [[humour]] article, but I
recognize that it actually isn't important.


body:
JFrost8401 at aol.com wrote:

> Ec
>
> I am sorry that this debate is getting so heated. There has been a
> compromise reached, and I can't see the necessity to upset it.
>
> The capitalisation style is not restricted to field guides. It is
> standard in indubitably serious profession publications and
> organisations such as the British Ornithological Union, British Birds
> Rarities Committee, Birds of the Western Palearctic, Handbook of Birds
> of The World, Handbook of Australian and New Zealand Birds, Ibis etc.
>
> Also Charles Sibley's DNA-DNA scientific papers use capitalisation,
> and you can't get much more serious than that (incidently, he also
> wrote and illustrated the best current guide to the birds of North
> America).
>
> The main exceptions to capitalisation are paper encyclopedias and
> their on-line versions. The serious point I was making earlier was
> that the nature of wikien means that there have to be compromises, as
> there are on spelling and vocabulary issues, and the nature of some of
> the articles. If we want this project to be like Brittanica, why
> bother competing?
>
> As you are aware, my main interest is birds, but mammals, as far as I
> can see, follow the same conventions. I don't know enough about other
> taxonomic groups to go to the wall on them. I can't see why the people
> who write the articles can't get on with using the agreed consistent
> style without it upsetting those who don't, on the whole, write the
> articles
>
> Jim

The tone of Jim's post is considerably cooled from the previous, and I
too am willing to cool down my own rhetorical flair.

The discussion is now under way to determine just what the compromise is
or means.

The one common point about all the works that you cite is that every one
is about birds.  You've made a strong case for birds, and, in the
absence of my being able to provide additional strong evidence, I have
already indicated that I am content to leave well enough alone on the
bird articles.

The primary battle ground seems to be with mammals.  Lower case seems to
be a less heated issue with lower fauna.  I'd like to see stronger
authorities in the specific case of mammals.

Ec


subject: [WikiEN-l] There WAS an attack, Stan

body:
On 6/4/03 2:39 PM, "Tony Wilson" <list at redhill.net.au> wrote:

> There WAS an attack, Stan. Did you miss it?.
>
> It was a unilaterial, sustained, and deliberate attempt to flout the
> naming conventions that we have already discussed and agreed on long
> since. One particular "contributor" (who, needless to add, has no known
> track record of adding to the fauna articles) went on a one-man revert
> rampage, even stooping to cut & paste page moves. This went on for
> several hours and succeeded only in wasting a great deal of the time of
> genuine contributors. (Not just me.) It took the combined efforts of
> several Wikipedians to restore the sometimes quite ugly hacks.
>
> We have long since decided on naming conventions for birds and mammals.
> The question is what are we doing with reptiles, fish, and other taxa?
> The sooner that is decided on, the sooner we can stop wasting time on
> jaw-jaw and get on with improving the 'pedia without distraction and
> without fear of having to re-do masses of stuff.

Hooray! Thank goodness for your decisive command and warm attitude.


from_name: a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: User:Harry Potter

body:
> From: "Eugene Gill" <minty at keergill.screaming.net>
>
> As we have noted, some of the people "correcting" these pages have adopted
> blanket reversions on account of a very povie view that fact and fantasy are
> two distinct categories

The view that fact and fantasy are distinct is POV?

I fail to see how an encyclopedia can possibly function without such
an (obviously-correct) distinction.

Evercat
--
Allan Crossman
a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk
http://dogma.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] A clarificaton for Toby

body:
Tannin wrote:

>It was birds *and* mammals, Toby. Run your eye back over the lengthy
>discussions two months ago. Just about any post titled "A plea for
>sanity ..."  and signed by me will do as a starting point, but there
>are lots of others. Or simply recall that the entire discussion began
>when I'd just spent two full days researching and writing entries on
>the hopping mice, only to have them buggerised about by people who,
>despite meaning only the best, had made no contribution to them at all.

