subject: [Wikipedia-l] Corrupted backup download

body:
Anyone who downloaded the August 1 backup dumps in the first day or so
may wish to double-check their current table dumps to make sure they're
correct.

If they're 14 bytes long, they're not correct. ;)

I think I've got them fixed now, see http://download.wikipedia.org/ for
links and (hopefully right) md5 checksums.

The old table dumps should not be affected.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikitech-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Using page cache when database is down

body:
Paul Ebermann wrote:

>What about a cached "Recent Changes"?
>
No real benefit I think, since RC updates very very frequently, and
editing tasks are impossible if we can't access the database anyway.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


list: wikien-l

from_name: Steve Vertigo

subject: [WikiEN-l] Search function

body:
Yeah -- getting around is definitely cut down to zero
without searching.  At least add a google redirect
again Brion, Erik... -- have google do the work for a
while.  (of course theres probably a very good reason
to not do this :)

-S-

PS - watchlists -- do they bog things down if lots of
people are caching *all their edits under their
watchlist?

--- K Forstner <kurt.forstner at chello.at> wrote:
> It's definitely '''not''' easy to find articles
> without Wikipedia's search
> facility. I just typed in "[[continental
> breakfast]]", not knowing that such
> an article does not exist (yet) and was referred to
> [[Departments of the
> Continental Army]] (!). This is going to drive away
> both casual users and
> regular contributors. If you type in "[[continental
> breakfast]]" you should
> at least get one of the "breakfast" articles rather
> than a "continental"
> one.
>
> KF
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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from_name: Christopher Mahan

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia more popular than Britannica!

body:
--- Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> Christopher Mahan wrote:
>
> >Also, the EB is trusted as far as people trust a British
> commercial
> >entity. The British, as a nation and to their credit, are probably
> >the most even keeled in terms of their pov.
> >
> Actually, the EB has been owned and operated in here in the US of A
>
> since the early 20th century. See:
> http://corporate.britannica.com/company_info.html

Brion, thanks for the update (I am, it seems, nearly 2 centuries
behind... eh)
What I wrote in my earlier post is then compounded by oh so lovely US
influence.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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body:
--- Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Isn't the Encyclopedia Brittanica an American commercial entity?
>
> RickK, making his first post on the mailing list

/me hands RickK helmet, wrist and kneepads.
Welcome to the fray.

=====
Christopher Mahan
chris_mahan at yahoo.com
818.943.1850 cell
http://www.christophermahan.com/

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from_name: Erik Moeller

subject: [Wikitech-l] Using page cache when database is down

body:
Brion-
> I've made some quick hacks to fall back to displaying cached pages where
> available when the database can't be connected to.

> Change is in CVS and on the test wiki; you can simulate the database
> being down here:
> http://test.wikipedia.org/w/breakwiki.php

Hmz, this only displays the Main Page for me, not the linked pages where I
only get the "Sorry, the database is down" text but not the actual
content.

On a related note, wouldn't it make sense to only cache the article body,
so we can also use the cache for logged in users?

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] Proliferation of temps

body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>Toby Bartels wrote:

>>It's the Internet Encylcopedia: <http://www.internet-encyclopedia.info/>.

>http://www.Internet-Encyclopedia.org

Thanks! and sorry.

-- Toby


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: morphophonics for wikipedia

body:
Tarquin wrote:

>Timwi (or Geoffrey Thomas?) wrote:

>>Geoffrey Thomas / JEF-ree TAH-muhs

>Yes but for a UK speaker, the above would be wrong.
>TAH and TOH is not the same.
>(we have an article on it with sound samples but I can't find it)

This is /exactly/ the sort of thing that morphophones are for.

Phonemically, the short "O" may be /A/, /A<rnd>/, /O/, maybe more.
Morphophonically, it's always a short "O".

A good morphophonic system will also distinguish "log" and "dog".

-- Toby


subject: [Wikitech-l] Inter-Langa Links and other clever ways of using *modern technology on the Wikipedia

body:
Foreword: As I begin to start making inter-langa links
on the Ar:wikipedia, I (curiously) am remined of the
langalinks issue -- as they might bear bearingly on my
current workload. :) How are they coming -- Is it Mr.
Magnus that is working on these?

More of my fancy ideas about langalinks:
1. Allow for self-language link in page -- which is
ignored.
This would allow for a little easier mass copying of
langalinks. (no typing a last link-- hard work :U )

If a page is moved to a new article -- making the old
one a redirect. Upon this move function, a note is
sent to recurse all the langa links connected to it.
Reading each file, and updating the specific langalink
thats associated with that file. A recursor to the
original links schedules a bot change (with no hurry)

Considering the possibility that all this editing
might generate a lot of bot activity, and cause
mixups, it may then be wise to separate langalinks
from their articles -- an edit window may have a field
at the bottom for only metadata (langalinks for
starters) and this metadata is actually a separate
field, thereby eliminating any unnecessary edit
conflicts. (Does the DB works that way at all?)

-SV

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from_name: james duffy

subject: [WikiEN-l] Pizza Puzzle's games with names

body:
Pizza Puzzle left the following on the Village Pump at  23:12, 1 Aug 2003

It is obvious that certain users have become convinced that I am another
user against which they hold a grudge. I will be changing my account name so
that this is no longer a problem for me. Pizza Puzzle

Those of us who have followed PP's edits and behaviour have long known that
it was Adam von Rickleff. Evercat showed the detailed evidence at
[http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Evercat/PP]

I have not argued for PP's banning, even though he is a multiple banned
user, on the basis that his behaviour was a considerable improvement on his
actions in the past, all of which warranted a ban then. When PP's behaviour
began to slip back to old ways, I told him

''You have done good work as PP and I have been one of the people defending
your right to be here because of how you have behaved as PP. Don't slip up
now and revert to a standard of behaviour that got you banned before. You
have a lot of ability. Please don't blow it and get yourself banned by
acting like Vera and the other characters. '' (He deleted the comment,
interpreting it as an attack, not constructive advice, which is what it was
intended as, given that I was one of only a small band of users to defend
him.)

However his actions is going incognito /again/ are hardly in the spirit of
wiki. It is the same old Adam, running away from the consequences of his
actions, then performing those actions again under another identity which he
hopes no-one will spot. I have gone out on a limb defending him as PP and am
not exactly impressed that he had decided to revert to form, as he did as
Bridget, Vera Cruz, Lir, Susan Mason, Dietary Fiber. We /really/ need to lay
down the rules here and tell him in no uncertain terms that running multiple
identities on wiki is as unacceptable now as it was months ago when we faced
his previous games with names.

JT

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list: textbook-l

from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
--- Toby Bartels <toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> wrote:
> LittleDan wrote:
>
> >If we just do that, we'd need some way to know
> their
> >name in order to cite it, which is impossible. Why
> not
> >have it all just be the same as Wikipedia is? That
> >seems to be working. I don't like ownership of
> >knowledge, and I'd rather that everything
> contributed
> >to wikibooks, anonymous or otherwise, is considered
> >authored by wikibooks, just like Wikipedia.
> >Additionally, some textbooks (like my Algebra I
> >textbook, for one) are partially based on Wikipedia
> >content, so it would be nearly impossible to say
> that
> >all of the non-anonymous contributers in any way
> own
> >the content; that would just be too broad.
>
> At first, you seem to be saying that we shouldn't
> change things.
> And then you describe the way that you'd like things
> to work.
>
> Unfortunately, if I've understood you correctly,
> then these two things that you're saying are
> contradictory.
> That's absolutely /not/ how Wikipedia works now.
> This /is/ basically the suggestion for the change.
>
>
> -- Toby

I guess I have a bad view of how things work. I was
under the impression that everything contributed to
Wikipedia was just Wikipedia's, not the author's.
That's what I was trying to say.
-LDan

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subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Aside: It would also be nice if links to other
> Wikimedia projects looked
> different than external links. A green color would
> be nice..
>
> --- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

That sounds good, but green is used for external links
in Cologne Blue. I think that sticking with blue for
the external links within Wikimedia.
-LittleDan

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from_name: a.crossman at blueyonder.co.uk

subject: [WikiEN-l] Multiple accounts...

body:
JT writes:

> We /really/ need to lay down the rules here and tell him in no
> uncertain terms that running multiple identities on wiki is as
> unacceptable now as it was months ago when we faced his previous
> games with names.

Ugh. I suppose I now have to come out of the closet and say that I
myself have a separate account that I occasionally use when I'm
involved in too many arguments with my main account, and want to be
able to ignore them all for a while...

I have never used it for any dubious activities like vote rigging or
anything. In fact, that account has never once been used for
discussion of any page, and with I think 1 exception, has never been
used for editing a page that I edited with my main account.

If there's a real objection to this then I'll stop (and make public
that account name, if you like).

How this all relates to Pizza Puzzle - it's not so much having an
alias that's dubious (I think), but rather using it for dodgy
purposes like escaping a ban, vote rigging, creating false concensus
in a debate, etc... this sort of behaviour is, I agree, a problem.

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


subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
--- Wouter Vanden Hove <wouter.vanden.hove at pandora.be>
wrote:
> Op vr 01-08-2003, om 06:55 Daniel Mayer wrote:
> > We really need a lawyer's opinion here.
>
> Yes. Since the number of wikis is growing, and
> Wikipedia is example to
> them all, we better get this right.
>
> I suggest to send a mail with these questions to the
> Creative Commons
> people. Perhaps Eben Moglen is also willing to
> answser. After all, the
> FSF supports Wikipedia.
>
>
> Wouter Vanden Hove

Alex 756 is a lawyer. I'll ask him.
-LDan

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list: wikipedia-l

from_name: Lars Aronsson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Worldwide wiki statistics

body:
I just updated the BiggestWiki statistics on the Meatball Wiki,
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?BiggestWiki

The German Wikipedia is now the world's 3rd biggest wiki.  With 25507
articles, it just grew past Ward Cunningham's c2.com, the world's
first wiki.

