subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
> On 8 Apr 2006 at 22:12, "Steve Bennett" <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Let's be stronger: Any image containing:
>> - elements of erotica,
>> - and depictions of people, real or fictitious, apparently under 18.
>
> If text of this nature were covered as well, you'd encompass a good
> deal of Harry Potter fanfic!
>

Strawman. Harry Potter fanfic shouldn't be on Wikipedia anyway.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Ian Tresman

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Policy clarification: Undue weight

body:
At 16:28 09/04/2006, you wrote:
>This is an on-going problem. It is done both by those who
>misunderstand the policy and by those with a point of view agenda.
>The only reasonable recourse is to patiently discuss the policy. I'm
>not sure the section on undue weight could be made any clearer. If
>you are unable to negotiate successfully with those who have a point
>of view agenda please use the dispute resolution procedure. Please
>don't edit war with them.

This is the one policy where I have had almost a year of
"discussion". I have tried various dispute resolution processes, and
am invariably told that it is a content dispute (presumably because
nearly all policy relates to content).

It seems to me that policy should be sufficiently clear for editors
to implement, not decide by consensus?

Regards,
Ian Tresman


list: wikien-l

from_name: Alphax (Wikipedia email)

subject: [WikiEN-l] Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act

body:
Carl F?rstenberg wrote:
> Don't know what to do, as I was wikify articles, I came to this one. as
> usual I searched for copyvios and found http://www.complianceit.net/?p=31
>
> The problem is that that page have copied wikipedia data without saying so,
> as IANAL I ask you what to do.
>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks should help you
here.

--
Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax
Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
"We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales
Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP

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list: wikitech-l

from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Outage

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> I thought each db server was on a UPS? If not, then why not?

As I understand it, our whole rack has two UPSs. The breaker that went is the
one that feeds power *from* those UPSs *to* the racks.

It's specced way over what should be needed there; according to bw at the colo
they've got the company running diagnostics on it as it shouldn't have been able
to blow.

> I also thought we had the capability
> to go read only from the other server farms when the Tampa farm went down. If not, then why not?

No, we've not had this capability so far.

> We are a top 20 website that makes more than enough money to hire enough people to make sure
> services decay gracefully and to make sure we have adequate redundancy. I'm working on the current
> year budget. Please start thinking about your staffing and equipment needs for the rest of the
> year.

If you've got the budget now we'll be happy to spend it. But for a "top 20
website" we've still got a piddly little budget and a single employee. Sites
with comparable traffic sell for many many millions...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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subject:
[Wikitech-l] Where the hell is the donation form? (was Re:
	Outage)

body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> Argh - For the 20th time over the last 3 years: CAN SOMEBODY PLEASE PUT A DONATION FORM ON THE
> WIKIDOWN PAGE!!!

When I am finally successful at wheedling the secret method of updating the
error pages from the unpaid volunteers who run the cache servers, we'll see what
we can do.

> Also, if we have a donation form, then these outages would be mostly self-correcting since the
> extra revenue will help us to add more redundancy to the system so we can at least go read only
> until we are completely back up.

It generally is considered to look very bad, though: "begging for money" or
"holding the site ransom".

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [WikiEN-l] Real-time mirrors as a net revenue _source_?

body:
Real-time mirrors seem to be a recurring phenomenon. They are a drain on
Wikipedia's resources, and hunting them and shooting them down is a
continuing battle.

The reasoning behind these mirrors appears to be:

1 putting up a Wikipedia mirror with ads will make money...
2 too lazy to set up a proper mirror...
3 instead, set up a script that queries Wikipedia in real time...
4 profit!

However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or
near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?

Currently, Wikipedia's running costs are about $1.2M per year, and this
pays for, among other things, serving about 4000 hits per second, that
is to say, about 1.26 x 10^11 hits per year, or about $ 10^-5 per hit.
(Of course, this is average gross cost; marginal cost will be
significantly higher, say $ 10^-4 per hit).

Web advertising rates are generally of the order of $1 CPM: that is, $
10^-3 per hit. If an advertiser manages to get 10,000,000 hits per year,
they will make $10,000 in ad revenue, and costs the Wikimedia Foundation
around $1000 in leeched server load.

What if we were to turn things round, and charge (say) $ 2 x 10^-4 per
hit for an official real-time mirror service? (Of course, this would be
aggregated in lumps, because it's impossible to bill tiny fractions of a
dollar). Now, the economics to the mirror operator is $ 10^-3 - $0.2 x
10^-3 per hit, and they still make 80% of the money they would have
before, and don't need to worry about being cut off. However, the
economics for the WF are now quite different: instead of losing $ 10^-4
per hit, the Foundation would make $ 2 x 10^-4 income - $ 10^-4 cost per
hit, and thus makes $ 1000 gross profit over the course of the year for
those 10,000,000 hits, which can be ploughed back into achieving the
Foundation's charitable goals (for example, by buying new server kit and
bandwidth, or paying for other real-world activities).

Note that the users of the real-time mirrors are _not_ being charged for
use of the GFDL content, which remains freely available as before; they
are being charged for real-time access to WP data, with no need to run a
modified copy of MediaWiki in order to run their service.

Administration of the scheme could be made automatic, by allowing the
existing credit-card interface to be used to for payment, and entering
an IP address or addresses to be authorized, an E-mail address for
contact, and getting an authorization key mailed back.

As a result:
* Wikipedia remains ad-free
* the WF gets revenue
* the advertisers still get to make (slightly less) money, but this time
without leeching unauthorized resources.

The feed could be provided from the existing software, only with a "null
skin" that produced only the rendered page content, thus both slightly
reducing the load of producing it (eg. no check for messages, greater
possibility for caching), and, at the same time, making the page content
easier to re-use, by removing the need to strip the user-interface from
around the page contents.

With other changes, for example, not checking for red/blue links,
serving costs could probably be reduced even further, and quote possibly
WF could charge more than $ 2 x 10^-4 per hit. Given the number of
mirrors around, setting up this scheme might pay for itself in a month
or less.

Good idea, or bad idea?

-- Neil


subject: [Wikitech-l] Real-time mirrors as a net revenue _source_?


from_name: Steve Bennett

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
On 4/9/06, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's an unnecessary limit.  The picture in question depicts someone
> who is obviously a very young child, and the juxtaposition with a
> dildo makes the picture explicitly sexual.  Depiction of sexuality in
> teenagers has long been acceptable; the example of Kubrick's Lolita
> (who in the film is fourteen, somewhat older than Nabokov's Lolita)
> painting her toenails would be acceptable because, although erotic, it
> is not sexually explicit and doesn't involve a young child.

Hmm, good points. I think in that example, the "level" of erotica is
much lower, and such an image would be offensive to many less people.
Context would probably play a part too.

Steve


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or
> near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?

Putting ourselves in a situation where we are dependent on other
organisations for our existence allows them to threaten withdrawal of
financial agreements if we do not make changes they request.

Chris

--
Chris Jenkinson
chris at starglade.org

"Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
  -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
Chris Jenkinson wrote:

>Neil Harris wrote:
>
>
>>However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or
>>near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?
>>
>>
>Putting ourselves in a situation where we are dependent on other
>organisations for our existence allows them to threaten withdrawal of
>financial agreements if we do not make changes they request.
>
The answer to that is to diversify revenue.  That limits the damage that
can be done by such people.  That's a principle of responsible
investments.  Countries with responsible pension standards do not allow
any more than a small percentage of a pension fund's investments to be
in the company's own shares.  This helps to prevent situations such as
happened at Enron.

Ec


subject: [Wikitech-l] Outage

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:
> Apparently an 800-amp breaker in the main PDU failed.
>
>
> The database servers are currently starting up; this takes a little while, but
> hopefully should be all done within the hour.

As always this step took a touch longer than hoped. :P

Right now most stuff seems to be back up and running: viewing, editing, images,
IRC feeds.

Editing-time outage: 6 hours, 15 minutes.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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from_name: Fred Bauder

subject: [WikiEN-l] A question about Wikipedia method

body:
Keep it. Verification can come later. But if someone removes it and
makes a fuss, don't put it back in.

Fred

On Apr 6, 2006, at 11:17 AM, Molu Bosu Palit wrote:

> Hi,
>
>   I have this question about Wikipedia method. If I see cntent that
> I know for CERTAIN to be true, but the content does not cite a
> verifiable source and I also know of none, then should I keep the
> content or should I remove it? Thank you.
>
>   Molu
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> How low will we go? Check out Yahoo! Messenger?s low  PC-to-Phone
> call rates.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


from_name: Gregory Maxwell

subject: [Wikitech-l] Redundancy for wikipedia

body:
On 4/9/06, Chris Wilson <chris at qwirx.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I guess you probably know that Wikipedia was down earlier, due to a
> power fault at the colo centre (apparently). I was chatting to brion on
> IRC and he recommended that I contact this list.
>
> I think it should be possible to make Wikipedia fully redundant to
> outages of individual data centres, and not too expensive. Here's how.
>
> Get a BGP portable IP address range.

Yea, one of dem portable /25s.

> Advertise this range from TWO
> locations, at separate data centres. Have basically identical read-only
> servers on each range, with the same IP addresses. Don't worry about IP
> conflicts, as the servers are identical, and the shortest route from any
> given client will point to just one data centre, and not move unless
> that data centre goes down, when it will automatically fall back to the
> other.

Er narf. No.
Internet routing is not that stable.

If you anycast TCP on the public internet you *will* end up with
oddball behavior as routing topology changes where users get hung
connections because the route changed out from under them.  Getting
such a thing working correctly is quite a big more complex then you
seem to think it is.

