from_name: Cary Bass

body:
Greg wrote:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: commons-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:commons-l-
> bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gregory Maxwell
> Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2007 12:03 AM
> To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List
> Subject: [Commons-l] New Java audio player, now with video.
>
> Greetings. Tonight I setup a test version of a new Java based
> install-free player for our Ogg files.
>
> Unlike the prior version it also supports Ogg/Theora Video. It also
> should improve compatibility with some Java implementations such as
> the old Microsoft JVM, and it should have working buffering which
> should make it useful for people with slow or intermittent links where
> the prior player was not.
>
> I was planning on testing it out for a few days before taking it live,
> but the database feel over on toolserver which broke the old player
> anyways. The new player setup is a little more robust against database
> failures.
>
> We still have a server problem which causes large media files to get
> stuck in the cache as zero byte files. If a particular file doesn't
> play for you, it's very likely that the file has been hit with this
> caching bug. This is a long standing bug, but we know the general
> cause now. It just is not fixed yet.
>
> Here is a video example:
> http://tools.wikimedia.de/~gmaxwell/jorbis/commonsJOrbisPlayer2.php?path=V
> ibraphone_Orchestra,_early_1940s.ogg
>
> See, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Video for more.
> Unfortunately most do not yet have a template which provides a direct
> link to the player.
>
> Here is an audio only example:
> http://tools.wikimedia.de/~gmaxwell/jorbis/commonsJOrbisPlayer.php?path=Sc
> arborough+Fair.ogg&wiki=en
>
>
> Feedback is appreciated.
>

It worked perfectly on my system, although there was some considerable
buffering delay.  I rather enjoyed the orchestra, although my first choice
for an example would have been a much shorter selection, like, say:
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~gmaxwell/jorbis/commonsJOrbisPlayer.php?path=Blen
der3D+BouncingSoftbodyBall.ogg

Cary Bass


list: wikien-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Anthony

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Accountability: bringing back a proposal I made
	nearly 2 years ago

body:
On 3/6/07, Sheldon Rampton <sheldon at prwatch.org> wrote:
> Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> > Jimbo knew that Essjay made up false credentials when he made the
> > comment that they were a pseudonym, and he has not to my knowledge
> > retracted that statement.
>
> Since Wikipedia does not currently have a policy stating that users
> should be honest on their user pages, Jimbo's statement was
> consistent with current policy.

The inconsistency I was referring to is between Jimbo and himself, not
Jimbo and current policy.

> The question now is, how should we
> deal with that? By bashing Jimbo? Or by fixing the policy?
>
I don't think policy is broken just because it doesn't explicitly
state that users should be honest on their user pages.  Mentioning
"oh, by the way, don't lie about credentials on your user page"
wouldn't hurt, but I think it goes without saying.

What needs to be dealt with is the fact that Jimbo apparently knew
Essjay was lying on his userpage about being a professor, yet he hired
him, put him on the arb com, and told the New Yorker that he had no
problem with it.

And if this policy is installed, do we even trust that it's going to
be run honestly?  Or is it just going to lead extra credence to these
false credentials?

Another thing that needs to be dealt with is that we have to stop
deleting all the evidence pertaining to the situation.

Anthony


list: wikipedia-l

from_name: David Gerard

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Look Who's Using Wikipedia

body:
On 07/03/07, Steve <subsume at gmail.com> wrote:

> Strong: revolutionary format. collaboration gone right. very decent
> end products. FREE.

NPOV. In my opinion that's much more radical an innovation than merely
letting any idiot edit your website.

- d.


from_name: Bartning at aol.com

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Accountability: bringing back a proposal I made
	nearly 2 years...

body:
In a message dated 3/5/2007 12:58:43 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
jwales at wikia.com writes:

How to  confirm? What counts as confirmation?  What sorts of things need
confirmation? These are very interesting questions, as there are many
types of situations.  But one thing that we have always been very  very
good at is taking the time to develop a nuanced  policy.

I wouldn't say academia should be the only criteria for credibility.   What
about work in field or exposure to it?  Someone who fought in World  War II or
a family member who had their loved one being killed in action  provides
exposure to the topics involved.  Often, historians interview  those involved.
Slavery and the Civil War provide other  examples.

Vincent Bartning
UN: John Wallace Rich

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from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
Hoi.
Wikipedia is very much lacking in all areas.. What Wikipedia are you
talking about; it is not the same situation on all Wikipedias.. On the
English Wikipedia I would say that subjects to do with Africa, Asia and
South America could use a lot of refinement. One topic I think is
worrisome is the lack of a full picture for Iran. It really makes it
easy to paint them as a villain when there is so little public knowledge
about the people, the country and the culture.

The en.wikipedia is strong on Pokemon, when there is an invasion of
these creatures we know all there is to know about them. :)

Thanks,
   GerardM

Frederick Noronha schreef:
> Could someone hazard a guess on which areas the Wikipedia is strong
> in, and which areas it is still lacking? FN
>
>
>> On 3/6/07, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I really don't think "we" all in agreement on what "we" want.
>>>
>>> I do not have a problem with people using Wikipedia as a primary
>>> source for information. When it comes to certain topics, I would
>>> encourage it because I have confidence in our accuracy and wide
>>> coverage.
>>>
>>> However, I would not encourage people to stake their fortune or their
>>> health on Wikipedia at all, and there are certain topics that I would
>>> discourage people from using Wikipedia as a primary source or in some
>>> cases even a secondary source for (pretty much anything related to
>>> Eastern Europe, all of which is still definitely a Work In Progress
>>> when it comes to POV).
>>>
>>> Mark
>>>
>
>
>


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Is editing for payment a fundamentally problematic
	conflict of...

body:
OK, I hope this indents what I'm quoting and responding to.   Otherwise, it's
not going to be clear.  I'll also put a more-than sign  at the end of my
responses.>

In a message dated 3/5/2007 2:47:19 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
delirium at hackish.org writes:

This is a pretty vague definition, but yes, it's the sort of thing I
wouldn't mind seeing expanded.  Note that conflicts of interest can  be
very subtle, though.  If our article on [[autism]] was edited by  someone
paid by a company selling autism drugs, that's a pretty clear  conflict
of interest.  But if it were edited by someone paid by a  non-profit
group like [[Cure Autism Now]], there would also be potential  conflicts
of interest; in particular, Cure Autism Now finds views that  autism
isn't a disease offensive, so would be prone to having those  treated in
an exclusively negative light if at all.  The mythical  independent
editor does not really exist; it's more a matter of  degrees.  I happen
to think that a conscientious editor accepting  money from a source that
might have a conflict of interest is actually low  on the list of
problems.  A PhD in CS editing CS-related articles in  which he has
published extensively is much more in a conflict of interest  (since it
is the very rare professor who has no bias in the field, or any  interest
in career advancement), but we actually encourage  that.

Wikipedia suffers with admins.  I notice a new topic on renaming  them
"janitors," and I plan to review it.  Certainly the poor treatment I  received,
getting attacked, having double standards, with an unfair   blocking begun by an
18 y/o senior in high school on a power trip whose  second language is English,
turns me off and makes me not want to do things  for Wikiipedia.  However, I
had put good work in an article.

There's certainly a problem.  We don't want articles to get worse  rather
than better do we?  Wikipedia's environment seems to  cause editing for the sake
of it rather than for truth, and it  encourages changing no matter what the
cost in some cases, not to mention  there's a lot of unfairness.  In others,
you'd better not touch a cabal's  work or someone who has an admin's or admins'
backing, and many do get paid by  corporations which actively involve their
legal teams.>

However I also think it would be nice if people disclosed the money  they
accepted---along with disclosing other potential conflicts of
interest---so articles could be scrutinized appropriately.  We can  never
actually force that to happen in all cases, but at the moment our
policies actively discourage it, which hardl

I've been actively avoiding Wikipedia's high placement in search  results
lately.  In most cases, the work's worth it, but certainly  confusion has gone
rampant regarding the difference between personal,  unpaid work with
professional, paid work here.  I don't see what I want  about it either.>

Vincent Bartning
UN: John Wallace Rich

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from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
FYI
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/ram/today4_wikipedia_20070307.ram

On 3/7/07, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/7/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Actually they don't seem to define what their counterpart to NPOV is.
> > For example, is it ok to have an article which states all the horrible
> > things that communists have done, and none of the horrible things
> > Americans have done? In any normal, even "conservative" encyclopaedia,
> > this would still be a glaring omission. If you don't define some kind
> > of bounds or some central position, the whole thing just becomes
> > propaganda or worse.
>
> Seriously people, it's called Conservapedia! What do you expect, a
> balanced and neutral look at the world? I mean, any time you name
> something after a political movement, it's going to be biased. I'm not
> going to be that trusting of the
>
> sushi-eating-cappucino-drinking-homosexual-academic-liberal-hollywood-elite-pedia
> either, at least not on stuff like religious topics (even though that
> particular tomb would describe me as a person fairly well ;).
>
> --Oskar
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
In a message dated 3/5/2007 9:44:50 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
nobs03 at gmail.com writes:

There  are various techniques in the Internal Revenue Manual that could  be
employed; for example, reviewing the edit contributions of an employee  of a
non-profit organization, a reasonable estimate of manhours allocated  by that
non-profit organization over a given period of time would meet  standards of
proof to establish income from paid editing, as well as the  activities of
the employer, not to mention possible conflicts of interest,  or violations
of Wikipedia's internal policies.

<Many nonprofits begin for a reason, and experts in the field such as  Jerold
Panas, (_Making the Case_), talk about how it should be the cause and not
profit or money that has importance for nonprofits.  How would you include
founders who don't even get paid in this witch hunt?  What about for-profit
corporations, which I would think is worse since it's just publicity and not a
cause they're more likely after?

