from_name: Delirium

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fw: Stadium Pics

body:
For whoever wants to reply to this,

Mark Pellegrini wrote:

>>-- Hello-How are you? My name is Andy Bosnak and I do  photo research for
>>General Learning Communications. Our company makes non-broadcast
>>educational
>>video supplements for textbooks. I would like permission to use some of
>>your
>>photos. I saw them at the website
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/upload/0/04/Reliant_Park.jpg
>>My deadline is Wednesday October 6, 2004.
>>Please contact me to discuss details. Thank you.
>>
>>
The image:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Reliant_Park.jpg
has no copyright info, and from the looks of it is probably a
professional image that's either a copyright violation or used under
fair use (or could be a freely-usable promo pic from the stadium's
operators, but there's no info on that).  So we can't really give any
permission, since it's not our image as far as I can tell.

-Mark


list: wikipedia-l

source: pipermail-mbox

from_name: Karl Eichwalder

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Distributing fonts

body:
Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> writes:

> I think everyone agrees we should have a page of "this site best
> viewed with the following tools/software: " followed by a list of
> fonts, browsers, media players.

You may think this way, but everyone does not agree to your opinion.  It
was already said that it is important to tell the user that the site
follows standards by W3C (XML, XHTML, CSS, PNG, more?), ISO (ISO 639,
more?), and more(?).

This was already explained by somebody else.  Please, pay attention,
especially if you make statements as above ("I think everyone
agrees...").

--
                                                         |      ,__o
                                                         |    _-\_<,
http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |   (*)/'(*)


list: wikitech-l

from_name: Gerard Meijssen

subject: [Wikitech-l] Vandalism on nl:wiktionary

body:
There is a person who thinks it funny to add texts to templates that are
used on almost all pages of nl:wiktionary. I have protected the
templates that were abused so far.

I have two questions:
*The latest IP number used is 213.224.16.165
<http://nl.wiktionary.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Speciaal:Contributions&target=213.224.16.165>
can we find if this person is known as a wikipedia user as well ?
*I want to protect all templates against this kind of abuse. Is there a
way of doing this easily ?

Thanks,
    GerardM


list: wiktionary-l

subject: [Wiktionary-l] Vandalism on nl:wiktionary


list: wikien-l

from_name: John Lee

subject: [WikiEN-l] Addressing bias in Malaysian political articles

body:
I have posted two or three times to [[WP:RFC]] (a few months apart),
twice to [[WP:VP]] (two or three weeks apart), and once on [[WP:PR]]
(regarding [[Anwar Ibrahim]]'s potential to become a featured article)
for help on addressing this, but since there's still no response, I have
no choice but to ask for help on the mailing list.

Several Malaysian editors have expressed doubts about the (N)POVness of
several articles related to Malaysian politics. Since I arrived last
year, things have only deteriorated. Even [[Malaysia]] has not been
spared - the second half doesn't mince its words in showing its open
criticism of the government, declaring the court that judged Anwar to be
a kangaroo court (the least that could have been done was to explain
that the justice involved was unknown and inexperienced and other such
reasons for accusing the government of unfair manipulation), and at one
point, makes the blanket statement that "almost anything to do with the
government involves corruption". I'm in the process of NPOVing this.

[[Anwar Ibrahim]] and [[Bumiputra]] both have NPOV notices on them, and
there's been a furious discussion on both Talks where much has been
hashed out but little has come out to improve the NPOV value of both
articles, beyond the effort of those who originally complained. (An
excellent deal of other work was done on [[Anwar Ibrahim]], though.) A
storm is brewing in [[Malaysian New Economic Policy]] which is overtly
pro-NEP in the beginning and suddenly switches to full-blown opposition
with completely inappropriate wording, directly stating the Malays are
"robbing" the Chinese and Indians.

The main issue here is that several editors have been doing great work
expanding these articles, but are not wording their edits in accord with
our NPOV policy. Sometimes crucial facts and opinions of those
supporting the government are not available at all, creating an
unbalanced impression, such as in [[Anwar Ibrahim]] (I NPOVed the last
section as a lot of material was available on it before complaining on
the Talk, whereupon it just degraded into all hot air and no actual work
done on NPOVing the article).

Another issue is that [[User:Malbear]], one of the few users other than
me actively involved in these articles has accused me of deleting
material that I don't agree with, such as on [[Education on Malaysia]].
Malaysian politics is highly impassioned, so I would really appreciate
if someone could tell me and [[User:Jpatokal]] that we're just paranoid
and overreacting, or that there really is an issue with how NPOV
Malaysian political articles are.

Thanks very much,
John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia meetups

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

>Michael Snow wrote:
>
>
>>Meanwhile only two people have signed up for the Chicago meetup, and
>>that's counting Jimbo himself. So I just have to ask, where are all
>>the Chicago Wikipedians? Is there nobody willing to make the trip
>>even from Wisconsin or Indiana (and Chicago's so much closer to the
>>state line than Seattle)? Doesn't anybody love Jimbo anymore?
>>
>>
>
>I'm like one of those rock stars only famous in Europe. ;-)
>
>
Can't say what things are like on the European side, or give a
representative sample of the US side, but from my limited sample of
people I personally know in the US who are Wikipedians, there's very
little interest in this sort of thing.  I'm the only one of the people I
know who does *anything* meta-ish, and most of them think I'm kind of
silly for spending ("wasting") a bunch of time reading and posting to a
Wikipedia mailing list rather than just getting on with it and actually
building the encyclopedia.  They generally attribute it to my being in
academia ("you academics like to talk about doing things more than you
like doing things").  If I tell them I'm thinking of actually travelling
to a Wikimedia conference I'll never hear the end of it. =]

Could it be that Europeans see it as more of a
social/community/organization endeavor, whereas Americans see it as more
of simply an internet-based collaborative project and generally don't
care who runs it or how those people run it, so long as the servers stay
up and useful new MediaWiki features periodically show up?  I don't know
what the percentage is like for Europeans, but an absolutely miniscule
percentage of Americans are involved in meta-type affairs---a lot of
them donate (the majority of donations are Americans I think) but only a
few dozen out of the thousands are involved in organizational stuff.

Of course, I don't have a big enough sample to make any confident
generalizations, so this is just speculation.

-Mark


body:
Fred Bauder wrote:

>I have looked at a couple of articles, [[Anwar Ibrahim]] and [[Education in
>Malaysia]]. I see a few sharp words but nothing like the protracted deadlock
>that can result from contested points of view in certain instances on
>Wikipedia. You all seem polite and restrained.
>
>
Thanks. I'm not too concerned about those any more, as those are now
past (I think). I'm very concerned with the state of [[Bumiputra]] and
[[Malaysian New Economic Policy]], though. In [[Bumiputra]], Jpatokal
has tried to NPOV it, but has been accused of strawmanning by Malbear
when making his argument for the rephrasing of certain sentences.

There's not much trouble on [[Malaysian New Economic Policy]] yet, but
the article is 100% biased in its tone of writing, even more so despite
an excellent addition of examples and facts by an anon (which only
worsened the NPOV situation by describing the situation as robbery),
despite getting all the facts right (something Malbear seems to harp on;
apparently in his view if the article gets all the facts right, it
doesn't matter how biased the tone of writing is, as can be seen from
the debate on [[Talk:Anwar Ibrahim]]). I'd expect something to happen
soon, though, since Jpatokal and I have agreed that much of the material
at [[Bumiputra]] should actually be merged with [[Malaysian New Economic
Policy]], which would mean introducing material of dubious NPOV quality
into an article already determinedly POV.

>Fred
>
John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


from_name: Rowan Collins

subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Hyperlink convention

body:
On Tue, 5 Oct 2004 13:32:42 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> I discovered the last time I was in London that what we Americans call
> 'arugula' is called 'rocket'.  This is a rather preposterous name for
> a lettuce, in my opinion, but nonetheless, that's what they say.

And "arugula" is a *sensible* name? It's not even pronouncable... ;)

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: David Gerard

body:
David Friedland wrote:

> There exists a technical solution that would alleviate the problem and
> not significantly burden editors.

See, the trouble is that both of those assertions probably aren't the
case and have been questioned already on this list without sufficient
answer.

- d.


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] Schema change work in progress

body:
On Oct 3, 2004, at 6:23 PM, kiddyr wrote:
> Please, please, consider adding columns for a uuid.
[snip]
> 4 - start a process to retroactively add uuid numbers to all
> page/revision/text rows. These can be added, dropped, re-added, etc
> and etc. When an id that you generate is unique and differentiable
> from any uuid generated in the entire rest of the universe, it is
> possible to stage this process, generate new uuids at any time, mix
> and match from different tables, or whatever.

Since this is true (that they can be added once we have an idea what to
do with them), I wonder why anything in particular has to happen before
#5. Particularly since you claim to have some ideas but don't want to
go into specifics.

> 5 - start to look at queries that can use these uuid numbers.

Could you give some examples of what you have in mind? You mentioned
vaguely distribution of data in a private e-mail.

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

subject: [Wikitech-l] WikiMarkupStandard WG + mailing list

body:
On Monday 04 October 2004 21:58, Magnus Manske wrote:

> Any wiki can keeps its own markup variant and still be compatible
> with all the others. Also, the XML should be
> easier to parse by mail programs, web browsers and who-knows-what than
> *any* conceivable wiki markup.

imho an end user would be more happy with as less different
markups to learn as possible. the best thing about such a
converter is imho that many wikis using proprietary markup
could be converted to a new standard easily.

d


from_name: David Friedland

body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> You are wrong. To me English is English I am colo(ur) blind to what
> makes English English or American.

OK...

> You forget that there other types of
> English as well and

This is patently false. If you actually read my proposal, you would see
that both the proposal and the examples given account for more varieties
than just en-us and en-gb. The reason I focus on en-us and en-gb is
because that is where the greatest differences are. Most of the other
written dialects of English are substantially the same as either en-us
or en-gb, with minor variation in usage.