> Under normal conditions, your load is shared between both data centres,
> so you don't need to actually increase the number of servers. If one
> goes down, all requests go to the other, so performance might drop, but
> Wikipedia should stay up.
>
> This only works for read-only servers, so the process of editing
> Wikipedia would still rely on one of the groups (or some subset of
> servers in that group) being masters, and all the other servers being
> slaves that sync off those masters.

Last I checked we still had issues getting mysql replication working
well across non-local networks.

> It's just a suggestion, I'd be interested to hear what you think.
>
> If you are interested, I know a hosting company that has a BGP-portable
> range (I used to work for them), and I could talk to them about whether
> they can set up redundant IP tunnelling for that range to whatever IP
> addresses (VPN endpoints) you want, so you wouldn't even need to have
> your own BGP range.

For what you propose the portable block would have to contain all the
normal Wikipedia traffic. I some how suspect that they would rather
not be tunneling several hundred mbit/sec of traffic. :)


subject: [Wikitech-l] Initial post-mortem notes for April 9, 2006 outage

body:
Recovery consisted of four phases:

1) "What the hell is going on?"
Outage mentioned immediately by users in IRC. On investigation, the whole of
PowerMedium appeared to be offline. Mark indicated that they had a major network
problem. I phoned their support line; they confirmed a big network problem and
said they were bringing in Charles to work on it. (This was about 3:30pm Sunday
afternoon Florida time).

At this point there was nothing further we could do, we had to wait for them to
fix things on their end. I also called Kyle so we'd have a pair of hands in the
office when things started to come back online.

2) "Why does nothing work?"

After an hour or so they apparently had their general issues under control.
PowerMedium's own web site came back up, we could get at our own switch over the
network, and Charles (bw) was available online.

Between us remote folks, and bw & Kyle on-site we did some banging on rocks. We
found that in addition to the network outage, there had been a power problem
(presumably this killed their routers too), which had rebooted everything.

In this stage we were confronted with the fragility of the internal DNS and LDAP
we had set up to make everything work. While we've expended some effort to
minimize the dependencies on NFS, we hadn't yet put similar effort into these
services. Until these services were restored, booting was a vveeerrryyyy slow
proposition (with lots of timeout steps), and it took another hour or so to get
key infrastructure back in place to where we could seriously get working.

3) "Where's my data?"

MediaWiki is highly reliant on its database backend. With machines on, we were
able to start the MySQL databases loading up and running InnoDB transaction
recovery. This took much longer than expected, apparently because we have a
*huge* log size set on the master: about 1 gb. (James Day recommends reducing
this significantly.)

While this step was running, mail was brought back online and the additional
MySQL servers for text storage were brought online. Two of the slaves were found
to be slightly behind, and the master log file appears to be smaller than their
recorded master log offsets. This might indicate corruption of the master log
file, or it might simply indicate that the position was corrupted on the slaves.
In either case, this is very much non-fatal for text storage as it's very
redundant and automatically falls back to the master on missing loads. (But it
should be looked into. We may have write-back caching or other problems on those
boxen.)

4) "Where's my site?"

Once the primary database was done, it was time to flip the switch and watch the
site! Except that the Squid+LVS+Apache infrastructure is a little fragile, and
in particular LVS was not set up to start automatically.

At this point it was late in Europe and our volunteer admins who do much of the
squid and LVS work were asleep. I was able to find the information I needed on
our internal admin documentation wiki, and got these back online after a short
while.

Additionally I had to restart the IRC feeds for recent changes data, which
involved recovering a tool which had gotten moved around between home directories.

Things appear to be pretty much working at this point. In the short term, we
need to examine the broken MySQL slave servers, and make sure we're at full
capacity.

In the medium term, we need to make sure that all services either will start
automatically or can be very easily and plainly started manually.

We also *must* examine our DNS & LDAP infrastructure: if we can't make it boot
fast and reliably we need to consider replacing this with something more
primitive but reliable. (ewww, scp'ing hosts files...)

We also need to make sure that:
* Squid error messages are easily configurable and can be updated with necessary
information.
* DNS can be easily updated when the Florida cluster is offline, eg so that we
could redirect hits from Florida to another cluster for an error page or
read-only mirror.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 4/9/06, Neil Harris <neil at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> [snip]
>
>> However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or
>> near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?
>>
> [snip]
>
> What makes you think that something which is effectively this, isn't
> already being done?
>
>
Would this be Answers.com?

-- Neil


from_name: Plyd

body:
This is a way to make money with advertisment. And who is going to loose, in
fact...
- Visitors, who will suffer ads watching the bad mirror (probably without
knowing it).
- How can we ensure visitors will still edit Wikipedia and not the mirror
(if it dares giving this possibility)?
- Separating Data/Websites called "mirrors"... Starting a concurrence
between websites... Start of the end for Wikipedia.org domain name. Betters
mirrors could appear. (good or bad I don't know)
- When a mirror name is known, it can easilier start a fork of the
encyclopedia. Even if it's allowed, maybe this is not to be encouraged.

Other solution:
Google-like policy: you are not allowed to use scripts browsing the search
engine. Why scripts could use Wikipedia?
Forbidding and blocking IP doing it still respect the GFDL.

Plyd

On 4/9/06, Neil Harris <neil at tonal.clara.co.uk > wrote:
>
> Real-time mirrors seem to be a recurring phenomenon. They are a drain on
> Wikipedia's resources, and hunting them and shooting them down is a
> continuing battle.
>
> The reasoning behind these mirrors appears to be:
>
> 1 putting up a Wikipedia mirror with ads will make money...
> 2 too lazy to set up a proper mirror...
> 3 instead, set up a script that queries Wikipedia in real time...
> 4 profit!
>
> However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or
> near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?
>
> Currently, Wikipedia's running costs are about $1.2M per year, and this
> pays for, among other things, serving about 4000 hits per second, that
> is to say, about 1.26 x 10^11 hits per year, or about $ 10^-5 per hit.
> (Of course, this is average gross cost; marginal cost will be
> significantly higher, say $ 10^-4 per hit).
>
> Web advertising rates are generally of the order of $1 CPM: that is, $
> 10^-3 per hit. If an advertiser manages to get 10,000,000 hits per year,
> they will make $10,000 in ad revenue, and costs the Wikimedia Foundation
> around $1000 in leeched server load.
>
> What if we were to turn things round, and charge (say) $ 2 x 10^-4 per
> hit for an official real-time mirror service? (Of course, this would be
> aggregated in lumps, because it's impossible to bill tiny fractions of a
> dollar). Now, the economics to the mirror operator is $ 10^-3 - $0.2 x
> 10^-3 per hit, and they still make 80% of the money they would have
> before, and don't need to worry about being cut off. However, the
> economics for the WF are now quite different: instead of losing $ 10^-4
> per hit, the Foundation would make $ 2 x 10^-4 income - $ 10^-4 cost per
> hit, and thus makes $ 1000 gross profit over the course of the year for
> those 10,000,000 hits, which can be ploughed back into achieving the
> Foundation's charitable goals (for example, by buying new server kit and
> bandwidth, or paying for other real-world activities).
>
> Note that the users of the real-time mirrors are _not_ being charged for
> use of the GFDL content, which remains freely available as before; they
> are being charged for real-time access to WP data, with no need to run a
> modified copy of MediaWiki in order to run their service.
>
> Administration of the scheme could be made automatic, by allowing the
> existing credit-card interface to be used to for payment, and entering
> an IP address or addresses to be authorized, an E-mail address for
> contact, and getting an authorization key mailed back.
>
> As a result:
> * Wikipedia remains ad-free
> * the WF gets revenue
> * the advertisers still get to make (slightly less) money, but this time
> without leeching unauthorized resources.
>
> The feed could be provided from the existing software, only with a "null
> skin" that produced only the rendered page content, thus both slightly
> reducing the load of producing it (eg. no check for messages, greater
> possibility for caching), and, at the same time, making the page content
> easier to re-use, by removing the need to strip the user-interface from
> around the page contents.
>
> With other changes, for example, not checking for red/blue links,
> serving costs could probably be reduced even further, and quote possibly
> WF could charge more than $ 2 x 10^-4 per hit. Given the number of
> mirrors around, setting up this scheme might pay for itself in a month
> or less.
>
> Good idea, or bad idea?
>
> -- Neil
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>


subject: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

body:
steven l. rubenstein wrote:

> It is natural that as we grow our values take more certain form, and
> our understanding of them, and the reasons for them, develop.
>
> I believe that Verifiability and No original research are two policies
> essential to the future of the project, which is to produce a
> high-quality encyclopedia.  If other encyclopedias are not rigorous on
> these matters, it is because their articles are generally written by
> PhD.s or graduate students, and are peer-reviewed.  I do not want our
> articles to have to be written by PhD.s or go through mandated and
> rigorous peer-review.  Therefore, I think these two policies are
> necessary.  And hand-in-hand with them, our Cite sources guideline is
> just as important.

Although I may have a slightly more liberal attitude toward NOR; I would
still view NPOV as having equally high sources.  To me citing sources is
implicit in verifiability.

I sometimes feel uncertain about the extent to which other publications
have been peer reviewed.  How often are the peer reviewers credited?  A
PhD's reputation is often more influential.  I think that our approach
which credits everyone who has worked on an article is superior to
anonymous peer-reviews.

> If I have been following this discussion adequately (and I admit I
> often miss things) many people have concerns about how realistic it is
> to expect every editor, especially newbies, to comply with these
> standards.  And I appreciate these concerns.  However, I do not think
> the issue is compliance with these standards as such.  I think there
> is a different issue.
>
> Specifically, it is our articles that must comply with these
> standards.  This I think is important for one simple reason that gets
> at the heart of our project: it is a collaborative work in process.
>
> If Wikipedia is as I believe it is and ought to be a collaborative
> work in process, then our policies are ideals to which we expect our
> articles to aspire, but no one editor can bear the full responsibility
> of achieving this.