Wikipedia itself has backing from a public-benefit charity really, the
Wikimedia Foundation.  However, others in the nonprofit industry have  talked about
how it's money venture - to show self efficiency or  something.

Vincent Bartning>

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body:
In a message dated 3/5/2007 10:21:45 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
william at scissor.com writes:

Yes, and  I think again the journalistic approach is the appropriate one.
Declare  any interests that might be worrisome

<Impartial essays do have their place, but there's also a time when they
detract from the subject.  Taking both sides does not mean being cowed into
silence.>

Vincent Bartning

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from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Accountability: bringing back a proposal I
 made	nearly 2 years ago

body:
Sheldon Rampton wrote:

>David Gerard wrote:
>
>
>>* Don't Climb The Reichstag Dressed As Spiderman To Make A Point
>>* Don't Shove Beans Up Your Nose
>>
>>
>We don't need rules against these actions. It's perfectly fine with
>me if David does them.
>
We probably need a rule to insure that there will be a person available
to take free photographs when he does them. :-)

Ec


body:
In a message dated 3/5/2007 11:15:29 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
michaeldavid86 at comcast.net writes:

This is  very much the way a hospital functions: A combination of paid staff
and  volunteers working together to accomplish the same goal - the best
patient  care possible. How these two groups get along in there interactions
is what  a culture is all about. Acceptance of this culture requires maturity
on the  part of the individual participants - and care and nurturing by  all.

<I don't think that's a good analogy in this day and age.  "In  Wikipedia,
the patients run the hospital" has become a worn out cliche, not to  mention
inappropriate because it's unfair.  We've got to think outside the  box - come up
with something new.

Granted I've experienced a wannabe psychiatric-nurse admin, but the
mental-health system's not supposed to fold in on itself for every reason in the
book, Murphy's Law to the extreme where ignorance and knowledge both lead to
dysfunction.

Many hospitals are nonprofit, but non-profit organizations themselves also
have structures.  We're going to get regional biases besides, being an
international encyclopedia.  Has anyone suggested separating  Wikipedia by country
rather than language, not that it would help mind  you?>

Vincent Bartning
UN: John Wallace Rich

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body:
Ronald Chmara wrote:

>On Mar 6, 2007, at 10:19 PM, Mark Williamson wrote:
>
>
>>The worst of all is that anyone who mentions the increasingly
>>hierarchial structure of our communities and the virtual impunity
>>afforded to certain persons (especially admins in medium-sized Wikis,
>>who often rule like dictators), they are instantly perceived as
>>anti-Wiki and/or paranoid.
>>
>>
><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:IAR> exists for a reason, and for
>me, that reason is to totally bypass bureaucratic wonks and trolls
>who get their rocks off from wiki-lawyering, and constantly
>complaining about process, pet projects, pet issues, etc.
>
It may very well do that, but at the same time it is not there to be
trotted out as an excuse for every POV pusher's actions.

Ec


from_name: Jeff Raymond

subject: [WikiEN-l] Be bold [in updating pages]

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:
> Another fundamental principle that seems to have changed when I wasn't
> looking: "Be bold" is now "Be bold in updating pages". Was it that
> ambiguous?

Yes.  People were being bold in messing with long-standing guidelines and
causing problems.  I wasn't involved in the name change, but it was a good
one.

-Jeff


body:
In a message dated 3/5/2007 11:34:03 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
william at scissor.com writes:

Someone  who does extensive work in CS can edit the 99% of CS articles
where the do  not have a strong conflict of interest. I have absolutely
asked passionate  topic experts, no matter how qualified, to not edit on
their personal pet  projects. There are areas where I have strong
expertise that I don't touch  for the same reason: I'm a partisan.

<Partisanship's different than experience or knowledge.  My example  of a
soldier who fought in World War II provides a good example, as well as of a
former slave.  You're using slippery slopes to justify unfairness and  disrespect.

Vincent>

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
On 3/7/07, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/7/07, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> > FYI
> >
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/ram/today4_wikipedia_20070307.ram
>
> I'm sure that the whole "British spelling is bad!"-thing went over
> real well with the BBC people :D
>
> --Oskar

Yeah, it's great to attack BE spelling on the BBC (it sounded to me like he
was about to say "British spelling" before he changed it).  It's a shame
though, that the deletion issue wasn't explained better (it sounds like Jim
Redmond's comment was cut off) - that the Conservapedia article went through
AFD, and anyway, you shouldn't be "working hard" on a Wikipedia article
about your non-notable website.


body:
In a message dated 3/5/2007 8:10:52 P.M. Pacific Standard Time,
geniice at gmail.com writes:

Given  it's Amazon it won't be open and may well be unlawful to create
our own.  They probably have a patent covering it.

Many sites use a similar approach, a credit card to only verify  identity.

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from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
On 3/7/07, Rob Smith <nobs03 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/6/07, Puppy <puppy at killerchihuahua.com> wrote:
> >
> > It formerly stated he was president of the Christian United States. And
> > oh my, it was a Wikipedian who fixed it.
> >
> > Rob Smith wrote:
> > > On 3/6/07, Puppy <puppy at killerchihuahua.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >> See
> > >> http://www.conservapedia.com/Cold_War  for an example of the
> "quality"
> > -
> > >> or Richard Nixon, unless its been fixed.
> > >>
> > >
> > >
>
>
>
> Hate to disappoint y'all, but diplomatic historians name eras after the
> architects of alliances that keep the peace between major wars.  For
> example, 1792-1812 Age of Napoleon; 1815-1848 Age of Metternich; 1862-1914
> Age of Bismarck; 1919-1939 Age of Wilson; 1945-1972 Age of Churchill; and
> since 1972 the US has become at peace and a trading partner with our
> former
> enemies, so you guessed it, you are today living in the Age of Nixon.  How
> many US Presidents have the honor of an historic Age named after them?
>
> Perhaps the failure of so many to recognize that is the root of so much
> misunderstanding.

I've never heard of any of these terms, except maybe the Age of Napoleon.
Then again, I'm not exactly an expert in the field of diplomatic history -
but still, if these are common terms, I'm wondering why pages like [[Age of
Wilson]] are redlinks.

Johnleemk


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject:
[Wikitech-l] "Planet" feed aggregators ( now running at
 http://WikiBlogPlanet.com/ )

body:
Nick Jenkins wrote:
>>> Oh, I don't know; Sometimes you get some interesting stuff that's not
>>> strictly MediaWiki / Wikipedia / Wikimedia - related.
>> I consider this primarily a strategic tool to improve communication
>> about what we are doing.
>
> Wow, that sounds really quite dull. I read the words "strategic", "communication",
> and "tool" all in the same sentence, and I started to lose consciousness and the
> will to live  :-(

Indeed, I'm not sure what the point of that would be. Who's supposed to
be doing the strategic communicating?

> This stuff is supposed to be fun, and if it's constrained too much, it ceases to
> be fun.

Amen!

What may make sense is to have a couple of topic-filtered feeds (so Erik
can read) and a full one (for the rest of us ;).

> An initial version is already up and running at http://WikiBlogPlanet.com/ ;

Guess you beat me to it; planet.wikimedia.org will be up a bit later.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)


list: commons-l

from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Commons-l] Audio file sizes

body:
On 3/6/07, Edward Z. Yang <edwardzyang at thewritingpot.com> wrote:
> I think this is a great idea and should definitely be investigated. However:
>
> 1. Encoding audio in a lossless codec seems, at least from my
> experience, to be a very CPU intensive process.  WIth our equipment,
> this may or may not be a problem.

Ogg/Flac is very fast, especially on the decode side.  My laptop can
convert a flac to an Ogg/Vorbis file at 45x real time.  Given your
point below and my cpu speed, which I hadn't thought of.. I wouldn't
expect any transcode to take more than 10 seconds. ;) But, that will
have to be fixed.

At some point we'll want to transcode video and for all I could argue
that transcoding audio is fairly cheap, transcoding video is far
less...

> 2. If we encourage losslessly compressed audio, we will probably want to
> increase our maximum upload size. Longer audio clips will easily exceed
> 20 MB, and Spoken Wikipedia usually *must* split up their audio files in
> order to upload them in (whether for better or worse). This also runs up
> with some of HTTPs limitations when it comes to file uploads. An
> anonymous FTP server would be pretty neat, but I doubt it's going to happen.

Ugh. This is a point that we'll have to address.  This is an issue
without lossless upload but more of one with it.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
Steve Bennett wrote:

>On 3/6/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>It's their site, and it seems at least that these rules are consistent
>>with their philosophy.
>>
>>
>Actually they don't seem to define what their counterpart to NPOV is.
>For example, is it ok to have an article which states all the horrible
>things that communists have done, and none of the horrible things
>Americans have done? In any normal, even "conservative" encyclopaedia,
>this would still be a glaring omission. If you don't define some kind
>of bounds or some central position, the whole thing just becomes
>propaganda or worse.
>
It's up to them to determine at what pace such things will evolve, but
at some point failure to do this will make them unable to properly
define their own constituency.  At this point it appears to support some
philosophy of Christian conservatism, and that should sustain it for a
while.  If your example holds water there is ample reason to support its
continued existence.  Religious conservatives tend to acknowledge
immoral acts as a natural part of the leftist landscape, but can be
particularly outraged when their own supporters compund these same acts
with hypocrisy.

Ec


subject:
[WikiEN-l] Study finds that Wikipedia has evolved from an
	oligarchy to a ...

body:
In a message dated 3/6/2007 4:19:22 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
andrew.cady at gmail.com writes:

Please  remember that (if we are to believe the dialogue) Socrates
could have fled,  but chose to drink the hemlock out of respect for
the authority of Athenian  government.  Even where the state murders
to censor critics, its  dictates are not to be resisted.  That is the
mentality of  Plato.