> as I mentioned earlier when I am expected to do the
> work YOU want people to do, you can count me, and with me many
> non-native (whatever English) speakers out, to contribute to
> EN:wiktionary. I have posted these reasons before.

I don't think there was anything about my proposal that indicated that
editors will be expected to know all the regional differences and be
required to put variant words in curly brackets. The beauty of the wiki
system, you see, is that when someone comes along who DOES know the word
is a regionalism, they can add the brackets, thus increasing the
article's accessibility.

Besides, there are plenty of people who get bothered when they read
things written in a foreign dialect. Why not allow them to read
Wikipedia the way the want to?

- David


list: foundation-l

from_name: John Pozniak

subject: [Foundation-l] Is the Voter's Guide legal?

body:
The English Wikibooks recently started a Voter's Guide
( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Voter%27s_Guide ).
While I think the project is a good idea, I wonder if
there are legal issues for the Foundation that
publishing such a guide might complicate.

Looking for a little guidance,

John Pozniak (Gentgeen)


list: wikimedia-l


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: technical measures for English variations...

body:
Robert Graham Merkel wrote:

>>While I admire the pluck of characterizing inconsistency as richness, I
>>think that "down in the trenches" the reality of the differences in
>>dialect (mostly between en-us and en-gb, but also, for example between
>>pt-pt and pt-br) is a continuous stream of conflict, debate, confusion,
>>and frustration that policy has failed to allieviate.
>
> And you think that there wouldn't be massive bunfights as to which word
> was most appropriate for each of the dozens of English locales - given
> that many people within a locale will use different words for the same
> object or concept?

No solution is perfect, but I think the debates among e.g. Brits and
Americans about usage will be substantially less frequent and
acrimonious, as written American English and written British English
have something of a standard that is upheld by usage guides and the
like. (I make no argument here about the legitamacy of such usage
guides, merely an argument about their significance, which is unequivocal.)

>>There exists a technical solution that would alleviate the problem and
>>not significantly burden editors. Should we reject this solution on the
>>wishful notion that our differences can unite rather than divide us?
>
> No, only a tiny fraction of the many subtle and usually inconsequential
> differences between British and American English (not to mention the many
> other variations of English, some that don't fit neatly on national
> boundaries) are amenable to technical solutions.

And so, because we can only fix some of the differences, we should
therefore fix none at all? I recognize that spoken British English and
spoken American English are very different in many subtle and usually
inconsequential ways, as you say, but _written_ British English and
American English, which are much more standardized, tend to differ in
certain specific ways which mostly are amenable to a technical solution
to translating between them. The vast majority of dialectical
differences are in the everyday, informal, spoken register that is not
the style that Wikipedia is written in. In fact it is the relatively
formal style of Wikipedia articles that makes me support a method to
make dialectical differences consistent. The occasional dialectical
spelling or words that differs from that encountered on other pages
comes across as frankly sloppy and contrasts negatively IMHO with the
otherwise consistently formal yet accessible style of the articles.
There is a vision to make all the articles consistent in terms of being
factualn, well-written, and well-researched, but there is no such vision
for making the articles dialectically consistent. The policy that
articles should be individually consistent based on either their subject
or the dialect used by the original author (!) doesn't really seem to
fit in with the goal of making Wikipedia a world-class reference work.
Instead it seems to just make it inconsistent, unprofessional, and
dialectically fragmented.

> Is any technological measure going to make the following (fictional)
> passage accessible to the average American?
>
> Brian Lara scored a double ton at the WACA in the 1997-98 season in a
> tour match against the PM's 11.  This was a Bradmanesque effort, the feat
> even more impressive considering Jo Angel's reverse swing and Michael Bevan's
> Chinamen, both aided by the Fremantle Doctor.

This example is a red herring.  I could make the same argument about the
following nonfictional example, from
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory], which is equally inaccessible
to the average English speaker, British, American, or otherwise.

Open strings of the type I theory can have endpoints which satisfy the
Neumann boundary condition. Under this condition, the endpoints of
strings are free to move about but no momentum can flow into or out of
the end of a string. The T duality infers the existence of open strings
with positions fixed in the dimensions that are T-transformed.
Generally, in type II theories, we can imagine open strings with
specific positions for the end-points in some of the dimensions. This
lends an inference that they must end on a preferred surface.
Superficially, this notion seems to break the relativistic invariance of
the theory, possibly leading to a paradox. The resolution of this
paradox is that strings end on a p-dimensional dynamic object, the Dp-brane.

Admittedly, many of the terms used here are defined earlier in the
article, but my point is that this debate is about dialectical
differences, not jargon. Argot and dialect are not the same thing.

> On the *specific* issue of number names, it might be feasible to provide
> a fix there.  Beyond that, however, technical fixes are more trouble
> than they're worth.

If we provide _any_ dialect-specific code, who decides what gets fixed
and what doesn't? Certainly you don't believe that the billion/milliard
example is the only such difference that warrants a fix? What trouble do
you envision other than "massive bunfights" among writers of a
particular dialect about usage? What harm is there in letting people put
brackets around {{colour}} so it appears with the correct spelling for
American readers? For the vast majority of cases, my proposal would
bring non-intrusive and more accessible dialectical consistency to
Wikipedia. Certainly a solution the frequent and acrimonous debates
about British versus American usage is at least worth a try.

In fact, the use of brackets in the wikitext to indicate regionalisms I
think would be a far better tool for learning about the dialectical
differences than encountering the occasional unfamiliar word or spelling
that one might _guess_ is dialectical.

Finally, since no one seems interested in bringing dialectical
consistency to Wikipedia in this area, might I propose an alternate
policy for usage disputes?

Where a word has different spellings/usages, the spelling/usage that has
the most number of Google hits shall be the spelling/usage used on
Wikipedia. If the spelling/usage with the most number of Google hits
changes, then so shall the spellings/usages on Wikipedia.

At least this way we can be sure that the spellings/usages we use will
be ones used by a majority that is based on actual data. It's
incontrovertible, democratic, neutral, and completely dialect-agnostic.
Not to mention consistent.

- David


body:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> You underestimate the problems with readability you get when your
> proposal is set into motion. I do not think I will bother with editing
> en:texts when I cannot easily read what it says. When people are
> edititing a text, they have to read what it says. All this extra balast
> will make it hard just to READ the article let alone edit it. So maybe
> there are "plenty" people who get bothered when they read something they
> are not familiar with but making it extra hard to editors will also make
> for "plenty" people who resent this unreadable garble.

How exactly does putting curly brackets around a word make it any less
readable than square brackets as for links, or quote marks as for bold
and italic?

I'm sorry, but calling

The primary {{colors}}, according to ''The Big Book of Color'',  are
[[red]], [[yellow]], and [[blue]].

"unreadable garble", but saying

The primary colors, according to ''The Big Book of Color'',  are
[[red]], [[yellow]], and [[blue]].

is not "unreadable garble" is disingenuous.

 > An other thing
 > you miss is that with other ways of writing you get slightly different
 > meanings and your system CANNOT cater for that.

Neither does your system, which I presume is doing nothing. I'm not
claiming my proposal is a cure-all for problems regarding
understandability. It is, however, a way to increase understandability
and also increase consistency. Doing nothing, of course, does nothing to
increase understandability or consistency.

- David


from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

body:
Anything NPOV is perfectly fine.  As a 501(c)(3) we can't engage in
certain types of political advocacy as an organization.

http://www.irs.gov/charities/charitable/article/0,,id=120703,00.html

But per our NPOV policy, we don't engage in political advocacy anyway.

John Pozniak wrote:

> The English Wikibooks recently started a Voter's Guide
> ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Voter%27s_Guide ).
> While I think the project is a good idea, I wonder if
> there are legal issues for the Foundation that
> publishing such a guide might complicate.
>
> Looking for a little guidance,
>
> John Pozniak (Gentgeen)
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

--
"La n??fle est un fruit." - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org


subject: [WikiEN-l] "Fair use" of frame grabs from movies, TV shows, etc.

body:
It is my belief that frame grabs of this type are perfectly within the
realm of fair use and fair dealing.

See, for example Blackwell Publishing's discussion of the matter,
here:
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/authors/permission.asp#film

--Jimbo


body:
David Friedland wrote:
> I recognize that spoken British English and spoken American English
> are very different in many subtle and usually ainconsequential ways,
> as you say, but _written_ British English and American English,
> which are much more standardized, tend to differ in certain specific
> ways...

Although I still disagree with the conclusion, I did want to
acknowledge that this is certainly true.

> Where a word has different spellings/usages, the spelling/usage that has
> the most number of Google hits shall be the spelling/usage used on
> Wikipedia. If the spelling/usage with the most number of Google hits
> changes, then so shall the spellings/usages on Wikipedia.
>
> At least this way we can be sure that the spellings/usages we use will
> be ones used by a majority that is based on actual data. It's
> incontrovertible, democratic, neutral, and completely dialect-agnostic.
> Not to mention consistent.

This does have some merit, and of course "number of Google hits" is a
traditional method of settling other disputes.  But the problem as I
see it is that American English is much more common on the Internet
than other variants, so the rule would in practice amount to "always
use American English" -- and this strikes me as deeply undesirable.

I suppose the biggest area where we differ is in our estimation of the
magnitude of the problem.  I view the differences as relatively minor,
and as far as I have been able to determine, the number of edit wars
and acrimonious arguments about this has been quite small overall.
Are people really getting upset about this?

--Jimbo


from_name: Andrew Lih

body:
On Tue, 05 Oct 2004 15:48:33 -0700, David Friedland <david at nohat.net> wrote:
>
> I want to note that all my examples are from the American perspective
> because I am American. Also, it is my understanding (although I don't
> have any firm proof of this) that American culture has a stronger
> overall impact on the British than the reverse, due partly to global
> American cultural hegemony and partly to rampant cultural isolationism
> in the US. In other words, my guess is that it is more likely British
> readers will be familiar with American usage than the other way around.