This is perfectly sensible.  It's about the articles rather than their
authors.

> This, at least, has always been my understanding of our prized NPOV
> policy.  For example, I just added considerable material on the role
> of "love" in Judaism in the "Judaism and Christianity" article.  I
> have no doubt that I have failed to express the full range of Jewish
> views.  Moreover, I am not qualified to explain the Christian views.
> Does this mean I have violated NPOV?  I do not think so, because I
> have identified which point of view I have represented (and here,
> citing sources is practically a requirement).  And I have left notices
> on a variety of talk pages, of both articles and users, inviting them
> to add more Jewish views and Christian views.  This is what I mean by
> a collaborative effort.  It may not be this week or this month but I
> have no doubt that in a year this section of the article will
> represent a variety of views fairly.

There is the ideal of writing for your opponents, but that should not
extend to creating controversies where there are none.  In the absence
of a controversy your writing can only be based on your own experiences
and understanding.

> In other words, I wrote my contribution so as not to break our NPOV
> policy, and so as to leave room for others to contribute.

Is the early maxim, "always leave something undone" still valid?

> I just think we should take the same approach to Verifiability.  No
> one should deliberately add unverifiable information in an article,
> and if they do, it should be deleted.  Moreover, no one should bear
> the bull responsibility of providing all sources.  In the Capitalism
> article someone has made claims about communism.  I did not
> immediately demand that they provide a source.  I first when to my
> books by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao.  I could not find
> confirmation in any of the books for some of those claims added by
> another editor.  Had I, I would have added the sources myself -- this
> is what I mean by collaboration.

There is also a question of relevance here.  I have not recently viewed
the article, but the question that stands out is, "In an article on
capitalism how much should we be talking about communism or any other
economic philosophy."  These subjects have articles of their own, and
can be easily linked.  Assuming that the material does indeed belong
there, you have done what you can by checking available fundamental sources.

> In one case I could not find a source and said so, and another
> contributor provided the source -- this is what I mean by collaboration.

Absolutely, but if no others can find appropriate sources the
responsibility comes back to the person who made the original assertion.

> I would demand that the specific editor adding specific information
> provide the source only if I could not find the source myself and
> suspected that the information were unverifiable.  If the contributor
> in question, as well as other contributors, cannot find a verifiable
> source, I do believe that warrants deletion.  But my point is this: I
> believe verifiability should and will be achieved through a
> collaborative process.

Often that contributor is no longer active or available for us to question.

> That said, I also insist on the corollary: our collaborative process
> should be dedicated to producing articles based on verifiable
> sources.  A collective process requires a collective commitment.

Yes.

Ec


body:
At 17:56 09/04/2006, you wrote:
>Point of view editing is not a content dispute. The policy is clear,
>but some chose not to implement it. Without looking at the articles
>involved it is impossible to tell what is going on.

Editing point of view is one thing. But getting a piece of
information into an article in the first place, based on policy, is another.

It's probably not appropriate to discuss a specific case in the
mailing list, (unless it might make a good example), though I'd be
happy to do it off-list, or perhaps point your to some talk pages?

Regards,
Ian Tresman

>Fred
>
>On Apr 9, 2006, at 10:14 AM, Ian Tresman wrote:
>
> > At 16:28 09/04/2006, you wrote:
> >
> >> This is an on-going problem. It is done both by those who
> >> misunderstand the policy and by those with a point of view agenda.
> >> The only reasonable recourse is to patiently discuss the policy. I'm
> >> not sure the section on undue weight could be made any clearer. If
> >> you are unable to negotiate successfully with those who have a point
> >> of view agenda please use the dispute resolution procedure. Please
> >> don't edit war with them.
> >>
> >
> >
> > This is the one policy where I have had almost a year of
> > "discussion". I have tried various dispute resolution processes, and
> > am invariably told that it is a content dispute (presumably because
> > nearly all policy relates to content).
> >
> > It seems to me that policy should be sufficiently clear for editors
> > to implement, not decide by consensus?
> >
> > Regards,
> > Ian Tresman
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wikipedia-l mailing list
>Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Fund-raising suggestion

body:
My earlier post on policy clarification leads me to suggest a good
way to raise a continuous stream of money.

If I had the option, I would stump up a $50 donation in an instant,
to acquire an "advocate" to ensure that policy is followed, while I
attempted to edit an article "by the rules". The advocate would NOT
take the side of the donor.

At the moment, administrators can quickly assess contraventions of
3RR (three revert rule) and vandalism. Other issues on policy are
typically judged by consensus which depends on the knowledge and
experience of editors on policy. There is often a conflict of
interest, and often poor understanding of policy.

I envisage policy advocates, who would initially take a short online
test to assess their competence, and may then be called upon to
uphold policy, either on a question by question basis, or on an
article by article basis.

If there are only a limited number of such advocates, their services
could be acquired by bidding.

At no time will an advocate take sides, and nor is an advocate
guaranteed to resolve a dispute. But in those cases where they can, I
think their services would be invaluable.

Regards,
Ian Tresman


subject: [Wikitech-l] Outage

body:
On 4/9/06, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I thought each db server was on a UPS? If not, then why not? I also thought we had the capability
> to go read only from the other server farms when the Tampa farm went down. If not, then why not?
>
> We are a top 20 website that makes more than enough money to hire enough people to make sure
> services decay gracefully and to make sure we have adequate redundancy. I'm working on the current
> year budget. Please start thinking about your staffing and equipment needs for the rest of the
> year.

In any decent facility house power should be more reliable than a
bunch of small UPSes stuck in your racks. MTBF on small UPSes is not
very impressive.


from_name: Michael Snow

subject:
[WikiEN-l] Fatally Flawed,
	part II: The Economist corrects itself

body:
maru dubshinki wrote:

>On 4/9/06, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>On 4/9/06, Carl F?rstenberg <azatoth at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>link?
>>>
>>>
>>It should be in the dead-tree US edition.
>>
>>The Graph in the original article seems to be corrected as of today:
>>
>>http://www.economist.com/images/20060318/CSF428.gif
>>
>>It still states:
>>
>>"And after the furore over the biographical entry last year, Wikipedia
>>changed its rules so that only registered users can edit existing
>>entries, and new contributors must wait a few days before they can
>>start new ones."
>>
>>http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5624944
>>
>>
>That's not the only problem. They are also using a very misleading
>article count- we don't have three million. We only have 3M if one
>counts every last entry and redirect as an article.
>
>
You seem to be laboring under the delusion that nothing exists outside
the English Wikipedia. That kind of attitude gets us a very bad
reputation in the Wikipedia community's other languages. If you read the
article, you will find that the article count there (2.6 million) is
explicitly described as covering 120 languages.

--Michael Snow


from_name: Jay R. Ashworth

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Mathematical expressions
	and	conditional	constructs, now implemented

body:
On Sun, Apr 09, 2006 at 11:58:41AM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> >>Date: Wed, 05 Apr 2006 18:32:01 -0700
> >>But Joe User still needs to plug information into the template.  Or in
> >>the course of ordinary editing he runs into a template which is not
> >>suitable to his subject, but it's beyond his technical capacity to trace
> >>the problem.  It's easy to say that he should ask someone more
> >>experienced in thee things, but that detracts from his editing
> >>experience and the genuine value that he has as a content provider.
> >>
> >That sounds like an argument in favor of penalizing smart users at the
> >expense of stupid users -- worse, making it harder for the smart users
> >to *help* the stupid users.
> >
> >That way lies madness, and sweaty palms.
> >
> The word that describes that attitude is "arrogance".  It's on a par
> with a politician saying, "Trust me."

Excuse me?

You're suggesting that *assuming users are smart enough to cope with
more power in their wiki environment* is *arrogant*?

It seems to *me* that being all paternal and saying "don't put that
power in there; people aren't smart enough to cope with it" is what's
arrogant.

> Others may have spent 25 years developing their experience in other
> areas of knowledge, with only negligible experience in computer
> systems.  That does not make them "stupid", and should not qualify them
> for such insults.  Without the content, the Wikipedia that you envision
> would be nothing more than an empty shell.

I made no insults.

I characterized my perception of the argument being made, and evinced
my opinion on it.

If you think that's arrogance, I think you're projecting.

Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates        The Things I Think                        '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

     A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
     Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

     A: Top-posting.
     Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject:
[WikiEN-l] What to do when "I'm sure it's true but I know of no
	verifiable source"

body:
On Apr 9, 2006, at 8:40 PM, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:

> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2006 10:17:52 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Molu Bosu Palit <loom91 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] A question about Wikipedia method
> To: WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> Message-ID: <20060406171753.2281.qmail at web32104.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
>
> Hi,
>
>   I have this question about Wikipedia method. If I see cntent that
> I know for CERTAIN to be true, but the content does not cite a
> verifiable source and I also know of none, then should I keep the
> content or should I remove it? Thank you.
>
>   Molu

Neither. If you're sure the content is true, then you should not be
in a rush to remove it, but if nobody has found a verifiable source,
then the reader should be specifically alerted to this problem.

So, tag it with a {{fact}} tag (which displays as a superscript
"Citation needed.") Wait a while and see if anyone can find a
verifiable source. Continue to try to find a verifiable source yourself.

If, after what you consider to be a reasonable amount of time, nobody
has come up with a source, then do not simply remove it, cut it from
the article, but paste it into the talk page and explain both that a)
you're removing it because nobody could find a source for it, but b)
you personally are sure that it is true. Give your reasons for
thinking it's true. Giving a good explanation may help someone else
find a source. For example, if you say "I think I read it in the
Boston Globe," then since my local public library happens to give me
access to a database with the full text of the Boston Globe back to
about 1980, I might be able to find a source even if you, without
such access, can't.


body:
On 4/9/06, Neil Harris <neil at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or
> near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?