There is always an uncertainty in comparing numbers.  There is no
implication that bigger is better, and this list doesn't compare
quality or purpose.  Ward's wiki doesn't support any comma count, but
instead the total number of pages is used for this site, an unfair
advantage that is allowed out of respect for the elderly.  :-)

Wikipedia accounts for 13 of the world's 25 biggest wiki websites,
but only two of the six biggest.  The other four are: susning.nu (2),
c2.com (4), Twiki (5), and Enciclopedia Libre (6).  Positions 7-13
are held by a strongly growing field of Wikipedias.  The Chinese
Wikipedia is new on the list at position 23, having 1504 articles.

For more detail on the size of Wikipedia websites, see
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multilingual_statistics

--
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/


from_name: Thomas Corell

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Worldwide wiki statistics

body:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
> There is always an uncertainty in comparing numbers.  There is no
> implication that bigger is better, and this list doesn't compare
> quality or purpose.  Ward's wiki doesn't support any comma count, but
> instead the total number of pages is used for this site, an unfair
> advantage that is allowed out of respect for the elderly.  :-)

Wikipedia is switching away from the ''comma count'', e.g. the German
Wikipedia used the new 'Link-Count'.


from_name: Cafemusique - Scott Rollins

subject: [WikiEN-l] Azuresong@charter.net

body:
On Fri, 1 Aug 2003, Toby Bartels wrote:

> >   BEGIN:VCARD
> >   VERSION:2.1
> >   N:Montaig;Azure
> >   FN:Azure Montaig
> >   EMAIL;PREF;INTERNET:azuremontaig at yahoo.com
> >   REV:20030731T075720Z
> >   END:VCARD
>
> So, this person's surname is "Montaig",
> and their full name is "Azure Montaig".
> Their Internet email addres is <azuremontaig at yahoo.com>.
> (One must admire this protocol -- if that's what it's doing! --
> for recognising that not all email is over the Internet.)
> This revision is dated 2003 July 31,
> but I don't grasp the "T075720Z" bit.

Time: 07:57:20 sounds like a good guess to me.

Scott Rollins
wikipedian at vivace.homelinux.net


from_name: Paul Ebermann

body:
"Brion Vibber" skribis:

> I've made some quick hacks to fall back to displaying cached pages where
> available when the database can't be connected to.
>
> Change is in CVS and on the test wiki; you can simulate the database
> being down here:
> http://test.wikipedia.org/w/breakwiki.php

What about a cached "Recent Changes"?

Paul


from_name: K Forstner

subject: [WikiEN-l] Search function

body:
It's definitely '''not''' easy to find articles without Wikipedia's search
facility. I just typed in "[[continental breakfast]]", not knowing that such
an article does not exist (yet) and was referred to [[Departments of the
Continental Army]] (!). This is going to drive away both casual users and
regular contributors. If you type in "[[continental breakfast]]" you should
at least get one of the "breakfast" articles rather than a "continental"
one.

KF


from_name: John Robinson

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Search function

body:
Try using google.  It's usually months out of date; you have to put
site:wikipedia.org in there manually to find anything that's actually
on the Wikipedia; it comes up with gobs of results, many of which are
in languages you can't read.  And it's fast!  For instance, according
to google, my search came up in no time at all:

 >Your search - "teng hsiao ping" site:wikipedia.org - did not match any
 >documents.
 >
 >Suggestions:
 >
 >- Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
 >- Try different keywords.
 >- Try more general keywords.
 >- Try fewer keywords.
 >
 >Also, you can try Google Answers for expert help with your search.

How easy is that?

(don't tell me, you're one of those folks who's hung up on blaming
browsers when the problem's with the server.)

-John "Hephaestos" Robinson (who doesn't work for google either, but
one's probably better able to tell it in my case.)

 >> It's definitely '''not''' easy to find articles without Wikipedia's
search
 >> facility  I just typed in "[[continental breakfast]]", not knowing
that such
 >> an article does not exist (yet) and was referred to [[Departments of
the
 >> Continental Army]]
 >
 >Try using google. It's fast; it doesn't cause Wikipedia to slow down;
it gives >vastly
 >better content summaries; and it's much better at evaluating the
relative >importance
 >of pages. For example, if I do a google search for "continental
breakfast", I >get two
 >hits, in under a second: [[breakfast]], and [[Full English
breakfast]]. >Parfait!
 >
 >How easy is that?
 >(don't tell me, you're on some browser where the google taskbar
doesn't play, >or
 >something - in which case, sorry...)
 >
 >-Martin "MyRedDice" Harper


from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
LittleDan wrote:
>--- Daniel Mayer wrote:
>> Aside: It would also be nice if links to other
>> Wikimedia projects looked
>> different than external links. A green color would
>> be nice..
>>
>> --- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
>
>That sounds good, but green is used for external
>links in Cologne Blue. I think that sticking with blue
>for the external links within Wikimedia.

But we /do/ need to distinguish between links within Wikibooks from links to
other Wikimedia projects. The Cologne Blue stylesheet should be fixed.

-- mav


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Preparing for 150,000 articles

body:
Yes, I know what you're thinking -- not another "x articles" press
release.

Well, I think for the next time we should think of some other news to
announce:

1) Wikimedia Foundation set up as an umbrella organization for applying
the wiki idea to a wide set of problems
2) Basic Wikimedia homepage set up
3) Wikimedia starts taking donations
4) Wikibooks launched
5) Wikiquote launched
6) Two week fundraising drive to allow us to buy new hardware etc.

We'll have 150K articles in about 3 weeks. Can we get this stuff sorted
out until then? E.g. have wikibooks.org set up, and have an account for
donations? Jimbo?

This might well be one of the biggest announcements in Wikipedia's
history, and we should prepare it well.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: martin at myreddice.freeserve.co.uk

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Search function

body:
> It's definitely '''not''' easy to find articles without Wikipedia's search
> facility  I just typed in "[[continental breakfast]]", not knowing that such
> an article does not exist (yet) and was referred to [[Departments of the
> Continental Army]]

Try using google. It's fast; it doesn't cause Wikipedia to slow down; it gives vastly
better content summaries; and it's much better at evaluating the relative importance
of pages. For example, if I do a google search for "continental breakfast", I get two
hits, in under a second: [[breakfast]], and [[Full English breakfast]]. Parfait!

How easy is that?
(don't tell me, you're on some browser where the google taskbar doesn't play, or
something - in which case, sorry...)

-Martin "MyRedDice" Harper


subject: [Wikipedia-l] 300,000 is a much better milestone (was: Preparing for 150,000 articles)

body:
Erik wrote:
>Yes, I know what you're thinking -- not another
>"x articles" press release.

I thought we had well over 200,000 articles... I just checked en.wiki's
Multilingual statistics page; the number is 270,616 as of July 31. So why not
wait until we have 300,000 articles? That seems like a better milestone and
it includes the /whole/ Wikipedia project, not just the English version. We
already had a press release just for the English version earlier this year
anyway.

NOTE: The growth of the non-English versions of Wikipedia since January of
this year has been /far/ more impressive than has the growth of en.wiki
during the same time period; ~35,000 total articles in January to ~120,000
total articles in July.  So, I think it is about time we had our first
Wikipedia-wide press release and try to stop mentioning the success of the
other languages only in passing.

>Well, I think for the next time we should think of
>some other news to announce:
>
>1) Wikimedia Foundation set up as an umbrella
>organization for applying the wiki idea to a wide
>set of problems

Yep.

>2) Basic Wikimedia homepage set up

I would like to help with that as soon as I get a chance to see the by-laws...
We can work things out on meta (all Wikimedia pages should also be exactly
translated into as many languages as possible).

Speaking of which, I think that meta should be moved to the Wikimedia.org
domain and for it act as a place to plan current and future Wikimedia
projects and also figure out ways for them to interoperate (in fact it is
already starting to perform this role). A Wikimedia mailing list would also
be nice.

Since we have project-specific namespaces (such as wikipedia: or wiktionary:)
there is no need for each project to have its own meta (historical note: Meta
was created as a place to move Wikipedia-specific pages in order to not
"pollute" the article space but that role has been largely replaced by
project namespaces). But we do need a neutral place outside of each Wikimedia
project to coordinate all of our activities.

What about a Wikimedia logo? Perhaps one of the runner-ups for the Wikipedia
logo contest could be voted on.

Oh, and we do not own Wikimedia.com - a cyber-squatter got that. So we may
want to use WikimediaFoundation.org in the announcement (I own the .com as
well) so that people won't get lost when some of them instinctively type .com
(I really don't care if Wikimedia.org or WikimediaFoundation.org is the
actual home of the Foundation's website, so long as all three links work - we
can deal with the squatter per ICANN trademark policy later).

>3) Wikimedia starts taking donations

Yes - I think this is the most important part of such an announcement even
though we are going to wrap it into an article count milestone statement.

>4) Wikibooks launched

Wikibooks needs to localize its language.php file and put up at least a
temporary logo first. Not to mention a move from the Wikipedia subdomain to
Wikibooks.org (I also own the .com as well as the singular .com/.org).

In addition, Wikibooks has some fairly important software needs that should
be addressed before such an announcement and inevitable increase in
contributors (major need: the porting over of pyWiki's php/GPL WikiGroup
functionality). However, there might not be enough time if a developer isn't
really interested in that (I'm willing to learn php just to do the port, but
that will take some time).

>5) Wikiquote launched

Jimbo owns Wikiquote.org/.com so a move would be nice for Wikiquote as well.

>6) Two week fundraising drive to allow us to buy new hardware etc.

Yep. Although last I heard there really isn't room for more than one more
machine. Upgrades to our existing hardware would be nice though.

>We'll have 150K articles in about 3 weeks. Can we get this
>stuff sorted out until then? E.g. have wikibooks.org set up, and
>have an account for donations? Jimbo?