I was citing political science.  Machiavelli, viewed in Italy as their
George Washington for his republican values, also said the people decide  better
about their rulers than princes when they're properly informed in _The
Discourses_.  Moreover, what about my citation of the _Federalist Papers_,  which also
criticizes pure democracy?

The United States still does not directly elect its president, though I
believe there's been improvement with the Electoral College since the Y2K
election.  However, we didn't even directly elect our senators till  the 20th
century.  Democracy and freedom are essentially one and the same,  but as Madison
also said, we must control the effects of liberty, or freedom, on  factions,
essentially "what air is to fire" in _Federalist 10_.  Otherwise,  the minority
get discriminated against, even down to the individual.   Moreover, on
Wikipedia, a majority may be of those who are unwilling or unable  to verify
themselves.  They could be not only the figments of our  imagination but the felons in
society, recently released from prison.

One simple solution, probably more on the accountability topic, would be to
give some sort of notification of verified status.  Other checks and  balances
also appear in order because of the awkwardness of arguments I've seen,
besides the invasion of privacy.  If Wikipedia editing is a community, then  its
community values hit you in the face rather than provide fairness.  Of  course
regional bias also exists.

Vincent

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from_name: Stephen Bain

body:
On 3/5/07, Conrad Dunkerson <conrad.dunkerson at att.net> wrote:
>
> 1: Having these 'verified credentials' visible will INEVITABLY lead to
> incidents of 'I am a verified expert and you are not'. Frankly, I have as
> much problem with Essjay saying, 'we should do it this way because I am an
> expert on theology' AT ALL as with it not being true. We just should not
> be giving greater weight to 'experts' (verified or not). That encourages
> 'original research' and 'POV pushing' on the esoterica of their fields.
> Experts should work by providing relevant citations and establishing
> consensus around text which presents all relevant views... just like
> everyone else. If you give them a special status that inherently becomes
> less likely and there aren't enough admins to patrol every edit against it.

Many people have mentioned this potential drawback, but I suggest that
claims of "I am a verified expert and you are not" will be treated by
the community in exactly the same way that we currently treat "I am an
expert and you are not". In the history of Wikipedia there is, and
always* has been a culture of, not so much anti-expertism, but
anti-people-who-try-to-impose-their-view-just-because-they-have-such-and-such-qualification.

Basically, I think that this part of the culture is so well ingrained
that a verification system is not going to change it.

--
* Go back to, say, the mailing list archives from when they began and
you'll find discussions about our approach to experts, particularly
experts claiming their word must be accepted as gospel simply because
they are an "expert" and getting rebuffed by the community.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com


from_name: Ken Arromdee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Essjay RFC deleted

body:
On Tue, 6 Mar 2007, Gwern Branwen wrote:
> > Essjay is one person out of maybe half a dozen with a similar
>   level of
> > responsibility. 1 out of 6 is quite a high rate...
>
> Come on. That's a [[Hasty generalization]]. What if Essjay hadn't
> messed up? Then we'd have a 0% failure rate!

"If we didn't fail as much as we actually did, we'd have a much lower
failure rate" isn't an interesting deduction.


from_name: Matthew Brown

subject: [WikiEN-l] Essjay RFC deleted

body:
I think the point is - the sample size is too small for any such
statistics to be meaningful.

-Matt


body:
What about merely verifying identity as an option?  I also think some  of the
stuff needs to go, like pseudonyms using WP:DICK or whatever.  Why  is the ad
hominem even there?

Vincent

**************************************
 AOL now offers free
email to everyone.  Find out more about what's free from AOL at
http://www.aol.com.


body:
In a message dated 3/6/2007 8:25:31 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
cunctator at gmail.com writes:

Frankly,  I think one of the benefits of Wikipedia is that it forces people
to become  disabused of Arguments by Authority, to force people to engage in
critical  thinking, etc.

Why? Because it doesn't rely on the lazy trappings of  credentials and
curricula vitae and titles and celebrity endorsement,  etc.

Any credentialling system can be gamed. So why encourage people to  have a
false sense of security about something that isn't really needed for  the
goals of the project?

I disagree.  People do not use critical thinking in their ignoring
authority, and it's not just credentials, it's making a joke out of something  serious
with pseudonyms or using systemic ad hominems such as WP:DICK, not  to mention
the unfair application of standards.

Vincent

**************************************
 AOL now offers free
email to everyone.  Find out more about what's free from AOL at
http://www.aol.com.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
On 3/7/07, charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>
wrote:
>
> Guettarda wrote
>
> > Yeah, it's great to attack BE spelling on the BBC (it sounded to me like
> he
> > was about to say "British spelling" before he changed it).
>
> Interesting argument that the majority of readers are American, so that
> American spelling should be used. What numbers do we have on that? ComScore
> has something; our total readership is in the region of 150m?
>
> Charles

Of course, where do the figures come from?  In addition, how does he come to
the conclusion that Wikipedia editors are 7x more liberal than the average
American?  And does he mean American editors, or all editors?  And how much
more "liberal" is the rest of the world than the average American?

I don't doubt that our editors are more "liberal" than the average American
- we're also probably better educated than the average American, more
computer literate than the average American, better informed than the
average American, and more likely to be non-American than the average
American.  But how does claiming that "dinosaur" is a Latin-root word,
discussing the amount of space on the ark
http://www.conservapedia.com/Dinosaur

and including pix of Jesus riding a dinosaur (gone now, but oh so amusing)
http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Dinosaur&oldid=17255

somehow balance the "liberal bias"?  Since when do conservatives believe
that the opposite of liberal is nut?


from_name: George Herbert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
On 3/7/07, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/7/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Actually they don't seem to define what their counterpart to NPOV is.
> > For example, is it ok to have an article which states all the horrible
> > things that communists have done, and none of the horrible things
> > Americans have done? In any normal, even "conservative" encyclopaedia,
> > this would still be a glaring omission. If you don't define some kind
> > of bounds or some central position, the whole thing just becomes
> > propaganda or worse.
>
> Seriously people, it's called Conservapedia! What do you expect, a
> balanced and neutral look at the world? I mean, any time you name
> something after a political movement, it's going to be biased. I'm not
> going to be that trusting of the
> sushi-eating-cappucino-drinking-homosexual-academic-liberal-hollywood-elite-pedia
> either, at least not on stuff like religious topics (even though that
> particular tomb would describe me as a person fairly well ;).

There's a difference between "We're a quality encyclopedia written
from a political and/or social conservative point of view" and what
Conservapedia is functionally right now.

It would be interesting to see focused POV encyclopedia projects
spring up to offer alternatives to the WP NPOV and what WP systemic
biases do exist (I believe that there's a tendency for both political
and social liberalism among WP editors; I don't believe that it
generally has a negative effect on article NPOV, but it is a mild
systemic bias).

This Conservapedia project is not showing the types of rigor and
scaling that will be required for it to rise to the challenge,
however.

Maybe it will later, but it's not looking hopeful.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


list: foundation-l

from_name: Jonathan Leybovich

subject: [Foundation-l] Index Data Announces Open Content

body:
All,

Index Data, maker of free software tools for
bibliographic data exchange (in particular through the
[[Z39.50]] protocol) has started indexing several open
content projects, including Wikipedia:

http://www.indexdata.dk/opencontent/

The integration with Wikipedia is very basic, however,
and the only useful article metadata that can really
be extracted at this point is the article title.  I'd
like to suggest that we consider allowing the
association of Wikipedia categories with something
like [[Library of Congress Subject Headings]] (I think
something like this was going to be an eventual fruit
of WiktionaryZ).  Though doing so would not
immediately enhance Wikipedia functionally, it would
help Wikipedia conform to the very established
standards and tools in the library sciences world and
therefore enhance its availability to the many people
doing their research primarily through such
mechanisms.

-----------------

Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 09:12:34 -0500
From: Sebastian Hammer <quinn at indexdata.com>
Subject: [Yazlist] Open Content and SRU/Z39.50

Hi guys,

this is a follow-up to an earlier announcement on this
list. We've now
completed the initial setup of our Z/SRU targets for
several open
content sites, specifically the Open Content Alliance,
Wikipedia, DMOZ,
and Project Gutenberg. Our hope is that exposing these
resources through
open information retrieval protocols will allow
libraries and others to
more easily integrate them into applications, portals,
and internet sites.

More details are available at
http://www.indexdata.dk/opencontent/ .

To keep people abreast of new developments, and to
stimulate discussion
about the use and sharing of open content resources in
this way, we have
created a new mailing list. Signup information at
http://lists.indexdata.dk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/oclist/
. We will be
using this list to announce the availablility of new
targets, changes to
setups, etc.

We sincerely hope that you will find these resources
useful, and that
you'll discover new ways to integrate this exciting
content into the way
you deliver services to your users.

All the best,

--Sebastian

--
Sebastian Hammer, Index Data

____________________________________________________________________________________
We won't tell. Get more on shows you hate to love
(and love to hate): Yahoo! TV's Guilty Pleasures list.
http://tv.yahoo.com/collections/265


list: wikimedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Index Data Announces Open Content


from_name: Frederick Noronha

body:
Could someone hazard a guess on which areas the Wikipedia is strong
in, and which areas it is still lacking? FN

> On 3/6/07, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I really don't think "we" all in agreement on what "we" want.
> >
> > I do not have a problem with people using Wikipedia as a primary
> > source for information. When it comes to certain topics, I would
> > encourage it because I have confidence in our accuracy and wide
> > coverage.
> >
> > However, I would not encourage people to stake their fortune or their
> > health on Wikipedia at all, and there are certain topics that I would
> > discourage people from using Wikipedia as a primary source or in some
> > cases even a secondary source for (pretty much anything related to
> > Eastern Europe, all of which is still definitely a Work In Progress
> > when it comes to POV).
> >
> > Mark

--
FN M: 0091 9822122436 P: +91-832-240-9490 (after 1300IST please)
http://fn.goa-india.org  http://fredericknoronha.wordpress.com
What bloggers are saying about Goa: http://planet.goa-india.org/


from_name: Sheldon Rampton

body:
Marc Riddell wrote:

> David isn't the only one having a problem with this. Are you
> talking about a
> "policy" that would be suggested be followed - or a "rule" that, if
> broken,
> would carry punitive consequences?