It sounds good to me, but would only work if we could add sufficient
value to that feed to make it worth buying instead of stealing
(inasmuch as scraping our pages is stealing). Cleaning up the feed
(could we supply raw XML?), filtering (oh wait, we don't content-tag
our pages :)) and hiding red-links would certainly be ways of doing
that...

Steve


from_name: Bryan Derksen

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deterioration of Featured Articles

body:
Ben Greenberg wrote:
> The biggest problem that wikipedia is facing right now is deterioration.  I
> really don't find the featured article review to be effective enough to
> prevent featured articles from getting worse.  What ideas do you guys have
> for how we could prevent featured article deterioration?
>
Deterioration might not be so bad. In evolutionary optimization (for
example via genetic algorithms) a concept that's often mentioned is the
"fitness landscape", a graph showing the relative fitness of all
possible solutions to a particular problem. The landscape for most
problems is usually hilly, with peaks around the solutions that are
relatively good and valleys where they're particularly bad. But peaks
may only be locally optimal, with higher peaks elsewhere. If an article
reaches a quality peak we shouldn't be too devoted to keeping it there
since somewhere else there might be an even better possible version to
reach. For example, new material might be added covering some aspect of
the article's topic that wasn't covered previously, but the new material
has bad grammar and sparse citations and is "bad" enough to knock the
article off of Featured status. The best approach in this case is not to
just revert to the old version, but rather clean up the new material to
result in an even better article than it was before.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape#Fitness_landscapes_in_evolutionary_optimization
has a nice diagram.


from_name: Guy Chapman aka JzG

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia broken

body:
On Fri, 7 Apr 2006 15:30:33 +0200, you wrote:

>I totally support that. I would also like the basic reasons for
>notability guidelines to be stated more explicitly. We don't, from
>memory, have any rationale stronger than "Wikipedia is not paper, but
>still!"

Some time back I tried to include an underpinning policy section in
notability guidelines - the point being that if something is not
notable, it is unlikely to be verifiable from reliable sources.
Notability is a shorthand for WP:V, WP:RS and WP:NOT (an
indiscriminate collection of information).

Case in point: Cleveland Steamer, where at least one voter at AfD said
it should remain because Wikipedia was the only reference he could
find to it.  Cited sources are unquestionably not reliable.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia broken

body:
On Fri, 07 Apr 2006 13:59:41 +0100, you wrote:

>I'm currently bogged down in [[LUEshi]], [[UGOPlayer]]
>[[GameFAQS]] and [[GameFAQs message boards]].  That's before I start on
>[[Internet Phenomenon]]. There's no chance of getting them deleted,
>simply because of pile on voting, but trying to keep them even
>pragmatically close to [[WP:V]], [[WP:NOR]] and [[WP:NPOV]] is a
>nightmare.

So true.  And what the hell are we doing with a [[list of YTMND
fads]]?
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject: [WikiEN-l] User harrassed in real-life at work for admin actions

body:
On Sat, 08 Apr 2006 13:04:36 -0700, you wrote:

>Kindness has nothing to do with it.  The statement
>	"Please -- be realistic.  Nobody has that kind of money."
>(in reference to "being sued for unfair dismissal") is absurdly wrong
>and contributes nothing to the analysis of a real, on-going problem.

So, maybe he could sue and win.  And the gurgling sound you hear as
the judge reads out the result is his career going down the toilet.

And the consequences for the original idiot are?
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


from_name: Chris Wilson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Redundancy for wikipedia

body:
Hi all,

I guess you probably know that Wikipedia was down earlier, due to a
power fault at the colo centre (apparently). I was chatting to brion on
IRC and he recommended that I contact this list.

I think it should be possible to make Wikipedia fully redundant to
outages of individual data centres, and not too expensive. Here's how.

Get a BGP portable IP address range. Advertise this range from TWO
locations, at separate data centres. Have basically identical read-only
servers on each range, with the same IP addresses. Don't worry about IP
conflicts, as the servers are identical, and the shortest route from any
given client will point to just one data centre, and not move unless
that data centre goes down, when it will automatically fall back to the
other.

Under normal conditions, your load is shared between both data centres,
so you don't need to actually increase the number of servers. If one
goes down, all requests go to the other, so performance might drop, but
Wikipedia should stay up.

This only works for read-only servers, so the process of editing
Wikipedia would still rely on one of the groups (or some subset of
servers in that group) being masters, and all the other servers being
slaves that sync off those masters.

It's just a suggestion, I'd be interested to hear what you think.

If you are interested, I know a hosting company that has a BGP-portable
range (I used to work for them), and I could talk to them about whether
they can set up redundant IP tunnelling for that range to whatever IP
addresses (VPN endpoints) you want, so you wouldn't even need to have
your own BGP range.

Cheers, Chris.
--
  ___ __     _
 / __/ / ,__(_)_  | Chris Wilson <0000 at qwirx.com> - Cambs UK |
/ (_/ ,\/ _/ /_ \ | Security/C/C++/Java/Perl/SQL/HTML Developer |
\ _/_/_/_//_/___/ | We are GNU-free your mind-and your software |


from_name: Ryan Delaney

subject: [WikiEN-l] Request for unblocking

body:
I'll unblock you on the condition that you agree to talk it out with the
involved parties, especially the blocking admin, before you resume the
disputed behavior. I don't mean that you have to get permission from an
admin to do this, because personally I don't think it's objectionable
behavior, but I don't want to create a situation where I unblock you, you
start mass messaging people, and get re-blocked, thus creating a
wheel-warring evironment. Just make sure that the situation has cooled off
if you do this again, okay?

Also, I haven't looked to see if there was any corellation, but I strongly
urge you not to be selective about the people you send this kind of notice.
That would be interpreted as political vote stuffing which is very strongly
frowned on at Wikipedia.

Ryan

On 4/6/06, Molu Bosu Palit <loom91 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Sir/Madam,
>
> I, Loom91 (59.93.194.7), was recently blocked by sysop Commander Jean for
> disruption. I believe that this is a mistake and appeal to have this block
> lifted. I've already requested Commander Kean by email to reconsider the
> block.
>
> I was banned for supposedly spamming user talk pages. What really happened
> was that a poll on the proposed policy Wikipedia:Censorship is ongoing and I
> wanted to inform potentially interested users abut this, so I posted a short
> and polite message on their talk page requesting them to review the policy
> and make their opinions known (I did not ask them to vote for any particular
> side, and votes in response to these messages were divided). I sent these
> messages both to those likely to vote Support and those likely to vote
> Oppose. I do not believe such messages constitute spamming or disruption.
>
> Some of the receivers thanked me for letting them know about the poll and
> voiced their opinions. Disruption is defined in Blocking policy as
> disrupting the normal workings of Wikipedia, but by involving more
> wikipedians in the discussion I facilitated better working of Wikipedia. As
> shown in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SPAM#Internal_spamming, this sort
> of communication is not considered to be inherently bad, let alone worthy of
> blocking.
>
> In the light of these circumstances, I ask sysops to investigate the
> matter and unblock me if they feel as I do that the block was unwarranted
> and a mistake on the part of Commander Kean. Thank you very much.
>
> Loom91
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Blab-away for as little as 1?/min. Make  PC-to-Phone Calls using Yahoo!
> Messenger with Voice.
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>


body:
On 4/9/06, Tim Starling <t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>
>
> That's arguable. You could say that there are many copies of Wikipedia on
> the Internet, and only one
> of them is ad-free, that is the one at wikipedia.org. Most readers come to
> Wikipedia via the search
> engines, and a large part of the remaining 80% of advertising revenue will
> go towards spamming those
> search engines with irrelevant keyword-pumped advertising-laden copies of
> Wikipedia pages.

Okay, but isn't that the situation we are already in? The only difference is
that the people running the advertising-laden copies will have to pay for
the privilege of doing so.

Ryan


from_name: Rob

body:
On 4/9/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>   >From a business perspective, what is to stop a site from sucking in
> just enough to mirror in real-time, and then turning around and
> forwarding it to other mirrors? In an extreme case, there would be
> only one customer of this service (paying say $1000) and they in turn
> might have multiple customers of their own (say 11m paying say $100);
> the original customer will turn a profit just from reselling the feed,
> the secondary customers will save major amounts of money, and all
> benefitting from advertising. I doubt we could prohibit it
> contractually, and even if we could, suing fly-by-night outfits would
> be tough, even in addition to the PR aspects.

Even if we couldn't contractually prohibit this, we could just turn off the
feed.


body:
On 4/3/06, Ben Greenberg <bengreenb at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> The biggest problem that wikipedia is facing right now is
> deterioration.  I
> really don't find the featured article review to be effective enough to
> prevent featured articles from getting worse.  What ideas do you guys have
> for how we could prevent featured article deterioration?

Huh? I thought that we had pretty much accepted that the general trend for
high-profile, highly edited articles is that as time passes they tend to
become higher quality. The often incredible improvement for front page
featured articles is proof enough of this. Do you have a particular example
in mind of this deterioration effect?

Ryan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Deleting the Lolicon picture

body:
On Sat, 08 Apr 2006 14:47:57 +0100, you wrote:

>in other words, we need an accepted definition for what constitutes
>deletable child porn on Wikipedia.

Alternatively we could ask ourselves who would argue to keep an image
which is construed by multiple experienced editors as, in context,
apparent paedophile pornography.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG


subject: [Wikitech-l] Redundancy for wikipedia

body:
Hi Gregory,

On Sun, 2006-04-09 at 18:58 -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> Er narf. No.
> Internet routing is not that stable.
>
> If you anycast TCP on the public internet you *will* end up with
> oddball behavior as routing topology changes where users get hung
> connections because the route changed out from under them.