We should not forget, however, that English, and a British derived
one, is an official language of 1 milliard (er, billion) people in
India. And that the Beeb (that's BBC to non Brits) is a more
influential news source globally than any American broadcast concern.
However, I do agree that given contemporary media exposure, American
English tends to have more overall impact given the number of pirated
films and music around the world.

As Jimbo said, we should not overengineer the system to weed out all
color|colour and flavor|flavour in our English articles. But I do
agree with you though - in situations where precision is paramount
(ie. scientific articles, statistics, legal issues, politics, etc.)
this stylistic confusion should not be left open ended. If WP can come
up with a mechanism and policy to conditionally display
milliard|billion, slate|schedule definitively.

PS - I can speak as someone close to this subject, as I recently moved
from an American style to a British style university system.

--
Andrew (User:Fuzheado)


body:
Whoops, meant to complete this sentence:

If WP can come up with a mechanism and policy to conditionally display
milliard|billion, slate|schedule definitively, it should.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 07:13:45 +0800, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 05 Oct 2004 15:48:33 -0700, David Friedland <david at nohat.net> wrote:
> >
> > I want to note that all my examples are from the American perspective
> > because I am American. Also, it is my understanding (although I don't
> > have any firm proof of this) that American culture has a stronger
> > overall impact on the British than the reverse, due partly to global
> > American cultural hegemony and partly to rampant cultural isolationism
> > in the US. In other words, my guess is that it is more likely British
> > readers will be familiar with American usage than the other way around.
>
> We should not forget, however, that English, and a British derived
> one, is an official language of 1 milliard (er, billion) people in
> India. And that the Beeb (that's BBC to non Brits) is a more
> influential news source globally than any American broadcast concern.
> However, I do agree that given contemporary media exposure, American
> English tends to have more overall impact given the number of pirated
> films and music around the world.
>
> As Jimbo said, we should not overengineer the system to weed out all
> color|colour and flavor|flavour in our English articles. But I do
> agree with you though - in situations where precision is paramount
> (ie. scientific articles, statistics, legal issues, politics, etc.)
> this stylistic confusion should not be left open ended. If WP can come
> up with a mechanism and policy to conditionally display
> milliard|billion, slate|schedule definitively.
>
> PS - I can speak as someone close to this subject, as I recently moved
> from an American style to a British style university system.
>
> --
> Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
>

--
Andrew Lih
andrew.lih at gmail.com


from_name: Fred Bauder

body:
This is where I must bow out, but at this point, unless I misunderstand, you
should focus on talking and negotiating with each other, attempting to find
solutions which incorporate all significant viewpoints into the articles,
probably including those viewpoints which you feel corrupt the article.

Fred

> From: John Lee <johnleemk at gawab.com>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2004 21:16:25 +0800
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Addressing bias in Malaysian political articles
>
> Following up, it's just as I feared. I've had to place the NPOV notice
> on [[Malaysia]] as well, because it was corrupted *again*. The
> situation's degraded a lot; there's plenty of bickering particularly at
> [[Talk:Malaysia]], [[Talk:Bumiputra]] and [[Talk:Malaysian New Economic
> Policy]]. Would mediation be suitable? Because I really want someone
> else to critique the articles and past revisions for neutrality, not
> just mediation between the three parties here (myself, Malbear and
> Jpatokal).
>
> John Lee
> ([[User:Johnleemk]])
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l


from_name: Peter Danenberg

subject: [Wikitech-l] Size of images from WikiTeX

body:
> That?s 46% of the original size by switching format.
> Futhermore, doesn?t wikipedia prefer PNG?

     Right  you  are, Jim; and you?ll notice the raw WikiTeX
source provides PNG?s.  I tweaked the local installation  at
Wikisophia since transparent PNG?s aren?t supported by IE.

     But  how  I?ve  longed  for  PNG! We must, alas, choose
between transparent GIF?s and PNG?s  opaque  until  LongHorn
(lol!).

     Vive l?opacit??

     Best, Peter

--
Peter Danenberg                                           .
wikisophia.org                                           ..:


body:
David Friedland wrote:

> David Gerard wrote:
>
>> David Friedland wrote:
>>
>>> There exists a technical solution that would alleviate the problem
>>> and not significantly burden editors.
>>
>>
>> See, the trouble is that both of those assertions probably aren't the
>> case and have been questioned already on this list without sufficient
>> answer.
>>
>> - d.
>
>
> In fact no one has replied in specific to my most recent proposal as
> to why it might be unacceptable
> (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-October/035317.html)
>
>
>
> - David
>
You are wrong. To me English is English I am colo(ur) blind to what
makes English English or American. You forget that there other types of
English as well and as I mentioned earlier when I am expected to do the
work YOU want people to do, you can count me, and with me many
non-native (whatever English) speakers out, to contribute to
EN:wiktionary. I have posted these reasons before.

On a brighter note, your problem got me thinking and I have introduced
templates in the nl:wiktionary to enable the indication of words in
their regionality. I have created templates for German, English and
Chinese at this time. Propably more will follow. (see
[[wikt:nl:Catalaans]] for an example with traditional and simplified
Chinese  The names for the templates are zh-tc and zh-sc. I welcome any
suggestions to make them more usable.

Thanks,
  GerardM


from_name: Ray Saintonge

body:
David Friedland wrote:

> Besides, there are plenty of people who get bothered when they read
> things written in a foreign dialect. Why not allow them to read
> Wikipedia the way the want to?

If they get bothered about such things it's their problem.  How can you
broadly presume how anyone wants to read Wikipedia?  If they're that
concerned maybe they should be writing it.

Judging from the tone of the discussion, it seems that if your scheme is
adopted you would be the only one using it.  The ultimate test of a
technological solution to a human problem is whether people use it, not
its technical soundness.

Ec


from_name: Thomas R. Koll

subject: [Wikitech-l] RFC: Approved Edits Only

body:
On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 09:02:56PM -0500, Randy Becker wrote:

> On #mediawiki it was suggested that I look into the recent changes
> patrolling in 1.4 as a potential method of implementing this solution.
> I have done this and determined that it will be just as difficult to
> use this as it will be to implement a cleaner solution, involving a
> new table in the database and an approval mechanism. Therefore, I'm
> here to ask for suggestions, comments, and help implementing this, or
> a similarly acceptable solution.

You could alternatively establish a new, hidden, namespace Edit:
and if someone clicks the edit-button on a normal page, he will
get a diff from the latest Edit: version to the normal version
and of course and edit-window of the article in the Edit: namespace.
That way you will have only one version in the approval queue, also
with a complete version history.

The admin-part (normal sysops!) is simply to move (more replace)
the article from Edit: to normal namespace. You also have
to move (i.e. change the namespace-key in old) the version
history from Edit to normal.

ciao, tom

--
== Weblinks ==
* http://shop.wikipedia.org - WikiReader Internet zu kaufen
* http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:TomK32
* http://www.hammererlehen.de - Urlaub in Berchtesgaden


subject:
[Wikipedia-l] I'll see your milliard,	and raise you a thousand
	million...

body:
Arwel Parry wrote:

> I agree. "Thousand million" is absolutely unambiguous. I would say
> that "milliard" has not been used in the UK for at least the last
> 30-40 years, and would not be understood by most readers.

"Thousand million" sounds a bit odd though.  If I saw "thousand
million", I would expect to see a footnote explaining why this odd
choice of wording was used instead of "billion", or perhaps a wikilink
to [[thousand million]] explaining the various terms used for that quantity.

-Mark


body:
David Friedland wrote:

> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> You are wrong. To me English is English I am colo(ur) blind to what
>> makes English English or American.
>
>
> OK...
>
>> You forget that there other types of English as well and
>
>
> This is patently false. If you actually read my proposal, you would
> see that both the proposal and the examples given account for more
> varieties than just en-us and en-gb. The reason I focus on en-us and
> en-gb is because that is where the greatest differences are. Most of
> the other written dialects of English are substantially the same as
> either en-us or en-gb, with minor variation in usage.
>
>> as I mentioned earlier when I am expected to do the work YOU want
>> people to do, you can count me, and with me many non-native (whatever
>> English) speakers out, to contribute to EN:wiktionary. I have posted
>> these reasons before.
>
>
> I don't think there was anything about my proposal that indicated that
> editors will be expected to know all the regional differences and be
> required to put variant words in curly brackets. The beauty of the
> wiki system, you see, is that when someone comes along who DOES know
> the word is a regionalism, they can add the brackets, thus increasing
> the article's accessibility.
>
> Besides, there are plenty of people who get bothered when they read
> things written in a foreign dialect. Why not allow them to read
> Wikipedia the way the want to?
>
> - David
>
You underestimate the problems with readability you get when your
proposal is set into motion. I do not think I will bother with editing
en:texts when I cannot easily read what it says. When people are
edititing a text, they have to read what it says. All this extra balast
will make it hard just to READ the article let alone edit it. So maybe
there are "plenty" people who get bothered when they read something they
are not familiar with but making it extra hard to editors will also make
for "plenty" people who resent this unreadable garble. An other thing
you miss is that with other ways of writing you get slightly different
meanings and your system CANNOT cater for that.

Is Wikipedia not a platform to make people come together ??

PS The USA and the UK should go metric. :)

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Stan Shebs

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:

>
>I suppose the biggest area where we differ is in our estimation of the
>magnitude of the problem.  I view the differences as relatively minor,
>and as far as I have been able to determine, the number of edit wars
>and acrimonious arguments about this has been quite small overall.
>Are people really getting upset about this?
>
Since it's been at least 24 hours since anybody has said anything
inflammatory :-), here's my total-stereotype observation guaranteed
to annoy the maximum number of people:

Empirically, the people most likely to complain about dialect are
lesser-educated Americans and over-educated Brits. Americans with
more education will have consumed vast quantities of British dialect
in the process of getting educated, and it will usually feel pretty
natural to them, with the occasional curveball (I knew "milliard"
before this discussion, but not "courgette"). Conversely, our Brits
(and to some extent Commonwealthers in general) with PhDs will
sooner or later get fed up with reading American English, and start
making remarks about "illiterate Americanisms", while regular Brits
seem generally indifferent to the issue.