Wikipedia makes a distinction between "guidelines" and "policies,"
but I'm not aware of a distinction between "rules" and "policies." In
any case, I think honesty should be a policy, and yes, policies on
Wikipedia carry possible punitive consequences. Someone who
repeatedly plagiarizes or is insulting and abusive to others gets
blocked. I don't see why it should be any more controversial to think
Wikipedia should have an explicit honesty policy than to think it
should have a civility policy.

In practice, of course, punitive consequences only kick in when
someone flagrantly violates the policy. Newbie acts of vandalism or
garden-variety sarcasm such as the type that David enjoys don't bring
punitive consequences. I would expect an honesty policy to be handled
in similar fashion. If it is noticed that someone is in minor
violation of the policy, an officious Wikipedian might remind them of
the rule, but actual blocking or other punishment of a user would
only occur in cases where the deception was deemed serious enough to
warrant such action.

Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:

>> The question now is, how should we
>> deal with that? By bashing Jimbo? Or by fixing the policy?
>
> I don't think policy is broken just because it doesn't explicitly
> state that users should be honest on their user pages.  Mentioning
> "oh, by the way, don't lie about credentials on your user page"
> wouldn't hurt, but I think it goes without saying.

The contrast between Marc's comment and Anthony's demonstrates the
need for an honesty policy. Marc seems to think that requiring users
to be honest on their user pages is so onerous that we have to fear
the punitive consequences. Anthony, by contrast, thinks the rule is
so obvious that it "goes without saying."

In fact, it *doesn't* go without saying. In the absence of a
generally agreed-upon policy, it *isn't* self-evident that users need
to be honest on their user pages. Jimbo's original statement in which
he equated deception about academic credentials with having a
pseudonym shows that even he was confused on this point. Many of the
comments that other Wikipedians have made during the Essjay incident
show that they also regard "disinformation" as acceptable.

There's a reason for this confusion: The internet is different from
the real world, and it operates according to different rules that
make deception both easier and more socially acceptable. In the real
world, 14-year-old boys do not pretend to be 24-year-old lingerie
models. By contrast, many places on the internet -- Second Life, for
example -- not only tolerate but encourage living a fantasy life with
an elaborately falsified biography. There is a natural tendency for
this sort of behavior to bleed over into Wikipedia and for people to
therefore think that it's okay for them to live out their fantasy
lives here as well. I've seen a number of cases in which people have
done this. It's not just Essjay, but as the Essjay incident
illustrates, it's not harmless, which is why a policy ought to
clarify that Wikipedia is not Second Life and honesty is expected here.

As I've stated previously, this does not have to eliminate humor or
creativity on user pages. A bright line can be drawn between those
practices and deliberate deception.

--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
|     Banana Republicans
|     The Best War Ever
--------------------------------
|  Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting:
|  http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html
|
|  Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting:
|  https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118
--------------------------------


subject: [Wikitech-l] AJAX and .aspx as technologies for MediaWiki?

body:
On 3/7/07, Sheldon Rampton <sheldon at prwatch.org> wrote:
> Simetrical wrote:
>
> > I don't think it's realistic to
> > expect total lack of change in the parser anyway: often it's a good
> > idea to tweak parser output slightly to add new classes, style things
> > a bit better, or whatever.
>
> I think it helps to break things down conceptually into three
> categories: input format, storage format, and output format.
>
> STORAGE format should be extremely well-defined and stable, hence XML.
>
> There could be (and probably should be) a variety of INPUT formats:
> wikitext, WYSIWYG, etc., each of which is defined through conversion
> rules that turn them back and forth into the storage format.
>
> The could also be a variety of OUTPUT formats. In addition to the
> current HTML, there could also be an audio output format, a "plain
> text" format, maybe a "summary" format (consisting of the lead
> paragraph and a table of contents for the rest), and probably some
> others I haven't thought of. Again, these would be defined through
> conversion rules.
>
> I imagine there would be some third-party development of input and
> output formats for a variety of uses.

XML is more of a data interchange than storage format.  If you're
storing data, and the software which is using it is the only source or
destination, there is no clear reason why one would use XML, unless
you're using it for data structure.  But MW currently needs no
structure; you're either storing metadata (in the db) or the
article/page contents (text, with some output parsing, but just text;
also in the DB, but only for convenience of access).

If the parser is going to stay the same, then there's no reason to
change the storage format to something which requires an intermediate
parser before the output parser.

If one wants to input different formats, then they can be parsed into
the Wikitext test file via the input parser.

If one was going to write a whole new Wiki tool with Mediawiki's
general performance from scratch, then it might make sense to
reconsider whether a neutral, interchange oriented storage format like
XML makes sense.  But you'd really have to see what you're talking
about doing interchange with and how, to see if it's worth it or just
pointless overhead.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
On 3/7/07, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/7/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > There's a difference between "We're a quality encyclopedia written
> > from a political and/or social conservative point of view" and what
> > Conservapedia is functionally right now.
> >
> > It would be interesting to see focused POV encyclopedia projects
> > spring up to offer alternatives to the WP NPOV and what WP systemic
> > biases do exist (I believe that there's a tendency for both political
> > and social liberalism among WP editors; I don't believe that it
> > generally has a negative effect on article NPOV, but it is a mild
> > systemic bias).
>
>
> dKosopedia is one such project.  It has been around since April 2004, with
> the following philosophy:
>
> "The dKosopedia is written from a left/progressive/liberal/Democratic point
> of view while also attempting to fairly acknowledge the other side's take"
>
> http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Oh, good, something new to look at.  Thanks for the pointer.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


body:
On 3/7/07, Jared Williams <jared.williams1 at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I did initially think this was a way to go, but after attempting to
> implement it (using WikiCreole markup), I think you need to store both.
> Store wikitext, and cache the intermediary XML.
>
> Wikitext to XML back to wikitext for editing will lose something. Things
> like optional whitespace would be removed.

What is more important:

Storing exactly what the user submits
or
Storing a stable representation which should produce the same output
for all time

Especially if there were an 'edit xml mode' which passed through
strict validation but not conversion which allowed very deterministic
editing, I'm not sure that it matters if what was in the edit box is
what is stored.

Being able to get the exact wikitext submitted from an edit 5 years
old does you no good when the parser has changed in a way which
defines previously ambiguous behavior in a way that breaks the old
revision.


from_name: Thomas Dalton

subject: [WikiEN-l] Essjay RFC deleted

body:
> I wasn't aware that we had identified anothe 5 users who had falsified
> credentials, but even so your inference is somewhat strangely
> backwards.  It means that if we had identified only one other the rate
> of 1 in 2 would be even worse!  The more important and useful statistic
> is the number of thes people as a ratio of total editors.

I didn't say there are another 5 editors with falsified credentials, I
said there are another 5 editors with a similar level of
responsibility to Essjay. There was only such a big outcry about this
because of Essjay's position in the community, so any statistics
should be about those people in similar positions, not the whole of
the community.


from_name: Andre Engels

subject: [Wikitech-l] live feed + worse

body:
On the Dutch Wikipedia we found a site that gets live feeds from the Dutch
Wikipedia, and posts them without mentioning Wikipedia or the GFDL, and
replacing all occurences of 'Wikipedia' by the site name. Is this the right
place to ask for them to get blocked? The site is at
http://www.jan-karel.nl/Speciaal:Recentchanges.

--
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels


subject: [Wikitech-l] Subversion server upgrade

body:
I'm upgrading Subversion to 1.4.3 on the server; theoretically if I
upgrade the repository this can same some disk space as well though I'm
not going to do that just yet.

Might be some brief repo downtime.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)


from_name: GerardM

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Some good news

body:
Hoi,
After the bad news of the last week, there was a really great article on the
BBC-website .. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.
Thanks,
    GerardM

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6422877.stm


from_name: Rob Smith

body:
On 3/7/07, Bartning at aol.com <Bartning at aol.com> wrote:
>
>
> In a message dated 3/5/2007 11:15:29 A.M. Pacific Standard Time,
> michaeldavid86 at comcast.net writes:
>
> This is  very much the way a hospital functions: A combination of paid
> staff
> and  volunteers working together to accomplish the same goal - the best
> patient  care possible. How these two groups get along in there
> interactions
> is what  a culture is all about. Acceptance of this culture requires
> maturity
> on the  part of the individual participants - and care and nurturing
> by  all.
>
>
>
>  the patients run the hospital" has become a worn out cliche, not
> to  mention
> inappropriate because it's unfair.  We've got to think outside the  box -
> come up
> with something new.
>
> Granted I've experienced a wannabe psychiatric-nurse admin, but the
> mental-health system's not supposed to fold in on itself for every reason
> in the
> book, Murphy's Law to the extreme where ignorance and knowledge both lead
> to
> dysfunction.
>
> Many hospitals are nonprofit, but non-profit organizations themselves also
> have structures.  We're going to get regional biases besides, being an
> international encyclopedia.  Has anyone suggested separating  Wikipedia by
> country
> rather than language, not that it would help mind  you?>
>
> Vincent Bartning
> UN: John Wallace Rich
>
>

**************************************
 AOL now offers free
> email to everyone.  Find out more about what's free from AOL at
> http://www.aol.com.