I wanted to start localizing the language.php file for Wikibooks yesterday but
Brion said on his talk page that he was working on a nifty new interface for
that type of thing. I'll still do it the old fashioned way if Brion's new
interface isn't going to be running in time (see above though - we can get
more time by waiting for the 300,000 article announcement).

Brion already has the password to access Wikimedia.org but I'm the only one
that has the passwords to access WikimediaFoundation.org/.com,
Wikibooks.org/.com and Wikibook.org/.com. I'll offlist email this information
to whichever developer needs them as soon as they ask. Of course I plan to
donate all these domain names to Wikimedia as soon as there is a legal means
to do so (Wiktionary.org and Wikimedia.org also have to be legally transfered
from me to the Foundation).

>This might well be one of the biggest announcements in
>Wikipedia's history, and we should prepare it well.

I agree. Let's get to it.

Oh, and just for fun we might want to mention, mostly in passing, that
according to Alexa.com we are clearly ahead of Britannica.com in terms of
daily hits. I would not, however, be boastful about that - just informative.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=wikipedia&p=Det_W_g_40_M1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wikipedia.org%2F

Type in Britannica.com into the Compare Sites field. Wow - try Slashdot.org
too (we seem to be gaining on them - maybe we will pass them the next time we
get Slashdotted ;).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
I wrote:
>Speaking of which, I think that meta should be moved to
>the Wikimedia.org domain and for it act as a place to plan
>current and future Wikimedia projects and also figure out
>ways for them to interoperate (in fact it is already starting
>to perform this role).

Just to be clear; http://meta.wikipedia.org -> http://meta.wikimedia.org

The main domain would be used by the Foundation.

--mav


from_name: Jake Nelson

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Cooperating with IMDB, FreeDB etc.

body:
I like the idea, personally. Those sites need more description and real
writing, and Wikipedia has a lot of stubs that duplicate the plain data
those sites have now... I can see it working into the sites' (Well, I don't
know what freedb has for this) existing comment systems without a lot of
trouble. It'd also probably mean a hefty traffic upswing... like you said:
> Perhaps we should wait with more concrete inquiries until we have more
resources to handle the traffic
But I'd put feelers out to those places and see what they think.
I disagree on limiting movies by income or related... some of these may be
those obscure-but-significant type of movie. Besides, earnings numbers are
less than reliable.
> IMHO "only open content people"  is too tight a rule.
I concur.
And besides, making people think of new ways of doing things is always a
good idea, in my book.

-- Jake
jnelson at soncom.com
User:Jakenelson


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Could the Tech old hands answer some basic questions?

body:
tarquin wrote:

> 1. I've committed a new language file to CVS. What next? The Ro: pedia
> guys are getting restless and I don't know what to tell them
>
> 2. What is the cycle for files going from CVS -> test server -> live

Someone copies the file into place on a test server, fixes the
inevitable syntax errors, puts the fixed version into CVS, and copies
the file onto the live server.

> Is any part of the above automatic?

No.

> If so, when does it happen?
> If not, who currently has the ability to do that? When do they do it?

Anyone with login access on pliny, but usually me.

Since this whole process is much more difficult than it needs to be, I
plan on replacing it all with an interface for editing the translations
directly through the site, with a one-button "approve and install" for
sysops. Hopefully that'll be up in the next few days.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


from_name: tarquin

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Inter-Langa Links and other clever ways of using
 *modern technology on the Wikipedia

body:
Steve Vertigo wrote:

>More of my fancy ideas about langalinks:
>1. Allow for self-language link in page -- which is
>ignored.
>This would allow for a little easier mass copying of
>langalinks. (no typing a last link-- hard work :U )
>
>
>
I suggested that ages ago ;)
AFAIK it's on the text server but not yet live


body:
1. I've committed a new language file to CVS. What next? The Ro: pedia
guys are getting restless and I don't know what to tell them

2. What is the cycle for files going from CVS -> test server -> live
Is any part of the above automatic? If so, when does it happen?
If not, who currently has the ability to do that? When do they do it?

I know the tech experts are swamped in database problems. but *please*
could you take a moment to answer these?
The info for wannabe hackers on meta peters out at getting CVS access.

I promise to write this up on meta once I understand it!


from_name: Delirium

body:
Till Westermayer wrote:

>but wouldn't the inclusion of our copylefted material because of the
>meme-viral character of that material make IMDB and others going GNU?
>
>
That's a bit of a tricky issue, because the GFDL doesn't seem to have
been intended for websites, but books.  In a book, I think this would be
the case -- if you took someone's book, and added a few chapters to it,
you'd have to FDL the whole thing, not just the original chapters.
Similarly, if you published a book on movie history and included stuff
from Wikipedia, you'd have to FDL the whole book, including your own
writings.

I'm not sure if this carries over to a website though.  Can a website
have only certain sections FDL'd (say, the reviews) and consider the
rest of them a separate work, even if they happen to appear on the same
page?  The analogy to books would say no, but I'm not sure.

-Mark


from_name: Erik Moeller

body:
tarquin-
> 1. I've committed a new language file to CVS. What next? The Ro: pedia
> guys are getting restless and I don't know what to tell them

> 2. What is the cycle for files going from CVS -> test server -> live
> Is any part of the above automatic? If so, when does it happen?
> If not, who currently has the ability to do that? When do they do it?

I presume you have committed your changes to the unstable branch of the
CVS code (the default). In that case, it will first have to be merged into
the stable branch. This might take a while given that there's still some
incomplete stuff (category code, new interlanguage links code) in the
unstable branch. If Magnus doesn't finish these soon, I will probably
remove them entirely.

The code from the live wikis is currently updated to the stable branch
regularly but manually. The next update will be in a few days. Before I do
it, and bring all wikis to the latest version, I want to make some
requested changes to the new features (see [[Wikipedia:Software updates]]
on en:).

If you want your code to go live with the next update cycle, you should
commit it to stable immediately (but be sure it doesn't break anything).
Just switch your working copy to stable, or check out a separate working
copy from that branch, and commit it there.

See
http://www.loria.fr/~molli/cvs/doc/cvs_5.html
for details.

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Richard Grevers

body:
On Sat, 2 Aug 2003 15:47:20 -0700, Toby Bartels
<toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu> gave utterance to the following:

>
> A good morphophonic system will also distinguish "log" and "dog".
>
There are accents/dialects in which these two are diffferent?
--
Richard Grevers
Bureaucrats cut red tape - lengthwise


from_name: Alex R.

subject: [Textbook-l] RE: Anonymous contributions

body:
I am not quite sure why you might want a policyassigning all copyrights
to the Wikimedia Foundation. First, this would be an administrative
nightmare to change the licensing in midstream. Those who
have contributed to any wiki type project are doing so with the
understanding that their work can be edited, changed, etc. even
if they don't grant any kind of additional license. However, they
do not give up their copyright, with or without attribution. If they
do not grant an open license then just posting it on a wiki type space
is legally no different than writing someone a letter (though the issue of
publication may come up).  Regarding anonymous and pseudononymous
works both are protected by copyright under US and foreign copyright
laws, as the case may be. The author of the letter retains copyright.

Regarding people making contributions under any kind of specific
license (be that open in the case of the WP community, or closed
in the case of AOL) it is just a license, it is not the transfer or
assignment of copyright, thus the original contributor under an
open, non-exclusive license could still sell her or his work or have
it published commercially, (without the GNU notice) though someone
who discovers that it is posted with a open license could then also
publish it  commerically  (as long as the GNU Free Documentation
License notice is then included).

I should also remind you that everything done on a wiki space IS
in writing, the question being who wrote it is a question of proof,
but it is written and recorded.

I am not certain why there is a discussion of assigning copyright
to the Wikimedia Foundation. Of course anyone is free to make
such a contribution (though I doubt they will get a tax deduction
for it) but it is not necessary IMHO for Wikimedia to use materials
under the open license it already has, perhaps I do not understand
the question, but what specifically cannot be acheived with the
current open license that every Wikipedia contributor grants when
they make contributions to any Wikipedia space? Is anyone really
worried that contributors will start publishing their original contributions
commercially (that includes publication by a not-for-profit corporation,
many so called "small press" publishers are exempt under 501(c)(3)
and their publications are sold in bookstores, i.e. most University
Presses).

Alex756 (the lawyer mentioned below)

>On Fri, 1 Aug 2003 07:10:47 -0700 (PDT) Karl Wick said:

>Wasn't there a lawyer who offered free services to Jimmy a
>while back ? An expert opinion would he helpful in many
>issues to make a plan that is legal and helps achieve WP
>goals and mission, such as regarding the proposed
>dedication of copyrights to the Foundation.

>--Karl


from_name: Matthias Jordan

subject: [Wikitech-l] Whitelist mode for article editing

body:
Hi, folks!

I implemented a whitelist mode for editing articles: if $wgWhitelistEdit
is true, users can only edit pages if they are logged in. The code took
about 25 lines of code and the default setting is "false" - meaning,
everybody on this planet can edit articles - as usual.

Is it ok to commit this feature to CVS or should I rather put it into my
own set of local diffs?

Bye!

Matthias


from_name: Toby Bartels

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Search function

body:
Hepaestos wrote sarcastically:

>Try using google:

>>Your search - "teng hsiao ping" site:wikipedia.org - did not match any
>>documents.

>>Suggestions:
>>- Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
>>- Try different keywords.
>>- Try more general keywords.
>>- Try fewer keywords.
>>Also, you can try Google Answers for expert help with your search.

I don't know what you're complaining about --
Google suggested that you check your spelling.
(Wikipedia's search was never so kind!)
When I fix the spelling (with the apostrophe),
I get fine results:

>Man of the Year - Wikipedia
>... 1974- King Faisal; 1975- American Women; 1976- Jimmy Carter; 1977-
>Anwar Sadat; 1978- Teng Hsiao-P'ing; 1979- Ayatollah Khomeini; 1980 ...
>www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_of_the_Year - 22k - Cached - Similar pages

>www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Teng_Hsiao-P'ing&action=edit
>Similar pages

>Deng Xiaoping - Wikipedia
>Deng Xiaoping. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Deng.png. Deng Xiaoping
>(???, Wade-Giles Teng Hsiao-p'ing) (July 12, 1904 - February 19, 1997). ...
>www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping - 31k - Cached - Similar pages

Even leading me to create a useful redirect page!