Now let the flames begin!

:-)

Stan


from_name: Jim Higson

body:
Compare (taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikitex):

http://users.aber.ac.uk/jqh1/chess.gif (17.1k)

With the png version I just made:

http://users.aber.ac.uk/jqh1/chess.png (7.9k)

That's 46% of the original size by switching format.
Futhermore, doesn't wikipedia prefer PNG?

Jim


from_name: Delirium

body:
Pablo Saratxaga wrote:

>On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 10:13:41AM -0400, Delirium wrote:
>
>
>
>>"Thousand million" sounds a bit odd though.  If I saw "thousand
>>million", I would expect to see a footnote explaining why this odd
>>choice of wording was used instead of "billion",
>>
>>
>
>Because a billion is not a thousand million but a thousand thousand
>million maybe :-)
>
>
[Sigh] That's what this whole discussion has been about.  Which one your
particular view on linguistic history prefers is irrelevant (I could
make all sorts of arguments about why the English language is illogical
in thousands of instances); the point is that in US English "billion"
means "a thousand million" unambiguously, whereas in some other dialects
of English it doesn't.

In US English, a billion is simply a thousand million.  Furthermore,
it's the only of writing a thousand million that doesn't sound odd.  "A
thousand million" is the only other correct way ("a milliard" is not US
English), and it sounds odd in US English.  Thus there should be some
explanation of what's going on for the confused reader who is not aware
of these differences, such as a hyperlink on [[thousand million]].

-Mark


body:
On Oct 6, 2004, at 8:13 AM, Peter Danenberg wrote:
>> That?s 46% of the original size by switching format.
>> Futhermore, doesn?t wikipedia prefer PNG?
>
>      Right  you  are, Jim; and you?ll notice the raw WikiTeX
> source provides PNG?s.  I tweaked the local installation  at
> Wikisophia since transparent PNG?s aren?t supported by IE.

IE supports transparent PNGs just fine so long as they're binary
transparency rather than alpha.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
David Friedland wrote:

> Finally, since no one seems interested in bringing dialectical
> consistency to Wikipedia in this area, might I propose an alternate
> policy for usage disputes?
> Where a word has different spellings/usages, the spelling/usage that has
> the most number of Google hits shall be the spelling/usage used on
> Wikipedia. If the spelling/usage with the most number of Google hits
> changes, then so shall the spellings/usages on Wikipedia.
> At least this way we can be sure that the spellings/usages we use will
> be ones used by a majority that is based on actual data. It's
> incontrovertible, democratic, neutral, and completely dialect-agnostic.
> Not to mention consistent.

"We must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this" is
STILL not a syllogism, and even less so when the first statement is
actually "I think we must do something, even if you lot think I'm wrong".

- d.


body:
Craig Franklin wrote:

> For instance, in Australian English, the word "milliard" is unknown (I had
> to go and look it up to see what you were on about).

It's pretty much unknown in en-gb nowadays as well.

- d.


from_name: Yann Forget

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] I'll see your milliard,
	and raise you a thousand million...

body:
Hi,

Le Wednesday 6 October 2004 11:55, Craig Franklin a ?crit :
> Scr?obh David Friedland:
> >would appear to an en-gb reader as
> >
> >a plan was formulated by which Germany was to pay 226 milliard gold marks
> >
> >and to an en-us reader as
> >
> >a plan was formulated by which Germany was to pay 226 billion gold marks
>
> This is clumsy, but manageable, when there's only en-us and en-gb to worry
> about.  Unfortunately, there are more than two dialects of English.
>
> For instance, in Australian English, the word "milliard" is unknown (I had
> to go and look it up to see what you were on about).  The sentence in en-au
> would be "a plan was formulated by which Germany was to pay 226 thousand
> million gold marks." (a thousand million being a 1 followed by nine
> zeroes). I've no idea what sort of dialectical differences exist in other
> English dialects, but I assume that they're there also.

Yes, and in India, you would write "22.6 thousand crores gold marks" or
"22,600 crores gold marks". So not very simple to accomodate. ;)

> I mean, it probably could be done, but coming up with alternatives for
> en-us, en-gb, en-au, en-ie, en-za, etc etc, would just be a massive pain,
> and lets be honest, who has time for that sort of work.  The system works
> fine as it is now (although putting the number in decimal form afterwards
> would probably help, and is my policy when there might be confusion
> caused).

This debate is interesting culturally, I am learning a lot, but I?don't think
it's going towards a usuable solution.

> - Craig Franklin

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


from_name: Austin Hair

body:
> > IMO the "milliard" convention is absolute rubbish, because it
> > effectively breaks the decimal system and I'm glad it's in decline in
> > the English speaking world. I wish the same were true for its use in
> > other languages as well.
>
> OK, we're drifting off-topic now, but I just wanted to say that I
> completely disagree. There's nothing "decimal" about
> million->billion->trillion going up in factors of a thousand rather
> than of a million, it's completely arbitrary. And etymologically, a
> billion being a million million makes sense: the "bi-" means "two",
> and it has twice as many zeros; similarly, a European trillion has
> three times as many zeros as a million, hence "tri-". What are there
> three of in an American trillion?

Multiples of a thousand.  As you say, both conventions are
mathematically arbitrary.

I would, however, like to point out that this "etymology" business is
nonsensse.  The word "billion" (and the convention thereof) comes to us
[English speakers] from French, whose system we [Americans] continue to
use despite the fact that France itself switched systems fairly recently
in history (and for quite sensible reasons).  In short, we have kept the
original definition, while Europe has standardized on another.  I can't
say that I have any problem whatever with that.

I'd also like to note that virtually all Americans are completely
oblivious to the difference, and to the best of whose knowledge a
milliard is some kind of waterfowl.  I was no exception, given the fact
that my foreign associations have always comprised mostly scientists and
academics, who by and large agree with my personal preference: to have
a name for each additional placeholder.

> It's a moot point, because the American version seems to have become
> the accepted standard in the English-speaking world (better than just
> remaining ambiguous for eternity, I suppose), but the old way is far
> more logical. [I've actually heard it suggested that the change was so
> that people could call themselves "billionaires", but I'm not sure how
> much truth there can be in that]

I was recently somewhat surprised to find that even BBC World Service
broadcasts have adopted the "American" convention for numbers, albeit
with an occasional parenthetical clarification.  That said, a clear
divide on the issue obviously remains, although in our particular case
the intrinsic problems can be avoided by enumerating large sums.

(Of course, this brings up the issue of commas vs. spaces as
placeholders, but that's another can of worms.)

> --
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]

--
Austin D. Hair <austin at austinhair.org>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Callidus
http://www.austinhair.org/
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from_name: Arwel Parry

body:
In message <001401c4ab8a$af7cba40$69971bd3 at equinox>, Craig Franklin
<craig at halo-17.net> writes
>Scr?obh David Friedland:
>
>>would appear to an en-gb reader as
>>
>>a plan was formulated by which Germany was to pay 226 milliard gold marks
>>
>>and to an en-us reader as
>>
>>a plan was formulated by which Germany was to pay 226 billion gold marks
>
>This is clumsy, but manageable, when there's only en-us and en-gb to worry
>about.  Unfortunately, there are more than two dialects of English.
>
>For instance, in Australian English, the word "milliard" is unknown (I had
>to go and look it up to see what you were on about).  The sentence in en-au
>would be "a plan was formulated by which Germany was to pay 226 thousand
>million gold marks." (a thousand million being a 1 followed by nine zeroes).
>I've no idea what sort of dialectical differences exist in other English
>dialects, but I assume that they're there also.
>
>I mean, it probably could be done, but coming up with alternatives for
>en-us, en-gb, en-au, en-ie, en-za, etc etc, would just be a massive pain,
>and lets be honest, who has time for that sort of work.  The system works
>fine as it is now (although putting the number in decimal form afterwards
>would probably help, and is my policy when there might be confusion caused).

I agree. "Thousand million" is absolutely unambiguous. I would say that
"milliard" has not been used in the UK for at least the last 30-40
years, and would not be understood by most readers.

--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


from_name: Jens Ropers

body:
Having lived and worked in both the UK and Ireland, I dare say that
IMHO the use of "milliard" is now (thank the Gods) relatively scarce
and diminishing in (probably any form of) English. It's an entirely
different story however when it comes to other languages -- e.g. in
German, "Milliarde" is the ''only'' correct way.

(NB: use a non-proportional font here)

So common English usage:		compares to German usage:

million						Million
billion						Milliarde
trillion						Billion
quadrillion 					Billiarde
quintillion					Trillion
etc.							etc.

IMO the "milliard" convention is absolute rubbish, because it
effectively breaks the decimal system and I'm glad it's in decline in
the English speaking world. I wish the same were true for its use in
other languages as well.

</2eurocents>

On 6 Oct 2004, at 11:55, Craig Franklin wrote:

> Scr?obh David Friedland:
>
>> would appear to an en-gb reader as
>>
>> a plan was formulated by which Germany was to pay 226 milliard gold
>> marks
>>
>> and to an en-us reader as
>>
>> a plan was formulated by which Germany was to pay 226 billion gold
>> marks
>
> This is clumsy, but manageable, when there's only en-us and en-gb to
> worry
> about.  Unfortunately, there are more than two dialects of English.
>
> For instance, in Australian English, the word "milliard" is unknown (I
> had
> to go and look it up to see what you were on about).  The sentence in
> en-au
> would be "a plan was formulated by which Germany was to pay 226
> thousand
> million gold marks." (a thousand million being a 1 followed by nine
> zeroes).
> I've no idea what sort of dialectical differences exist in other
> English
> dialects, but I assume that they're there also.
>
> I mean, it probably could be done, but coming up with alternatives for
> en-us, en-gb, en-au, en-ie, en-za, etc etc, would just be a massive
> pain,
> and lets be honest, who has time for that sort of work.  The system
> works
> fine as it is now (although putting the number in decimal form
> afterwards
> would probably help, and is my policy when there might be confusion
> caused).
>
> - Craig Franklin
>
> -------------------
> Craig Franklin
> PO Box 764
> Ashgrove, Q, 4060
> Australia
> http://www.halo-17.net - Australia's Favourite Source of Indie Music,
> Art,
> and Culture.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


body:
I don't actually have an opinion on David's proposal yet.