The point here is paid employees of a non-profit entity with an agenda
evidenced by initiating internal processes of dispute resolution.  This is
something not addressed in any policies anywhere.  ( 1 ) They are agents of
a non-profit entity; ( 2 ) volunteers in dispute have no disclosure as to *
whom* they are in dispute with; ( 3 ) the dispute may not be initiated for
the purposes of improving articles or writing an encyclopedia; ( 4 ) what
protections do volunteer editors, acting in good faith, have against being
targeted and publicly defamed by a non-profit entity with a political
agenda?


from_name: Simetrical

body:
On 3/7/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> What is more important:
>
> Storing exactly what the user submits
> or
> Storing a stable representation which should produce the same output
> for all time

I don't see that as the difference here.  There are only very slight
backwards incompatibilities that have ever been introduced into the
parser; mostly it just gets new stuff added to it, rather than old
stuff changed.  A page from 2003 would be parsed and displayed now
roughly as it was when first written.  Any differences would be pretty
minor, nothing to be concerned about.  I don't think it's realistic to
expect total lack of change in the parser anyway: often it's a good
idea to tweak parser output slightly to add new classes, style things
a bit better, or whatever.

As I see it, the advantages of XML wouldn't be stability, but
well-definedness and speed.  Third parties could reliably manipulate
the data to produce identical results, and they could do so using
standardized and so reasonably optimized XML parsers.  Parsing time
for us would drop from 800 ms to what, on the order of 100 us-10 ms?
Perhaps most usefully, JS could also manipulate the XML tree, and so
could potentially produce a nice clean WYSIWYG editor that would have
exactly the same output as the actual parser.

I don't really think it would be acceptable to have failure of
round-tripping.  It's not that it's a problem that what's submitted
isn't what's saved, it's the problem that what's loaded by the client
isn't what's saved.  Merely touching a page, a null edit, could
noticeably affect the page's display if we don't guarantee correct
round-tripping.  And the changes wouldn't show up in a wikitext diff,
either.  I don't view that as an acceptable option.


from_name: Steve Sanbeg

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Wiki XML (was Re: AJAX and .aspx as technologies for
	MediaWiki?)

body:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2007 15:33:13 +0000, Jared Williams wrote:

>
>> Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Absolutely, many individual parts need reworking, and some
>> major parts
>> > (such as Parser) could use a total rewrite.  But individual
>> parts need
>> > reworking, not the whole thing.
>>
>> My personal opinion is that the code should be rewritten so
>> that articles are still largely *edited* in wikitext but get
>> *stored* as XML. This would present several advantages:
>

That seems like it would be a long way off, and would require some
intermediate steps first.  I.e. modify the parser to allow an extension to
change the output format, so the parser parses the syntactic elements,
then allows a renderer to render them.

Then write an XML extension, and something to convert the XML to wikitext.
I think this would be pretty useful.  Currently we have ambiguous
wikitext, and lose information when it's converted to HTML.  It would be
nice to have something that's unambiguous and reversible.

> I did initially think this was a way to go, but after attempting to
> implement it (using WikiCreole markup), I think you need to store both.
> Store wikitext, and cache the intermediary XML.
>
> Wikitext to XML back to wikitext for editing will lose something. Things
> like optional whitespace would be removed.

Why not just encode them?  It shouldn't be any worse than encoding the
begin/end of line markers that you'd need to handle lists/tables in
templates.  It may be a bit ugly, but the ugliness wouldn't be hidden away
so deeply.


subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
On 3/7/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dividing the world into USA and not-USA is not a very
> neutral classification...

Dividing the world into Sec. 230 content and non-Sec. 230 content is not
neutral either:

"An American citizen who posts material on the Internet that is illegal in a

foreign country could be prosecuted if he subjected himself to the
jurisdiction of that

country or of another country whose extradition laws would allow for his
arrest and

deportation. However, under American law, the United States will not
extradite a person

for engaging in a constitutionally protected activity even if that activity
violates a

criminal law elsewhere."

http://www.rjayco.com/obrien/nazism.pdf


body:
Simetrical wrote:

> I don't think it's realistic to
> expect total lack of change in the parser anyway: often it's a good
> idea to tweak parser output slightly to add new classes, style things
> a bit better, or whatever.

I think it helps to break things down conceptually into three
categories: input format, storage format, and output format.

STORAGE format should be extremely well-defined and stable, hence XML.

There could be (and probably should be) a variety of INPUT formats:
wikitext, WYSIWYG, etc., each of which is defined through conversion
rules that turn them back and forth into the storage format.

The could also be a variety of OUTPUT formats. In addition to the
current HTML, there could also be an audio output format, a "plain
text" format, maybe a "summary" format (consisting of the lead
paragraph and a table of contents for the rest), and probably some
others I haven't thought of. Again, these would be defined through
conversion rules.

I imagine there would be some third-party development of input and
output formats for a variety of uses.

--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
|     Banana Republicans
|     The Best War Ever
--------------------------------
|  Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting:
|  http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html
|
|  Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting:
|  https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?id=1118
--------------------------------


from_name: Vadlamani, Kalyan

subject: [Wikitech-l] reg authentication plugin

body:
Hi,

     I created an external authentication plug-in to get mediawiki
authenticated against external database...it works!!! I want mediawiki
to automatically add the user once he/she is authenticated to its local
database, and disable login/create user form. Any ideas how I should go
about implementing this? Thanks in advance/

Regards,

Kalyan


from_name: Cormac Lawler

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Some good news

body:
On 3/7/07, GerardM <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> After the bad news of the last week, there was a really great article on the
> BBC-website .. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.
> Thanks,
>     GerardM
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/6422877.stm

Thanks very much for this, Gerard.

"Dr Pratt, who teaches on the Middle East for students taking a
Masters in international relations and development, has built her
course around Wikipedia."

Interesting field of study to be analysing in the context of Wikipedia.. :-)

Cormac


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Subversion server upgrade

body:
Rob Church wrote:
> On 07/03/07, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
>> I'm upgrading Subversion to 1.4.3 on the server; theoretically if I
>> upgrade the repository this can same some disk space as well though I'm
>> not going to do that just yet.
>
> Just pinch some cash for another disk...

It's the principle of the thing. ;)

Software upgrade is complete, btw. (Older clients should still read the
existing repository just fine.)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)


from_name: Guettarda

subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
On 3/7/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> There's a difference between "We're a quality encyclopedia written
> from a political and/or social conservative point of view" and what
> Conservapedia is functionally right now.
>
> It would be interesting to see focused POV encyclopedia projects
> spring up to offer alternatives to the WP NPOV and what WP systemic
> biases do exist (I believe that there's a tendency for both political
> and social liberalism among WP editors; I don't believe that it
> generally has a negative effect on article NPOV, but it is a mild
> systemic bias).

dKosopedia is one such project.  It has been around since April 2004, with
the following philosophy:

"The dKosopedia is written from a left/progressive/liberal/Democratic point
of view while also attempting to fairly acknowledge the other side's take"

http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Main_Page

This Conservapedia project is not showing the types of rigor and
> scaling that will be required for it to rise to the challenge,
> however.
>
> Maybe it will later, but it's not looking hopeful.
>
>
> --
> -george william herbert
> george.herbert at gmail.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2007 11:58:53 -0500, Simetrical wrote:

> On 3/7/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> What is more important:
>>
>> Storing exactly what the user submits
>> or
>> Storing a stable representation which should produce the same output
>> for all time
>
> I don't see that as the difference here.  There are only very slight
> backwards incompatibilities that have ever been introduced into the
> parser; mostly it just gets new stuff added to it, rather than old
> stuff changed.  A page from 2003 would be parsed and displayed now
> roughly as it was when first written.  Any differences would be pretty
> minor, nothing to be concerned about.  I don't think it's realistic to
> expect total lack of change in the parser anyway: often it's a good
> idea to tweak parser output slightly to add new classes, style things
> a bit better, or whatever.
>

I think that's due in large part because the data depends on that.  If you
fix the parser, you break the data.  that would be bad, so better to
support the parser bug, for the sake of data that depends on it.  If data
suddenly became resilient to parser changes, the parser could change more
than it does now.

> As I see it, the advantages of XML wouldn't be stability, but
> well-definedness and speed.  Third parties could reliably manipulate
> the data to produce identical results, and they could do so using
> standardized and so reasonably optimized XML parsers.  Parsing time
> for us would drop from 800 ms to what, on the order of 100 us-10 ms?
> Perhaps most usefully, JS could also manipulate the XML tree, and so
> could potentially produce a nice clean WYSIWYG editor that would have
> exactly the same output as the actual parser.
>

Unlocking the data from a particular implementation so it could be
reliably manipulated would be nice, and consistent with the Foundation's
goals.

> I don't really think it would be acceptable to have failure of
> round-tripping.  It's not that it's a problem that what's submitted
> isn't what's saved, it's the problem that what's loaded by the client
> isn't what's saved.  Merely touching a page, a null edit, could
> noticeably affect the page's display if we don't guarantee correct
> round-tripping.  And the changes wouldn't show up in a wikitext diff,
> either.  I don't view that as an acceptable option.

I agree.  I don't think XML is inherently less expressive than wiki, so
should be workable.