So this is not to say that Google is a satisfactory solution.
But it's also nothing to sneeze at.

-- Toby


subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

>I guess I have a bad view of how things work. I was
>under the impression that everything contributed to
>Wikipedia was just Wikipedia's, not the author's.
>That's what I was trying to say.

That's how peple are supposed to think about the /articles/.
That is, I don't own this article just because I wrote,
so you can change it if you like (and I can change it further).
But each individual revision is still copyright by its author.

-- Toby


from_name: Till Westermayer

body:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .

Hi,

>I like the idea, personally. Those sites need more description and
>real writing, and Wikipedia has a lot of stubs that duplicate the
>plain data those sites have now... I can see it working into the
>sites' (Well, I don't know what freedb has for this) existing
>comment systems without a lot of trouble. It'd also probably mean
> a hefty traffic upswing... like you said: Perhaps we should wait
> with more concrete inquiries until we have more
>resources to handle the traffic

but wouldn't the inclusion of our copylefted material because of the
meme-viral character of that material make IMDB and others going GNU?
 __ .
 / / / /                            ... Till Westermayer - till we *)
. .
  . mailto:till at tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072
  . Habsburgerstr. 82 . 79104 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179
  . . . . .


subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
Alex R.
>I should also remind you that everything done on
>a wiki space IS in writing, the question being who
>wrote it is a question of proof, but it is written and
>recorded.

The question before us then is this; can we state on our Wikibooks copyright
policy page and on every edit page that by pressing save, that the submitter
is agreeing to grant Wikimedia a non-exclusive right to license to use their
own unique and copyrightable work under both the GNU FDL /and/ any other
copyleft license the Foundation may deem fit in the future (with a defintion
of "copyleft" linked from that word)?

Can authors transfer the right re-license their work through a click-through
agreement like we have with the "Save page" function, under the narrowly
defined terms mentioned, without assigning away all their rights to the work?

Question two: Would such a notice prevent us from using purely FDL work (such
as from Wikipedia)?

If the answer to the first question is yes and the second no, then we could
have our cake and eat it too; We would be able to swap text to and from
Wikipedia and be able to more easily relicense at least some of the content
on Wikibooks.

Related question: If the above is true then could we add such a notice to
Wikipedia in order to cover all new submissions (we would also have to
contact every current and past contributor we could in order to ask them
about the change in copyright terms; if they say no or we can't find them
their text will only be under the FDL)?

The reason I ask is that some people here see that our content could be even
more useful if it also could be used under other licenses similar to the GNU
FDL. This would not, however, solve the problem of us being able to use work
under other copyleft licenses.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions (correction)

body:
Replace my first paragraph with this:

The question before us then is this; can we state on our Wikibooks copyright
policy page and on every edit page that by pressing save, the submitter
is agreeing to grant Wikimedia a non-exclusive license to use their
own unique and copyrightable work under both the GNU FDL /and/ any other
copyleft license the Foundation may deem fit in the future (with a defintion
of "copyleft" linked from that word)?

--mav


body:
tarquin wrote:
>Well, actually, I think having a metawiki *just*
>for the encyclopedia project is perhaps better

Can you back that up with some reasoning to counter my reasoning why we should
all work together in one place? En.wiki does just fine as an uber
encyclopedia of encyclopedias with thousands of edits a day - why can't we
have a metawiki for planning /all/ Wikimedia functions?

Having separate metawikis for every Wikimedia projects is a mistake - there
simply will not be enough activity on any one to create a viable community.
Simply have different Main Pages for every project and project language
version. Each project and project version could also have its own RC if it
wanted; simply have every page relating to that project or project version
listed on one page and use the "Related changes" function. Or better yet use
category tags as a basis for RC sorting.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
Imran Ghory wrote:
>> Question two: Would such a notice prevent us from using
>>purely FDL work (such as from Wikipedia)?
>
>Yes. The person who is importing the work will not be able
>to legally save the page and meet the required conditions.

I meant to word the click-through agreement to more clearly state that only
work the submiter holds the copyright too would be covered by the Wikimedia
re-licensing clause. Everything else would only have to be kosher per the GNU
FDL and the limited amount of fair use materials we allow.

-- mav


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Search function (google)

body:
> It's usually months out of date

A month max, IIRC. At the moment it's just under a week out of date: the google
cached version of [[breakfast]], for example, is from the 29th July.

> you have to put site:wikipedia.org in there manually

Nope. You want the "search this site" toolbar button* - if you're on a wikipedia
webpage when you hit search, it'll automatically add site:www.wikipedia.org. (If you
can't use the google toolbar, then see the apologies I gave in the last post, and
ignore this mail).

Using site:www.wikipedia.org rather than site:wikipedia.org also ensures that you get
only English results, by the way - so that should solve your problem with gobs of
foreign language results.

Hope this helps :)
-Martin "MyRedDice" Harper


from_name: Walter Vermeir

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: 300,000 is a much better milestone (was: Preparing for 150,000 articles)

body:
Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote
>
> NOTE: The growth of the non-English versions of Wikipedia since
> January of this year has been /far/ more impressive than has the
> growth of en.wiki during the same time period; ~35,000 total articles
> in January to ~120,000 total articles in July.  So, I think it is
> about time we had our first Wikipedia-wide press release and try to
> stop mentioning the success of the other languages only in passing.

Yes, this is very true.

Wikipedia NL has now 9990 articles. We will send very, very soon a press
relase.

Just look at the numbers;
2003-04-13; 4897
2003-05-25; 6104
2003-06-22; 7026
2003-08-02; 9990 (10 000??)

And take in to account;
- Dutch is a very small language if you compare it whit English or German
- No automatic created articles form a file like on some wikipedia's
- No help from users who like more to work at the big wikipedia instead of
that in there own language.

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


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] 300,000 is a much better milestone (was: Preparing
 for 150,000 articles)

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>I wrote:
>
>
>>Speaking of which, I think that meta should be moved to
>>the Wikimedia.org domain and for it act as a place to plan
>>current and future Wikimedia projects and also figure out
>>ways for them to interoperate (in fact it is already starting
>>to perform this role).
>>
>>
>
>Just to be clear; http://meta.wikipedia.org -> http://meta.wikimedia.org
>
>
>
Well, actually, I think having a metawiki *just* for the encyclopedia
project is perhaps better.


from_name: Geoffrey Thomas

subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Special characters

body:
Toby Bartels saith on WikiEN-l:
> Try setting your options for the mailing list
> so that the digest comes with MIME enabled.
> This is off by default in case of broken readers,
> but there's no reason that anybody should leave it off
> if they have a decent mail reader -- like Mozilla.
> Then if an individual message specifies its charset,
> your mail reader will know and won't have to guess.

Brion Vibber also saith (in part) on Wikitech-l:
> ...Change your options to use MIME digests instead of plain text digests...

I /do/ have MIME enabled. I'm not using Mozilla Mail
(the so-called "Thunderbird") but Mozilla Navigator
("Firebird") because I use web-based Yahoo! Mail. In
Y!Mail, the entire digest comes as one HTML file, and
messages with different charsets in one digest confuse
both Y!Mail (as to what charset it should write out)
and Mozilla (as to what charset it should autodetect).

There is no option in Y!Mail not to show e-mails within
other e-mails automatically, and POP access for Y!Mail
costs (too much) money (so I can't use Mozilla Mail).
The main problem is not so much with UTF-8 bytes,
but with ISO Latin-1/ANSI bytes that are invalid in UTF-8
and hence display as white question marks inside
black diamonds. It<?>s hard to read messages with these
symbols. (The 'smart' quote is one of these
invalid characters.)

Isn't there some simple software routine to convert all
incoming messages - or at least the Latin-1/ANSI ones - to
UTF-8?

There was talk a while back about moving to a wiki-like
or bulletin board system instead of using mailing lists;
that would solve this charset problem, and would be a
generally good idea. Are there any plans for that?

-[[User:Geoffrey|Geoffrey Thomas]]

=====
-Geoffrey Thomas
geoffreyerffoeg at yahoo.com

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Special characters


body:
Erik Moeller wrote:

>CVS code (the default). In that case, it will first have to be merged into
>the stable branch. This might take a while given that there's still some
>incomplete stuff (category code, new interlanguage links code) in the
>unstable branch. If Magnus doesn't finish these soon, I will probably
>remove them entirely.
>
>If you want your code to go live with the next update cycle, you should
>commit it to stable immediately (but be sure it doesn't break anything).
>Just switch your working copy to stable, or check out a separate working
>copy from that branch, and commit it there.
>
>See
>http://www.loria.fr/~molli/cvs/doc/cvs_5.html
>for details.
>
>
eep.
I use WinCVS, which isn't the most helpful of itnerfaces.
AFAIK I had commited Ro to the stable branch, since the revision number
I as given was 1.1 once the action was complete.

I can work out how to branch a particular module or file, but nothing
about switching.
I think I had best keep away from CVS, as I have trouble visualizing
what these things mean.


subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
Would not it be more expedient to ask for a non-exclusive general license
to be transferred to Wikimedia Foundation, as Wikimedia's basic corporate
purpose
is to provide free content throughout the world (see
http://www.sunbiz.org/COR/2003/0620/90039369.tif )
a grant of copyright license should be well protected by the Florida State
AGs office,
possible court intervention and the cy-pres doctrine, such a non-exclusive
license would
be vast enough to allow the original author to do whatever else they want
with their
work while giving Wikimedia enough power to prevent infringement by third
parties and
to create any variations of open source licenses or copyleft licences in the
future.
Also conflict of law (private international law) issues would be forstalled
as their would be no
issue of agency (mandate) if the author grants the foundation to grant
further rights in the
future.