I am however under the impression that it probably has gotten confused
with earlier proposals by some of us and that it hasn't really been
looked at by most of us.
Without having made up my mind, I think it does indeed deserve another
look:
>> http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-October/
>> 035317.html

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com

On 6 Oct 2004, at 11:06, David Friedland wrote:

> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> You underestimate the problems with readability you get when your
>> proposal is set into motion. I do not think I will bother with
>> editing en:texts when I cannot easily read what it says. When people
>> are edititing a text, they have to read what it says. All this extra
>> balast will make it hard just to READ the article let alone edit it.
>> So maybe there are "plenty" people who get bothered when they read
>> something they are not familiar with but making it extra hard to
>> editors will also make for "plenty" people who resent this unreadable
>> garble.
>
> How exactly does putting curly brackets around a word make it any less
> readable than square brackets as for links, or quote marks as for bold
> and italic?
>
> I'm sorry, but calling
>
> The primary {{colors}}, according to ''The Big Book of Color'',  are
> [[red]], [[yellow]], and [[blue]].
>
> "unreadable garble", but saying
>
> The primary colors, according to ''The Big Book of Color'',  are
> [[red]], [[yellow]], and [[blue]].
>
> is not "unreadable garble" is disingenuous.
>
> > An other thing
> > you miss is that with other ways of writing you get slightly
> different
> > meanings and your system CANNOT cater for that.
>
> Neither does your system, which I presume is doing nothing. I'm not
> claiming my proposal is a cure-all for problems regarding
> understandability. It is, however, a way to increase understandability
> and also increase consistency. Doing nothing, of course, does nothing
> to increase understandability or consistency.
>
> - David
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Georg Schweizer

subject: [Foundation-l] New: Alemannic Wikipedia

body:
The former Alsatian Wikipedia [als] had to broaden it?s audience to all
speakers of the Alemannic language:
http://als.wikipedia.org

I would like one of the stewards/devs/whoever to change the site?s
language name (displayed as interlanguage link titles) from
?Elsässisch? (Els?ssisch/Alsatian) to ?Alemannisch?:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/phase3/languages/
Names.php?rev=1.1.2.2&view=markup
     'als' => 'Alemannisch', # Alemannic

I?m suggesting to change the language tag in the xhtml source code from
?gem-alsatian? to ?gem-CH? which is currently the most precise valid
tag for Alemannic, even if it does not include variants outside
Switzerland. However, anything like ?gem-alemannic? is neither a valid
generic code nor registered by the iana nor common practice on the net.

Thirdly: Could someone *please* switch our logo?
http://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wiki.png

Thank you!
?Georg


subject: [Foundation-l] New: Alemannic Wikipedia


from_name: Lars Aronsson

body:
David Friedland wrote:
> So what is the solution?

"thousand millions".

Lars Aronsson, lars at aronsson.se
--
  Aronsson Datateknik


body:
In message <ck0buh$hev$1 at sea.gmane.org>, David Friedland
<david at nohat.net> writes
>Finally, since no one seems interested in bringing dialectical
>consistency to Wikipedia in this area, might I propose an alternate
>policy for usage disputes?
>
>Where a word has different spellings/usages, the spelling/usage that
>has the most number of Google hits shall be the spelling/usage used on
>Wikipedia. If the spelling/usage with the most number of Google hits
>changes, then so shall the spellings/usages on Wikipedia.
>
>At least this way we can be sure that the spellings/usages we use will
>be ones used by a majority that is based on actual data. It's
>incontrovertible, democratic, neutral, and completely dialect-agnostic.
>Not to mention consistent.

Argh! No, I strongly object to this proposal. The Google majority is
_not_ always right, and in any case the preponderance of US websites
would tend to bias Wikipedia towards US usage.

Just this morning, I noticed a discussion on the UK Wikipedians article
about the [[IUPAC]] standardised spelling of the name of element 16,
where it was noted that despite what IUPAC says, they have no standing
for determining what British English usage is, where the element remains
"sulphur".

--
Arwel Parry
http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/


from_name: Daniel Mayer

body:
--- Matthew Larsen <mat.larsen at gmail.com> wrote:
> I wouldnt like it if someone took a frame grab from one of my movies,
> but then you do see a lot of them on movie review sites.

Whether you like it or not is irrelevant. ;)

What matters is the amount of the work that is used and the use of that subset.
Since a feature-length movie has over 150,000 frames in it, a single low
resolution frame grab is an utterly tiny part of the whole work. Add in the
educational use and we have an *extremely* firm fair use/dealing/practice
defense; far stronger than any claim of fair use over what was from the start a
still photo.

Of course, IANAL.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

_______________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today!
http://vote.yahoo.com


body:
Portuguese uses "mil(1e3) -> milh?o(1e6) -> bilh?o(1e9) -> trilh?o(1e12)
-> ..."

e2m

Em Wed, 06 Oct 2004 10:57:59 -0400, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
escreveu:

> Pablo Saratxaga wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 10:13:41AM -0400, Delirium wrote:
>>
>>
>>> "Thousand million" sounds a bit odd though.  If I saw "thousand
>>> million", I would expect to see a footnote explaining why this odd
>>> choice of wording was used instead of "billion",
>>>
>>
>> Because a billion is not a thousand million but a thousand thousand
>> million maybe :-)
>>
> [Sigh] That's what this whole discussion has been about.  Which one your
> particular view on linguistic history prefers is irrelevant (I could
> make all sorts of arguments about why the English language is illogical
> in thousands of instances); the point is that in US English "billion"
> means "a thousand million" unambiguously, whereas in some other dialects
> of English it doesn't.
>
> In US English, a billion is simply a thousand million.  Furthermore,
> it's the only of writing a thousand million that doesn't sound odd.  "A
> thousand million" is the only other correct way ("a milliard" is not US
> English), and it sounds odd in US English.  Thus there should be some
> explanation of what's going on for the confused reader who is not aware
> of these differences, such as a hyperlink on [[thousand million]].
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>


from_name: Rowan Collins

body:
Gerard Meijssen <gerardm at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> PS The USA and the UK should go metric. :)

The UK already has - well, except for road signs and beer. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication#UK_and_Ireland

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Robert Graham Merkel

subject: [Wikipedia-l] technical measures for English variations...

body:
> If you were reading about the primary exports of a small region of an
> obscure country and in the list was "rocket", is it possible you could
> have come away from the article believing that the obscure country is a
> mjor exporter of rockets? Under ideal conditions, yes, these kinds of
> dialectical differences can be illuminating, but under equally likely
> non-ideal conditions, the differences can be confusing and misleading.
>

You can't provide technical measures against poorly-written articles.
An article that listed "rocket" as an export without further definition
needs editing, not some fancy technical solution.

> While I admire the pluck of characterizing inconsistency as richness, I
> think that "down in the trenches" the reality of the differences in
> dialect (mostly between en-us and en-gb, but also, for example between
> pt-pt and pt-br) is a continuous stream of conflict, debate, confusion,
> and frustration that policy has failed to allieviate.
>
And you think that there wouldn't be massive bunfights as to which word
was most appropriate for each of the dozens of English locales - given
that many people within a locale will use different words for the same
object or concept?

> There exists a technical solution that would alleviate the problem and
> not significantly burden editors. Should we reject this solution on the
> wishful notion that our differences can unite rather than divide us?

No, only a tiny fraction of the many subtle and usually inconsequential
differences between British and American English (not to mention the many
other variations of English, some that don't fit neatly on national
boundaries) are amenable to technical solutions.

Is any technological measure going to make the following (fictional)
passage accessible to the average American?

Brian Lara scored a double ton at the WACA in the 1997-98 season in a
tour match against the PM's 11.  This was a Bradmanesque effort, the feat
even more impressive considering Jo Angel's reverse swing and Michael Bevan's
Chinamen, both aided by the Fremantle Doctor.

On the *specific* issue of number names, it might be feasible to provide
a fix there.  Beyond that, however, technical fixes are more trouble
than they're worth.

--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                           Robert Merkel
                                     robert.merkel at benambra.org
                                        http://benambra.org

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
                -- Albert Einstein
They laughed at Einstein.  They laughed at the Wright Brothers.  But they
also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
                -- Carl Sagan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


body:
On Wed, 06 Oct 2004 01:14:26 -0700, David Friedland <david at nohat.net> wrote:
> I don't think there was anything about my proposal that indicated that
> editors will be expected to know all the regional differences and be
> required to put variant words in curly brackets. The beauty of the wiki
> system, you see, is that when someone comes along who DOES know the word
> is a regionalism, they can add the brackets, thus increasing the
> article's accessibility.

This isn't an argument against your {{foo}} proposal, more an
additional design consideration, but there is a problem with how you
know, while reading, whether an article is using translations or not -
by design, you only see one version of the text. So people will only
come across places to put these braces (or whatever other markup, for
that matter) if they are already editing the article. Or, I suppose,
if the word they see is not the one that matches their choice of
dialect.

----

On the "milliard" front, can I just point out that this isn't actually
normal British usage anyway - "thousand million", ugly though it is,
is what British people would have called 1000,000,000 until recently.
Some probably still do, and when "billion" is used in casual usage,
let alone "trillion", it tends to be worth checking the context to see
if it is a traditional/European (10^12) billion or a US/modern (10^9)
billion.