But the complexities won't be things like encoding whitespace, so much as
handling templates; especially with things like that subst: bug, where we
allow data to be polluted with weird meta templates, rather than ad new
features that would encourage behavior we don't like, or break existing
data by fixing a bug in the code.


from_name: Ray Saintonge

subject: [Foundation-l] Update of Foundation organization

body:
Oldak Quill wrote:

>On 06/03/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>>This is naive.  I am very much in support of of maximum volunteer
>>input.  You cannot oblige anybody to work a specified number of hours
>>per week unless they are getting something out of it.  That something
>>may still be intangible, like personal satisfaction, instead of money;
>>pure altruism is unlikely to be enough.
>>
>>
>Surely those who volunteer their time and energy to Wikimedia projects
>are in some way committed to what the Foundation is trying to achieve?
>If this is the case, then most of our volunteers *do* get satisfaction
>out of their work. I don't think this satisfaction would disappear if
>they started being asked to do tasks rather than electing to do them.
>Volunteers would volunteer to their own areas of interest, after all.
>Perhaps I misunderstand you?
>
The range of task available to be done on Wikipedia.  Very few of us
will find that even a norrowly defined box of tasks is ever exhauted.
It is a mistake to think that because you can adapt to having a larger
box of tasks handed to you, others will react the same way to such
circumstances.  Someone's refusal to expand his box of tasks does not
imply a lessened committment to Wikipedia.  You can ask volunteers to do
additional tasks, but you cannot oblige them to do those tasks.

>>When you start to hassle them
>>by phone or whatever they're more likely to say, "Screw you!" and go
>>away.
>>
>>
>If someone volunteers to a position that involves phone communication
>then they I would guess that they'd understand why it was necessary.
>I'm not denying that they'd sometimes get annoyed.
>
Very few of us have volunteered to be involved in telephone communication.

>Similarly, I feel committed to what the Foundation is aiming to
>achieve. I started to get involved with Wikimedia by editing articles
>on Wikipedia. I was pleased to be adding to a free encyclopedia. I
>loved the fact that what I added could be adapted and reused without
>ever becoming unfree. I slowly began to appreciate the aims of the
>Foundation on a far more philosophical level. It is this kind of
>philosophical commitment that allows me to stand in the cold for a
>couple of hours and would allow me to be relied upon in a specified
>voluntary position.
>
Philosophical committment comes with time, but a volunteer must still
give priority to real life.

Ec


from_name: Pedro Sanchez

subject: [WikiEN-l] Essjay RFC deleted

body:
On 3/7/07, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Mar 2007, Gwern Branwen wrote:
> > > Essjay is one person out of maybe half a dozen with a similar
> >   level of
> > > responsibility. 1 out of 6 is quite a high rate...
> >
> > Come on. That's a [[Hasty generalization]]. What if Essjay hadn't
> > messed up? Then we'd have a 0% failure rate!
>
> "If we didn't fail as much as we actually did, we'd have a much lower
> failure rate" isn't an interesting deduction.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

half a dozen is a too low number. There is over 50 people with
potential access to checkuser, oversight if you count all wikis. So
it's 1 out of 50.  Number increases many times more if you count
bureaucrats and other positions above sysop

Recall that english wikipedia is not equivalent to wikipedia.


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Wiki XML (was Re: AJAX and .aspx as technologies
	forMediaWiki?)

body:
George Herbert wrote:

> XML is more of a data interchange than storage format.  If you're
> storing data, and the software which is using it is the only source or
> destination, there is no clear reason why one would use XML, unless
> you're using it for data structure.  But MW currently needs no
> structure; you're either storing metadata (in the db) or the
> article/page contents (text, with some output parsing, but just text;
> also in the DB, but only for convenience of access).

Actually, though, its "text with some output parsing" uses wikitext
as a shorthand for HTML, so it *does* have a data structure. You just
have to parse it to get the structure. So why not use a data
structure that is already close to HTML and that is a widely-accepted
standard rather than the idiosyncratic shorthand of wikitext?

> If the parser is going to stay the same, then there's no reason to
> change the storage format to something which requires an intermediate
> parser before the output parser.

I think there's a feeling already that the parser *shouldn't* stay
the same. It works, but it is the result of an original idea that has
been repeatedly hacked and modified to the point that it has become
unwieldy and imprecise in its ability to map unambiguously to HTML.
Since it needs a rewrite anyway, why not be forward-looking and
ambitious and rewrite with an eye to better standardization and
reusability?

--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
|     Banana Republicans
|     The Best War Ever
--------------------------------
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|
|  Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting:
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--------------------------------


from_name: David Gerard

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: And now for the good news (coverage)

body:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6422877.stm

Students assessed with Wikipedia

Students at a UK university are working on the Wikipedia online
encyclopedia as part of their degree course.
Postgraduates at the University of East Anglia are being assessed as
they edit existing Wikipedia articles and research and write their own
pieces.
[...]
Politics lecturer, Nicola Pratt, says using Wikipedia can develop
students' research skills.

(spotted by GerardM on wikipedia-l)

- d.


from_name: George Herbert

body:
On 3/7/07, Sheldon Rampton <sheldon at prwatch.org> wrote:
> George Herbert wrote:
>
> > XML is more of a data interchange than storage format.  If you're
> > storing data, and the software which is using it is the only source or
> > destination, there is no clear reason why one would use XML, unless
> > you're using it for data structure.  But MW currently needs no
> > structure; you're either storing metadata (in the db) or the
> > article/page contents (text, with some output parsing, but just text;
> > also in the DB, but only for convenience of access).
>
> Actually, though, its "text with some output parsing" uses wikitext
> as a shorthand for HTML, so it *does* have a data structure. You just
> have to parse it to get the structure. So why not use a data
> structure that is already close to HTML and that is a widely-accepted
> standard rather than the idiosyncratic shorthand of wikitext?

Right now, we don't have transform-for-edit, we have
minor-transform-on-save, and transform -on-display.  But what you see
to edit is what is in the DB.

I have no inherent problems with another backend, or being able to
edit in HTML or whatnot, but a lot of the way MediaWiki is built is
built around the idea that we give people friendly Wikitext to edit
not raw HTML, which is beyond most normal people's tech knowledge.

Unless you're proposing that we stop using Wikitext, then it's in the
system somewhere, and the no-transform-to-edit and
minor-transform-to-save features are useful.

Essentially, right now we're optimized for editing.  Structurally, we
could do an intermediate closer to HTML and do less
transform-on-display, but to do that and keep Wikitext would require
transform-on-edit and transform-on-save, which we basically don't have
to do now.

I can see an argument that optimizing for display makes sense,
operationally, but to some degree the HTTP cacheing in the site setup
renders the engine's display behavior slightly less critical.

If we introduce major code effort in the new major transform
functions, then that's a pretty big investment to be making.

I'm not saying "bad idea", but I don't see the value yet from the
discussion.  I am listening, though 8-)

> > If the parser is going to stay the same, then there's no reason to
> > change the storage format to something which requires an intermediate
> > parser before the output parser.
>
> I think there's a feeling already that the parser *shouldn't* stay
> the same. It works, but it is the result of an original idea that has
> been repeatedly hacked and modified to the point that it has become
> unwieldy and imprecise in its ability to map unambiguously to HTML.
> Since it needs a rewrite anyway, why not be forward-looking and
> ambitious and rewrite with an eye to better standardization and
> reusability?

There's a difference between "we need a new parser" and "we need a new
front end parser, store-to-wikitext parser, and wikitext-to-store
parser", and "we need a new parser and replacement for Wikitext".

If Wikitext is a required feature, and I think that practically it is,
then the middle case is a whole lotta pain and suffering.  Just a new
from scratch Wikitext parser is a lot easier.

--
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com


subject:
[Wikitech-l] "Planet" feed aggregators ( now running at
	http://WikiBlogPlanet.com/ )

body:
On 07/03/07, Nick Jenkins <nickpj at gmail.com> wrote:

> An initial version is already up and running at http://WikiBlogPlanet.com/ ; (If that
> URL doesn't work for you, leave it 24 hours for the DNS to propagate, & then try again).
> To start with, it's based on Angela's blog list ( http://wikiangela.com/wiki/Blogs ),
> including everything in the "Wikipedia/Wikimedia/MediaWiki" category, everything in the
> "Wiktionary" category, everything in the "Wikia" category, and a handful of things from
> the "Miscellaneous" category. Anything that I couldn't get a feed in English for was
> omitted. Also there are tend to be a _lot_ more blogs about the social aspects of wikis,
> and far fewer about the technical aspects, so the I've tried to include all the
> technical ones, but haven't included all the social ones from the "Miscellaneous"
> category, to try and get some semblance of balance between technical and social.

Nice one!

- d.


from_name: Jim Wilson

body:
> We already have several instances of this happening:

Here's another one: automagical removal of attribute tags.  Try these:
*
whatever
 or
* some text

Notice how the 'class' and 'href' attributes hare stripped at submission
time.

On 3/7/07, Mark Clements <gmane at kennel17.co.uk> wrote:
>
> "Simetrical" <Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com>
> wrote in message
> news:7c2a12e20703070858l553205fcmeae3c833c7cac34a at mail.gmail.com...
>
> > I don't really think it would be acceptable to have failure of
> > round-tripping.  It's not that it's a problem that what's submitted
> > isn't what's saved, it's the problem that what's loaded by the client
> > isn't what's saved.  Merely touching a page, a null edit, could
> > noticeably affect the page's display if we don't guarantee correct
> > round-tripping.  And the changes wouldn't show up in a wikitext diff,
> > either.  I don't view that as an acceptable option.
>
> We already have several instances of this happening:
>
> 1) Expanding signatures: ~~~~
> 2) Pipe trick: [[Help:Contents|]]
> 3) {{subst:Page}}
> ...and maybe others.
>
> I don't think it's as big a problem as you think.  Large changes (e.g.
> entering wiki markup and getting back XML markup) would of course be a Bad
> Thing. but so long as the rendering of the page isn't altered by null-edit
> round-tripping, I don't think it matters too much if trivial changes (e.g.
> whitespace) occur in the wiki text.
>
> - Mark Clements (HappyDog)
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] CSPAN copyright

body:
According to an "email release" CSPAN is going to shift to a cc-by-nc type
license.  Not quite good enough for us to use, but certainly a nice step.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/3/7/1522/54537


from_name: John Vandenberg

subject: [WikiEN-l] Rename admins to janitors

body:
On 3/7/07, xaosflux <xaosflux at gmail.com> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ray Saintonge" <saintonge at telus.net>
>...
> > MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote:
> > > People who ask admins/sysops to make editorial decisions are simply unaware
> > > of their role. Instead of causing loads of work by renaming the position, it
> > > would IMO be more effective to educate the others. People who make editorial
> > > decisions about writing are usually called editors. Should we rename that
> > > term too?
> >
> > The name change process should not be a problem, as it would happen
> > gradually.  Admins did used to be called sysops, and that term has not
> > completely died out.  Applying to be a jamitor could be renamed "Request
> > for Brooms".
>
> I'd be fine with renaming it back to sysop if it would help specify that it
> is more of a technical role then a management one.