Quaere: preventing the original author from using their own work as they
wish does not fit with the
underlying policy considerations behind the open content movement. If
someone is writing
a book and wants to contribute part of their book to a Wikimedia Foundation
project that
should not prevent them from completing their work and exploiting it without
seeking
approval from Wikimedia (which might be withheld),  this would tend to scare
away contributors
who might otherwise have another outlet for their work and who might be
willing to contribute on
a non-exclusive basis.

The analogy with software is not the same as it is with other intellectual
property content that
might be author specific. The reason for having the copyright assigned in
the software context is
to prevent the software which essentially has many coauthors to have one
author to represent
it should anyone try and exploit it without respecting the rights of the
authors. This is not the
same kind of situation where there are contributors to a compilation work
(such as Wikipedia);
in the software situation it is doubtful that each coauthor would have any
possible use for their
contribution as the work functions as a whole, where as with a compliation
each author can
still find some potential use for their work outside of the compilation
(textbook, encyclopedia, etc).

Facts, science and other information cannot be copyrighted anyway, they
already exists outside the domain
of ownership (except when it intersects with patent, trademark or other
statutory protection
schemes).
Alex756

----- Original Message -----
"Imran Ghory" <imran at bits.bris.ac.uk> wrote on  Sunday, August 03, 2003 6:49
PM
Subject: Re: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

> IANAL. But I'm going to answer these questions from a legal viewpoint
> (without my personal opinion on the issue).
>
> On Sun, 3 Aug 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
> > The question before us then is this; can we state on our Wikibooks
copyright
> > policy page and on every edit page that by pressing save, that the
submitter
> > is agreeing to grant Wikimedia a non-exclusive right to license to use
their
> > own unique and copyrightable work under both the GNU FDL /and/ any other
> > copyleft license the Foundation may deem fit in the future (with a
defintion
> > of "copyleft" linked from that word)?
>
> Yes.
>
> > Can authors transfer the right re-license their work through a
click-through
> > agreement like we have with the "Save page" function, under the narrowly
> > defined terms mentioned, without assigning away all their rights to the
work?
>
> Yes.
>
> > Question two: Would such a notice prevent us from using purely FDL work
(such
> > as from Wikipedia)?
>
> Yes. The person who is importing the work will not be able to legally save
> the page and meet the required conditions.
>
> > Related question: If the above is true then could we add such a notice
to
> > Wikipedia in order to cover all new submissions (we would also have to
> > contact every current and past contributor we could in order to ask them
> > about the change in copyright terms; if they say no or we can't find
them
> > their text will only be under the FDL)?
>
> Yes. If we were doing that we might as well ask for copyright assignments
> like the FSF do, so the wikipedia will be able to defend the copyright in
> court if it want to.
>
> Imran
> --
> http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran
>
> _______________________________________________
> Textbook-l mailing list
> Textbook-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Search function (I still don't get it)

body:
Using Google may be okay -- thanks for the various hints -- , but coming
back to Wikipedia's own search facility, why do I get "Ann-Marie MacDonald"
when I type in "Ann-Margret" (and there '''is''' an article with exactly
this title)?

KF


from_name: Timwi

subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: Number separator

body:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>> Do you ever discuss about automatic number separator ? (ex: 12512 ->
>> 12,512)
>> In french Wikipedia it is a real problem because our separator is the not
>> veiwable character : " ".
>>
> Does the entry Alt+0160 not work as an equivalent to " "?

It does for some browsers, but as soon as someone edits the article with
either Mozilla 1.4 or Opera 5 or older or some other browser that has
this bug, they are changed to normal spaces again.

This was discussed here recently between Anth?re and Vincent.

Greetings,
Timwi


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Search function (I still don't get it)

body:
K Forstner wrote:

> Using Google may be okay -- thanks for the various hints -- , but coming
> back to Wikipedia's own search facility, why do I get "Ann-Marie MacDonald"
> when I type in "Ann-Margret" (and there '''is''' an article with exactly
> this title)?

On the English Wikipedia, if I search for "Ann-Margret", I get
[[Ann-Margret]]. If, however, I search for "ann-margret", I do get
redirected to "Ann-Marie MacDonald" as you describe; only the first
character of a title appears to be case-insensitive (which, for the
search function, really shouldn't be the case, but I doubt there's much
that can be done about it).

Greetings,
Timwi


body:
Kurt-
> Using Google may be okay -- thanks for the various hints -- , but coming
> back to Wikipedia's own search facility, why do I get "Ann-Marie MacDonald"
> when I type in "Ann-Margret" (and there '''is''' an article with exactly
> this title)?

Are you sure you typed "Ann-Margret"? I get the article as expected. On
the other hand, if I type "Ann Margret" I get to the article about
MacDonald (unfortunately MySQL's relevance sorting isn't so great, so it's
not the closest match). Perhaps a redirect should be created?

Regards,

Erik


from_name: Imran Ghory

subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
IANAL. But I'm going to answer these questions from a legal viewpoint
(without my personal opinion on the issue).

On Sun, 3 Aug 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> The question before us then is this; can we state on our Wikibooks copyright
> policy page and on every edit page that by pressing save, that the submitter
> is agreeing to grant Wikimedia a non-exclusive right to license to use their
> own unique and copyrightable work under both the GNU FDL /and/ any other
> copyleft license the Foundation may deem fit in the future (with a defintion
> of "copyleft" linked from that word)?

Yes.

> Can authors transfer the right re-license their work through a click-through
> agreement like we have with the "Save page" function, under the narrowly
> defined terms mentioned, without assigning away all their rights to the work?

Yes.

> Question two: Would such a notice prevent us from using purely FDL work (such
> as from Wikipedia)?

Yes. The person who is importing the work will not be able to legally save
the page and meet the required conditions.

> Related question: If the above is true then could we add such a notice to
> Wikipedia in order to cover all new submissions (we would also have to
> contact every current and past contributor we could in order to ask them
> about the change in copyright terms; if they say no or we can't find them
> their text will only be under the FDL)?

Yes. If we were doing that we might as well ask for copyright assignments
like the FSF do, so the wikipedia will be able to defend the copyright in
court if it want to.

Imran
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran


body:
Andre Engels wrote:
>I disagree. I think it is strange to count the various
>languages together into one number. Some of these
>articles are translations of each other, others are
>different articles about the same subject.

We are talking about the progress of the project as a whole -our community
effort-, we /are not/ boasting about the relative merit of our encyclopedia
as a usable resource (using article count as a proxy). We need to make that
clear in the announcement. It takes a lot of work to create 300,000 articles
(including the ones that are translations). /That/ is what the milestone
statement is for.

Community.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


body:
Andre Engels wrote:
>It would be like Larousse adding the number in
>the Petit Larousse and the Grand Larousse, or
>the publisher of English-XXX dictionaries adding
>up all languages. Having many languages available
>is certainly a good thing, but just adding up the
>numbers gives a wholly false image.

That's why we would say that we have 300,000 articles spread across 50
different languages. We would then list the top 10 or so with their article
counts. How is that /at all/ presenting a false image? See my last email
about acknowledging community effort.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Jimmy Wales

subject: [Wikitech-l] RE: Database dump

body:
Erik Zachte wrote:
> I'm confident Jimbo would consider adding diskspace a minor investement,
> provided we don't use anything fancy (raid, SCSI)  (Jimbo am I right?).
> I guess bandwidth costs are the main expense and several orders of
> magnitude larger.

The drive in the machine now is SCSI, and that's what I will add.

Bandwidth costs are minor, as far as I'm concerned.  I've never even
bothered to break it out from my overall bandwidth bill.  People think
Wikipedia is popular, and it is in a sense, but on a bandwidth basis,
it's a small part of what we do overall.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikitech-l] ES wiki and EL

in_reply_to: <3F2AAF90.60200@chaos-productions.com>; from lightning@chaos-productions.com on Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 02:21:04PM -0400

body:
This is a policy discussion better suited for wikipedia-l, or better
yet, intlwiki-l.

I recommend a policy of kindness and generosity towards EL, and would
generally only support a mass import if it's something that they
generally wanted.  I see no reason to antagonize them.

Lightning wrote:
> Since EL content is under the GFDL just like the spanish-language wiki
> is there maybe a chance that we could do a mass import of all the
> articles they have that we do not? I mean, theres is no reason not too
> and it could only help the spanish-language wiki.
>
> Or is it a reason that they might get mad and the talks of rejoining
> will die? They seemed to have been pretty fruitless up until now anyways....


subject: [WikiEN-l] Daniel C. Boyer on wikipedia

in_reply_to: <BAY1-F99oLrj3sPRlI3000062fe@hotmail.com>; from jtdirl@hotmail.com on Sat, Jul 26, 2003 at 12:52:22AM +0100

body:
I'm very reluctant to say or do anything 'policy-like' about this.

There's no article about me in the encyclopedia, nor should there be,
I think.  There is an article about 'Bomis', but I wouldn't presume to
edit it myself.  Both of those are arguably special cases, given the
relationship to Wikipedia, but even so, it's really a matter of good
taste to me.

Perhaps Daniel could be gently (*gently*) persuaded that whatever the
merits of this on other grounds, it is a social faux pas to write
about yourself.

--Jimbo


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Do we really need a Sifter project?

in_reply_to: <8qa4JJxSpVB@erik_moeller>; from erik_moeller@gmx.de on Sat, Jul 26, 2003 at 06:54:00PM +0200

body:
Erik Moeller wrote:
> Well, the idea of the Sifter project was to create a stable space
> where articles can *never*, by definition, be in an undesirable
> state.

Yes.  To make this more concrete, one goal of a "Sifter" project of
some sort would be to have a 'release 1.0' that could be easily
produced in a 'hard' medium like paper or CD-ROM.