If you standardise on "-{en-us billion en-uk thousand million}-",
you're going to get into trouble with "-{en-us trillion": the obvious
choice of "en-uk billion}-" is not a good idea, because many official
British institutions now use the US definition of "billion" anyway.
Maybe this just means we shouldn't bother translating this one at all,
or maybe it goes to show how complex this problem really is; I'm not
sure which.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Brion Vibber

subject: [Wikitech-l] browser black list

body:
On Oct 6, 2004, at 2:01 PM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Emmanuel Engelhart wrote:
>> Some browsers are not UNICODE compliant.
>> The consequence is that some users are breaking pages... and don't
>> understant how/why.
>> I propose to implement a test on each update of article, and put a
>> warning if the user's browser belongs to a regexp (browser black
>> list) specified in the config file.
>>
> As they have a negative effect on mediawiki content, why not banning
> them from changing stuff ? The reason is obvious NPOV and there are
> good quality alternatives like Firefox.

a) the broken stuff can be fixed and b) they won't break every page.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
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body:
On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 12:23:14 +0200, Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:
> IMO the "milliard" convention is absolute rubbish, because it
> effectively breaks the decimal system and I'm glad it's in decline in
> the English speaking world. I wish the same were true for its use in
> other languages as well.

OK, we're drifting off-topic now, but I just wanted to say that I
completely disagree. There's nothing "decimal" about
million->billion->trillion going up in factors of a thousand rather
than of a million, it's completely arbitrary. And etymologically, a
billion being a million million makes sense: the "bi-" means "two",
and it has twice as many zeros; similarly, a European trillion has
three times as many zeros as a million, hence "tri-". What are there
three of in an American trillion?

It's a moot point, because the American version seems to have become
the accepted standard in the English-speaking world (better than just
remaining ambiguous for eternity, I suppose), but the old way is far
more logical. [I've actually heard it suggested that the change was so
that people could call themselves "billionaires", but I'm not sure how
much truth there can be in that]

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


body:
On Wed, 06 Oct 2004 15:28:49 +0200, Gerard Meijssen
<gerardm at myrealbox.com> wrote:
> However, which word are you to use for the template "colour" or "color"?

This is an interesting point. AFAIK, you can't use redirects in
templates to include the content of Template:Color when you enter
{{colour}}, but it is feasible that this feature could become
available in the future.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Distributing fonts

body:
On Mon, 4 Oct 2004 10:47:19 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> I see merit in both positions.  By taking a stand for OGG over MP3, we
> are inconveniencing people in the name of free content.  We have an
> obligation to minimize that inconvenience, and this might be in part
> be resolved by hosting some GPL software and very user-friendly
> instructions for installing it.  We can decide on a case by case basis.
>
> A lot of GPL software is hosted on nerdy websites that would simply
> frighten inexperienced users.  When that's the case, it would be nice
> if we used our public communication skills to help out.

This is one of the things I was trying to work on with the ideas I was
putting on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia  I'm going to
have a go at drafting my suggested Help: page now, complete with the
links to various means of listening to  ogg vorbis files. (And now I
think, perhaps some instructions, too) Note that most of these are
plugins for whatever media player you already have, not a whole new
piece of software.

But perhaps it *would* be nice to have a "wiki-player" that just read
in an ogg, and played it, and nothing else, for people who don't have
a media player at all. It could actually be considered, in a vague
kind of way, to be part of the site software: if playing oggs is part
of using the wiki, then an ogg player is part of the interface.

Of course, what would be *really* nice, would be if we could *embed*
the player, but that might be a bit awkward.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: Gerard Meijssen

body:
David Friedland wrote:

> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> You are wrong. To me English is English I am colo(ur) blind to what
>> makes English English or American.
>
>
> OK...
>
>> You forget that there other types of English as well and
>
>
> This is patently false. If you actually read my proposal, you would
> see that both the proposal and the examples given account for more
> varieties than just en-us and en-gb. The reason I focus on en-us and
> en-gb is because that is where the greatest differences are. Most of
> the other written dialects of English are substantially the same as
> either en-us or en-gb, with minor variation in usage.
>
>> as I mentioned earlier when I am expected to do the work YOU want
>> people to do, you can count me, and with me many non-native (whatever
>> English) speakers out, to contribute to EN:wiktionary. I have posted
>> these reasons before.
>
>
> I don't think there was anything about my proposal that indicated that
> editors will be expected to know all the regional differences and be
> required to put variant words in curly brackets. The beauty of the
> wiki system, you see, is that when someone comes along who DOES know
> the word is a regionalism, they can add the brackets, thus increasing
> the article's accessibility.
>
> Besides, there are plenty of people who get bothered when they read
> things written in a foreign dialect. Why not allow them to read
> Wikipedia the way the want to?
>
> - David

I have rememebered wrong for which I am sorry, the curly brackets do
hide the difficult stuff. This makes a world of difference.

However, which word are you to use for the template "colour" or "color"
? The point is when you decide you want to edit an existing article you
have to search for the place where you want to edit. This is because of
the difference in layout. When the words also change because of these
templates, it will be that much harder to find the right location.  So I
had it wrong, the curly brackets hide the complications I thought there
were but, there are still arguments against your scheme.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Anthere

subject:
[Wikipedia-l] Re: I'll see your milliard,
	and raise you a thousand million...

body:
I am disappointed...
Seeing the title, I expected a fundraising bringing us a milliard of
dollars.
Sigh

Craig Franklin a ?crit:
> Scr?obh David Friedland:
>
>
>>would appear to an en-gb reader as
>>
>>a plan was formulated by which Germany was to pay 226 milliard gold marks
>>
>>and to an en-us reader as
>>
>>a plan was formulated by which Germany was to pay 226 billion gold marks
>
>
> This is clumsy, but manageable, when there's only en-us and en-gb to worry
> about.  Unfortunately, there are more than two dialects of English.
>
> For instance, in Australian English, the word "milliard" is unknown (I had
> to go and look it up to see what you were on about).  The sentence in en-au
> would be "a plan was formulated by which Germany was to pay 226 thousand
> million gold marks." (a thousand million being a 1 followed by nine zeroes).
> I've no idea what sort of dialectical differences exist in other English
> dialects, but I assume that they're there also.
>
> I mean, it probably could be done, but coming up with alternatives for
> en-us, en-gb, en-au, en-ie, en-za, etc etc, would just be a massive pain,
> and lets be honest, who has time for that sort of work.  The system works
> fine as it is now (although putting the number in decimal form afterwards
> would probably help, and is my policy when there might be confusion caused).
>
> - Craig Franklin
>
> -------------------
> Craig Franklin
> PO Box 764
> Ashgrove, Q, 4060
> Australia
> http://www.halo-17.net - Australia's Favourite Source of Indie Music, Art,
> and Culture.


from_name: David Friedland

body:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
>>Where a word has different spellings/usages, the spelling/usage that has
>>the most number of Google hits shall be the spelling/usage used on
>>Wikipedia. If the spelling/usage with the most number of Google hits
>>changes, then so shall the spellings/usages on Wikipedia.
>>
>>At least this way we can be sure that the spellings/usages we use will
>>be ones used by a majority that is based on actual data. It's
>>incontrovertible, democratic, neutral, and completely dialect-agnostic.
>>Not to mention consistent.
>
> This does have some merit, and of course "number of Google hits" is a
> traditional method of settling other disputes.  But the problem as I
> see it is that American English is much more common on the Internet
> than other variants, so the rule would in practice amount to "always
> use American English" -- and this strikes me as deeply undesirable.

Well, all the data seems to be pointing towards Americans rapidly
becoming an internet minority. Perhaps at first it will favor American
usage, but eventually it will favor the most common usage, whether that
usage is American, British, or whatever.

Of course, implementing this policy now would just be perceived by
non-Americans as just another act of American linguistic hegemony, and
as such is not really workable. I only suggested it to point out that
sometimes the fairest and most neutral thing to do will be unpopular.
Unfortunately, fairness and neutrality are often at odds with the
equally laudable goals of inclusiveness and diversity. Is there an ideal
way to reconcile these conflicting goals and does our current policy
reflect that ideal?

> I suppose the biggest area where we differ is in our estimation of the
> magnitude of the problem.  I view the differences as relatively minor,
> and as far as I have been able to determine, the number of edit wars
> and acrimonious arguments about this has been quite small overall.
> Are people really getting upset about this?

I'm doing some searching and research and will post a summary of my
findings later. I can, at the outset, say that from personal experience
I have encountered invocation of the "original author's dialect" clause
under dubious circumstances to support allegedly "British" usage.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Slovene_language]

- David


from_name: ruimu uestc

subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia meetups

body:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Delirium" <delirium at hackish.org>

> I don't know
> what the percentage is like for Europeans, but an absolutely miniscule
> percentage of Americans are involved in meta-type affairs

Let's exchange a bunch of your (US) existing projects fillers with a bunch
of our (French) new empty projects builders, then :-D


from_name: Carson, David

body:
Hi all,

I noticed, the other day, that someone was uploading a bunch of frame
grabs from episodes of Star Trek to illustrate the articles on said
episodes. There were no copyright tags on the images. So, I was going to
jump in and say "hey, can you put copyright tags on those images?", when
it occurred to me that if he said "OK, what do I put?", that I had no
idea.

I've seen a few people ask about whether frame grabs from movies, TV
shows, etc. may be used as "fair use", the most recent discussion being
on the Help Desk a couple of weeks back
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Help_desk#Images_.26_Copyrights)
, but I'm still not sure what the definitive answer is. Or, indeed, if
there can even BE a definitive answer.

Looking over the 4 factors for "fair use", it seems quite positive:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is
of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes

	In the case of Wikipedia, for nonprofit educational purposes
(but what of selling a CD or paper distribution?)

2. The nature of the copyrighted work

	OK, these are creative works, but they are published to a
non-restricted audience

3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the
copyrighted work as a whole

	A single frame, a fraction of a second (without audio!) out of a
half hour TV episode or 2 hour movie.