However, administrators are performing roles that are in effect
editorial in nature; e.g. decisions at Afd and DRV to name just two.
Changing the name of this role wont significantly decrease the
perception of power/influence; it is real and as more and more new
articles are being thrown on Afd, I expect that new users often form
their first impressions of "administrators" due to an editorial
judgement.

The current climate is at odds with [[Wikipedia:Administrators]]:

"From early on, it has been pointed out that administrators should
never develop into a special subgroup of the community but should be a
part of the community like anyone else."

I'd like to throw in a more radial idea to this renaming discussion.
Maybe we can separate the editorial roles out from the current
administrator role, and call the new role "editor at-large",
Custodian, or similar.  This separation is already in practise at DRV
where usually senior administrators make the final decision.  The role
of a sysop is then to perform technical actions where a clear policy
exists, or based on the decision of a custodian.  This role would be
primarily more attractive to a different set of people like
developers, bot operators, or people who just want to clear backlogs
and don't really want to be held responsible for having made a bad
editorial decision.

To restore the level playing field, the administrator "bit" could then
be given to anyone who has been "active" for a six months stretch (100
edits/month?), and has maintained a defined "editing rate" (100 edits
in the *last* month seems sufficient) without a formal objection being
raised by another editor.  This ensures the editor has been in regular
and recent contact with lots of other editors, so other editors have
as a collaborative group implicitly and continuously approved of the
"bit".  The first time a user gains the bit, they could be listed on a
NewAdmins list and senior admins could keep an eye on them for strange
happenings.  Less paperwork and less credibility attached to the role
also means it is less of a problem if the bit is revoked because
nobody explicitly vouched for them in an RfA.

If these ideas have been thrashed around already, could someone point
me to the previous discussions.

--
John


from_name: teun spaans

body:
There are many ways in which people can express their respect for fellow
volunteers.
The giving of barn-stars is one of them, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Barnstars That also gives people
"status"

On 3/6/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> On 3/5/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> > You cannot oblige anybody to work a specified number of hours
> > per week unless they are getting something out of it.  That something
> > may still be intangible, like personal satisfaction, instead of money;
> > pure altruism is unlikely to be enough.
>
> What's the difference between having personal satisfaction as the only
> reward and pure altruism?  Even if there's a philosophical difference,
> there doesn't seem to be a practical one.
>
> That said, a common intangible reward for volunteers is status in a
> hierarchical system.  Everything2 has its experience system.  Slashdot
> has its karma system.  The volunteer fire department has probies and
> drivers and officers etc.  The Wikimedia community has some hierarchy,
> but not a lot, and there are strong feelings that it not be used as a
> reward.  It'd be perfectly possible to require all admins to commit to
> 2 hours a week of some particular duty to stay admins, and many people
> would still sign up for adminship, but the culture of Wikimedia is
> such that this would probably cause a huge backlash.
>
> Anthony
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>


from_name: Matthew Brown

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Is editing for payment a fundamentally a problematic
	conflict...

body:
The continual re-hashing of ancient issues in a very partisan way was
getting very tiresome, as well.

-Matt


subject: [WikiEN-l] WikiBlogPlanet

body:
http://wikiblogplanet.com/

Completely unofficial. Run by Nick Jenkins from publicly-available RSS
feeds, announced in
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2007-March/030180.html
- see that post for how to get added, etc.

- d.


from_name: Oskar Sigvardsson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Be bold [in updating pages]

body:
On 3/7/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Another fundamental principle that seems to have changed when I wasn't
> looking: "Be bold" is now "Be bold in updating pages". Was it that
> ambiguous?
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold_in_updating_pages
>
> Steve

I always remembered it that way, "Be bold" is just what we call the
policy, not the actual page title.

In fact, it looks like its been called that since 2004, according to
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Be_bold&action=history

--Oskar


subject:
[Wikitech-l] Wiki XML (was Re: AJAX and .aspx as
	technologiesforMediaWiki?)

body:
On 3/7/07, Sheldon Rampton <sheldon at prwatch.org> wrote:
> So why not use a data structure that is already close to HTML and that is
a
> widely-accepted standard rather than the idiosyncratic shorthand of
wikitext?

Wikitext's 'shorthand' is its strength.  I much prefer to author content in
wikitext than HTML (or anything like it).  Even if I had a WYSIWYG editor,
I'd prefer wikitext hands down.

There's also the added complexity of Templates, tag extension and parser
functions.  All of which make it a hard problem to model (but nobody's
saying it would be easy).

> I think there's a feeling already that the parser *shouldn't* stay
> the same. It works, but it is the result of an original idea that has
> been repeatedly hacked and modified to the point that it has become
> unwieldy and imprecise in its ability to map unambiguously to HTML.

Although I agree that it's "unwieldy", to say that it's imprecise is an
overstatement.  That's what test cases are for - to make sure that it does
precisely what it does every time. (Defining what it _should do_ seems to be
the issue, not its precision in doing so).

Also, wikitext can't map unambiguously to HTML because there are more than
one way of doing things.  In HTML, there is exactly one way to make a
hyperlink: blah.  In Wikitext, there are several ways
including [[whatever]] [url: whatever] and {{:transcluded whatever}} (the
latter will make an edit link or transclude depending on state)

This flexibility is what makes MW syntax great (and complicated).  If MW
only supported HTML or a small variant thereof, it wouldn't be nearly as
popular as it is today.

There are light markup languages that aim to be 100% reversible - but
they're much less powerful, and accordingly, much less popular.

On 3/7/07, Jared Williams <jared.williams1 at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > Since it needs a rewrite anyway, why not be forward-looking and
> > ambitious and rewrite with an eye to better standardization and
> > reusability?
>
> Wikipedia has hundreds millions (guess from numbers of pages  * number of
> revisions) of pages of wiki text, so changing anything substantially is
> going to cause a lot of problems.

I agree wholeheartedly with Jared.  A rewrite shouldn't invalidate
everyone's collective time spent learning the current syntax.  I mean,
that's a whole lot of peoples time you could potentially be wasting.

On 3/7/07, Jared Williams <jared.williams1 at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
> > [mailto:wikitech-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of
> > Sheldon Rampton
> > Sent: 07 March 2007 20:02
> > To: wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Wiki XML (was Re: AJAX and .aspx as
> > technologiesforMediaWiki?)
> >
> > George Herbert wrote:
> >
> > > XML is more of a data interchange than storage format.  If you're
> > > storing data, and the software which is using it is the
> > only source or
> > > destination, there is no clear reason why one would use XML, unless
> > > you're using it for data structure.  But MW currently needs no
> > > structure; you're either storing metadata (in the db) or the
> > > article/page contents (text, with some output parsing, but
> > just text;
> > > also in the DB, but only for convenience of access).
> >
> > Actually, though, its "text with some output parsing" uses
> > wikitext as a shorthand for HTML, so it *does* have a data
> > structure. You just have to parse it to get the structure. So
> > why not use a data structure that is already close to HTML
> > and that is a widely-accepted standard rather than the
> > idiosyncratic shorthand of wikitext?
> >
> > > If the parser is going to stay the same, then there's no reason to
> > > change the storage format to something which requires an
> > intermediate
> > > parser before the output parser.
> >
> > I think there's a feeling already that the parser *shouldn't*
> > stay the same. It works, but it is the result of an original
> > idea that has been repeatedly hacked and modified to the
> > point that it has become unwieldy and imprecise in its
> > ability to map unambiguously to HTML.
>
> That requires fixing the grammar which is ambiguous. Which has already
> been
> ruled out by Brion, at least for the foreseeable future.
>
> > Since it needs a rewrite anyway, why not be forward-looking
> > and ambitious and rewrite with an eye to better
> > standardization and reusability?
>
> Wikipedia has hundreds millions (guess from numbers of pages  * number of
> revisions) of pages of wiki text, so changing anything substantially is
> going to cause a lot of problems.
>
> Jared
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
On 3/7/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Actually they don't seem to define what their counterpart to NPOV is.
> For example, is it ok to have an article which states all the horrible
> things that communists have done, and none of the horrible things
> Americans have done? In any normal, even "conservative" encyclopaedia,
> this would still be a glaring omission. If you don't define some kind
> of bounds or some central position, the whole thing just becomes
> propaganda or worse.

Seriously people, it's called Conservapedia! What do you expect, a
balanced and neutral look at the world? I mean, any time you name
something after a political movement, it's going to be biased. I'm not
going to be that trusting of the
sushi-eating-cappucino-drinking-homosexual-academic-liberal-hollywood-elite-pedia
either, at least not on stuff like religious topics (even though that
particular tomb would describe me as a person fairly well ;).

--Oskar


body:
On 07/03/07, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Nick Jenkins wrote:

> > This stuff is supposed to be fun, and if it's constrained too much, it ceases to
> > be fun.

> What may make sense is to have a couple of topic-filtered feeds (so Erik
> can read) and a full one (for the rest of us ;).