I've been working (but more slowly than I would like) on a proposal
for a timetable for a drive to 1.0.

I would have titled Erik's proposal differently.  Instead of saying
"Do we really need a Sifter project?" I might have titled it "Do we
already have a Sifter project, without realizing it?"

And I'm inclined to agree with the notion that adding a few ideas to a
function that already arose organically from within the community is
more likely to be naturally successful than something made up 'a
priori' to meet our Platonic Ideal of what a sifter project "should"
look like.

--Jimbo


in_reply_to: <BAY1-F76ZmYu9HqHb8B00018f59@hotmail.com>; from jtdirl@hotmail.com on Sat, Aug 02, 2003 at 05:25:30PM +0100

body:
james duffy wrote:
> Those of us who have followed PP's edits and behaviour have long
> known that it was Adam von Rickleff. Evercat showed the detailed
> evidence at [http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Evercat/PP]

For whatever this may be worth... last week I asked Adam point blank
if he was editing as Pizza Puzzle and he flatly denied it.  He tells
me that he's spending his time in other ways and has given up on
Wikipedia.

I express no opinion here, I am just reporting the facts.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] Ban Palestinian liberator immediately

in_reply_to: <BAY1-F126Wtyi67EKRu0001c5a4@hotmail.com>; from jtdirl@hotmail.com on Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 01:33:31PM +0100

body:
> A ban page is at [[User talk:Palestinian liberator/ban]]. Please
> express your viewers whether here on the list or there on the
> page. A decision is clearly needed quickly before the scale of
> vandalism gets out of hand.

I'm convinced.  Palestinian liberator is to be banned.  Can someone
take care of this for me?

It might be helpful -- though it is hard to say -- if someone who
considers themselves generally or overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian but
NPOV could write to this person explaining NPOV and what not, and
explaining that contributions like that are just going to be deleted,
and that a more effective way to help the cause is to contribute
materials that is simple and factual and uncontroversial.

One of the advantages of NPOV is that all of us believe fervently that
everyone would agree with us if only they had all the facts.  So no
matter what your POV, if you *really* believe in it, you will agree
that simply laying out the facts, warts and all, will be sufficient to
convince.

--Jimbo


subject: [WikiEN-l] No comment

body:
http://will.edit.wikipedia.articles.forfood.org/

No comment on the tastefulness, or lack thereof, of this joke.
:-)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Israeli-Palestinian neutrality

body:
Toby Bartels wrote:
> Eclictology wrote:
>
> >Taking this one step further -- Neutral writing is often viewed by
> >partisans as seriously biased in favour of the opponents.
>
> That's why interpreting NPOV as the middle ground is a big mistake.

Yes!  Yes, yes!

I think this is the key innovation of NPOV.  NPOV is writing that even
partisans can agree to, as opposed to the middle ground that no one
can agree to.

--Jimbo


from_name: Robert

subject: [WikiEN-l] Palestine liberator

body:
We have a problem with a new user, "Palestine liberator"

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Palestine_liberator

Here are some of his gems. Let's start with his
anti-Semitic statement in which he demands that all the
Jews in Israel be murdered "Only peace will come when the
Zionists drink the sea at Gaza."

Some more of his statements:

INSERTING PIC OF UGLY DICK SHARON

SHARON IS FECES

RULES: COMMENTS BY ZIONISTS WILL BE DELETED !

This site is crawling with Zionists

ZIONIST TERROR

The Zionists are the REAL terrorists.

This was genocide and ethnic cleansing. The UN says Zionism
equals racism and this proves they are right, as the
genocide by the Zionists was motivated by their race
hatred.

Only peace will come when the Zionists drink the sea at
Gaza.

The Zionist entity, which the Zionists call "Israel" so
that everyone forgets their crimes against the Arab nation
of Palestine, is the world's biggest terrorist. Like Nazi
Germany and bin Laden, this terrorist must be destroyed so
that Palestine can strech from the river to the sea

(There is more, but I tire of copying his rants.)

I think "Palestine liberator"'s statements speak for
themselves. His rabid hatred is a violation of everything
that Wikipeida stands for, and I hope that he is not
allowed to damage our community.

Robert ("RK")

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subject: [Wikipedia-l] QUERIES ABOUT A SPECIFIC ENTRY

in_reply_to: <BAY2-F76ndcx3Vp20N300004d4e@hotmail.com>; from john_francis_crawford@hotmail.com on Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 03:45:47PM +0100

body:
Sure, but a better place would be on the Talk page for that article.
Go to the article and click on 'Discuss this page'.

John CRAWFORD wrote:

> I have a few queries about an entry in your encyclopaedia.  Is this the
> Email address to which I should send them?
>
> Thank you in anticipation.
>
> John.
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Find a cheaper internet access deal - choose one to suit you.
> http://www.msn.co.uk/internetaccess
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


from_name: sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Meta-wikis (was: 300,000 is a much better milestone)

body:
Tarquin wrote:

> Well, actually, I think having a metawiki *just* for the encyclopedia
> project is perhaps better.
>

I'm not sure about that. Having a common meta-space for all
Wikimedia projects would allow easier interlinking and cross-
pollination. What are the advantages to keeping separate meta-
wikis?

Stephen G.
-------
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org


body:
Andre Engles wrote:

> I disagree. I think it is strange to count the various languages together
> into one number. Some of these articles are translations of each other,
> others are different articles about the same subject. It would be like
> Larousse adding the number in the Petit Larousse and the Grand Larousse,
> or the publisher of English-XXX dictionaries adding up all languages.

In those examples, the dictionaries are separate projects.
Wikipedia is a single project conducted in different languages.

> Having many languages available is certainly a good thing, but just adding
> up the numbers gives a wholly false image.

I don't understand this statement. How is saying we have a total
300,000 articles giving a wholly false image?

Stephen G.

-------
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org


from_name: Andre Engels

body:
On Sun, 3 Aug 2003, Daniel Mayer wrote:

> Erik wrote:
> >Yes, I know what you're thinking -- not another
> >"x articles" press release.
>
> I thought we had well over 200,000 articles... I just checked en.wiki's
> Multilingual statistics page; the number is 270,616 as of July 31. So why not
> wait until we have 300,000 articles? That seems like a better milestone and
> it includes the /whole/ Wikipedia project, not just the English version. We
> already had a press release just for the English version earlier this year
> anyway.

I disagree. I think it is strange to count the various languages together
into one number. Some of these articles are translations of each other, others
are different articles about the same subject. It would be like Larousse
adding the number in the Petit Larousse and the Grand Larousse, or the
publisher of English-XXX dictionaries adding up all languages. Having many
languages available is certainly a good thing, but just adding up the numbers
gives a wholly false image.

Andre Engels


body:
On Sun, 3 Aug 2003, Delirium wrote:

> Till Westermayer wrote:
>
> >but wouldn't the inclusion of our copylefted material because of the
> >meme-viral character of that material make IMDB and others going GNU?
> >
> >
> That's a bit of a tricky issue, because the GFDL doesn't seem to have
> been intended for websites, but books.  In a book, I think this would be
> the case -- if you took someone's book, and added a few chapters to it,
> you'd have to FDL the whole thing, not just the original chapters.
> Similarly, if you published a book on movie history and included stuff
> from Wikipedia, you'd have to FDL the whole book, including your own
> writings.
>
> I'm not sure if this carries over to a website though.  Can a website
> have only certain sections FDL'd (say, the reviews) and consider the
> rest of them a separate work, even if they happen to appear on the same
> page?  The analogy to books would say no, but I'm not sure.

I would say that even in books, the answer could be yes, provided that
the part which falls under the GNU/FDL is clearly set apart and labelled
as such. In my opinion, a work of which part is from the GNU/FDL and part
not, could fall under:

  7. AGGREGATION WITH INDEPENDENT WORKS

  A compilation of the Document or its derivatives with other separate and
  independent documents or works, in or on a volume of a storage or
  distribution medium, does not as a whole count as a Modified Version of the
  Document, provided no compilation copyright is claimed for the compilation.
  Such a compilation is called an "aggregate", and this License does not apply
  to the other self-contained works thus compiled with the Document, on account
  of their being thus compiled, if they are not themselves derivative works of
  the Document.

  If the Cover Text requirement of section 3 is applicable to these copies of
  the Document, then if the Document is less than one quarter of the entire
  aggregate, the Document's Cover Texts may be placed on covers that surround
  only the Document within the aggregate. Otherwise they must appear on covers
  around the whole aggregate.

Andre Engels


from_name: Daniel Ehrenberg

subject: [Textbook-l] Anonymous contributions

body:
--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> LittleDan wrote:
> >--- Daniel Mayer wrote:
> >> Aside: It would also be nice if links to other
> >> Wikimedia projects looked
> >> different than external links. A green color
> would
> >> be nice..
> >>
> >> --- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
> >
> >That sounds good, but green is used for external
> >links in Cologne Blue. I think that sticking with
> blue
> >for the external links within Wikimedia.
>
> But we /do/ need to distinguish between links within
> Wikibooks from links to
> other Wikimedia projects. The Cologne Blue
> stylesheet should be fixed.
>
> -- mav
>
Maybe links to other projects on cologne blue should
be light blue, just a reversal of the normal
stylesheet.
--LDan

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from_name: Daniel Mayer

subject: [Wikipedia-l] 300,000 is a much better milestone

body:
Erik wrote:

>Good idea, but will we still make a big announcement when
>en: reaches 150K? From the looks of it, the two will nearly
>happen at the same time.

Let's wait for the 300,000 milestone and then make just one uber announcement.
We don't want to be in the situation where a news director decides not to run
our 300,000 milestone/Project wide/Wikimedia story because they already ran
an article on Wikipedia the week before. Let's get the biggest bang for the
buck.

>Well, IMHO all of the logos should be in the same general
>style.

I don't agree with this at all - each project needs to have its own very
distinct logo so that each project can be instantly recognizable when readers
are using interproject links. Readers need to know very fast where they are.