OK, I didn't realise it was actually unstable like that. Maybe you could
keep a backup group of servers dormant, not advertising their BGP range,
but monitoring the availability of the main group, and staying in sync.
Then if the main group goes down, the backup starts advertising
immediately.

Another option might be for the backup group to advertise constantly,
but with a priority so much lower than the master, that nobody will ever
route to them until the master goes down.

You lose load balancing, so it costs more to maintain the same capacity,
but you might not need much for a read-only mirror, I don't know.

> Getting such a thing working correctly is quite a big more complex then you
> seem to think it is.

I appreciate the lesson, thanks!

> Last I checked we still had issues getting mysql replication working
> well across non-local networks.

Maybe I can help with that? I've been a MySQL replication admin as well.
I thought it was possible to run a Wikipedia read-only server from a
flat file copy of the database, without using mysql?

> For what you propose the portable block would have to contain all the
> normal Wikipedia traffic. I some how suspect that they would rather
> not be tunneling several hundred mbit/sec of traffic. :)

For the right price, they would :-) I guess it depends how much you pay
for hosting right now, whether it would be affordable to work this way.
But you're right, it might not be (or only as a backup).

Cheers, Chris.
--
  ___ __     _
 / __/ / ,__(_)_  | Chris Wilson <0000 at qwirx.com> - Cambs UK |
/ (_/ ,\/ _/ /_ \ | Security/C/C++/Java/Perl/SQL/HTML Developer |
\ _/_/_/_//_/___/ | We are GNU-free your mind-and your software |


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia broken

body:
On 4/8/06, Mark Gallagher <m.g.gallagher at student.canberra.edu.au> wrote:
> 1) Policy is descriptive --- it *describes* what we already do, it
>     attempts to document consensus.  When we look to policy, it's because

IMHO, "policy is descriptive" is misleading. It's actually
descriptively prescriptive. That is, it describes what people think we
should do. It does not only describe what people actually do. Nor does
it prescribe what people should do, without evidence that people
actually want that (with a few rare exceptions like WP:OFFICE, that
come "straight from the top").

Steve


from_name: Anthere

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> Real-time mirrors seem to be a recurring phenomenon. They are a drain on
> Wikipedia's resources, and hunting them and shooting them down is a
> continuing battle.
>
> The reasoning behind these mirrors appears to be:
>
> 1 putting up a Wikipedia mirror with ads will make money...
> 2 too lazy to set up a proper mirror...
> 3 instead, set up a script that queries Wikipedia in real time...
> 4 profit!
>
> However; why not turn this on its head, and offer a real-time, or
> near-real-time, Wikipedia feed service to paid-up subscribers?
>
> Currently, Wikipedia's running costs are about $1.2M per year, and this
> pays for, among other things, serving about 4000 hits per second, that
> is to say, about 1.26 x 10^11 hits per year, or about $ 10^-5 per hit.
> (Of course, this is average gross cost; marginal cost will be
> significantly higher, say $ 10^-4 per hit).
>
> Web advertising rates are generally of the order of $1 CPM: that is, $
> 10^-3 per hit. If an advertiser manages to get 10,000,000 hits per year,
> they will make $10,000 in ad revenue, and costs the Wikimedia Foundation
> around $1000 in leeched server load.
>
> What if we were to turn things round, and charge (say) $ 2 x 10^-4 per
> hit for an official real-time mirror service? (Of course, this would be
> aggregated in lumps, because it's impossible to bill tiny fractions of a
> dollar). Now, the economics to the mirror operator is $ 10^-3 - $0.2 x
> 10^-3 per hit, and they still make 80% of the money they would have
> before, and don't need to worry about being cut off. However, the
> economics for the WF are now quite different: instead of losing $ 10^-4
> per hit, the Foundation would make $ 2 x 10^-4 income - $ 10^-4 cost per
> hit, and thus makes $ 1000 gross profit over the course of the year for
> those 10,000,000 hits, which can be ploughed back into achieving the
> Foundation's charitable goals (for example, by buying new server kit and
> bandwidth, or paying for other real-world activities).
>
> Note that the users of the real-time mirrors are _not_ being charged for
> use of the GFDL content, which remains freely available as before; they
> are being charged for real-time access to WP data, with no need to run a
> modified copy of MediaWiki in order to run their service.
>
> Administration of the scheme could be made automatic, by allowing the
> existing credit-card interface to be used to for payment, and entering
> an IP address or addresses to be authorized, an E-mail address for
> contact, and getting an authorization key mailed back.
>
> As a result:
> * Wikipedia remains ad-free
> * the WF gets revenue
> * the advertisers still get to make (slightly less) money, but this time
> without leeching unauthorized resources.
>
> The feed could be provided from the existing software, only with a "null
> skin" that produced only the rendered page content, thus both slightly
> reducing the load of producing it (eg. no check for messages, greater
> possibility for caching), and, at the same time, making the page content
> easier to re-use, by removing the need to strip the user-interface from
> around the page contents.
>
> With other changes, for example, not checking for red/blue links,
> serving costs could probably be reduced even further, and quote possibly
> WF could charge more than $ 2 x 10^-4 per hit. Given the number of
> mirrors around, setting up this scheme might pay for itself in a month
> or less.
>
> Good idea, or bad idea?
>
> -- Neil

The live feed service exist. Generally, it is a bad idea to let
live-mirrors as they are a drain on our resources. For this reason, a
service is provided against a certain fee, meant to at least cover the
costs of feeding the live-mirror.

There could be two main sources of customers. Either mirrors or
potential customers are directly contacted by Terry. Or live-mirrors are
blocked by developpers and as a consequence contact the board to
complain or look for another solution. In this case, we answer them that
they can either choose the dump or sign a contract with us for a live feed.

Now... to be fair, there are very few customers :-) So the income made
through this mean is frankly... limited.

Why is it so ? Well, it may be a mixture. Possibly Terry contacting few
potential customers. Possibly blocked live mirrors not being informed of
that solution (now, you know, so next time a blocked mirror complains,
please tell it to contact us). Possibly a lack of reactivity to propose
contracts. Or lack of understanding from the people in OTRS about what
the live feed is...

So, to go back to your original mail, yes, good idea. Good idea to
implement more widely.

Ant


body:
On 4/9/06, Rob <gamaliel8 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Even if we couldn't contractually prohibit this, we could just turn off
> the
> feed.

...and then we'd be right back where we started.

Ryan


subject: [WikiEN-l] Ethics

body:
On 4/3/06, Arie van Buuren <arie2 at tien.biz> wrote:
>
>
> Writing for the opposition (i.e. improving, not detracting) - ethical
> Writing against the opposition (i.e. detracting) - unethical
>
> I may be wrong, being a 4-month WP newbie, but it seems to me that the
> former type of edits are much thinner on the ground than the latter.

Well, neither is exactly unethical. The problem is that when people are
writing for their own position, they are much more likely to be writing
something that is not neutral. Now, if they do manage to write something
that is neutral (and I can say that from watching others and from my own
personal experience, that is very difficult when you are invested in the
topic), there would be no problem.

Optimally, each edit should be analyzed on its own merits, not the merits
(or lack thereof) of the person contributing. That means that a pedophile
shouldn't be forbidden from making neutral, referenced edits to [[NAMBLA]]
and an evolutionary biologist shouldn't be forbidden from making neutral,
refereced edits to [[Creationism]]. There's no need for this litmus test of
moral responsibility-- the quality of an edit stands out on its own.

Ryan


from_name: brion at pobox.com

subject: [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki automated test run failure 2006-04-10

body:
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:

Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test Magic Word: {{NUMBEROFFILES}}... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!

Passed 300 of 303 tests (99.01%) FAILED!


from_name: Tony Sidaway

body:
On 4/9/06, Neil Harris <neil at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> * Wikipedia remains ad-free

Why is this an important goal?  If we put, say, Google ads up on
Wikipedia, how would it compromise Wikipedia?  They're easy enough to
block.


from_name: Locke Cole

subject:
[Wikitech-l] Getting the current month number without leading
	zero

body:
On 4/9/06, Shinjiman <shinjiman at gmail.com> wrote:

> is that have any suitable method to produce the current month (in
> number) without the leading zero? I've been found out in the MediaWiki
> software currently only have the magic word CURRENTMONTH which would
> generate the current month with leading zero. Is that have any other
> ways to generate the current month without the leading zero? or maybe
> I would like to submit a patch to BugZilla to resolve this issue?

There's CURRENTDAY (which does the day without a leading zero) and
CURRENTDAY2 (which does the day *with* a leading zero). I suppose they
could always add CURRENTMONTH2 (which would do the month without the
leading zero). It would be backwards from the CURRENTDAY magic words,
but at least you'd be able to get the month without the leading zero.
=)

-L


from_name: Ben McIlwain

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia broken

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

geni wrote:
> On 4/9/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
>> On Fri, 07 Apr 2006 13:59:41 +0100, you wrote:
>>
>>> I'm currently bogged down in [[LUEshi]], [[UGOPlayer]]
>>> [[GameFAQS]] and [[GameFAQs message boards]].  That's before I start on
>>> [[Internet Phenomenon]]. There's no chance of getting them deleted,
>>> simply because of pile on voting, but trying to keep them even
>>> pragmatically close to [[WP:V]], [[WP:NOR]] and [[WP:NPOV]] is a
>>> nightmare.
>> So true.  And what the hell are we doing with a [[list of YTMND
>> fads]]?
>
> It gives us a useful way of removeing all the individual articles.

So true :-/

It seems like we keep some stuff on Wikipedia, because if we didn't, the
overall problem would just be worse.  We even have a subpage of the
Muhammed controversy article for people to argue about the cartoons in
general.