4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the
copyrighted work

	Certainly no harm done to the copyright holders ability to sell
their work

..but from whence can a decision come as to whether such things are
desirable on Wikipedia? I know that a Free image is always to be
preferred over a "fair use" one, but it's hard to see how a movie or TV
show might be provided with a Free image.

Other questions include what such an image could be used to illustrate?
Is a frame from a movie OK in an article about:

* The movie?
* The actor depicted in the scene?
* The fictional character depicted in the scene?
* The historical figure being portrayed by an actor in the scene?
* The director of the movie?
* The author of the book the movie is based on?
* A concept depicted in the movie (e.g. a scene from that crappy Heath
Ledger movie in the article on "Jousting")?

Any thoughts?

Cheers!
David... (aka Stormie)

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
This email and its attachments are for the sole use of the addressee and may contain information which is confidential and/or
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from_name: Pablo Saratxaga

references:
<20041005224845.C886C1AC027C@mail.wikimedia.org>
	<001401c4ab8a$af7cba40$69971bd3@equinox>
	<VbBCvpBVQ9YBFwtP@cartref.demon.co.uk>
	<4163FD95.6040305@hackish.org>

body:
Kaixo!

On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 10:13:41AM -0400, Delirium wrote:

> "Thousand million" sounds a bit odd though.  If I saw "thousand
> million", I would expect to see a footnote explaining why this odd
> choice of wording was used instead of "billion",

Because a billion is not a thousand million but a thousand thousand
million maybe :-)

The US English usage of "billion" and "trillion" is archaic (the same
holds for most of the measuring units used in the USA); of all the
languages I know all use the modern meanings of billion and trillion,
that is, 1,000,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 respectively.

Now I came accostumed to it, but when I first read things like
"a billion dollar" I was shocked to read about a so huge amount of
money; well, it was actually a thousand times smaller amount than it
was written; now I know that US newpapers always grossly exagerate
ands that big amounts have to be shrinked a thousand times to have
the real amount :-)

--
Ki ?a vos v?ye b?n,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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from_name: Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales

subject:
[Wikitech-l] yet another conference: invitation to 21C3 mediawiki
	devcon

body:
Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
> The people who participate should decide soon where they want their
> living-room at the congress: you can either stay with the rest of the
> wikipedians at the ground floor or I could organize a corner in the
> hack-center in the basement.

I vote hack-center... it's just too cool. :-)

--Jimbo


body:
elian wrote:
> > At the 21C3 - the annual congress of the Chaos Computer Club -
> > we are organizing a small mediawiki developer conference to which I'd
> > like to invite everybody involved in mediawiki development (the people
> > doing mostly admin tasks on the servers are of course invited too ;-).

Evan Prodromou wrote:
> Really quick question: are you sure you understand the difference
> between "Wikimedia" and "Mediawiki"? I'd like to participate, but I'm a
> Mediawiki developer, and not a Wikimedia developer.

Yes, she said it the right way!  Everyone involved in Mediawiki
development would be most welcome.  Indeed, I have asked Ross Mayfield
of SocialText to send someone from the Kwiki project.  And I hope we
can reach out to other developers from other free software wiki
projects as well.

--Jimbo


body:
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Matthew Larsen <mat.larsen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I wouldnt like it if someone took a frame grab from one of my movies,
> > but then you do see a lot of them on movie review sites.
>
> Whether you like it or not is irrelevant. ;)

:-)

Precisely.

"Fair use" and "fair dealing" are important rights that should be
defended and expanded, in my personal opinion.  We should be legally
conservative in our use of them, of course.

--Jimbo


body:
Is "million, milliard" the sole French usage?
Or do you use "million, billion" as well?

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com

On 6 Oct 2004, at 15:32, Anthere wrote:

> I am disappointed...
> Seeing the title, I expected a fundraising bringing us a milliard of
> dollars.
> Sigh


body:
On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 19:39:21 +0200, Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:
> What '''drives me NUTS''' however is the "traditional" usage, whereby
> you have:
>
> million                  10^6                                         1,000,000
> milliard                         10^9                                     1,000,000,000
> billion                 10^12                        1,000,000,000,000
> billiard                        10^15                    1,000,000,000,000,000
> trillion                        10^18       1,000,000,000,000,000,000
> trilliard                       10^21   1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
> etc.
>
> -- this effectively uses a "duodecimal" system as it were.

I guess I've always thought of it as million -> billion -> trillion as
adding 6 noughts at a time, and the rest just kind of "filling in" in
between. It's still not really a decimal vs something else
distinction, but I see what you mean. It's more like Roman numerals
than anything else, with the X and V, C and L, M and D, etc

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia meetups

body:
ruimu uestc a ?crit:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Delirium" <delirium at hackish.org>
>
>>I don't know
>>what the percentage is like for Europeans, but an absolutely miniscule
>>percentage of Americans are involved in meta-type affairs
>
>
> Let's exchange a bunch of your (US) existing projects fillers with a bunch
> of our (French) new empty projects builders, then :-D

Hum ?


from_name: Matthew Larsen

body:
I wouldnt like it if someone took a frame grab from one of my movies,
but then you do see a lot of them on movie review sites.

On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 04:13:13 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> It is my belief that frame grabs of this type are perfectly within the
> realm of fair use and fair dealing.
>
> See, for example Blackwell Publishing's discussion of the matter,
> here:
> http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/authors/permission.asp#film
>
> --Jimbo
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>

--
Matthew Larsen
   > mat.larsen at gmail.com
   > 07739 785 249


body:
On 6 Oct 2004, at 16:03, Rowan Collins wrote:

> On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 12:23:14 +0200, Jens Ropers
> <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:
>> IMO the "milliard" convention is absolute rubbish, because it
>> effectively breaks the decimal system

>  I completely disagree. There's nothing "decimal" about
> million->billion->trillion going up in factors of a thousand rather
> than of a million, it's completely arbitrary.

My beef with the "milliard"-convention (and why I think it "breaks" the
decimal system) is not its number of zeros. If the
"milliard"-convention were only to use:

(NB: use a non-proportional font here)

milliard			 10^9					  1,000,000,000
billiard			10^15			 1,000,000,000,000,000
trilliard			10^21	1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
etc.

then hey, that's logical and "kinda decimal".
I wouldn't have a problem with that.

Likewise, if people were only to use:

million			 10^6					      1,000,000
billion			10^12		  	     1,000,000,000,000
trillion			10^18	    1,000,000,000,000,000,000
etc.

then I wouldn't have a problem with that either.

What '''drives me NUTS''' however is the "traditional" usage, whereby
you have:

million			 10^6					      1,000,000
milliard			 10^9					  1,000,000,000
billion			10^12		  	     1,000,000,000,000
billiard			10^15			 1,000,000,000,000,000
trillion			10^18	    1,000,000,000,000,000,000
trilliard			10^21	1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
etc.

-- this effectively uses a "duodecimal" system as it were.

((In [[List_of_numbers#English_names_for_powers_of_10]], this latter
system is described as the "Continental European" convention, with the
"Traditional British" usage being a much more sane alternative (cf.
above).))

Sadly, the said "traditional" (I mean "Continental European") usage is
what's in use in in the country I'm now again (temporarily) living in
-- Germany. IMHO no sane person could actually settle on such a system.
Well, at least in Germany that system is ''unanimously'' used, so thank
heaven for small favours!

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


from_name: Craig Franklin

body:
Scr?obh David Friedland:

>would appear to an en-gb reader as
>
>a plan was formulated by which Germany was to pay 226 milliard gold marks
>
>and to an en-us reader as
>
>a plan was formulated by which Germany was to pay 226 billion gold marks

This is clumsy, but manageable, when there's only en-us and en-gb to worry
about.  Unfortunately, there are more than two dialects of English.

For instance, in Australian English, the word "milliard" is unknown (I had
to go and look it up to see what you were on about).  The sentence in en-au
would be "a plan was formulated by which Germany was to pay 226 thousand
million gold marks." (a thousand million being a 1 followed by nine zeroes).
I've no idea what sort of dialectical differences exist in other English
dialects, but I assume that they're there also.

I mean, it probably could be done, but coming up with alternatives for
en-us, en-gb, en-au, en-ie, en-za, etc etc, would just be a massive pain,
and lets be honest, who has time for that sort of work.  The system works
fine as it is now (although putting the number in decimal form afterwards
would probably help, and is my policy when there might be confusion caused).

- Craig Franklin

-------------------
Craig Franklin
PO Box 764
Ashgrove, Q, 4060
Australia
http://www.halo-17.net - Australia's Favourite Source of Indie Music, Art,
and Culture.


body:
On 6 Oct 2004, at 15:28, Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> David Friedland wrote:
<snip>
> I have rememebered wrong for which I am sorry, the curly brackets do
> hide the difficult stuff. This makes a world of difference.
>
> However, which word are you to use for the template "colour" or
> "color" ?

You could just use one of the two and make a redirect for each
alternative spelling.

> The point is when you decide you want to edit an existing article you
> have to search for the place where you want to edit. This is because
> of the difference in layout. When the words also change because of
> these templates, it will be that much harder to find the right
> location.

True, but is this really a major problem?
I gather that a majority of people on this list isn't all that bothered
about "fixing" British/US spellings, but a non-trivial minority is, as
the subject keeps cropping up.
Implementing the technical plumbing for David's "curly brackets plus
templates"-suggestion would enable people like him that are really
serious about "fixing" these things to work away and do it, while not
really inconveniencing the rest of us (and yes, it would be more
difficult to do, for the reasons you've just mentioned, but hey! you
and me don't have to do it ;-) .

One thing should be clear however: No bot should ever be set lose to,
e.g., seek all non-curlified color's and colour's and curlify them, as
this would break a great many things (think ColoUr Graphics Adapter).
This will only ever be a human job to do (in the absence of significant
AI breakthroughs ;-) .