>Daniel wrote:
>>..(major need: the porting over of pyWiki's php/GPL
>>WikiGroup functionality)
>
>Hmm, not sure this is really essential for the
>wikibooks project.

Oh yes it is very essential - without it we cannot organize books in the
WikiWay. Yeah sure we can hard code navigational aids like Next and Previous
Page but 1) that is tedious, 2) it is very inflexible (any change of
organization in a book's TOC would be difficult to implement) and 3) that
ensures that each module can only be used for a single book. This is counter
to the whole idea of having modules (which could, on the fly, be assembled
into various different configurations just by changing the Wikibook's TOC;
and there could also be several different TOC's for the same set of modules).

>Perhaps the template idea
>could be complemented to support this.

What template idea?

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Palestine liberator

body:
--- Robert <rkscience100 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> We have a problem with a new user, "Palestine
> liberator"
>
>
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Palestine_liberator
>
> Here are some of his gems. Let's start with his
> anti-Semitic statement in which he demands that all
> the
> Jews in Israel be murdered "Only peace will come
> when the
> Zionists drink the sea at Gaza."
>
> Some more of his statements:
>
> INSERTING PIC OF UGLY DICK SHARON
>
> SHARON IS FECES
>
> RULES: COMMENTS BY ZIONISTS WILL BE DELETED !
>
> This site is crawling with Zionists
>
> ZIONIST TERROR
>
> The Zionists are the REAL terrorists.
>
> This was genocide and ethnic cleansing. The UN says
> Zionism
> equals racism and this proves they are right, as the
> genocide by the Zionists was motivated by their race
> hatred.
>
> Only peace will come when the Zionists drink the sea
> at
> Gaza.
>
> The Zionist entity, which the Zionists call "Israel"
> so
> that everyone forgets their crimes against the Arab
> nation
> of Palestine, is the world's biggest terrorist. Like
> Nazi
> Germany and bin Laden, this terrorist must be
> destroyed so
> that Palestine can strech from the river to the sea
>
> (There is more, but I tire of copying his rants.)
>
> I think "Palestine liberator"'s statements speak for
> themselves. His rabid hatred is a violation of
> everything
> that Wikipeida stands for, and I hope that he is not
> allowed to damage our community.
>
>
> Robert ("RK")

Has he made any harmful edits? That's all that really
matters. If we kick him out, it won't make him any
less racist. Probably more, actually.
-LDan

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body:
Oops. I retract my last post about Palistinian
Liberator
LDan

--- james duffy <jtdirl at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> I believe there is overwhelming evidence that this
> user is not interested in
> any way of contributing NPOV content to wikipedia
> but instead vandalising
> articles.
>
> ==Examples==
>
> * Inserting a picture of Ariol Sharon on the
> [[Penis]] page with the summary
> ''INSERTING PIC OF UGLY DICK SHARON''
>
> * Inserting a picture of Sharon the the [[Feces]]
> page with the summary
> ''SHARON IS FECES''
>
> * Inserting a picture of a penis on the [[Ariel
> Sharon]] page with the
> summary ''new pic looks more like him''
>
> * replacing real headlines and texts in
> [[Israeli-Palestinian conflict]]
> with
> === ZIONIST TERROR===
>
> The Zionists are the REAL terrorists.
>
> ''and''
>
> The Zionist entity, which the Zionists call "Israel"
> so that everyone
> forgets their crimes against the Arab nation of
> Palestine, is the world's
> biggest terrorist. Like Nazi Germany and bin Laden,
> this terrorist must be
> destroyed so that Palestine can strech from the
> river to the sea.
>
> He summarised his changes as ''This site is crawling
> with Zionists''
>
> * In [[Intifada]] he replaced a paragraph with the
> following
> ''Both intifadas were originally characterized by
> civil disobedience by the
> [[Palestinians]], which escalated into the use of
> honorable  armed
> insurrection.  Many Palestinians, including women
> and children, were
> martyred due to the Nazi-fascist brutality of the
> Zionists.'' The summary he
> gave was ''This site is crawling with Zionists''.
>
> * redirected [[Israel]] to <nowiki>[[Zionist
> Entity]]</nowiki>. I deleted
> the page and restored it to its proper location, but
> he reinstated it,
> leading to a second deletion.
>
> I do not have any problem with a pro-Palestinian
> viewpoint on wiki. Indeed I
> have been called ''pro-Arab'' and ''anti-semite'' by
> RK for seeking to stop
> his blatent pro-Israeli propagandising of some
> pages. Personally I do
> believe that wiki represents the what outside the US
> is seen as America's
> ''Israelophile'' sympathies. But it is crystal clear
> that this user is not
> trying to offer a balancing analysis of the
> Palestinian analysis of the
> Middle East problem. He is simply maliciously trying
> to vandalise articles.
> It is worth noting a similar user appeared on wiki
> some weeks ago
> propagandising articles supposedly from one
> viewpoint, yet whose
> contributions seemed nothing but vandalistic
> malicious nonsense, not a
> serious attempt at offering an alternative
> viewpoint. It might be worth
> someone checking this user's IP and comparing it to
> that user to see whether
> it is the same person. This user here clearly
> warrants a ban, not for his
> opinions but for his malicious vandalism of pages.
> [[User:Jtdirl|Fear?IREANN]] 12:19, 4 Aug 2003 (UTC)
>
> BTW 172 summed up this user's contributions with the
> following, which I
> concur with.
>
> I can see that you're a mature and articulate
> advocate of your cause, laying
> out very convincing arguments involving poo poo and
> wee wees. 172 08:20, 4
> Aug 2003 (UTC)
>
>
> Since I started this page, Pl wrote on the talk page
>
> I will stop messing with pages without permission. I
> will stop making rules
> on my page. However, I still want to be able to have
> others sign the list
> I'm starting agreeing that Zionism is racism.
>
> I agree Zionism = racism
>
> * user Palestine liberator
>
> After changes, that version was posted at 13:02, 4
> Aug 2003. He then
> followed it up 8 minutes later, at
> 13:10, 4 Aug 2003 with
>
> *  United States - some in the Palestinian movement
> and others regard
> America as a puppet of the Zionists.
>
> So much for the promised neutrality and stopping
> messing. This guy is simply
> playing games.
>
> I have already had to protect one page that he
> continually reverted over and
> over and over again. I and others have been
> continually reverting other
> pages. A ban is /urgently/ required.
>
> A ban page is at [[User talk:Palestinian
> liberator/ban]]. Please express
> your viewers whether here on the list or there on
> the page. A decision is
> clearly needed quickly before the scale of vandalism
> gets out of hand.
>
> JT
>
>
_________________________________________________________________
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subject: [Wikipedia-l] 300,000 is a much better milestone (was: Preparing for 150,000 articles)

body:
tarquin wrote:
>But one of the things we need to do is make
>
>www.wikipedia.org
>
>lead to a multilingual portal and not the homepage of the english branch.

Given the project-wide nature of the 300,000 article announcement I think that
this very issue should finally be addressed. We don't need anything real
fancy, just the already developed idea here
http://mitglied.lycos.de/manske/wiki/test.php (without the intro text; its
simply too long). Somebody will have to figure out how to fetch each wiki's
{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} output to make this work though. We can add more
features as time goes by.

We can switch the logo and move en.wiki at the same time.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


from_name: Delirium

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>I don't agree with this at all - each project needs to have its own very
>distinct logo so that each project can be instantly recognizable when readers
>are using interproject links. Readers need to know very fast where they are.
>
>
If this is the case, then I think we need to come up with yet another
logo for the overarching Wikipedia project, that'd be suitable for using
on press releases and such (since picking any one language's logo is
likely to be unpopular with the others, and using them all is likely to
be infeasible).  Given that various languages have different alphabets,
I think this would be be a fairly simple logo with the text "Wikipedia"
in it, and alternate versions -- identical but for the alphabet used to
spell "Wikipedia" -- could be made for other languages if their news
sources desire something with local spelling.  A universal and
recognizable "Wikipedia logo" of this sort would also help with various
promotional materials, rather than splitting up our recognition between
dozens of different logos.

I'm not opposed to individual language logos, but I think they should be
in some ways subsidiary -- we have a generic "Wikipedia logo" and then
each language can have its own unique logo to identify itself.

-Mark


from_name: Steve Vertigo

body:
I agree with Maverick on this one. The wikipedias
traditional notions of nice walls between languages
serves only to keep some structure. As a whole,
wikipedia is destined to be far more than just an
English and Germanic and Latin language resource.
It should be thought of in this way regardless of the
issue.
-S-

> Andre Engels wrote:
> >I disagree. I think it is strange to count the
> various languages together into one number. Some of
these articles are translations of each other, others
are different articles about the same subject.
>
> We are talking about the progress of the project as
> a whole -our community
> effort-, we /are not/ boasting about the relative
> merit of our encyclopedia
> as a usable resource (using article count as a
> proxy). We need to make that
> clear in the announcement. It takes a lot of work to
> create 300,000 articles
> (including the ones that are translations). /That/
> is what the milestone
> statement is for.
>
> Community.
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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body:
Delirium
>Daniel Mayer wrote:
>>...each project needs to have its own very
>>distinct logo so that each project can be instantly recognizable when
readers
>are using interproject links. Readers need to know very fast where they are.
>
>If this is the case, then I think we need to come up with yet another
logo for the overarching Wikipedia project, that'd be suitable for using
on press releases and such (since picking any one language's logo is
likely to be unpopular with the others, and using them all is likely to
be infeasible).


body:
Um, yeah. I dont think we need the supreme court on
this one.  :)