- --
Ben McIlwain ("Cyde Weys")

~ Sub veste quisque nudus est ~
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from_name: Mark Williamson

subject: [Wikitech-l] Outage

body:
lol

On 10/04/06, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> > Right now most stuff seems to be back up and running: viewing,
> > editing, images,
> > IRC feeds.
> >
> > Editing-time outage: 6 hours, 15 minutes.
>
> Now as we have enough of money to perform better, we can start planning.
>
> First of all, for 24/7 operation we'd need to have 9 fully qualified
> system administrators ( for every 8h timeslot with redundancy, leave/
> sick coverage, etc) (payroll costs ~100,000$ each).
>
> Of course as these guys would be working on site operations, they'd
> not have any time for development. So we need >100 guys outsourced to
> India (payroll costs ~1000$ each).
>
> Sure, as open source technologies are not that suitable for round the
> clock operation, we might have to start using either Java
> (enterprise!!!) or .Net/C# (on Microsoft platform, sure, enterprise
> again!!!).
>
> Then, datacenters. To have a reasonably working read-only stand-by
> datacenter, we'd have to invest ~250k$ in it (with current load).
>
> We should of course have 3rd party consultants to help this set up
> (+100,000$ one time, one week gig).
>
> Moreover, we should invest into security measures (as wikis are often
> hacked). We'd need to screen traffic, ensure highly secure AAA
> subsystems, uh oh.
>
> I guess other developers (especially with experience in high-
> availability environments) could add more requirements for fluent
> operation!
>
> So... let's start rolling!!!
>
> Domas
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>

--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin


from_name: maru dubshinki

body:
On 4/9/06, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> maru dubshinki wrote:
>
> >On 4/9/06, Mathias Schindler <mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >>On 4/9/06, Carl F?rstenberg <azatoth at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>link?
> >>>
> >>>
> >>It should be in the dead-tree US edition.
> >>
> >>The Graph in the original article seems to be corrected as of today:
> >>
> >>http://www.economist.com/images/20060318/CSF428.gif
> >>
> >>It still states:
> >>
> >>"And after the furore over the biographical entry last year, Wikipedia
> >>changed its rules so that only registered users can edit existing
> >>entries, and new contributors must wait a few days before they can
> >>start new ones."
> >>
> >>http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5624944
> >>
> >>
> >That's not the only problem. They are also using a very misleading
> >article count- we don't have three million. We only have 3M if one
> >counts every last entry and redirect as an article.
> >
> >
> You seem to be laboring under the delusion that nothing exists outside
> the English Wikipedia. That kind of attitude gets us a very bad
> reputation in the Wikipedia community's other languages. If you read the
> article, you will find that the article count there (2.6 million) is
> explicitly described as covering 120 languages.
>
> --Michael Snow

It's still wrong then; to my withered and weary eyes, if you follow
the article line to the top where it ends, it is vastly closer to 3M
than 2.6M.

~maru


from_name: Chris Jenkinson

body:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
> On 4/9/06, Neil Harris <neil at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
>> * Wikipedia remains ad-free
>
> Why is this an important goal?  If we put, say, Google ads up on
> Wikipedia, how would it compromise Wikipedia?  They're easy enough to
> block.

It's not a case of blocking the ads, it's a case of increasing our
dependency on a profit-making organisation. Google has done good works
but it makes me nervous thinking we may become dependent on corporations
for Wikipedia's existence. Corporations are known to threaten the
withdrawal of funds as punishment.

Chris

--
Chris Jenkinson
chris at starglade.org

"Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
  -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra


body:
On 4/10/06, Shinjiman <shinjiman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Since the CURRENTMONTH magic word is widely used in WikiCommons. If this word
> is changed, it will affect majorly affecting the pages as like in Commons I've
> stated. I think having a name called CURRENTMONTH1 is more suitable for this
> case. Is that will be okay?

This was pretty much what I was suggesting. =) I just think
CURRENTMONTH2 would be the logical choice (given the
CURRENTDAY/CURRENTDAY2 naming).

-L


body:
On 4/10/06, Chris Jenkinson <chris at starglade.org> wrote:
>Google has done good works
> but it makes me nervous thinking we may become dependent on corporations
> for Wikipedia's existence. Corporations are known to threaten the
> withdrawal of funds as punishment.

Wikimedia in itself is a corporation.

I don't see how a few google ads could threaten Wikipedia by
withdrawal of funds.   The ads are context-sensitive according to
parameters set by the site owner.  Many corporations would be very
happy to see their ads in a pool to be selected by Google to show on
Wikipedia, one of the most popular non-Chinese language websites  in
the world.  If Google tried to be funny, we're big enough to take our
business elsewhere.  Actually, maybe we could run our own advertising
system and enforce a noninterference agreement from the start.
Really, Wikipedia is absolutely massive, there's no reason not to do
this except lack of seed capital and political squeamishness.


body:
I think the problem is that on WP, people try to enforce the letter of
the law when it suits them, and when it doesn't, they try to enforce
based on its intent.

There is obviously a simple way to solve this, but most users actually
secretly hate NPOV -- they like the fact that there are loopholes that
allow them to somehow get their opinions and viewpoints into
Wikipedia.

I must say, there are times when I have felt this way. But if somebody
wanted to add clarification to remove the ambiguity, I would support
it, even though the ambiguity has at times worked to my advantage.

Ask any Wikipedian if they've ever knowingly tried somehow or other to
get a POV in Wikipedia. If they say no, they're lying or they haven't
been around very long.

Mark

On 10/04/06, Ian Tresman <it at knowledge.co.uk> wrote:
> At 20:20 09/04/2006, you wrote:
> >I would say that the vast majority of people who abuse it are people
> >with an agenda.
> >
> >The point of it is so that we don't have pages and pages of Alex Chiu
> >crap in [[immortality]] and [[teleportation]] and the like, or two
> >entire books full of "how to goodbye depression" and "internal fenix"
> >(sic) crap in the [[Eric Castenada]] article.
> >
> >The point is not so that we don't have two sentences about Flat
> >Earthers or so that we don't have two sentences about people who
> >believe GWB sucks.
>
>
> I agree with all of this, but nevertheless, editors are citing undue
> weight and that information should be presented in the "proportion to
> the prominence of each". And this is in relation to little-known
> verifiable peer-reviewed papers.
>
> I've been through every dispute resolution processes, consensus falls
> behind one another and tells me I'm wrong; the administrators notice
> board say they can handle only 3RR and vandalism. The mediation cabal
> talks reason, but can't make a decision, and the arbitration
> committee tell me its a contents dispute.
>
> I can't even get policy clarified as certain editors are content with
> the current wording.
>
> What's my next course of action? I personally believe that the
> addition of one sentence of clarification in the Undue weight section
> of NPOV would solve the issue.
>
> Regards,
> Ian
>
> >Mark
> >
> >On 09/04/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> > > This is an on-going problem. It is done both by those who
> > > misunderstand the policy and by those with a point of view agenda.
> > > The only reasonable recourse is to patiently discuss the policy. I'm
> > > not sure the section on undue weight could be made any clearer. If
> > > you are unable to negotiate successfully with those who have a point
> > > of view agenda please use the dispute resolution procedure. Please
> > > don't edit war with them.
> > >
> > > Fred
> > >
> > > On Apr 9, 2006, at 9:09 AM, Ian Tresman wrote:
> > >
> > > > Significant material is sometimes excluded from some articles on the
> > > > grounds of undue weight. Can someone clarify whether the policy on
> > > > NPOV Undue weight is being misinterpreted, and if so, whether it can
> > > > be clarified?
> > > >
> > > > NPOV Undue weight states:
> > > >
> > > >          * "... the article should fairly represent all significant
> > > > viewpoints, in proportion to the prominence of each". See
> > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_Point_of_View#Undue_weight
> > > >
> > > > But if the perceived prominence is very low, the proportion is
> > > > rounded down to zero, and material excluded, regardless of the
> > > > significance? The policy goes on to say:
> > > >
> > > >          * "To give undue weight to a significant-minority view, or
> > > > to include a tiny-minority view, might be misleading as to the shape
> > > > of the dispute."
> > > >
> > > > In other words, the mere mention of a significant-minority view may
> > > > be misleading, not whether we write that text in a neutral point of
> > > > view?
> > > >
> > > > But I also note from the NPOV tutorial:
> > > >
> > > >          * Editors may unwittingly or deliberately present a subject
> > > > in an unfair way [.. by] Entirely omitting significant citable
> > > > information in support of a minority view, with the argument that it
> > > > is claimed to be not credible.
> > > >          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NPOV_tutorial
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > I have examples of material being excluded from several articles on
> > > > the grounds of Undue weight, though the material is peer-reviewed,
> > > > citable and verifiable. In some cases, there are dozens of citations.
> > > >
> > > > The result is that anonymous and accountable editors may by
> > > > consensus, completely exclude verifiable material from credible,
> > > > career scientists; yet "Consensus should not trump
> > > > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPOV>NPOV (or any other official
> > > > policy)" See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus
> > > >
> > > > Shouldn't we be open and inclusive, so that "Readers are left to form
> > > > their own opinions" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> > > > Neutral_Point_of_View ]
> > > >
> > > > I'd like to see a clarification that significant minority views, in
> > > > which prominent adherences can be verified (eg. as peer-reviewed
> > > > authors), should not be excluded from an article on the grounds of
> > > > undue weight; their views may be summarised, though detailed in an
> > > > article of their own.
> > > >
> > > > Examples on request.
> > > >
> > > > Regards,
> > > > Ian Tresman
> > > >
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > > Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> > > http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> > >
> >
> >
> >--
> >"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin
> >_______________________________________________
> >Wikipedia-l mailing list
> >Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> >http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>

--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin


from_name: Molu Bosu Palit

subject: [WikiEN-l] Lolicon pictures deletion

body:
On 8/4/2006 Sam Korn wrote
  >> The definition of "child pornography" differs from country to
>>country.