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Distributing fonts

body:
On 6 Oct 2004, at 16:27, Rowan Collins wrote:

> But perhaps it *would* be nice to have a "wiki-player" that just read
> in an ogg, and played it, and nothing else, for people who don't have
> a media player at all. It could actually be considered, in a vague
> kind of way, to be part of the site software: if playing oggs is part
> of using the wiki, then an ogg player is part of the interface.
>
> Of course, what would be *really* nice, would be if we could *embed*
> the player, but that might be a bit awkward.

Hmm...
Java applet?


body:
On 6 Oct 2004, at 19:31, Stan Shebs wrote:

> Empirically, the people most likely to complain about dialect are
> lesser-educated Americans and over-educated Brits.

LOL!

;-D


subject: [WikiEN-l] completely off-topic

body:
Completely off topic, but I just '''had to''' send this, because of
it's humour value:

http://www.rte.ie/news/2004/1006/1news/1news56_11.smil
This is a Real video stream about Google opening its European HQ in
Dublin.

Note towards the end -- what essential inventory did they bring to
[[Baile Atha Cliath]]?
You couldn't make it up.
:-D


subject: [Wikipedia-l] Distributing fonts

body:
On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 19:59:03 +0200, Jens Ropers <ropers at ropersonline.com> wrote:
> > Of course, what would be *really* nice, would be if we could *embed*
> > the player, but that might be a bit awkward.
>
> Hmm...
> Java applet?

Well, that requires the user to have a Java VM. Which is arguably no
more/less of an imposition than standardising on embedding RealPlayer,
or QuickTime, or a Flash gadget, or...

Not that means it's not the way to go, but the awkwardness comes of
having to deal with what people will and won't have, how to instruct
them to get it, whether to have it as a preference only, off by
default. Those are all true of any embedding system, be it Java, an
existing media player, or a home-made construction that people can
install for this and only this use.

I note that there is a Java Ogg implementation out there though - I
added to the list on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia/Help:Listening_to_sounds

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]


from_name: John Lee

body:
Following up, it's just as I feared. I've had to place the NPOV notice
on [[Malaysia]] as well, because it was corrupted *again*. The
situation's degraded a lot; there's plenty of bickering particularly at
[[Talk:Malaysia]], [[Talk:Bumiputra]] and [[Talk:Malaysian New Economic
Policy]]. Would mediation be suitable? Because I really want someone
else to critique the articles and past revisions for neutrality, not
just mediation between the three parties here (myself, Malbear and
Jpatokal).

John Lee
([[User:Johnleemk]])


from_name: Evan Prodromou

subject:
[Wikitech-l] yet another conference: invitation to 21C3
	mediawiki devcon

body:
On Thu, 2004-10-07 at 03:10 +0200, Elisabeth Bauer wrote:

> At the 21C3 - the annual congress of the Chaos Computer Club -
> we are organizing a small mediawiki developer conference to which I'd
> like to invite everybody involved in mediawiki development (the people
> doing mostly admin tasks on the servers are of course invited too ;-).

Really quick question: are you sure you understand the difference
between "Wikimedia" and "Mediawiki"? I'd like to participate, but I'm a
Mediawiki developer, and not a Wikimedia developer.

~ESP

--
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
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from_name: Emmanuel Engelhart

subject: [Wikitech-l] browser black list

body:
Hi

Some browsers are not UNICODE compliant.
The consequence is that some users are breaking pages... and don't understant how/why.
I propose to implement a test on each update of article, and put a warning if the user's browser belongs to a regexp (browser black list) specified in the config file.

reactions ?

Best regards

Emmanuel Engelhart

--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ne prenez pas la vie trop au serieux :
De toute facon vous n'en sortirez pas vivant.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Emmanuel Engelhart      ICQ UIN : 53388731   TEL (+49)(0)6.22.15.88.03.31


subject: [Wikitech-l] browser black list

body:
Emmanuel Engelhart wrote:

>Hi
>
>Some browsers are not UNICODE compliant.
>The consequence is that some users are breaking pages... and don't understant how/why.
>I propose to implement a test on each update of article, and put a warning if the user's browser belongs to a regexp (browser black list) specified in the config file.
>
>reactions ?
>
>Best regards
>
>Emmanuel Engelhart
>
As they have a negative effect on mediawiki content, why not banning
them from changing stuff ? The reason is obvious NPOV and there are good
quality alternatives like Firefox.

Thanks,
    GerardM


subject: [Wikitech-l] browser black list

body:
Brion Vibber wrote:

> On Oct 6, 2004, at 2:01 PM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
>> Emmanuel Engelhart wrote:
>>
>>> Some browsers are not UNICODE compliant.
>>> The consequence is that some users are breaking pages... and don't
>>> understant how/why.
>>> I propose to implement a test on each update of article, and put a
>>> warning if the user's browser belongs to a regexp (browser black
>>> list) specified in the config file.
>>>
>> As they have a negative effect on mediawiki content, why not banning
>> them from changing stuff ? The reason is obvious NPOV and there are
>> good quality alternatives like Firefox.
>
>
> a) the broken stuff can be fixed and b) they won't break every page.
>
> -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

How is the broken stuff fixed ?? When this is done automagically it is
no problem otherwise, it is like vandalism, it gets only picked up when
it is noticed.

Thanks,
    GerardM


from_name: Victor Fariña

subject: [Wikitech-l] Showing last changes on teh wiki since last visit ...

body:
Hi ...
I need this feature :
When a user logins , some articles must be marked with a light yellow to
view faster the last changes ...

My wiki is intended to use by deelopers, so when a user commits a change
, a mail would be sent and also
the changes maden to an article must be marked ...

Anyone knows what files are involved on this step ??
i know this feature may be not interesting to wikimedia , so i will
start to develop it, but i dont know
what files i must touch ... any appointment ?? any help ??

thanks

--
Problems with Windows - Reboot.
Problems with Linux   - Be root.

Vic (aKa CoffMan)
vic at wickle.com


from_name: David Gerard

body:
Stan Shebs wrote:

> Empirically, the people most likely to complain about dialect are
> lesser-educated Americans and over-educated Brits. Americans with
> more education will have consumed vast quantities of British dialect
> in the process of getting educated, and it will usually feel pretty
> natural to them, with the occasional curveball (I knew "milliard"
> before this discussion, but not "courgette"). Conversely, our Brits
> (and to some extent Commonwealthers in general) with PhDs will
> sooner or later get fed up with reading American English, and start
> making remarks about "illiterate Americanisms", while regular Brits
> seem generally indifferent to the issue.

I'll have you know I'm Australian without a Ph.D and complain just
as much!

- d.


from_name: Jeff Bonham

subject: [WikiEN-l] Fw: List of fake universities

body:
----- Forwarded message from Infotech - Vancouver University <infotech at vancouveruniversity.edu> -----

X-Original-To: silsor at localhost
To: jbonham at mail.utm.utoronto.ca
From: Infotech - Vancouver University <infotech at vancouveruniversity.edu>
Subject: List of fake universities
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
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X-Source:
X-Source-Args:
X-Source-Dir:

Hi,
We certainly do not like being included in the Wickipedia list of fake
universities.
We attempted to open the item, but the url was blocked.
Whoever is responsible, please actually look at
www.VancouverUniversity.edu
and sub-pages like www.VancouverUniversity.edu/alumni.php
and note how inappropriate to so list us
(unless the person doing so is a public sector fanatic
who cannot stomach the idea of private non-profit institutions).

Thanks for any help in this matter,
Derrick

---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.772 / Virus Database: 519 - Release Date: 10/1/2004

----- End forwarded message -----

--
Jeff Bonham
jbonham at mail.utm.utoronto.ca
PGP Public Key ID: BA289747
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from_name: Elisabeth Bauer

body:
Hello,

At the 21C3 - the annual congress of the Chaos Computer Club -
we are organizing a small mediawiki developer conference to which I'd
like to invite everybody involved in mediawiki development (the people
doing mostly admin tasks on the servers are of course invited too ;-).
The event takes place from 27th to 29th december in Berlin

Planning happens on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/21C3/MediaWiki_developer_conference

Please list yourself, if you want to attend and contact me if you need
accomodation/a computer to work on/anything else ;-)

The people who participate should decide soon where they want their
living-room at the congress: you can either stay with the rest of the
wikipedians at the ground floor or I could organize a corner in the
hack-center in the basement.

@Brion and Tim Starling: it would be fine if you could send abstracts
for your presentations in soon, the schedule is quite full already.

greetings,
elian


from_name: Peter Danenberg

body:
> IE supports transparent PNGs just fine so long as they're binary
> transparency rather than alpha.

     Interesting,  Brion;  I'm  rewriting  WikiTeX  as a PHP
extension, interfacing natively with ImageMagick's API.  Yet
under IE, I've had limited success with DVI-derived PNG's.

     Of  course, everything works beautifully in Firefox and
company; and an alternative library may do the trick.

--
Peter Danenberg                                           .
wikisophia.org                                           ..:


body:
> Or an alternative renderer. Try dvipng

     Hello,  Jan-?ke; as a matter of fact, I was just brows-
ing your source.  Fantastic work, by the way; very fast.

--
Peter Danenberg                                           .
wikisophia.org                                           ..:


subject: [Wikitech-l] Re: browser black list

body:
Gerard Meijssen a ?crit:
> Emmanuel Engelhart wrote:
>
>> Hi
>>
>> Some browsers are not UNICODE compliant.
>> The consequence is that some users are breaking pages... and don't
>> understant how/why.
>> I propose to implement a test on each update of article, and put a
>> warning if the user's browser belongs to a regexp (browser black list)
>> specified in the config file.
>>
>> reactions ?
>>
>> Best regards
>>
>> Emmanuel Engelhart
>>
> As they have a negative effect on mediawiki content, why not banning
> them from changing stuff ? The reason is obvious NPOV and there are good
> quality alternatives like Firefox.
>
> Thanks,
>    GerardM

Banning someone just because he has an old browser/computer is not a
good idea...

Which NPOV are you talking about ?

anthere