> > An initial version is already up and running at http://WikiBlogPlanet.com/ ;

> Guess you beat me to it; planet.wikimedia.org will be up a bit later.

How wikilike ;-)

- d.


body:
On 3/7/07, Mercenary Wikipedian <mercenarywikipedian at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> What does any of this have to do with Wikipedia? There are already
> policies
> in place regarding NPOV and NPA, and there are multiple dispute resolution
> processes in place to handle serial/chronic non-compliance. What
> protections
> does _anyone_ have against defamation on Wikipedia? Well, if they are the
> subject of an article there is WP:BLP. If they are just an editor and not
> the subject of the article there is the policy mandating No Personal
> Attacks. What makes you think these won't work if people are getting paid?
> Is this an issue of scalability? If so, it seems a little late to be
> worried
> about whether or not the idea of Wikipedia is scalable.
>
> MW
>
> **********
>
> The point here is paid employees of a non-profit entity with an agenda
> evidenced by initiating internal processes of dispute resolution.  This is
> something not addressed in any policies anywhere.  ( 1 ) They are agents
> of
> a non-profit entity; ( 2 ) volunteers in dispute have no disclosure as to
> *
> whom* they are in dispute with; ( 3 ) the dispute may not be initiated for
> the purposes of improving articles or writing an encyclopedia; ( 4 ) what
> protections do volunteer editors, acting in good faith, have against being
> targeted and publicly defamed by a non-profit entity with a political
> agenda?
>
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>

None is addressed in current policies.  And there is evidence Wikipedia is
being used for purposes *other than* writing an encyclopedia, i.e. to target
certain individuals and smear their character.  The Daniel Brandt episode is
one such case.  Stephen Kinsella and the Ludwig von Mises Institute is
another. The Free Congress Foundation and Paul Weyrich is a target for much
questionable content being added, as well as an anonymous editor who
identified himself as a professional journalist and friend of Weyrich
received a community ban for efforts to instill NPOV & fairness in those two
articles.

By contrast, User:Katefan0, aka Kathryn Wolfe of *Scripps Howard* did
precisely the samething as Weyrich's friend, admitted a conflict of interest
prior to initiating official Wikipedia Dispute Resolution Policy, was
promoted to Admin, presented evidence before Arbitrators admitting her
conflict of interest

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Rangerdude/Evidence#Personal_attacks.2C_incivility_and_bullying

yet the Arbs used her evidence against an aggrieved party.  There are
numerous other instances to be cited where a pattern is established that the
intent of some parties, acting as agents of others, are using Wikipedia to
pursue their own aims and not constructively contribute to the encyclopedia.


from_name: Stan Shebs

subject: [WikiEN-l] Autograph pages

body:
Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:
> On 3/8/07, Puppy <puppy at killerchihuahua.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm in favor. Does not facilitate, etc. OTOH, I am ill, and I tend to be
>> less tolerant when I don't feel well, so that may be affecting my attitude.
>>
>
> Lets just politely ask them to stop, and it they do, we leave it
> alone. If they persist, then we'll figure out the next step
>
My pipe dream is to tie it into a status system - for every 1,000 edits
in article space, you get to add one userbox.

Or one could get a little nasty, and publish ratios of user page editing
vs article space editing, give out a "Most Useless Wikipedian" award to
the person at the top of the list.

:-)   ... maybe ...

Stan


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Commons-l] [Wikitech-l] Audio file sizes

body:
Hoi,
Using loss less audio is particularly relevant for the recordings of
pronunciations. For ordinary use having them compressed in a lossy way
is not a problem. The point is that with the Shtooka software that
became available, we are in a position to easily create large amounts of
sound files. These are of relevance to scientists and they have a need
for loss less files. Given that the only identified reason to have loss
less soundfiles ARE the pronunciations, the current upload size would
suffice. They are in effect single words at most a sentence.

Thanks,
    GerardM

Edward Z. Yang schreef:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>
>> What I'd like to see us do instead, is to ask uploaders to send us
>> losslessly compressed Ogg/Flac files instead. Lossless compression
>> because disk space isn't totally irrelevant and to avoid people
>> downloading insanely huge wavs just because they don't want to use the
>> java player or install a codec.  We already permit uploading these
>> lossless audio files they can be easily transcoded to Ogg/Vorbis while
>> preserving all metadata. [snip]
>>
>
> I think this is a great idea and should definitely be investigated. However:
>
> 1. Encoding audio in a lossless codec seems, at least from my
> experience, to be a very CPU intensive process.  WIth our equipment,
> this may or may not be a problem.
>
> 2. If we encourage losslessly compressed audio, we will probably want to
> increase our maximum upload size. Longer audio clips will easily exceed
> 20 MB, and Spoken Wikipedia usually *must* split up their audio files in
> order to upload them in (whether for better or worse). This also runs up
> with some of HTTPs limitations when it comes to file uploads. An
> anonymous FTP server would be pretty neat, but I doubt it's going to happen.
>


subject: [Wikitech-l] Audio file sizes


from_name: James Farrar

subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
On 07/03/07, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/7/07, Guettarda <guettarda at gmail.com> wrote:
> > FYI
> > http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/ram/today4_wikipedia_20070307.ram
>
> I'm sure that the whole "British spelling is bad!"-thing went over
> real well with the BBC people :D

I notice how that's the one point that was ignored, despite it being
the one that's most obviously false (especially in article naming).


from_name: Jared Williams

body:
> Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Absolutely, many individual parts need reworking, and some
> major parts
> > (such as Parser) could use a total rewrite.  But individual
> parts need
> > reworking, not the whole thing.
>
> My personal opinion is that the code should be rewritten so
> that articles are still largely *edited* in wikitext but get
> *stored* as XML. This would present several advantages:

I did initially think this was a way to go, but after attempting to
implement it (using WikiCreole markup), I think you need to store both.
Store wikitext, and cache the intermediary XML.

Wikitext to XML back to wikitext for editing will lose something. Things
like optional whitespace would be removed.

Jared


from_name: charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
Guettarda wrote

>http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/ram/today4_wikipedia_20070307.ram

Andy Schlafly discusses with Jim Redmond. Hmmm.

About:

Common Era dates
Spelling (claims majority of readers are in US)
Christianity in the Renaissance
Americans in Philipines
'WP more liberal than the general public (of US)'
'removal of pro-Christian, pro-American edits'

Schlafly say WP 'run by a mob', uses phrase 'lynch mob'.

Charles

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Conservapedia

body:
Guettarda wrote

> Yeah, it's great to attack BE spelling on the BBC (it sounded to me like he
> was about to say "British spelling" before he changed it).

Interesting argument that the majority of readers are American, so that American spelling should be used. What numbers do we have on that? ComScore has something; our total readership is in the region of 150m?

Charles

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from_name: Steve Sanbeg

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Wiki XML (was Re: AJAX and .aspx as
	technologies	forMediaWiki?)

body:
On Wed, 07 Mar 2007 18:41:47 +0000, Jared Williams wrote:

>> > Store wikitext, and cache the intermediary XML.
>> >
>> > Wikitext to XML back to wikitext for editing will lose
>> something. Things
>> > like optional whitespace would be removed.
>>
>> Why not just encode them?  It shouldn't be any worse than encoding the
>> begin/end of line markers that you'd need to handle lists/tables in
>> templates.  It may be a bit ugly, but the ugliness wouldn't
>> be hidden away
>> so deeply.
>
> I suppose you could.
> There are a few issues tho.
>
> 1, Want the XML to be pretty close to XHTML. At the moment the wikitext is
> transformed to XHTML, with anything complicated (transclusions etc) being
> output as object elements. Encoding optional markup means more work it to a
> browser.
>
> 2, In the final parse for a browser, to resolve the browser unsupported
> object elements, supports transclusion using xpath, so it could complicate
> things there.
>
> Jared

It shouldn't be too difficult to strip unneeded elements out on a
server-side transform, maybe XSLT.  Personally, I'm more interested in
unambiguous and lossless than how close it is to what the browser wants.

It should be possible to get there, either with a server-side post
processing transform, or by making the rendering more modular.  But I
think it would require some intermediate steps, such as making the parser
more module and implementing some kind of XML rendering.


from_name: Fernando Correia

subject: [Wikitech-l] reg authentication plugin

body:
2007/3/7, Vadlamani, Kalyan <kalyan.vadlamani at ttu.edu>:
>      I created an external authentication plug-in to get mediawiki
> authenticated against external database...it works!!! I want mediawiki
> to automatically add the user once he/she is authenticated to its local
> database, and disable login/create user form. Any ideas how I should go
> about implementing this? Thanks in advance/

It is possible. We did just that, but we took a very tortuous way to
avoid patching MediaWiki.

Basically we want our users to be able to go to any page of the wiki,
and authenticate themselves, even if they are not in the wiki users
table. Then we want them to get automatically inserted on this table.
Additionaly, on each login we want their name, email and other
information to be updated on the wiki. Also, we want their numeric ID
on the wiki table to be the same as in our main user table. We were
able to achieve all that and them some.

On initUser() we do a $dbw->commit to write the new user to the
database and run an external function that updates the new user
record, changing its ID (!) to be the same of our internal database,
setting its password and name also from our user table, and so on.
After this we change the $user object in memory so it will reflect the
changes that were made to the database by that external function.

On the authenticate() function, we also call our external function to
update the user name, e-mail, password and so on on the wiki table,
according to the main user table.

We didn't exactly disable the login form, but we call it behind the
scenes through a proxy web form. It simulates a post to the wiki login
form and returns the resulting HTML.

To disable user account creation, there is a setting that you can put
in LocalSettings.php:

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;

It is worth noticing that because of a breaking change in version 1.9,
you may be forced to have allowPasswordChange() return true during
user creation.