>Yes, in terms of laws.  This image might not fall under child
>pornography rules in some country or another, but that doesn't
>actually stop it being child pornography.

  Of course that does! Whether something is or is not child pornography is clearly subjective (especially in borderline cases like the picture you decided to delete) and I do not see why your personal judgement on the matter should be considered to supersede the judgments of other editors on Wikipedia who are neither POV-pushers nor trolls.

  People left and right are saying things like "It was child porno" or "it was inappropriate for Wikipedia". These sort of things are what are called weasel words on Wiipedia articles. Wikipedia should not be edited according to the personal likings and dislikings of one or even several editors.

  I believe it is accepted process to maintain status quo unless there is consensus to change, not change unless there is consensus to keep. We don't start by deleting articles and then undeleting them if people demonstrate a super-majority for retaining them, we do it the other way. I don't see why the process should be otherwise for image deletions.

  Your rationale for deleting the image without consensus (that the IfD had failed to delete the image) is very strange, surely that's why the IfD is there for, to prevent the deletion of images when Wikipedia editors don't want to delete the image? "I will let the IfD delete images when I want them deleted but when it keeps images I want to be deleted then I'm just going to go ahead and delete them": doesn't this sound wrong to anyone?

  Supposedly an admin has only abilities and not rights, but clearly in this case an admin has the right to irreversibly delete images that are not to his taste while an ordinary user doesn't have the right to keep images that are to his taste.

---------------------------------
New Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. Call regular phones from your PC and save big.


list: foundation-l

from_name: michael_irwin at verizon.net

subject: [Foundation-l] just testing

body:
Erik Mermagen wrote:

>sorry about this. but I seem to be having a problem.
>_______________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l at wikimedia.org
>http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
>
>
I recieved the test above from foundation-L sunday night on the West
Coast of U.S., perhaps it is just quiet on the mailing lists you
subscribe to?

Regards,
lazyquasar


list: wikimedia-l

subject: [Foundation-l] just testing


subject: [WikiEN-l] Child pornography

body:
On 4/8/06 Sam Korn wrote:

  >No, so you make sure that the majority of people would consider
>something child pornography.

  Wikipedia is not a democracy, we need supermajority instead of majority to change status quo (though whether this is the best way to go is another question, but that's the way things currently are and not likely to change anytime soon), and if we did have the supermajority against an image it would be automatically deleted by the IfD system without need for unilateral actions.

---------------------------------
Yahoo! Messenger with Voice. PC-to-Phone calls for ridiculously low rates.


body:
My guess:

You never will.

Is it unfair? Yes. Do I think you should be able to? Yes.

In all likelyhood, will it ever change? Nope.

It's really too bad. Wikipedia is a great concept, until you add the
people in. Most Wikipedians are antisocial by nature, thus pretty much
every one of us has some sort of annoying personality quirk or a few
hundred. And Wikipedia is just one big fight.

But nonetheless it works to build an encyclopaedia. Is it an
encyclopaedia that is fair and balanced? Moreso than many. But
totally? Certainly not.

In short: I wish I could help you, but it's pretty much hopeless.

Mark

On 10/04/06, Ian Tresman <it at knowledge.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >Ask any Wikipedian if they've ever knowingly tried somehow or other to
> >get a POV in Wikipedia. If they say no, they're lying or they haven't
> >been around very long.
>
> Sure, we all like to put a "good spin" on our own points of view, and
> begrudgingly moderate our views to fit into the neutral point of view style.
>
> But I'm talking about the wholesale exclusion of material on the
> pretext of undue weight. I haven't even got as far as describing the
> minority view, let alone doing so in an NPOV style.
>
> Regards,
> Ian
>
>
> >Mark
> >
> >On 10/04/06, Ian Tresman <it at knowledge.co.uk> wrote:
> > > At 20:20 09/04/2006, you wrote:
> > > >I would say that the vast majority of people who abuse it are people
> > > >with an agenda.
> > > >
> > > >The point of it is so that we don't have pages and pages of Alex Chiu
> > > >crap in [[immortality]] and [[teleportation]] and the like, or two
> > > >entire books full of "how to goodbye depression" and "internal fenix"
> > > >(sic) crap in the [[Eric Castenada]] article.
> > > >
> > > >The point is not so that we don't have two sentences about Flat
> > > >Earthers or so that we don't have two sentences about people who
> > > >believe GWB sucks.
> > >
> > >
> > > I agree with all of this, but nevertheless, editors are citing undue
> > > weight and that information should be presented in the "proportion to
> > > the prominence of each". And this is in relation to little-known
> > > verifiable peer-reviewed papers.
> > >
> > > I've been through every dispute resolution processes, consensus falls
> > > behind one another and tells me I'm wrong; the administrators notice
> > > board say they can handle only 3RR and vandalism. The mediation cabal
> > > talks reason, but can't make a decision, and the arbitration
> > > committee tell me its a contents dispute.
> > >
> > > I can't even get policy clarified as certain editors are content with
> > > the current wording.
> > >
> > > What's my next course of action? I personally believe that the
> > > addition of one sentence of clarification in the Undue weight section
> > > of NPOV would solve the issue.
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > Ian
> > >
> > > >Mark
> > > >
> > > >On 09/04/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> > > > > This is an on-going problem. It is done both by those who
> > > > > misunderstand the policy and by those with a point of view agenda.
> > > > > The only reasonable recourse is to patiently discuss the policy. I'm
> > > > > not sure the section on undue weight could be made any clearer. If
> > > > > you are unable to negotiate successfully with those who have a point
> > > > > of view agenda please use the dispute resolution procedure. Please
> > > > > don't edit war with them.
> > > > >
> > > > > Fred
> > > > >
> > > > > On Apr 9, 2006, at 9:09 AM, Ian Tresman wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > Significant material is sometimes excluded from some articles on the
> > > > > > grounds of undue weight. Can someone clarify whether the policy on
> > > > > > NPOV Undue weight is being misinterpreted, and if so, whether it can
> > > > > > be clarified?
> > > > > >
> > > > > > NPOV Undue weight states:
> > > > > >
> > > > > >          * "... the article should fairly represent all significant
> > > > > > viewpoints, in proportion to the prominence of each". See
> > > > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_Point_of_View#Undue_weight
> > > > > >
> > > > > > But if the perceived prominence is very low, the proportion is
> > > > > > rounded down to zero, and material excluded, regardless of the
> > > > > > significance? The policy goes on to say:
> > > > > >
> > > > > >          * "To give undue weight to a significant-minority view, or
> > > > > > to include a tiny-minority view, might be misleading as to the shape
> > > > > > of the dispute."
> > > > > >
> > > > > > In other words, the mere mention of a significant-minority view may
> > > > > > be misleading, not whether we write that text in a neutral point of
> > > > > > view?
> > > > > >
> > > > > > But I also note from the NPOV tutorial:
> > > > > >
> > > > > >          * Editors may unwittingly or deliberately present a subject
> > > > > > in an unfair way [.. by] Entirely omitting significant citable
> > > > > > information in support of a minority view, with the argument that it
> > > > > > is claimed to be not credible.
> > > > > >          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NPOV_tutorial
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > >
> > > > > > I have examples of material being excluded from several articles on
> > > > > > the grounds of Undue weight, though the material is peer-reviewed,
> > > > > > citable and verifiable. In some cases, there are dozens of citations.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > The result is that anonymous and accountable editors may by
> > > > > > consensus, completely exclude verifiable material from credible,
> > > > > > career scientists; yet "Consensus should not trump
> > > > > > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPOV>NPOV (or any other official
> > > > > > policy)" See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Shouldn't we be open and inclusive, so that "Readers are left to form
> > > > > > their own opinions" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
> > > > > > Neutral_Point_of_View ]
> > > > > >
> > > > > > I'd like to see a clarification that significant minority views, in
> > > > > > which prominent adherences can be verified (eg. as peer-reviewed
> > > > > > authors), should not be excluded from an article on the grounds of
> > > > > > undue weight; their views may be summarised, though detailed in an
> > > > > > article of their own.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Examples on request.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Regards,
> > > > > > Ian Tresman
> > > > > >
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--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin


from_name: Neil Harris

subject: [Wikitech-l] Outage

body:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 4/9/06, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> I thought each db server was on a UPS? If not, then why not? I also thought we had the capability
>> to go read only from the other server farms when the Tampa farm went down. If not, then why not?
>>
>> We are a top 20 website that makes more than enough money to hire enough people to make sure
>> services decay gracefully and to make sure we have adequate redundancy. I'm working on the current
>> year budget. Please start thinking about your staffing and equipment needs for the rest of the
>> year.
>>
>
> In any decent facility house power should be more reliable than a
> bunch of small UPSes stuck in your racks. MTBF on small UPSes is not
> very impressive.
>
On the other hand, small UPS's generally do not all fail at once.

In most big facilities, there are generally two power chains, A and B;
the only time both should go off is in the case of a dire emergency that
requires a manually forced power cut. Were the database servers
dual-powered from independent A and B side power supplies, or is there
only a single house feed to each DB server?

-- Neil


from_name: Erik Mermagen

subject: [Foundation-l] just testing

body: sorry about this. but I seem to be having a problem.


subject: [Foundation-l] just testing


from_name: europanto

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Europanto

body:
It's a little bit more than "just take random words" from different European
languages.
If a script was enought to generate Europanto sentences, I would have
written it
a long time ago ( I'm a computer engineer )
The fun is that everyone speaks the way he/she wants/can and the underlying
goal,
apart from having people understand what you're trying to say ( you can
reformulate
your sentence  as many times as you wish ), is to have good sounding ... er
..."lyrics".  ;o)

smh
--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Europanto-t1056989.html#a3839180
Sent from the Wikipedia General forum at Nabble.com.


from_name: Tim Starling

body:
Neil Harris wrote:
> What if we were to turn things round, and charge (say) $ 2 x 10^-4 per
> hit for an official real-time mirror service?