-S-

--- james duffy <jtdirl at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> I believe there is overwhelming evidence that this
> user is not interested in
> any way of contributing NPOV content to wikipedia
> but instead vandalising
> articles.
>
> ==Examples==
>
> * Inserting a picture of Ariol Sharon on the
> [[Penis]] page with the summary
> ''INSERTING PIC OF UGLY DICK SHARON''
>
> * Inserting a picture of Sharon the the [[Feces]]
> page with the summary
> ''SHARON IS FECES''
>
> * Inserting a picture of a penis on the [[Ariel
> Sharon]] page with the
> summary ''new pic looks more like him''
>
> * replacing real headlines and texts in
> [[Israeli-Palestinian conflict]]
> with
> === ZIONIST TERROR===
>
> The Zionists are the REAL terrorists.
>
> ''and''
>
> The Zionist entity, which the Zionists call "Israel"
> so that everyone
> forgets their crimes against the Arab nation of
> Palestine, is the world's
> biggest terrorist. Like Nazi Germany and bin Laden,
> this terrorist must be
> destroyed so that Palestine can strech from the
> river to the sea.
>
> He summarised his changes as ''This site is crawling
> with Zionists''
>
> * In [[Intifada]] he replaced a paragraph with the
> following
> ''Both intifadas were originally characterized by
> civil disobedience by the
> [[Palestinians]], which escalated into the use of
> honorable  armed
> insurrection.  Many Palestinians, including women
> and children, were
> martyred due to the Nazi-fascist brutality of the
> Zionists.'' The summary he
> gave was ''This site is crawling with Zionists''.
>
> * redirected [[Israel]] to <nowiki>[[Zionist
> Entity]]</nowiki>. I deleted
> the page and restored it to its proper location, but
> he reinstated it,
> leading to a second deletion.
>
> I do not have any problem with a pro-Palestinian
> viewpoint on wiki. Indeed I
> have been called ''pro-Arab'' and ''anti-semite'' by
> RK for seeking to stop
> his blatent pro-Israeli propagandising of some
> pages. Personally I do
> believe that wiki represents the what outside the US
> is seen as America's
> ''Israelophile'' sympathies. But it is crystal clear
> that this user is not
> trying to offer a balancing analysis of the
> Palestinian analysis of the
> Middle East problem. He is simply maliciously trying
> to vandalise articles.
> It is worth noting a similar user appeared on wiki
> some weeks ago
> propagandising articles supposedly from one
> viewpoint, yet whose
> contributions seemed nothing but vandalistic
> malicious nonsense, not a
> serious attempt at offering an alternative
> viewpoint. It might be worth
> someone checking this user's IP and comparing it to
> that user to see whether
> it is the same person. This user here clearly
> warrants a ban, not for his
> opinions but for his malicious vandalism of pages.
> [[User:Jtdirl|Fear???IREANN]] 12:19, 4 Aug 2003
(UTC)
>
> BTW 172 summed up this user's contributions with the
> following, which I
> concur with.
>
> I can see that you're a mature and articulate
> advocate of your cause, laying
> out very convincing arguments involving poo poo and
> wee wees. 172 08:20, 4
> Aug 2003 (UTC)
>
>
> Since I started this page, Pl wrote on the talk page
>
> I will stop messing with pages without permission. I
> will stop making rules
> on my page. However, I still want to be able to have
> others sign the list
> I'm starting agreeing that Zionism is racism.
>
> I agree Zionism = racism
>
> * user Palestine liberator
>
> After changes, that version was posted at 13:02, 4
> Aug 2003. He then
> followed it up 8 minutes later, at
> 13:10, 4 Aug 2003 with
>
> *  United States - some in the Palestinian movement
> and others regard
> America as a puppet of the Zionists.
>
> So much for the promised neutrality and stopping
> messing. This guy is simply
> playing games.
>
> I have already had to protect one page that he
> continually reverted over and
> over and over again. I and others have been
> continually reverting other
> pages. A ban is /urgently/ required.
>
> A ban page is at [[User talk:Palestinian
> liberator/ban]]. Please express
> your viewers whether here on the list or there on
> the page. A decision is
> clearly needed quickly before the scale of vandalism
> gets out of hand.
>
> JT
>
>
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body:
Delirium wrote:
>Daniel Mayer wrote:
>>... each project needs to have its own very
>>distinct logo so that each project can be instantly
>>recognizable when readers are using interproject links.
>>Readers need to know very fast where they are.
>
>If this is the case, then I think we need to come up with yet
>another logo for the overarching Wikipedia project, that'd be
>suitable for using on press releases and such (since picking
>any one language's logo is likely to be unpopular with the
>others, and using them all is likely to be infeasible).

OK, I obviously wasn't clear enough: I specifically said interproject links
/not/ interlanguage links. Each project should have its own logo (we are
developing one for Wikipedia right now); Wikipedia needs its own, Wiktionary
does too, so does Wikiquote and let's not forget Wikibooks. Those project
logos should be internationalized enough so that they are usable by all
language versions within the same project.

The translated interface tells the user instantly which language version they
are in.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)


subject: [WikiEN-l] Our Pal liberator

body:
Well, at first it can *seem to go either way --
someone might come off as brash and blatant -- feeling
like they have to swing a sword around, and then they
calm down.  This obviously wasnt the case, and his
"edits" had about as much to do with politics as the
"homomorph" (?) guy did on Hephaestos's pages last
night. :)

Its good not to jump to conlusions either way, but his
very first edit, moving Israel to "Zionist entity"
warranted an immediate ban, regardless of any attempts
to be neutral.
-S-

> It might be helpful -- though it is hard to say --
> if someone who
> considers themselves generally or overwhelmingly
> pro-Palestinian but
> NPOV could write to this person explaining NPOV and
> what not, and
> explaining that contributions like that are just
> going to be deleted,
> and that a more effective way to help the cause is
> to contribute
> materials that is simple and factual and
> uncontroversial.
>
> One of the advantages of NPOV is that all of us
> believe fervently that
> everyone would agree with us if only they had all
> the facts.  So no
> matter what your POV, if you *really* believe in it,
> you will agree
> that simply laying out the facts, warts and all,
> will be sufficient to
> convince.
>
> --Jimbo
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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subject: [WikiEN-l] No comment

body:
I recognize that guy. Hes one of our Frisco Bums..

:D

-S-

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> http://will.edit.wikipedia.articles.forfood.org/
>
> No comment on the tastefulness, or lack thereof, of
> this joke.
> :-)

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body:
Mr Miyagi say : Left side of road, OK! Right side of
road, OK! Middle of road, Squish like grape!

-S-

>>Toby:
> > >Taking this one step further -- Neutral writing
> is often viewed by
> > >partisans as seriously biased in favour of the
> opponents.
> >
> > That's why interpreting NPOV as the middle ground
> is a big mistake.
>
> Yes!  Yes, yes!
>
> I think this is the key innovation of NPOV.  NPOV is
> writing that even
> partisans can agree to, as opposed to the middle
> ground that no one
> can agree to.
>
> --Jimbo
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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body:
I suppose a better way to end this thread would be to
say "Is-Pal neutrality" is a complete oxymoron, just
as most present controversial issues are.

-S-

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body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:

>OK, I obviously wasn't clear enough: I specifically said interproject links
>/not/ interlanguage links. Each project should have its own logo (we are
>developing one for Wikipedia right now); Wikipedia needs its own, Wiktionary
>does too, so does Wikiquote and let's not forget Wikibooks. Those project
>logos should be internationalized enough so that they are usable by all
>language versions within the same project.
>
>The translated interface tells the user instantly which language version they
>are in.
>
>
Oh ok, that makes perfect sense then.  We might want a "Wikimedia
Foundation" logo, but it'd be for activities of the Foundation itself,
not its subsidiary projects.  I think the mere proliferation of so many
major projects with the prefix "Wik" is likely to have a strong "World
Domination" type of effect without one overarching logo -- even though
we're not the only wikis out there, to a casual observer it's probably
obvious that "Wikipedia" and "Wiktionary" and "Wikibooks" are all related.

-Mark


body:
Well, its not like the news is going to work exactly
that way -- you dont just send a press release to
journalists and papers and say "we have ammased x
quantity of various bits and bytes" and expect them to
run it pronto.

You have to send them *money with the press release.
:)

-S-

> Let's wait for the 300,000 milestone and then make
> just one uber announcement.
> We don't want to be in the situation where a news
> director decides not to run
> our 300,000 milestone/Project wide/Wikimedia story
> because they already ran
> an article on Wikipedia the week before. Let's get
> the biggest bang for the
> buck.

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subject: [WikiEN-l] Palestine liberator

body:
> Has he made any '''''harmful edits?''''' That's all
that
> really
> matters. If we kick him out, it won't make him any
> less racist. Probably more, actually.
> -LDan

ROFL.
You must not have read the previous emails. (like JTs)
Lets just say they werent "technically correct" or
"factual", and his "counseling sessions" on Wikipedia
were terminated. :)  -S-

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body:
It's like the authoritative voice of documentary
broadcasting, its not NPOV, because it is not
inclusive, NPOV includes the differing POVs,
not silencing POVs that don't agree with majority
rule. IMHO NPOV is giving a voice to all POVs, and
stating what the controversies may be (sort of
like legal writing where dissents and "minority" holdings
are equally acknowledged).
alex756
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com>
To: <wikien-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Monday, August 04, 2003 9:23 AM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Israeli-Palestinian neutrality

> Toby Bartels wrote:
> > Eclictology wrote:
> >
> > >Taking this one step further -- Neutral writing is often viewed by
> > >partisans as seriously biased in favour of the opponents.
> >
> > That's why interpreting NPOV as the middle ground is a big mistake.
>
> Yes!  Yes, yes!
>
> I think this is the key innovation of NPOV.  NPOV is writing that even
> partisans can agree to, as opposed to the middle ground that no one
> can agree to.
>
> --Jimbo
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: cwb at lim.nl

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Help! Wikipedia Preferences gone haywire

body:
Hi all,

I just changed a setting in my Preferences page, and for some reason it
has set my edit window to 4x4 -- and I can't reset it. Changes now don't
seem to stick. I am unable to edit pages. Has anyone changed anything?