The discussion on the mailing list made no reference to hopping-mice.
In any case, I just read it all, and it focussed on birds, like I said.
The official compromise by mav referred to both birds and mammals:
<http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002848.html>,
but then mav almost immediately back-pedalled to just birds:
<http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-April/002884.html>.
(Note that he remained agnostic on mammals, not anti-capitalisation
as had been his earlier position.  And I speak only of what mav wrote
on the mailing list, not what he wrote elsewhere or believes now.)

>See http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spinifex_Hopping_Mouse for
>details.

This is a helpful citation, thanks.

It might be useful to give a huge list of mammal books with capitalisation,
similar to the huge list of bird books (the mammal books cited have been few).
For my part, seeing that mav hasn't continued any objections on that page
is sufficient for me to accept that a consensus was reached even for mammals,
among those that work on these articles.

>By the way, the agreed convention is actually nice and simple. Indeed,
>it simply follows the same convention that applies to everything else.
>If the phrase is normally capitalised, then it is always capitalised.

Sure, of course.  So is it normally capitalised?  That's what's disputed.
Perhaps you're responding to an earlier post of mine where I said
that this discussion was more than style, it was a naming convention.
That's because the style choice (whether to capitalise in text)
*affected* the naming convention.  That's what makes this issue:
(A) important; (B) worthy of writing up on a naming conventions page.

I'd like to point out, Tannin, that I'm *not* arguing against capitalisation.
But you need to document the discussions, or it'll come up again and again.

-- Toby


from_name: cprompt

subject: [WikiEN-l] Please post in plaintext

body:
Unless your post specifically requires the use of HTML, could folks from
now on just use plaintext?

Thanks.

--

--cprompt


body:
Michael Becker schrieb:

>I'm not sure what you are implying by making it a meta page.  Please
>elaborate.
>
>
Instead of putting language links, categories, and
who-knows-what-else-we-might-come-up-with into the article, IMHO we
should put it into separate fields in the (a) database, and access this
meta-information via a "special" page that is automatically generated
upon request (aren't they all:-)

Advantages:
* keeps the article text free from meta-information
* avoids check/dropdown items on the article page (less confusing,
especially for newcomers)
* has all meta information in one place
* machine-readable (filter-able, for example)

Disadvantages:
(I don't see any real ones here...)

Magnus


subject: [WikiEN-l] Umlauts in article titles

body:
Mirko Thiessen wrote:

>I just came back from a month of absence from Wikipedia and realised,
>that lots of article titles about German cities, regions etc. have
>been changed from titles WITHOUT umlauts to titles WITH umlauts (e.g.,
>Moelln is M?lln now). I searched in the naming conventions, but I
>didn't find any conventions about this topic. Up to now, I created every
>article without umlauts (that means, with ae instead of ?). How should
>we handle this in the future? Is there a convention, which I was just
>too stupid to find?

I've argued in the past for using whatever spelling is common
in the place itself (rendered into English orthography if Greek, etc).
I mention that only to point out that I'm *not* speaking from that POV now;
rather, I'm explaining the *current* policy (to the best of my ability).

We're supposed to use the spelling generally found in English.
The question then is, what is that spelling?
We've been arguing lately about titles of mammal species' articles,
and this is the same problem -- all agree to use the capitalisation
that one normally finds in English text, but what is that?
In mathematics (and mathematical physics), my own academic fields,
one generally sees names written out with all the various diacritical marks
(and in English we do think of them as diacritical marks).
Thus [[Poincar? conjecture]], not [[Poincare conjecture]].
But for placenames, I can't speak with any authority.

If creating an article myself, I'd place it at a title with the umlaut.
But I doubt that I'd move an article that was placed somewhere else
(especially for old place names, which often have English "translations"
that are more than mere *transliterations* into English orthography).
The really important thing is what Dan said: Create redirects!
Unless the naming conventions address a situation explicitly
(and often even when they do), then one should create redirects
from any title that might reasonably be linked to.

>And what about the sharp s (?)? Should it be used in article titles as
>well, or should it (as I did so far) be replaced with "ss"?

"?" is rarer in English writing than "?" and its friends.
So even if we write [[M?lln]], then we might still decide
that it's more common in English to see [[Sassnitz]].
(Here I'm assuming that the city's name is really "Sa?nitz" in German.
I'm not sure if it is!  I wasn't able to find a clear example.)

-- Toby