We already have something very similar, in the form of a paid OAI-PMH subscription. It's kept very
quiet, maybe for PR reasons, so there aren't many subscribers.

> As a result:
> * Wikipedia remains ad-free

That's arguable. You could say that there are many copies of Wikipedia on the Internet, and only one
of them is ad-free, that is the one at wikipedia.org. Most readers come to Wikipedia via the search
engines, and a large part of the remaining 80% of advertising revenue will go towards spamming those
search engines with irrelevant keyword-pumped advertising-laden copies of Wikipedia pages.

> * the WF gets revenue
> * the advertisers still get to make (slightly less) money, but this time
> without leeching unauthorized resources.
>
> The feed could be provided from the existing software, only with a "null
> skin" that produced only the rendered page content, thus both slightly
> reducing the load of producing it (eg. no check for messages, greater
> possibility for caching), and, at the same time, making the page content
> easier to re-use, by removing the need to strip the user-interface from
> around the page contents.

The best cache hit rate is for ordinary anonymous page views. Unless hits from mirrors were
responsible for a significant proportion of our traffic, the reduced cache hit ratio would outweigh
any benefit from lightweight skins.

-- Tim Starling


from_name: geni

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia broken

body:
On 4/9/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman at spamcop.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 07 Apr 2006 13:59:41 +0100, you wrote:
>
> >I'm currently bogged down in [[LUEshi]], [[UGOPlayer]]
> >[[GameFAQS]] and [[GameFAQs message boards]].  That's before I start on
> >[[Internet Phenomenon]]. There's no chance of getting them deleted,
> >simply because of pile on voting, but trying to keep them even
> >pragmatically close to [[WP:V]], [[WP:NOR]] and [[WP:NPOV]] is a
> >nightmare.
>
> So true.  And what the hell are we doing with a [[list of YTMND
> fads]]?

It gives us a useful way of removeing all the individual articles.
--
geni


from_name: Ivan Krstic

subject: [Wikitech-l] How to insert a "Wiki contents table"

body:
thomas Armstrong wrote:
> I'd like to insert a "Wiki contents table", similar to the green ones at:
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Botany
> Which is the wiki code to generate it?

http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Template:BotanyTOC&action=edit

The question isn't on-topic for this list; please be mindful of this in
the future.

--
Ivan Krstic <krstic at fas.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Europanto

body:
Well, joke language or not, it is a  language. Its grammar is a set of all
european language grammars.
Why doesn't it have a unique grammar ?
Because there's no common grammar among all european languages, so why
choose one
instead of another. You just adapt it to the vocabulary you use locally in
your sentence ( for example ).
It has cultural and historical background.
Anyway, I'm not here to defend Europanto 'till I die.
Or you're a language purist and you'll never admit it as a language, or
you're not that narrow-minded and you see what's the point of it,
or ... you were kind of seduced and even if you're not a linguist, you
decide to support that "way of thinking".

By the way I must admit that I won't kill myself if there isn't a europanto
wikipedia ;o)

--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Europanto-t1056989.html#a3839936
Sent from the Wikipedia General forum at Nabble.com.


from_name: Ryan Delaney

body:
On 4/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> More often than not, people will add stuff to an article, and some time
> later, another editor will come along and clean it up. Then some more
> stuff will be added, and some time later, it will get cleaned up again.
> Very rarely do you see an article /only/ get better (one example I *can*
> think of is [[Jordanhill railway station]]
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordanhill_railway_station >), but that was
> an extraordinary case.

I'm really getting confused now. You just described the whole process of how
articles get improved on Wikipedia, and then say that they don't only get
improved. I mean, yeah; sometimes people add stuff to Wikipedia that doesn't
follow the style guide / is badly written, typos etc / isn't wholly neutral
/ isn't referenced / etc. And then someone else comes along and makes it
better. That's the whole purpose of the collaborative process. Isn't that
what it means for an article to "always get better"? Isn't that what we are
doing? Maybe I am missing the point here, but...

To put it in the strictest theoretical terms, an Wikipedia with zero edits
is worthless. Wikipedia with infinite edits is perfect. I really believe
that, mind you -- I believe that after infinite edits, Wikipedia will be
perfect. Of course, we'll never get there, but each edit puts us closer. So
all this talk about "deterioration" is puzzling to me.

Ryan


from_name: TGGG85 at aol.com

subject: [WikiEN-l] BLOCKED FROM EDITING

body:
I too was blocked not too long ago from editing Wikipedia. I NEVER  recieved
an adequate explanation from any of the administrators. I think a lot  of them
are power freaks whose need for control finally surfaces after they  recieve
the "position" of administrator. I checked out the administrator who
originally blocked out me and wasn't impressed with his credentials if you call  being
an expert in "punk and metal rock" something really significant in the  vast
realm of things.


subject: [WikiEN-l] BLOCKED FROM EDITING

body:
On 4/10/06, TGGG85 at aol.com <TGGG85 at aol.com> wrote:
>
> I too was blocked not too long ago from editing Wikipedia. I
> NEVER  recieved
> an adequate explanation from any of the administrators. I think a lot  of
> them
> are power freaks whose need for control finally surfaces after
> they  recieve
> the "position" of administrator. I checked out the administrator who
> originally blocked out me and wasn't impressed with his credentials if you
> call  being
> an expert in "punk and metal rock" something really significant in
> the  vast
> realm of things.

For starters, if you want the situation to be rectified, starting out by
insulting the only people who can help you is probably not the most tactful
approach (and might have had something to do with why you were blocked to
begin with). That said, if you want to supply us with the username/IP
address you were blocked under, someone will probably review it.

Ryan


from_name: Daniel P. B. Smith

subject: [WikiEN-l] Deterioration: losing references

body:
> Date: Sun, 9 Apr 2006 23:10:24 -0400
>
> Huh? I thought that we had pretty much accepted that the general
> trend for
> high-profile, highly edited articles is that as time passes they
> tend to
> become higher quality. The often incredible improvement for front page
> featured articles is proof enough of this. Do you have a particular
> example
> in mind of this deterioration effect?

I'm afraid I don't, not at hand, but one phenomenon I've noticed and
am going to make a point of documenting the next time it occurs is
that there is a significant tendency for references to be lost over
time. I notice it because I try to be fairly punctilious about
providing them, and in several cases when reviewing articles I put
significant work into, say, a year ago, I find that treferences have
been lost.

Given the inability to perform a text search through histories, it is
sometimes fairly laborious to find them again. On the other hand, a
Google search on anything that's been in Wikipedia for more than
about six months is apt to turn up, overwhelmingly, WIkipedia and
mirrors as the first few pages of hits. I believe, but I cannot
prove, that Web sources quoted in Wikipedia, that _still exist,_
sometimes fail to show at all in Google searches if they are small
and insignificant sites and there are hundreds of bigger ones
(Wikipedia and mirrors).

As I say, I don't have an example to point to, but I'll make a point
of doing so when I find one.

The edit history usually shows that what seems to be happening is
very sloppy editing, particular in rewriting or restructuring parts
of articles. Sometimes people will remove a sentence they think is
wrong and inadvertently remove an adjacent reference. Sometimes
people remove an item but not the reference that supports it.
Sometimes people remove a reference but not the item it supports.
Sometimes people remove an item and its reference, then later someone
reinserts the item but fails to reinsert the reference...


body:
On 4/10/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If articles don't deteriorate, why do they get de-featured?

 Usually it's because the standard for featured articles has gone up.

Ryan


body:
On 4/10/06, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
>
> The edit history usually shows that what seems to be happening is
> very sloppy editing, particular in rewriting or restructuring parts
> of articles. Sometimes people will remove a sentence they think is
> wrong and inadvertently remove an adjacent reference. Sometimes
> people remove an item but not the reference that supports it.
> Sometimes people remove a reference but not the item it supports.
> Sometimes people remove an item and its reference, then later someone
> reinserts the item but fails to reinsert the reference...
>

Okay, I think I see what you are getting a here. Some edits are deleterious.
Sometimes good content is deleted and never restored. I guess that all I can
do in response to that is to shrug and say that's the downside of open and
free access; mistakes get made. I don't think there is anything to be done
about it really, except try to correct each other's mistakes where we find
them.

Ryan


body:
On 4/10/06, Sam Korn <smoddy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 4/10/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:>
> >  Usually it's because the standard for featured articles has gone up.
>
> Or because the article should never have been promoted in the first
> place.  I remember [[Terrorism]] falling into this category.
>

[[Garry Kasparov]] was a personal favorite of mine. Check out its original
FAC nomination:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Garry_Kasparov

How many support votes do you see? Hmm...

Ryan


body:
On 4/10/06, Mathias Schindler <neubau at presroi.de> wrote:
>
> The current aim of some people is to reach the (moving) target of 0,2
> per cent of featured articles.

I'll tell you how you can achieve that goal immediately: Lower the standard
to such a degree that all articles are included.

Seriously, I don't think there is much point to such goals. Sure, they
improve the encyclopedia, which is great. But people will cite statistics
like "Only 0.1% of our articles are featured!" as if this means that
Wikipedia sucks or something. No, it just means the standard for featuring
is high, and if the gap between articles : featured articles is increasing,
that just means the standard is going up. It has nothing to do with the
objective quality of the encyclopedia; it's only the relative quality. That
is, the relative quality between articles.

Ryan